The Persistence of Arno J. Mayer | Verso Books

 Arno J. Mayer was the last of the great Jewish American intellectuals who were refugees and exiles from fascism in Europe. His passing last December represents an important marker in modern intellectual history, an end point from which to look back and take stock, as well as to look forward. His life represents an end point to the explosion of Jewish thought beginning in the late 19th century with emancipation from the ghettos of Eastern Europe and Russia, one of the most influential global intellectual processes of the past 150 years. This explosion ended in the apocalyptic fire of WWII and the Holocaust, or in Mayer’s preferred term, the Judeocide. Those scholars and intellectuals who fled from the burning ruin of European civilization across the Atlantic brought with them an uneasy sense – the tension between their experience of the humanistic strands of the European educational system in which they had distinguished themselves, and that the very same societies that had created that system had turned against them and had tried to destroy them. Coming of age in the United States as a young refugee, Mayer’s thought provides one of the most insightful analyses of how this civilizational destruction came about, as well as providing a structural model to extrapolate from to understand our current moment of crisis.  

One of Mayer’s main themes throughout his oeuvre was the investigation of the nature of the ruling class, both under capitalism and that of the feudal aristocracy. This put him apart from most of his contemporaries and distinguished his body of thought. Most intellectuals and historians of a left wing persuasion have unsurprisingly made the study of working people central to their analyses – they seek to understand the oppressed, the forgotten, and the exploited, variously for the sake of political tactics, the reclaiming of the history of the class subject seen as the proper revolutionary agent, and as a moral task of attempting to give voice to those whose history has been hitherto suppressed or ignored. Yet, it has also often been assumed that the nature and history of the ruling class is self-evident and perpetuated through an all-encompassing and suffocating ideological apparatus of the media, culture, and popular education. For many scholars then, the nature and history of the ruling class is the assumed normality that they must push against and excavate beneath in order bring the truth to the surface.

This has resulted in a curious lack of rigorous historical study of the ruling class. When the history of the ruling class is examined, it often breaks down into conspiracy, a listing and web connecting who knew who, bloodlines and meetings, in which history is flattened into an all-encompassing nightmare of elite control, a story of the evil few hiding in the shadows and pulling the strings. If and when the history of the ruling class is studied in a more rigorous way, it is often done regarding the life and thought of right-wing intellectuals, the troubadours of the ruling class, but not necessarily members of the class itself. The left then finds itself in an ironic state of extreme ignorance about its class opponent, relying on assumptions, clichés, and desiccated intellectual history. Mayer was a rare exception.

For Mayer, the history of the ruling class is intimately connected to the structure of the state and foreign policy, and thereby to global politics. In Mayer’s analytic, domestic conflicts, primarily those of class conflict and social pressures within the nation-state, are the main elements impacting the decisions the ruling class makes in a given country regarding foreign policy. Mayer argued in his famous 1967 article, “The Primacy of Domestic Politics,” that it was the force of internal revolutionary forces that pushed the elites of individual states into WWI as a kind of pressure valve for the release of domestic tensions. Class conflict was outsourced to inter-state war. Yet this also brought about a global crisis and the threatened destruction of the ruling class, as the war also unleashed wider revolutionary forces. Post-WWI and the Bolshevik Revolution, the global ruling class was divided along national lines, at that time almost synonymous with the North Atlantic ruling class, and had to find a way to retain their power and manage national domestic conflicts between them without falling again into a war that destroyed them all, with the added threat of the Soviet Union looming against them.

Mayer sought to make sense of this post-WWI fallout in the structure of the North Atlantic ruling class. His initial scholarly work was concerned with the diplomatic process of the Versailles treaty and the attempted creation of a new state system in Europe after WWI, with the 1959 Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917–1918, and the 1967 Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918–1919. Mayer argued through both that the Versailles treaty and its connected negotiations on the formation of a new state system functioned as an expression of class conflict over two competing positions regarding the nature of diplomacy and international order.

One position was an attempt at a reactionary return to the pre-war form of the state system and inter-state relations, characterized by decisions made by the ruling class interpersonally between each other across states in order to quell potential revolutions within their respective borders. The other was a new form, exemplified by the Soviet Union and aspects of Woodrow Wilson’s utopian ideas of inter-state cooperation, in which diplomacy would be carried out in a rational, universal, and open way, wrested out of the hands of the ruling class. This clash between what Mayer termed the old and the new diplomacy was also a series of nested conflicts, with domestic class conflicts fueling elites to both oppose and work together internationally as they confronted the vast changes created in the wake of WWI.

With Mayer’s focus on the state system after WWI and the reaction and counterrevolutionary aspects of involved in its formation, he came to the study of the nature of counterrevolution as a structural analytic frame to understand modern European history. Thus, his 1971 Dynamics of Counterrevolution in Europe, 1870-1956: An Analytic Framework. This was a short book, less a history than a long sociological essay posing questions for further research. Mayer laid out a typology in the book between reaction, conservatism, and counterrevolution, contending that these forces, while often overlapping and occasionally supportive of each other, were not the same phenomena. Mayer also wrote Dynamics of Counterrevolution in the shadow of political developments in the US, with Mayer beginning his career in academia during McCarthyism, the work explicitly confronting the presidency of Richard Nixon and the backlash against the revolutionary movements of the 1960s.

Mayer was an idiosyncratic historian, bucking the trends of periodization for his own terms and analysis. 1914 to 1945 was Europe’s second Thirty Years’ War; the interwar years up until the late 1930s were the First Cold War; the Palestinian revolt of 1936 was the First Intifada; rather than the Holocaust, Mayer preferred the term Judeocide. In this personal repertoire we see Mayer pushing for a different periodization of modern European history, connecting the pre- and postwar periods into a larger cohesive whole, one that even went back to the 17th century. This is most strongly formulated in what is also Mayer’s most famous work, the 1981 The Persistence of the Old Regime. The Persistence of the Old Regime is the answer to the questions Mayer posed in Dynamics of Counterrevolution, in sum, what role did counterrevolutionary actors play in the politics of modern Europe, especially regarding the interactions of the older feudal aristocratic ruling class with the largely middle class counterrevolutionaries in the face of the perceived threat of the revolutionary international socialist and communist movement? The answer given by The Persistence of the Old Regime was its classic argument that the feudal and aristocratic nature of the European ruling class was not dislodged or faded away by the rise of industrialization and the capitalist bourgeoisie, but rather remained and integrated itself into the new capitalist system, retaining large control over the state and the economy, with the crises of WWI, the interwar period, and WWII both symptoms of the attempts of this old feudal order to hold on to power, as well the events that finally dislodged them.

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In this sense, Europe did not become properly bourgeois and capitalist until after WWII. There was less a bourgeois revolution than an apocalyptic last stand by the last remnants of the feudal order, one that almost brought the continent down with them, and the bourgeoisie left to pick up the rubble. For Mayer, there was no simple progression of ruling class compositional change, in which the feudal order naturally and seamlessly gave way to the bourgeoisie in the latter half of the 19th century. Capitalism is not as simple and neat as that. Rather, following the argument made by Perry Anderson in the concluding chapter of Lineages of the Absolutist State, the development of capitalism did not do away with prior modes of production and their class formations, but rather synthesized them into an incongruent, anti-teleological mix. As Anderson wrote, “For rather than presenting the form of a cumulative chronology, in which one phase succeeds and supersedes the next, to produce the successor that will surpass it in turn, the course towards capitalism reveals a remanence or the legacy of one mode of production within an epoch dominated by another, and a reactivation of its spell in the passage to a third.”

According to Mayer, the feudal aristocratic elements of the ruling class remained in power and developed a close relationship, literally bonded through blood via marriage, with the industrial bourgeoisie due to a shared consensus on the need to batten down on class pressure from below. With the rising organization of mass socialist parties and generalized political unrest in Europe, the ruling class bonded over the need for a prevention of revolution via a counterrevolution of their own. This dynamic accelerated with the establishment of the Soviet Union, which then imprinted the clash of revolution vs. counterrevolution onto the very international state system itself. The development of these intertwined interests in the nature of the ruling class, the longer term survival or persistence of the feudal aristocratic order, the crisis of the state system in the early 20th century, counterrevolution, and the division of the state system into blocs of revolution vs. counterrevolution, ultimately led Mayer to the study of Nazi Germany.

Mayer’s Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? raised a storm of controversy when it was published in 1988. The controversy lay in Mayer’s book being one of the first popularly written accounts of the Holocaust in English that supported a functionalist approach, with the Holocaust analyzed not as the result of a long term plan or conspiracy from the beginnings of Nazism to exterminate the Jews of Europe, but rather as a process of regime radicalization due to the wartime conditions of imperial conquest and the failure of the invasion of the Soviet Union. While the functionalist argument is of large scholarly consensus today, in the late 1980s it was still seen as tantamount to Holocaust denial. This was in the context of the high point of a Holocaust memorial culture and Holocaust historiography tied to Cold War narratives and nationalist sensibilities in both the United States and Israel. The functionalist position challenged a view of the Holocaust as the result of an inevitable plan drawn up by Hitler from the end of WWI onwards. Nazism and fascism for Mayer was the final conclusion of the synthesis of the aristocratic feudal ruling class attempting to hold onto power, allying with counterrevolutionaries. This was not a case of a singular German Sonderweg, in which a failed bourgeois revolution caused the retention of feudal elements that led to fascism and Nazism, but rather that the very idea of the bourgeois revolution across Europe was itself flawed. If there was a special path regarding capitalism and catastrophic political development, it was for Europe as whole, in terms of the continent’s uniqueness of the development of the structural bonding of the feudal aristocracy with elements of the rising capitalist elite to try to hold on to power up through WWII. Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? also linked with Mayer’s emphasis on the role of the ruling class and elites, with domestic politics the primary factor in motivating international policy – the Holocaust was driven by developments within the Nazi regime itself, a self-radicalizing process of the imperial machinery of conquest and those who ran it.

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Reading Mayer, one sees that he was often ahead of the curve, presaging arguments and framings years or even decades before they became widely accepted. His arguments regarding the clash of old vs. new diplomacy at Versailles, these latter new diplomacies influencing attempts at a completely new world order against a reactionary resurgence, were made decades before the clinching of this kind of approach in the 2000s, best represented by Erez Manela’s 2007 The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism. In his focus on the dynamics of class conflict after WWI from the perspective of the elites or upper bourgeoisie, Mayer also presaged the work of Charles Maier in the latter’s 1975 Recasting Bourgeois Europe. Mayer’s Dynamics of Counterrevolution, published in 1971, reads as an almost one to one real-time analysis of the wave of coups and juntas that took place across the 1970s in South and Central America, beginning with Pinochet’s overthrow of Allende in 1973. Dynamics of Counterrevolution also remains fruitful reading for today’s debates about fascism, attuned as it is to the phenomenon of varying blocs of conservative and reactionary supporters of fascist counterrevolutionaries, the former believing they can control the latter to use against the threat of revolution. Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? also speaks directly to contemporary debates regarding fascism, Nazism, and the process of genocide. It also contained many provocative ideas that are only just now starting to come into their own within academic study, such as Mayer’s characterization of Nazism as a form of pan-European crusade, exemplified by the 2017 volume edited by the Australian military historian David Stahel, Joining Hitler’s Crusade: European Nations and the Invasion of the Soviet Union, 1941.

Mayer’s concern with the role of revolution in history led him to his second to last book, the 2002 The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions. Mayer returned in this book to an emphasis on the curious situation that while revolution had an essential role in modern politics and history, it was a vastly understudied and theorized phenomenon, approached negatively as something to avoid, and so studied as an object of how to prevent, but not looked upon on its own terms. Here Mayer fused the concerns of class dynamics, counterrevolution, the state system, and regime radicalization by studying how a new revolutionary class thrust into ruling positions by their own success responded to counterrevolutionary violence and a hostile international system. Mayer in The Furies continued the theme of investigation of the radicalization of political regimes in the face of domestic and international pressures, similar to the radicalization of Nazism with the invasion of the Soviet Union. Revolutionary France and the Soviet Union faced pressures that caused them to turn toward extreme violence and terror in an ad hoc fashion, while also creating counterrevolutionary responses against them, in similar structural dynamics of political development.

Mayer’s last book was his most personal, a critical history of Zionism and Israel, the 2006 Plowshares into Swords: From Zionism to Israel. Mayer used the writings and biographies of critical Jewish Israeli intellectuals to orient himself, drawing upon Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, Ernst Simon, Ahad Haam, and Yeshayahu Leibowitz. Mayer’s father was a staunch Zionist, as many good bourgeois European Jews were in the interwar period. By Mayer’s own account his parents spent their honeymoon in the British Mandate of Palestine in 1924. His father also ran a Zionist reading group in Luxembourg, funded a training farm for Zionist Jews to work at on the border between France and Luxembourg in preparation for moving to a kibbutz Mandatory Palestine, and almost moved his family to Mandatory Palestine to become members of the yishuv in 1936, but the violence of the Arab Revolt of 1936 halted these plans. For Mayer, as for many American Jews, the confrontation with the history of Israel was also a grappling with his own family and life history.

Mayer was scathing, concluding that Israel was a kind of revanchist Sparta on the Mediterranean, a garrison that functions simultaneously as protectorate, a client state, and a recalcitrant partner of the US. Mayer highlighted one of the great ironies of Zionism, of which there are many, which is that an ideology based on the self-determination and independence of the Jewish people and the creation of security for the Jewish people through a nation-state, has resulted in the creation of a state that can only exist in its current form, and carry out its wars and foreign policy, due to its intimate relationship and reliance on the support of the global hegemon. Mayer’s history of Israel contained no conclusion, as by his admission the history is still ongoing.  

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We see the relevance of Mayer’s body of work in understanding the current breakdown of the post-Cold War state system as a symptom of the crisis of the global ruling class. Post-WWII the world saw the rise to prominence of various waves of nomenklatura, new classes of ruling elites replacing the old feudal aristocratic standard, raised up through various revolutionary or reformist programs, such as the New Deal in the US, Stalinist industrialization in the Soviet Union, anticolonial and communist revolutions across the globe, and mixed Fordist and Keynesian influenced economic orders. While these processes typically benefited the middle classes in capitalist countries the most, there was also the raising up of peasants and older agrarian social orders, such that by the early 1960s there was a world historically unique moment in which the two competing nuclear armed superpowers were led by men who had both grown up in the late 19th and early 20th century in rural poverty without electricity, Nikita Khrushchev and Lyndon Johnson. Framing this globally overlapped moment of a mutual Soviet industrialization/New Deal postwar nomenklatura raised up from agrarian poverty as the high point of the post-Old Regime, post-WWII global ruling class order, the last sixty years have seen a decline in the functioning of the ruling class structure, the crisis of the New Regime.

In the United States, we have on the one hand a political elite that is both resentful of their respective party bases and prospective voters, at times seeming to hold them in active contempt, while also unable to adapt to the crises facing the country, leading to acceleration of those crises and of broader mass political disillusion and extremism. One the other hand, the American capitalist ruling class are invested in finance and software technology, exemplified in Silicon Valley, in which innovation has utterly stalled and the creation of products that do little more than shuffle the cards on the table, creating enthusiasm for new developments that end up functionally as either pyramid schemes or extensions of copyright monopolies, such as the wave of cryptocurrency, AI, NFTs – promises of new technology in search of markets that do not exist, except for investor speculation and their platforming through the monopolization of the infrastructure of daily life by tech companies. In both cases, democracy has become a problem, as it prevents business as usual, and business as usual means stagnation. The United States still retains massive military, political, and economic power, but for how long?

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In Eastern Europe and Russia, crooks and power brokers that are functionally organized criminal gangs rose out of the chaos of the 1990s, as the transition decade created an economic shock in the region more severe than the Great Depression, mixing with the bureaucratic and technocratic holdovers of the old socialist regimes, leading to new corrupt authoritarian governments whose competence was marked by how much they could get away with in stealing the public assets built up over the socialist period. These new governments also mixed with the promotion and diffusion of a schizophrenic nationalist revival, based around visions of power during the socialist era and abuses of medieval history, a postmodern mixture of the immediate and ancient past to justify territorial revanchism. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is the end point of this process. In Europe more broadly, the technocratic and bureaucratic elite are stalled – caught between their anti-democratic visions of a top down continental order, rising social unrest and fascist revivals pushing against them, resentful of the American global dominance but unwilling and unable to take the reins of power themselves and thereby acquiescent, with the vision of a Fortress Europe against any migration from the Middle East and Africa gaining ever more credibility as a way to solve all problems.

In the destruction of Gaza and its people by Israel we see the most catastrophic symptom of both the climax and breakdown of the post-Cold War international system, a hinge point in the crisis of the New Regime, both an emblem of Israel’s impunity via US support and a model of what may lie ahead globally in the 21st century. The US-Israeli relationship is one that echoes the Old Diplomacy of the pre-WWI world as characterized by Mayer, with cynical backroom deals and secret relations among elites, done without attention or heed to a rational system or democratic input, a personalist form of inter-state relations. As a rogues gallery of American officials cycles through visits to Israel and the Middle East, and endless rounds of negotiations take place, Biden and the upper administration continue at the same time to offer virtually unconditional support for Israel and to send weapons and aid, promising that American support for Israel will always exist. With Biden having recently withdrawn from the presidential race, there is some speculation that Kamala Harris may represent a softer policy from the US in the case of her election victory, as contrasted with Donald Trump. However, there is little reason to believe that Harris will not continue the pattern set by Biden – occasional acknowledgement of Palestinian suffering and calls for a ceasefire, all while voting to continue to deliver aid and weapons to Israel, which will be used to kill Palestinians. While thousands march in protest in the streets and the conflict roils American culture, the popular anger over American support for the war is dismissed, looked down upon, or castigated as intransigent antisemitism.

In light of the recent Israeli assassination in Tehran of the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, and the assassination of the Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr, Israel seems determined to push the wider Middle East into an all-out war. Israel faces a total strategic defeat. Even if a ceasefire is at some point put in place, Israel is boxed in by the logic of its contradictory positions. Israel cannot win in Gaza, given the classic dynamics of an insurgency. Hamas cannot be truly defeated, and even if that were to happen, another Palestinian resistance organization would soon rise to fill its place, given Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people, and especially now with the destruction meted out by Israel in the war. The only way for Israel to “win” would be to annihilate the Palestinians in Gaza physically, or to remove them via ethnic cleansings into Jordan and Egypt. This cannot be done without Israel losing complete international credibility, the destruction of its ability to function in the international state system, and the high risk of its finally losing American support at even the elite level, its ultimate shield and foundation. Hamas cannot truly be defeated, and so the war can only end in an Israeli withdrawal, or an indefinite direct military occupation, the former of which would render the war pointless and the latter a bleeding wound on Israel’s economy and legitimacy. The only way for Israel to save itself from this strategic defeat is to create a larger regional war in which there are more delineated stakes in fighting against state enemies. This war would also draw in the US, to the benefit of Israel’s military capabilities and strategic possibilities. Such a regional war would also create wider wartime emergency conditions that could allow Israel to carry out a full massacre of the Palestinians in Gaza and ethnically cleanse them. This situation mirrors the breakdown of apartheid in South Africa, but on a more apocalyptic scale, in which the state over decades worked to widen its domestic conflict into a regional one in order to buy itself time out of its fundamental internal contradiction, as seen with the wars in Angola and the funding of mercenaries and conflicts in a range of border states in southern Africa.

We can understand the crisis of Israel through Mayer as that of an ideological state confronted with domestic and international pressures that are acceleratingly radicalizing it, but also a symptom of the unsteady social structure within Israel itself. The fundamental stake is that Israel’s assault on Gaza is not a function of rooting out an enemy, or even simply a revanchist mission of revenge, but an expression of the structural instability of the nature of the Israeli state itself. It is not just that Israel cannot win, as that it cannot end the war that it has embarked upon without collapsing in on itself and forcing some kind of transformative change in the function and structure of the state itself and its relations vis a vis the Palestinians. The North Atlantic ruling class has gathered itself as a reactionary force defense of Israel, and thereby shown the stakes of the coming century. Gaza represents a model for a potential kind of solution or form of management for the North Atlantic ruling class, in the face of coming mass migration and domestic uprisings due to climate change and social upheavals – the isolation and targeted destruction of populations. In the use of Israeli AI technology targeting Gazans for killing, we see a form of the digital economy promised by Silicon Valley and entrepreneurial gurus in practice.

Using Mayer’s oeuvre, we can see the post-Cold War international order as a kind of echo, or replication in a different key, of the 20th century interwar crisis. As our ruling class seeks to hold onto power, bargaining with reactionary forces, and unwilling to take action to confront the current crises for fear of change, while also supporting a targeted campaign of destruction in Gaza, we see familiar patterns surface, as characterized by Mayer. The current ruling class seem to have become a holdover of a prior mode or phase of capitalist development, just as the feudal class was a century ago, capitalism creating, consuming, and synthesizing ruling classes in turn. Will our world suffer a recurrence of the war and chaos that these prior ruling class breakdowns and their attempts to hold on to power caused? Time will tell.

Image: Paul Nash, Battle of Germany, 1944, via Wikicommons

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