everyone's doing corbyn retrospectives & i don't have any provocative takes. felt in a weird position all along as my family & several comrades were corbynites while i wasn't. i just hope ppl have taken the right lessons from what i'm sure's been a painful & exhausting experience

the last few years have forced & challenged those of us who want more than Labourism can ever "give" us to justify how we think/what we do against the unrelenting realpolitik of the radical left collapsing into Corbyn's Labour party & the structural & historical limits that sets

i've tried to steer clear of superiority&snark in relating to this wave. i guess a lot of ppl will think i've failed but it's been a painful process for us all as ruptures scythed thru orgs & relationships - this is what capital/state & electoralism have always done & always will

i guess my main relation to corbynism ended up being the oversized impact accusations (most exaggerated, wrong or simplistic but still many real & not taken seriously) of antisemitism had. this forced me to think & feel my Jewishness in ways i never have b4 (itself a privilege)

as a non practising, irreligious, and in a way nonBritish, Jew, i experienced, above all, the racialising discourses of antisemitism, and how ingrained and subtle, complex, even ambiguous, they are. And how this racism has profound legacies on the British and European Left.

some of this is in common with bourgeois, state, ruling class antisemitism but some of it has to be given due agency wrt the history of whiteness/bordering/xenophobia/racism of the European working class through history that is so often erased in histories of parties & unions

this has been erased by today's left. "race" & racism have, by & large, not been talked about seriously. this has been for structural & electoral reasons on the part of long-travelled Labour party logics but above all because the discourse has been dominated by the reactionaries

for whom broad & mixed up, often cynical, definitions of antisemitism have been apprehended merely as a stick to beat a slightly more leftwing electoral prospect into submission. spraying accusations of antisemitism around like machine gun rounds with no care for consequences

i have so much hatred & disdain in my heart for these ppl, we all know who they are. this blurred everything into a further murky and squalid situation of conspiracy theory & defensiveness & lines drawn.

if anything i became more sympathetic to corbynites because the accusations became so grossly divergent from my experience of the majority of ppl in the movement (apart from the ones who were antisemitic to me, fuck you lol.)

anyway, this was unplanned and too long and going nowhere so just read our book when we publish it to see what i think about race/class/gender/social movements/ history/capital/state. My main interest, antiracism, has *a lot* of work ahead, imo, to build from this situation.