The Marxists Who Explained the Nazis to Washington

http://m.foreignaffairs.com/articles/139466/william-e-scheuerman/the-frankfurt-school-at-war?page=show

by antman • 13 years ago

40 7 13 years ago

m.foreignaffairs.com

Relying on Neumanns Behemoth, which depicted modern capitalism as Nazisms main basis, they argued that the revitalization of German democracy depended on a socialist overhaul of the countrys economy, failing to anticipate the possibility of a fresh recalibration of capitalism with liberal democracy, along the lines that emerged after the war in the Federal Republic of Germany...

Huh? First off, Germany was divided in two after WWII, something almost no one anticipated. There was no German renewal because there was no Germany.

As far as the FRG being capitalism with liberal democracy...capitalism - the FRG was dominated by works councils, Mitbestimmungsgesetz and the like since World War II, and to some extent still is. How the economy worked in the FRG after World War II is closer to how it worked in Yugoslavia than how it worked in the United States. Although even in the US how the US economy ran under the New Deal/Square Deal/Great Society into the 1960s is different than how it is now.

As far as liberal democracy...the FRG reinstated the Nazi ban on voting for the communist party...some democracy - you're OK, as long as you vote for a pro-capitalist party. This was a time when French and Italian workers almost voted in communist governments, something American's today tend to forget. The FRG's federal Intelligence service was run by Reinhard Gehlen and his crew, the Confederation of German Employers' Associations and Confederation of German Employers' Association were run by former SS officer Hanns-Martin Schleyer (later kidnapped and killed by the Red Army Faction). Not all that much changed in western Germany after 1945.

_delirium• 13 years ago

Der Spiegel published a summary last year of Nazi influence in postwar West Germany: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/from-dictatorshi...

Kudzu_Bob• 13 years ago

Germany was divided in two after WWII, something almost no one anticipated.

Nonsense. Haven't you heard of the Society for the Prevention of World War III, not to mention the Morgenthau Plan, both of which advocated the dismemberment of Germany well in advance of Berlin's fall? The real surprise is that any Germans whatsoever managed to survive the post-war forced expulsions and near-genocidal 1,200 calorie per day rations.

cafard• 13 years ago

"The real surprise is that any Germans whatsoever managed to survive the post-war forced expulsions and near-genocidal 1,200 calorie per day rations."

And yet they did, there's a bunch of them last time I looked. The expulsions were in the east, chiefly East Prussia and Silesia, or of Volksdeutsch from the former Hapsburg lands.

duopixel2• 13 years ago

I've kept an eye on continental social science since leaving university, and I must say that—for most practical reasons— it's useless. It is not, however, worthless (quite the opposite).

You might be familiar with Feynman's story about how he was trying to decipher a social science paper, starting sentence by sentence, he encountered something like

    The individual member of the social community 
    often receives his information via visual, 
    symbolic channels

Which he translated as "people read". He then continued "translating" the paper and figured out there was not much to it.

Having been exposed (unwillingly) to many of these kind of papers, I've come to understand that they are abstractions. It's not just reading, it's how you receive all kinds of information through your eyes. You "read" people when you make judgements of how they dress, talk and act, you "read" objects in a store and decide if you want to buy them, and so forth.

Critical theory authors are trained to understand that all interpretation comes from a culture. In understanding a foreign situation (say, the Syrian civil war) you must be conscious that you are looking at the problem through western eyes. These theorists tend to over-analyze things (they are the very embodiment of analysis paralysis) but they make an interesting read when you are familiar with the problem. It makes you feel like you've seen all the possible angles of a specific event. This is why I'm not surprised Washington would make use of them.

If you'd like a gentle introduction to this kind of writing, I'd recommend Tzvetan Todorov. He exposes really complex ideas without the mumbo jumbo. You can make a fair judgement if it's horseshit or not (as it's clear he's not hiding behind obfuscated writing).

tehwalrus• 13 years ago

Can you recommend a particular book by Todorov? being a philosopher he has written a fair number, and I'd hate to start with his worst (sods law).

duopixel2• 13 years ago

I've read and throughly enjoyed "The Conquest of America" and "The Defense of Enlightenment", but these are topics I already liked. Todorov goes really deep into the topics he's writing about, so I'd chose something I'm familiar with. It remains accessible, but he is obsessive towards comparing how different parties perceive the same event and it could get tiresome if you chose unwisely

"Facing The Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps" is still on my reading list, but I suspect it might be his most accessible book. This reviewer explains Todorov better than I ever could:

http://www.amazon.com/review/R25MOQCFS574VO/

The Marxists Who Explained the Nazis to Washington

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