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NOTES, ANNOUNCEMENTS, AND SHORT REVIEWSAnti-Semitism and National Socialism is an essay by Moishe Postone. First published in the collection Germans and Jews Since the Holocaust: The Changing Situation in West Germany (Holmes and Meier, 1986), it has now been issued as a pamphlet, No. 7 of its Boomerang Series, by Chronos Publications. Postone argues that the Holocaust and the virulence of Nazi era anti-Semitism sprang not from racist and economic causes, to which we have generally attributed them, but rather from a mystical/irrational aspect of the National Socialism that Hitler brought onto the German political scene. Contrasting the Holocaust to the pogroms of Czarist Russia, he sees the former as motivated less by immediate racial hatred and more by "modern" anti-Semitism, a characteristic of Nazism. The source of this modern anti-Semitism is the development of industrial capitalism which contributed to the dislocation of the conventional social relationships of the peasant/artisan society of Germany and elsewhere in Europe. What made its development especially strong in Germany was the very rapid growth of capitalism and its political repercussions in Germany. The "old" anti-Semitism rampant in Germany prepared the ground for this "modern" version which makes the evil Jews worthy of extermination because they constitute a cancer eating away at the nation, one that must be excised. Most interesting is Postone's view that the Nazi anti- Semitism was a sort of quasi anti-capitalism. Twenty-four pages, no price given, from Chronos Publications, B.M. Chronos, London WCIN 3XX. The Unabomber and the Future of Industrial Society by T. Fulano. Writing in Fifth Estate, the oldest and best-known of the primitivist anarchist journals, Fulano, like John Zerzan, might have been expected to write an admiring essay on Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Instead this 16-page article taken from the Fall, 1996 issue is highly critical of both Kaczynski himself and also of the Manifesto. Although he contrasts him favorably to General Powell and the other international conspirators in the mass murder of the Gulf War-at least in terms of the magnitude of his acts (three dead versus hundreds of thousands), Fulano attributes the bombings to a maniacal rage that the Unabomber sustained for twenty years while carefully designing and building the bombs. Fulano faults Kaczynski'd defenders and admirers, "his fan club on the West Coast" led by John Zerzan, for their willingness to see the actions of a mad man as a step toward the solution of the problems created by industrial capitalism. Fulano sees this response to the Unabomber as the response of an otherwise thoughtful element in our society who have simply given up on a rational solution and are willing to go along with the Unabomber. No price given. From The Fifth Estate, 4632 Second Ave., Detroit, MI 48201. Revolutionary Optimist: An Interview with Martin Glaberman is perfectly described by its title. Glaberman is one of the authors of Working for Wages reviewed elsewhere in this issue. Conducted by a three-man team from various political persuasions, it enables Glaberman to recount his political history, which began with his joining the Socialist Party of America at age 13, joining the Trotskyist tendency that entered the SP in the mid-thirties, and leaving with the Trots to form the Socialist Workers Party. He then became a part of the Max Schachtman's group, which opposed the official SWP position on the nature of the Soviet Union. When the Schactmanites split, he became a part of the Johnson-Forest tendency of the SWP . When the J-Fs left the SWP, Glaberman left with them and became a part of the grouping that included Raya Dunayevskaya and CLR James. Besides his wanderings in the jungle of Trotskyist splinter groups and indeed contributing later on to new growth, Glaberman describes his adventures as an industrial worker/political missionary in the Detroit and Flint union movement. Aside from what appears to be an assumption on the part of Glaberman and his interviewers that the working class consists of factory workers, a noteworthy fact about the pamphlet is that Gaberman the revolutionary seeker has never found a group or program that he can support wholeheartedly. A Red & Black Notes Pamphlet, 28 pages, $4.00 postpaid from Red & Black Notes, PO Box 47643, Don Mills, Ont MC3 3S7 Canada Internationalist Notes in the current issue, Volume 3, Number 1, Second Quarter 2001 has transformed itself from a newsletter into a 16-page standard size journal and bills itself as the "Left-Communist Political and Theoretical Journal of the U.S. Supporters of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP). This first issue begins with an interesting five-page article "Marx and Engels and Human Nature," much of it a review of a 1945 book Human Nature: The Marxian View by Vernon Venable , an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vassar College. "The Head Fixing Industry: The Growth of Corporate Media Monopolies" contains a wealth of information about the salaries and other perks that capital grants to the media stars it has trained to mystify the masses. Also included are articles on the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. union movement ("Unions Oversee Defeats for Workers"). $2 (A sample copy upon request) from IN-USA, PO Box 57483, Los Angeles, CA 90057. Red & Black Notes seems to be the only English language councilist journal still in existence now that Collective Action Notes is in remission. This 16-page issue, No. 13, Spring 2001, contains articles on the anti-capitalist movement in Canada as well as theoretical material of interest to non-market socialists. In this issue: "Goodbye to the Welfare State," which begins with the idea that "...the welfare State isn't now and never was, a genuine gain for the working class." The two-page article goes on to point out the ongoing process by which welfare measures are evolving into means tested actions to cut benefits and costs. Social Security-in Canada at least-has developed administration xxxxx to policing rather than administrating claims. R & B next considers the question of resistance to this trend and concludes that the abolition of capitalism is the only solution but unfortunately not one likely to be accomplished soon. The best our class can do is to resist individually and collectively. Also book reviews; "A Fair Day's Wages for a Fair Day's Work," an 1881 essay by Frederick Engels; and a half page of the "Ultra-Left on the Web," a listing which I intend to reproduce below with some additions. $5 for four issues (North America), $7 (elsewhere), from POB 47643 - 939 Lawrence Avenue East, Don Mills, ON, M#C 3S7, Canada. On the Web
Red & Black Notes web page
Break their Haughty Power
Chronicles of the Class Struggle
Troplin
Wage Slave X
Love & Treason
Internationalist discussion list
Socialist Labor Party
New Union Party
Socialist Party of Great Britain
New Democracy
Internationalism
Chain Reaction
South Chicago ABC Zine Distribution
Institute for Social Ecology (Murray Bookchin)
Aufheben
Revolutionary Perspectives
Collective Action Notes -fg
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