Richard Seymour’s Journey to the Right Continues As He Abandons Class whilst Glorifying the Attractions of Fascism

 Firstly it was ‘unconscious anti-Semitism’ that was Labour’s problem now we have a rewriting of the fight against German fascism

One of the iron rules of left politics is that refugees from the SWP’s internal regime almost invariably move to the right. So it is with Richard Seymour. The politico-psychological reasons for this I will leave to others. The sense of political freedom that comes from not having to pay lip service to a particular political line perhaps? Or maybe the stress of having to pretend that some organisation or other is really a genuine manifestation of the popular will rather than an SWP front group no doubt takes its toll.

Richard Seymour - is he the Guardian's replacement for the ever insipid Owen Jones? 

Richard Seymour who has had his Lenin’s Tomb blog since 2003 became a licensed critic within the SWP. Just as Kremlinologists became adept at reading between the lines of official Soviet pronouncements in order to gauge which way the wind was blowing, so some of us became adept at reading between the lines of Seymour’s blog.

The ideal German family in 1937

It all exploded in 2013 with the SWP’s rape scandal when women who accused the National Secretary, Martin Smith (Comrade Delta!) of rape and sexual assault found themselves under attack. At a kangaroo court, (Disputes Committee) they found themselves being questioned about their sexual history and they found themselves becoming the accused. The nearly all women Committee (the only the male member, Pat Stack dissented) cleared Smith and convicted the women of defaming an upstanding Central Committee member. They were even barred from the emergency conferences which discussed what had happened to them and other women (including a friend of mine) who were victimised and dismissed from their jobs with the party. All under the benevolent gaze of Kings College's Professor Alex Callinicos. This was the catalyst for Richard Seymour and hundreds of others to resign from the SWP. 

Jews in Stuttgart being marched to the deportation trains in 1941

Seymour, like many others was enthused by the election of Jeremy Corbyn as he wrote The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics.

In April 2016, a month after I was suspended and as the witchhunt was just getting going Richard wrote a remarkably perceptive article Pitch forks at the ready in which he wrote of the ‘dishonesty, hypocrisy and malice’ of the attacks ‘which is more redolent of a McCarthyite inquisition than a real debate.’

Which of course was absolutely correct. Ken Livingstone had just been suspended for supporting Naz Shah’s meme about how it would be so much cheaper if Israel was transferred to the United States. Seymour wrote that

‘it is a grave mistake for anyone to either quietly condone the suspension [of Livingstone] out of a misguided sense of realpolitik... or vocally support the suspension in the vain hope that throwing one more carcass into the ravening maw of the right-wing mob will placate it... If you rebuke someone, they’ll demand suspension; if you suspend them, they’ll demand expulsion; if you expel them, they’ll wonder why it took you so long to get round to expelling antisemites...’

You cannot win by obeying this logic. And the logic which has been used to condemn Livingstone... will soon enough be turned on others. Corbyn, for example. If Greenstein can be suspended for criticising Zionists, if Bouattia can be vilified for the same, and if Livingstone can be monstered as a “Nazi apologist” for referencing actual historical facts, then how long before another round of demonisation of Corbyn on the basis of his supposed ‘connections’ to extremists... Pusillanimity in the face of this kind of inquisition is its own kind of liability. The more you concede, the more you are obliged to concede.... Alan Johnson, doyen of the 'antitotalitarian left' ... has stated the case very clearly: “Save your pitch fork for Corbyn”

Hotel Silber - former Gestapo HQ in Stuttgart

If Richard had confined himself to this analysis then he would not have gone wrong. But unfortunately, before long he was revising his opinions and trying to find something new to say. This is the problem with left-wing writers who want to keep the eye of editors in the bourgeois media. They end up trimming and cutting.

Two years later I came across Labour’s Antisemitism Affair on America’s Jacobin site. Jacobin is the premier left-wing publication in America for which I had previously contributed Rewriting the Holocaust  about Netanyahu’s attempt to blame the Palestinians for the Final Solution (& thus exonerate Hitler). Now Seymour was hedging his bets. Yes ‘anti-Semitism’ had been weaponised but that was not to say that it did not have some basis.

Crowds Outside Hotel Silber in the 1930s

I wrote that Seymour was

‘mired in the swamp of identity politics… a Jewish identity based around Israel and Zionism, suitably dressed up as a concern with anti-Semitism, is equally as valid as a Palestinian identity based on ethnic cleansing. If Jews can claim that they are oppressed because of hostility to Israel who is going to countermand this? When class and race are removed from the equation who is to decide who is oppressed and who is the oppressor? Everything is subjective and personal. All identities are equally valid, albeit some are more equal than others.’

I observed that

‘People who prize themselves on their detachment from the struggle and who adopt an aloof and condescending attitude to those who are involved in political battles are destined not to hang around for too long.

Unfortunately Richard did not heed my advice that

One of the hallmarks of socialist or left-wing writers is their commitment to the overthrow of the system we live under.  They employ their talents on our behalf not just their own…. People such as John Pilger, Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and Tariq Ali have demonstrated their commitment under fire.  However the Left is also plagued by opportunists and turncoats, fair weather friends and erstwhile socialists like Owen Jones, … Others, like Nick Cohen, simply jack-knifed to the right.  American neo-conservatism is littered with the bodies of ex-leftists…’

There was no attempt by Richard to explain the origins of Labour’s ‘antisemitism’ campaign.  It was if it had appeared by magic.  An example of political spontaneous combustion. The idea of a deliberately co-ordinated and engineered campaign to destabilise Labour didn’t occur to Seymour.  The possibility of state interference completely eluded him. Seymour referred to the famous mural by Mear One, that was used by Luciana Berger to undermine Labour at the 2018 local elections, as being automatically antisemitic. Not once did he ask how a mural, which had been erased for 6 years, had come into prominence just before the 2018 local elections.  That, and only that, was the issue.

Hotel Silber in the 1930s

When talking about Livingstone’s remark that Hitler supported Zionism, Seymour changed his tune. No longer was it the case that ‘at worst he made a clumsy attempt to say something that is true.’ Now Seymour was of the opinion that Ha'avara, the Transfer Agreement between the Zionists and the Nazi state, was not so much a case of  Hitler ‘ “supporting” Zionism so much as using every expedient to expel Jews from Germany.’

But this was not true. Ha'avara was agreed to by the Nazis as a means of undermining the Jewish led Boycott of Nazi Germany. For a time the Nazi government, at the behest of the Zionists, forbade Jews going anywhere but Palestine. The Gestapo acceded to the Zionist demands that those taking advantage of Ha’avara should only go to Palestine.  Seymour git all of this horribly wrong. German Jews could always take their money out of the country. True there were massive confiscatory taxes which only got worse but Ha’avara made it worse, not better for Jews seeking to emigrate.

The Communist Party of Germany

According to the American Jewish Yearbook less than one in 7 of the nearly 450,000 German and Austrian Jews who got out went to Palestine (60,000) and that is larger than most estimates. Ha’avara was about the richest Jews, who could have gone elsewhere, not poor and working class Jews.

Nor is it true that the Nazis didn’t support the Zionist movement.  They did, vociferously, against the 98% of German Jews who were not Zionists. When the Nazis arrested thousands of Jews after Kristallnacht, orders came the next day from Heydrich that Zionist Jews were to be released immediately.  Zionist historian David Cesarani wrote describing how ‘The efforts of the Gestapo are oriented to promoting Zionism as much as possible and lending support to its efforts to further emigration.” (my emphasis) [The Final Solution (p.96)] Lucy Dawidowicz described how, on 28th January 1935, Reinhardt Heydrich issued a directive stating that

‘the activity of the Zionist-oriented youth organizations … prior to their emigration to Palestine lies in the interest of the National Socialist state’s leadership.’ These organisations therefore ‘are not to be treated with that strictness that it is necessary to apply to the members of the so-called German-Jewish organizations (assimilationists)’.  [Lucy Dawidowicz, War Against the Jews, pp.118]

Dr Joseph Mengele - the 'angel of death' fled to Paraguay and died in Brazil - Israel refused to call for his extradition as that would have upset relations with both these countries

Seymour accused Jackie Walker, by attending the ‘training session’ of the Jewish Labour Movement on anti-Semitism, of waging a ‘factional war’.  Seymour describes her comment that Holocaust Day was not “open to all people who experienced a holocaust.” as wrong. In fact Seymour was wrong. The holocaust in the Belgian Congo and Namibia are excluded as are all genocides before 1939. 

One unfortunate characteristic of Seymour is that he tends to pontificate about subjects he knows nothing about. For example Seymour quoted uncritically from a survey by the far-Right Campaign Against Antisemitism without asking whether it was designed to produce certain outcomes.

In Analysis: British Jewry and a feeling of insecurity Jonathan Boyd, Executive Director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research described the CAA’s findings as being ‘based on a survey with little, if any, methodological credibility.’  Boyd described the finding that 45% of British people were anti-Semitic as a ‘deeply flawed read of the data’. The IJPR found the CAA's survey to be 'littered with flaws' and 'irresponsible'. Due to 'quite basic methodological flaws and weaknesses', its poll of British Jews had 'very limited capacity' to assess the representativeness of its sample.

Seymour quoted uncritically the CAA's findings without probing deeper.  Even the Zionist Community Security Trust’s Dave Rich wasn’t so superficial.  He observed that:

Nazi pageantry to hypnotise the masses

‘This latest poll showed something else that is interesting… that people who believe antisemitic things about Jews rarely think of themselves as antisemitic…. It is as if antisemitic ideas circulate in society and influence the stereotypes people believe about Jews, but this does not affect how people imagine they relate to actual, living Jews who they know or might meet…. Even people who believe there is a global Jewish conspiracy or deny the Holocaust are affronted by the notion they might be antisemitic. What antisemites really think

The CAA claimed that more than half of British Jews felt that anti-Semitism echoed that of the 1930s. Anshel Pfeffer in Ha'aretz observed that if the CAA believed that “then it’s hard to take anything they say about contemporary anti-Semitism in their home country seriously.” Pfeffer noted, regarding the statement that Jews talk about the Holocaust too much in order to gain sympathy:  “too many Jews … are often too quick to bring up the Holocaust in order to make a point. … Holding that opinion doesn’t necessarily make you an anti-Semite.”  In other words a number of the anti-Semitic stereotypes were not anti-Semitic!

There were other indications that Seymour was writing in complete ignorance of what he was writing about. He described Gary Spedding, a Walter Mitty character, as a ‘Jewish left-winger’ citing his article We in the Palestinian Solidarity Movement Have a Problem With anti-Semitism.

If Seymour had been following my blog then he would have read my articles Gary Spedding - The Zionist Cuckoo in the Palestine Solidarity Nest, Gary Spedding Calls in the Police - I have been harassing him!, Gary Spedding – the Self-Proclaimed Expert on ‘anti‑Semitism’ and Jewish Voices for Labour Expels Gary Spedding & its Zionist wing (or some of them) - after much Blood, Sweat & Bile. However Seymour knew nothing about Spedding other than he was always happy to provide a rent-a-quote.

Spedding is not Jewish (nor is he left-wing, he is a former member of the Alliance Party in Northern Ireland) although that doesn’t prevent him telling Jews just what is and is not antisemitic. Spedding is not a Palestine solidarity activist and his claims to that effect are widely derided. He has no involvement with any Palestine solidarity organisation. He has been an avid supporter of the witchhunt and confessed to breaking down with tears of joy when I was expelled. Like most SWP exiles Seymour is trying to find a progressive space between the politics he once espoused and the SWP's right-wing critics. 

The KPD's Red Front Fighters Paramilitary Group - Banned by the SPD Government in 1929

Seymour has surpassed himself with his latest article The masses against the masses on German fascism. It can be read on the blog of Jewish Voices for Labour who, for some strange reason, decided to republish it.  When I went to the Patreon site, where it originated, I was asked for my credit card! Not only Rupert Murdoch operates behind a pay wall.

He begins as he continues telling us that 

‘It’s too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective.”

The fascist inside you is an interesting concept. It is as if fascism is some kind of pathology that we are all infected with.  It mirrors the Zionist claim that anti-Semitism is a ‘virus’.  If what Seymour meant to say was that all of us have contradictory sides to us, that socialists can be oppressors on the personal level, then that is true but it is a product of living in a class society. 

Irony is sometimes lost on the Socialist Workers Party

Seymour writes that 

there was not a huge gap between the “Wild-frei” gangs, with their Dionysian sexual rituals – many of whom would join the Nazis – and the insolent SS boys who loved to strut about in their leather, and the girls who went into paroxysms of excitement when the stormtroopers showed up. 

I don’t know about the orgasmic excitement of the Fräulein but I can’t think of a more absurd comparison than between repressed Nazi sexuality and Dionysus, the Greek god of sensuality and hedonism as opposed to the austere Apollo and the Nazi ideal of youth: '"swift as a greyhound, as tough as leather, and as hard as Krupp's steel."

If Seymour knew anything about the Nazis and sexuality he would know about the disturbed, repressed, mysoginist and sadistic sexuality of the SS with their leather fetish. He might also care to acquaint himself with Richard Evans The Coming to Power of the Third Reich [p. 375] and the raid on Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science on 5 May 1933. The National Socialist Student League and then the SS destroyed and burnt thousands of books, documents and photographs in this world famous centre.  Fortunately Hirschfeld himself was abroad. The Institute was a champion of homosexuality, women's sexual freedom including abortion.  It stood for everything that the Nazis hated.

In his follow-up book, The Third Reich in Power [pp. 205-6] Evans describes the subversive power of jazz and swing and their attractions to the youth and how:

‘the free-and-easy social mixing of Jews, half-Jews and non-Jews in the social scene of the swingers was crassly at odds with the dictates of the regime’s racial policy. What had begun as an act of adolescent cultural wilfulness was rapidly becoming a manifestation of political protest.’

Annette Dumbach and Jud Newborn describe how, in 1936, 1,500 German youth had organised to attack Hitler Youth leaders at night. Likewise in Munich a group calling itself Red Anchor formed to attack anyone in the Hitler Youth. These groups had spread to Berlin and Cologne and in Leipzig two 17 year olds were sentenced to 3 years hard labour when the Gestapo caught them. [Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, p.39]

Of all this Seymour is blissfully unaware yet the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism capitalised on this image of Nazis as austere and disciplined when they coined the slogan NF=No Fun. We painted the National Front as austere and censorious.

Seymour went on to quote Daniel Guérin, who concluded after a visit to Germany that fascism

“surged forth from the depths of the German people. It’s because of its popular appeal that it was irresistible, that it swept everything else away;’

Seymour commented that ‘Somehow the masses had come to desire fascism.’ A quite amazing observation that is at variance with the facts. Seymour says that this led many of Guerin’s readers ‘to suspect he had lost his marbles.’ The same observation could be made about Seymour.

However I prefer to believe that Guerin simply changed his mind as his Fascism and Big Business is well worth reading,

It is true that Hitler’s main base of support was among the petit-bourgeoisie, the middle-class and the peasants but the working class remained impervious to his attractions.

What is really unforgivable is that in order to prove his point Seymour simply resorts to distortion. He writes that ‘between 1928 and 1933, the Nazis had added 16.5 million votes to their support.’

Either Seymour is ignorant or he is deceiving his readers. The March 1933 election was not free. Coming after the Reichstag fire it was held under a state of terror. Despite this the Nazis only got 44% of the vote and the KPD and SPD retained over 12 million votes.

Seymour omits to mention the two 1932 elections. He resembles another falsifier of history, Daniel Goldhagen and his Hitler’s Willing Executioners which held that Germans, all Germans, were eliminationist murderers. [see David North’s A critical review of Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners

In July 1932 37.3% (13.75m) supported the Nazis compared to the 13.24m (35.9%) vote for the workers’ parties. However in November 1932 the Nazi vote fell to 11.74m (33.09%). The combined vote for the workers’ parties 13.2 million (37.3%) was one and a half million more than the Nazis’. By November 1932 the Nazis had passed the peak of their popular support.

Seymour misses these complexities because it would ruin his bankrupt thesis about the mass attraction of fascism. It was precisely because the Nazis were losing support and the fierce opposition to them by Germany's workers that the military and industrialists put Hitler in power.

But for Stalin's Third Period dating from the 6th Congress of the Comintern in 1928, in which reformist parties were termed ‘social fascist’, and the refusal to form united fronts with workers who supported social democracy, Hitler could have been defeated. The KPD was under Stalin’s thumb and Stalin was happy to see Hitler coming to power as a way of dividing the western powers. The KPD stupidly followed the foreign policy demands of Stalin rather than the needs of the German working class. But Seymour has other, somewhat more right-wing fish to fry.

Seymour writes that

‘Millions were infected by volkisch, racial-nationalist ideas, long before Hitler was even a clamorous, minatory nuisance in the fringes of the German Right.’

In fact volkish organisations had declined in number in the Weimar period.  Hitler and the Nazis played down anti-Semitism to the point of invisibility in the run-up to the 1933 elections. As Raul Hilberg wrote anti-Semitism in Germany ‘never became altogether respectable or truly prevalent.’ [The Goldhagen Phenomenon, p.723]

Ian Kershaw wrote that the millions of extra votes in the 1930 elections ‘‘were in no sense anti-Semites’. [Popular Opinion and Dissent, p.230] Zionist historian David Cesarani stated that Hitler’s attacks on Jews ‘diminished to vanishing point.’ in the run up to the 1933 elections yet Seymour, whether out of design or ignorance, chooses to portray the German population as thoroughly anti-Semitic.

Seymour speaks of ‘a broad popular consensus favouring core elements of the fascist agenda.’ This is BBC history. Seymour writes that in the 1933 elections

‘the Nazis had a clear plurality in all but two constituencies. Moreover, it’s clear that on top of the Nazis’ 44 per cent of the vote, millions of centrist and conservative voters were willing to accept a dictatorship against the Left.’

Actually this is not true. The Catholic Centre Party and Bavarian Peoples Parties were dissolved by Hitler in July, just before the Pope agreed a Concordat with the Nazis in which he agreed that the Church would abstain from politics.

Seymour writes that his ‘version of events hasn’t been tenable for a long time.’ Well not amongst socialist historians but amongst the Neil Fergusons and Andrew Roberts I imagine that Seymour will receive a warm welcome! Seymour quotes Zionist historian Otto Dov Kulka

in the run up to the Nuremberg Laws (1935) and Kristallnacht (1938), the Nazi leadership was being pressured to act by violent demonstrations and pogroms.

and that ‘most disturbing is the role that a large, radicalised minority played in catalysing the regime’s offensive against Jews.’ as well as a ‘mass hysteria about Jewish “race defilers” This is simply not true.  He himself recounts this was called a ‘mass psychosis’ by a member of the Gestapo. Nearly all these riots and pogroms were by members of the SA and SS. Seymour informs his readers that

‘the same pattern of agitation occurs before and during Kristallnacht. The regime radicalised its base with intense propaganda, who in turn catalysed and consolidated the regime’s agenda.’

This is rubbish. The majority of Germans, including even members of the Nazi Party, were revolted by the SA pogroms of November 9-10 1938. The same Otto Dov Kulka wrote about how a Gestapo situation report after Kristallnacht reported how ‘the Communists declared their solidarity with the Jews’ and how this had found ‘eager support in middle-class and especially clerical circles.’ [‘Public Opinion’ in Nazi Germany and the ‘Jewish Question’, p. 140].

Kershaw wrote of his

‘admiration for the courageous minority – overwhelmingly communist workers – who fought uncompromisingly against the Nazis…the vast proportion of them workers’ were put in ‘protective custody’ [Popular Opinion, p.71]

 Of Germany’s workers Seymour says nothing because it doesn’t accord with his narrative and in any case he clearly hasn’t read around the subject.

Kershaw wrote of Germans’ hostile attitude to Kristallnacht despite ‘the conditions of extreme terror and intimidation in which people live.’ (p.271) According to Seymour civil society was terrorised but that it was also an instrument in terror. ‘The masses were deployed against the masses.’

Kulka wrote of how ‘in some places the police stepped in to halt acts of terror only after the maltreatment of Jews aroused spontaneous popular opposition.’  What is Seymour’s take on this?

‘the tumult, in which cops were frequently called “Jewish lackeys” if they intervened, risked causing a rift with police who had thus far been smoothly integrated into the Third Reich.’

Seymour writes of how

‘the consensus behind the Nazi regime did not fall apart, according to Ian Kershaw, until the middle of the war when it became clear that Hitler was leading Germany to disaster.’

In conditions of extreme terror, 75,000 communists were placed in concentration camps between 1933 and 1935, of whom thousands were murdered. The idea of consensus seems a particularly strange way to describe what was happening.

The Nazi regime made every effort to inject anti-Semitic poison into the body politic but there is every indication, from the empty cinema halls for its anti-Semitic films that they were unsuccessful. Even Himmler was forced to admit that every German had his favourite Jew in his October 1943 Posen speeches.

When in 1937 Hitler opened a House of German Art in Munich a contrasting exhibition was held of ‘Degenerate Art’. It was soon closed down as the crowds flocked to it rather than the Aryan Art.

Seymour argues that the popularity of the Nazis was due to the fact that living standards rose. They did for big business and to a lesser extent the middle-class but not the working class with the exception of those working in the armament industries. From 1933 to 1939 wages fell, the number of hours worked rose by 15 per cent, serious accidents in factories increased and workers could be blacklisted by employers if they attempted to question their working conditions. Seymour should consult the GCSE History syllabus!

Seymour is taken  up with ‘the erotic glamour of (fascism’s) organised violence.’ Since Seymour begins his essay with Daniel Guerin’s visit to Germany before the Nazi accession to power, he should also consider what Guerin said in Fascism and Big Business: ‘All ‘anti-fascism’ that rejects it [socialism] is but vain and deceitful babbling.’ (p.13) It is a message that Seymour’s former comrades in the SWP could also take to heart!

It’s not often that I agree with Graeme Atkinson of Searchlight magazine but his comments on the JVL blog were spot on.

‘Richard Seymour’s article is shallow and, sad to say, rather politically uninformed about the class nature of Hitler fascism and German working class’s resistance to it.’

The only mystery is why JVL thought it worth republishing this worthless, reactionary article. JVL seems to be attracted to trendy ex-leftists embarked on the road to the Right.

Tony Greenstein

How Leftist Intellectuals Take Fright when Zionism Wages a War on ‘anti-Semitism’

Richard Seymour and Labour’s Antisemitism Affair –straddling both sides of the fence

Jacobin is not a site that most people on the left in Britain will be familiar with. It is however a major left-wing journal in the United States.  I once contributed Rewriting the Holocaust for Jacobin, in the wake of Netanyahu's speech to the 2015 World Zionist Congress when he described how Hitler was persuaded to adopt the Final Solution by the Mufti of Jerusalem.

Richard Seymour is undoubtedly a gifted and capable writer.  He was, until the 2013 rape crisis, a member of the Socialist Workers Party when he led the resistance on his Leninology blog to the attempts by the leadership and Alex Callinicos to cover up what had happened.  Since then he has drifted politically, writing a couple of books, becoming immersed in intersectionality and flirting with Left Unity.  Seymour’s latest article in Jacobin suggests he is wandering aimlessly across the left, dragged in the undertow of conflicting political currents without neither ballast or firm conviction.

Seymour is mired in the swamp of identity politics and this is causing him to lose his political bearings. After all a Jewish identity based around Israel and Zionism, suitably dressed up as a concern with anti-Semitism, is equally as valid as a Palestinian identity based on ethnic cleansing. If Jews can claim that they are oppressed because of hostility to Israel who is going to countermand this? When class and race are removed from the equation who is to decide who is oppressed and who is the oppressor? Everything is subjective and personal. All identities are equally valid, albeit some are more equal than others.  By what criteria can one say that an identity based on Zionism is reactionary if one does not have an analysis based on class and imperialism?

Seymour’s latest article Labour’s Antisemitism Affair on Labour’s media manufactured anti-Semitism crisis proves the maxim that those who leave the SWP invariably drift to the right.  In Seymour’s case this involves a wholesale abandonment of class politics in favour of subjectivism and a crude empiricism.

Seymour’s article is a deep disappointment as he tries to bridge the gap between the two sides of what he calls Labour’s Anti-Semitism Affair.  Seymour’s purpose is blindingly obvious.  He wants to find something innovative to say.  He wants to put new wine into old bottles and thus he imagines he’s being daring and brave in seeking to break the mould of the politics of anti-Semitism.  Like those who have tried this feat of political acrobacy before him, he ends up satisfying no one. It is a tilt to the Right and an abandonment of the Left.  It stands in marked contrast to the subsequent article Corbyn Under Fire in Jacobin by Daniel Finn.

One of the hallmarks of socialist or left-wing writers is their commitment to the overthrow of the system we live under.  They employ their talents on our behalf not just their own. There should be no room to doubt where they stand on the major issues of the day.  They are against the mainstream.  People such as John Pilger, Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and Tariq Ali have demonstrated their commitment under fire.  However the Left is also plagued by opportunists and turncoats, fair weather friends and erstwhile socialists like Owen Jones, the Guardian’s resident leftist and friend of the Israeli Labour Party/JLM. Others, like Nick Cohen, simply jack-knifed to the right.  American neo-conservatism is littered with the bodies of ex-leftists such as Nathan Glazer, James Burnham and Irving Kristol. See The Neoconservative Counterrevolution

Gilad Atzmon, the anti-semitic jazz player who the SWP was associated with through the years when Richard Seymour was a member

I would have expected Richard Seymour to have put into some kind of context, in the course of his 5000+ word article, from where and why he thought that Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism’ crisis arose. Or was the ‘anti-Semitism’ controversy a spontaneous eruption when the prospect of a Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party materialised?  A narrative of ‘anti-Semitism’ that is espoused by every right-wing newspaper in Britain – from the Daily Mail and Sun to the Guardian surely demands some explanation as to its origins? 

I find it wholly dishonest that when describing the fabricated anti-Semitism controversy at Oxford University Labour Club in January 2016, Seymour referred to the central villain, the Chair of the Club, Alex Chalmers, as “a former intern at the pro-Israel group BICOM.”

I wrote an article for Jacobin nearly 2 years ago

Chalmer’s resignation as Chair sparked the crisis and led to the Royall Report which in turn led to the Chakrabarti Report. The information about his links to BICOM was discovered by Asa Winstanley, a researcher and writers for Electronic Intifada, whose articles How Israel lobby manufactured UK Labour Party’s anti-Semitism crisis and Instigator of anti-Semitism scam kicked out of Labour are indispensable to anyone seeking to make sense of what was happening.  Yet although purloining the fruits of Asa’s investigative work, Seymour deigned to give him credit. The Guardian and other papers get frequent references but the writings of a journalist on our side is simply ignored.

As people will know, I was one of the major casualties of this crisis.  I was suspended on March 18^th 2016 and expelled on February 18^th 2018.  I have detailed the various stages of my suspension from my Investigation Hearing to my successful application for an Injunction against the Labour Party on my blog.  I have tried to put what has happened to me into a wider context, for example detailing the suspension of people like Jackie Walker.

I find it difficult to empathise with so-called intellectuals who divorce themselves from that which they write about.  People who prize themselves on their detachment from the struggle and who adopt an aloof and condescending attitude to those who are involved in political battles are destined not to hang around for too long.  People like Richard Seymour believe themselves equipped to offer their advice from on high without ever getting their hands dirty.

Gary Spedding

I don't doubt that Seymour can sometimes write interesting and insightful articles but he can also be extremely arrogant. Although he has escaped from their clutches Seymour has nonetheless retained the mentality and psychology of the SWP where everything is subordinate to building the party. Perhaps having kept aloof from left sectarian politics I find myself irritated at the cynicism of a group from which I was expelled at the tender age of 19.  To repeat all its mistakes over and over again, without ever learning from those mistakes and to operate in the same way as you have always done, with front organisations which garner less and less support, merely proves Einstein's maxim that the definition of insanity is repeating the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different result. 

There is no attempt in Richard’s article to explain the origins of Labour’s 'antisemitism' campaign.  It apparently appeared as if by magic.  The idea of a deliberately co-ordinated plan to destabilise Labour doesn't even seem to have occurred to Seymour.  The possibility of state interference and involvement completely escapes him. Seymour begins with the minutae of the latest incidents of 'anti-semitism' from Jewdas, to the famous mural by Mear One, which he automatically assumes is antisemitic, to Christine Shawcroft. Seymour concludes that 'There is, clearly, a problem somewhere. Unfortunately, the way in which allegations of antisemitism have been used for party-political purposes, has tended to obscure the need to address it.'

An article in Haaretz by Gary Spedding supporting the bogus anti-semitism campaign

This is the key defect of Seymour’s article.  He accepts that ‘There is, clearly, a problem somewhere.’

Seymour’s article provides justification for the statement by Momentum that was issued in the wake of the latest episode of ‘anti-Semitism’. It bears the imprint of Jon Lansman, a left Zionist who is the head of Momentum.  Lansman has consistently refused to mobilise Momentum in the fight against the witch-hunt in the Labour Party still less to counter the activities of the Jewish Labour Movement, the Israeli state’s representatives inside Labour.  The statement reads:

Momentum’s NCG believes that accusations of antisemitism should not and cannot be dismissed simply as right wing smears nor as the result of conspiracies. Current examples of antisemitism within the Labour Party are not only a problem of a few, extreme ‘bad apples’ but also of unconscious bias which manifests itself in varied, nuanced and subtle ways and is more widespread in the Labour Party than many of us had understood even a few months ago.

It is possible to accept that antisemitism is a problem in parts of the left and needs to be loudly denounced whilst also accepting that some of Jeremy Corbyn’s political opponents are opportunistically using this issue as a way to undermine his leadership.

There is nothing in the above statement that Seymour could disagree with. 

It does not seem to have occurred to Seymour that the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the second major party in the US’s closest ally in Europe, someone who was both anti-Nato and anti-US imperialism, could not but help provoke panic in the security establishment.  If the CIA and all the other spooks at the US Embassy were not discussing what to do when Corbyn appeared to be winning the Labour leadership contest they weren't doing their job. 

Perhaps Seymour believes that whilst the CIA has no compunction in destabilising governments and parties in Latin America they wouldn’t do such a thing in Britain?  Maybe he hasn’t heard of Operation Gladio. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Seymour that the Labour Party is being destabilised via the United State’s chosen friend Israel.  It is as if the Al Jazeera undercover programmes The Lobby had not been shown and Shai Masot, the Israeli agent had never existed.

Seymour takes certain facts and ignores others, for example the attack on Corbyn even before he became leader as a holocaust denier.  He lacks any perspective, making empiricism into a fine art.  Indeed the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign is all our fault.  ‘If you walk straight into the constantly whirring propellers of a hostile media with eyes wide shut, then what is the use of complaining about the “Israel Lobby”?’  So the false anti-Semitism campaign has nothing to do with the media or those who own them. The blame lies rather with the victims of the press.

Seymour’s factual grasp leaves a lot to be desired.  When talking about Ken Livingstone’s remark that Hitler supported Zionism, Seymour says of Ha'avara, the Transfer Agreement between the Jewish Agency in Palestine and the Nazi state, that: ‘Hitler was not “supporting” Zionism so much as using every expedient to expel Jews from Germany.’

This is simply not true.  The Nazi government made it clear that they did support the German Zionist movement vs  their non-Zionist German counterparts. David Cesarani wrote describing how ‘The efforts of the Gestapo are oriented to promoting Zionism as much as possible and lending support to its efforts to further emigration.” (my emphasis) [The Final Solution (p.96)] Lucy Dawidowicz, another Zionist historian described how, on 28^th January 1935, Reinhardt Heydrich issued a directive stating that

‘the activity of the Zionist-oriented youth organizations ... prior to their emigration to Palestine lies in the interest of the National Socialist state’s leadership.’ These organisations therefore ‘are not to be treated with that strictness that it is necessary to apply to the members of the so-called German-Jewish organizations (assimilationists)’.  [Lucy Dawidowicz, War Against the Jews, pp.118]

Francis Nicosia writes of how Berl Katznelson, a founder of the Israeli Labour Party Mapai and editor of its paper Davar saw the rise of Hitler as “an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have”.  [Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, p.91, CUP, 2008.]  Ben Gurion’s attitude to the Holocaust is best described by his official biographer, Shabtai Teveth: ‘If there was a line in Ben-Gurion’s mind between the beneficial disaster and an all-destroying 

catastrophe, it must have been a very fine one.’ [The Burning Ground 1886-1948, p.851, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1987].

Ha'avara was not set up in order to help Jews emigrate from Germany.  The Jews it helped were amongst the richest, those who could take £1,000 capital out (which enabled them to enter Palestine without an immigration certificate).  They could have left anyway. Ha'avara’s purpose, from the Nazi’s point of view was to undermine the International Jewish Boycott of Nazi Germany which was destroying the German export economy. From the point of view of the Zionist Organisation, Ha'avara was the sole way of bringing into Palestine the maximum amount of German Jewish capital. [Jewish Chronicle, 13^th December 1935] According to Edwin Black [Ha’avara – The Transfer Agreement, Brookline Books, 1999, pp. 257-8), Ha'avara’s main purpose was ‘saving the wealth’ of German Jewry and ‘rescuing the capital from Nazi Germany.’  The Jews themselves were a secondary matter.

Baruch Vladech, Chair of the American Jewish Labour Committee and Editor of the Yiddish Daily Forward, described Ha'avara’s purpose as 'not to rescue the Jews from Germany but to strengthen various institutions in Palestine.' He observed that whilst

the whole organized labor movement and the progressive world are waging a fight against Hitler through the boycott. The Transfer Agreement scabs on that fight.’[Lenni Brenner, pp. 92-93, 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis’, Barricade Books, 1972].

Seymour's criticisms of Jackie Walker, the Black-Jewish activist who was Vice-Chair of Momentum, are even more off beam.  By attending the ‘training session’ of the Jewish Labour Movement on anti-Semitism, she was waging a ‘factional war’.  Seymour describes her comment that Holocaust Day was not “open to all people who experienced a holocaust.” as wrong. It wasn’t, the African & Belgian Congo holocausts are absent. The extermination of the Disabled and Roma are classified under ‘Persecution’ rather than ‘Holocaust’ on the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.

Seymour describes Jackie’s behaviour as ‘tendentious’ and that ‘she was splitting hairs, belittling antisemitism’. Seymour describes his ignorance of the subject. Jackie was challenging the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism which conflates anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. The IHRA is at the centre of the debate over false allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’.  If Seymour is so unaware of the ramifications of the IHRA then he should read the criticism of it in London Review of Books May 2017 by former Court of Appeal Judge Sir Stephen Sedley. [Defining Anti-Semitism].

Seymour concludes by saying that ‘Walker’s tactical misadventure inadvertently damaged her own cause’ implying that it was her own fault that ‘she was drummed out of the Momentum leadership.’  What kind of socialist blames the defeat of workers on their own mistakes as a means of making a rhetorical point? It is noteworthy that Seymour has nothing to say about the Momentum leadership.

Seymour says that precisely 56 individuals have been suspended because of allegations of anti-Semitism citing Thomas Jones’ Labour and Anti-Semitism. The only problem with this is that this article was written in May 2016.  We are nearly two years down the road and the numbers are far greater.  We had thousands of suspensions in the summer of 2016 during the leadership election, many of which were based on ‘anti-Semitism’.

Seymour is right when he says that Israel has become a ‘totem issue...a displacement for other issues.’ and that this is one of the reasons for the false anti-Semitism campaign.  It is because Israel has become symbolic of the divide between right and left that we have to confront Labour’s role in supporting the world’s only apartheid state not allow ourselves to be bogged down in refuting the false allegations of anti-Semitism.  Unfortunately Seymour proposes the opposite course, namely that we should take serious that which he describes as a displacement issue.

In the section on Jewish Anti-Zionists Seymour writes that the reaction  to what he calls anti antisemitism ‘has many sources, and some of it, as Momentum suggests, might be rooted in shades and variations of unconscious antisemitism. ' Momentum’s own statement speaks of an ‘unconscious bias which manifests itself in varied, nuanced and subtle ways and is more widespread... than many of us had understood.’

Racism if it is unconscious it’s not worth the candle.  At a time when the government is stripping Black people who came here in the Windrush of their citizenship rights, when we face the continuing issue of Black deaths in custody at the hands of a racist police force and the incarceration of refugees, to talk about an invisible or ‘unconscious’ racism that is deployed on behalf of White privileged people is obscene and racist in itself.

Momentum’s statement calls for ‘unconscious bias training... awareness trainings’.  As Virou Srilangarajah wrote in an obituary for the legendary anti-racist writer and activist, Ambalavaner Sivanandan, who died earlier this year, ‘racism awareness training’, removed state and institutional responsibility for racism, instead turning it into a ‘natural’ social phenomenon independent of material conditions, a ‘white disease’. 

Racial awareness training, which Chakrabarti opposed but which the Labour Party has ignored, is based on the idea that racism exists inside one’s head not in society.  It reaches its apotheosis in the absurdity of the Jewish Labour Movement, the ‘sister party’ of the racist Israeli Labour Party, a party that supports the segregation of Jew and Arab and which Netanyahu’s deportation of 40,000 Black African refugees from Israel, running training sessions on ‘anti-Semitism’. You might as well have the Yorkshire Ripper give a lecture on violence against women.  This is the nonsense that Seymour is subscribing to.

If what Seymour (and Lansman) argue is correct, the false allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ have nothing to do with labelling all criticism of Zionism as ‘anti-Semitic’. They have nothing to do with the Right’s use of the issue as a means of attacking Corbyn on other issues, it’s all down to the unconscious mind.  I just hope that if Seymour decides to abandon writing for a career that he doesn’t choose psycho analysis or psychiatry as his chosen profession. Freud undoubtedly has a lot to answer for but surely not the vacuity of Richard Seymour. 

There is, of course, a simpler explanation. Momentum has resolutely avoided opposing the anti-Semitism witchhunt.  This nonsense about 'unconscious antisemitism' is intended to explain why there are so few genuine examples of anti-semitism to be found.

Seymour’s description of Jewish Voice for Labour, Free Speech on Israel and Jewdas as anti-Zionist is simply wrong.  None of the groups say that they are anti-Zionist.  Although Seymour is right about the decline of left-wing Zionism I fail to understand his analogy with Wallace baiting Truman.  Seymour describes he doesn't analyse.

Seymour’s section The Limits of Anti-Anti-Antisemitism  suggests that anti-Zionists in the Labour Party are posturing as being politically tough.  He tells us that ' it is not helpful for the Left to adopt this attitude, or the performative political “toughness” that often comes with it. Defensiveness has to give way to reflexivity.' This demonstrates the superficiality of  this article and also how far removed Seymour is from that which he writes about. We are in a midst of a war, waged by the Right using anti-Semitism as a weapon and all Seymour can suggest is that we should be 'reflexive'.

What Seymour really means is that we should accept that there is some factual basis to the allegations of anti-Semitism. Seymour uncritically quotes from a survey by the far-Right Zionist Campaign Against Antisemitism without asking any deeper questions such as whether the survey was flawed, whether it was designed to produce certain outcomes or indeed anything about the CAA itself. 

In the CAA’s survey people are asked different questions relating to Jews (for example do Jews chase money) and because nearly half of the population answer positively to one of the questions they conclude that we are in the middle of a wave of anti-Semitism and that nearly half of the British people are anti-Semitic. Seymour goes along with this. 

Dave Rich, the Deputy Director of the Zionist Community Security Trust, with whom I agree on virtually nothing, observed that

‘This latest poll showed something else that is interesting... that people who believe antisemitic things about Jews rarely think of themselves as antisemitic.... It is as if antisemitic ideas circulate in society and influence the stereotypes people believe about Jews, but this does not affect how people imagine they relate to actual, living Jews who they know or might meet.... Even people who believe there is a global Jewish conspiracy or deny the Holocaust are affronted by the notion they might be antisemitic.

The normally restrained Institute for Jewish Policy Research found that the CAA’s “barometer” report was “littered with flaws” and the group’s work “may even be rather irresponsible.”  The IJPR criticized the way that the Campaign Against Antisemitism had used data to make the

“rather sensationalist claim that almost half of all British adults harbor some sort of anti-Semitic view… a far more accurate and honest read” of the data would “highlight the fact that between 75 percent and 90 percent of people in Britain either do not hold anti-Semitic views or have no particular view of Jews either way, and only about 4 percent to 5 percent of people can be characterized as clearly anti-Semitic.”

The CAA also claimed that more than half of British Jews felt that anti-Semitism echoed that of the 1930s. Anshel Pfeffer witheringly observed in Ha’aretz that if the CAA “actually believe that, then it’s hard to take anything they say about contemporary anti-Semitism in their home country seriously.” Pfeffer noted, regarding the statement that Jews talk about the Holocaust too much in order to gain sympathy  “too many Jews … are often too quick to bring up the Holocaust in order to make a point. … Holding that opinion doesn’t necessarily make you an anti-Semite.” 

According to the respected Pew Research Centre’s 2016 Global Survey of Attitudes just 7% of British people are anti-Semitic.  Compare this to 28% in the case of Islamaphobia and a 45% in the case of anti-Roma racism. 

The problem with Seymour is that he is still faithful to the SWP notion that all forms of racism are equal, even when anti-Semitism is a marginal prejudice that doesn't involve power relations within capitalist society, state racism or economic discrimination.  Instead of researching the subject, Seymour reaches for Google Search and takes what the CAA says at face value without any attempt to find out what their motives might be.

It would also appear that Seymour has adopted or rather swallowed the concept of ‘left anti-Semitism’ that is normally associated with the pro-imperialist Alliance for Workers Liberty.  He describes the self-publicising narcissist Gary Spedding as a ‘Jewish left-winger’ citing his article in Ha’aretz We in the Palestinian Solidarity Movement Have a Problem With anti-Semitism. Whatever else Spedding is, he is certainly not Jewish (nor is he left-wing) although that doesn't prevent him telling Jews just what is and is not antisemitic.

Spedding bases his experience of ‘anti-Semitism’ on being told at a Palestine solidarity meeting that the term ‘anti-Semitism’ applies equally to Arabs, since they too are anti-Semites.  This is a common fallacy which is quite easily corrected.  Words and phrases take on a certain meanings over time.  There are no such things as ‘Semites’, which are the product of Wilhelm Marr’s attempt to racialise anti-Jewish hatred in 1879. 

An example of the Palestine solidarity movement's very own Walter Mitthy

Spedding is not a Palestine solidarity activist. His claim to having spent 10 years fighting anti-Semitism in the Palestine solidarity movement is a lie. When the fight against the influence of Gilad Atzmon and Israel Shamir were at their height Spedding was nowhere to be seen. It was people like Ali Abunimah, the editor of Electronic Intifada, whom Spedding has gratuitously abused, who dealt a lethal blow to Shamir and Atzmon with the issuing of a declaration Granting No Quarter: A Call for the Disavowal of the Racism and Antisemitism of Gilad Atzmon, signed by over 20 prominent Palestinians and Arabs which destroyed Atzmon’s reputation.  It was at my urging that JVL expelled Spedding.

Another example of ‘anti-Semitism’ that Seymour asserts is Annie Kehune of Jewdas who ‘writes of being “fed up of having to follow ‘I’m Jewish’ with ‘but I’m not a Zionist’ in left-wing circles.  It may well annoy Annie but unfortunately the leadership of the British Jewish community claim that all Jews support Israel and its actions against the Palestinians. It is no surprise therefore that people associate being Jewish with being a Zionist.  I see nothing wrong with Jewish people making their position clear just as one would have expected White opponents of Apartheid in South Africa to have made their views clear.

Spedding gave support 2 years ago to the false and bogus claims of Angela Eagle, who was then trying to be the Right's candidate against Corbyn, that she had been subject to homophobic abuse in her party.  Wallasey CLP was suspended because of these lies.  It is no secret that Spedding peddled these lies but it is some what surprising that Richard Seymour considers him an ally

Seymour quite unbelievably concludes by arguing that 'However, while every claim has to be evaluated carefully, a precondition for that is that they should be taken seriously in and of themselves, and not merely and a priori as a manifestation of the “Israel Lobby.” Why, when these allegations are made maliciously, should we take them seriously?  If allegations of anti-Semitism are made to deflect from support for the Palestinians then they should be seen for what they are.  So when Jonathan Arkush of the Board of Deputies claims that Jewdas are a “source of virulent antisemitism” and goes on to claim that their members “are not all Jewish” should we investigate such matters?  Perhaps we should take a blood test just in order that the matter can be resolved conclusively!

Like most SWP exiles Seymour is trying to find a progressive space between the politics he once espoused and their right-wing critics today.  He doesn't even like talk of the Israel Lobby and would prefer if we would simply turn a blind eye to the activities of the JLM and Labour Friends of Israel. 

Seymour ends in true SWP fashion that 'At a time when nascent far-right movements are surfacing, with antisemitic tendencies linked to state power in Hungary and the United States, the Left has a particular responsibility to lead on this issue.'  Yes indeed and who is it, in the USA and in Hungary, who is hand in hand with these anti-semites if not the Zionist movement?  I can only presume that Seymour in his ivory tower is unaware that the founder of the alt-Right himself, the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer has declared himself a White Zionist. Or that Jonathan Arkush, one of the main players in the false ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign welcomed Donald Trump’s election with all its anti-Semitic dog whistles?

The last thing we should do is to be diverted into every alleyway that the Zionists want us to go down.  What Seymour is really proposing is that the Zionists be allowed to set the agenda.

Seymour is isolated from the movement he writes about which is why he thinks Spedding is representative. Yes of course antisemitic nonsense should be countered. However it endangers not a single Jew because racism against Jews is a matter of prejudice, not of life and death.  As I wrote over a decade ago, opposition to anti-Semitism has become the "anti-racism" of the political right.’  No one has died from a tweet or social media post.

The irony is that it was the SWP itself, when Seymour was a member, which was allied with Gilad Atzmon. In June 2005 Jews Against Zionism picketed a meeting of the SWP at Bookmarks where Atzmon was giving a talk on Otto Weininger. I wrote Blind eye to anti-semitism attacking the SWP’s support for Atzmon. Although Richard was not happy about their position he wasn’t exactly outspoken either and tellingly he chose to remain a member of the SWP. It is not for Richard Seymour to now lecture us on the evils of anti-Semitism.

I was surprised that Jacobin had published Seymour’s article but reassured that the current editor Bhaskar has responded to me that he completely disagreed with the thrust of the article.  The previous editor, Max Ajl told me that he would never have published ‘such a Shoddy piece!’  I still find it puzzling why Jacobin thought it worthy of publication when there are so many right-wing sites would have welcomed what they would consider a repentant sinner!

Tony Greenstein