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I teach Hobson's "Imperialism" for an undergraduate course. Hobson was *both* a profoundly important thinker *and* viciously anti-Semitic. That Corbyn wrote a Foreword does not make him an anti-Semite but it does say something about his blind spots. THREAD thetimes.co.uk/edition/commen…
2. Hobson was one of the most significant British thinkers of the early-twentieth century. He forged a powerful critique of imperialism, helped lay the foundations for a more interventionist, welfarist liberalism, & influenced figures like Churchill, Lloyd George, Keynes & Lenin.
3. But Hobson's analysis of both capitalism & imperialism seethed with hatred of the Jew - especially "the foreign Jew", as "the leading type" of "the class of financial capitalists". He raged against "Jewish control of the press" & "economic monopolies organised by Jewish rings"
4. In "The War in South Africa", Hobson blamed the Boer War on "an oligarchy of financial Jews", a "rich and ably organised syndicate" executing a "Jew-Imperialist design". "Economic power" & "political power", he predicted, would pass to "an oligarchy of German Jews at Pretoria"
5. In "Imperialism: A Study", he identified a "central ganglion of international capitalism", "controlled ...chiefly by men of a single and peculiar race, who have behind them many centuries of financial experience, [who] are in a unique position to control the policy of nations"
6. So should we junk Hobson? Not necessarily. As with other flawed thinkers, it may be possible to detach his more valuable insights from the anti-Semitic poison coursing through them, & plenty of writers have tried. What we can't do is to ignore it or pretend it doesn't matter.
7. I don't for a moment think Corbyn was endorsing Hobson's anti-Semitic views. But he either didn't notice them or didn't think they mattered. That has been a consistent blindspot for him, which says something troubling about the lesser status of anti-Semitism on the Corbyn Left
8. In the quotes above, try replacing "Jew" with the N-word. No one on the left would let that pass. But too often, anti-Semitism is overlooked or treated as a pardonable eccentricity, so long as the author is on "the right side of history" in the war vs "capitalist-imperialism".
9. Time and again, a wing of the left that is committedly & sincerely anti-racist in every other respect gives a free pass to anti-Semitic murals, terrorist organisations and left-wing thinkers, so long as they are anti-capitalist, anti-American or anti-Israeli. And that matters.
10. By all means study Hobson, as my students do. But don't ignore his anti-Semitism. Grapple with it. Think about why it keeps recurring on the Left & how we root it out. You can't eliminate a problem unless you accept it's real. And that's where the Left too often fails. ENDS
