Reply To: Zionism and anti semitism
Just heard a silly Labour MP, Siobhain McDonagh, MP for Mitcham and Morden in London, say on the radio that if you are anti-capitalist you are anti-semitic because this means you are against rich Jews. She said such people, by which she meant anti-capitalists, had no place in the Labour Party. Which in a sense is true – if you are against capitalism there is no place for you in the Labour Party as it is a party that has always supported capitalism. But of course you can be against capitalism without being anti-semitic.
Having said that, the sort of “anti-capitalism” that circulated at the Occupy camps and within Zeitgeist a few years ago (attacks on “banksters” and finance capitalists, currency crankism, New World Order, conspiracy theories) did have an anti-semitic tinge with leaflets frequently singling out the Rothschilds. It seems that some who were influenced by these ideas joined the Labour Party as part of the Corbyn intake. Not his fault of course, but it brings out the importance of our view that banking is not the essence of capitalism but this is just one sphere of capitalist investment for profit that is not particularly worse than any other spheres.
The pre-WW1 German Social Democrat August Bebel is supposed to have described anti-semitism as the “socialism of fools”. The “anti-capitalism of fools” might be a better description.