Corbyn’s ‘rigged system’ politics is a template for antisemitism

The Labour leader’s rhetoric about a corrupt elite pitted against ‘the people’ has helped drive Jew-hate on the left

AT THE end of 2016, with his leadership floundering, it was reported that Jeremy Corbyn intended to take inspiration from the newly-elected Donald Trump, and cast himself as “the leader of a populist, anti-establishment movement”. The fruits of this new strategy were soon apparent in Mr Corbyn’s speeches, in which he began to denounce British capitalism as a “rigged system” — a phrase Mr Trump had lifted from his Democrat rival, Bernie Sanders.

Mr Corbyn argued this system had been “set up by the wealth extractors for the wealth extractors”, and pinned the blame for Britain’s travails on a “morally bankrupt” elite who “extract wealth from the pockets ordinary working people” by means of a corrupt “racket”.

The “rigged system” trope has now been honed into Mr Corbyn’s rhetorical weapon of choice. There is no doubt that this campaign strategy of pitting “ordinary working people” against a corrupt and unproductive “elite” has proved a huge success.

This creation of a division between a productive “us” and a morally-compromised “them” is the sine qua non of populist politics, on both right and left, and it has borne significant electoral fruit.

The rampant inequality of income and wealth Mr Corbyn rightly highlights needs tackling. But in our recent book, Corbynism: A Critical Approach, we use the work of critical theorists like Moishe Postone and David Hirsh to argue that the depiction of capitalism as a “rigged system” imposed by a minority of “wealth extractors” on “the many” carries potentially troubling resonances. Pushed to its limits, such a depiction can nurture the development of an antisemitic worldview.

This is by no means inevitable. We do not claim that, in itself, the phrase “for the many not the few” — which features in the revised Clause IV instituted by Tony Blair — is antisemitic, latently or otherwise. Rather, we argue that when a political movement is built around the notion of an allpowerful elite extracting wealth from an innocent productive people, the potential is there to create an environment where antisemitic perspectives are legitimised.

This is not to condemn the left in its entirety. As Robert Fine and Philip Spencer have shown, despite the persistence of a distinctive form of leftwing antisemitism, the most cogent critiques of antisemitism have historically come from the left. By critiquing notions of the “rigged system”, or “the people” against the “elite”, our concern is to defend rather than denigrate the possibility of an effective anti-capitalist politics. Our critique stems from a fundamentally different understanding of capitalism. In our view, capitalism is not a monolithic system consciously designed and covertly imposed by one group — be it the “capitalist class”, the “bourgeoisie” or the “elite” — upon another, whether that is the “workers” or “the people”.

Capitalism is a specific historical form taken by human social relations. It compels everyone — rich and poor — to behave in certain ways in order to survive, even whilst one group benefits at the other’s expense. Companies have to compete to make a profit in order to avoid going bankrupt. This is a compulsion, not a choice. Workers have to go to work in order to earn a wage to buy the things they need. We have no other option.

There is no doubt that the former enjoy a better time of it than the latter. Indeed, inequality — in Marxist terms, the result of the capitalist’s exploitation of the worker — is an unavoidable consequence of the way capitalist labour is organised. Exploitation is not a moral failing on behalf of a business owner, or a form of robbery. It is systemic. Even the nicest, fairest capitalist exploits their workers.

But capitalism is more than mere exploitation. The compulsion to continually produce profit is beyond the control of any individual or institution, no matter how much money or power they have, and has a dynamic of its own which constantly forces both capitalists and workers to adapt to its changing demands at a given time in order to survive. As Marx put it, capital is an intangible yet mighty force that “works behind the backs” of those who live under its sway.

The “rigged system” conceit is not just a neat rhetorical trick adopted for electoral gain, but a lens through which some on the left and right view this dynamic, with different results.

Through the prism of the “rigged system”, this ongoing process of political and economic transformation is explained solely by the machinations of powerful groups.

For example, a scheming elite, we are led to believe, callously destroyed the old Keynesian system of “real” industrial production in order to construct an international financial system that, producing nothing, merely

The elite, we are led to believe, helped destroy ‘real’ industrial production’