CONFRONTING ANTISEMITISM ON THE LEFT: An exchange between Daniel Randall and Matthew Bolton.
Daniel Randall, author of Confronting Antisemitism on the Left: Arguments for Socialists, will present the themes from his book and discuss these questions, and others, in conversation with Matt Bolton, co-author of Corbynism: A Critical Approach.
Scroll down for a video of the original discussion.
Daniel Randall is a railway worker, trade unionist, and socialist activist based in London. He is the author of Confronting Antisemitism on the Left: Arguments for Socialists (No Pasaran Media, 2021). Matthew Bolton is a researcher at the Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung in Berlin,
and the co-author, with Frederick Harry Pitts, of Corbynism: A Critical Approach (Society Now, 2018).
This written exchange is an extension of discussion between them at an online meeting hosted by the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism on 24 March. A recording of the meeting is online here.
MB: The arguments in your book draw on critiques of left antisemitism – or antisemitism within the left, which is an important distinction – that have been around for decades: arguments made by the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Steve Cohen’s 1984 book That’s Funny You Don’t Look Antisemitic, all the way back to Marx.
So the information about how antisemitism can foment within leftist worldviews has been out there for a long time. Yet these arguments, from writers and activists with impeccably leftist credentials, have been routinely ignored or dismissed by the dominant factions of the British left. Did that make the kind of crisis that unfolded within Corbyn’s Labour Party inevitable in the event that someone from the British left won political power?
In short, was the Corbyn crisis avoidable?
DR: There are certainly things the Labour leadership could have done differently to have prevented things from playing out in quite the way they did. This includes some actions on a basic rhetorical level, in terms of being seen to take the issue seriously. For example, there was a whole period in which Corbyn would simply doggedly, mechanically repeat that he was “opposed to all forms of racism” whenever he was asked about antisemitism in the party.
Charitably, one might claim this was an attempt to situate a confrontation with antisemitism within a wider anti-racist politics. But what it mainly communicates is a lack of sensitivity and understanding. If the focus had been on another form of bigotry – sexism, for example, with which there’s also clearly a problem on the left – we’d expect left leaders to talk specifically about sexism when questioned about it, rather than only saying “I’m opposed to all forms of bigotry and oppression.”
But in a longer-range sense, the “crisis” was not avoidable. As you allude to in the question, there was a long-standing critique of left antisemitism, a phenomenon with roots going back decades, even centuries. There was going to have to be a significant confrontation with it at some point.
It’s unfortunate and suboptimal that a confrontation took place in the context of a right-wing ideological attack on the left as a whole, rather than on terms those of us within the left who’d been seeking that kind of reckoning for many decades might have preferred. That had an effect on the way the debate has played out. It caused a lot of people to batten down the hatches. But we, as a left, can’t control which issues the right chooses to make an issue of and when, we can only control how we respond.
Contemporary left antisemitism is inextricably linked to the phenomenon of “campism”, a splitting of the world into dualistic “imperialist” and “anti-imperialist” blocs, or camps. Over Syria, and now again over Ukraine, we’re also seeing a crisis, or reckoning, on the left over the phenomenon of “campism”, more widely.
Those backdrops are obviously significantly more tragic and brutal than the right-wing campaign against Corbynism, and I don’t wish to imply that moments of social catastrophe might have some positive character because they represent opportunities for political clarification. But the left is seeing some of its established common sense tested against events in the world, and the common sense is being found abjectly inadequate.
How much of this was tied to the figure of Corbyn himself – thinking of both his personal history and the way he was and is regarded (by his supporters and indeed, by himself) as morally unimpeachable, the personification of “socialism”?
Less than both his most vocal supporters and his detractors would like to think. This is a phenomenon that long predates Corbynism and Corbyn, and an over-emphasis on his personal role obfuscates the debate.
Having said that, he’s responsible for his own actions. He chose, for example, to install Seumas Milne and Andrew Murray – two people whose political backgrounds were in Straight Left, a hardcore-Stalinist splinter from the Communist Party – in key positions on his staff, giving them significant political and organisational influence over how the leadership responded to the issue.
Corbyn is not a Stalinist, but his “socialism” – although he didn’t often talk explicitly about “socialism” – is moralistic, thinking in terms of good (downtrodden and disadvantaged) and bad (powerful and oppressive) people. That lends itself both to shallow populism, and to campism, which replicates the “good and bad people” framework on the terrain of international politics, and both of those things dovetail into left antisemitic themes.
There was also a personality-cultist element to some of the movement around him, and an additional and related factor is the tendency for politics to become a matter of identity, or even heredity. Phrases like “lifelong anti-racist”, or “he doesn’t have an antisemitic bone in his body”, were common. We might also note Corbyn’s own references to his mother having been at Cable Street to deflect accusations of antisemitism – as if his mother’s action against fascist antisemitism in the 1930s meant his own ideas, 80 years later, couldn’t possibly be antisemitic. The implication is that correct political morality and ideas are something you’re imbued with at birth, that’s in your genes, rather than something that develops through struggle and education, and which should be subject to critique and reassessment.
Does the centre/liberal-left need to share some of the blame here too? Do they understand antisemitism any better than the left?
I’m not sure how useful it is to talk in terms of “blame”, but I do think there’s a very shallow understanding of antisemitism across political culture as a whole, not only on the left.
One doesn’t have to be in and of the far left to identify and critique antisemitism, or any other bigotry, within it, just as one doesn’t have to be a Tory to identify and critique bigotry in the Tory party. But the most sophisticated and useful critiques of left antisemitism have come from within the left itself. Without an understanding of the historical roots of left antisemitism, its function as a form of conspiracy theory, its relationship to “campism”, and so on, it’s hard to develop a critique that goes much beyond saying “some Jews seem to be upset, that seems bad, I hope the thing which has made them upset stops happening.”
I don’t wish to dismiss that instinct, as it’s a better starting point than denialism, but if you’re interested in dismantling a historically-constructed ideological problem, you need more than that. It’s also the case that the shallow understandings of capitalism, which can slide into conspiracism, and a campist approach to Israel/Palestine, which also impels antisemitism, are sometimes encountered on the liberal left as well.
Is there a connection between your analysis of left antisemitism and the approach of some of the left to figures like Putin over the years, with the recent Ukraine invasion in mind?
Absolutely. This is fundamental to my analysis. As I’ve said, to me the critique of left antisemitism and the critique of campism are inextricably linked, one cannot be overcome without overcoming the other.
Another parallel we’ve seen is some on the left taking a similar attitude to Ukrainian nationhood to the one taken to Israeli Jewish nationhood. To oversimplify slightly, the argument is that, because Ukraine is aligned with the west, and because there are far-right elements within Ukrainian nationalism, Ukrainian nationhood and self-determination is somehow inherently reactionary. Russian conquest of Ukraine therefore takes on some kind of progressive, “anti-imperialist” character. I think that mirrors the way some on the left see Israeli Jewish nationhood as innately illegitimate and essentially imperialist in and of itself.
The way to overcome that is to reconnect with consistent democracy, the advocacy of democratic rights on a universal basis, rather than thinking in terms of “good” and “bad” peoples.
Where do you stand on the debate over how to define antisemitism, thinking of the furore over Labour’s eventual adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition, and the publication last year of the rival Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA)?
Do either of them adequately capture the anti-hegemonic element of antisemitism – the notion that antisemitic ideas are often understood by their adherents as a means of resisting powerful forces – which distinguishes antisemitism from other modes of racism?
They do both emphasise, or at least cover, antisemitism-as-conspiracy-theory, so something of the “anti-hegemonic” element is in there, at least on the level of acknowledging antisemitism as a would-be critique of power. Whether that element can be “adequately captured” in a single document is another matter, however.
I was supportive of the Labour Party adopting the IHRA definition in full when that was the subject of fierce debate, and in my book I defend the IHRA’s most talked-about clause, that it can be antisemitic to assert that “a state of Israel” (the indefinite article is used quite deliberately, it seems to me) is a “racist endeavour”. The IHRA definition has become a kind of artefact now, something that people will denounce in the most vituperative terms without even having read it. Some claim it censures all criticism of Israel as antisemitic, which it very explicitly doesn’t.
Unfortunately it’s also become a kind of artefact for its supporters, too, and is now being used in a way which I think is not entirely faithful to its original intent, as a kind of statutory document to police speech rather than a tool to aid discussion. Some now talk about it as a kind of supplement to equalities law and I’m very much against it being used in that way.
As for the JDA, some of the people who are promoting it are people whose work I very much respect. Some of the claims made against it, for example that its authors are “anti-Jewish racists”, are calumnious. Having said this, I think the text, and its approach, are flawed. I’m not sufficiently important to have been asked to sign it, but had I been asked, I wouldn’t have. It claims to clarify things the IHRA leaves ambiguous but in doing so it mostly piles on its own ambiguities.
For example, the JDA is very keen to protect arguments for a single state in Israel/Palestine, and arguments for boycotts of Israel, from being considered antisemitic. And I agree that advocating a unitary state is not necessarily, inherently, antisemitic. But anyone advocating a unitary state as the best way to realise equality between Arabs and Jews has a responsibility to explain how they see such an outcome being achieved in a way that does not override the rights of one or the other people in the process.
The British SWP, for example, says it supports a single state with “full equality for all”. In the abstract, of course that’s not an inherently antisemitic position. But the SWP also supports Hamas and Hezbollah, whose political goals certainly do not include “full equality”, not only for Jews, but for women, LGBT+ people, and others. The not-inherently-antisemitic outcome Socialist Worker supports is thereby connected to support for military struggle by antisemites for antisemitic ends. Supporters of such a position may not be antisemites in the sense of having a personal animus towards Jews – indeed, they may be committed and active opponents of such antisemitism – but their policy nevertheless has an antisemitic logic.
Using the “lens” of the JDA, someone might look at the SWP’s formal policy and think, “fine, no problem here”, which I think is miseducating. As such, emphasising that it’s not antisemitic to support a single state has almost as little explanatory value as the banal truism, oft repeated on the left, that “it’s not antisemitic to criticise Israel and Zionism”.
In typical “Third Camp” fashion, the “definition document” I feel is closest to my own thinking is neither the IHRA nor the JDA, but the Nexus Document, which has attracted significantly less attention than either but which I think is better than both, although also not without its limitations.
In general I’m increasingly inclined to the view that these attempts to define antisemitism in terms of a simple, one-sentence statement, scaffolded with all these contextual examples, and then present the resulting document as a kind of silver-bullet, is really just a dead end. I’d rather debate the issues on their own terms, so to speak, rather than at one or several remove via the “definition wars”.
The book clearly demonstrates the poverty of the “anti-imperialist” worldview, built upon a binary “campism” with roots in Cold War Stalinism, and which you rightly suggest has been fundamental to the politics of Corbyn and his close associates for decades. The malign consequences of the rigid ahistoricity of this perspective have recently been evident in parts of the left’s ambivalence – at best – about Putin’s aggression, not just in Ukraine, but also prior to that in Syria.
The desperation to shift all blame for any particular conflict onto the shoulders of the “imperialist powers” leads to the de facto exoneration of the supposedly “anti-imperialist” Russian (or Syrian, or Iranian) states, and opens up pathways to conspiracy theories around false flag attacks, chemical weapons use, genocide denial, and so on. GIven the myriad abuses of the concept of “imperialism” by the campist left, should we retain it as a concept at all? Is it still useful today?
Yes. For all that there’s been significant contestation within the left historically over theories of imperialism, it’s also a useful shorthand for the bullying of smaller powers, or of national minorities, by bigger powers, and it still has value on that level. I don’t know how you can explain what Russia is doing in Ukraine without talking about imperialism. I also think the concept of “regional imperialism” is important for understanding the status of powers like Iran, Turkey, and indeed Israel.
But beyond this simplistic usage, the concept retains a deeper explanatory value in terms of thinking about how ruling classes and their states conduct themselves internationally. What’s distinct about contemporary imperialism, I’d argue, is that rather than a world of territorial-colonial empires, with vast swathes of the planet conquered and ruled directly from a few imperial metropoles, we have what Ellen Meiksins Wood called an “empire of capital”, through the globalisation of capitalist markets and class relations, dominated by the most economically powerful states but into which other states are integrated and attempt to assert themselves. The primary enforcement is through market mechanisms rather than military conquest.
Direct conquest and subjugation of a national or proto-national group by a more powerful state still occurs. We can see that in how Turkey, Syria, and Iran treat the Kurds, how Morocco treats the Western Saharawis, how China treats the Uyghurs and Tibetans, how Israel treats the Palestinians, and how Russia treats the Chechens and is attempting to treat the Ukrainians. That’s not an exhaustive list, there are other instances. But that typically takes place on a regional basis, whereas at an international level we have Wood’s “empire of capital” rather than a rivalry between a small number of large colonial empires competing with each other for territorial expansion and control.
The globalisation of capitalist class relations, including throughout the ex-colonial world, does mean that only working-class struggle against capitalism, rather than nationalist struggles for independence, has revolutionary potential on a global scale – which is not to say that a particular “national” struggle might not have important democratic legitimacy, as in Palestine or, currently, in Ukraine.
In the book you argue that socialists should strive to win Jewish communities over to the goal of a universal class emancipation. Does the horizon of class universality threaten Jewish existence as Jewish? Is it possible to retain a particularist Jewish identity, or non-identity, within the universalist framework of class unity?
Bluntly, I’d say “particularist” – no, but “distinct”, yes. To me, particularism means a kind of cultural nationalism, seeing politics through the prism of the particular interests of the group, which inevitably entails an attempt to privilege those interests over the interests of others where they’re perceived to clash.
But I don’t see any contradiction between the horizon of class universality, or even a more general human universality, and the expression of distinct cultural identities. Often, those identities are the gateways through which we access the universal – this is something Isaac Deutscher talks about in his concept of the “non-Jewish Jew”, how radical Jewish thinkers used their Jewish identity and experience to thrust towards the horizon of universal human emancipation.
Steve Cohen also talks about this, in a passage I quoted in the author’s note in my book: “The positive image I have is bouncing on a trampoline called ‘Jewish’. I bounce higher and higher until one day I bounce beyond the power of gravity and become a free-floating human. We should all try it, Jews, Muslims, whoever. It sure would make the world a far more energetic place.”
So I don’t see class universality, or universalist humanism, as being about the extirpation of distinct cultural identity. It’s about how we can synthesise what’s best in those identities, and on an individual level use them to access the universal.
There is a strong emphasis throughout the book on the influence of antisemitic conspiracy theories from the USSR , such as the Doctors Plot and the Slansky Trial, amplified through an anti-Zionist propaganda campaign that percolated through the international left, including the British left.
Is this a political theory of antisemitism? Is the relation between capitalism (or state capitalism, if it is possible to understand the Stalinist and “actually existing socialist states” in such terms) and antisemitism contingent, or necessary? Is antisemitism on the left a direct result of Stalinist propaganda, which could have been avoided had the Soviet Union taken a different path after 1928, or are there deeper roots – say in the social form of labour that constitutes capitalist modernity, as Moishe Postone argues?
Clearly there are deeper roots, in all sorts of ways. Trotsky writes in 1937, years before the Doctor’s Plot or any of those episodes, about Stalinism’s enthusiasm for appealing to chauvinist prejudices in Russian society, including antisemitism. And what I talk about as the “primitive strand” of left antisemitism, based on a conflation of Jews with finance, was obviously picked up by Stalinism and woven into its conception of anti-Zionism.
We could game out the counterfactuals all day; if things had developed differently in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, the whole of world history would’ve unfolded differently. But in terms of how things did actually develop, I think Stalinist anti-Zionism and campism are central for understanding how antisemitism manifests on the contemporary far left.
Much left antisemitism is a result of Stalinist propaganda, I’d argue – if not directly, then at least in terms of how the campist worldview was spread and taken up across much of even the anti-Stalinist left, which is something I discuss quite extensively in the book. I don’t particularly object to my approach being thought of as a “political theory of antisemitism”. Certainly, questions of political ideology are very much foregrounded and emphasised.
As I say, there are often traces of the older themes embedded in contemporary left antisemitism. One might also argue that Stalinist antisemitism would simply not have been able to take root in the way it did if it had not been for the foundations laid by those primitive forms. One can also point to a definite resurgence of “primitive” antisemitism on the left at least since the late 1990s, and definitely since the 2008 crash, which is worthy of distinct consideration, and which isn’t explicable primarily by reference to Stalinist propaganda.
But Postone himself said that, if primitive left antisemitism had been “the socialism of fools”, centring on a “primitive critique of capitalist modernity”, then today, and since the 1960s, it is clearer to describe it as “the anti-imperialism of fools”. Looking at the development of Stalinism and campism is key to understanding that.
In the book you reject the idea that capitalist power is “intangible.” Against conspiratorial understandings of capitalism which seek to pin the blame for the suffering it causes on the secretive workings of string-pulling cabals of financiers, you argue that the workings of capitalist societies are “perfectly perceivable, conducted primarily in the open and consisting primarily of the exploitation of wage-labour.” Capitalism is not “a shadowy conspiracy shrouded in darkness”, nor a “mysterious manipulation taking place beyond our sight or perception” but rather “something people are engaged in every day.”
There is some truth to this, but I think leaving the analysis at this level risks missing what is historically distinct about the functioning of capitalist societies, and why antisemitism is intrinsically, rather than contingently, connected to capitalism. All societies across history have featured the exploitation of labour by powerful groups. But only in capitalism is the exploitation of labour driven not by the personal desires of the powerful but by the demands of the system itself. Capitalist exploitation is not, ultimately, driven by the individual needs of the capitalist, but is the necessary prerequisite of survival for everyone within capitalist society, rich or poor.
The question that distinguishes Marx’s critique of political economy from every other form of socialist or communistic denunciation of capitalism is – what underlies this unescapable drive for exploitation, and why does it take the form it does? How and why is that imperative imposed upon the capitalists themselves? And his answer in Capital is that part of what makes capitalism distinct from other modes of production is precisely the intangible forces which make production for production’s sake necessary.
Those forces are visible to us in the workings of the market – the need to ensure production of commodities adheres to the ever-changing standards of socially necessary labour time, the rise and fall of inflation, interest rates, financial crashes and so on. But none are under the control of capitalist power – however rich, capitalists are subject to those forces just as workers are, albeit with a greater room for manoeuvre.
This is at the core of Postone’s critical theory of antisemitism – that capitalism contains an abstract, intangiable element that cannot be reduced to concrete power relations between worker and capitalist. It is here that antisemitism can bloom, as attempts are made to ‘concretise’ or ‘personify’ abstract forms of social domination. It gives us an explanation for Soviet antisemitism which is not dependent on the particularities of political control at any one point.
I think Postone is right about antisemitism embodying a “primitive critique of capitalist modernity”, in the sense that it attempts to “personify”, in the figure of “the banker”, “the financier”, or simply “the Jew”, what appears to be intangible and incorporeal in modern capitalism.
I’m “bending the stick” a bit in terms of how I formulate things in the book. What I’m attempting to emphasise in the quotes you reference is the questions of location and agency. Antisemitism tells us that capitalism “happens” somewhere beyond our sight. Sometimes that is concretised into claims about things like the Bilderberg Group, where the master-puppeteers of the world gather to devise their nefarious schemes, the execution of which then end up shaping our lives in ways we can’t control: all we can do is seek to “reveal” the hidden places where the plans are made.
My argument is that capitalism actually “happens” most essentially in the workplace. Starting from your own working day, the hours you and your workmates spend selling your labour power to a boss, and scaling that up to the level of class collectivity is more important for understanding how capitalism functions, and how it might be overthrown, than looking at Soros or the Rothschilds or whoever. Capitalism is most fundamentally expressed in the wage relation, and when workers go on strike that relation is disrupted.
I don’t want to replace one shallow misanalysis with another, and get people to identify their own employer, rather than George Soros, as the personification of power and control. And there are dynamics and processes that are outside the immediate direct control of individual capitalists. Many market mechanisms have a certain “anarchic” character. But the educational imperative there is to explain how those are consequences of a system of production organised for profit, rather than designs impelled by the personal immorality, greed, and a desire for domination on the part of “bankers” or “financial elites”.
