El Chisme

Yeah what happened to Finkelstein put him on an "anti-woke" bend because he identified with the free speech crowd. I feel like in another timeline where there was an actual left wing in academic circles that could've stood by him he wouldn't necessarily have gone down this road. But screw him for siding with the free speech absolutists that only ever care to defend the speech of rabid bigots like the one he's slowly become.

Caution: This is in some ways a stream of consciousness. Please don't hesitate to challenge and correct my thinking here.

Here is something I think people here can help me wrestle with. I'm leaving this comment here because I think this is another instance of this phenomenon I've seen sporadically from some left leaning individuals. I say Individuals because I do not think this is a broad sentiment within the left that simply goes unspoken. That is, this notion of "Not focusing on Identity Politics", which at times I've seen coupled with "We need to focus on Class Politics".

It is this inversion of the sentiment "Anything but class" into its polar opposite "Nothing but class". How is it that people come to this conclusion, wherein the only thing they believe we should be struggling against is the Marxian class divide? To me, it would seem, by focusing strictly on class, you homogenize a large swath of society and, as such, dilute, erase, or otherwise ignore the struggles of the diverse demographic makeup of the proletariat. How is it that you can convince people deep in the margins of the proletariat that your movement can uplift them, if you can't even articulate, as a result of having done zero analysis of these group's various struggles, the ways in which society will be improved that resonate with their struggle?

Finkelstein's entire message here falls apart, explicitly because of what he says at the very end. For someone who considers themselves an intellectual, it’s telling that he seems not to understand that historically fascist movements also scapegoated marginalized identity groups, and has not synthesized this truth into his broader understanding of fascist movements. This type of lukewarm understanding of fascism is what leads him to this conclusion that Trump is somehow not a true fascist. By their very existence, Trans People expose a fundamental contradiction within patriarchal capitalist society. If gender is fluid, if gender is not binary, if at birth you are not predetermined man or woman, then all forms of gender-based oppression are rendered functionless. As Engels states in Origin of Family, "The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male."

Devoid of the analysis of identity, we cannot come to the conclusion that queer and trans people's very existence challenges this foundational form of class oppression. It seems clear to me, as someone who is a simple shitposter on an internet web form and not a world renown intellectual, that if people are allowed to be who they feel they truly are, without any boundaries or limitations; if they are allowed to be a woman today, and a man tomorrow, then this house of cards we call "Patriarchal Capitalist Society" falls apart. To be clear, I do understand it is not a simple matter of "Today I decided to be this or that", but that is the simple, uncompassionate, reductionist perspective that lays at the heart of what Finkelstein is saying here. He deliberately speaks outside his field of expertise to cast a smoke cloud over the actual point he is giving to the fascists. That idea being, If we cannot rigidly define who is a man, and who is a woman, then how on earth can we exploit the "free gifts of nature" that spring forth from a person's capacity to give birth? How can we legislate the bodies of the people we need to produce more laborers if we've also given those people the inalienable right to self identify?

He says that historically, fascism arises from a conflict with a growing and powerful [economic] left movement. He says this while ignoring the fact that one of the earliest acts of violence handed out by the growing German fascist movement, was in 1933, when they looted and destroyed the Institute for Sexual Science, burning all of its files and research. Likewise, he says this as Fascism under Mussolini results in the widespread targeting of homosexuals by Italian fascist police. It is as if this is a key element of Fascist oppression. That not only is this a capture of the economic arm of society but also the social side of society, with the goal of regressing the social culture back to a form more compatible with capitalist origins. An attempt to reinstate "the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage" and the "first class oppression...", "...that of the female sex by the male.", which ultimately requires the destruction of the idea that these categories are not rigid, and then reimplementing through violence the patriarchal gender binary.

Serious: Am I flying too close to the sun here? Am I wildly off base and need to do more reading? I know that could be entirely possible. It feels apparent to me why we shouldn't be "leaving aside his transphobia" because his world view and understanding of the nature of capitalism is rooted in a patriarchal hierarchy, a hierarchy fundamental to the continuation of capitalism. This root allows him to dismiss what is clearly Fascism, as something he identifies as, not really fascism.

He addressed it pretty head on in another interview. His thinking is, he's an academic who is trying to study and explain exactly what international law says should happen, and what the law says is that Israel is a legitimate state, but it also says that all the actions that Israel is engaged in constitute a genocide and should therefore be sanctioned. This is his main disagreement with BDS, where he claims that BDS wishes to simultaneously condemn Israel on a legal basis, yet also go against international law by claiming that Israel is an illegitimate state.

Obviously this line of thinking is very problematic and assumes that international law is 1. correct and 2. static. People have the right to say that the international law isn't working and was established on an unjust premise of justifying the creation of an ethnostate because of the Holocaust. That doesn't mean that it becomes hypocritical to use the same international law to criticize the Zionist project's illegal actions, it just means that there are multiple dimensions (moral and legal) to the transgressions of the Zionist entity. I think Norm understands this point to some extent and limiting his scope to always siding with the law is more just a way to stay grounded and always having an undeniable basis for his arguments, even if they're not fully there morally.

yeah, i understand pure anti-zionism, no israel is kinda simultaneously a quixotic and utopian position. what you said is fair. but i don't think it's wrong to identify 2 state solution as essentially, technically zionist.