A list of essays that we have coauthored or published independently, with links to publications.
Essays
Historicising Anti-Identity Politics: an Interview with Alex Charnley and Michael Richmond, Authors of ‘Fractured’
Maria Elena Delicato, Alex Charnley & Michael Richmond
Journal of Intercultural Studies
We should first of all clarify that ‘hegemonic neoliberalism’ is Adolph Reed’s term, not our own. Reed is a US Marxist professor and historian who is hostile to identity politics. We include Reed in the introduction in order to provide some background to ‘anti-identity politics’ positions on the Anglo-Marxist left. We refer to Eric Hobsbwam, the British historian who opposes an ‘enlightenment’ universalist left to a divisive identity politics in the 80s. And also Nancy Fraser, who periodised neoliberalism as an ‘age of identity politics’. Though Reed stands out as the most popular critic because of the consistency of his polemic for over four decades. What Reed eventually calls ‘identity politics’ grew out of the era of US civil rights and Black liberation. An emphasis on racial ‘particularity’ developed for him as the template for the emergence of a ‘Black leadership class’ that positioned themselves in Black churches, communities and within formal political structures. In the same period, Reed notes how the Black working class got poorer, even as the ruling class began to diversify. He used this historical parable to warn against other rights-based movements emerging in the late 70s, which he predicted would suffer the same fate.
It is on this basis that Reed critiques identity politics and relates it to the ‘hegemonic’ power blocs of neoliberal America that flourished afterward.
Aliens at the Border: Excerpts from Fractured
Alex Charnley & Michael Richmond
New Socialist
In 2011, Walter Benn Michaels was interviewed for a Jacobin article titled, ‘Let Them Eat Diversity’. He argued, “Neoliberal economists are completely for open borders … [Milton] Friedman said years ago that, ‘You can’t have a welfare state and open borders’, but of course the point of that was ‘open the borders, because that’ll kill the welfare state’ … Because who’s for illegal immigration? … the only people who are openly for illegal immigration are neoliberal economists.”
Neoliberalism became a leftist epithet used to describe a laissez-faire form of capitalism as new markets opened up and commodity production further globalised. This transition saw social provisions cut in Western societies and increased movement of labour globally. It did not reduce the role of the state, it progressed its policing function. The failure to clearly distinguish between increased funding for carceral state functions and the defunding of welfare has been the basis for ‘oppositions’ to capitalism that are realised in defences of the nation. British Fire Brigade Union official, Paul Embery, wrote in 2018, ‘There was a time when support for open borders was a fringe position on the Left … having absolutely no control over the numbers of people entering your country was inimical to socialist planning around employment, housing and welfare.’
A long way from Cable Street: Last weekend’s March Against Antisemitism was in fact a march against solidarity with Palestinians.
Michael Richmond
Vashti
Following last Sunday’s “March Against Antisemitism”, the demonstration’s organisers, the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA), announced triumphantly: “Britain has not seen a gathering against antisemitism of this size in almost a century, since the Battle of Cable Street. We are proud to come together to say: This is the United Kingdom: United Against Antisemitism.” Yet the CAA’s claim of affinity between Sunday’s march and the Battle of Cable Street is both strange and historically misleading.
The CAA was formed in 2014, after a previous Israeli bombardment of Gaza. Its explicit founding purpose was to counter the antisemitism that arises in Britain when Israel pummels Palestinians and, implicitly, to defend Israel’s right to pummel. Chief executive Gideon Falter is also vice chairman of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) UK, which is reported to have provided funding to the CAA in the past. The JNF enjoys charitable status and its existence predates the Balfour Declaration. For over a century, it has bought up land in historic Palestine, helped plan the Nakba, furthered exclusive Jewish settlement and transformed colonised land into parks and forests to erase what had been before.
Organised Aliens: A history of radical Jewish migrants
Alex Charnley & Michael Richmond
Vashti
The late British Sri Lankan novelist and activist Ambalavaner Sivanandan once called immigration controls the “loom” of British racism. The catchphrase “immigration concerns” has also allowed for subtler racist manoeuvring in the centre and distortions of anti-racist history on the left. British centrist “anti-racists” today have successfully instrumentalised their professed love of Jews to attack socialists while supporting immigration controls at every step. The instrumentalisation of anti-semitism within the Labour party prompted an absurd counter-argument from the left: that the Labour party, and by extension the British left, is “proudly anti-racist”. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The Aliens Act of 1905 forces us to think more concretely about how racism changes and new forms are established on the basis of new relations of production. Britain’s first modern immigration controls, the act was passed by Arthur James Balfour’s Conservative government and implemented by the succeeding Liberals, the other main party until Labour replaced it in the 1920s. The act submitted Britain’s working-class Jewish population to the threat of deportation – though neither Jews nor any racial minority were named in the law itself. Legal scholar Nadine El-Enany has shown how Britain imitated measures taken by its white settler colonies in Canada, Australia and Southern Africa, where early immigration laws took on the appearance of “race-neutrality” while producing “racialised effects”.
Playing The Jew: is Jewface a thing?
Michael Richmond
Vashti
When in 2019, the long running Broadway show Falsettos – about a Jewish man in 1970s New York who leaves his wife for another man – was brought to the West End without any Jewish cast members, the blowback was intense. More than 20 Jewish actors and playwrights, among them Miriam Margolyes and Maureen Lipman, signed an open letter in The Stage, accusing the producers of Falsettos of “a startling lack of cultural sensitivity and at worst, overt appropriation and erasure of a culture and religion increasingly facing a crisis”.
In recent years, a number of high profile Jewish performers have been drawing attention to a problem they call "Jewface". Just last month, Lipman made headlines once more with her complaint that Dame Helen Mirren had been cast as Golda Meir in an upcoming biopic of the former Israeli prime minister. Earlier this year, Tasmin Greig apologised for playing a “Yiddishe mamma” in Friday Night Dinner.
Philosemitism: an Instrumental Kind of Love
Michael Richmond
New Socialist
A couple of years ago I had an exchange on Twitter with a prominent anti-left philosemite. When I called her a philosemite she appeared confounded by my use of the word as a pejorative. “What’s wrong with me loving Jews?” she seemed to say. This person had previously pointed to her rejection of “critical race theory,” and its supposed misrecognition of Jews, as a reason for her beef with the left. When someone on Twitter told her: “lmao white people can’t be victims of racism.”, she responded: “tell that to Holocaust victims.” On another occasion, when told “you are white,” she replied derisively: “so are Jewish people, who famously haven’t been subject to discrimination.”
In recent years, white philosemitic identification with Jews has been increasingly expressed through this subsumption of Jewish experience into defences or celebrations of whiteness. Some Jews and Jewish institutions actively help to strengthen this ‘white’ alliance, at the expense of Jews of colour. Many of these philosemites, who actively present themselves as anti-racists, seem to particularly delight in telling Black and Asian people how racist they are.
Hard Stop: On Seeking Justice for Chris Kaba
Alex Charnley & Michael Richmond
Pluto Press | Black Agenda Report
Over the past week, people in Britain and the world have been educated or reminded of some of the most archaic rudiments of its constitutional monarchy. Some of the population mourned the monarch. Others were puzzled or pissed off as Premier League football bowed to national grief. Society’s diversions locked down again, though wage-labour and rent were deemed “respectful” enough to continue as normal. Meanwhile, cancer patients’ appointments and “ordinary” funerals were shunted aside for the pageantry of national mourning and a coronation designed to symbolise the passing of British sovereignty from one deceased human body into that of the son and heir.
Elizabeth II lived in the most extreme wealth and comfort imaginable. She died in one of her palaces at the age of 96. Her death was received by many with shock despite her advanced years. Three days earlier Chris Kaba was shot dead by a Metropolitan policeman in Streatham Hill. He was 24 years old but his state murder was treated as normal by many.
On the evening of September 5, Kaba was pursued by five police cars and a helicopter. The car he was driving, not his own, had been flagged by an Automatic Number-Plate Recognition (ANPR) camera, which indicated, the “Independent” Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) states, that the vehicle had been involved in a “firearms incident in previous days.”[1]
This ambiguity was sprung upon by social media racists, assuming that ANPR systems only tag “criminals.” Kaba was hemmed in by police vehicles and shot dead through the windshield. Chris’ family said: “We are devastated; we need answers and we need accountability. We are worried that if Chris had not been Black, he would have been arrested on Monday evening and not had his life cut short.”
On ‘Black Antisemitism’ and
Anti-Racist Solidarity
Michael Richmond
New Socialist
Last Friday and Saturday the East London rapper Wiley went on an extended rant to his half a million Twitter followers. The main focus of his tweets was the racialised figure of “the Jew,” with various claims that “Jews” controlled business, particularly the music industry, and that they were “cowards” and “slippery.” Wiley’s rant extended even to Holocaust Denial and inciting violence against Jews. He was eventually suspended from both Twitter and Instagram. As always, if you look under any viral Jewish Conspiracy tweets, done by anyone, you will invariably see replies from Nazi accounts sharing links and trying to deepen antisemitic worldviews. Wiley even liked and retweeted such replies. Some prominent Jews and Jewish organisations, along with many allies and celebrities, launched a 48-hour walkout of Twitter with the hashtag #NoSafeSpaceForJewHate in response to the slowness with which the social media firm reacted to Wiley’s tweets and the widespread toleration of antisemitism on the platform. Part of the action seems to be based on a widely held notion among participants that antisemitism is particularly tolerated by Twitter and by society, in a way that other forms of racism aren’t.
However, many of the people fronting the campaign have had high profile and well documented instances of racism themselves. Amongst the campaign’s backers are a rogues’ gallery of politicians, journalists, anti-immigrant shock jocks and celebrities supporting the boycott, many of whom have long, proud careers of upholding racism. The decision to make such a prominent display, headed up by such a coalition, in direct reaction to a single Black man’s tweets, and with the support of some of the most powerful figures in society, including government ministers, is incredibly damaging. It is harmful to Black people, to Jews (particularly Black Jews), and to antiracist solidarity.
The Last Days of a White World
Alex Charnley & Michael Richmond
Base Publication
Last Friday and Saturday the East London rapper Wiley went on an extended rant to his half a million Twitter followers. The main focus of his tweets was the racialised figure of “the Jew,” with various claims that “Jews” controlled business, particularly the music industry, and that they were “cowards” and “slippery.” Wiley’s rant extended even to Holocaust Denial and inciting violence against Jews. He was eventually suspended from both Twitter and Instagram. As always, if you look under any viral Jewish Conspiracy tweets, done by anyone, you will invariably see replies from Nazi accounts sharing links and trying to deepen antisemitic worldviews. Wiley even liked and retweeted such replies. Some prominent Jews and Jewish organisations, along with many allies and celebrities, launched a 48-hour walkout of Twitter with the hashtag #NoSafeSpaceForJewHate in response to the slowness with which the social media firm reacted to Wiley’s tweets and the widespread toleration of antisemitism on the platform. Part of the action seems to be based on a widely held notion among participants that antisemitism is particularly tolerated by Twitter and by society, in a way that other forms of racism aren’t.
However, many of the people fronting the campaign have had high profile and well documented instances of racism themselves. Amongst the campaign’s backers are a rogues’ gallery of politicians, journalists, anti-immigrant shock jocks and celebrities supporting the boycott, many of whom have long, proud careers of upholding racism. The decision to make such a prominent display, headed up by such a coalition, in direct reaction to a single Black man’s tweets, and with the support of some of the most powerful figures in society, including government ministers, is incredibly damaging. It is harmful to Black people, to Jews (particularly Black Jews), and to antiracist solidarity.