Review of “Labour's Antisemitism Crisis: What the Left Got Wrong and How to Learn From It” by David Renton

The last few years have not been fun for a lot of Jewish socialists. No sooner had the Labour Party - which some of us had written off as a vehicle for political change - unexpectedly elected an actual socialist as its leader, than we were deluged with a flood of accusations that the man, who had a long history of involvement in anti-racist struggles, was actually racist towards Jews. 

A series of unfortunate events followed, and the responses to them became factionalised and also poisonous. It seemed almost impossible to assert that there was some truth on both sides of the many arguments - that the left generally, the left in the Labour Party, and the party itself really did have a problem with antisemitism and that at the same time there were unscrupulous people within and outside Labour who were “weaponising” this problem to attack the left in the party and Labour itself. And others who used the opportunity to attack anyone who’d ever tried to criticise Israel or Zionism.

David Renton gives a detailed account of many of the incidents and episodes...the Mear One mural, Naz Shah, Ken Livingstone’s Hitler outburst, Jackie Walker and the slave trade, IHRA definition, the Chakrabarti report, the EHRC investigation and its report...He’s a lawyer by profession, and this is reflected in the detail and also in the sometimes legalistic discussion; he refers to specific elements of anti-discrimination legislation and applies them to what actually occurred.. But despite this he remains resolute that no set of rules and procedures could have saved the day - what was needed, and still is, is a proper political understanding of antisemitism and its place in political culture.

The author is at great pains to be fair to the people he is writing about, and gives them the most sympathetic interpretation possible of what they said or meant to say. He does this with Jackie Walker, with Ken Livingstone, with Chris Williamson...and sometimes it feels like he’s just trying too hard, and that what he ought to be doing is blasting these people for wallowing in the fetid pools on the outskirts of political culture. He does the same with Luciana Berger, the JLM-supporting MP who I never had much time for, and who became a bitter enemy of the left.

He’s mainly kind to Jon Lansman, who emerges as something of a hero from the narrative, and he’s nicer to the JLM than I would have been, even though I know some people who are members and are actually quite decent. He’s even kind to the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, treating his thoughts on Corbyn as if they were part of a considered and intellectually coherent commentary.

And he has a sensible, balanced approach to what Zionism means to Palestinians, and what it means to middle-of-the-road British Jews, which is not the same thing at all.

There are some things - inevitably - that don’t make it into the book. The various episodes involving Ken Loach, stretching all the way back to the ‘Perdition’ affair. The way that Corbyn himself, and his supporters, seemed unable to issue any condemnation of antisemitism without immediately adding “and all forms of racism”...a verbal tick which some have compared to the “All Lives Matter” racist response to Black Lives Matter. The often-repeated assertion that “our movement has a proud history” of antiracism, which is both untrue and irrelevant. 

But there is lots more about the present conjuncture...the failures of the Jewish Communal leader in the UK - unlike their American counterparts - to address the antisemitism of the right. The characteristics of the Corbyn moment, including the influx of people who’d never been involved in politics before and the left’s inability to absorb them. The political culture of the left, and the nastiness of online communication and social media in general. And the strangeness of the political culture of the broader ‘movement’, which includes a huge swathe of people who identify with some sort of anti-establishment feeling, manifest this by a willingness to believe in multiple and sometimes contradictory conspiracy theories about ‘the elite’, and are ripe for harvesting by the far right even if they don’t think of themselves as any kind of facist. Anyone who has found themselves in a conversation with an anti-vaxxer, or a believer in 5G conspiracies, will recognise this and welcome Renton’s sensible discussions about what this means for us.

I’ve never met David Renton, though I’ve enjoyed reading his blog posts. We’ve exchanged a few messages via Facebook, mainly me telling him that I’ve appreciated something he’s written. But I wish I’d known him during the period that his book covers; it might have made it easier to live through the misery.

Review of "Caliban and The Witch" by Sylvia Federici

A Stroud Radical Reading Group book. I'm embarrassed to say I'd never heard of Federici before, because she's great. A brilliant Marxist-feminist account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and the way that this shaped the different roles of men and women in the total world that capitalism created. One of the great things about it is the focus on the relationship between 'production' - making stuff in what capitalism considers productive industry - and 'reproduction' - all the things that have to go on so that there is labour power to be exploited in that industry...things like food preparation, cleaning, childcare and child-rearing, care for the weak and sick. She argues that under feudalism the distinction between production and reproduction was not so sharp, with much production taking place within the sphere of the household, just like reproduction.

I have to say that there are things that I didn't like so much about the book. I think that she's oddly weak on the actual events and progress of the witch hunts which are one of the main focuses of the book. I'm no expert, but a quick bit of reading about the witch trials in Germany (for example in Trier) suggests a very different picture to the one that she describes - men, and children, executed en masse for witchcraft, prominent intellectuals standing up against the trials (and being executed as a result), men of property falling victim to the witch hunters. It's not at all a matter of old women with knowledge of herbs living on the margins of village society. 

I also suspect that she is not entirely right on the question of whether capitalist forms did, or didn't, develop within the belly of feudalism. She sets herself against this argument, advanced by Braudel, and to make a political point by lots of others including Paul Mason, Kevin Carson, Michel Bauwens and so on...it's an argument that informs others about the possibility of transition to socialism. She emphasises the violence with which capitalism was imposed - enclosures, witch-hunts, and so on, whereas the others emphasise the extent to which capitalist relations emerged without an 'overthrow' of feudalism. And she is keener than orthodox Marxists on the possibility that there might have been another route out of feudalism, one based in the resistance of peasants and townsfolk to their masters. I think that others have also suggested this (Christopher Hill in The World Turned Upside Down, for example). I keep an open mind on this (for all the difference that it makes) but the possibility that it's only capitalism that can develop the forces of production sufficiently to provide a material basis for proper communism doesn't seem to me to be self-evidently wrong.

But it's still a great book, and I want to read more by her.

Review of "We''ll take Manhattan"

OK film about David Bailey and Jean Shrimpton going to New York on Vogue's budget and making themselves famous, despite the best efforts of the Vogue staffers sent to mind them. Really good soundtrack of early 1960s Jazz, nice art direction and clothes and interiors, less good script and everything else.

Weirdly this film triggered a very powerful dream about corporate life, in which - like the David Bailey character in the film - I stood up to corporate bullies and told them that the report that I had written was theirs, and they could do what they wanted with it, but if they removed or watered down my key conclusion they would have to take my name of it...braver than I was in real corporate life, of course. Even more weirdly, my bravery was undermined by a typical piece of dream anxiety, in that I was about to storm out when I realised I couldn't find my overcoat or remember where I'd put it. Everyone had these fabulous blue wool overcoats, and I had one too, only I couldn't remember which cloakroom I'd put it in. I still had the tag, but it didn't provide any clues. Huh...

Watched on Amazon Prime.

Review of Ammonite

Worthy, beautifully filmed, but a bit dull biopic of Mary Anning, the early-Victorian working class fossil hunter who laid the basis for so much paleontology and earth science. Spiced up with a lesbian love story between Anning and her real-life friend Charlotte Murchison, that doesn't seem to figure in any of the biographical material I've read. This is nicely acted, and the way that the relationship is depicted is non-obvious....though I did wonder how Anning, who doesn't seem to have had any sexual involvement before this, seems to know exactly what to do.

Watched on Amazon Prime...the first film we paid for there for a long time.

Review of "Project Hail Mary" by Andy Weir

I sort of liked this...well, I read through 476 pages so it carried me along. It's hard science fiction, with lots of detailed descriptions of how things work, and lots of science...some of which I skimmed. In that it's a lot like Andy Weir's other book, The Martian, which I also sort of liked. 

Basic plot is that an alien virus is eating the sun, and our hero is on the one last desperate effort to find a cure. And he's alone, because the other astronauts died before he awoke from his induced space-travel coma.

No spoilers here, but I felt the end made it worth ploughing through some of the earlier material, and the sentiments and even the politics are mainly good. Not top of my recommend list, but enjoyable all the same.

Review of 'Downsizing'

This starts off as a silly comedy sort of film, like a slightly more grown-up version of "Honey I Shrunk The Kids"...scientists at a Norwegian research institute come up with a way of reducing humans to about five inches (it's an American film...say 12cm?) tall, with the suggestion that this is the answer to the crisis of sustainability - smaller people means less resource consumption and less waste. Soon it becomes a bit of a trend, with communities for small people spring up in several countries. And the main character (Paul), played by Matt Damon, and his wife, are going to become small and thereby become much richer...in a small gated (and netted, to keep out insects) community your money goes much further.

Soon, though, it changes tone. The wife doesn't go through with the process, leaving Paul alone in his new mansion. They divorce, and he ends up obviously lonely in a much smaller apartment. There's a lot about the emptiness of material satisfaction and consumerism, and then suddenly there's class. Not all of the small people are rich...there are poor small people who live outside the gated community, travel in on gritty buses, and do all the rotten jobs. They live in concrete sheds roughly fitted out for smalls...and there was something about the depiction that reminded me of the Torre David in Venezuela. And then - through a sort of friendship with a Vietnamese woman dissident who was shrunk against her will as punishment, and with the Balkan wheeler-dealers who live in the apartment above, Paul rediscovers people and community. 

I won't do turn by turn descriptions of the plot, some of which is a bit contrived, but I thought it was an interesting film with a good message and drive-by touches on a lot more...there's climate change, class, and a postive drug experience. In fact, I've noticed that most depictions of party drugs in contemporary American films seem to be positive (unlike depictions of cocaine, heroin or alcohol)...is this because the film makers known that showing them otherwise would just not be plausible to their target audience, who have grown up with this stuff and know it's mainly OK?

Review of "Why the Germans Do it Better; Notes from a Grown-Up Country"

I grew up British and Jewish, so it was pretty much inevitable that I'd start out not liking Germans. My youthful comic reading was full of war stories...yes, that war, because none of the wars that the British state got involved in after WW2 were deemed fit for comic book depiction. Biggles, Dad's Army, Colditz, Manhunt... 

And as Jews my parents dutifully hated everything German. They particpated unevenly in the long-running and least successful economic boycott in history, the Jewish boycott of post-war Germany. They avoided buying anything German, except when they didn't. My dad bought a German Heinkel bubble car, and as kids we absolutely loved it...no seat belts, a sun roof that we looked out of (by standing on the bench seat) as he drove along. 

My dad was a consistent anti-racist, except that this didn't apply to Germans, who it was OK to hate, especially older ones. Of course this didn't apply to the nice German lesbian who joined his Jewish Judo club, because even in the early 1960s she was aware and ashamed of what her parents had done. And despite his Germanophobia my dad wanted me to learn German at school because it was useful, and I disappointed him by choosing Latin because the teacher was cooler (wrong choice).

And then, in Israel, I met young German volunteers, and they were great. By then I'd grown out of being anti-German, but I sort of knew about the extent to which West Germany was still run by hastily polished-up ex-Nazis. Of course my new German friends knew this too. And they were really nice to be with, straightforward and decent in a way that English people wanted to be, but often weren't.

And then later I worked for German clients, and alongside German professionals, and they were always great too; honest, straightforward, well-organised. Meetings with Germans started on time, finished on time, and had proper notes and minutes. People stuck to the agenda and didn't have side conversations. When German clients asked for something that I explained couldn't be done in the way that they wanted it, they entered into a discussion about what could be done instead - they didn't treat it as the first stage in a negotiation about price. 

So when John Kampfner subtitles his book 'notes from a grown-up country' I get it. Not all Germans are great or grown-up, but it seems to be the default. 

That said, the book was a bit of a disappointment. There's lots in it about contemporary Germany, but I felt it was more about how much better the Germans are than about why they are. There are little bits about the legacy of history, and the education system, and so on, but it never seems to add up to a sustained hypothesis. Not enough about a culture of trust, and solidarity, and an attitude to authority and rules that is pretty much the opposite of that in the UK...where we are at once supine in the face of posh-boy class superiority and distrustful of authority, particularly that of experts.