Abstract
The book's main subject is a comparison of the communist and Zionist movements as two answers to the crisis of liberal emancipation. The author rejects the perspective that the two movements are in opposition to each other, instead finding similarities and parallels. He believes the two movements were two revolutionary answers to the failure of the evolutionary emancipation that the liberalism of the 19th century had promised both to excluded cultural groups and to exploited workers. In one case the emancipation was meant to be the inclusion of excluded Jews in the civic nation, while in the other case it was to be the inclusion of exploited workers in the middle class. Zionism and socialism grew out of a reaction to the failure to fulfil these promises. Instead of the individual integration of members of oppressed groups - Jews and workers - into an already existing collective, the two movements each proposed the establishment of another collective: in one case a new nation (and its state), in the other case a new (type of) society.
The evolution of the existing system was to be replaced by revolution, in which the oppressed group broke away in order to build another system. This change of content had a corresponding change of form. Instead of the emancipation of the oppressed from above, the two movements proposed emancipation from below. Moreover, the working-class variant of Zionism and the Bolshevik variant of revolutionary socialism, which at the end of the First World War started to play a central role in both movements, both arose in the space of the Russian empire and inherited a number of common features from Russian populism. The intense animosity that they felt towards one another for a large part of the 20th century can therefore best be understood not against the background of the allegedly impassable gulf between them, but, on the contrary, against the background of the intimate closeness that characterised their beginnings.
Despite its subject, this is not a historical work but one of political theory. The ideas of the two revolutionary movements are examined from the point of view of the questions that are asked by current emancipation theory. Before getting to the actual subject of the book in the second and third parts, the author thus devotes the first part to theoretical issues. He explores solutions to the relationship of nation and nationalism to race and racism in Hanna Arendt and Benedict Anderson (chapters 1 and 2), Etienne Balibar and Michel Foucault (chapter 3), Immanuel Wallerstein and Klaus Holz
(chapter 4). The ideal-typical map of the four positions to which we are led by a comparison of these four authors arises from a combination of answers to two questions. Are we to consider nationalism, from the standpoint of emancipation, an unambigously positive or negative phenomenon, or should we consider it an ambiguous and ambivalent phenomenon? Should we subordinate nationalism and racism to a single concept, or should they be conceptually divided?
The author defends the second answer to both questions: taking as his starting point the ambiguity of the nation, he distinguishes it conceptually from race. Race and racism, together with class and socialism, are from his point of view a universalist alternative to the particularism of the nation and nationalism (chapter 5).
This conceptual distinction between race and class on one hand and the nation on the other is not overturned by the fact that empirically speaking, racial and class movements such as Nazism and
Bolshevism have sought connections or at least compromises with national movements.
As the author shows in the second part, working-class Zionism also sought to connect universalist and particularist answers to the crisis of Jewish assimilation. While its nationalist wing (A. D. Gordon, Y. Ch. Brenner) concentrated exclusively on the renewal of the identity of the Jews by means of their proletarisation in Palestine (chapter 6), its internationalist wing (B. Borochov) originally saw the settlement of Palestine merely as a path to enable Jewish proletarians to take part in the worldwide class struggle (chapter 7).
The socialist-Zionist synthesis, which in practical terms reconciled these two opposing positions, experienced its initial growth during the Russian revolution of 1905 and its culmination in the revolution of 1917 (chapter 8). One of the main causes of its subsequent decline was that the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917 assigned the Zionist project in Palestine to the opposite geopolitical bloc from that which was established in the 20th century from the Bolshevik revolution that took place five days later (chapter 9).
In the third part the author analyses the Bolshevik concept of the national question (chapter 10) and the fortunate meeting of Russophile Jews with philosemitic Russians in the Bolshevik movement and revolution (chapter 11). He subsequently describes Stalin's turn towards nationalism, which contradicted this Russian-Jewish synthesis (chapter 12). He states that the three main answers to the failure of this second great European attempt by the Jews at assimiliation were neozionism, liberal multiculturalism and the globalism of human rights (chapter 13). Towards the end he returns to the beginnings of the Soviet Union and searches for the similarities and differences between the relationship of the Bolsheviks to the non-Christian and non-European population and the relationship of the Zionists to the Arab and Muslim populations of Palestine. He also asks whether the Soviet empire managed to move beyond the classic model of empire (chapter 14). In the Conclusion he states that the liberal-evolutionary and the socialist-revolutionary concept of emancipation from history have both failed to reach the millenium, and thus have to be replaced by the concept of emancipation in history. From a comparison of the primacy of action in anarchism (in the concept of direct action) with the primacy of knowledge in orthodoxically-conceived historical materialism he concludes that emancipation, which has abandoned its faith in the end of history, has to try and avoid both biases and combine, in a balanced way, knowledge and action, explanation and operation, questioning and answering, interpreting the world and changing it.