Book Review: Safety Through Solidarity
From Freedom News UK
Burley and Lorber’s project is both honourable and necessary, but why do they let Marxist antisemitism off the hook?
~ Jay Arachnid ~
Poor timing or perfect timing? Re-centring American Jewish voices crying out against the weaponisation of Jewish trauma by extremist right-wing/quasi-fascist Israeli politicians while at the same time deflecting and minimising the homicidal oppression of Palestinians (and now Lebanese)? I ordered this book prior to the audacious October 7 Hamas attacks; the authors had to scramble to incorporate something about it in their introduction and toward the end of the text.
Sadly, their attempt to acknowledge the shock in the Jewish diaspora (as well as inside Israel) falls a bit flat after the ensuing – and typically – hideously disproportionate response by the Israeli military in Gaza and paramilitary settlers in the occupied West Bank, facilitated by the easy flow of weapons from the USA. And now (as of this writing) in Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria (and perhaps Iran by the time this is published). Given the public outrage against Israeli massacres of non-combatants, the targeted assassinations of journalists, and the bombing of schools and hospitals, it feels uncomfortably self-centred to read a book about mostly non-deadly Jew-hatred.
To their great credit, Burley and Lorber have provided a concise but still excellent history of antisemitism in the first 138 pages (chapters one through six). Also excellent are the ways they briefly interrogate others’ analyses of Jew-hatred as inadequate, obsolete, or in the case of chapter two (Neither Eternal, Nor Inevitable: New Perspectives on ‘The Oldest Hatred’), politically biased. Yet in chapter five (The Socialism of Fools: Antisemitism and Anti-Capitalism), they succumb to their own. Despite being known as anarchists for years, they have a soft analytical spot for some broad Left, even while taking various leftists to task for harbouring, maintaining, and sometimes promoting a vulgar populist-driven antisemitism. On pages 100-101, they write:
“Unlike the Right, the early European Left tended less to look backward at restoring a nostalgic past, and more to look forward, to the building of a more equal society. But they, too, often propagated antisemitism in misguided attempts to ‘punch up’ at the root of capitalism, and the ‘Jewish question’ was a fiercely common debate among Leftists. In the mid-nineteenth century, influential anarchist theorist Mikhail Bakunin railed against ‘the whole Jewish world, which constitutes a single exploitative sect, a sort of bloodsucker people, a collective parasite, voracious… every popular revolution is accompanied by a massacre of Jews: a natural consequence’. Anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon went further, insisting that ‘the Jew is the enemy of the human race. One must send this race back to Asia or exterminate it’”.
The very name of the Lorber and Burley’s chapter cries out for an explanation of Marx and Marxist Jew-hatred. Yet despite correctly raking the old-guard anarchists over the coals — insinuating that anarchists (alone? especially?) are the ones to watch out for — the authors pointedly and inexplicably ignore (or is it censor?) the contributions of Marx and his many followers to this unfortunate discourse; they briefly mention Red Army pogroms in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War as well as the idiocies of the German Communist Party in the 1930s, who made the accusation that “Nazis help Jewish capital” (p 106). Also mentioned in passing are Stalinist anti-Jewish purges in the former Soviet Union “and satellite states like Czechoslovakia”, (p 107), accusing Jews of being Zionist agents (despite the Soviet Union being among the first governments to recognise the new state of Israel in 1948); here, “Zionists” was clearly a codeword for Jews, aka “rootless cosmopolitans”, generally accused of dual loyalty, and therefore politically unreliable. They rightly accuse contemporary leftists of minimising and/or ignoring antisemitism because “Jews are white and therefore oppressors” (and other similar nonsense), but never bother to question where these prejudices might come from.
Since Burley and Lorber are (anarcho-)leftist organiser-activists, it’s taken for granted that there should be – indeed, must be if there isn’t already – a mass movement for social justice based on anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, and that this renewed mass movement (the incipient stages of which are allegedly seen in the Palestinian solidarity movement[s]) needs to take antisemitism seriously if it to succeed. They write, “It is through… building community and organizing a mass movement, that we can build safety through solidarity, and win a just world” (p 325). This is perhaps their primary reason for avoiding taking Marxism to task for being just as mired in anti-Jewish caricature-based prejudice as Bakunin and Proudhon; the risk of alienating people with a history of Marxist-dominated mass movements is just too great. But if radical social justice activists are allowed to challenge pro-Palestinians for their support of Hamas and Hezbollah (“despite those groups’ reactionary beliefs”, p 214 –I would call this kind of truncated and facile anti-imperialism the other socialism of fools), shouldn’t they equally be able to challenge a truncated anti-capitalism that includes the Jew-hatred in which Marx was mired, and which too many of his followers continue to perpetuate? Or is there no historical throughline within the socialism of fools?
The topic of antisemitism requires a multilayered and nuanced analysis in order to defy the too-easy conflation of Jews and Israelis – or making diaspora Jews responsible for and representative of Israeli policies (not coincidentally the shared wet dream of zionists and antisemites). And in the wake of the latest round of seemingly endless and increasingly horrifying Israeli atrocities, the potential targeting of non-Israeli Jews for retaliatory violence is sadly real. Burley and Lorber’s project to counter the mundane racism of collective guilt/responsibility is both honourable and necessary, and they have provided anarchists and other radicals a critical entry-point into the discourse.
Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism, by Shane Burley and Ben Lorber. Melville House Publishing, 2024. 375 pages.