It’s the opening rally of Marxism 2023, the “festival of socialist ideas” organised by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). We are tightly gathered into the Quakers’ central hall at Friends House. But, unlike your traditional Quaker meeting (austere, silent, confessional), the mood is one of daring, colour, braggadocio. Speeches are interrupted by whooping applause, if not by collective chanting. Not a great deal of laughter though — in this place enthusiasm goes hand-in-hand with militancy. Side-lined from the Labour Party since the catastrophe of the 2019 election, the hard Left is no longer satisfied with the lucid registration of historical defeat. I’m told this is the biggest Marxism festival for a decade, since the crest of the post-Occupy and anti-austerity movements. But now the final disintegration of capitalism is nigh. They believe this is their time.

Never mind the old joke about socialism taking up too many evenings with dingy “meetings”. Marxism 2023 isn’t shy. Settling in for a long weekend of proselytising, it has booked out the blocks and quads of the entire SOAS campus. And aside from a brief scuffle with some far-Right counter-protesters, all goes smoothly. The Art Deco halls of Senate House are bedecked in posters. On the grass and patios a fleet of trestle tables has docked, groaning under the weight of revolutionary literature. An intergenerational crowd moves between them. The grizzled remnants of the old labour movement are here, “the warriors for the working-day” with their buckets for donated change. But I also meet students attending for the first time. There’s one thing they all agree on. There’s a fresh energy here. “It’s younger.” “More enthusiastic.” “More open.”

But, like Milton’s rebel angels, the radical Left has been exiled from frontline influence to that bottomless hell of irrelevant perdition: the university campus. Do they have answers for our historical moment? Here to narrate the theoretical underlay over video link is Adam Tooze, who has probably done the most to repopularise a Marxian worldview in recent years. In conversation with SWP vanguardist Alex Callinicos, he trades names and abstractions. Lukács and Horkheimer; “complex totalities” and “conjunctural analysis”. But they capture the mood best when they returned to plain Anglo-Saxon. We are living through an “oh shit” moment, says Tooze. A polycrisis of pandemic, climate change, war and neoliberal collapse not seen since the Seventies. The rough end of capitalism (or, as they say around here, its copious “internal contradictions”) has never felt more real. There’s talk of Hobsbawm’s “age of catastrophe” — the years 1914-1945.

So far, so inarguable. It’s a language that’s trickled into the mainstream commentariat, words such as “structural” and “systematic” polished off and redeployed. And labour (not the party) has organised itself in response. The recent record of Britain’s trade unions is a point of pride at Marxism 2023. Fighting for wage increases ahead of inflation, they’ve had their busiest year for a generation. The number of days lost to strikes in 2022 (2.47 million) was the highest since 1989, and the 2023 figure will exceed even that. Picket lines are a daily constant, whether at railway stations or primary schools. And Marxism 2023 was themed around collective action. Tucked away in the smaller rooms, of course, there were still events such as “Family affair: does capitalism want you to have kids?” But the headliners were far more grimly dialectical. “System crash.” “The New Age of Catastrophe.” Not for them the woolly identity politics of the 2010s: here is a harder, sharper project.

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The challenge for the radical Left has always been how to convince workers to connect their experiences with the politics of revolution. But Darren Westwood, an Amazon warehouse worker from Coventry who addressed the opening rally alongside Smalls, has already done this. He mobilised the first British strike action against Amazon in January after he was offered a 50p per hour pay rise (to £10.50, a fraction over minimum wage) — when he questioned it, he was told he “should’ve bought shares”. It started as a wildcat strike with a few mates, but now, with hundreds of colleagues signed up and the support of the GMB union, he says it’s “all-out war”.

But until that Damascene moment, he had little politics beyond alienation. He didn’t really bother voting; he doesn’t see the parties as red or blue, but “a dirty purple”. The only choice was “which one is less shit”. But: “I consider myself now as a Marxist. My eyes have been opened and I see it as an alternative. And people point to Venezuela — ‘inflation’s through the roof’. That’s Great Britain now under capitalism … Everyone in this country is angry with what’s going on. Everyone. And all the voices are saying the same thing: there’s got to be a change.” That final clause is a clarion that any voter on Right or Left could have sounded in the past decade.

One of the stories of that decade has been the Left’s failure to successfully interpret this rage. A brief flowering of populist-socialists around Europe has wilted. In Britain, the populist Right has been the principle beneficiary of our turbulence and alienation, turning apathetics into activists and offering the promise of social transformation through projects such as Brexit. As the economic situation worsens, particularly at the crummy extremes of the gig economy, some of that energy is being diverted Left — to its most traditional institution, the trade union — and it can be detected throughout the Festival. Ben, a student from Bradford, is here because he’s “bored as fuck”. Back home, he says, “all you end up doing is going out, getting pissed — the so-called student lifestyle. And it’s just boring. I want to see something change, so I’ll come down here and see it.”

There’s a tentative path forward for the Left if they can capture this, translate that visceral grumble into a politics of inspiration. But the path backwards is here too. Just after lunch on Saturday, Jeremy Corbyn speaks at the culture tent. He’s been asked to discuss his three books that changed the world. There are cheers as he arrives and he looks happy. A reverential hush comes over the crowd. It doesn’t matter what he’s going to say. It’s him that’s saying it. But there’s an immediate air of disappointment as he starts boring away about An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. By the time he’s onto his visit to the Texas agricultural museum, and certainly by the time he starts actually reading from the book, even this captive audience begins to trickle away. He’s a grandfather reading stories, not a leader.

But Keir Starmer’s not their leader either. Whenever I mention his name people look revolted. Some look as though they’re going to spit. I ask Ben to describe him in a word and he laughs: “You wouldn’t be able to say it.” (“Tosser”, he later clarifies.) “I don’t have enough swear words,” an otherwise kindly 77-year-old woman tells me, shaking her head. The hard Left had an accord with the Labour Party so long as Corbyn was in charge, perhaps even as long as Starmer pledged to imitate his policy platform. But the purges, the obsessive ideological discipline, have forced them elsewhere. Lewis Nielsen (joint national secretary of the SWP and an organiser of Marxism 2023) tells me their strength and their success lie outside Parliament, “in protests, with strikes… Real change comes from below”.

They say they’ve sold 4,000 tickets; Lenin seized the Winter Palace with fewer. But are these people plotting a revolution or waiting for one? And what follows — a centrally-planned economy run by the SWP? Marxism 2023 has been tastefully marketed in Barbie pink (“Did Marx ever wear pink?”), with the party name excised from the posters. But through the gates, you hit a blizzard of joining-forms and evangelical cadres — who look at you very strangely when you stand them up. Socialist ideas aside, it’s clear this Festival is substantially a membership drive. And there are historic questions about the SWP’s own toxicity. Some 700 members disowned the party after it allegedly covered up a rape case in 2013, including prominent Marxist writers like Richard Seymour and China Miéville (the SWP later admitted it “failed the two women who made the complaints”). It may be a harder, sharper world than the soft Left, but it can also be a nastier one.

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After 2008, the Occupy movement also believed they were bearing witness to the final irresolvable crisis of capitalism. And they were wrong. Different people have come to Marxism 2023 seeking alternatives, seeking answers to their sense of political rage. But how much do university lecturers and Amazon warehouse workers really have in common, other than the fact that they’re both on strike? When, at the closing rally, Amy Leather from the SWP leadership declares, “we’re against all immigration controls and we say, ‘open the borders, all refugees welcome’”, how many people does she expect to win over?

If we read Marxism 2023 as a symptom rather than a cause though, it clearly reflects political energy searching for an outlet. Anton Jager has described our age as one of “hyperpolitics”: politics is everywhere again, on the streets and in our lives. But it is not being practised through the parties or associative structures which traditionally generate change. Instead we see the scattered, the lost and the angry — everywhere from the gilets-jaunes to the BLM protesters and the Brexit vote. The question of state failure and democratic deficit is repeatedly posed and never resolved. However fervent its leadership, this isn’t a vehicle for revolutionary socialism. Its reach is too narrow. Its heraldry — the clenched fist, the Internationale — looks back, not forwards.

The new leader does seem sincere in his desire to decontaminate the party. But however committed Keir Starmer and his allies may be to expelling members, it’s a bit like painting the Forth Bridge. Kick one out and another will emerge.

The problem runs deep. But the problem isn’t Labour per se. The party was never the origin of anti-Semitism in British politics. Members didn’t wake up one morning and decide that because Jeremy Corbyn was leader they would start to hate Jews. The anti-Semitism was latent. It was within them, inculcated and maturing over years. Mr Corbyn gave them a feeling that it was ok to say certain things publicly, but the real issue is why they harboured such anti-Semitism ideas in the first place. And the blame for that lies with academia.

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Anti-Semitism runs deep in Britain

By Matthew Sweet

Campus anti-Semitism is the hidden story of the past few years. A Community Security Trust report published last month recorded 123 university incidents in the past two years. Indeed, such is the scale of the problem that, as editor of the Jewish Chronicle, I constantly hear parents and prospective students saying that they will not consider some universities because of their reputation for anti-Semitism.

This is anti-Semitism that hides in plain sight; it is recorded and is a major topic of discussion within the Jewish community. But there has, until very recently, been little focus on it from elsewhere — as if somehow those responsible are merely overgrown kids getting a bit too overheated in debates over the Middle East.

But this is a complete misunderstanding of the real problem. Far from it being the preserve of students, campus anti-Semitism often emanates from, is propagated by and is defended by academics and the university authorities themselves. When examining problems on campus the focus should be primarily on academics, not students.

Take what happened at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). It was reported last week that the university has agreed to pay £15,000 — the cost of his tuition fees — to Noah Lewis, a former student who had to withdraw from his course because of what he called a “toxic, antisemitic environment on campus”.

SOAS’s first ‘investigation’ recommended that Mr Lewis be paid £500 to cover a few expenses. Mr Lewis appealed, and the independent panel set up to consider his appeal was withering in its judgment, arguing that the first panel had simply ignored the student’s broader complaint about the environment at SOAS.

Mr Lewis had complained that there were racist daubings on campus and that criticisms of Israeli policy “often morph into attacks on the State of Israel and then further progress into blatant attacks on Jews in general”. The full account he provided to the appeal is shocking even for those of us used to this sort of thing. That’s probably why the appeal panel recommended setting up a further independent investigation into what it said was prima facie evidence that there was indeed a “toxic, antisemitic environment” at SOAS.

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The real importance of the appeal ruling, however, is not that it upheld the accounts provided by Mr Lewis. It’s that the appeal exposed the institutional failure of SOAS’s own academics to treat Mr Lewis’ complaints properly. This is a story that is repeated time after time.

Worse, it is often the academics who are responsible for fostering such an intolerant atmosphere and who are then protected by their colleagues. Fifteen of the incidents described in the CST report were perpetrated by academic staff, including four at the University of Warwick, two at the University of Leeds and two at the University of Nottingham.

In November 2019, for example, a Jewish student at the University of Warwick alerted CST to a lecture on Israel and Palestine by Goldie Osuri, Associate Professor of Sociology. The student reported that the lecturer had said to students, “this idea that the Labour Party is antisemitic is very much an Israeli lobby kind of idea…”.

Warwick’s Jewish Israeli Society then released a recording of these comments and submitted a complaint to the university on behalf of the Jewish student, who wished to remain anonymous. In response, Dr Osuri emailed the entire class informing them of the complaint and recommending that her students look at the website of Jewish Voice for Labour (a notorious Corbynite group set up solely to deny claims of Labour anti-Semitism) which, as Dr Osuri put it, “argue that the claims of anti-semitism against the Labour Party are orchestrated”.

The Jewish student understandably felt targeted and intimidated by Dr Osuri for being involved in a complaint, even before it had been investigated. Then the university said it could not consider the recording and would seek to punish whoever was responsible for it as it breached data protection.

The investigation later dismissed the student’s complaint, ruling that Dr Osuri’s statement was legitimate “within the principles and values of tolerance and freedom of speech”. But — extraordinarily — the president of the Jewish Israeli Society (who had submitted the complaint against Dr Osuri on behalf of the Jewish student) was told by the university authorities that a complaint had been made against him by Dr Osuri and another academic, and that he was being charged with “Violation of the Policy on Recording of Lectures by Students” and “bullying and harassment and a defamation of the academic reputation of Dr Goldie Osuri”.

It took three months for this investigation to be completed, with all charges dropped.

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The whole sorry episode reeks of attacking Jews for daring to complain about perceived anti-Semitism. It effectively sends the message to Jewish students and those who represent them that they should shut up and put up with whatever they are faced with, to exculpate the offender and find a way to blame the complainant. To blame the Jew for his own victimhood, in other words — an all too familiar theme in history.

Another example, at Bristol University, is equally revealing. In February 2019, two Jewish students reported to CST what they considered to be anti-Semitic content taught in a lecture in the course “Harms of the Powerful” by David Miller, Professor of Political Sociology at the university. Prof Miller was said to have shown a PowerPoint slide with a diagram featuring a web of Jewish organisations, placed under or subservient to the “Israeli government”.

The topic was ‘Islamophobia’, and the slide was part of Professor Miller’s explanation of his theory that the “Zionist movement (parts of)” is part of a global network that promotes and encourages hatred of Muslims and of Islam. The PowerPoint presentation used by Miller during the lecture included CST and other mainstream UK Jewish organisations and leaders in this diagram, implying that they are part of this alleged Islamophobic network.

A Jewish student in the lecture gave CST a written statement that “as a Jewish student I felt uncomfortable and intimidated in his class. I know and understand what he says is false, it is clear however that a number of students in the class believe him, just because he is an academic”. The same student claimed that “I fear that if he found out that I was Jewish this would negatively affect my experience throughout this unit”.

A different Jewish student in his class further stated that “I don’t think it is right that I should have to sit in a lecture or seminar in fear. Fear that he will offend me personally or for fear that he is going to spread hatred and misinformation to other students who, in turn, can pass on these false ideas”.

Out of respect to the students’ desire to remain anonymous, CST wrote to the university authorities. Their response, in all seriousness, was simply to say that the Head of School had discussed the letter with Professor Miller through his line manager. Indeed, because the students wish to remain anonymous, Bristol still refuses even to consider that there has been a formal complaint.

In a Zoom meeting this August, Prof Miller described CST — a charity which exists solely to examine anti-Semitism and protect the Jewish community from it — as “people who must only be faced and defeated”. He elaborated in a newspaper interview, saying CST “is an organisation that exists to run point for a hostile foreign government in the UK…this is a straightforward story of influence-peddling by a foreign state”.

The University of Bristol authorities responded by seeming to closing ranks, describing CST as an “external third party”, saying that it would therefore not enter into a discussion with it over Miller.

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It is quite rightly said that what happens on campus is a prelude to what happens in real life a generation later, as fashionable academic ideas seep out of the academy and as the students influenced by those ideas move into positions of influence in wider society. These are the academics who set the tone and agenda for much of campus life — and for those students who, over the next decades, will be setting the tone for national life.

That is why, quite apart from the facts of these incidents themselves, they matter so much.

Defeating the intellectual cancer that has spread among some academic communities will be a difficult and lengthy process. But there is a more immediate and practical step that can be taken. Last month, Oxford University became the latest to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism (which, you may remember, was the cause of a long battle within the Labour Party during the summer of 2019). The vast majority of Russell Group universities have now adopted it — as has Warwick. 

It is helpful because as well as offering a clear definition it provides a series of concrete examples which demonstrate why certain behaviour — such as holding individual Jews responsible for the actions of a foreign government, Israel — is anti-Semitic.

Education Secretary Gavin Williamson may not have many fans, but he has been a tireless advocate of the IHRA definition, even warning that universities could face cuts if they refused to adopt it. The real test will come when one of the institutions that has adopted it has to confront the behaviour of one of its own staff members. We will, I fear, not have long to wait.