Corbynism, Marxism, and Conspiracy

We've encountered Matt Bolton's critique, and I use that term advisedly, of Corbynism before. In the market place of ideas his niche is a self-described Marxist take on Corbyn and his works. Funnily enough, this is just the kind of Marxism Matt's mates in Progress find congenial - which should tell you something about the direction of his politics. Anyway, Matt has been at it again in the New Statesman with Frederick Pitts, and so here we go a second time.

After a rough couple of days re: Labour and anti-semitism, the last thing we needed were further examples. But we got them. We saw a round robin open letter organised by a member of the We Support Jeremy Corbyn Facebook group that, groans, argued Corbyn is being targeted by a secretive "special interest group". And then it emerged Christine Shawcroft had opposed the expulsion of Alan Hull, a prospective council candidate who had posted a "Holohoax" article onto Facebook. She claims she was unaware of this, which is fair enough, but to not notice he was getting done for allegations of anti-semitism and not think "hmmm, this warrants a further look" is unconscionable. She was right to resign as the chair of the disputes panel, but she should step down from the NEC altogether.

Here then we have two instances of "left" anti-semitism. One that can be put down to ignorance of anti-semitic tropes, which is symptomatic of the unpolished and unsophisticated politics you'd expect to see when hundreds of thousands of "new people" enter the political process. And the other related to the internal culture not of the Labour Party, but of the groupthink of a section of the anti-war/anti-imperialist far left and hard left. Add to that a perception that Corbyn and his leadership are constantly under siege, which they are, you can understand why (without for a moment excusing it) how in these contexts anti-semitism isn't taken seriously and are dismissed as factional attacks.

In their argument, Matt and Frederick take it a step further. We've noted before the tendency of conspiracy thinking to be a gateway to full blown anti-semitism, yet they argue this conspiratorial politics more or less marks Jeremy Corbyn's outlook. They suggest, without any evidence it has to be said, that Corbyn talks about society being under the hoof of the "1%" who stitch up and rig the game at the expense of the 99%. Their version of Corbyn argues that the removal of these people would allow for socialism to emerge and usher in a world of freedom and plenty. In Corbyn's politics, the job is to find the guilty parties and remove them.

This, of course, is utter rubbish. If this is the calibre of their coming book on Corbynism I'd recommend giving it a miss. Yes, Labour has occasionally indulged populist rhetoric (it even did under The Master from time to time) but his politics are not. Corbyn's politics are fundamentally Bennite and remain within the envelope of Labourism. What does that mean? A number of things: a commitment to a "mixed economy" (i.e. an expanded state sector side by side with a market economy dominated by private enterprise), a Keynesian approach to investment in industry by the state, and an enhanced role for trade unions. Like Benn before him, Corbyn believes there is a role for limited economic democracy via cooperatives, employee stakes in firms, and alternative forms of ownership, as well as more democracy and accountability within the public sector. You can find all this in Labour's 2017 manifesto and the debates around it since. Also like Benn before him, Corbyn believes these reforms can be achieved by securing a Labour majority in Parliament via a general election, but must be augmented by the party becoming a massive movement of millions. This is to keep the Labour government honest and offer an extra-parliamentary lever against the opposition such an administration would face from bosses and other civil society actors. In practice it means a kinder, gentler capitalism, and would open up opportunities for a politics aiming to go beyond capitalism itself. And whether you agree with this or not, it is much more complicated than the goodies vs baddies caricature offered by Matt and Frederick.

Are our comrades arguing in good faith, then? I do wonder. For instance:

The inordinate focus on the crimes of Israel within the British left – far outweighing the attention given to the chemical slaughter currently inflicted by Bashar al-Assad for example – results from the portrayal of Israel as the evil “1 per cent” of the global community, a state whose very existence is the source of all suffering in the Middle East, if not the world.

What drivel. There are plenty of criticisms of Israel on the British left, ranging from the centre left who focus their critique on the right of Israeli politics and selected human rights abuses, to a more fundamental critique of Israel as a colonial project and, therefore, an institutionally racist one. Even here you find divisions over whether the Israeli state has a right to exist or not. And then there are other layers of analysis positioning Israel in the global system of power politics, and its role as a client of the West generally and America in particular. You pays your money and you makes your choice. Nowhere, however, do we come across any analysis claiming Israel is part of the "evil 1 per cent". In fact no one on the left continuum ranging from Progress to the SWP, from Labour First to the most degenerate Stalinoids operates with an analysis this superficial. All are rooted in an analysis of Israeli politics, and as we move out from the mainstream to radical arguments, an embedding in a critique of political economy and the international system. Sometimes this can manifest itself in crude anti-imperialism and an overstatement of Israel's power, but it's not conspiracy theorising.

Matt and Frederick have to set up these straw men for the grand reveal: that a conspiratorial approach has nothing in common with a Marxist analysis. Consider me thunderstruck. They turn to the work of Moishe Postone, who died in February, to argue that the object of the critique of capitalism should be capitalist social relations themselves. Postone has his virtues, but you can only suppose this is an original argument if you know no Marx at all. What is the body of work Marx left behind if not an unravelling of the impersonal dynamics of capitalism, a modelling and critique of its fundamental dynamics, and an appreciation of how the commodity form conditions, well, everything? Marx was also very clear that persons and personifications in his work condensed the social relations they typified and, in his writings on politics, represented - though with varying analytical power.

Where Matt and Frederick are right is rooting conspiracy theorising in fetishistic thinking. The commodity circuit, the operation of capitalism as an impersonal, amoral, unconscious and directionless beast presents the world to us, its inhabitants, as personifications. It can appear as if the system is rigged by a shadowy cabal, and the complex shifting (and shafting) attending capitalism is their doings, but it isn't. What hampers our comrades' theoretical position, quite apart from a tenuous relationship with the facts, is a refusal to properly situate their argument. There's their wafer thin case for classifying Corbynism as a type of conspiracy thinking and therefore a species of reification, which implicitly means it's illegitimate, but they fail to note the conspiratorial themes they ascribe to Jeremy Corbyn (remember, they're critiquing his thought, not his support) are common place, if not banal features of bourgeois politics. Consider the Labour right and its refusal to explain Corbynism beyond the machinations of sundry Trots and troublemakers - no evidence of an appreciation of the social relations at work there. And the Tories - bad GDP figures are about liberal chunterers talking the economy down, industrial unrest the result of unspecified militant troublemakers, the relative decline of Britain the fault of Brussels' bureaucrats. On and on it goes. With their greater reach, influence, and embeddedness in the institutions of government and media, why do they see it fit to ignore the mainstream if conspiracy thinking is so powerful and terrifying? I digress. By forgetting to situate their analysis in the context of wider bourgeois politics Matt and Frederick egregiously abuse the thrust and spirit of Marx and Postone. Their empty critique of Corbyn's positions allows them to construct not just a distorted view of his politics, but a false one. In other words, they have either maliciously, or as a result of their unthinking ignorance of their subject matter, created another phantom, another personification whose appearance obscures its essence. Call it what you like - a hatchet job, a cynical hit, whatever you do it's a rum business when self-described Marxists use Marxist categories to mystify the social world instead of rendering it intelligible and knowable.

Matt has form for this. His original piece, 'The Terrifying Hubris of Corbynism' (now mysteriously disappeared from the internets by Matt himself) was of similar character. In an analysis peppered with unused, decorative Marxist categories, he argued Corbynism wasn't an authentic left movement because it lacked x, y, z characteristics. It wasn't as ideologically coherent as the Militant Tendency, for example. This approach, needless to say, ain't a Marxist approach. Instead of taking social relations, the movement of hundreds of thousands of people into the Labour Party, their trajectory, and their common characteristics as a means of explaining Corbynism, Matt imposes his characterisation and, yup, distorts it. Good for getting noticed, not so good if you want to know the social world for the express purpose of changing it.

Yes, Corbynism does have its problems. As a movement it is uneven and parts of it are prone to conspiracy thinking and, therefore, anti-semitism - almost as if the two are an outer shell of an immature radicalism. But the way these problems can be dealt with is not just through a programme of education, as helpful as that would be, but by understanding our movement ourselves. In this endeavour Matt and Frederick's intervention is singularly useless. A nice fairy tale to help their establishment promoters and friends sleep at night, but nothing else.