On the occasion of Robert Ashlar’s courageous “On the Zionist Para-State” article being republished by this magazine, I hope the discussion about it does not follow the same path that it did last year, circling the drain of arguments with a Neo-Chomskyian opposition that should, with the wider revelations of the Epstein files, be mostly discredited. To this end I would like to suggest some avenues of research which I believe will refine the concept forwarded by Ashlar, which has in my view only taken its first steps as a theory that has languished in the realm of insinuation and intuition.

The first question a theory of Jewish power in our age must answer is, why America? Or more precisely, what about America has made it so particularly vulnerable to Zionist politics?. On the surface level this seems quite simple, America having the largest Jewish population outside of Israel would seem to be sufficient on its own. If one digs deeper however, the fascinating history of the United States as a “racial democracy” appears. It is my contention that politics in settler-colonies such as America have an inherent weakness to immigrant interests once racial domination is no longer the letter of the law. This shouldn’t be too much to swallow - those blocs that can act in a united and organized manner have much larger sway in democracies, and the vast majority of citizens have been taught not only to think of themselves as universal subjects - but to also respect minority ambitions in civil society. Race and racial politics in the United States are an integral part of the story of Zionism, not simply because of any analogous history of settlerism, but because the Zionist class itself is in part a product of American “racial struggle”. To appreciate the shape of this weakness inherent in our country we also must understand the legal history of private associations, foundations, and philanthropy as a capitalist technology of governance. This will help us refine what exactly this “Zionist Para-State” substantially consists of. In this endeavor, we are beginning a critique against another sacred cow, the Civil Rights movement. It is worth researching how Jewish organizations and activists attempted to position themselves as gatekeepers of the movement – and the repressed struggle between Black and Jewish organizations after integration. This line of research is also critical if American socialists are to revive the national question in our country. Thankfully, some of this work has already been done in the Black intellectual tradition, I have found Harold Cruse particularly insightful.

The next question is why the Jews? This will require the most original thinking and creative synthesis on our part. This subject will also be the most fraught as it's all too easy to fall into right wing narratives on this path, all the more because they have a ring of truth. To those still squeamish about the subject, I believe that you will find that the more you read, the more shallow those narratives reveal themselves to be, so all one needs to credit the right with is retaining an intuition illiterate peasants had. To answer this question we need an anthropology, an anthropology of Jewish cultural strategies to fend off assimilation and foster greater ethnic cohesion, for example competitive giving within the Jewish community (every year they routinely give the most out of any community in America to what are legally defined as charities, or more accurately Jewish community institutions). It will also require a firm grasp on the history of organized crime in America (although organized crime already implies an international field of study). This latter task connects to our first question as it will provide us one of the precise means by which ethnic communities in the United States attempt to advance their collective lot, whether it be Jews, Italians, Irish or Cubans and it will also show the ways in which the American security state becomes increasingly entangled with them – beginning to share their perspectives, at the expense of a public debate about their merits. I believe this will bring into much greater focus how this “Para-State” reproduces itself and the usefulness of Israel as a force multiplier for a fraction of the American bourgeoisie in their contest for control over the global hegemon. To this end I highly recommend the research of the late great crime scholar Alan Block.

The last question is a reflective question for Marxists. Why, except at the very margins, have these problems eluded us? Why were they banished to out of hand denials? Beyond a laudable cultural aversion to racism, I believe many of us are quite poor at evaluating information that fails to present itself in a systematic way, and most of the paranoiac forerunners of lets say “Critical Semitism Studies” have hardly been systematic. However, on a deeper level I believe this to be the pernicious mark of a talmudic brand of Marxism that's declining in influence. Søren Mau’s awful book Mute Compulsion can be taken as an extreme form of this thought-terminating economism where somehow all power relations pale in significance to “the inner logic of Capital” and thus don’t deserve a critical eye, the master key to all of our problems lies in another reading of Marx’s Capital every 5 years. Thankfully, recent events as well as Twitterati line struggle has gotten us over the hump of rejecting “conspiracy” out of hand, but we all need to give power relations as well as family (in the expanded sense ethnic and communal) relations a more considerate look, lest we fall into the lazy trap of thinking that most of man’s motivations are ever reducible to cold economic rationality or that our leaders (in government and business) act as mere avatars of a global capitalism.

Ardoare C. Larna