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A few words on that thunderingly stupid “six blue marbles in a jar of 10,000 red marbles” analogy now doing the rounds across cyber-Corbynite Twitter, which is being used to minimise the issue of left antisemitism by pointing to its alleged “scale”:
Firstly, the figures themselves are unrepresentative. They refer to formal complaint procedures initatied against Labour members that have been fully investigated and where the defendant was “found guilty” of antisemitism.
That obviously doesn’t include complaints still under investigation; incidents never made the subject of formal complaints; complaints where investigations haven’t started; etc. etc.
Left antisemitism doesn’t consist of people getting up in Labour Party meetings and saying “I hate Jews”, or people in red rosettes going and lobbing bricks through the windows of synagogues — i.e., discrete “incidents” you could apply a legalistic disciplinary process to.
It consists of the reproduction of ideas, often online more than in physical meetings, that imply antisemitic conclusions about Jews, Zionism, and Israel. That’s not something a “we’ve investigated X people and found them guilty”-type quantification can ever meaningfully express.
But here’s the more important bit about why the analogy is bullshit: if your aim is just to have a jar apparently full of red marbles, the presence of six blue ones is basically irrelevant. They’re practically invisible amongst the 10,000. They have no meaningful negative impact.
But a socialist political movement isn’t a “jar full of marbles”, it’s an organisational expression of a struggle to change the world and build a society based on freedom and equality.
For *that* aim, the presence of any bigotry of any kind, at any “scale”, is a potential source of toxicity that risks poisoning the political objectives of the movement and must be uncompromisingly ideologically confronted.
There’s a specificity to antisemitism in this regard, in that it has historically had what Moishe Postone called a “counter-hegemonic”, “pseudo-emancipatory” dimension. It therefore poses a specific threat to attempts to develop a politics that are genuinely emancipatory.
If left antisemitism is allowed to spread, it will miseducate people about who our real enemies are, misdirect the movement, and potentially fatally undermine attempts to build a genuinely working-class anti-capitalism.
That’s not to say that it’s “worse” than other bigotries, simply to acknowledge that there’s a specific history in terms of antisemitism and the left which we need to be aware of, and can’t dismiss by misleading and unhelpful arguments about “scale”.
TL/DR: Antisemitism on the left is not a “blue marble” but a source of poison that will fuck up our entire project if we don’t understand it and confront it, whatever its perceived “scale”.
