In 2020, the Stoff collective published their first issue. What follows are some thoughts and comments about the publication.
The article on Detroit Techno and Heinrich’s interview are both really good. The culturalist approach in the analysis of Detroit techno is something that had been missing in the communisation/ultra-left cultural criticism. It allows them to really discuss the links between sonic technologies, sounds, space, collectives linking them to the concrete racial and class conditions of mid 80s Detroit.
Their section on populism is without surprise. The “new” populist turn is understood as outside of historical forms of populism and with a communisation approach that is not entirely new, I believe, somewhat in discussion with Alain C. (RIP) work on populism and “citoyennisme”.
The article on antisemitism got me conflicted, though. I mostly agree with their entire characterisation of the problems of discourses around antisemitism, and more particularly on the Left. But they have a very unusual definition of race and racism, and absolutely no analysis of Whiteness. This leaves their definition of antisemitism (racialising Jews as “more white than Whites”) very under theorised. I enjoyed how they approached the topic of micro-level of racialisation supposedly at play in current antisemitism, but it is misguided, I believe. Jews are not racialised as “uber-whites”, but as a stand in for whiteness, as an intermediate racial group in a hierarchy. Because yes, race is a hierarchy. And strangely, this is never mentioned as such in the article.
What’s more frustrating to me, is that they translated Baldwin’s “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White”, which draws very well on the problem: Jews stood in for whiteness in Black ghettos where non-Jew whites wouldn’t even set foot. But what the Stoff collective doesn’t see in their critique of Baldwin (that they’ve written as an introduction to their translation) is that he actually points to colonial Christianity as a producer of antisemitism (which is actually a Jew critic of antisemitism). Pointing Jewish integration in US society as nothing more than a mystification. That’s also why they also completely misrepresent Houria Bouteldja’s point in “Whites, Jews, and Us”. She says little more than Baldwin (even though Baldwin is definitely clearer in my opinion) when she says that assimilation in French culture, notably through Zionism, is just another ghetto. She writes:
This rotten system is turning you into monsters, just like it is turning us into villains. And yet, its task is not complete. I know the people of my race well. Though we may be battered and terribly damaged, we still have a big heart and a certain practice of human nobility; but for how much longer? I will take my leave of you now, but not without entrusting you with two of my certitudes first, and humbly, making you a “generous offer”:
You are losing your historical friends.
You are still in the ghetto.
Why don’t we get out of there together?
What Stoff does by defining racialisation of Jews as “uber-whites” is enabling criticism of Jewish participation to whiteness as being purely antisemitic. I agree with them that we shouldn’t see antisemitism, even its version enacted by other racialised groups, as being a purely misguided criticism of current systems of domination. It isn’t. It is however an effect of racial hierarchies. This hierarchy is an effect of Geopolitical circumstances, not uniquely national ones. Which is also an aspect they lack. This way they cannot see Zionism as being a wider effort of racialisation of Jews than “just” the existence of a “Jewish State”.
A couple more points on Race:
- The Semite of antisemitism is not THE Jew. “Jews” have obviously been racialised through antisemitism as one form of the figure of the Semite, but so have “Arabs” (the scare quotes are here to point the porosity and already racial meaning of the categories, Arab Jews do exist…). As I’ve argued somewhere else, those two are figures that should be understood in relation when discussing antisemitism, even its new forms.
- The text also lacks any critical engagement with Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks and his own description of micro-racial hierarchisation. Wallerstein & Balibar’s Race, Nation, Class was written in 88 and our theorists are still unable to link Race and Geopolitical domination. But the poverty of their engagement with race has been illustrated again by their use (which has been a more general issue in the French ultra-left) of Idriss Robinson’s colourblind analysis of the recent Black Lives Matter insurrections. Let’s just hope that they will be ready to engage with Black radical, and more generally antiracist radicals in the future instead of simply misrepresenting them.
