Joachim Bruhn's Left-Wing Critique of Anti-Zionism and the Capitalist State in the 1990s

An Intellectual History of the Antideutsche

Bibliographic Data

ID4070816
AuthorsWill Stratford (0000-0002-4152-616X, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume51
Issue3
Pages125-157
Publication date2024-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueNew German Critique (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0094-033X • E-ISSN: 1558-1462
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/0094033x-11309223
OpenAlexW4404749883
LanguageEN
References cited25

In one of the greatest alliances of the German extraparliamentary Left since 1968, rival factions from more than one hundred organizations came together in 1990 to express their opposition to German reunification, sparking the Antideutsche (Anti-German) current within the German Left. The theoretically sophisticated but little-studied Antideutsche group, the Initiative Sozialistisches Forum (Socialist Forum Initiative), led by Joachim Bruhn, used the occasion of unification skepticism and increased anti-immigrant violence in the 1990s to develop a unique Kapitalismuskritik, before the Antideutsche movement liquidated its critical edge around the turn of the century. Bruhn drew on German leftist national self-hatred from the nineteenth century to the 1970s New Left, Moishe Postone's theory of structural anti-Semitism from the 1970s, and the Frankfurt School's critique of "state capitalism" from the 1930s and 1940s to develop a threefold critique of a "German" predilection for reactionary-conservative anti-capitalism, left-wing anti-Zionism as concealed Stalinism, and de facto nationalist and statist ideology, respectively. While Bruhn brought to the surface several repressed ideological concessions of the German Left, his fixation on historical national guilt and the purely negative aspects of the capitalist state prohibited a genuinely dialectical critique revealing opportunities from within the apparent impasse

Left-wing politics · New Left · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · State (computer science) · Zionism · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Computer Science · European history and politics · German History and Society · Law · Philosophy · Psychology

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