This preface begins with a consideration of the common political heritage, in Trotskyism, of the editor and creator of Fathom, and the Academic Director and founder of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism; and more widely of some more of the people who have been key to constructing Jewish communal and democratic responses in Britain to 21st century antisemitism. Going beyond the spirit of ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’ it is a marker of some of the positive aspects of that heritage. One of these is a stubborn refusal to release one’s political moorings from the constraints of the material, existing world, even if that world can confound one’s hopes and expectations. The temptation to float free can open the door to fantasy thinking and then totalitarian politics. So one lesson that was instilled in us was the necessity of doing, and not only of thinking and talking. If Trotskyism was the anti-totalitarian spirit of the Russian Revolution, it focuses us on the difficulties of holding the anti-totalitarianism and the radical socialism together, and it looks at the effects of letting one or the other of these principles slip. Perhaps it is the fact that Trotskyism addressed some of the key issues of its time head on, which explains why some of those who were educated in its culture have been important in the development of the key issues of our time; and not in any specific direction but in all possible directions. The ‘Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: The Fathom Essays’ edited by Alan Johnson is available here.
Projects
This volume is a testament to the Fathom project; to its energy, its clarity and its impact. Fathom is a forum for reality-based discourse about Israel and its conflicts with its neighbours; and for thinking about the antisemitism that associates itself with discourse about Israel.
In January 2001, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process collapsed, at least that process did, and for that period. The following September, antizionism, for which it is axiomatic that such a peace process could never succeed, reasserted itself in the global left and liberal imagination as the common sense view, at the Durban World Conference against Racism. A week later, planes slammed into the World Trade Centre in New York, into the Pentagon, and one was prevented by a heroic struggle from slamming into the White House. The Durban programme for ‘Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions’ (BDS) against Israel, was taken up by academics in London, who agitated for an exclusion of Israelis from university campuses. The academic unions in Britain did not adopt a boycott of Israeli universities, but they did allow the boycotters to create a culture in which, by 2009, there were no Jews left in their decision-making structures who were willing and able to argue against antizionism, or the antisemitism that came with it, and which inspired it.
Fathom was created in 2011, in the wake of the University and College Union (UCU) defeat of the activists who were challenging its antisemitic culture and norms; and at a time when antisemitism was spreading from the academic union into the key activist layers of the whole labour movement. By 2015, The Labour Party had elected Jeremy Corbyn as leader, a man steeped in a lifetime of antizionist politics. Fathom was well established by then and it was in a position to offer an intellectual and political lead to those who wanted to understand the Labour antisemitism storm, and to those who found themselves inside it. Fathom offered a space for the resistance to Labour antisemitism to think and to debate, to learn and to teach.
Alan Johnson’s own 30,000 word 2019 Fathom report, Institutionally Antisemitic: Contemporary Left Antisemitism and the Crisis in the British Labour Party, went through 130 examples of Labour antisemitism, giving evidence that they happened, and offering clear explanations of why they were antisemitic.[1] It was cited in the damning 2020 report of the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) into antisemitism in the Labour Party. The EHRC report also made it clear that one of the key manifestations of the ‘unlawful harassment of Jews’, which had been common in Corbyn’s Labour Party, was the assumption of bad faith made against those who reported antisemitism. This was the assumption that people were pretending to think there was antisemitism but that they were ‘faking’ it or ‘smearing’ Corbyn and his faction in pursuance of an unstated underlying motive. The EHRC was re-describing the phenomenon that I had called ‘The Livingstone Formulation’ in the language of UK Equality law.[2] The EHRC drew on the evidence and the understanding that had been developed, nurtured and published by Alan Johnson in the Fathom project and by me through the Engage project.
His Fathom collection is one of the first books in a new book series, edited by myself and Rosa Freedman, Studies in Contemporary Antisemitism, which is a collaboration between Routledge and the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (LCSCA). This series is one element of an ambitious programme to establish a suite of platforms to publish academic research and debate on contemporary antisemitism. We are also nurturing the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism (JCA) as a high quality, peer reviewed, academic platform for publishing research. We are producing policy papers, journalism, blogs, social media and videos, which play important roles in disseminating academic research more widely. We are growing our network of antisemitism scholarship as an international community of research, of reading and writing, and of peer review.
Around that academic core, we are helping wider networks of debate, learning, activism and support to develop.
Threads
In this preface I am thinking about threads of the intellectual heritage that are shared by Fathom and by the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism. One key thread descends from the apparently arcane groups and struggles within the Trotskyist left of the 1980s.
Trotskyism was an anti-totalitarian Marxism that positioned itself in the tradition of the Russian Revolution and, therefore, of Leninism. But there was always a tension between the anti-totalitarian aspect and the Leninist one. Trotsky himself resisted the Leninist doctrine of the revolutionary party until the eve of the revolution, although he then accepted it completely.
In ancient times, Plato had wrestled with the contradiction between truth and democracy. Democracy can help you to find out how people are thinking and it can contribute towards a fair distribution of power, but it cannot help you to find out what is true. Two plus two equals four, whether or not the Four Party wins the election, or the Four Campaign wins the referendum. That was why Plato argued for what he called aristocracy, the rule of the best: a system of government in which the philosophers make the decision.
Much later, Rousseau argued for a rather nice fantasy solution to Plato’s question. He had been brought up in the city state of Geneva, and that was perhaps his inspiration for radical, face to face democracy. He thought that so long as a democracy followed a number of strict principles and practices, then the outcome of a debate, the ‘will of the people’, would always be the best and most true answer to the question. To guarantee this, democracy must be face to face and include all citizens, never via representation; there must be no factions or parties, or back room deals, but all debate must happen inside the official structures; discussion must be verbal and not written. Such tight conditions are never followed in the real world and could never be. Free citizens do not, as Rousseau imagined, ‘hasten to the assembly’ eager to participate. The fate of the French Revolution showed clearly enough what happens when an ever smaller coterie of the powerful substitute themselves for the assemblies, and determine the ‘will of the people’ for as they wish.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx had embraced a rather simple, utopian solution to the problem. Marx’s fantasy was that the working class, which he thought was becoming ever more homogenous and ever more the overwhelming majority of all people, would necessarily find its way from ‘false consciousness’, which is diverse, to a single ‘true consciousness’. This would happen through the process of collective struggle, which, thought Marx, would confront the working class with the truth about what he called ‘capitalism’.
Lenin was less of a fantasist. He embraced Marx’s narrative in principle but he also set up a Party, something like an organised network of Plato’s ‘philosophers’, to guide the workers towards ‘true consciousness’ more efficiently. Who had time to wait for the dialectics of history to play themselves out on their own? During the revolution, the Party, through its disciplined, educated and trained cadres, amplified Lenin’s influence.
Trotsky, a brilliant, free-thinking, Jewish revolutionary was not willing to restrict his own public speech by joining the Party until he was inside the revolution itself in 1917, when it became clear to him that without Lenin’s Party there would be no successful revolution.
The playing out, in twentieth century Russia, of Plato’s problem regarding the tension between truth and democracy, is familiar. The more the parliamentary and ‘Soviet’ structures were unable to function properly, the more threatened the revolution was, the more the Party abrogated the power to substitute for the working class as a whole, and the more the leaders abrogated the power to substitute for the Party.
In any case, in Russia the modern industrial working class was nowhere near being either homogeneous or the majority of society, which were Marx’s assumptions for the rise of ‘true consciousness’. Those assumptions also made the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ democratic. Hannah Arendt quipped later that although the ‘professional revolutionaries of the early twentieth century may have been the fools of history’, they were ‘no fools’.[3] They knew there was a problem but they justified abrogating power to themselves by portraying Russia, not yet ‘ripe for socialism’, as only the first step of the European revolution.
The sparks of revolution in Europe, in Germany, Italy and Hungary in particular, were snuffed out. Stalin took Lenin and Trotsky’s rhetoric and he re-shaped it into something that was, in a sense, hugely more radical. He built a whole society based on terror, and in 1939 he signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler, the other great pioneer of this new type of society. But it was only two years before they turned on each other in a ferocious war of annihilation.
Trotsky-ism was a movement of nostalgia for ‘authentic’ Leninism, of which there were two defining features. First, Lenin-ism was defined by its doctrine of the party, which was a short cut around the organic development about which Marx fantasised, ‘true consciousness’; and second, Lenin’s willingness to substitute the organising structures of the revolution, the ‘Soviets’, for the Parliament, which was itself working to be recognised as Russia’s legitimate, democratic institution of power.[4] The Trotskyists embraced these two defining features, but added a third of their own, which derived from their existence as an opposition to Stalinist totalitarianism.
The original Trotskyists thought that Stalinism was unstable and they were confounded by its emergence from the Second World War, strengthened and invigorated. Either it would be swept away by a new upsurge of revolutionary working class revolt, they had thought, or it would be defeated by ‘capitalism’ from the outside. The Trotskyists had trouble understanding Stalinism’s expansion into Eastern Europe, China, and the Far East. Some remained permanently vigilant for the imminent crisis, while others normalised ‘actually-existing Communism’ as ‘state capitalism’; and others still began to think that they were witnessing a new and terrifying form of rule.
As the decades passed, being a Trotskyist amidst crushing defeat and radically falsified perspectives was like following a path along a high ridge in the mountains, which kept on getting ever narrower. Only a few persisted to the end. Before it narrowed to the width of a tight-rope, most people let themselves deviate down one side or the other onto more stable ground. Some of them sacrificed their Marxism to their anti-totalitarian commitment and became neocons, liberals, or social democrats.
Others strayed down the other side, sacrificing their anti-totalitarian heritage to a broad community of the orthodox left. Having embraced the Trotskyist slogan ‘defend the Soviet Union’ for so long, they allowed that one side of their politics to become central to their worldview, and they forgot about the other, the ‘political revolution’, which was to send the ‘bureaucracy’ packing and re-institute the authentic rule of the workers.
New Beginnings
I met Alan Johnson, if not yet on the head of an ideological pin, at least on an especially vertiginous section of the journey, in Socialist Organiser, later to become Workers’ Liberty. This group was both the most ideologically combative Trotskyist group around, and also the one that took its anti-totalitarian tradition the most seriously. At the time I joined, in 1986, Socialist Organiser was being cajoled and coerced by its leader and theoretician, Sean Matgamna, away from the antizionism that had already become standard on the Trotskyist left. Matgamna was educating his group with the ability to recognise, and to recognise the significance of, antisemitism (see chapter five in this volume). He was of genuinely working class heritage, from County Clare in Ireland; he had been a dock worker; he had been brought up Catholic. He had participated in the ‘Free Derry’ campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland but as a socialist rather than as an Irish nationalist. His clarity on antisemitism was unusual. Sean was influential in the political education of a number of people who later contributed significantly to shaping the responses in Britain of the Jewish community, and of society more generally, to antizionism and its boycott and the Corbyn movements. Sean is, however, quite incapable of taking any pride in this fact, seeing us only as renegades from the true path and so partly responsible for its ultimate failure.
Alan and I were to find different paths down from Trotskyism, and perhaps we each sacrificed some different things in doing so. In the age of populism, some of the neo-conservatives in America, the never-Trump Republicans, influenced as they were by Trotskyism, ended up looking liberal, democratic and principled but they also found themselves isolated again, on a new lonely ledge. Alan was not attracted, I think, to what looked to him like the abstract individualism of ‘neoliberalism’. He eschewed the loneliness of that individualism, at least in principle, yearning to stay close to more traditional class and national solidarities. His was the socialism of working class community. Maybe our distinct paths, which sometimes have ravines and jutting peaks between them, but at other times are not far from each other at all, will converge again; maybe they won’t. Or maybe hoping for absolute convergence is, itself, as though there was one true consciousness and others that were all false. I was 19 and Alan was a few years older. At that age it feels significant and I never got over thinking of him as being senior to me, and wanting his approval.
My mum was, aged 8, a 1938 refugee from Germany. Her family knew how to fit in with middle class sensibilities, but it had been unjustly, brutally and murderously excluded from those comforts, and discomforts. Her dad retained the steel and the business sharpness that had led him from Poland to some success in Germany. My dad was a scholarship boy, from the big, immigrant, Jewish, working class communities in London’s East End. He was never taught to pray in Hebrew because his left-wing people had no time for it; but they did value education and he was clever enough to find the value in it. Mum, an enemy alien and a Jew, was sent to a school that she hated, in Bedford, run by nuns who bullied her. Dad must have appeared as an extraordinary specimen when he arrived at his minor public school near Epping Forest, a cockney Jewish kid amongst public schoolboys. His emotional life was beaten far down inside him and he learnt to pass as an English gentleman.
He went into medical school, and he came out of it to help build the brave new NHS, literally inside the shell of a Victorian workhouse, at Barnet Hospital. He pioneered a geriatric medicine that brought, for the first time, science and dignity to the care of old people. Mum learnt interior design in a Milan where Aldo Gucci was selling the Dolce Vita and Gianni Versace was in his teens. My parents built a simulacrum of middle class perfection for me and my sisters, in a big house in Highgate, but we didn’t quite buy it; or if we did, we thought that there was something wrong with us, that made us feel alien to it. That was my path to student Trotskyism.
I think Alan might be as ambivalent about our shared Trotskyist heritage as I am; not quite either nonchalant or at peace with it, but simultaneously, proud of it and ashamed too. It was in some senses a combination of a wildly radical, but also a solidly pragmatic politics. Our Trotskyism was concerned with big principles and with the ambitious, far-off goal of securing profound change and re-making the world; we referred to ‘capitalism’ as a system of ‘wage-slavery’. But this concern with the world as it might be, as it should be, was always anchored firmly to the world as it is. Our Socialist Organiser tradition wanted to know which way to turn now, and which way to lead today. But we satisfied ourselves with a vision of our final destination that was profoundly vague. After the revolution, we said, people will find ways to live and to overcome problems, which we, deformed by the capitalism within which we live and which formed us, and which lowered our horizons, cannot conceive of yet.
Ours was a socialism of working class self-emancipation, but immediately of the radical transformation of the existing movements of that class. The ‘party’ of the future was to be a catalyst to the practical struggles and reform fights of today, not a substitute for those movements, trading in fantasies of revolutionary violence. Hannah Arendt thought that at the heart of twentieth century totalitarianism was an especially toxic ingredient: the breaking free of utopian thinking from immediate, practical, material concerns. Class politics, she argued, binds people into communities with shared, limited and obtainable goals,[5] while totalitarian politics gains a hold where those communal bonds are already cut; and to the extent that those bonds persist, totalitarianism cuts them anyway. It preys on masses of furious, atomised individuals, who have already been spat out of society, who it teaches to obsess only about a far off and dreamed future of sweet revenge and utopian comfort. The ‘masses’ that totalitarian politics prey on are people who have no immediate next step forward and no comrades to take it with; totalitarian politics seduces them into relating to the world only through the single figure of the strong-man leader and the fantasies they sow of revenge and utopia. Each of totalitarianism’s ‘new men’ project their own fantasies onto the infallible leader, who makes them coherent and good, who makes each part of a whole, and who speaks for ‘the people’.
Trotskyism had trouble holding together actually existing communities of interest, and communities of ‘consciousness’, with its radically ambitious dreams of humanity transformed. Which is to restate the thesis, that Trotskyists generally ended up sacrificing either one or the other.
We were strong on the practical politics of utopia. Socialist Organiser made us think about big ideas, but always in the context of how they play out in the present. What is important, according to high principle, but then, what does that mean in immediate, practical terms? My family had the vision to see the world closing in but they also had the courage to act on their clarity of vision; and the ones already in England, they liked the big ideas, but the boy studied medicine, not sociology. Alan’s big visions were also anchored in the world, My mum’s cousin had been at Auschwitz but she died in a warm hospital in Tel Aviv, six decades later, surrounded by children and grandchildren, and doctors and carers. That is what winning looks like. My cousin proudly showed her my newly published book, Contemporary Left Antisemitism, as she lay there. She looked. She turned it over. She opened it. Her face was sceptical and she shrugged. ‘Does he make a living writing this?’ she asked, ‘why didn’t he study medicine like his father?’
We were big talkers, and big thinkers, but we were also doers. In the early 2000s we were more and more worried by left wing movements around us becoming unmoored from the material world and floating off where they fancied. We had once thought we were revolutionaries, but the scholarly thinking around us was a hundred or a thousand times more radical; yet in reality it was much less radical. It did not challenge existing inequalities or injustices in any practical way, but it did corrupt ways of thinking about them and co-opt them into maximalist utopian frameworks.
The scholars seemed not to care, or even to notice; perhaps because they were not connected to any practical sense in which it mattered, other than their own success in constructing rhetorical criticism. People were no longer satisfied addressing the oppressive structures of social relations, as we had been; they wanted to smash everything: truth, reason, civil society, state, freedom, law, community, nation, democracy, friendship. They were all denounced as completely fake productions of those who benefit from ‘the system’, facades to hide reality and to fool the majority into consenting to their own subordination. George Orwell, half a century earlier, had already nailed this ultra-radicalism. If all of the structures of social life were only tricks, played on us by the powerful, then the only thing that was real was raw power. If there was no legitimate authority, then all that was important in life was indeed O’Brien’s vision, from 1984, of a boot stamping on a human face, forever. We could not make headway in this culture – either intellectually or careerwise. We just kept on shouting, in our academic writing, ‘the Emperor has no clothes!’ In the folk tale, that was all that was needed for people to see the truth; but in the real world, just stating it was not enough.
One of our common mentors, Robert Fine, also with a Socialist Organiser pedigree, worked hard in the realm of social theory to hold on to both the radicalism and the anti-totalitarianism of the tradition. He argued that we should never let go of the critique of existing conditions, with their injustices, inequalities and violence; but he said that we must also keep a tight hold, with our other hand, of the critique of the critique. By ‘critique of the critique’, he meant the critical engagement with ideas and movements that are oppositional with respect to existing conditions. The experience of the descent of radical movements into totalitarianism changes everything for those of us who still seek radical change. Perhaps Robert Fine’s key observation, the alarm that his work sounds, is that the significance of totalitarianism has not sufficiently registered inside radical thinking and politics. It has not changed everything; it has not changed nearly enough. Those who champion the radical critique have not understood their own responsibility to engage critically with their own critical traditions.[6]
I remember Alan Johnson saying that it was becoming impossible to operate in an intellectual and political environment that was increasingly unmoored from truth, reason and the civilisational gains of the democratic and industrial revolutions and from an engagement with the potential consequences of their thinking. His argument was that we needed to build our own journals and institutions. The unusual thing about Alan was that he did not just say it, but he also did it. In 2005, he built Democratiya, a journal of rational, Enlightenment-based thought and politics; visions anchored to the world. Truth, we insisted, could be approached via debate and discussion, so there had to be intellectual pluralism.
The issue of the Enlightenment illuminates a central dividing line in today’s thinking. Our Marxist tradition held that the problem was unjust social structures of power which excluded the majority of people from the full benefits of the Enlightenment. Our project was to complete the Enlightenment for all of humanity, rather than allow it to remain something that worked for the privileged. But today, our students are taught that far from being the solution, the Enlightenment was the problem. The injustices of ancient societies were re-founded by the Enlightenment, our students are taught, in ways that created a modernity of unimaginably efficient, rationalised and powerful oppression to replace the piecemeal and personalised oppression of old. In this view, the Enlightenment was the fall into darkness, not the path towards the light; and it was a fall which, more and more, is being treated in practice as irreversible. This giving up on aspirations to change the world tends to result in the acceptance of a negative politics of ‘resistance’, and then a moralist framework by which we absolve ourselves of responsibility for the terrible world that we have given up trying to fix.
Alan Johnson created Democratiya out of nothing, with no money, and he published sixteen issues. (Democratiya was incorporated into Dissent magazine in 2010 and is archived at the Dissent website.) At just about the same moment, I came face to face with the common-sense notion that Israel was a unique and symbolic evil on the planet and that we should address it by excluding Israeli scholars from our campuses, our journals and our conferences. The antisemitism, oozing out from every crack of the academic boycott campaign, came to find me. At the time, I was just about beginning to feel I belonged in a university sociology department, but I learnt that I was not at all at home. I was transformed by this antisemitic thinking from a sociologist into a Zionist sociologist, meaning a dishonest, racist and corrupt sociologist. It was clear to me how my exclusion was antisemitic; but that clarity was rare. I, with others, who not entirely accidentally also shared some political heritage with us, set about building the Engage network and website, to organise resistance, in practical, political and intellectual terms, to the antisemitism that had been recycled by 20th century Stalinism and re-disseminated, after the collapse of the peace process, at the Durban World Conference against Racism in 2001. In an inspired moment in 2011, the British Israel Communications Research Centre (BICOM), employed Alan Johnson to reboot its work of promoting awareness and knowledge about Israel in the UK. And in an inspired moment, Alan built Fathom; another project to construct our own journals and institutions within which we could take forward serious political education and debate, this time about Israel and its relationships with its neighbours and the world. In Britain, and not only in Britain, thinking about Israel is significantly connected to antisemitism, so Fathom was necessarily concerned with that too. Fathom was necessary because rational and reality-based discussion was locked out of the mainstream academic and political discussion in Britain on these topics.
Fathom has kept on going for ever a decade, due almost entirely to Alan’s will to make that happen, combined with his talent and his experience in knowing how to make it happen; and his political and intellectual judgment about how it should best navigate the boundaries of the discourse that it needs to cover.
I experienced writing in Fathom as a liberation from the gaslighting that passes for peer review inside the institutions of the antisemitic hostile environment that is today’s academia. In Fathom you could write what you felt needed to be written, and I think that some of my best writing on antisemitism was published there. Alan Johnson’s knowledgeable, decisive and sensitive editing helped too. And Fathom was also hugely more nimble than the dinosaur academic journals, where it can take two years to publish an article. And it is all open access, not hidden away behind the dusty paywalls of the ivory tower.
[1] Alan Johnson. 2019. Institutionally Antisemitic: Contemporary Left Antisemitism and the Crisis in the British Labour Party. Fathom May 2019. https://fathomjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Institutionally-Antisemitic-Report-FINAL-6.pdf
[2] David Hirsh. 2016. “How Raising the Issue of Antisemitism Puts You Outside the Community of the Progressive: The Livingstone Formulation,” in Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism: Past & Present, ed. Eunice G Pollack. Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press. https://engageonline.wordpress.com/2016/04/29/the-livingstone-formulation-david-hirsh-2
[3] Hannah Arendt. 1963/1990. On Revolution. London: Penguin, p. 60.
[4] In reality, when elections to the Parliament, and then also to the Soviets, produced non-Bolshevik majorities, both were abolished in favour of rule by the Party. This practice violated the second defining feature of Leninism, encapsulated in the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’’ in favour of the first, the centrality of the Party. But the Party principle also applies within the Party, in the sense that the leadership relates to the Party as the Party relates to the ‘Soviets’ – and so the leadership principle violates the Party principle. Of course the leadership principle was to become, in the hands of Stalin, the Leader Principle, familiar also from the practice of ‘National Socialism’ in Germany.
[5] Hannah Arendt. 1951/1985. The Origins of Totalitarianism San Diego: Harcourt Brace.
[6] Robert Fine. 2001. Political Investigations: Hegel, Marx, Arendt. New York: Routledge.
