David Osland reviews Daniel Randall's Confronting Antisemitism on the Left (£9.99 plus post, available here)
For something many socialists don’t even think exists, recent years have seen a surfeit of literature on left antisemitism.
Three of this spate of books already sit on my shelves: Dave Rich’s The Left’s Jewish Problem, which includes a page or two on my own distant political past; David Hirsh’s Contemporary Left Antisemitism; and Israel and the European Left by Colin Shindler.
So the obvious question for any reviewer to start with is, why another? And my answer would be, because this one is badly needed.
The clue to why Daniel Randall’s Confronting Left Antisemitism: Arguments for Socialists stands out from the pack is in the name.
This is not an attempt to write backward from preconceived conclusions, mangling history to fit the exigencies of current disputation, or a disingenuous bid to pass off humdrum polemic as academic sociology.
Moralistic
Randall instead eschews moralistic imprecations in favour of open ideological confrontation, backed by the full strength of the revolutionary socialist tradition, particularly the sub-section thereof to which he subscribes.
The effort is largely successful. For the socialist reader, this feels like the right starting point towards an understanding of the controversies that dogged the period in which Jeremy Corbyn led the Labour Party, and rumble on even now.
It isn’t the self-image we collectively like to project, but the left has not in the past been immune to bigotry of any description. Accordingly, there is no guarantee that we are immune today.
One of the strengths of the book is the warnings it offers against the pitfalls of the inchoate populism that landed us in the shit in the first place.
The left cannot gaze enviously at the success of the right’s flirtation with that brand of politics, conclude we are missing a presentational trick or two, and attempt to adapt the formula to our own ends.
It’s unduly harsh exaggeration to reduce Corbynism to a left populism that substituted the super-rich for some undefined notion of “the elite”. At it’s best, it had rather more intellectual substance than that.
But then again, it wasn’t always at its best. Ritual invocation of “banksters” inevitably opens the backdoor to the antisemitic Rothschild and Soros stereotypes that never quite go away.
Randall’s key analytical framework is provided by a tripartite taxonomy of the primary historical phrases of left antisemitism.
The first is what he calls “the primitive strand”, the late nineteenth century/early twentieth conflation of Jews and finance capital that was a feature of many labour movements.
The clearest example in this country may be the repeated accusations from the likes of prominent Edwardian Marxist Henry Hyndman and leading Liberal radical J A Hobson that Boer War was being waged on behalf of nefarious Jewish interests.
That attitude died hard. The more honest biographies of such heroes of mainstream Labourism as Attlee and Bevin are littered with antisemitic remarks, seemingly as casual as they are grotesque, as late as the middle of the last century.
Strand
The second strand emerged in the USSR and its satellite states in the 1950s, following the allegations of a “doctors’ plot” on the life of Stalin and the Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia.
Echoes in this country were not extensive. Yet the question was debated within the Communist Party of Great Britain, especially after allegations of the persecution of Jews in Stalin’s final years were published in Folkstymme, a Yiddish-language communist publication in Poland.
The CPGB’s hapless Jewish committee - whose membership somehow included Rajani Palme Dutt, a famously slavish Stalinist hack of no known Jewish heritage - at least managed to get muted objections on the record, despite the leadership’s efforts to play things down.
The third strand, anti-Zionism twisted beyond breaking point, has arisen in recent decades, and this is the predominant contemporary variant on the left.
It’s no easy matter to raise it in leftwing circles without getting shouted down. Most of those who fall into this trap get there from the entirely justified starting point of moral repugnance at Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, which all too frequently takes on armed and bloody substance.
Here we have what is sometimes described as “the anti-imperialism of fools”, by analogy to the description, usually attributed to August Bebel, of antisemitism as “the socialism of fools”.
Opposition to imperialism and solidarity with Palestine are, of course, elementary duties of socialists. But that just makes theoretical clarity all the more essential.
Depressingly, examples of the third strand are all around us and cover the full spectrum of the organised left, from movementist to reformist to revolutionary.
We see them in every chant of “from the river to the sea”, in every strenuous insistence that a Zionist cabal is in clandestine charge of US foreign policy, in every fervid protestation that Israel now “controls the Labour Party”.
There are of course limitations of Randall’s schema. Like all taxonomies of this kind, it cannot hope to be comprehensive, and is insufficiently capacious to act as a filing cabinet for every known instance of the disease.
But it is a useful classification, not least because it highlights the roots of the phenomenon. This is a backstory that needs to be better known.
Yet even those friendly to the the argument may do a double take on chapter seven, in which it is maintained - in the face of orthodoxy on the topic - that left antisemitism does not meet the threshold at which it becomes racism, or at least is “not best understood” as such.
That exemption is specifically extended to left antisemitism alone, with “many” other forms of antisemitism “clearly classically racist”.
Of course, a valid analytical distinction is to be made between third-strand left antisemitism and antisemitism of knuckle-dragging fascist persuasion or Christian fundamentalist provenance.
But my, doesn’t this look like a Get Out of Jail Free card, carefully placed in advance to undermine the ability of other far left organisations to lay the charge that the nasty AWL is calling them racists.
You can also hear the centrist execrations now; he’s trying to let the far left off the hook! Double standards! Once a Trot, always a Trot!
After all, if antisemitism that postulates Jews as immensely powerful is analytically distinct from the racism that portrays blacks as less than human, that is as true of the antisemitism of the far right as the antisemitism of the far left.
I also offer other minor criticisms. One niggle is the curious lack of any discussion of the work of Lenni Brenner, which has been hugely influential in Trotskyist circles and beyond.
Brenner
Brenner’s 1983 volume Zionism in the Age of the Dictators is the locus classicus of the contention that fascism and Zionism were allies in the decades before world war two.
It is regularly cited by Ken Livingstone and others to that end, and their arguments have found widespread social media resonance among those who won’t have read Brenner themselves.
It would be useful for those making the arguments against third-strand left antisemitism to have included a concise critique of such ideas.
But let me close out on a note of praise. While I have never denied the extent of left antisemitism, Randall’s book brought it home to me that the problem goes beyond the aberrational.
By trying to keep things soft focus and “broad”, a mistaken analysis has become an integral element of meat and potatoes left-wing thinking, especially on foreign policy questions, with the consequences we see before us.
Confronting Antisemitism on the Left may well be the far left’s last best word on the topic. I am going to reserve definitive judgement on that until I’ve read yet another contribution to the debate, David Renton’s Labour’s Antisemitism Crisis: What the Left Got Wrong, which I have seen positively reviewed.
Meanwhile, the left Shachtmanism on which Randall’s book is so obviously premised remains a niche ideological product, and dislike of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty is so widespread that many ears will be closed in advance.
I presume Daniel was named after the famous prophet of the Hebrew Bible. As I dimly recollect from Sunday School, Old Testament prophets were famously not heeded. Sadly I suspect he will get a similar reception.
• David Osland is a long-time left wing journalist and author. Follow him on Twitter @David__Osland
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