Adam Tooze on Auschwitz and Capitalism
In a bravura of a post, the historian Adam Tooze dismantles a lot of the cliches—so common to a certain style of Marxism associated with Moishe Postone, and to a deep strain of Heideggerianism—about the Holocaust being the telos, the logical triumph and end game, of industrial capitalism and/or industrial modernity.
Tooze also addresses a common misconception regarding the genocide of the Jews: that somehow the obsessive transport of Jews to their death entailed such a massive diversion of material resources and personnel, that it ultimately hurt the German war effort, that even on the Nazis’ own terms and plans for imperial conquest, it was irrational to kill all the Jews.
Tooze shows that such a view is an evasion of the genuine banality of evil, not just at the level of an Eichmann-type bureaucrat, but at the largest levels of industrial capitalism and what it is capable of.
It’s an extraordinary and eye-opening essay that builds up from the smallest detail to a comparative framework that takes in everything from Auschwitz to Hiroshima to the industrialized slaughter of animals for food, and shows why these comparisons, which critical theorists and other scholars often draw, are so misleading, often concealing much more than they reveal.
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4 Comments
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Kas
As an aside, an important one, capitalism, in its various forms, and industrialization continue to exploit people, land, water, and air, all of which lead to destruction. What is more banal than that?
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Please excuse this post which I’m sending in case my other comment did not get to you (I’m new to this).
Alternatively, capitalism in its various forms and industrialization continue to exploit and damage not only people but also the land, the water, the air, and all of what we call the natural world so that the few can prosper, so that the few can increase their wealth and power. What is more banal than that evil?
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Chibuike Obi
Nothing. It’s simply a death cult.
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I started to write a long, belated comment, but on second thought I’ll just say that my sense, based on what I’ve read about WW 2, is that the Holocaust likely did hurt the German war effort on the margins, but as Tooze’s post suggests, not very much (and definitely not enough to have made a difference in the war’s outcome).
