ABSTRACT
In the early 1920s, the American automobile manufacturer Henry Ford published a series of antisemitic articles, later published as four collected volumes, titled The International Jew. While previous scholars have noted the influence of these texts on later cases of antisemitic conspiracy theory, Ford’s peculiar view of the modern economy has so far been overlooked. This chapter argues that Ford expresses a form of productivist anti-capitalism. That is, Ford erroneously takes capitalism to be an artificial instrument of a Jewish conspiracy and as only referring to finance, while production is described as organic and non-capitalist. In this way, the arch-industrialist writes himself out of the category of capitalist, while also depicting social and economic problems as the fault of only one group rather than as structural features of capitalist society. Furthermore, the chapter argues that this productivist view of capitalism persists in some contemporary cases of populism.
