By Yorgos Mitralias
Why republish a text on Auschwitz and its meaning, written in Greek in the last century? Because, reread today, at a time profoundly marked not only by the genocide of the Palestinians and the destruction of Gaza, but also by the return in force of the fascist threat – and war – on a global scale, embodied by the Trump-Musk duo, this text takes on a heightened significance and topicality. For, as Ernest Mandel puts it in his important essay “Material, social and ideological preconditions for the Nazi genocide”, which is often quoted in our text, “In order to struggle better against neofascism and biological racism today, we have to understand the nature of fascism yesterday. Scientific knowledge is also a weapon the human race needs to fight and survive, not a purely academic exercise. Refusing to use this weapon means facilitating the arrival of new would-be mass murderers; it means allowing them to commit fresh crimes. Explaining the causes of fascism and the Holocaust means strengthening our capacity for rejection, indignation, hostility, total and unshakeable opposition, resistance and revolt, against the ever-possible re-emergence of fascism and other dehumanizing doctrines and practices. This is a basic, indispensable work of political and moral hygiene.”
Auschwitz and its industrial-bureaucratic machine for the mass extermination of human beings, a true product of our time and its capitalist “modernism”, calls out to us in this pivotal period between two centuries for at least three main reasons: (a) because it does not point to a supposed return to ancestral barbarities; (b) because it represents a profound break in civilization and in the way we view the idea of progress; and (c) because its lessons are today – and will continue to be – more useful and relevant than they were 55 years ago.
So, if history today is divided into a before and after Auschwitz, this is due as much to the “uniqueness” of the Nazi gas chambers as to the fact that nothing is the same after them. If Auschwitz is both “unique” and “modern”, it’s not because other manifestations of human barbarity that claimed even more victims (for example, the mass extermination and genocide of the indigenous populations of the “New World” or Africa by European conquerors and colonialists) didn’t precede it. In fact, what makes Auschwitz like nothing else, that it is not a simple repetition – perhaps even more murderous – of past barbarities and, therefore, that it cannot be explained by an alleged “metaphysical” or “innate” tendency to return to another era (to the much-vilified Middle Ages, for example), is the fact that it would have been impossible and unthinkable outside of triumphant capitalism and its bourgeois society!
FROM PARTIAL RATIONALITY TO TOTAL IRRATIONALITY
A product of the modern Western world and its developed industry, Auschwitz – according to Ernest Mandel – “was an industrial extermination project, not a do-it-yourself one. This is all that distinguished it from traditional pogroms. It required mass production of Zyklon-B gas, gas chambers, pipes, crematoria, barracks, and massive reliance on railways, on a scale that would have been unattainable in the eighteenth century and most of the nineteenth century, not to speak of earlier epochs”. And Mandel continues: “In this sense the Holocaust was also (not only, but also) a product of modern industry that has increasingly escaped from any control by human or humanist reason, i.e. of modern capitalist industry driven onwards by more and more intense competition that has gotten out of control”.
But there’s more. This monstrous factory of death was made possible and was able to function in this specific historical period because only the developed bourgeois state offered it another of its preconditions: the necessary bureaucratic mentality, the short-sighted daily “rationality” of its hundreds of thousands of direct and indirect executors. In other words, blind obedience and submission to the all-powerful and “sacred” master-state, which translates into the well-known spectrum of attitudes ranging from the acritical self-limitation of each individual to his partial and fragmented “duties” (“I’m just doing my job and everything else doesn’t concern me”) to the transformation of active citizens into involuntary servants of the “good or bad, it’s the state” and my country doctrine…
So here we are, at the heart of the modern monster, with the crucial question legitimately posed to us: if it is indeed our era that made Auschwitz possible, then what guarantee do we have that we won’t witness a repeat of it, or even something worse? Unfortunately, the answer is both simple and tragic. Absolutely nothing! After Auschwitz, anything is now possible, and to categorically deny this can only be tantamount to political irresponsibility! Or, as Brecht warns us: “The womb is still fertile, from which the foul beast has sprung”!
No, it’s not just the fascist monster Bertolt Brecht was talking about. Auschwitz is not just the most extreme example of modern barbarism. In essence, it is first and foremost an almost typical and exemplary expression of the destructive tendencies that have existed and continue to exist (and indeed, are still developing) within our bourgeois societies at this stage of late capitalism. If Auschwitz is both a watershed and a symbol of the modern capitalist-imperialist era, it’s because no other “founding event” of our time has so powerfully highlighted its dominant characteristic and supreme contradiction: the combination of the most perfect partial rationalism with absolute total irrationalism. The marriage of the greatest rationality of means with the most extreme irrationality of ends!
After all, what is Auschwitz if not this “mortifying partial rationality” of the modern organization of work and technology at the service of the most absurd and irrational objectives, i.e. the cruel and barbaric enterprise of the total extermination of human beings simply because they – as Jews and Gypsies – had committed the “fault” of existing? We’re not even talking about a totally “immoral” objective, like that of the Stalinist Gulag, where millions of Zek (prisoners) were turned into a labor force too cheap for the (forced) construction of the “socialist” economy. Here, we have moved on to a qualitatively different level of barbarism, which can be explained neither by certain economic objectives of the executioners, nor by their racist hatred. Jews, as human beings condemned exclusively to extermination, obviously cannot even work as slaves, nor can they continue to play the role of scapegoat reserved for them by traditional anti-Semitism!
THE IDEA OF HISTORICAL PROGRESS AND PLANETARY DESTRUCTION
Unfortunately, what was once a simple premonition of the most perceptive anatomists of today’s pitiful reality (Walter Benjamin, Leon Trotsky, Ernest Bloch, …) is now becoming more or less a truism that tends to be adopted, even if in fragments, by millions of people in every corner of the planet. Rosa Luxemburg’s dilemma of “socialism or barbarism” is long gone, because we’re already living in barbarism! Instead, a new, even more tragic existential dilemma is taking its place, and is being imposed as inevitable: socialism or destruction of the planet and extinction of the human species! Now, it’s no longer “just” a question of the wave of completed or unfinished genocides sweeping through our era (Rwanda, Chechnya, East Timor) and the ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, nor of the horror of the 45 million children in the Third World who die every four years from malnutrition and lack of medicines and drinking water, nor even of all this martyred humanity sacrificed on the altar of the unbridled maximization of the rate of profit. It’s no longer a question of all that, or even of the existence of human civilization, but of something more, something qualitatively superior, of the total destruction already promised and prepared by the nightmarish capitalist “total irrationality” to the air we breathe, to the atmosphere, to the forests, seas and lands we inhabit – in short, to our planet itself and to the people who persist in living on it!
New problems, new dilemmas, new universal nightmares, all of which overturn old certainties and traditional beliefs. The first and best of these is the blind belief in the inevitability of progress, to which the human race is “condemned”. As the twentieth century draws to a close, leaving behind innumerable material and, above all, spiritual ruins, it is perfectly justified to note, with Daniel Bensaid, that “two world wars, the barbarity of the camps and the gulag, and the exponential growth of destructive forces have since mauled these beliefs. The collapse of bureaucratic regimes in the East, the realization that resources are not inexhaustible and freely available from nature, the vertigo over the possibilities opened up by biology in terms of procreation and genetic engineering, the blurring of the boundaries between life and death, are all dealing new blows: the angel wings of Progress are riddled with lead”.
Yes, after all, it is the very idea of the long, linear and “inevitable” historical progress of the human species that cannot endure and must be relativized, if not fundamentally revised, at a time when the very survival of man on Earth is now in question, when “the Apocalypse ceases to be a prophetic vision to become a quite tangible threat”. If, at Auschwitz, it was Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and a few other categories of “Untermenschen” (i.e. “sub-humans” denied any human status by the Nazis) who were offered as “raw material” to the human devouring machine that operated thanks to the cooperation and convergence of biological racism, modern science-technology and capitalist industry, it is now the whole of humanity that is being offered up as guinea pigs for experimentation with the enormous destructive power that this brutal late capitalism has accumulated.
FOR THE VISIONARY SOCIALISM OF THE NEW QUALITY OF LIFE
To criticize and revise the idea of the “inevitability of progress” is also to criticize and revise a certain kind of Marxism! A Marxism which, even if it seeks to replace the law of profit with the satisfaction of human needs, “has no intention of overturning the foundations of society identified with industry, technique, science and progress”.
Never more than today has this deterministic, prosaic, economistic Marxism of the “stages” of historical evolution been so unrealistic, useless and, above all, ineffective. And never has it collided so head-on with the emancipatory, visionary and humanist revolutionary Marxism that is not content with “surpassing” Western civilization, but seeks to reverse – or rather, turn upside down – the course that Western civilization has followed for centuries.
So it has nothing to do with the vulgar, ankylosed Marxism that disdains to see the course of history from the point of view of the “losers” who are condemned ex-cathedra to be no more than… dust of history” (as was the case in the past, for example with the ‘uncivilized’ Indians or with the ‘historically backward’ small peoples, and much more recently with the ethnically cleansed ex-Yugoslavs), and stubbornly refuses to approach it through the possibility of (imminent) total catastrophe. And, of course, nothing to do with the bureaucratic Marxism of so many “epigones” who still blindly believe in the supposedly progressive automatism of the development of productive forces and the even more dreaded “domestication” of (necessarily hostile) nature by man and “miraculous” technology.
No, it’s no coincidence that this Stalinist and social-democratic Marxism constantly “forgets” to propose a strategic vision, to rehabilitate the revolutionary utopia, to propose “a radically different civilization, a new quality of life, a new hierarchy of values, a different relationship with nature, equal relations between the sexes, nations and “races”, social relations of solidarity and fraternity between peoples and continents”, a new, radically different relationship (positive discrimination) between the rich world and the underdeveloped world. And of course, it’s no coincidence – as Bensaid points out – that he blindly adopts “the idea of progress (which) is merely the flat, devalued and gentrified form of this capacity to move forward, imperceptibly leading to the abandonment of political action in favor of technical and commercial automatisms”.
The die has been cast. Revolution can no longer simply be – as it once was – “the locomotive of history”, because nothing justifies or imposes its historical-existential necessity, just as, more than any other, it alone must pull – as Walter Benjamin put it – the “emergency brake” that stops the train’s mad race towards destruction! From now on, the dilemma is no longer socialism or the regression of humanity. It’s socialism as a new civilization or the destruction of humanity! And don’t tell us that this is an extremely ambitious task for the socialist revolution. Let’s not forget that “first you renounce the impossible, then everything else”.