Thread by @JeromeRoos

OK, I didn't want to get drawn into this, but since I've been spending some time reading, thinking and writing about this book lately, here's a long thread with my two cents on this week's Hobson/Corbyn anti-Semitism kerfuffle:

(For those who haven't followed: John A. Hobson was a prominent liberal thinker who wrote Imperialism: A Study [1902]. The book contained a number of anti-Semitic passages. A Times columnist recently "discovered" that Corbyn wrote a foreword for the 2011 reprint. Cue outrage.)

Observation #1: Yes, Hobson was a vile anti-Semite. Not only did the quoted passages in Imperialism highlight his troubling views; they were also a sign of the weakness of his political analysis of British foreign policy, which ultimately hinged on a Jewish conspiracy theory.

I recently wrote abt this in a broader critique of Hobson & co: “The political analysis behind his claims remained extremely crude, hinging on an ill-defined conspiracy theory with strong anti-Semitic overtones. Finance, for Hobson, was simply a ‘parasitical’ special interest...”

“... ‘controlled, so far as Europe is concerned, chiefly by men of a single and peculiar race, who have behind them many centuries of financial experience [and who] are in a unique position to control the policy of nations.‘”

(My full critique is here: viewpointmag.com/2018/02/01/new…)

Now, Hobson's claims clearly foreshadowed subsequent Nazi tropes about the “all-powerful” & ”parasitic” Jewish financier, demonstrating the extremely dangerous nature of his analysis, which ultimately reduced the abstract forces behind imperialism to the power of a Jewish cabal.

I would suggest that Hobson's tendency to *personalize* and *racialize* the power of finance was precisely an outcome of his liberal establishment ideology. Despite contemporary claims to the contrary, classical liberalism was always shot through with notions of white supremacy.

Moreover, as a liberal economist, Hobson may have presented an innovative reading of the export of capital and the role of foreign investment, but did not possess a v systematic understanding of capitalist class formation or of the structural nature of the state-finance relation.

As a result, Hobson had to locate the *political* source of imperialist policies elsewhere: in this case, in a crudely formulated conspiracy of Jewish financiers who exerted direct pressure on the British government to expand the Empire and safeguard their foreign investments.

Apparently, for Hobson, it was precisely its Jewish nature that lent this cabal its internal coherence and enabled it to ”control the policy of nations.” Anti-Semitism is therefore much more central to Hobson's analysis than it is often made out to be in introductory IR courses.

This is why the knee-jerk reaction to defend Corbyn by downplaying the anti-Semitism in Hobson's text is so misplaced. These were not just a handful of incidental remarks; they actively served to displace blame for imperial overreach from *finance capital* to Jewish financiers.

Nevertheless, while such a critique of Hobson is long overdue, I do believe that it is entirely compatible with observation #2, which is that the people now pushing this narrative in the Times & Guardian are not nearly as concerned about anti-Semitism as they are about socialism.

To launch this so-called ”scoop” on the eve of local elections speaks volumes about the despair of the conservative and liberal establishment media in the face of Corbyn's stunning political ascent. This is the light in which the ongoing smear campaign against him has to be seen.

Clearly, if the liberal columnists decrying Corbyn's decision to write a foreword to the 2011 reprint truly cared about anti-Semitism, they would have called out Brown and Blair for praising Hobson as well. Or The Guardian itself, which actually published Hobson back in the day!

That's why, in my view, there's really only one way to defend Corbyn from these cynical right-wing and centrist smears, and that is by criticizing him from the left. He should never have written such an uncritical foreword to a book containing such incontrovertible racist claims.

Just because Hobson has subsequently been appropriated by Lenin, and thereby made his way into the socialist intellectual canon, does not mean that 21st century socialists can simply overlook or downplay the brazenly anti-Semitic and white supremacist aspects of his work.

Here, I should probably stress that Hobson was by no means a socialist or even an anti-imperialist thinker; he was a liberal establishment figure expounding racist views, who advocated a form of “sane imperialism” that would see Britain draw the “lower races” into civilization.

Of course, as a liberal, he was also a proponent of popular self-government. But despite this he kept emphasizing the differences between the British and the so-called “lower races”. Ultimately, his critique of ”insane imperialism” was made on grounds of national self-interest.

The truth is that when I studied Hobson at the LSE a decade ago, we were never even remotely told about these problematic aspects of his classic text. My liberal professors either loved him or didn't care to read him properly. His white supremacist views never came up.

So the problem is that virtually everyone—left, right and center; incl world-leading IR experts—overlooked the nationalist, racist and anti-Semitic undertones in Hobson. To single out Corbyn is unfair and hypocritical. But to give him a pass on this would be equally unacceptable.

For me, the bottom-line is this: if we're going to talk about anti-Semitism, let's do it properly. We cannot be selective or hypocritical on this issue. We need to expose the collective blindness of Western society as a whole—left, right and center—to this massive social problem.

Similarly, if we are going to discuss Hobson's problematic views, let's not just get hung up on the aspects that resonate with the ongoing smear campaign against Corbyn. The things he wrote about African people were just as despicable, yet these receive no mention. Why? /END