“(…) Fourier, as we see, uses the dialectic method in the same masterly way as his contemporary, Hegel. Using these same dialectics, he argues against the talk about illimitable human perfectibility, that every historical phase has its period of ascent and also its period of descent, and he applies this observation to the future of the whole human race. As Kant introduced into natural science the idea of the ultimate destruction of the earth, Fourier introduced into historical science that of the ultimate destruction of the human race”. (Engels, Anti-Dühring)
«I write from my own experience. When I arrive home and my two little ones begin to sob, it is like the swallows that announce spring and new life. It is the reminiscence of our past and at the same time the announcement of the future. We ask God for these conditions to change and for the children to grow up healthy.» (Félix with Hania, October 19, 1941, F. Maur, Warsaw, Franciszkańska Street, No. 5, Poland, to Mr. S. Maur, Corro Street 567, Córdoba, Argentina. Stamp of the Judenrat, Jewish Council of the Warsaw Ghetto, stamp of the Third Reich, postal stamp with date or code 21 X 4117 and inscription “Warsaw C 1”)[1].
Read in spanish. Translated to english by Federico T.
Last January 27th, the 80th anniversary of the historic breakthrough of the Red Army into the largest concentration camp ever established by Nazism was commemorated: Auschwitz-Birkenau. The decision to set it up had been made by the SS on January 25th, 1940, six months after Germany invaded and occupied Poland, and it consisted of a vast complex of camps of enormous scale. Auschwitz, known in German as Konzentrationslager Auschwitz, was composed of various concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in the occupied Polish territories. It included Auschwitz I—the original camp—, Auschwitz II-Birkenau—a concentration and extermination camp—, Auschwitz III-Monowitz—a forced labor camp for IG Farben—, and 45 additional satellite camps.
Located in Oświęcim, 43 kilometers west of Kraków, it was the largest extermination center of Nazism, where approximately 1.3 million people were sent. It is estimated that 1.1 million of them were murdered, mostly Jews, but also Poles, Gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war, communists, regime dissidents, and others. It was a true «Babel» of enslaved human beings from all corners of Europe who did not even share the same language, which facilitated their subjugation by the Nazi enslavers (Primo Levi).
Alongside Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 1945), the horrific bombings of Dresden in February 1945, and other atrocities of World War II—an inter-imperialist and counterrevolutionary war—Auschwitz represents the embodiment of capitalist barbarism at its highest level: the industrialized slaughter of six million human beings in a short period of time (Auschwitz operated at its full capacity for only two years, from 1942 to 1944).
Its very existence posed a challenge of interpretation, as the “descent into hell,” into the “underworlds of madness and unreason,” demanded a rational explanation. The reality is that Marxism struggled to develop a coherent interpretation of the «concentrationary universe,» that portion of the «geography» that operated under its own laws, where extreme arbitrariness, enslavement, and mass extermination prevailed.
In what follows, we will attempt to address the interpretation of this “event” by reviewing Marxism’s elaboration on the subject—a review that will not be exhaustive, as such an undertaking would require an entire book. We will establish a certain “dialogue” between the traditions of Marxism and humanism, a necessary dialogue because without the testimony of humanist authors such as Primo Levi and Vasily Grossman, as well as the young Marxist David Rousset, it is impossible to achieve a materialist interpretation of the most atrocious aspects of the human experience that unfolded within them.
In general terms, Marxism provided a perspective that set the correct parameters for understanding the experience of this «hell on earth,» in opposition to various interpretations or distortions: the exclusivist narrative promoted by Zionism to justify its crimes against the Palestinian people; a certain extreme humanist tendency that viewed what happened at Auschwitz as «inexplicable»; and Holocaust denial, which is resurging today but has had multiple chapters, including the well-known Historikerstreit («historians’ debate») in Germany during the 1980s, in which the German historian Ernst Nolte was the leading figure of the most reactionary positions.
To guide us in this endeavor, we will critically follow certain texts by Leon Trotsky, Ernest Mandel, and Alex Callinicos, as well as the testimonies of some of the authors mentioned above (Mandel also experienced life in a concentration camp, though not an extermination camp; he was detained twice in Buchenwald, which was founded as a camp for political prisoners in 1937 and, later, transformed into a forced labor camp during World War II.)
1- Mandel or the Challenge of Specifying Nazi Extermination
Vasily Grossman, a war correspondent for the Red Army, was the first to report on the conditions in an extermination camp. While the existence of these camps was known, the Allies as a whole (i.e., the Western imperialist powers and the USSR) refused to take action. His report «The Hell of Treblinka» became historic and was used as a privileged testimony during the Nuremberg Trials: «Those who arrived from the Warsaw Ghetto were met with terrible torments. Women and children were separated from the crowd and led to the places where the bodies were burning, instead of being sent to the gas chambers. The mothers, driven mad with terror, were forced to pass with their children between the burning furnaces, over which thousands of dead writhed in the flames and smoke, contorting and shaking as if they had come back to life, while the bellies of pregnant women exploded from the heat and their unborn children burned in the open wombs of their mothers. This sight could drive even the most balanced person insane.» (A Writer at War); [2]
The testimony of horror immediately raised the issue of its interpretation. Grossman’s report, works like The Concentrationary Universe by David Rousset—himself a former detainee in Buchenwald—and If This Is a Man (or Survival in Auschwitz) by Primo Levi, are some of the landmark works about the camps, generally approached from a deeply humanistic perspective. David Rousset, still a young Trotskyist who, when rescued from Buchenwald, weighed only 40 kilograms, wrote his profound and poetic work in just a few weeks during his recovery in August 1945. He dedicated it to several comrades killed by Nazism, including Marcel Hic, an important Trotskyist leader during World War II. “Men from all peoples, all beliefs, at the moment when the snow and wind beat against their backs, freezing their abdomens with military rhythms, shrill like a torn and sarcastic blasphemy, under the blind lights, in the main square of Buchenwald’s frozen nights, men without convictions, famished and violent; men bearing shattered beliefs, humbled dignities; an entire naked people, inwardly naked, stripped of all culture, of all civilization, armed with shovels and pickaxes, picks and hammers, chained to the rusty Lorens [cargo wagons], salt drillers, snow cleaners, concrete makers; a people destroyed by blows, obsessed with memories of food paradise erased from memory; inseparably imprisoned by degradation: all this people throughout time (…) The camps are of Ubu-esque inspiration [from the king Ubu, referring to the sinister and cynical character from Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi (1896), where «Ubu-esque» refers to the irrational, a “tragic buffoonery” highlighted with enormous literary richness by David Rousset]” (The Concentrationary Universe). [4]
In this way, Rousset opens his work with a chapter titled “The Doors Open and Close,” describing an original universe governed by its own laws; a hell that even Dante could not have imagined, a hell of this world, where one could enter but never leave. That’s why the doors would open but then close, sealing them shut.
Rousset acknowledges the perplexing face of class struggle within the concentrationary universe, but he insists—just as Primo Levi and even Mandel in his personal testimony in Buchenwald will—that there is a distinction between political prisoners and common prisoners, with the latter often willing to endure all kinds of ignominy. Mandel will testify similarly about how guards of communist or social-democratic origin helped him survive in Buchenwald, even aiding in his first escape. The concentration camp, and especially the extermination camp, did not operate in the same way for those who were politicized or, at least, had some belief to cling to. Even in the worst conditions, the flame of rebellion survives. This is why Rousset had the capacity to end his work with hope:“It is still too early to take stock of the concentrationary experience. Nevertheless, even now, it shows itself full of lessons. To become actively aware of the strength and beauty of the act of living (…) to live even through the worst falls or the most fatal setbacks. A sensual freshness, filled with joy, built upon the most exhaustive knowledge of the rubble and, consequently, a hardening in action, a tenacity in maintaining decisions; in short, a broader, immensely creative health.” (The Concentrationary Universe)
In this brief final paragraph, Rousset speaks to the awareness of life, the most exhaustive knowledge of barbarism, and the resistance against it, highlighting its lessons, the tenacity to remain steadfast, and the importance of creativity. In essence, he emphasizes the human and political capacity for resistance even in the worst conditions imaginable.
However, despite these testimonies that emerged in the immediate post-war period, Marxism struggled to engage with the extermination camps (just as it struggles to address other manifestations of capitalist, Stalinist, and pre-capitalist barbarism). The doors that «opened and closed» with blood and fire, the cynical inscription at Auschwitz “Work Sets You Free,” and the logic of the «concentrationary universe» challenged, and still challenge, a Marxist explanation of the most extreme barbarism: the «human condition» within that experience.
Ernest Mandel’s work is a good starting point because not only did he experience Buchenwald firsthand, but he was also one of the leading Trotskyist figures of the postwar period. As a scholar of Marxism with an inclination towards an objectivist, economistic, and sociological Marxism, he struggled to conceptually grasp what he himself lived through—what was specifically processed in the extermination camps.
In an introduction to Trotsky’s analysis of fascism from 1969, Mandel sharply highlights how fascism abruptly transformed the historical and individual fate of thousands, and later millions, of human beings into one unified entity. He discusses how such radical experiences in an era of extremes tore people away from their daily lives, their «private» existence. However, Mandel then makes a positivist statement against all historical evidence, asserting that “(…) nothing happens in vain in history; every historical event has, in the long run, positive outcomes” (“Fascism”). [5]
If it is true that nothing happens in vain in history, that everything has determined conditions, it is false that everything has positive outcomes, whether in the long run or the short. History is not a narrative of positive outcomes over time, but rather a struggle between the ascending and descending curves of history, as Engels asserted with a much more dialectical approach. Turning its back on the Marxist alternative of «socialism or barbarism,» it is clear that such a statement could not serve to appreciate what was specific about the experience of Auschwitz. Mandel’s extremely «Enlightenment» Marxism, his belief that progress always triumphs in the end, was a characteristic present throughout his work, giving it positivist traits that clashed with the experience of the previous century. These traits were more aligned with the Marxism of the Second International than with revolutionary Marxism. [6]
However, the essay we are citing, although unilateral from the point of view of historical dialectics, is educational. Mandel emphasizes the concept of the “undominated past,” in relation to a past that cannot or does not want to be exhaustively explained and, therefore, cannot be dominated (this cynical game was played by the postwar German authorities, a game that today is returning with the rise of the AfD!). [7] He also introduces the Blochian concept of «non-simultaneity,» which expresses the persistence of older forms of historical existence in contemporary society, as a way to explain facets of Nazism. Mandel also recalls that this concept shares similarities with the “unequal and combined development” concept, worked out by Labriola and Trotsky independently.
We give the concept of ‘non-contemporaneity’ a different twist in our analyses. However, we believe it is an extremely valuable concept that must be embraced. [8] We use it to explain ‘bipolarity,’ the dialectical reversibility of events, and the fact that, alongside the rise of the far right, a restart of the historical experience of the exploited and oppressed is taking place—something that the prevailing Marxist skepticism fails to see.
Trotsky was brilliant in his use of the concept as we have just outlined it, applicable equally to the 1930s and the present era: «Fascism has made politics accessible to the underworld of society. Today, not only in peasant homes but also in urban skyscrapers, the twentieth century coexists with the tenth or the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magical power of gestures and exorcisms. The Pope of Rome broadcasts the miraculous transformation of water into wine over the radio. Movie stars visit mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by human genius wear amulets on their clothing. What inexhaustible reserves of obscurantism, ignorance, and barbarism! Desperation has awakened them, fascism has given them a flag. Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism as cultural excrement through the normal course of societal development is now vomited forth by capitalist society as undigested barbarism. Such is the physiology of National Socialism.» (What is National Socialism?)
Mandel then proceeds with a critique of the German historian Ernest Nolte (1923–2016), who shifted from a liberal position to an ultra-reactionary stance, blaming Bolshevism for the emergence of Nazism. Nolte asserts that «if fascism is an expression of ‘archaic military tendencies,’ then something peculiar and irreducible emerges in human nature.» It does not emerge as a fruit of capitalist society, despite the fact that today it can only arise on the basis of the capitalist system (…)»—thus attributing the specificity of the extermination camps to «human nature,» a classic recourse of reactionary intellectuals. Mandel refers to Trotsky’s classic analysis of fascism as historically determined, emphasizing that Nazism—and, we add, the extermination camps—was not a matter of «human nature.» Rather, Nazism built a mass movement to crush the working class (with concentration camps, and later extermination camps, as part of this counterrevolutionary «apparatus.»)
Mandel critiques the vulgar, objectivist, and fatalistic Marxism present in Kautsky, who attributed the «impossibility» of fighting the rise of fascism to «objective conditions.» He adds something instructive for today’s skeptical Marxists: «This school [that of the Second International] has never understood that our actions can change the given balance of forces, and, in particular, that our passivity shifts that balance in favor of the class enemy» (ibid.).[9] He further argues, following Trotsky, that fascism is the great bourgeoisie’s punishment of the proletariat for its communist agitation and criticizes the reformist thesis of «clinging to legality at all costs.» [10]
Towards the end of his life, Mandel seems to have modified his approach to his “Enlightenment positivism.” He introduces a correction in his analysis of the Jewish question and the extermination, which is significant, given that he also makes a similar adjustment regarding Stalinism in his valuable work Power and Money. It is as if he had finally accepted that history is not a linear process of progress but a dialectic of advances and setbacks. Already in his inspired book The Meaning of the Second World War (1985), in the second appendix titled “On the Dispute Among German Historians Regarding the Origin, Nature, the ‘Unique Character’ of Nazism, and the Possibility of Its Reproduction,” Mandel introduces more nuanced perspectives and once again engages in polemics with Ernest Nolte.[11]
In this appendix, he correctly states: “There is no doubt that, in fact, this crime is unique and that to this day it represents the pinnacle of a long history of inhumanities inflicted by men upon their fellow men,” rejecting Ernest Nolte’s attempt to relativize the issue of the extermination camps. (It is clear that this debate was and remains a “two-front dispute”: against Zionist exclusivism and against reactionary relativization.)
In this appendix, he correctly states: “There is no doubt that, in fact, this crime is unique and that to this day it represents the pinnacle of a long history of inhumanities inflicted by men upon their fellow men,” rejecting Ernest Nolte’s attempt to relativize the issue of the extermination camps. (It is clear that this debate was and remains a “two-front dispute”: against Zionist exclusivism and against reactionary relativization.)
Mandel denounces Nolte’s sophistry in equating the Nazi extermination camps—an extreme counterrevolutionary action—with the “threat of extermination” directed at ruling classes by revolutionary thinkers of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. In the first case, it was a matter of physical extermination, that is, the announcement of mass murder. In the second, it referred to a “social destruction” in the sense of the “negation of those classes as classes,” and in no way implied physical annihilation. Mandel asserts that there is not a single example of a text advocating the physical extermination of members of the ruling classes, let alone their women and children. “Overlooking this ‘small’ difference from the Nazi murders is unworthy of a scholar” (El significado de la Segunda Guerra Mundial)
Mandel then addresses the issue of the Nazi bureaucracy and its irrationality.
Through a narrative similar to that of Hannah Arendt, Mandel describes—though without explicitly naming it—the «banality of evil.» He speaks of «the unlimited faith of Nazi bureaucrats in the State,» their «willingness to obey,» their «unrestricted conformism,» and their «radical nationalism,» pointing out that these mentalities are what enable «a mass of more or less educated citizens to become collaborators in such cruelties» (ibid., 229).[13] He adds that to understand this mindset and behavior, one must start with a critique of Weber’s thesis regarding the supposed «increasing rationality of bourgeois society.» Instead, Mandel characterizes this society by «the combination of an increasing partial rationality and an increasing overall irrationality,» emphasizing that during the Third Reich, this combination reached an extreme development in both of its (dialectical, we add) moments: «an enormously heightened partial rationality in numerous fields» simultaneous with an «overall irrationality amplified to the point of absurdity, as in the murder of European Jews» (ibid.).
It is this escalation of the Nazi regime’s overall irrationality to the point of absurdity—this tragic «theater of the absurd» embodied in the extermination camps—that connects Mandel with David Rousset and Alfred Jarry, particularly with his «surrealist» work Ubu Roi. This analogy or metaphor of absurdity was also aptly used by Mandel to characterize the irrational drifts of Stalinist bureaucratic «planning” (the «disappearance of planning within the plan,» as Moshe Lewin insightfully put it, quoted in Marxism and the Socialist Transition.)
Mandel insists that only within the extreme counterrevolutionary context shaped by Nazism «does the tendency to hypostatize violence become intelligible and explicable,» a tendency evident «both in the Third Reich and in World War II and Auschwitz.» The Belgian Marxist emphasizes that this should not be seen as something «unexpected,» but rather as «the ultimate outcome of a radical rejection of the civilizing tendencies of modern history,» whose first rupture «toward barbarism» was the outbreak of World War I.
Mandel concludes this appendix with a correct argument that should be a part of any Marxist analysis—one that strictly humanist approaches, that is, those dehistoricized and lacking a materialist context, fail to grasp: “It is precisely the thesis that asserts the total irrationality of the Hitlerian dictatorship, the supposed inability of human reason to grasp and explain the causes and extent of Nazi crimes, that leads to conclusions which hinder the struggle against fascism” (ibid.).
This final point holds value when appreciated in its proper measure. The Nazi barbarism of the extermination camps was, in a sense, “a barbarism from another planet.” However, sharp and sensitive perspectives like that of Primo Levi—a humanist tout court who speaks of the “inexplicability of their acts”—remain overly indeterminate. Here, two distinctions must be made: a) on the one hand, it is necessary to criticize the common mistake of many Marxists who dissolve the specificity of the extermination camps’ barbarism within a broader analysis of fascism; b) at the same time, Marxism must engage in dialogue with humanist thought to understand what was historically unique about these events—but without concluding that Marxism and humanism are of the same nature. In other words: Marxism is not a humanism, even if it carries strong humanist elements within it.
Here, it is important to draw a distinction from so-called “Marxist” thinkers like Louis Althusser, who, in asserting that “Marxism is not a humanism,” actually upholds an anti-humanist Marxism that has nothing to do with Marx and Engels, nor with our emancipatory project. We understand that Marxism carries a strong humanist component—especially in light of the dramatic experiences of the past century. However, Marxism is not merely a variant of humanism; it is a radical, dialectical, and materialist critique of all that exists. It is a dialectical, materialist, and emancipatory thought that grasps that history up to the present day is the history of class struggle—a struggle forged through blood and fire, something no form of humanism truly comprehends. [14]
Subsequently, in a draft written in 1990 on Traverso’s first work, The Marxists and the Jewish Question, Mandel notes that Marxism had “failed to explain the Jewish question.” He asserts that “Lenin had an unacknowledged debt to the Jewish Bund regarding ‘Leninist’ criteria for party organization,” an interesting remark. He also criticizes Marx’s early text, On the Jewish Question, as “flawed,” while acknowledging that only the older Engels and Trotsky had grasped the issue in a more dialectical manner. Additionally, he reaffirms Abraham Léon’s concept of Jews as a “people-class,” considering it a “dialectical approach to the question.”
As a digression, we should note that we consider the concept of “people-class” to have been valid for Judaism only until its destruction in Eastern Europe and the creation of the State of Israel (1945–48). After this point, the “people-class” ceased to exist as such: its social nature shifted from that of an oppressed people to that of an oppressor, as it became assimilated into imperialism. Consequently, the Jewish question also ceased to function as a “producer” of unparalleled talents like Marx, Einstein, Freud, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and many others—figures who, in one way or another, emerged from conditions of oppression, from the combination of talent and adversity.
Isaac Deutscher offers a sharp concept for understanding Marxist universalist personalities who came from the former Jewish tradition: the “non-Jewish Jews,” a category that includes figures like our classics as well as postwar thinkers such as Mandel, Bensaïd, Tony Cliff, and others (in this sense, Traverso insightfully speaks of the “end of Jewish modernity” following the establishment of the Zionist state.)
Returning to Mandel, he approvingly cites Traverso when the latter argues that the Jewish question “reveals certain flaws in classical Marxist thought,” particularly “an inability to grasp the significance of the religious phenomenon in history and a difficulty in thinking about the nation.” However, Mandel asserts that “he does not believe this flaw belongs to Marx” and, certainly, “even less to Engels”; in his view, “it pertains to most of their disciples.” In other words, it reflects the shortcomings of a Marxism with a reductionist view of history—economicist, mechanical, and evolutionist—a Marxism to which, paradoxically, Mandel himself was also indebted (“Les marxistes et la question juive, de Enzo Traverso, note de lecture,” Ernest Mandel, 1990, Google).[15]
Before moving on to the next point, a digression on Nahuel Moreno’s analysis of Nazism. While he never developed a systematic analysis or dedicated written works on the subject (Moreno relied too heavily on spoken discourse, which is far less systematic than the written word), he appeared to have a deep sensitivity toward Nazism—the same unsystematized sensitivity he displayed regarding the bureaucratization of the USSR in his final years.[16] His references to the Warsaw Ghetto as “one of the most important events of the class struggle during World War II” and his critical stance against the partition of Germany as “the most severe historical defeat of the German working class” seem to indicate this.
However, his lack of theoretical systematization led him astray: he pushed his analysis beyond reasonable limits by defining Nazism as a “new social regime.” Moreno became overly fixated on the extreme forms the Nazi regime took in the final years of the war, during which it did, in fact, control 7.5 million forced laborers in Germany. He saw in Nazism “an emerging new social regime” that abolished wage labor and private property—an assertion contradicted by Hitler himself in his speech to industrialists in June 1944, as well as by Albert Speer, a liberal-minded leader of Nazi state industry in the regime’s final years. Moreno’s approach was marked by a kind of “pragmatic Marxism” that lacked systematic rigor, which is why little of lasting written value remains from him. His acute sensitivities never fully crystallized into balanced, systematic analyses (“Causas y consecuencias de la victoria de la URSS sobre el nazismo” Izquierda Web).[17]
2- Callinicos, Marxism, and Humanism
Now, let us turn to the contribution of Alex Callinicos. The most comprehensive text we found by the British Marxist on the Holocaust is titled Plumbing the Depths: Marxism and the Holocaust and dates from 2001. It is a valuable text that attempts to reconstruct the Marxist historiography on Nazism up to the year it was published.
The text begins by stating that «nothing questions Marxism more directly than the Holocaust.» It emphasizes that Marx, both a supporter and critic of the Enlightenment, aspired to the universal emancipation of human beings through the power of reason, seeking the material reasons behind events. In this context, it presents the Holocaust as generally regarded, and for good reasons, «as the most extreme case of human evil.» It argues that at Auschwitz, «different types of domination merged»: racism, directed against Jews, Slavs, and Roma; the exploitation of slave labor; the oppression of gay people and women; the persecution of dissenting minorities like communists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc.
It states that no other human phenomenon has tested the explanatory powers of Marxism as much, and that the darkness of the circumstances in the concentration camps is so extreme that one might doubt whether Marxism or any other social theory can provide a reasonable explanation for what was experienced there.
In this context, however, he makes several delimitations. He correctly stands against the exclusive views of the Holocaust and the self-interested perspectives of Zionism. Comparisons must be made between Auschwitz and other genocides. The refusal to do so hinders shedding light on what happened there. Furthermore, he adds, this refusal, far from being purely «religious,» responds to more worldly interests, something that can be clearly seen today in the instrumentalization of the Holocaust by the State of Israel in relation to its genocide in Gaza.
However, Callinicos then relies on W.G. Runciman when he establishes «the difference between explanation and description of a social event,» stating that «explanation seeks to see the causal links of events,» while description «shows what it meant to be a victim,» something that, he claims, is perhaps more characteristic of an autobiography or art than science.
Here, Callinicos makes, in our view, a first and profound mistake in his approach. Perhaps this explains why in his long essay he does not cite Primo Levi, David Rousset, or Vasili Grossman, who were, respectively, prisoners in Auschwitz (the first), Buchenwald (the second), and the first to testify to the horrors of an extermination camp, Treblinka (the third). Methodologically, dismissing the testimonies of the victims of these dramatic events seems to us a grave error, because in their lived experience undoubtedly lies part of the truth of what happened there. [18]
However, if there is one thing that Callinicos criticizes in Mandel, it is precisely—sharing Norman Geras’s view—a certain «lack of specificity» in the analysis of the Holocaust, which, according to Callinicos, is also present in other «less orthodox» Marxist authors. He points out that the same issue occurs with Adorno, Horkheimer, and Hobsbawm— the latter, we add, literally «forgets» about the extermination camps in his poor work The Age of Extremes, which only has a sharp title, as the rest is an updated Stalinist narrative of 20th-century events.
Callinicos points out that this «lack of focus on the Holocaust as a specific phenomenon» is far from being exclusive to Marxism, and in this context, he praises the works of Geras (which we have not studied) and Traverso (which we have studied almost in its entirety) as an effort to respond to the phenomenon from a Marxist perspective.
Callinicos reminds us thNonetheless, and although anti-Semitic elements reemerge here and there, the reality is that the new far-right and governments like those of Trump and Milei are pro-Zionist to the point of fanaticism. Both support Netanyahu and the genocide in Gaza, having replaced old anti-Semitism with Islamophobia and the persecution of immigrants. The rise of the AfD in Germany is a significant example of this, as is the «immigrant hunt» that Trump launched from the very first minute of his second termat Zionism has instrumentalized the Holocaust after decades of silence on the subject following World War II. Traverso sharply points out that, to a large extent, the Holocaust was transformed into a kind of «secular religion» of the West, monumentalized and turned into a «state religion» in the last long stage of the neoliberal capitalist democratic-bourgeois era—an era that seems to be changing with the opening of this new stage of barbarism and revolution that we are currently living through.
Nonetheless, and although anti-Semitic elements reemerge here and there, the reality is that the new far-right and governments like those of Trump and Milei are pro-Zionist to the point of fanaticism. Both support Netanyahu and the genocide in Gaza, having replaced old anti-Semitism with Islamophobia and the persecution of immigrants. The rise of the AfD in Germany is a significant example of this, as is the «immigrant hunt» that Trump launched from the very first minute of his second term.
Callinicos asks: «Can Marxism contribute to understanding the Holocaust?» and answers affirmatively, a statement that we agree with. He approvingly quotes Geras when he points out that Trotsky had well captured in his early writings the genocidal character of the pogroms under Tsarism (we would add that Lenin had done the same, which Callinicos does not mention: he called on social democrats to fight alongside the Jews against these atrocities), and recalls Trotsky’s 1938 text, mentioned earlier, where he predicted the possible Holocaust that would come with the outbreak of the Second World War.
Thus, an attentive reader might think that Callinicos would, based on these statements, embark on the task of providing an explanation of the extermination camps; to specify his investigation. But this is not what happens. As we have already seen, Callinicos dismisses the testimonies of the victims as material for interpreting the Holocaust. Furthermore, he enters into a debate with authors like Geras and Zizek about the supposed idea that Auschwitz would demonstrate there is something «intrinsic to human nature related to its capacity for evil,» a capacity «that coexists with other, more benign traits…»
Callinicos correctly criticizes this essentialist approach and the lack of specificity in the analysis, the nonsense of claiming it would refer to an aspect of «human nature,» but then he makes a serious mistake in his analysis, a mistake that he glosses over but which is a key interpretative flaw in his own analysis of the extermination camps (it seems the matter is elusive).
Without addressing in his essay, as we have pointed out, the works of Levi, Rousset, or Grossman, as if they could offer nothing to the Marxist interpretation of the extermination camps, he states: «Simply invoking the human capacity for the worst [Geras, Zizek] (…) fails to connect with the fact that this episode—so beyond imagination as it was—was precisely that, a historical episode limited in time and space» («Plumbing the Depths,» italics are ours).
As we can see, the word «episode» appears twice in a paragraph dedicated to correctly stating that invoking the human capacity for evil is not enough to understand what happened in the extermination camps. Auschwitz was «unimaginable,» Callinicos explicitly states, but by reducing it to a mere «historical episode,» he commits a grave error of judgment.
We could argue that this is an aporia, a self-contradictory statement, not a dialectical one—a kind of unsolvable difficulty within Callinicos’ otherwise well-documented text. How could it make sense to describe Auschwitz, a black hole of history, as just a mere «episode»? «Episode» implies something transient, lacking historical depth, when it is clear that the extermination camps, much like black holes in the cosmos, have an immense density that must be unraveled. The density of the latter as a physical phenomenon mirrors that of the former in historical terms—a great specificity, but not a historical exclusivity.
If black holes capture and «suck» the matter around them, it’s clear that our cosmic analogy applies here to the extermination camps, because they dramatically «sucked» the existence of six million human beings, no less: they constituted the largest killing machine in history to this day (along with Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the bombing of Dresden).
Perhaps Callinicos should have given his article a different title, and that would have been fine. If he had called it «A Marxist Analysis of Fascism» or «Marxist Historiography of Nazism,» the title and the subject of his study would have matched. But by titling it «Plumbing the Depths: Marxism and the Holocaust,» one would expect some deep exploration of the Auschwitz event, not just a review of historiography on Nazism. While this is very useful and provides context, it sidesteps the analysis that is the subject of this note.
We have the impression that Callinicos tilts the scale too much, in his disregard for the lived experience in the camps, by relegating it to «autobiography or art.» He reviews the works of Arno Mayer and his study on the counterrevolution in our contemporary world; defends Trotsky’s legacy, emphasizing that, far from economic determinism, Trotsky developed a nuanced analysis of fascism; recalls that fascism was—and may be again in the new phase of far-right ascension, as we add— a mass movement; asserts that Hitler and his associates were not mere puppets of German capitalists; revisits Trotsky and his sharp definition of fascism as «counterrevolution in the form of a revolution»; recalls Daniel Guerin’s view of fascism as a «demagogic ‘anticapitalism'»; shuts the door on any crude economic analysis claiming the extermination camps had any «economic utility» (not to be confused with the forced labor camps and slave labor used by Nazi Germany in general); reaffirms the analysis of his current on the importance of state capitalism in the last century, as well as the territorial forms of Nazi imperialism (forms of old imperialism that have resurfaced with Trump, we add); develops the idea of the cumulative radicalization of Nazism to explain the unplanned decision, from the outset, to resort to the Jewish genocide; elaborates all this with precision and sharpness, but the fact remains that he does not even come close to explaining what was specific about the extermination camps.
In the subsection titled «Ideology and Genocide,» he skillfully traces the roots of Nazi racism and biologicism. He also explains how the Jewish genocide was decided more by the failure than by the success of achieving a swift victory over the former USSR. He adds: «Auschwitz as such, in its varied functions – understood as both a concentration camp and an extermination camp – was the result of a plurality of determinations that produced the Holocaust.» He also evokes Himmler’s words addressed on October 4, 1943, to the SS Gruppenführer in Poznan: «Most of you know what it means when one hundred bodies are lying around, or five hundred, or a thousand. Having gone through all this – beyond exceptions caused by human weakness – and remaining decent, has been hard. This page of glory in our history has never been written and will never be written again.»
And yet, despite all this effort of reflection, despite Callinicos saying that he tries to «fill the specificity that Mandel demanded in the analysis,» there is something that remains unresolved: the very experience of the extermination camps is left out of the analysis. It is contextualized, true, but its specificity is not fully acknowledged. A paradoxical result of so much interpretive effort.
In addition to his historiographical contextualization, which Callinicos performs masterfully, the «circumstance» of the camps invites a «dialogue» between history and Marxist anthropology. Neither a purely humanist approach that highlights their «incomprehensibility» due to their extreme nature, as Primo Levi develops, nor a «going off on tangents» that dissolves the specificity of the camps.
In reality, Callinicos understands this. That is why he states that «no explanation of the extermination of the Jews [and Roma, Slavs, Soviet soldiers, etc.] can be truly satisfactory, not because the explanation is necessarily false, but because of the enormity of the event that must be accounted for.» «Such an inherent discrepancy between cause and effect is presumably at least part of what Hannah Arendt was attempting to understand when she presented her celebrated thesis of the ‘banality of evil'» (we wrote about this in «The Human Condition After Auschwitz,» so we will not revisit this topic here).
This gap between the Holocaust event and our attempts to understand it rationally, Callinicos asserts, is possibly what Elie Wiesel, among others [like Primo Levi], sees as beyond history and understanding.
But if this is the case, then what happens is that Callinicos did not take the best path to understand what was specifically processed in Auschwitz.
First, it is essential to understand the extermination camps as something more than a mere “episode.” In this regard, Traverso has been far more insightful in grasping them as a “tear in history.” Indeed, that is what they were: a historical rupture in human experience, a moment where humanity was placed in parentheses—just as in other ruptures, such as the brutal Zionist genocide in Gaza today. A historical rupture is a qualitative event; it establishes a historical mark, reveals the capacity for barbarism within capitalism (or Stalinism) at the current stage of productive forces, and can lead to humanity’s self-destruction in a nuclear event. It confirms what Engels stated at the beginning of this note: human history is shaped by two intersecting tendencies—one ascending and the other descending.
In this regard, Trotsky was much more concrete and came closer to a dialectical materialist explanation of Auschwitz that borders on brilliance, although the text we will quote is from 1933 and he did not live to see the extermination camps (though he did witness Stalin’s barbarism during the Great Purges, forced collectivization, and the gulag!). He wrote: «To evolution, to materialist thought, and to the rationalism of the twentieth, nineteenth, and eighteenth centuries, there is opposed in his mind national idealism as a heroic inspiration. Hitler’s nation is a mythological shadow of the petty bourgeoisie itself, a pathetic delirium of a thousand-year Reich. To elevate it above history, the nation is supported by race. History is seen as the emanation of race. The qualities of race are constructed without relation to changing social conditions. Rejecting ‘economic thinking’ as vile, National Socialism descends one step further: from economic materialism, it turns to zoological materialism.»
The denunciation of the «zoological materialism» of Nazism is a brilliant link, serving as an entry point to understanding the brutality of Auschwitz. Here lies another flaw in Callinicos’s analysis. To approach an understanding of the experience in the extermination camps, there is no alternative but to establish a dialogue between Marxism and humanist thought. This is why Callinicos makes the mistake, at the beginning of his essay, of dismissing the approach of former detainees in the camps, the truth embedded in their experience and testimonies: the aforementioned regression of humanity to an animal condition (or worse): «Upon leaving the darkness, we suffered from the regained consciousness of having been debased. We had been living for months and years in that animal-like state… our days had been filled, from morning to night, with hunger, exhaustion, fear, and cold, and the space for reflection, reasoning, or feelings had been annulled» (Primo Levi, La trilogía de Auschwitz). [20]
Under the reign of this «zoological materialism,» the experience lived in the camps was situated «outside of humanity.» To understand it, a Marxist anthropology is required, precisely because anthropology studies these border zones between the human and the animal. Of course, the animal kingdom is more «benign» and has nothing to do with the «Nazified animalism,» the «concentration camp universe,» as defined by David Rousset when he was still a Marxist: a universe, a «cosmos» that, as the word indicates, had its own separate rules.
We already know that there is nothing that can be classified as «evil» in the animal kingdom, simply because there is no consciousness or morality in it, attributes that are distinctly human. Callinicos should have delved deeper, beyond historical contextualization, into a certain Marxist anthropology to understand the camps, as well as engaging in a dialogue, from Marxism, with the humanist thinkers who went through them—something neither he nor Mandel achieve: «We lived the incommunicability in the most radical way. I refer especially to the Italian, Yugoslav, and Greek deportees (…) the shock with the language barrier occurred dramatically (…) knowing or not knowing German meant a separation into two branches. With those who understood them and answered them articulately, an appearance of human relationship was established. With those who didn’t understand them, [the SS] reacted in a way that terrified and astounded us: the order, which had been spoken in the calm voice of someone who knows it will be obeyed, was repeated the same way, loudly and furiously, after a chilling scream, as if directed at a deaf person, or a domestic animal, more sensitive to tone than to the content of the message (…) the use of the word to communicate thought, that necessary and sufficient mechanism for a human to be human, had fallen into disuse. It was a signal: for those, we were no longer human; with us, like with mules or cows, there was no substantial difference between the scream and the punch (…) Marsalek recounts in his book Mauthausen that in that Lager, even more polyglot than Auschwitz, the rubber whip was called der Dolmetscher, the interpreter: the one who made himself understood by all.» (Los hundidos y los salvados, en Trilogía de Auschwitz)
We believe this note suffices to explain that it is impossible to understand Nazism without understanding the extermination camps (something Callinicos fails to do) and vice versa: it is impossible to understand the extermination camps without understanding Nazism (something Callinicos does attempt). His problem is that he fails to connect one thing with the other. And he fails to do so because he cannot establish a dialogue between two distinct traditions of thought that need to be linked to understand, at least, certain aspects of Nazism (and also of Stalinism!)[21]; to have a particular sensitivity about the fact that history is an eminently human event: to establish a critical dialogue between humanism and Marxism without reducing the second, historical-materialist and dialectically determined, to the first, humanism, which is generic and historically undetermined (an abstract narrative about the «human condition»).[22]
Indeed, in relation to Primo Levi’s work, we can say that the journey he traces in his Trilogia moves from a certain hope to desolation, unfortunately. While Levi does recognize forms of resistance in the camps, which indeed occurred through escapes, sabotage, and organization inspired by communist, Bundist, Trotskyist, social-democratic movements, etc., it is a fact that between If This Is a Man (a.k.a. Survival in Auschwitz), written in 1946, and The Drowned and the Saved, published in 1986, the tone has changed. In his final work, he appears despondent. It was written shortly before he committed suicide, by an older Primo Levi, weighed down by the self-imposed burden of bearing witness and never forgetting over the course of decades.
Indeed, in his 1976 Appendix to If This Is a Man (a.k.a. Survival in Auschwitz), as well as in many other places, Levi points out: “(…) it should be remembered that there were indeed uprisings in some of the camps: in Treblinka, in Sobibor, and also in Birkenau (…). They were not large in number: like the similar uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, they were more examples of extraordinary moral strength. In all cases, they were planned and led by prisoners who were in some way privileged (…) In the camps for political prisoners, or where they were the majority, the conspiratorial experience of these prisoners proved invaluable, and often, rather than open rebellions, more efficient defensive activities were carried out (…) sabotage was carried out against the work for the German war industries.”
Absolutely, this passage highlights a crucial element amidst the barbarism: a principle of revelation, as you put it. It’s the awareness of political consciousness, solidarity, and the ability to establish a clear «us vs. them» that marks the difference between animality and the humanity of the oppressed and exploited. Even under the worst conditions, this boundary must be drawn. The consciousness, resistance to oppressive conditions, and moral stance are what define the line between animality and humanity![23]
Engels argued that human history was marked by two tendencies: one ascending and the other descending. And, logically, the ascending tendency is «humanization,» that is, the full historically determined development of all human potentialities; the descending one goes in the opposite direction. It is evident that the extermination camps, as the «logical extreme» of the counterrevolution, were in the descending line of history.
And this leads us to another theme absent in Callinicos’ text but important for understanding Auschwitz: the role of irrationality in history. Traverso correctly asserts that in the 20th century, an entire positivist conception of human progress died, the conception characteristic of the Second International and which also marked Trotskyism after the war. Hence the narrative of the “workers’ state” that survived all the counterrevolutionary atrocities, or the naive idea that “in the era of socialist revolution, all revolutions that expropriate capitalism are socialist” (an idea from Nahuel Moreno in his ultra-objectivist phase, in the 1980s, and which is still repeated by his followers today).
Here, we need to separate two issues: epistemic rationality from historical irrationality. Every event, even the most irrational, can be analyzed rationally. But this does not mean that every development of reality is «rational»: that would be an idealist approach to things that does not belong to material reality. Hegel was right when he stated that everything rational is real (meaning, it can become real given the force with which it captures the «mechanics of reality»), but its opposite is false: not everything real is rational. There are real developments that are irrational, and it has always been argued that this part of Hegel’s statement was conservative, as it consecrated the existing order.
In this last point, Mandel is correct: «If we view the Holocaust as the most extreme expression of the destructive tendencies existing in bourgeois society, tendencies whose roots go deep into colonialism and imperialism, we can draw attention to other trends going in the same direction, notably in the development of the arms race (nuclear war, biological and chemical warfare, the so-called ‘conventional weapons’ more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and so on). A nuclear war, or even a ‘conventional’ world war without dismantling nuclear plants beforehand, could be worse than the Holocaust. The general irrationality of preparations for such a war is currently perceptible in the language [of imperialist politicians]. When they talk about ‘limiting the costs’ of a nuclear war, it seems like an attempt to commit suicide, to destroy the entire human race, ‘at the least possible cost.’ What does ‘cost’ have to do with suicide?» («Material, social and ideological preconditions for the Nazi genocide»).
This text dates back 35 years, to 1990, yet it seems to have been written for the current global stage of crisis, the return of wars and colonialism, barbarism, and revolution! It is crystal clear that the destructive power currently possessed by capitalist imperialist humanity has the «rationality» of competition for world hegemony, but also the very real irrationality of the possibility of humanity’s self-destruction! Rational and irrational developments coexist in human history, just as civilization and barbarism coexist. No wonder Benjamin pointed out, in his Theses on the Concept of History, his sharpest text, that every manifesto of progress up until today has been nothing more than a manifesto of barbarism; how much more so were the extermination camps a manifesto of barbarism and irrationality, the darkest face of counterrevolution to this day (along with Stalinism as counterrevolution in the revolution).
In his work The Thought of Hegel, Bloch makes a suggestive philosophical statement that we believe is key to the problem of irrationality in history: “What is real is rational [Hegel asserts], but one must know how to distinguish what is effectively real. The real also has an external existence; it presents us with the arbitrary and the contingent. Reason has always existed, but not always in a rational form”.[24]
3-From the extermination in Auschwitz to the genocide in Gaza
It is evident that this text cannot be concluded today without talking, even briefly, about the Zionist genocide in Gaza. Due to the twists of history, last week the Gazan population began to return to what is left of their homes and farmlands after the Zionist devastation (another form of extermination). The images are striking: clinging to their few belongings, families and individuals return in large numbers to their cities, neighborhoods, and towns, to their lands.
To understand this, one must bear in mind not only the claim to the national right to their historical land, but also that the Palestinians are, in fact—not from the formal standpoint of international law, but in reality—»stateless»: part of a nation that is not truly recognized, with no exit visa or funds to emigrate.[25] Where could they go if not to reclaim their land, from which they were brutally displaced by the Zionist genocide of the past few months?
It is this material and moral reality of the return of Gazans to their cities and towns – along with the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners – that Marxist apologists for defeat do not want to see, just as they refuse to see any of the other facts of international class struggle that break with their predictions: the growing mobilization of immigrants in the U.S. against Trump; the mass marches in Germany against the AfD; the crisis of Milei’s government due to his statements in Davos, etc. The global stage is marked by the initiative of the far right, it is reactionary, but it does not unfold in a vacuum: the world is a pressure cooker about to explode! And it will explode if the far right continues to exert its barbaric pressure!
In the defeatist definitions of the current world, there is an evident class element: the petty bourgeois is more easily impressed and incapable of appreciating the world dialectically (Trotsky already stated this in his time). An example of this is the characterization of the magazine Jacobin about the ceasefire in Gaza, which, despite being unstable and transitory, remains a significant partial victory for the Gazan people. Not for Jacobin, though. They confidently state, «Gaza, as we know it, no longer exists. When Israeli leaders and generals boast of bombing Gaza ‘back to the Stone Age,’ they are not speaking metaphorically. Israel has destroyed Gaza for generations to come and made it totally and completely uninhabitable» (Seraj Assi, «The Gaza Ceasefire is Far from Enough»). Well, the Gazan people cannot afford to dawdle; they must get to work on rebuilding.
Thus, the whims of the calendar have placed the extermination in Auschwitz and the martyrdom of the Palestinian people face to face. The genocide in Gaza has occurred due to a dramatic historical paradox: the Jewish people, historically oppressed, have become an oppressive people. This character is multiplied infinitely by the far-right drift of the Zionist project: ethnic cleansing in the lands of historical Palestine.
Trotsky had anticipated with incredible foresight in 1938 the reactionary nature of the “Zionist solution”: “(…) It must be taken into account that the Jewish question will persist for an entire future era. Today, nations cannot exist normally without a common territory. Zionism was born precisely from this idea. But everyday facts show that Zionism is incapable of solving the Jewish question. The conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine is taking on an increasingly tragic and threatening character. I do not believe at all that the question can be resolved within the framework of decaying capitalism and under the control of British imperialism” (Leon Trotsky, “La cuestión judía,” 01/18/37).
The transformation of the Jewish people into an oppressor people can only generate a new rise in antisemitism, to which also contributes the interested overlap between anti-Zionism and antisemitism promoted by officials of the Zionist state. In reaction to such barbarism against the Palestinian people, it is clear that there is enough «fuel» for a renewal of antisemitism: “In such a context [the genocide in Gaza], the evocation of the Holocaust becomes a permanent source of misunderstanding. The instrumentalization of Holocaust memory is not new. Today, it is used to legitimize the war in Gaza. When the Holocaust is evoked, it is to present antisemitism as the key to explain October 7th and to be astonished, even indignant, at the wave of solidarity with the Palestinian people that has been massively demonstrated (…)” (Traverso, «“La guerra en Gaza difumina la memoria del Holocausto”).
The application of Nazi methods in Gaza and against the Palestinian people in general shows the limits of any interested «essentialist» narrative: the far right, Nazism, and Zionism are not a matter of religion; they are the darkest face of capitalist imperialist reaction and counterrevolution, which takes on different forms depending on historical circumstances.
Bibliography
Ernst Bloch, El pensamiento de Hegel, Fondo de Cultura Económica, México, Buenos Aires, 1949.
Alex Callinicos, “Plumbing the Depths: Marxism and the Holocaust”, 2001, MIA.
Antony Beevor y Luba Vinogradova editores, Un escritor en guerra. Vasili Grossman en el Ejército Rojo, 1941-1945, Memoria Crítica, Barcelona, 2010. Federico Engels, AntiDhüring, Antídoto-Gallo Rojo, Argentina, sin fecha.
Vasili Grossman, “El infierno de Treblinka”, punto I, Galaxia Gutenberg, 2014, Google.
Ernest Mandel, “Ensayo sobre los escritos de Trotsky sobre el fascismo”, en Alemania, la revolución y el fascismo, volumen 1, León Trotsky, Juan Pablos Editor, México, 1973.
- “El fascismo”, 1969, MIA.
- “Material, social and ideological preconditions for the nazi genocide”, International Viewpoint, 1990, 27/01/2020.
- El significado de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, Fontamara, México, 1991.
Primo Levi, “Apéndice de 1976”, Si esto es un hombre, Google. Trilogía de Auschwitz, El Aleph, Barcelona, 2005.
David Rousset, El universo concentracionario, Siglo XXI, Anthropos, Barcelona, 2018.
Enzo Traverso, “La guerra en Gaza difumina la memoria del Holocausto”, Viento Sur, 06/11/23.
León Trotsky, “La cuestión judía”, respuestas ofrecidas al diario Der Weg, 18/01/1937, MIA.
- “¿Qué es el nacional-socialismo?”, 1933, izquierda web.
Roberto Sáenz, “La condición humana después de Auschwitz”, izquierda web.
[1] A letter provided by a comrade from our movement, sent by his relatives in Poland to relatives in Argentina. Simply looking at the number of stamps on the letter reveals the irrational bureaucratic nature that was one of the faces of Nazism.
[2] Grossman is one of the greatest writers of the past century, who depicted in his works the horrors of life under both Stalinism and Nazism. His mother was murdered in the Babi Yar ravine, in Kyiv, Belarus, during the massacres of September 1941 by the Einsatzgruppen (the SS extermination troops that followed immediately behind the Wehrmacht).
[3] It should be remembered that Abraham León, the leading figure of Belgian Trotskyism during World War II and author of the renowned work The Marxist Conception of the Jewish Question, was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. Between Nazism and Stalinism, they managed to assassinate a significant portion of the young European Trotskyist leaders toward the late 1930s and early 1940s (including Trotsky’s son, León Sedov). In a way, it is a fact that European Trotskyism was left leaderless in the final sequence of the first «age of extremes.»
[4] David Rousset underwent a tortuous political evolution. In 1948, he denounced Stalinism’s concentration camps, which led to fierce opposition from the PCF, then at its peak as a mass organization and legitimized by its resistance to Nazism. The pressure of circumstances and his life experience eventually turned him into a left-wing Gaullist, a political formation for which he served as a parliamentarian for several years. His anti-Stalinist testimony was rejected by the Stalinist Pierre Daix, who had also been imprisoned in the extermination camps, leading to a harsh and bitter confrontation. Sartre and other writers defended Rousset, whose son, Pierre, is a historical leader of the Mandelist current. (Sartre also defended Paul Nizan, a dissident against Nazism who was assassinated by the Stalinists on the beaches of Dunkirk in 1940).
The intertwining of the simultaneous struggle against Nazism and Stalinism, as well as against popular fronts and imperialist democracy, was one of the defining features of the first «age of extremes,» a radicality of circumstances that we have not yet reached in our time.
[5] In a variation of the previous formulation, in a text that may have been edited differently, he also unilaterally states the following: “A new phenomenon had suddenly emerged that seemed to sharply reverse a long-term historical trend of progress” (“Essay on Trotsky’s Writings on Fascism”).
[6] Traverso is right in this critique of Mandel. He develops it in his texts and argues that the type of Marxism upheld by the Belgian leader prevented him from grasping, until very late, the specificity of the barbarism that took place in Auschwitz. In this text, we do not focus on Traverso, nor on the limitations of his own approach, which is too detached from the historical process—an issue we have already analyzed in another article (“La condición humana después de Auschwitz”, izquierda web).
[7] The Nuremberg Trials prosecuted the high-ranking authorities of the Nazi regime while leaving the rest of the administrative personnel largely intact, especially in the former FRG (the former GDR would require a specific analysis that we cannot undertake here).
[8] The families of Mandel and Bloch were friends. Mandel rightly considered Ernst Bloch the foremost Marxist philosopher of the last century and dedicated a highly inspired article to him upon his passing: “Hay que soñar: la anticipación y la esperanza como categorías del materialismo histórico” (Izquierda Web).
[9] It is clear that Mandel did not write as a scholar but as a revolutionary: he was not addressing academia but the militant community.
[10] «These theses arise from the false belief that when fascists abandon the sphere of legality, workers’ organizations must limit themselves to actions within that sphere,» another lesson of great relevance in today’s confrontation with the far right, which is both parliamentary and extraparliamentary.
[11] The sociological and «Plekhanovian» features of his approach remain, however, in the first appendix, at least in the Fontamara edition that we have, titled «The Role of the Individual in the History of the Second World War.»
[12] In this regard, see our work Marxism and the Socialist Transition: State, Power, and Bureaucracy, Volume 1.
[13] It is typical of every bureaucrat to rely on the supposedly unlimited power of the State. The same happened under Stalinism.
[14] In this regard, Trotsky’s polemic with Serge in Our Morality and Ours is accurate. Serge was a Marxist humanist who, with all the sensitivity he had and all his loyalty to the «old man,» nonetheless did not understand the iron laws of class struggle. The bibliography of Susan Weissman on Serge, the documentation she provides of his positions and articles after his departure from the former USSR, has confirmed the weakness of the Marxist thought of the great Bolshevik anarchist humanist he was (i.e., in the critique of reducing Marxism to a humanism even when addressing the most extreme cases of barbarism in the last century, such as Nazism and Stalinism).
[15] It is Bensaïd himself who criticizes these limitations in Mandel (“Mandel según Stutje, Bensaïd y Moreno”, izquierda web).
[16] It is symptomatic that both Mandel and Moreno revisited these reflections in the 1980s, that is, towards the end of their lives. We do not have the explanation, although it may be linked to a more general review of historical dialectics, more intricate than what is usually thought within the militancy.
[17] We have not been able to review for this text the reflections that Tony Cliff and Daniel Bensaïd may have made regarding Nazism and specifically the Nazi extermination (the task will be left for later).
[18] We cannot help but think that Callinicos rejects this type of approach due to his Althusserian Marxism. It should be remembered that Althusser rejects in his Marxism the importance of experience in the search for truth. He sees experience, not as a critical gateway to truth, but as an «epistemological obstacle» to be set aside. But this is a very abstract way of accessing truth, if not idealistic.
[19] A case of political hypocrisy in this regard is that of the Democrats in the U.S., who have maintained similar anti-immigrant policies under their presidencies, just in a less theatrical manner than Trump’s. The cynicism is immense, and each bourgeois imperialist force stages its policies in the way that best appeals to its electorate, but what is sought in all cases is to keep immigrants as a sort of industrial reserve army that serves to lower the total value of labor power.
[20] It is evident that in specifying his analysis, Callinicos made a shift in which, beyond all the contextual elements he introduced in his essay, beyond his critical study of Nazi historiography, he made the mistake of sidelining the lived experience in the camps themselves. We cannot help but attribute this to his Althusserian, objectivist, non-dialectical, and anti-humanist Marxism at its root. That is, abstractly «materialistic.»
[21] Something similar occurs with the analysis of Stalinism. Hence, the “Marxist” thinkers who profess anti-humanism are characterized by their inability to understand both phenomena: their “humanly disembodied” Marxism, made up of purely abstract structures, cannot understand these radical phenomena of the counterrevolution of the past century (“Althusser, filosofo tardío del estalinismo”, izquierda web).
[22] Language is a distinctly human characteristic, this is evident. In this sense, Levi sharply reminds us, as we have pointed out in other texts, how the prevailing slavery in concentration and extermination camps was affected by the lack of communication among its slaves, something that had also occurred under slavery in Greece and Rome. The camps were a Babel of misunderstanding, not only between masters and slaves but also among the slaves themselves.
Moreover, the path from humanist materialism to Marxist materialism was taken by Marx and Engels in their critique of Feuerbach (The German Ideology), as everyone knows.
[23] The «principle of hope» of Ernst Bloch, which we referred to earlier, also appears.
[24] And Bloch adds, eruditely, that this is what «The Rose of Reason» is about. The well-known phrase «Here is the rose, dance here,» the sentence placed by Marx at the end of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Hic Rhodus, hic saltus), has the same meaning as the discovery of truth. Or what is equivalent in Hegel to the same: the substantial core of reality (the rational explanation of it).
[25] The UN resolution recognizing a «Palestinian state» since 1948 is nothing more than a formality without practical consequences. This is aside from the great help that important UN humanitarian agencies, such as UNRWA, have provided in the Gaza and West Bank territories for decades (an institution unknown to the genocidal Zionist government).
