Darkening prospects

Issue: 159

Alex Callinicos

Internationally the neoliberal order continues to implode. Donald Trump seems intent on pursuing trade wars with both the United States’ strategic rival China and allies such as the European Union and Canada, while he embraces détente with North Korea, once the ultimate rogue state. As we argued in our last issue, Trump has proved to be deadly serious about undermining the post-war liberal international order.1 This is shown in his attitude towards Germany, whose re-emergence as a major economic power now fully integrated into Western capitalism has been a key prop of that order.

Not only has Trump made it clear that the German car industry would be a main target in any transatlantic trade war, but he has directly intervened in the crisis of the German grand coalition government over migration with the aim of simultaneously forcing Angela Merkel onto the defensive and justifying his own monstrous (and now partially reversed) policy of detaining the children of migrant families at the US border with Mexico and separating them from their parents.2 As Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman puts it, “for Mr Trump and his alt-right allies in Europe, the fall of Ms Merkel would be a kind of vindication—proof that her decision to allow more than 1 million migrants into Germany in 2015 has been decisively rejected by the electorate”.3 Trump is mounting a generalised challenge to the neoliberal “extreme centre” from the right that is inspiring imitators and emboldening fascists everywhere.

Meanwhile, mainstream British politics is stuck in the doldrums of Brexit. Britain’s long goodbye to the EU is itself both a result and an exacerbation of the more general crisis.4 Now it is consuming the two main parties, which emerged more dominant from the general election a year ago than they had been for a generation. Both confront dual challenges—externally an EU determined to use its bargaining advantage to impose the worst possible exit deal on Britain, and internally powerful minorities for whom the relationship with Brussels is a burning political priority in a way in which it isn’t for most people, however they voted in the referendum.

This double bind is worse for Theresa May’s government. She is inching towards an eventual Brexit settlement that will leave Britain still very close to the EU but excluded from its decision-making processes, mainly because any other outcome would be disastrous for the dominant capitalist interests. But such a deal is anathema to the powerful minority of Brexiteers in the cabinet and on the Tory back benches, who sincerely believe that a prosperous and powerful future awaits a Britain that makes a clean break with Brussels. Hence she is forced to tack and manoeuvre and delay, at the cost of intra-party friction and draining business confidence.

Despite the overriding importance of access to European markets for British capitalism, politics commands economics in this process, as the bosses’ organisation the CBI complains with increasing stridency. Its outgoing president, Paul Drechsler, accuses Tories and Labour alike of being “consumed” by “a fest of political debate and ideology” and warns that British companies are shifting capital abroad as part of “contingency plans” against Brexit.5 He’s also predicted that, if Britain doesn’t stay in a customs union with the EU, “there are sectors of manufacturing society in the UK which risk becoming extinct”, notably the car industry.6 Leading firms—Airbus, BMW, Siemens, Unipart, for example—have weighed in with warnings of the dire consequences of a hard Brexit. Bronwen Maddox of the Institute for Government nicely captures the parochial focus of May’s efforts: “For the UK to leave the EU, she must find a version of Brexit acceptable to her cabinet, Conservative MPs, the House of Commons overall and, incidentally, to EU negotiators as well. It is possible no such version exists”.7

On the face of it, the situation is better for the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn. His position of studied ambiguity on the issue of Brexit has worked to Labour’s electoral advantage, allowing it to secure the support of both Leave and Remain voters in last year’s election. But this stance is becoming harder to sustain as the political struggle has narrowed down to the arduous parliamentary scrutiny of the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill. Since the Tories lost their majority in the House of Commons in June 2017, and have vocal Leave and Remain caucuses, the process is inherently destabilising, with the real possibility of a serious government defeat precipitating May’s fall.

But it’s not just the pro- and anti-EU Tory factions that have been empowered by this situation. Labour has its own fifth column, in the shape of a strident group of Remainers. Its political loyalties (and hence disloyalty to Corbyn) stem from the Labour right. Indeed its rebellions have been egged on from the sidelines by figures from the New Labour era—the most discreditable in the party’s history, when it sold its soul to the City and George W Bush—headed by Tony Blair himself. Most recently, in mid-June, 75 Labour MPs ignored a three-line whip to abstain and voted for an amendment passed by the House of Lords proposing that Britain remain within the European Economic Area (EEA), alongside countries such as Norway and Iceland, after Brexit.

Partly in response, Corbyn has, like May, edged closer to supporting a soft Brexit. But he continues to resist Britain staying in the single market, which would restrict the economic policies a Labour government could pursue. He led Labour last year to its best share of the vote in nearly 20 years on a programme of solid if moderate economic and social reforms—they seemed radical only because of the corroding effects of neoliberalism and the fact that he and shadow chancellor John McDonnell look committed to actually implementing them. They have lifted the hopes of the left in Britain higher than they have been for many years.

Nevertheless, in the past few months, there has been an apparent loss of impetus, and not merely because of the parliamentary war of attrition over Brexit. Labour’s failure to make the widely anticipated breakthrough in the London local elections on 3 May by toppling at least one of the Tory strongholds of Kensington and Chelsea, Wandsworth, Westminster and Barnet led to widespread speculation that Corbyn had peaked. For example, ITV political editor Robert Peston commented: “Labour has not dispelled widespread worries from within its own ranks that we may have already witnessed Peak Corbyn”.8

Of course there is an agenda shared by the Tories, the Labour right, and much of the media, all eager to see Corbyn fail. Labour supporters can legitimately point out that its share of the vote increased in London by four percentage points. Nevertheless, the failure to capitalise on Tory unpopularity in London—a hugely diverse conurbation that voted strongly to Remain in 2016—was significant. It bought May badly needed time. Moreover, the vote took place amid a huge furore stoked by all the different anti-Corbyn forces over antisemitism in the Labour Party. Barnet in north London, a prime Labour target, went from no overall control to Tory after Labour lost several seats in wards with large Jewish populations.

Truth and lies about antisemitism

This journal takes the issue of antisemitism very seriously, as Rob Ferguson’s powerful article last year showed.9 Antisemitism in its modern racist form was the ideological driver of the worst crime of the 20th century, the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe. This same ideology is playing a critical role in the development of a new far right, reinvigorated by the role of the alt-right in Trump’s election victory, but most powerful in Europe. Paradoxically, however, the latest campaign against antisemitism in Britain isn’t reacting to this real threat but instead has targeted Corbyn’s Labour Party. It hasn’t addressed Labour’s actual record on the issue—for example, its ministers’ enforcement of the wartime coalition government policy of refusing to rescue Jews from the Nazis.10

Instead, the object of strident attack has been Corbyn himself and the Labour left more generally. The intellectual content of this assault does not rise above the traditional equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism made by defenders of the State of Israel—an equation that has effectively been adopted by the EU and the British government when they accepted a “working definition” of antisemitism produced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Consider, for example, the way in which historical research into the settler-colonial origins of Israel can be deemed antisemitic on this definition: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, eg, by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour”.11

One spurious attempt to give academic credibility to the idea of “left antisemitism” singles out Ken Livingstone for rejecting this kind of ­equation.12 This indicates that one of the sources (though not, arguably, the most important one) of this campaign is a kickback by Zionists horrified at having an anti-Zionist as leader of the Labour Party, where supporters of Israel have traditionally been well-entrenched. Occasionally, the accusation of left antisemitism has been intellectually reinforced by appeal to arguments developed by the distinguished Canadian Marxist Moishe Postone. Postone, who died in March, was the author of an important study of Marx’s critique of political economy. But he also was an intellectual patron of the bizarre Antideutsch (Anti-German) movement in Germany, which argues that the left should respond to the Holocaust by supporting Israel, as if the Palestinians should be made to pay for the crimes of European imperialism.

Postone gave comfort to this current by arguing that the opposition against the war in Iraq and more broadly contemporary anti-capitalist movements had adapted to the “purportedly anti-hegemonic ideology” dominant in the Arab world and based on “the conflation of British and, then, American hegemony with that of global capital, as well as the personification of the latter as the Jews”.13 He affirms, truthfully, that modern racist antisemitism (as opposed to the mediaeval Christian religious variant) involves a form of spurious anti-capitalism. As he puts it, “modern antisemitism can be understood as a fetishised, one-sided form of anti-capitalism that grasps capitalism in terms of its abstract dimension alone, and biologistically identifies that dimension with the Jews, and the concrete dimension of capitalism with the ‘Aryans’”.14 Denouncing the conspiracy of what Hitler called “international finance Jewry” allowed the Nazis to offer a critique of the economic system that had failed the German masses so profoundly during the Great Depression after 1929 and thereby to build a pseudo-revolutionary movement.15 This ideology drove the radicalisation of the National Socialist regime in power that culminated, in conditions of total war, in the Holocaust.16

But what Postone omits to place sufficient emphasis on is that racial antisemitism is a pseudo-revolutionary ideology. Rather than develop a genuinely systemic critique of capitalism it targets a fantasised racial conspiracy. By contrast Marx conceptualises the capitalist mode of production as an articulated totality that, as Postone himself puts it, “subjects people to impersonal structural imperatives and constraints”.17 The capitalists themselves are not some shadowy group pulling the strings from behind the scenes but, as Marx famously says, they are “the personifications of economic categories, the bearers (Träger) of particular class relations and interests”.18 So antisemitism represents a displacement of class antagonisms onto imaginary racial conflicts, thereby—despite the heavy overhead costs that National Socialist ideology eventually imposed on German capitalism—helping to rescue the system it purportedly attacks. This is why antisemitism—denounced by the German Social-Democratic leader August Bebel as the “socialism of fools”—can never be part of a genuine left. Contrary to Postone’s slur, the anti-globalisation movement of the early 2000s didn’t go near it.

But this is also why antisemitism continues to be important to the contemporary fascist right. Since the Second World War, antisemitism has not been the main issue around which Nazis have tried to mobilise in western Europe. Their racist campaigning has targeted other groups—Commonwealth immigrants in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s, Muslims today. But antisemitism is still in the ideological cement of contemporary fascism because it offers its cadres a form of pseudo-anti-capitalism whose conspiratorial fantasies offer an apparently “deeper” explanation of the economic and social miseries wrought by neoliberalism and the Long Depression. This is why, for example, Holocaust denial remains endemic in the far right. Their obsession with the liberal hedge fund impresario George Soros is highly symptomatic: denouncing him effectively functions as an invocation of the conspiracy of “Jewish finance capital” they hold responsible for all the world’s ills.

So antisemitism still really matters. But this isn’t what interests the constellation of forces—Tories and Blairites in particular—denouncing alleged Labour antisemitism. Some are motivated primarily by their preoccupation with defending Israel. Branding its critics as antisemites has been their most effective ideological tool—why give up now? Blair aligned the Labour right to Israel more strongly than it had been in the past (when often it was the Labour left who were the most vocal supporters of an Israel that, under its own Labour Party till 1977, purported to be “socialist”).

But this isn’t the main factor involved in the campaign. One crack through which antisemitism can creep into the genuine left is by exaggerating the power of the Israel lobby. The ruling classes in the US and Europe support Israel not primarily because of this lobby’s efforts but because it is a settler colonial state locked structurally in conflict with the Palestinians it has dispossessed and therefore with the Arab masses more broadly. Israel is therefore a reliable ally of Western imperialism in an unstable but still economically crucial region. Hence the support the contemporary antisemitic right gives to Israel as a bastion against “Islamic fundamentalism”.

Similarly, charging Labour with antisemitism is a good way of keeping Corbyn on the back foot. He is an immensely popular party leader, and the Blairite right have been unable to lay a finger on him. His mild and modest personality makes him the perfect anti-political politician (as well as ­scandal-free). And the economic programme he and McDonnell have devised is also popular. Endless accusations of softness on antisemitism, fed by relentless media coverage, are a means through which he can be blemished and forced onto the defensive—never mind that he has an exemplary record as an anti-racist and anti-fascist campaigner.19

There is little doubt that this campaign will continue. After all, it has produced results. Labour’s setback in Barnet was followed by Livingstone’s resignation from the party. To have forced out one of the historic figures of the Labour left is a big prize for the anti-Corbyn alignment. The reason for the two years’ suspension from the Labour Party that preceded Livingstone’s resignation—saying on a radio interview in April 2016 that “Hitler was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews”—is less evidence of genuine antisemitism on his part than an example of the kind of pitfalls facing the anti-Zionist left. It was certainly badly formulated—Hitler never supported Zionism and the extermination of the Jews wasn’t a product of his madness. Livingstone was probably trying to be provocative by appealing to the undeniable historical fact that the National Socialist regime and Zionist organisations in August 1933 struck the so-called Haavara Agreement under which 50,000 German Jews and more than 100 million Reichsmarks of Jewish assets were transferred to Palestine by the outbreak of the Second World War.20

But this cooperation—thoroughly opportunistic on both sides and rendered null by a global imperialist war in which the conquest of states with vast Jewish populations encouraged the Nazis to adopt progressively more exterminationist policies—isn’t the ground where a critique of Zionism should take its stand. That has to be the continuing dispossession and oppression of the Palestinians by Israel. It is this, not obscure historical debates, which has created a worldwide movement of solidarity with the Palestinian people. Livingstone’s ill-judged attempt at provocation shows how critics of Zionism can get so locked into polemics with their powerful opponents that they become obsessed with shock-effects rather than winning arguments.

Politically, however, the significant thing is that Livingstone was indeed forced out, with the acquiescence of the Corbyn leadership, which said that resigning was “the right thing to do”. Livingstone effectively fell on his sword for the sake of the party of which he was a member for 50 years. Past leaders of the Labour left—Stafford Cripps and Aneurin Bevan, for example—were expelled only to make a later comeback, as Livingstone did after running against Labour in the 2000 London mayoral election. He shouldn’t hold his breath this time. Corbyn’s opponents will continue to target figures on the left for antisemitism and he will in all likelihood give them more heads, even though this will merely feed their appetite for more.

The high cost of caution

The Corbyn leadership’s cautious and defensive response to the antisemitism campaign is symptomatic of its more general stance. We’ve already seen this in the case of Brexit. Corbyn and McDonnell have remained steadfast in defending their anti-austerity economic policies, but the latter in particular has sought to spin them in a form palatable to big business. The Financial Times described him wooing an audience of financiers at a recent CityUK conference:

By way of introduction, a previous speaker, City minister John Glen, had made an attack on the “maverick” McDonnell, saying he was a bigger risk than Brexit. Against the odds, McDonnell charmed at least some… His opener raised a titter: “The last panel was asked what is the most horrifying thing facing us all now. Apparently I’m the most horrifying thing, according to [Glen]”.

He moved on to serious stuff—warning of the risk to jobs from Brexit. Overthrowing capitalism was not mentioned. “I don’t expect you to join the Labour party,” he quipped, but stressed his door was open to talk to financiers as “partners”. CityUK (and Barclays) chairman John McFarlane seemed sold. “He comes across as a decent guy,” he told City Insider afterwards. “I’ll go in to see him”.21

McDonnell is on record warning that capital flight could be a major problem for a Labour government. There’s no harm therefore in trying to charm the City. But charm can only get you so far. This is particularly so if you share the post-Keynesian approach that seems to prevail in the McDonnell team, since this identifies finance as the main driver of inequality and economic crisis. It’s hard to see how the City can be the partner of a Labour government striving to break with neoliberalism if it is the source of the problem.22

The same mixture of principle and equivocation is to be found on what is, together with the economy, the biggest issue of all—race and migration. This is, of course, a general and not a purely British issue. Thus just at the present we have Melania Trump expressing concern at her husband’s policy of separating “illegal” children from their families in detention centres, the painstakingly constructed grand coalition in Germany threatened with collapse over arguments about asylum policy, and a new government in Italy in which the right-wing racist Lega leader and interior minister Matteo Salvini is making the running, and starting to turn back the refugee boats adrift in the Mediterranean. Anti-migration politics is generalising internationally. Trump says he will make “strong borders, no crime” the main issue in the mid-term elections, while, at an EU summit on how to share the “burden” of migration, Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte blocked the policy that Merkel hoped would save her government.

Racism is a profound fracture in British society as well. But it doesn’t automatically favour the right. The scandal over the Border Agency’s illegal campaign to drive out the children of the Windrush generation—migrants who came to work in Britain with full citizenship rights from different parts of what was still called the British Commonwealth and Empire during the 1950s and 1960s—put May’s government on the defensive in an issue-area that more than anything seems to define her politics.

Corbyn and his shadow home secretary Diane Abbott were of course quick to denounce what they rightly described as a scandal. But although both have an excellent record defending the benefits of migration (and individual migrants threatened with deportation), their policy is shot through with qualifications. We have been treated to the sorry sight of Abbott opposing an amnesty for “genuinely” illegal immigrants.23 And early last year Corbyn abandoned his previous support for free movement in and out of Britain for Europeans. He did so under heavy pressure—dropping free movement is something that both the Blairite right and the left wing of the trade union bureaucracy is strongly committed to. But now abandoning free movement has been elevated into a principle—invoked, for example, to justify opposing Britain remaining a member of the EEA or the European Single Market.

The caution that pervades the Corbyn leadership’s approach is in large part dictated by electoral politics. The present situation offers a huge prize: May’s cabinet could finally implode, precipitating a general election that might bring to office a left-led Labour government. But so ­glittering is this prospect that it encourages a risk-averse strategy of doing nothing that might endanger it. The trouble is that, despite their unappetising figurehead, endless blunders and endemic divisions, the Tories remain stubbornly ahead in the polls. Corbyn and his supporters thrust Labour forwards in the general election of 8 June 2017 by pursuing a very different approach—a bold campaign for their anti-austerity programme during which Corbyn responded to the Manchester bombing on 22 May by reaffirming his opposition to the war in Iraq.

Boldness is needed today as well. The advance Corbyn’s Labour Party made last year can only be sustained for more offensive action. In politics as in war, success is a wasting asset. This is because the enemy doesn’t stand still but reacts to failure by adopting new forms.

One of the most striking developments in mainstream politics over the past year has been the electoral eclipse of UKIP. The shift of many of its former voters to the Tories helped May to weather the local elections. But the very welcome decline of UKIP as a force in mainstream politics has been accompanied by an important and threatening reorganisation of the racist right. The emergence of the Football Lads Alliance—ostensibly to combat “all extremism” in response to the London Bridge terrorist attack in June 2017, but in reality to offer a new platform for Islamophobic mobilisation—marks the emergence of the first serious extreme right street movement since the eclipse of the English Defence League. More recently the breakaway Democratic Football Lads Alliance has become a more effective campaigning force, working in alliance with the latest UKIP leader Gerard Batten, who has succeeded in attracting some leading alt-right figures.

The potential of this new movement was shown on 9 June when 15,000 people marched through central London in protest against the jailing of ex-EDL leader Tommy Robinson for contempt of court. This is probably the biggest demonstration the far right has ever been able to organise in Britain. The mobilisations of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists during the 1930s seem never to have amounted to more than a few thousands.24 The main post-war Nazi organisations—the National Front in the 1970s and the British National Party in the 1990s and 2000s—were unable to build street movements of any size.

The 9 June demonstration involved a number of different elements—the role that Robinson has come to play as an international symbol of the extreme right, the solidarity shown by major far right forces from across the globe (a speech by the Dutch Islamophobe Geert Wilders, messages of support from Steve Bannon, patron of the US alt-right and ex-adviser to Trump, and from the Rassemblement National, as the French Front National now calls itself), the confluence of different elements of the British far right (UKIP, fragments of the BNP and EDL, FLA/DFLA supporters, the white supremacist group Generation Identity). The demonstration was also marked by its proneness to violence, leading to clashes with the police, and by the open fascist salutes made by many participants.

After the comprehensive defeat inflicted on the National Front by the Anti-Nazi League in the late 1970s, the BNP concentrated on a so-called “Euro-fascist” strategy of presenting itself as a “respectable” racist electoral force and keeping off the streets. The EDL emerged as this strategy stalled after the BNP’s failure to build on the success it had in winning seats in the European Parliament in 2009. It showed the potential that exists to develop a fascist street movement on the basis of Islamophobia, but was forced onto the defensive by the counter-mobilisations mounted by Unite against Fascism, which culminated in the defeat in 2012-13 of its efforts to march in areas with large Muslim populations in Waltham Forest and Tower Hamlets.

Now, however, against the background of the global growth of the far right, we see a much more threatening street movement emerge. So far the counter-mobilisations organised by Stand Up To Racism (SUTR) to the FLA and DFLA have usually been much smaller than the racist marches. This was even more true on 9 June. It has been hard to motivate the left as a whole against these demonstrations. This has reflected both the preoccupation of many activists with building Corbyn’s Labour Party (canvassing for the local elections, for example) and a refusal to see the FLA/DFLA as a serious political threat—these organisations’ use of football supporters’ groups is clever since it draws on existing networks and can appeal to the illusion that football is just an apolitical element of “popular culture”.

But there is no room for any complacency now. We can have sophisticated discussions about which of the different elements of the far right are genuinely fascist. But 9 June showed that we confront a growing street movement that is acting as an incubator for real fascism. If we fail to respond, there will be a very high price to pay—particularly by the black, Asian and minority ethnic people who will be targeted by fascists emboldened by the size of these protests: the arson attacks on a mosque and Sikh gurdwara in Leeds in early June, just after a pro-Robinson demo in the city, may be just the beginning. We have seen elsewhere in Europe how the development of aggressive far right movements—the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, the Lega in Italy, for example—can pull the whole political scene rightwards. It’s hard to see how a Corbynite Labour Party could flourish in such an environment.

A form of economism on the left often obscures the necessity of directly confronting the far right. This starts from the correct premise that the soil for the growth of fascism is provided by economic crisis and the destructive effects of neoliberalism, and concludes that the far right must be countered by offering an attractive alternative to the system from the left—in the British case by building Labour under Corbyn. Of course it is essential to offer an alternative, although it’s open to argument whether Labour’s relatively modest Keynesian reforms suffice for this.

But the lesson of history is that fascists have also to be countered directly. This requires sustained counter-mobilisation—mass demonstrations bigger than those of the far right that, wherever possible, make it impossible for them to march. Whatever its other weaknesses, the far left in Britain has shown itself more than capable of doing this—from the Battle of Cable Street against Mosley’s Blackshirts in October 1936 through the great confrontations with the NF at Wood Green and Lewisham in 1977 to the struggles against the EDL a few years ago. The scale of the threat today requires an even greater effort—in particular to build SUTR as a real mass movement. SUTR’s conferences have been impressive for the support shown by leading figures in the Labour Party, starting with Corbyn and Abbott themselves. But this needs to be reflected at the grass roots with the development of local anti-racist coalitions deeply embedded in their working class communities, at the same time as a massive propaganda campaign comparable to the ANL at its height takes place at the national level. The statement initiated by SUTR and signed by leading Labour MPs, trade unionists, and anti-racist activists on 19 June is a good start, but much more needs to be done.25 UAF, with its successes against the BNP and the EDL, will also have a role to play.

It has become clear for some time that race and migration structure the whole political debate in Britain (and indeed to a significant degree in the rest of Europe). Now we can see the toxic effects on our streets. This is a challenge not just to the revolutionary left, with its long tradition of anti-fascist organising, but also to all those who have rallied to Corbyn’s Labour Party but could see these hopes dashed if they fail to react to the revival of the far right.

Alex Callinicos is Professor of European Studies at King’s College London and editor of International Socialism.


Notes

1 Callinicos, 2018. Thanks to Joseph Choonara, Rob Ferguson, Charlie Kimber, John Rose and Camilla Royle for their comments on this article in draft.

3 Rachman, 2018.

4 Callinicos, 2016 and 2017.

5 Gordon, 2018.

6 Hodgson, 2018.

7 Maddox, 2018.

8 Peston, 2018.

9 Ferguson, 2017.

10 Newsinger, 2017.

11 Go to www.holocaustremembrance.com/working-definition-antisemitism. In May 2018 the annual meeting of Liberty passed a resolution condemning the “working definition”: http://freespeechonisrael.org.uk/libertyihra

12 Hirsh, 2018, chapter 1.

13 Postone, 2006, pp101 and 108.

14 Postone, 1993, p174, n115. See the more developed analysis in Postone, 1980. This makes strong historical and theoretical points about the relationship between antisemitism and National Socialism but drifts towards Zionist political conclusions.

15 Kershaw, 2000, p153.

16 Callinicos, 2001. Donny Gluckstein reviews an alternative Marxist interpretation of the Holocaust by Horst Haenisch elsewhere in this issue—see Haenisch, 2017.

17 Postone, 1993, pp3-4.

18 Marx, 1976, p92.

19 It was no doubt because of his involvement in the Anti-Nazi League that Corbyn attended the meeting at Marxism 1993 where I first put forward the Marxist interpretation of the Holocaust later published in Callinicos, 2001. The sympathy he briefly expressed some years ago for the painter of a mural with antisemitic overtones was quite simply a mistake, not an expression of Corbyn’s real views.

20 Nicosia, 2000.

21 Jenkins, 2018.

22 See the discussion of post-Keynesianism in Hardy, 2016.

24 Benewick, 1972.


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