Jeremy Corbyn has had a rough couple of weeks. After the Salisbury poisoning he failed to condemn Russia, the following week he was forced to fire Owen Smith from the front bench for calling for another Brexit referendum and soon after the simmering Labour anti-semitism row reignited. This time, it was revealed that Corbyn opposed the removal of a strikingly anti-semitic mural in 2012. It portraited Jews as evil bankers playing monopoly on the back of naked labourers. He says he didn’t look closely at the image…
Jeremy Corbyn has a commendable record of opposing racism, and it is unthinkable to perceive him failing to notice such blatant racism in an image if the victims were any minority other than the Jews. And this is no one-off. The hard left has traditionally had a problem with anti-semitism. Corbyn’s old ally, Ken Livingstone, is currently suspended form the party for asserting that Hitler supported Zionism. Why is anti-semitism so prevalent on the far left?
As with all racism, it stems from identitariansim. The creed of left-wing identity politics sees the world through a prism of the oppressed vs. the oppressors. This was the basis for Marx’s original class-based analysis and it is the fundamental tenet of modern identity politics movements like 3rd wave feminism and anti-racism groups like Black Lives Matter. Group identity is paramount, and to an old left-winger there is no more despicable group than international capitalists.
In reality, capitalism is of course a wonderous system of seemingly choreographed human action, with individuals pursuing their own self-interest through mutual, voluntary cooperation to the benefit of all. But to the left it is a system of oppression, with a capitalist class exploiting the working class. It is a world view based on social conflict, not mutual co-operation. It is, as with much of left-wing thinking, a question of redistribution of money, opportunity or power. One group can only thrive if the other suffers. It is captured in the divisive slogan of the Corbyn Labour Party: ‘For the many, not the few’.
To many, no more oppressed group exists than the Jews. The horrors of the Holocaust was the culmination of centuries of discrimination and vilification. But Jews are not like other groups. They do not tick many of the boxes of victimhood that the left regards as badges of honour. Primarily, they are not poorer than average, in fact often they are richer. Ironically, the financial success of many in the Jewish community and their prominent role in international finance of course owes much to historical discrimination. In medieval times, Christians were banned from lending money at interest and so willingly left that role to the Jews. But at the same time, Jews were denied the right to own land and property and excluded from professional guilds, pushing them to work as merchants and bankers.
So, when Jeremy Corbyn sees a Jew, he sees a member of a group designated as oppressors. He sees not an individual, but an exponent of international capitalism; someone who incapsulates what he has spent his life fighting against – he sees a caricature, Shylock from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.
The Corbynistas were quick to jump to their old defence of claiming that this is another smear campaign against their leader. Others claim that Corbyn is not anti-semitic but blinded by his class-war agenda or that his views are not anti-semitic but anti-Israel. He has always been supportive of the Palestinian cause – and there is of course nothing racists in that. But none of this an excuse. The mural certainly did not reference Israel. It played on old, racist stereotypes.
Identity politics is poisoning society, whether right- or left-wing. Its allegiance to group identity sows divisions. Each group must be assumed to possess certain defining characteristics – virtuous in the case of the oppressed, malignant in case of the oppressors. It is the antithesis to individualism and capitalism, where cooperation is paramount and a person is judged on merit alone; where lineage, creed or race is irrelevant to success and fulfilment. Far from the stated intent of the left-wing identitarian movements, identity politics encourages racism. Left-wing anti-semitism is only a natural extension.