The Marxian Roots of Campus Anti-Semitism The left can’t behold Israel’s prosperity without concluding that the Jews have stolen their wealth from their neighbors. By Barton Swaim
If you thought claims of anti-Semitism on university campuses were exaggerated, you can’t think it after the past week. The spectacle was appalling: university presidents responding to the murder of hundreds of Jews by pretending that the fault lies partially with Israel and that reasonable people can differ over whether Hamas’s atrocities are justified; student groups issuing letters proclaiming solidarity with Hamas; campus protesters brandishing signs bearing such slogans as “resistance is justified” and “from the river to the sea”—the latter signifying the goal of extirpating all Jews from Israel.
How is it possible hundreds of Jewish civilians—including children and the elderly—were gunned down, bombed in their homes, raped, abducted and beheaded, and some of America’s elite students, academics and college administrators commiserated with the perpetrators? Again and again you hear otherwise intelligent people expressing vacuous phrases—“state-sanctioned violence,” “Zionist apartheid”—solely to excuse the butchery of Jews.
They will hotly deny that they hate Jews, but their denials don’t bear scrutiny. Even if all they say about Israel were true—in fact, it’s filled with distortions and lies—you’d still be left wondering why they’re unbothered by brutality when carried out by Hamas or anyone else other than Israel.
Where are the campus protests against Chinese concentration camps in Xinjiang? Governments brutalize citizens in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria and many other places, but this week’s campus demonstrators bring their placards to the quadrangle only against the Jewish state.
That anti-Israel protests erupted on elite campuses this week—not after the accidental killing of a Palestinian demonstrator but after the systematic murder of at least 1,300 people in Israel—signifies an egregious failure at the heart of American higher education. That so many students and academics could think this was a proper response to an act of mass murder suggests something deeply amiss on our campuses. What we are witnessing is the fruition, many decades in the making, of a habit of mind that can accurately be called Marxian.
It was Karl Marx who, in “Das Kapital,” first argued that the wage earner in a capitalist economy never works for himself but only for the owner of the means of production. The capitalist appropriated as “profit” his “surplus labor”—that is, work beyond what was necessary to keep the operation going. The taking of surplus labor Marx called “exploitation.” This little idea—that the wealthy capitalist makes his millions by expropriating what rightly belongs to the worker—cast a spell on the minds of 19th- and early-20th-century radical intellectuals. It was a total misunderstanding of economic value, and philosophically it was akin to saying “up is down” or “blue is red”—nonsense in practice, but in theory who could contradict it?
Notwithstanding many dauntless efforts over several generations to defend regulated market economies as just, the belief that profit is theft, that prosperity under capitalism is taken from the poor laborer by force, is so much a part of today’s left-progressive mindset as to be unquestioned and immovable. The entire “social justice” movement is premised on the belief that if one group does well and another doesn’t, the former must have taken advantage of the latter—a thousand explanatory circumstances be damned. (See Thomas Sowell’s latest book, “Social Justice Fallacies,” for a brilliant treatment of the subject.) You can hear Marx’s concept of exploitation in Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s constant assertion that successful corporations and wealthy Americans have somehow gamed the system at the expense of the poor and middle class.
There’s an irony here. For America’s credentialed elite to take the Marxian view that prosperity is evidence of exploitation requires skill in the art of self-exculpation. Ms. Warren herself is wealthy. The vast preponderance of the anti-Israel students at Harvard, Stanford and other elite campuses are the products of privileged and well-connected upbringings. Shouldn’t they fix their attentions on their own acts of exploitation? Maybe, but their use of electric cars and belief in the right progressive causes expiate their guilt, and anyway it’s far easier to accuse others.
That’s why they particularly hate Israel—a wealthy nation among neighbors whose poverty is relieved only by oil revenue. Israel is the one country in the Middle East where ordinary people stand a good chance of creating prosperity for themselves and their families. For modern progressive academics, weaned on the Marxian concept that wealth is the result of exploitation, that is precisely the reason for Israel’s guilt. They can’t behold its prosperity without concluding that the Jews have stolen their wealth from their neighbors.
Other developed nations are targets of radical denunciations for their alleged histories of expropriation—especially the U.S., not coincidentally Israel’s greatest ally and financial supporter, and the place where many Jews found a haven even before modern Israel’s founding. But there must be few campus radicals prepared to demand that all American territory be given back to Native Americans. For our campus-dwelling anti-Semites, however, Israel’s removal is the goal.
Democratic political leaders, who have credibility on elite campuses their Republican colleagues lack, have a duty to denounce these spineless university presidents and fomenters of anti-Israel bigotry. Jew-hatred among the cognoscenti has a history of spreading faster than anybody expected.
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