Deleted posts on "Auschwitz or the Great Alibi"

I'm actually someone on this site that has defended hosting Bordigist texts as being broadly 'of interest' to libertarian communists (even if in no way libertarian themselves)

It appears that this site doesn't host "Bordigist" texts to let them speak for themselves, but rather to paint a certain picture of what "Bordigism" would constitute - as further evidenced for example by this:

https://libcom.org/library/bordigism-adam-buick

I think we already have too many texts on this incredibly tedious discussion about an incredibly tedious article.

It is a dubious honour to be hosted by Libcom if it means to have assassination attempts attached to texts. Accusations of Holocaust denial are a serious matter, describing the defence against that as "tedious" is at best cynic when we can witness by Sike's reaction in this very thread how easily parties are tainted by slander. You'd think anarchists would be wary of this phenomenon, given the history of Stalinism.

And unlike Mike, I have a lot less patience to get into protracted back-and-forths over the minutae of debates like these.

Harman doesn't seem to be interested in "minutae" [sic] either, as we can see from his stupid reply to our recent article.

We're discussing this internally (though a lot of us are away/busy atm). We'll get back to you as soon as we can, though I realise the international proletariat awaits with bated breath.

Surely the proletariat is still busy listening to extremely insightful podcasts on green anti-fascism.

Battlescarred

And snide allusions to Armando Borghi's surname are just pathetic and childish, a damn sight better militant than Bordiga who kept schtum under fascism

It's exemplary that people here seem to get hung up on peripheral matters and language, derailing the thread instead of discussing. Similar behaviour can be witnessed in the comments to the Great Alibi on this website.

Sike

I happened across this WordPress feed with mention that "Auschwitz the Great Alibi" wasn't written by Bordiga, but was instead written by one Martin Axelrad .

You could have also found that information in the texts we wrote on the subject matter.

Sike

If indeed it was written by Axelrad it does seem odd that he would feel compelled to write something denying the existence of the Holocaust given that both his parents lost their lives to it.

Ignoring for a moment the fact that the text does not deny the Holocaust, we have also shown in our response to Mike Harman that it is likely not true that Axelrad's parents died in Treblinka. The version hosted by Libcom continues to spread this misinformation, so we either assume that Harman has not read our text that far, or that the administrators simply don't care.

Sike

I guess I maybe I should read it and make up my own mind.

Bringing oneself into the position to discuss is usually considered a prerequisite to talking about a subject. Apparently, this idea is not very highly valued here.

jef costello

Just like Mike says it argues that it was capitalist pressures rather than any ideology that lead to mass extermination.

The Great Alibi explains ideology, rather than tautologically asserting a slippery slope within ideology itself. Ideology does not exist in a vacuum, freely floating above the world.

jef costello

I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of capitalism. The liberal (not the anti-fascist) tells us that we do not have a problem with capitalism, just capitalists. "If they gave away their money like Bill Gates rather than suing Hawaiians for land rights like Zuckerberg then everyhing would be fine". So it seems this text tells us that the capitalists merely search robotically for more capital and have no agency of their own. This is of course not true, many of us have had a 'good' boss that treated us well and a 'bad' one that treated us badly, sometimes to the point of economically damaging their own business.

Liberalism and anti-fascism do not exclude each other. Moreover, capitalism exists in and through the actions of capitalists – they uphold it through pursuing their interests. If an individual capitalist acts against his own interest, this in no way hampers the system as such, it is an accident whose possibility is from the outset included in the logic of capital, and whose consequences will assert themselves somewhere else within the whole, depending on his standing within competition. "Winners" can afford generosity at the expense of their favourable position - and may even need to do so, to attract workers -, losers can only act that way in the long-term at the cost of them ceasing to be capitalists, which means that another capitalist will take their place.

The text does absolutely not follow the vulgar materialism (more characteristic of the standpoint of political economy and the bourgeois) that you seem to read into it – the fact that you do so reveals more about your own idea of Marxism than it informs on the article. Nowhere does the Great Alibi deny the agency of the Nazis – something that is elaborated in detail in the various replies that we have translated, uploaded to our blog and also attempted to make available on this site. As already mentioned above, you'd think that reading them before replying would be mandatory.

jef costello

This, it seems to me, is why revisionism is mentioned. They take the extreme position that the extermination of the jews was 'just business'. In order for this to work a non-ideological reason is necessary.

Ideology by itself does not suffice as an explanation. Where does your ideology come from? Any resort to ideology as an explanation is itself an ideological explanation. Additionally, he text does not argue that the Holocaust was simply "business". It explains how antisemitism was able to develop on a mass scale, and how it gradually intensified. This materialist approach is broadly consistent with modern - non-Marxist - historians' explanations of the genocide, such as Ian Kershaw's, Yehuda Bauer's or Arno Mayer's. If this would make the text "revisionist", then so are the works of them.

jef costello

So the argument is that jews were mostly petty bourgeois (shown to be untrue)

Why don't you first read the ICP's, as well as our, replies to criticisms like yours, before making yourself into a clown like Harman did? Harman, who was too lazy to read his own sources and was unable to read the actual origins of the original criticism. Someone who apparently doesn't even know what negationism is! He obviously starts out from what is to result, otherwise his "arguments" cannot be explained.

jef costello

Oddly enough if the argument were expanded to include jews as workers too, you could argue that it was a simple reduction in available workes and siezing the capital of the rest.

The argument is not "expanded", because that would make it not based on facts, but fiction. The vast majority of German Jews were not workers – we went to great pains to show that.

jef costello

But it doesn't explain why the Roma were targeted, for example.

Surprising – the text is not about something it never claimed to be about! Why don't you write your own text discussing the murder of the Roma then? Besides, this issue is also dealt with in the replies by the ICP.

jef costello

If there can only be a capitalist reason for death camps, then reasons need to be supplied for everyone or else the reader will start to wonder why the extermination of the jews has been singled out in this way.

The text itself limited its scope on a particular subject - it aims to explain the Holocaust, not death camps in general. It is a funny critique to blame a work for not discussing topics it was never supposed to be about. Do you also lament that Darwin in his "Origin of Species" didn't explain gravity?

jef costello

It is very true that most countries did not want to take large numbers of jews, but this was not simply for economic reasons (although economically the jews having already been stripped of virtually everything, they would have been an economic burden) there were also practical reasons

What would those "practical reasons" be, and how would they not be mediations of economic facts?

jef costello

and of course our old friend anti-semitism.

An "old friend" Marxism has explained long before the Great Alibi - as stated in the article.

jef costello

This completely ignores all the ideology that preceded the war.

The Great Alibi explains the ideological movements of the Nazis, it does not ignore them.

jef costello

Finally, the argument that capital worked jews to death doesn't hold water, Germany was already struggling to find enough workers when the Final Solution was implemented. It doesn't make sense for Germany to deliberately reduce its productive capacity when it was scrambling to find labour elsewhere (forced French labour etc).

The point of ideology is precisely that it is not rational – nobody ever claimed that the Nazis would be machines who could perfectly respond to capital's "necessities" – it would be absurd to attempt to find economic reasons for the death of every single person killed in the Second World War and genocides. If you want to know why German capitalism embarked on this road, you ought to research the reasons for forced labour in France, rather than abstractly argue like this.

jef costello

And you could also mention any of the other decisions, you can find a lot of them if you look for a few minutes, that the Nazis (or any other regime under capitalism) are more than capable of acting against their own interests an or the interests of capital (the text also seems to think that these two interests are unified)

You mean like the Nazis building highly powered, "scary" weapons instead of just looking at what they need? Or the Nazis halting at Dunkirk, allowing the British to retreat, with the idea that they'd later secure an aerial victory, which never materialised and led them to engage in war with Russia? Or the fact that the Nazis did not collaborate nearly as much with Japan, Italy, etc. as the Allies did among themselves? All of those things are well known.

As already repeated ad nauseam, the Great Alibi does not dispute that – it is absurd to claim there would be an abstract general "interest of capital" separate from what asserts itself through the interplay of finance, commercial and industrial capital, respectively small and big capital, respectively different industries etc.

If anything, the complaints about tone, as well as people actively avoiding to read the material confirms everything the ICP has ever written about the topic. For the sake of completeness, here is the list of texts on our blog that we are talking about:

[*]Infantile Anti-Anti-Fascism - Le Prolétaire
[*]Auschwitz or the Great Alibi: What we deny and what we affirm - Le Prolétaire
[*]Polemic against “Auschwitz or the Great Alibi”: The Crusaders of Democratic Anti-Fascism in the Assault of Marxism - Le Prolétaire
[*]Again on “Auschwitz or the Great Alibi” – anti-Marxist “Mouvement Communiste” - Le Prolétaire
[*]New Attacks against “Auschwitz or the Great Alibi” - Le Prolétaire
[*]An Open Letter to the Marxists Internet Archive - Libri Incogniti
[*]No Collusion, No Obstruction: The Libcom Report - Libri Incogniti

Reddebrek

You know I'm partial to breaking up big blocks of text myself, but very few of your responses have anything to do with the bits of text you're quoting. Like at all.

We are sorry for not replying in long, rambling essay form. We cannot help but notice that you're continuing to talk and complain about everything apart from what's in the text and what the original thread is about.

jef costello

Perhaps the fact that you have written half a dozen articles in defnce of it suggests that the text is problematic.

We haven't written "half a dozen articles in defence of it". We wrote two pieces, one dealing with Mitchell Abidor's "introduction" which the Marxists Internet Archive affixed to the text, the other addressing a similar preface by Mike Harman. The rest of the texts are translations. You haven't read anything about the topic, evidenced by you trying to judge the quality of a topic on the number of articles written about it. Counting makes a fine substitute for reading. Moreover, asserting that a text would be "problematic" is as vague as Harman's wording of "approaching revisionism" is. Either a text is revisionist, or it is not. Everything else is just quibbling and a sad attempt at slander. If there's a problem, it's not in the text but in what people want to read into it – a phenomenon definitely not exclusive to the Great Alibi, as decades of misreceptions of the work of Karl Marx show us.

jef costello

I did start one of them,, I forget which, but it was just more of the aggressive kind of 'defence' you are putting up which seemed like a waste of time. Much like responding here, but I've started so I'll finish.

Besides calling Mike Harman a clown – a label which seems more than appropriate considering his behaviour – our tone was completely neutral. We do not care about harsh tone, but if it is a problem to you, you ought to consider that it was not us calling others "cretins", as another person aptly remarked. Our defence is determined - simply because we are convinced that the argument of the Great Alibi is correct, and accordingly consider your attempts at throwing mud in the hope that something sticks defamatory. If you consider reading any kind of polemic a waste of time, you must have a hard time reading classics like Marx and Engels, who were a lot less restrained than us in matters of personal indignities.

jef costello

I think the text needs to explain why it is only about jews and not about others killed in the death camps. If the explanation only applies to jews then it is not an explanation of the camps.

The text is not supposed to be an "explanation of the camps". It explains the Holocaust – why you want a 1960 text to deal with a topic that not only isn't its declared objective, but that is poorly researched even today, is anyone's guess.

jef costello

I wonder (again) why there was a need to explain why exterminating jews was due to economic pressures but no explanation for anyone else.

Because the genocide of the Sinti and Roma is not commonly used in bourgeois propaganda in an attempt to disarm the proletariat, whereas the Holocaust has been cited as a justification for the Second World War since the liberation of the camps.

jef costello

If I really want to know then I shouldn't read an article that explicitly claims to give that knowledge?

The Great Alibi does not claim to inform about the reasons for the German state employing forced labour in France.

jef costello

An article that claims that the extermination of the jews was purely down to economic pressures should explain the extermination of productive workers when the regime was desperately in need of productive workers.

We didn't think it was worth mentioning the fact that Nazis separated those fit for work and those who weren't, described enough as happening at the railway station at Auschwitz and other places. Stupidity clearly knows no bounds.

jef costello

This is not abstract, especially as the article rather glosses over it.

The abstract part is you randomly bringing the topic up, when it has no connection to the Great Alibi. There was not going to be any point at which the Nazis would have decided that "enough Jews would have been killed to fix the economy", if that is what your idea is. Harman's fixation on Eastern Jews seems to stem from a similar blunder – the ideology of the Nazis sprang from German conditions, and developed as such.

jef costello

I really don't see the point of your rude and aggressive style, I don't see how it achieves anything other than you having the feeling you have scored a few points.

We are not interested in "scoring points", which is perhaps projection on your part. These recurring and lame complaints about language are again a way of dodging to talk about the salient aspects. If we come across as "rude", then that is merely because we consider your admitted laziness as well as the defamation of the Great Alibi not only rude, but insulting.

jef costello

You haven't actually refuted anything, aside from saying things aren't true

We have - in multiple texts that you acknowledge you won't read.

jef costello

making general statements in a patronising way "it would be absurd to attempt to find economic reasons for the death of every single person killed in the Second World War and genocides", but that don't really contribute anything. And in this case contradict what you have said, as far as it can be said to have any relevant meaning. You can explain every single jew, but not other groups?

The Great Alibi does not aim to explain every single Jew killed – that is precisely what we wanted to say by the excerpt your quoted here.

jef costello

If you can point out which article explains why only the extermination of the jews can be explained, or which explains that of other groups, then I will read it, otherwise I am not reading half a dozen articles just so I can be down a rabbit hole with you.

We go "down a rabbit hole" because of people like you or Mike Harman – we've looked into various sources brought up and found that they don't say what people claim they do. If you don't even want to look at the summary we have provided of our research, then that's your decision, but it's ridiculous to further attempt to argue on the basis of obviously incomplete knowledge on your part. The only conclusion that we can draw from this whole fiasco on Libcom is that anarchists adopt a priori stances and then work backwards to defend them - facts and logic be damned.

Ed

If you don't want to host your articles on libcom, feel free not to. No one's forcing you to post them if you find such "assassination attempts" so upsetting.

I see you've linked to them in this thread, which seems a fine compromise. As far as I'm concerned, this matter can be closed.

The reason as to why we decided to uploaded these texts should be obvious. Libcom refused to remove the demonstrably wrong introduction to the Great Alibi, seemingly happy that a distorted understanding of the text and its ideas (as witnessed in this thread) are free to fester. If the hosting of "Bordigist" texts is such a controversial issue among the administrators of this site, and if you are weary of talking to us, why don't you then simply take the Great Alibi offline? If you continue to host it and leave the "introduction" attached to it, we don't see why our few texts should now suddenly prove to require precisely that bit of server storage too much, considering all the nonsensical texts that Libcom hosts without wasting a comment on them.

Black Badger

This statement, coming so soon after the idea of "bourgeois propaganda being used to disarm the proletariat," makes it sound like the propagandists of the Allies used the Nazi policy of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question as one of the reasons put forward to explain their participation in the war. This is hilarious, given that there might have been some sort of move by one or more of the Allied powers to hasten the rescue of Jews in the parts of Europe who were subject to deportation and extermination (or even some move to disrupt the mundane functioning of the various labor and death camps). Yet, as is amply documented in numerous bourgeois histories of the war, no such moves were ever implemented aside from various single-office or even single-person efforts, like those of Si Kaddour Benghabrit, Abdol Hussein Sardari, Chiune Sugihara, Angel Sanz Briz, and more famously Raoul Wallenberg -- which are remarkable and memorable precisely because their efforts were so rare.

This person hasn't read the text either, as this is precisely one of the central arguments of the Great Alibi - another example of the users here adopting a priori stances in the manner that we have mentioned previously.

Mike Harman

fwiw I didn't add that line to the introduction, it was added by craftwork - feel free to ask craftwork where he got the information from. Users with sufficient permissions on the site can see the old version of the intro from 2016 here, before I made any edits. https://libcom.org/node/28806/revisions/101636/view. Fun that you think everything added to the site is done personally by me though.

We were aware that the excerpt in question was added by Craftwork. We cited you, because you apparently made it your personal duty to distort texts you reference in order to distort the Great Alibi, whereas you obviously do not care to correct actual misinformation – a point we also brought up in our text.

Mike Harman

If by 'stupid' you mean 'pointing out our intellectual dishonesty and inability to read'. You've used a lot of words in this thread, but none to actually respond to the comment I left at the end here: https://libcom.org/library/auschwitz-big-alibi

We didn't consider it necessary to answer to your reply, as it seems obvious to us that you either intentionally misunderstand the points brought forward, or are too daft to get them. You conflate categories all over the place, from identifying ethnic cleansing immediately with murders, up to your attempt to disprove the Great Alibi through making recourse to Eastern Jews – a matter we have discussed in detail in our text by making reference to the precise text you invoked to refute Axelrad. And then you go on to list historical facts, apparently thinking that they would somehow would run contrary to the thesis of the ICP, when in fact they support it.

You half-assed that answer just as much as you half-assed your introduction, and we do not see the point of engaging with someone obviously acting in bad faith.

Throughout the thread there are the same knee-jerk reactions, the adopting of a priori stances, arguing about everything and anything besides the texts and the hypocritical attitudes regarding tone. Everything including this attitude of refusal to read is included within the texts that were uploaded. And one of the people here wonders why half a dozen were written: They just need some self-reflection.

Rob Ray

Y'know, if there's one perfect way to persuade people to do a thing you want I reckon it's telling them they're lazy idiots who don't read.

Edit: No, wait, I tell a lie, publishing a 5,600-word blog denouncing the admins. That's even better.

We generally assume to be talking to adults who are mature enough to look beyond personal vanity in their judgements, and who do not need to be buttered up. Though it is of course possible that we are mistaken on this matter in this particular case. Thank you for recommending us your negotiation strategies anyway.

Black Badger

You're right; I haven't read the text in question.

Yet you evidently feel to be in a position to take a side in arguments about its content. Why is that?

Black Badger

I was responding directly to what YOU wrote.

No, you were not. You read something into our words that was just not there.

Black Badger

The fact that you can't see a difference between the two levels of response is something that really does approach an a priori position, that being that the Alibi text is the best thing since sliced bread, and the rest of us poor stupid lazy anarchists who refuse to use your trademarked brand of logic -- by starting with conclusions and working backward -- are therefore useless as interlocutors. Yet here you remain, persisting in foisting the Good Word on us poor benighted souls...

You know, a simple "no you!" is not that impressive after openly admitting that you do not even have a clue about the subject in question two sentences before. Our judgement comes from research – god forbid that we do not think people are entitled to not having their unfounded opinions challenged. "Makes it sound like", "does approach" – seeing as Harman already used this wording to construct strawmen, is this "trademarked anarchist logic" then?

We are not selling a text, we are merely arguing against its defamation. How about we get back to that topic, instead of weaseling around it by means of complaints about our conduct?

We tried to refrain from quoting the texts we translated, since it seemed clear to us that this would just prompt another series of posts not reading the articles themselves, but replying to these isolated excerpts then. However, witnessing the insistence on not getting acquainted with the material, we cannot help ourselves. This is the ICP commenting on Ras l'Front, an organisation that tried to spin the Great Alibi as being revisionist:

ICP

Ras l'Front

Even if we discuss about revisionists, analysing their lies, dismantling their reasoning, we refuse to discuss with them, whether they are from the far right or, as here, ultra-left. We have nothing to tell them and we will not answer their delusions.

This curious clarification is not made by chance: its purpose is not to deny us a democratic discussion that we have never considered proposing to them, but to discourage the militants and supporters of “Ras l’Front” from becoming aware of our positions and discussing them, in the same way that the Stalinists called the revolutionaries “Hitlerians”, “fascist provocateurs”, etc., in order to prevent any contact with them and justify an expedient disregard for them. One could quote the proud reply of an activist from Ras l’Front in a Parisian meeting to the question of whether he had read the brochure he had just denounced in his speech: “I don’t read shitty literature!”