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. 

Review of "The Awakening of Motti Wolkenbruch"

Pretty dire film about a young orthodox Jew living in Zurich, full of cliches and stereotypes, and rather misognistic in its depiction of Jewish, non-Jewish and Israeli women. Motti is the last unmarried son of his parents, and his mother is desperate to get him married off, but he's not attracted to any of the dull ugly orthodox candidates that they find for him. Instead he ends up falling for a young woman in his economics class at the university (why is he studying there when he comes from such an orthodox background?) and they develop a relationship. There's a short interlude in a fantasized hedonistic Israel, where he is sent to find a bride but instead loses his virginity in a casual fuck with a beautiful, cool Israeli woman. 

He rejects his community and his heritage, brings his "shiksa" (there's no engagement with just how horrible that word is) home to meet his parents, and then is thrown out by his mother. Oh and there's a dying orthodox older woman with clairvoyant tarot-reading powers...reallly, it's just rubbish. Time wasted, slightly mitigated by some nice shots of Zurich.

Review of 'Dancing in the Streets: AHistory of Collective Joy' by Barbara Ehrenreich

As someone who has relatively recently discovered the joy of dancing (for years I was too self-conscious to really engage) I liked this book. I think I sort of knew a lot of it, including the efforts to suppress, or occasionally co-opt, collective expressions of joy by Church and State...but it was good to have it all in one place. Nice to have something of an explanation for why we enjoy it...because it helps to enable us to form groups larger than our immediate kin, and those who did enjoy it would have had an evolutionary advantage. Surprisingly little about chemical enhancements that make dancing even more enjoyable and help bring us nearer to that feeling of connection...she rather dismisses that as an ersatz experience and perhaps also recent innovation, which I think is rather unfair. But that's a quibble, it's a nice book.

Review of "Zami: A New Spelling of My Name" by Audre Lorde

Shamefully I've never heard of Audre Lorde, even though she is quite famous as a poet and writer, and activist. I hope to read more of her (prose anyway, I don't do that much poetry) because she's a very engaging writer, able to write in an articulate, non-academic way about the way that different kinds of oppression interlock and counter-balance each other. She writes about her life as a Black working class lesbian, and this book covers the period in which she is formed as a writer but before she is one. She writes about work, and racism (at school, college and work) and about the various lesbian tribes and subcultures of 1950s New York. 

She's brilliant at depicting the latter, and in bringing the city to life as it was at a very special moment of its history, when it was still possible to live as a bohemian (bourgeois or other) in Manhattan. I wish I'd read it with a map, and it would be great to have a 'virtual walking tour' of the New York she is writing about.

I note in passing that she obviously moved in Communist Party circles, was involved in the campaign to save the Rosenbergs from execution, relishes the very end of the 1940s as a time of hope, and is excited and enthusiastic about the creation of the State of Israel as a sign of that hope.

There's a lot of material about growing up the children of immigrants that I recognise...she wasn't just Black in New York, she was West Indian, which I think makes for a very different sort of Black experience. It would be good to know more about that.

Review of "Promising Young Woman"

Good enough thriller-drama about a not-so-young woman taking revenge on men in general, and some specific men (and women) who were involved in the rape of her best friend while at college. Lots of tension, plot twists, and some well constructed scenes. Some of the twists were visible before they arrived, but it works well as a film, and is a good one for bringing up the issues involved in the way men behave...especially the 'nice' ones.

Informal distribution, VLC on laptop and Chromecast - working again at the moment. Sometimes there's now sound but not on this one.

Review of Fatherhood

Sort of OK film about a man whose wife dies soon after childbirth, and ends up bringing up his daughter himself as a single dad. Mainly positioned as a comedy, but with lots of poignant moments. The most remarkable thing is that the dad is a black guy working in the tech industry in Boston (though the family are from Minnesota, and his mother and mother-in-law keep suggesting that he moves back there), and there's no racism at all in his experience. His white boss and white colleagues are mainly just great to him, and there is never any suggestion at all that anyone sees him as a black man. Oh, and in the way that seems to be really common in Hollywood movies, he seems to be much richer (and work much less) than would really be compatible with his job...it's not clear exactly what he does in what seems to be a CAD company, but he does give a few presentations.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of 'The Overstory' by Richard Powers

Very effective and moving novel, about trees. Reminded me a lot of Barkskins, partly because of the subject matter (which also focuses on the clearance of forests from North America) but also the structure, and the feeling. I didn't learn all that much that I hadn't previously heard about trees, but it did affect the way that I felt about them...I have much more respect for the HS2 protestors than I did before, for example. And I think it changed the way I thought and felt about people too, including the people who are wedded to the existing way of doing things, who have jobs in logging or in enforcement of property rights. I'd like to read more by Richard Powers, who on the strength of this is a very good writer.

Review of 'Promised Land' (2002)

Came across this pretty much by accident while looking for the other 'Promised Land' with Matt Damon and Frances McDormand. This is a different film altogether, though as with that one the title is ironic. It's in Afrikaans, and set mainly among Afrikaners in the world of immediate post-Apartheid South Africa. The main characters are a farming family in a bleak, dry spot, to which a young man who's been living in London returns after the death of his mother. 

It's creepy, and violent, and a bit cliched ("You don't understand our ways, you don't belong here any more"), but not without interest. Apparently it's based on an award winning novel. A curiosity is that it features Yvonne van den Bergh, an Afrikaner actor who went on to become a big thing in South African TV before outing herself as a dominatrix and then going all out into porn. It's supposed to be the other way round, isn't it?

Whole film was available on YouTube.

Review of "The Forty Year Old Version"

A nice, feelgood film about a middle-aged black woman living in Brooklyn who teaches theatre to kids but also aspires to be a playwright. She'd been tipped as a rising star but hasn't delivered on the promise...and now she has a chance to have her play produced, only she has to deal with manipulative and duplicitious financial backers and so on, who want her to change the focus, and wiggle around her wish for a black director, and so on. So it's about artists, and compromise, but it's also about being 40 (hence the title, a play on 'The 40 Year Old Virgin' film title, and wanting to be cool - she has a go at rapping in a club - but, well, forty...

Enjoyable to watch, nice acting, well observed. A rare good film from Netflix.

Review of "The Great Indian Kitchen"

Really good film, though somehow describing it makes it sound dreary and dull. Oddly the poster makes it look like it's a Bollywood romance, which much be someone's idea of irony. The film starts with a wedding, but after that there's little romance, though there is some unpleasant sex.

It's about a young Indian woman who marries into a middle-class family in Kerala, and the way that they are everyone else she knows expect to her accept a life of absolute servile drudgery. Interesting on several levels - in some ways her life was not so different from my own mum's. My dad thought of himself as modern and progressive, but helping around the house (let alone doing a share of the housework) was not his thing, and was not something that my mum ever seemed to expect. My mum expected no more of me or my brother, and always seemed at least bemused by the fact that we did housework in our own homes. Still, the men in this film do take it to another level; among her duties is putting toothpaste on her father-in-law's toothbrush. 

Worth noting is that this is a Hindu family - Muslims and even Orthodox Jews are often singled out as the epitome of patriarchal religion, but as the film makes clear Hinduism at least as depicted here has just as many taboos about contact with menstruating women, who are regarded as unclean and to be shunned. And these are middle-class, educated people in progressive Kerala - at one point towards the end of the film the woman walks past a mural of Che Guevara.

Made me realise the extent to which my favourite Indian foods (and most of my favourite foods are Indian) are labour-intensive, and not possible without either the unpaid labour of women or the underpaid labour of restaurant workers.

Watched on Amazon Prime.

Review of "Modern Persuasion"

No redeeming features whatsoever. Wash your hair, wash your eyes with lemon juice, just don't watch this film.

Review of 'Almost Famous'

A film from 2000 about a 15-year-old boy (young man?) who blags his way into writing for Rolling Stone magazine (they don't know how old he is, and he fakes a deeper voice over the phone), and ends up on tour with the rock band Stillwater, developing substantive relationships with some members of the band and their hangers-on. One of these is a young woman called "Penny Lane" who is a member of a groupie cohort called the band-aids, and it's here that the film gets problematic. The hero calls out the band because he thinks they aren't kind enough to these girls, but there's no suggestion that he or anyone else thinks that there's anything abusive about sexual relationships between men in their twenties and girls in their mid-teens.

There's surprisingly little tension in the film - the hero is never really in trouble or in danger. The band's manager is supplanted by a cool dude appointed by the record company, but the old manager who has been with them since the beginning still stays on. And so on. Frances McDormand is nice as the boy's mother.

Watched on Amazon Prime.

Review of 'The Moneyless Man' by Mark Boyle

I read 'The Way Home', Mark Boyle's book about living without technology, and found it just about interesting enough to want to read another book by him - because though that was mainly annoying, there were occasionally interesting insights or thoughts.

This one is the same. It's mainly annoying too. Sometimes it's smug - he rarely writes about his struggles and his failures, or even about the process whereby he learns to do stuff. I think that's because he's trying to be inspirational, and feels that writing about the process might be too disheartening - but it comes across as smug. Sometimes he writes dismissively about the people who criticize him, but often without much insight or understanding. 

He's annoyingly inconsistent about what the point of the exercise is. Is it OK that he bought stuff in advance so that he could live without money once his challenge had started? Sometimes he implies not, but he's definitely done that...the solar panel, for example. Is it OK to receive gifts that others have paid for? Same inconsistency. Is he living off the slack and waste of industrial civilisation (like scavenging food from dumpsters behind supermarkets) or is he turning his back on industrial civilisation, and only eating what he grows or forages? Sometimes it's one and sometimes it's the other.

So while there are important points to be made about personal relationships with money, and also about consumption and happiness, and the psychological aspects of self-reliance...I don't think he more than scratches the surface. I don't think that what he performs here is scalable - we couldn't all live like that, even if there are a few things that it might be worth paying attention to. If I were a single parent trying to feed and clothe kids in a way that would help my family keep its head above water I'd want to throw this book across the room, and then maybe rip it up and burn it. There would be very little in it that would help me at all.

Review of The Sound of Metal

A moving, effective film about deafness - a heavy metal drummer becomes profoundly deaf, and he has to reflect on how he's going to live his life now. He's given hope that cochlear implants will fix him, but they are very expensive and he is forced to sell the RV that is his home (I checked, in the UK they are available on the NHS, but this is America where being sick is traumatically expensive)...and also to deal with the rejection from the deaf community that he's found, who don't accept that deafness is a handicap or that it should be fixed.

Really good in the way that the film manages to represent his experience of deafness.

Watched on Amazon Prime - best film there for a long time.