Seen to be standing for the same goals, or something different entirely?

The word is that later this month or probably next month, Jeremy Corbyn will announce an alliance of left electoral candidates to stand in local elections in May 2026. Next year’s elections will be principally of metropolitan boroughs, including all London councils. They will be a much more favourable area of contest than this year’s elections, many of which were rural. They will also be a test for Labour Party, a government which is universally despised, and yet which portrays itself as the only bulwark against the likeliest result of the 2029 election – a comfortable Reform landslide.

From Corbyn, the model seems to be one in which candidates – starting with the MPs, possible defectors, existing councillors, and stretching down from there – would have the maximum say over the new organisation. They could opt in and out at will. No demands would be made on them.

From the organised British left the answer is one of reluctant assent to this model. People are annoyed that it is taken so long, and are looking seriously at the Corbynite candidate for leadership of the Green Zack Polanski as an alternative. The most coherent counter-model comes from people calling for a New Popular Front based on the one in France. It has a programme, which could be lifted with few changes. It has a record of success. That model is unfortunately unlikely to be adopted here, since all the weight is likely to be given to the people who have been successful at getting people elected, and none of them (not Corbyn, nor the Greens) nor any possible organisation with any counterweight to them has studied the NPF, or absorbed its lessons.

Here, I’ll set out my view of what the priorities should be for any left electoral formation.

A PRINCIPLED LEFT ELECTORAL CURRENT – THE THREE PRIORITIES

-The principle of recall

Assuming the new project does get founded, the single most important requirement is that its leaders are accountable to the people who join the campaign. Through Corbyn’s influence, the model is going to be that representatives are going to be accountable to be the people in their own constituency only – Corbyn himself to members of the project in Islington North, Andrew Feinstein in Camden, etc.

Dual accountability would be better – both in the local area, and to party nationally. Assuming the latter is unachievable on a short timescale, what I do hope is that people drafting the constitutions for the various local groups write in to their programme the accountability of representatives, and the power of ordinary members to recall an elected representative who departs from the positions of the local collective.

This should be leftist ABC – think back to the Paris Commune, and the principle that all delegates are recallable.

There are in Britain, however many models of people getting this wrong. Think, for example, of Respect, the last time we were here. The leaders of the new coalition accepted the principle in theory of a national membership body, whose conference could control the character and politics of the new organisation. What both Galloway and the SWP fought to avoid was a culture in which the leaders should keep to a maximum (workers’ wage) or should be accountable to conference. The result was the promotion of leaders who equivocated on LGBT rights and abortion.

No-one on the British left is keen to remember history; none of our leaders want the to be an honest accounting with the mistake of the Corbyn leadership (including the failure to permit let alone canvass for the deselection of hostile MPs), let alone of Respect. At best, they are willing to concede a new set of programmatic demands which will keep the organisation on track. But the proposals they are putting forward are minimal – ones which no left voters would disagree with, nor even many centre voters. (Against cuts, against climate change). They would have no more content than the promises on which Keir Starmer stood for leader of the Labour Party.

We have so many examples of leaders who speak left out of officer and then defer, when given any responsibility, to the line of least resistance. In the present arguments between old-style Corbynites trying to found a social democratic party and young Greens, the common argument of the former is that the Greens cannot be trusted since they have been in power now in several local councils and have adopted cuts budgets. Why should we expect any Labour mark II organisation to do any better than them? In America, the left has any number of people who have been elected to Congress by left caucuses (AOC and the squad). They are in no way accountable to their base who has no choice but to cheerlead passively for them. If you can’t control your representatives they will drift to the right, they will not make social democracy.

The easiest time, by far, to shape a new organisation is at its start – if we don’t win the principle in the first few weeks of the new group, we will never win it.

-A strategy of conflict with neoliberalism

There have been many governments in the last 20 years which were left in inspiration (Greece) or which were soft left but backed up by left parties (Spain 2018-23 and Italy 2006-8). Joining in those governments destroyed the left parties which served in them. In the most important cases, defeat came about because parties signed up to cuts proposals pushed by the dominant parties, or proposals for war, and the left allies were merely junior coalition parties, and had no choice – having joined those governments – but to push policies their members disliked.

Nothing people do or say in the new few weeks could prevent a disaster like Syriza’s backing down before its creditors. But what people can try to avoid is the phenomenon of serving in local or national government as the despised junior partners of cutters.

The question is really what would you do differently, if you took control say of Camden council, and had to deal with national policies mandating local cuts. If you are the sole party controlling a council, you can state the reason for the cuts (national policy) and take various steps to fight them (from explaining the cuts to voters, to resistance, right up to refusal to set council budgets). By contrast, if you are the junior partner, you cannot simplify, you cannot explain or resist. You have given your votes in advance to other parties, your antagonists.

The one force which has grasped the importance of not entering government save as a majority is the far right. Think for example of France, where for 40 years the RN and its predecessors have rebuffed multiple efforts to join right wing governments as minorities. Each refusal has made them seem principled, and swollen to their vote, until the present situation has been reached in which any right wing government would see the far right dominate. Poor and working class voters regard the state as their enemy, they reward a politics of hostility to existing institutions. Patience is the only chance to win anything.

-A deeper commitment to fighting oppression

When left forces in Britain articulate what they would want an electoral party to achieve they always speak of equal rights. But they do so using languages which are barely to the left at all: the say they will oppose Islamophobia. They never speak of trans liberation through class struggle, but only of “trans rights”, a policy which imagines that the universal hostility of the British ruling class (Parliament, the Supreme Court, our Equality Commission) can be changed with the most minimal acts of resistance.

Defeating Prevent or the war on trans people or acheiving a real would require determination, a conflict within the institutions, the defunding of large parts of the police, the secret services, the closing down of well-funded institutions with significant press support. If you were serious about fighting for trans people, you would have to take on not just the Mail, the Telegraph but also the Guardian, the New Statesman and the Observer.

(The NPF gets this, incidentally, at least over some of this issue, this is one of the reason why it’s seriously frustrating that so few people here have talked thought its achievements).

What I’m talking about is such a long way from what anyone involved or trying to get a place in electoral politics is offering here, whether Corbyn, the Greens, the SWP. And yet it is the principled thing to do, and the way you could win back the trust of young and urban voters, the people most desperate for change.

I saw Sinners on the weekend with my son Ben. He was the perfect company: unfazed by the monster plot, more interested in the music, the history. Friends may know already that it’s a retelling of the Robert Johnson myth: the blues singer who stands by the crossroads, seeks his soul to the devil for the chance to make music of impossible beauty.

Sinners is faithful to this story, fills the soundscape with riffs of old Robert Johnson songs, Tommy Johnson too (the first black artist about which the devil-pact story was told, a story then appropriated by those promoting his unrelated namesake). It’s their sound which roots and shape the film, make it so memorable.

Sinners has fun with this legend. It extends Robert Johnson’s breakthrough. In the film’s midpoint, he performs and in that moment he is the expression of all oppressed people fighting enslavement, Yoruba, Hoodoo, Chinese dancers, rap artists today. In place of a dialogue with the devil the guitarist Preacher Boy summons a group of white Irish vampires, the successors to the disbanded Klan. They are effective killers but trapped by the conventions of their kind- no going through doors uninvited. (No spoilers but the rise of sunlight was handled so much better here than in last year’s Nosferatu).

The vampires are a metaphor for the real-life Klan, returning, revenge-driven, capable of defeat only by the armed African soldier – a figure with real-life parallels – in the 1860s, after 1918, and in the 1960s Cleaver savaging Baldwin. (There, for the first time, I felt the film was incapable of admitting the complex story it was summarising).

Don’t rely on the trailers. They make it seem a mere horror film. As if, once again, a black cultural artefact could be sold only by reducing it to white cliche. Watch Sinners rather for the joy of artistic creation, for the music, for a story faithful to the past and yet brave enough to look beyond it.

A review of Shon Faye, Love in Exile.

Friends may have read the extract from Shon Faye’s new book Love in Exile which appeared in the Guardian. If so, you’ll have picked up form that this is story about dating and love. Those may sound like de-politicised topics, a step back from Faye’s previous bestseller, The Transgender Issue. But that’s not how I read it.

To my mind, the exile of her title is Britain in 2025. Trans writers have to communicate from there because a group of people, starting at the centre-left of politics, noticed they could build an audience by courting far-right voices on social media and cultivating the violence of the latter and their willingness to denounce trans people, responding to anything they wrote with so much hatred as to make it impossible for them to keep on writing. Trans people will be free to live in Keir Starmer’s Britain (so long as they do not play sports, don’t have a job, don’t expect to use a toilet or be permitted healthcare…) but they – including Faye – have been forced out of public life. Faye is choosing her genre as way of trying to build a community of shared concern between her and other women. She is talking about sex, love and gender socialisation in order to challenge the idea that cis women and trans women should be enemies, rather than allies.

The first chapter on Faye’s book begins with a break-up from a boyfriend B who was in love with her but left her because he wanted to have children and she did not. As she left B, Faye was still looking in his eyes, searching for a figure “calm and kind and sane and sexy”. But life – her position as a trans woman and society’s insistence on providing a certain script of the ideal, cis-heterosexual relationship – prevented her from being that woman.

Through subsequent chapters, Faye describes coping with breakdowns by listening to music, reading books on relationships, exploring that literature’s history and its more radical forms. She considers the games which heteronormativity requires all women to play.

Faye describes the kind of man towards whom she is attracted: “straight”, “alt-posh”. They are “Upper-middle-class boys well brought up, from rich families, who pride themselves on pursuing lifestyles less and grabbing than their lawyer-accounting-banker fathers.” They aren’t Tories, these “quiet sons of privilege.” They carry tote bags, wear trainers. In their company, she drinks more than she’d like to, she talks down her sexual history. When she feels mischievous, she teases them about their sexuality.

They are (although it’s not a comparison she uses) a more confident version of Donny in Baby Reindeer – quite as driven by lust as he, better at dealing with having a trans girlfriend, but still falling some way short of reciprocity. Their shame make Faye “dishonest about sex”. Straight men fetishise her, but she dislikes the label “chaser” and refuses to see herself as the chased.

Faye describes how her desires changed as she transitioned, before she slept with gay or bisexual men, afterwards found straight men more desirable. She acknowledges being turned on by stereotypical, laddish, forms of sexuality – eroticising a power dynamic even as it made her own life demeaning. In none of those passages does she say comment about cis women or their sexuality. She is scrupulously against appeals to anyone’s experience save for her own. But it’s hard not to hear a question being voiced from between her lines: don’t you hate laddish men? Haven’t you played up to them, too?

In a chapter on motherhood, Faye admits to a Catholic faith, sets out the rationalisations she sometimes give for not wanting to be a parent, writes, “I simply don’t want a child.” She tells the story of second-wave feminism, emphasising how the radical feminists of the 1970s were convinced that if biology oppressed women, then women should revolutionise biology. She writes about the claimed successors to that moment and how their horizons have narrowed, how becoming a mother is proclaimed as the moment of truth in a women’s life. Faye sets out the problems with making motherhood the purpose of women – the positions it compels you to adopt in relation to abortion, disability, the compact it implies with bigots and homophobes.

Another chapter is devoted to alcohol addiction, a history which Faye credits to her father as well as to her own life choices, her own “dread of abandonment”.

Faye writes about community, especially that easy, almost cliched, attachment queer people can find, on escape from the home to the city. She writes about the way many straight men lack intimate friendships and burrow into romances as a way of supplying them. Whereas, for Faye, those friendships have an intensity and a truth that partners rarely supply.

Faye dedicates a chapter to self-love including self-forgiveness. She writes about self-harm, recovering from addiction, from especially toxic relationships.

She ends with the Christian virtue of agape – and old, forgotten, idea – the opposite of the world which the likes of Elon Musk and Keir Starmer are both trying to create. She writes about forgiveness particularly the forgiving of the self.

I fear Faye’s book will fail in finding its readership – essentially because it is an optimistic appeal to the generosity of wavering people who have conflicted feelings about transphobia, who combine a belief in the humanity of trans people with the balancing idea that there must be something decent as well in the opposed camp that the bigots must be right at least in their supposed sphere of expertise and in their claim that pro-trans feminism underestimates the biological reality of sex.

The discussion is too polarised and has fone on for too long; there are few wavering platforms capable of being even temporarily won; certainly, Faye’s memoir has failed to find reviewers in the sorts of publications that like to suggest that their transphobia is only skin-deep – the New Statesman and its kin. I enjoyed her book; I hope you will too. I believe in the generous society for which she is fighting, even as I recognise how far away it remains.

A philosopher at George Washington University and a longstanding socialist activist who has written compellingly about such topics as Black Lives Matter, border policing, and the cops’ belief that they are above the law, Wills published Marx’s Ethical Vision last autumn. It is a significantly rewritten and updated version of her PhD thesis. Many theses becomes duds when they are released for a general readership – their authors don’t know how to rewrite them for a popular non-academic audience, get bogged down, retreat back to the academy and its cap-doffing to authorities. Wills’, by contrast, is a joy to read. It takes a neglected idea of Marxism, explains it and makes it accessible to anyone.

The argument of Marx’s Ethical Vision can be summarised as follows; many people who read Marx come away with the idea that he is a profoundly ethical writer with a strong sense of wrong and right. He likens capitalism after all to vampires, serpents, barbarians. This reading of Marx is a good one, which gets all the important things right. And yet, Marx is also constantly distancing himself from the moralists of his age, who he accuses of hypocrisy, piety, and placing in front of the working class moral rules (do not kill, do not steal…) as if these are timeless injunctions which must be obeyed, no matter what. Moralism, in his writing, always tends to become a defence of the existing state of things. Communism, Marx seems to argue, calls for the abolition of not just prisons and bad laws but of morality itself.

There are two ways Wills resolves this apparent contradiction. One is to say that Marx does make ethical judgments but always makes them in context (just as he also argues that there are no political methods which are good for all time), the best, most revolutionary act at any moment is always be judged according to circumstances. A second, more revealing, way of looking at Marx is also true. Marxism is a political science which is intended to maximise the best of human nature – our desire for creative self-expression. In her words, “To be a communist is to seek to approach the world from the perspective of the species and to adopt the active furtherance of humans’ well-being and creative potential as one subjective aim.” She continues, “In capitalist society, this is an inherently ethical posture.” Marx’s long-term desire for human self-expression is the guiding principle, in other words, which stands behind those many contextual decisions about each moment and what is the right thing to do.

To reach her conclusions, Wills has to push a number of dull arguments out of the way. In her chapter 2, she engages with the ideas that morality is an ideology and therefore Marxism could not be ethical, since ideology is always false consciousness. Wills deals efficiently with writers including Althusser who ascribed to Marx positions which weren’t his. Marx, she observes, did not use the word ideology in quite that way. At times, he used it to refer to any set of ideas adopted in relation to society, including benign ones. A member of the bourgeoisie who goes over to Communism, Marx and Engels argue in the Manifesto, still has an ideology, just a better one than they possessed before.

The following chapter expands on the idea of human nature to be found in Marx. He had such a theory, contrasting it to liberal theories of the isolated, atomised, individual who wants to be left alone by the state and other people in order to find their true fulfillment in trading goods at a market. Again, Wills describes Marx as holding two ideas, one broad, one specific. In general terms, he regarded human nature as everything people ever been or done – our selfishness, altruism, violence, creativity – all. Further, Marx believed that through labour (i.e. the process of imaging an activity and then carrying work out) we expressed ourselves, and that people are always seeking greater creativity. This urge goes alongside such other human needs as the desire for food, drink or shelter. At the end of Marxism and indeed (although Wills does not make this point) other traditions, including anarchism, is someone who enjoys “rich individuality”, as in the passage from the German Ideology in which Marx writes of the individual who can do “one thing today and another tomorrow” – be a hunter, a fisher, a critic.

Wills reminds her readers that Marx’s theory of alienation was not a semi-psychological description of general disaffection with life – rather it was a principally an account of the dehumanising effects of work under capitalism. “And the worker who for 12 hours weaves, spins, drills, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stones, carries loads, etc – does he consider this 12 hours weaving, spinning, drilling, turning, building, shovelling, stone-breaking as a manifestation of his life, as life? On the contrary, life begins for him when this activity ceases, at the table, in the public house, in bed.”

Wills disagrees with those authorities on Marx who see him as a determinist. Such critics as Karl Popper attack Marx “for failing to conjure up in thought what does not exist in reality – a world of human being who act entirely freely, and a human society that allows ways of living undetermined by narrow economic pressures and interests.” Marxism gives people choices, and argues for a world which would maximalise collective freedom.

Wills devotes a chapter of her book to Marx’s idea of rich individuality. Why should we care about the full flourishing of human beings? “Because they’re us,” she writes.

One question I often come back to in my own writing is whether individuals or  society should ever feel a need to forgive. To answer that question, you need an idea of where ethics fits into socialism, which Wills supplies.

There are times when I read her book and it solved problems with which I’ve been grappling without answer. For example, what to make of Terry Eagleton’s attempt to synthesise socialism and religion by claiming that Marxism is at its core a belief that people must sacrifice to make a revolution – an Easter 1916, or a How to Blow up a Pipeline vision of resistance? Wills insists that such an approach isn’t and couldn’t be Marxism. She gets there through Marx’s critique of the individualist anarchist Max Stirner. Communists do not call on anyone to make sacrifices, Marx argued. It is capitalism rather which demands self-abnegation. Revolutionaries want rather the satisfaction of all people’s needs in a society intended to meet them.

Against the common argument that Marx stands for the abolition of rights, Wills says that he does (because every legal right is, in the end, a claim for the privileging of one group over another; and, under Communism we won’t need to think like that anymore), but that this critique is intended to bear fruit only after the revolution. She finds in Marx the argument that workers’ struggles are often based on an idea of entitlement. People rightly believe that they enjoy right’s won through struggle, they rightly resist when capitalism steals from them. Believing in right and wrong is not a failing, it is a step towards engagement.

Marx’s Ethical Vision defends Marx’s critique of religion, and of Kantian morals, and rejects the various attempts to improve Marx by tying him to one or another haphazardly chosen ethical principle – starting with Bernstein’s revisionist rewriting of Marxism. We remember Him today as the grand-daddy of Starmer, but he began as Engels’s padawan, who just wanted to improve Marxism by increasing its ethical content – and whitewashing imperialism.

Any flaws I could see I the book were marginal. At three points she cites Paul Blackledge. If she wanted a British Marxist to bounce off, I wish someone had pointed her to Dan Swain’s None So Fit to Break the Chains, which takes the Macintrye-Marxism synthesis into new places, especially in relation to the old controversy about whether a revolution needs to be prefigured through forms of practice. I don’t feel that I know what Wills would make of Swain’s account, which finds a narrow point of virtue between established “Marxist” and “anarchist” positions – whatever she’d say, though, I know it would be interesting.

Marx’s Ethical Vision is an important book which deserves to be widely read. A google suggests that, as of today, six months fter the book’s publication, it has only had a single review: in Marx and Philosophy (the review was then reproduced in Monthly Review). To my mind, that absence is a sign of the weakness of many of our activist publications. We sense, intuitively, that a book which grapples which such problems as Althusser’s contribution to Marxism, or Marx’s debt to Epicurean philosophy must be obscure. We assume, without reading it, that most Marxists would be interested in something else. But Wills’s text is neither hard to read nor is it alien to practice. Actually, it is a clear and generous account which shoves bad arguments out of the way before shining a light on what socialists need to do.

While a large number of the positions the book takes are critical of particular academic fads, all the time, what Wills is doing is striving continuously for that interpretation of Marx which opens up the greatest imaginative space for people to change their lives. In academic terms, she chooses a strait path. In relationship to broader society, however, her approach is extremely broad, being one which could inform a Marxism that was Trotskyist or Third Worldist or libertarian. She integrates insights from LGBTQ+ and women’s or black struggle. Philosophy, she follows Marx in arguing, should be for everyone.

When I first was diagnosed with cancer, and for some time after, it seemed that every medical appointment resulted in slightly worse news that I had been expecting. My tests indicated a chance of cancer; the consultant converted doubt to certainty. There was possibility it had spread: at one time a single lymph gland might be affected, later four definitely were. For surgery, I was told to expect to be in hospital for between 5 and 10 days; I was inside for three weeks. My chances of a stoma were less than 20 percent – when I woke, I had one.

Not that all has been bad. A friend, Katy, urged me to read Olivia Laing’s Everybody and for three pleasant days I immersed myself people and ideas I’d forgotten: Freud and the libido, Wilhelm Reich converting that metaphorical force into a tangible life force which he called the orgone, Rechians in the 1970s dealing not with love but with death, Sontag’s refusal to accept anyone’s blame for her cancer, Kathy Acker treating it as a demonic pregnancy. Sontag fought her cancer, demanded the most aggressive treatment; Acker willed it into non-being. My cancer is not a child (how much easier it is to write that, as a man). It is no-one’s judgment. Having started in my gut, it must have begun – I infer – with food. But there was no single, ill-thought meal, no blow-out on holiday to India or anywhere else, no secret love-in with all the obvious carcinogens – red meat, cigarettes, alcohol. It happens; I am not complaining.

Survivors of chemotherapy told me what to expect; each cycle would begin with me in a state of relative happiness and energy. From there, I should expect to sink, reaching a low point around the middle of every fortnightly cycle before recovering again to something like my starting state. Each cycle will be cumulatively a bit worse – if I was in such a state as 100% at the beginning of the first, it would be 95 at the start of the second, 90 for the third.

The first, I have described before. Its message was the impossibility of cold. This time around, it’s the heat which has proved my enemy. Two hours in the shade at Finsbury Park, listening to Colin as we chatted about the history of sex. I struggled back home, dragged myself to bed, was still there 16 hours later.

I walked through north London with Danny (pictured), planning a route for a socialist history walk in June. You can see how well wrapped-up I was in my cap, my Kefiya, my sun factor 50. I went to another Tesla Takedown protest. Last time I’d managed an hour and a half, this time fifty minutes was beyond me

Fellow socialists met by zoom to plan an insurrection against the Supreme Court, one which would involve such defiant numbers that it would be their generation’s poll tax. I spoke at the start for seven minutes, I listened for the next 80, I spoke at the end for three. As I waited, I felt a tiredness I’ve hardly known. I was seated in a chair and my head span, my eyes hurt – I was happy with to be there among my comrades, I closed my eyes, clenched my fists, breathed in deeply to keep myself awake.

Now that I am receiving chemotherapy, my treatment has stabilised. The doctor will call tomorrow, for 10 minutes. After that, I am due to be related to from fortnightly check-ins to monthly. I am no longer the sole recipient of treatment, I am part of a collective. Within that group, as far as I can tell, the results of my blood tests are considered normal. You could say that every appointment is now resulting in slightly better news that I had been expecting. I have felt no pain, no significant nausea. My skin will get worse, as will the fatigue. Already, I am shedding some of the activities I had been expecting, no gym trips this cycle but, overall, the chemo is going better than I expected. Life continues, I am more than happy. Friends continue to visit. Two cycles done, eleven ahead of me.

Itamar Ben-Gvir at Meir Kahane’s grave

In Eric Hobsbawm’s history of the twentieth century, Age of Extremes, at around 50 pages in, the historian makes one of his characteristic eagled-eyed moves. Having spent many pages describing the unique horrors of the first world war, and of the second, he begins to describe both conflicts not as two separate moments in world history but as a single process in which the 21 years’ of peace in between count ultimately for little: “an era of havoc,” “a single age of war”. Perhaps the historians of the future will see our own times similarly.

The place where there has been the greatest continuity – and the greatest break – is in Jewish life, in Jewish education, in the diaspora as well as in Israel.

For a certain lie about the past was permitted to go effectively unchallenged in which all of Jewish history prior to 1939 was said to culminate in a single moment of defining truth, the mass murder of the Jews. That event was so great that it proved once and for all that Jewish people could not live in Europe, or with neighbours anywhere, since they were so committed to the inevitable project of mass killing that we could only live away from them.

Grow up in the 1970s and 1980s, as I did, and our classic literature was Anne Frank’s diary, our cheap pot boilers The Boys from Brazil. The Holocaust was everywhere, inescapable. And the same was even more true for those who had a proper communal education (which I did not). And even more true, once again, for people growing up in Israel – the Holocaust was your literature, your history, your holidays. You walked around the concentration camps, carrying your blue and white flag.

To forget the Jews who lived at ease in twentieth century Europe, to disdain the history of the Bund, to ignore Sigmund Freud’s Vienna, to pretend that the millions of people who lived in peace were in some essential sense wrong, to obliterate the memory of all those non-Jews who sheltered the survivors, who made refugees a home – all this was to make the Holocaust something which could return, has returned, is being waged again today in our names.

The paradox of the victim is one of the recurring ideas in Edward Said’s work – that at the moment the Jews became the greatest victims in history then any crime was legitimate so long as it was done in the victims’ name.

You can tell the history of Jewish intellectual life, in Israel and the diaspora, through the two concepts of forgiveness and resentment. From 1945 to 1965, Europe would not let Jewish people suffer the Holocaust. Europeans were making peace with Germany. The perpetrators were being permitted to take up posts as judges, as politicians, as the business leaders of a forgiven Germany.

A generation of Jewish survivors emerged – the outstanding example is Jean Améry – stating clearly their resentment at a world which had forgiven the torturers and forgotten the tortured. The culprits, he complained, had been left free to live without guilt and memory. As late as the 1960s and 1970s, when Améry was writing, the condition of resentment was still in many ways a moral cause. Améry had been a leftist, flirted with support for Israel, turned once more against that state. He wouldn’t forgive (why should expect that he should?). He could see no alternative save resentment. He hated that path, knew that it obliged him to hate people who were not killers. Could see no other way to live.

Somewhere around 1979, the politics of Jewish resentment for the Holocaust stopped being a slogan against genocide and started being the call for more people to die.

The pair to Jean Améry is Meir Kahane, the champion of US power, the man who bombed US Communists, who travelled to Israel and became the intellectual guru to that country’s far right – the leader who tutored Smotrich and Ben Gvir. Kahane taught the Israeli far right that there is only self-interest, that there could be no criticism of Israeli power that would not lead to an inevitable murder of a new six million. That killing on a mass scale was the only way to prevent more gas chambers. He said that every crime done by the Germans justified a new and equal crime in which an equal number of Palestinians would die. “Jews in their land,” he called it, “Arabs in theirs.” Israeli centrist politicians banned Kahane’s party, permitted his descendants to organise, are now in coalition with them.

It isn’t just Kahane. The problems go wider, go deeper. In Israel and in the diaspora, people intending both love and malice have been teaching Jewish people that the Holocaust is the only fact in Jewish history, our definition, the inevitable point to which all state policies of all non-Jewish rulers was always tending.

Against all our wishes, we made the Holocaust small. We made genocide seem a natural and inevitable piece of state politics, another weapon, like education policy or taxes. That’s why in this war, there have been so many Jewish politicians – in the Israeli Cabinet, in the army, in the Parliament, in local government – all demanding a second Holocaust directed against the Palestinians. We made it seem nothing, something anyone we can do. It’s why so many diaspora Holocaust charities have been singing on the killings, demanding more of them – a genocide has become the way of proving Israelis’ maturity among the nations – it has become just what ordinary virile nation states do.

Many Jewish people hate the current war, have given our names to resisting it. What I am trying to explain is those who haven’t, those who feel by some weird but inescapable logic that fidelity to past generations requires them to act as advocates of genocide. I am trying to explain the small, successive steps that lead to decent people to cheer on killings. To expect more of them is to demand that they resist deep processes of socialisation, to expect them to think against their own education. It is an almost superhuman ask. I am not asking you to forgive anyone but only to understand.

And if any of them should read this piece, should think about what I am saying and feel an unease about the positions they have taken then trust that reaction. Acknowledge it. Think what your heart is telling you. Because the killings are only going to become more numerous from here. And loyalty to the dead of 80 years ago means loyalty to their pain, to their torture, their suffering and their hatred for all the jailors – even if they are wearing different uniforms this time. These aren’t two separate genocides, they’re one.

The market in the Warsaw Ghetto, 1941

One of the most deeply-held ideas among journalists and politicians in Britain is that it is wrong and offensive to make any comparison between events in Gaza and the Nazi mass murders of the Jews. It is an article of faith that the events of the latter are on a different scale, involved a different extent of state violence, and involved killing more people at a faster rate. This is important, because in the British political imaginary there is only ever and was only ever one genocide in history – the wartime genocide of the Jews. We are expected to all agree that all the other genocides of the twentieth century somehow don’t count. So that unless the events of 2023-5 are comparable in scale to 1939-41, it would be wrong to see them as a moral outage worth complaining about. Rather since, on this circular reasoning, events in Gaza are by definition not a genocide, so therefore we should continue supporting them by selling arms to Israel, by sending our planes to provide the information which Israeli jets and drones us to provide targets. We cannot be complicit, since there is no immoral act we could be complicit in.

(This post is written in part to honour the memory of the members of my own family who lived through a genocide, and resisted it, and in consciousness of how angry they would be to be told that mass killing is forgivable if its victims are Muslims, are Palestinians… Minimise nothing, forget nobody, celebrate no perpetrator whatever uniform they wore. Don’t you think there were civilised Europeans who said no less confidently in 1941 – these aren’t real killings, the dead are only Jews?)

With that in mind, I thought it would be useful to remind people of how far the Holocaust had progressed by its equivalent moment – i.e. by March 1941 or 18 months since the war had begun – the equivalent point in other words more or less to April 2025.

1) The size of the occupied population
At this stage, in practice, the Holocaust had been limited to the Nazi occupation of Poland. Because the Germans occupied that territory they held in their possession a captive population of around 3.3 million Jews. Almost all of them would be killed at some point between 1939 and 1945: they were the centre of the Holocaust. Almost all the various Nazi innovations (mass shootings, starvation, extermination camps) began with killing Jewish Poles and were only extended later to other Jewish groups.

By comparison, the Palestinian population of Gaza was in October 2023, was approximately 2.3 million people

2) The techniques of killing
Between September 1939 and March 1941, the Holocaust meant in practice – an initial process of the German capture of Polish cities and the humiliation of their populations there followed by a slower process of forcing people into ghettos and starving them there.

In the first 6 months, Jewish grievances concerned humiliation and brutalisation. Synagogues were burned and non-Jewish Poles were made to join in the attacks, mocking and beating individual Jews. In Czestochowa in January 1940, a crowd of Jewish men were beaten in the city square and kept standing for hours in the frost. Men wearing identifiable Jewish, clothing hats and long coats, were beaten. Jews were made subject to compulsory forced labour in Treblinks and Madjanek – after 1941, these forced labour camps would become extermination camps but not yet. The two largest Jewish ghettoes were formed in Warsaw (500,000 people) and Lodz (160,000 people) in summer and autumn 1940. During this initial period, the principle mechanism for killing people was mass starvation, i.e. by allowing people so few calories to eat that they must die. Lucy Dawidowicz writes that the calory maximum was set at 1100 calories per person in 1940. I’ve seen other, lower, figures later – 634 calories in the second half of 1941 and in 1942.

I don’t need to labour here the ways in which Palestinians have been killed, through a combination of “old” technologies (bombs, rifle fire…) and “new” (drones, a dynamic of collective assassination in which poor-quality intelligence is used to identify any individual who has had any relationship at all with the old Palestinian state in Gaza, no matter how minor, and then the regime allows itself a margin of appreciation: for every one intended killing the IDF permits itself to kill another much larger group of civilians).

What I want to focus on here is rather calories. As long ago as February 2024, Oxfam estimated that the average Gazan citizen had a real diet of around 245 calories per day.

3) The numbers killed

There are no figures for deaths between September 1939 and December 1940 that I have been able to establish. That doesn’t mean no Jews died – eg the regime already had kill lists of prominent Jews – but for the majority, the outrages took the form of a series of Polish Kristallnachts in September 1939, and then a slowly growing figure which was hundreds per month across the whole country in early 1940 getting up to low thousands per months by autumn 1940. Things then accelerated during war, as starvation grew worse.

Noakes and Pridham give the following figures for deaths in 1941: in Warsaw, 898 Jews killed in January, 1023 in February, 1608 in March…. These are *not* proxies for total Jewish deaths in Poland. Warsaw and Lodz were by far the largest ghettoes – so you would need to add a third to take account of deaths in Lodz, then perhaps double to get figures for Poland as a whole – ie about 10,000 people in 3 months. Then, there is an acceleration in the process from June – associated with the quickening of pace after the German invasion of the Soviet Union – but to take that through would mean going beyond the 18 month cut off point.

Obviously, in Gaza, there are two figures. There are the verified number of deaths, checked by the remaining state against officials Israeli IDs. That gives us 50,000 deaths by April 2025. The problem with this figure is that it relies on state capacity, i.e. people going to the scenes of mass bombings, and digging the dead out from under the ground. The figure is likely to have been an underestimate from the start (those who were counted were the victim of a public war crime – say, the bombing of a hospital – not those who died privately at home). But, more significantly, Israel operated a blanket policy of killing the people who count the dead, thus degrading the figures, and creating an ever larger gap between those recorded as killed and those actually did. You can see this very clearly in the declining rate of official casualties – over half were recorded in the first four months of the war, when people still had access to food, reserves, their own homes. More now are dying of hunger and the state is unable to count them.

I suppose the point I am making is that even if we use the figure of 50,000 Palestinian dead in Gaza knowing as we do that it underestimates the actual date many times over – and knowing what I can see of the statistics for those killed in 1941 in Warsaw-

I can see how the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis in Poland between September 1939 and April 1941 might match the figure of 50,000. What I can’t see is that it surpasses it by a factor 10 or more times over – i.e. at the rate that politicians here assume must be true, when they insist that the Holocaust was just a completely different order of things. In its first 18 months it wasn’t.

The number was high, no-one was properly counting, but mass industrial killing hadn’t started, this was still early in the mass starvation of the Jews. In broad terms, as many Palestinians have died in Gaza than Jews as had died at the equivalent stage of the the Nazi occupation of Poland.

As time went on, the means chosen would get more violent – don’t you think that has been happening in Gaza too?

The comparison is wrong and offensive – I understand that as well as anyone – but I make this point in response to a political class which makes that comparison in order to minimise the events taking place in front of us. I hate Holocaust comparisons, I get why they make bad politics. I can’t see a way of grasping the scale of the killings going on today except by looking at this directly.

At the equivalent point in the Holocaust, the main weapon which Hitler was using to kill the Jewish population of Poland, is the same main weapon which Israel is using against the Palestinians. If Oxfam is right (and frankly, I trust their people on the ground more than I trust the hasbara machine which is making its own mendacious count; pretending theirs is a model occupation, the Nazis did this too) then-

In comparison to events at the equivalent stage of 18 months after the Nazi occupation of Poland country had begun, Israel is allowing the Palestinians to live today on one one-fifth of the calories that the German occupiers permitted the Jews.

The story of Brianna Ghey’s will be familiar to many friends. A 16 year old trans woman in Warrington, she built up a Tiktok audience in the hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions. Brianna was murdered in February 2023 by two teenage acquaintances, who had shared transphobic messages before killing her. The press coverage of her murder was at first unsympathetic, with national newspapers deadnaming Brianna. The tone of coverage did change though because of a series of large public events rooted in LGBT communities which celebrated her life and demanded justice for her.

Brianna’s mother Esther responded to her killing by setting up a charity in Warrington, to ban social media companies from exploiting teenagers. Esther Ghey met Keir Starmer in Parliament in 2024 and the same day Rishi Sunak ambushed Starmer with a cheap transphobic joke at Question Time. Esther Ghey met and befriended the mother of one of her daughter’s killers, who she forgave. She has now brought out a memoir of her and Brianna’s relationship. Her book is patient, reflective, well-written, and fiercely loyal to Brianna’s memory. It has been widely commended, even in publications which are often hostile to the lives of trans people including the New Statesman and the Guardian. (I haven’t seen any reviews in the left or queer press).

Esther Ghey became a campaigner by accident. While members of the trans community turned out for Brianna in their thousands, so did cis folks. A member of the Warrington Wolves rugby team, Danny Walker, wore his Number 16 short with Brianna’s name on it. Messages of support poured into the GoFundMe set up to remember Brianna. Messages of hate came from transphobes too. “Something good must come of this,” Esther told herself. She supported projects to encourage Mindfulness in Schools. She planted trees, she raised money through the Good North Swim. Reading the memoir, I found myself wondering how different the story might have been had Esther Ghey been based in London, how much faster she would have found herself in a world of journalists and lobbyists? She reaches that point in the end – meets Labour MPs, stands beside them to demand an age limit below which children could not own a smartphone. In the United States, she notes, children aged 11-14 spend an average of 9 hours a day online. (Do they really – even at school? When do they sleep?) She does not became a campaigner without first having exhausted all that Warrington could give her: churches, the local paper – walks with loved ones along Lake Windermere.

One part of her story which the liberal press has focussed on is Ghey’s decision to forgive the mother of Scarlett Jenkinson. Reading Ghey’s memoir, I believe that journalists misreport the nature of that decision and its quiet radicalism. When liberals think of the virtue of forgiving, they have typically secularised a kind of Christian theory, in which it is right for a victim to forgive pre-emptively, in the hope that they will return the sinner by their example to the path of goodness. This fits with the liberal idea that they are all good people and their enemies evil, even when the liberals leave injustice in place. Think Nelson Mandela negotiating to leave whites in charge of the South Africa economy, think how wonderful a speaker Obama was – and for god’s sake don’t blame him for Trump.

Esther Ghey has not forgiven her daughter’s killers. Blame the killers, she insists, not the families, not the mental health services, not the school. The person she has forgiven is one of their mothers. That mother has apologised, denounced the killing. In the liberal model of forgiving, the victim must accept a perpetrator, even one without remorse. But the woman Esther Ghey has forgiven is full of remorse, has denounced bigotry and violence. She too has been trolled online. Forgiving in that context is a different kind of act – and one which leftists should applaud. We want a world in which people can change. We do not subordinate it to the need for change – but still we want it.

Ghey’s decision to campaign to focus expressly on social media companies and to see them as the problem – rather than, say, the transphobia which inspired her daughter’s murder – is not straightforward. Her focus has led her to adopt a similar positions to that of the current Labour government. Starmer’s plans to ban phones from schools are top-down, they imagine that society is a terrain of evil from which the only good people who can emerge are law-enforcers: policeman, teachers, and prison-guards. In response to those plans, those of us who remain unpersuaded have posed a series of questions. Why ban teenagers from having phones when the generation most naïve about social media and worst radicalised by it are the over 50s? Why limit children’s use of mobile phones, but never their parents’ excessive use of them? How can the government pose as anti-misogynist while courting Donald Trump who has offered sanctuary to Andrew Tate?

Ghey’s memoir doesn’t answer those questions, nor could we expect her to, she is no politician. But political choices shape her book.

Ghey explains that it isn’t Brianna death which made her a campaigner, but her daughter’s life. She writes about her own experiences of depression as a teenager, her own self-destructive behaviour, inhaling aerosol gasses to impress a friend. By the time she gets to Brianna’s life, a series of separate events taking place over months and years are written together as if they happened very quickly: Brianna’s early life as boy, her acquisition of her first mobile phone, her decision to transition, her new excitement, vigour and purpose, the impact of Covid, Brianna’s retreat into an online word, her addiction to building an audience, her battles with CAMHS, her fascination with sites which promoted anorexia. Her mother found Brianna’s trans look childlike and cutesy, believed she was neglecting her personal hygiene, thought that excessive screen use was making her life unhealthy.

The focus is on Brianna’s life – which, having been lived so close to her mother’s – is described in brutal honesty. When we get to the events of her death, from which her mother was separated and about which she can tell us only facts which were mostly already in the public domain, the story becomes vaguer. Brianna gravitated towards the people who killed her; her mother describes the guilt she feels at having failed to protect her. This becomes a dual failure; Esther Ghey should have saved Brianna from her killers – and from social media.

This may help us to grasp why the likes of the New Statesman have been quite so keen on the memoir. Esther Ghey does not seem to fully understand there have been many tens of thousands of trans teenagers who have found in collective online discussion routes to solidarity and happiness. Nor does she ask how far online contact played a similar positive role in Brianna’s life. She sees only the addictive nature of the online world, not its mutuality. Like many contemporary parents (and I am one myself), she seems baffled by her child, unable to admit that they might find joy in breaking away from her.

All that said; in this memoir, there is more than one story being told. You can hear Brianna Ghey’s voice, as well as her mother’s. The latter’s love for her daughter was and remains unconditional. Of her daughter’s online persona, Esther writes that Brianna “gave as good as she got, could sideswipe you with a look, and had not one iota of victimhood about her.” She describes without complaint the meetings she attended to help Brianna transition: the time and effort of paying for hormone treatment, while also monitoring calories, nutrition… She recalls with joy the time they had together, their brief holidays near the end.

In a time of where anti-trans brutality is the cutting edge of a global reactionary advance, we should celebrate any clear gesture of love and support.

“Why do you always bang on about trans people? Is it because you’re dating a trans woman?” I remember being asked that question by arch-bigot (and my then room-mate) Allison Bailey shortly before she amended her tribunal claim against Garden Court chambers, so that around 80 members of chambers were being sued not collectively but individually, and she could have enforced her judgment if she’d won against any of us personally – including me.

Apologies if I have been posting a lot about this these last few weeks, and I do know that some of my friends on have probably been thinking of muting me. Honestly, if any readers feel like that – fair enough! I don’t try very hard to control who reads my posts. It’s intrusive reading arguments you don’t agree with. And plenty of friends call this question differently from me. To them: I appreciate your forbearance. It’s an issue where some people are willing to rage and hurt, and I get why people run away from the fume.

For the record: it’s not about my partner Rather, it’s about the virtue Elon Musk hates, empathy. Deeper still, it’s because I remember the Gender Recognition Act came in, back in 2004, and I remember how popular the legislation was.

Back then I worked for a trade union, UCU, as an equality official. (Another “gotcha”: the Marxist Dave Renton was once a union bureaucrat). I did what seemed to me the natural thing to do. I set up a small group of the union’s few out trans members. Including Laura Miles, who I’ve lost touch with since, but in a stale often-bureaucratic organisation has been fighting the good fight, to her immense credit. We drafted a policy document, including draft workplace policies and we (I with a colleague Kate Heasman, who was head of the unit) negotiated a good practice document which the Association of Colleges. It was sent to ever FE college in Britain, as long ago as 2005, calling on them to implement it.

Raising the issue was pushing at the proverbial open door. The representative of the Colleges asked if they shouldn’t send trans women to disabled toilets. “But they aren’t disabled,” Kate said. Well, won’t women complain? “No,” Kate said, and as the founder of the union’s women’s committee, who could disagree with her.

From a union whose women’s committee which included people who’ve spent the last 5 years blackmailing parts of the left to hold to anti-trans positions (Mary Davis of the CPB for example), in 2004 there wasn’t a peep of complaint. Everyone got it.

Having agreed that employees should practice gender self-ID, the employers began to raise what were effectively reasonable adjustments for trans people. Should they have fridges to keep their oestrogen or testosterone? Kate and I feeling out of our depth, rang a friend. “Yes, please,” our trans members said.

I’m loyal to a moment which now feels like another world – a Britain where public services were properly funded, where colleges had money. Where we didn’t have three political parties (Labour, Conservative and Reform) all chasing the exact same tiny coterie of far-right voters. Watching people getting this wrong, I feel tired and old. But not as tired all my trans friends.

To finish the story: Allison did sue all those individual members. If she’d won, any one of us might have had to pay her £250,000. The day before the hearing concluded she dropped that part of her case. She never apologised for the immense pain and anxiety she caused by personalising it. Nor for the way that she urged on her twitter mates (Alice Sullivan – “BT” in this post – was the worst of the bullies) to get their followers to make death threats and deluge chambers with messages saying we all should be sacked.

Finally, the photo is of Kate Heasman, my old feminist mentor, a student who’d participated in the Warwick sit in back in the 1960s, and who taught me that many all the worst bigotries relied on the same constant of dismissing people as less than human according to some weird template of how they should look. I wish she’d been around in 2013, when there was a real sexual predator to be dealt with, and none of these self-proclaimed lifelong opponents of male violence were anywhere to be seen. I wish she was around now.

It is a joy to see these two histories appearing within weeks of each other. They are both timely, in explaining the precursors to today’s reactionary feminism. Each book begins with contemporary trans-hostile advocacy and then, without spending too long in the present, goes back in time to the movement’s predecessors. In both accounts, the examples are almost all from Britain and the United States since 1800. In each case, the narrative is richest in relation to the same case studies: feminist opponents in the US of the 15th amendment granting the vote to black men; and those British suffragettes who joined Oswald Mosley’s fascists.

Each starts from the same insight – that at very many points in human history, a significant portion of the people who have called themselves feminists, have at the same time advocated racism, fascism, colonialism, and even racial genocide. In neither case, does that realisation cause the authors to give up on feminism or the justice arguments which underpin it. They call, in effect, for a deeper commitment to equality. For a feminism, in other words, which does not treat white as naturally superior to black, nor support genocide, nor demands the creation of a series of laws to police the category of woman.

Lewis’s book is broader than Charnley’s or Richmond’s. Hers also includes a rich discussion of the ways in which reactionary politics seeps into both Mackinnon and Dworkin’s radical feminism, so that even their formal opposition to transphobia cannot be presented as a simple win for today’s intersectional feminists. She is also good on the British campaign against slavery in the Congo, showing how, at its height, US explorer and journalist May Sheldon built a career out of a feminist defence of the Belgian empire.

The greatest difference between the two texts are ones of temperament and style rather than argument. Lewis ranges widely, draws contemporary parallels, makes connections between movements normally isolated from each other. I found reading her book a bit like eating a pile of donuts – each comparison with our present giving its own brief sugar rush. Charnley and Richmond, despite their anarchist politics, are more cautious. If they are going to make a comparison, then they check it, explain it, stay with the detail before moving on. There’s is more like the slow pint you share with friends as you ease down after a fraught political meeting.

Lewis is a bigger name and her book will be wider reviewed. I won’t say Charnley and Richmond’s is more persuasive – it’s just different. But they do make fewer of those small inaccuracies that make you wish Lewis had a historian as her editor (Oswald Mosley was not a British fascisti, nor any kind of fascist, in 1923; the Independent Labour Party was not simultaneously an affiliate of both Labour and the Communists, nor ever any component of the latter).

Looking deeper at the example of the British fascist suffragettes; I do wonder if these groups are necessarily the reactionary harbingers of the present, though, that both books make them. When I look at the present gender critical movement, I do see a set of people who are in a functional alliance with the global far-right. That far, I agree with Lewis, Charnley and Richmond. But if you look at the gender critical legal campaigns, the number of people donating to them are frequently in the several thousand. That’s qualitatively different from the few former suffragettes who made their way to fascism. Indeed, of the minority of suffragettes who remained political into the 1930s – as many, probably more, were on the far left (Nellie and Rose Cohen, Daisy Lansbury, Dora Montefiore…)

It is an uncomfortable thought but the anti-trans feminists have been able to dislodge not just those one-time campaigners for women’s justice who were on the left but now celebrate Trump (the Allison Baileys, the Alice Sullivans) but also a group of people who weren’t that political to start with (the Mumsnet people). Militant anti-trans politics is going to be a disaster for everybody, because its capture of the state is going to result relatively quickly in an immense, state-sanctioned, policing of gender roles (of toilets, of hospitals, of universities…). But theirs is a much larger phenomenon than the small group of people who have jumped from left to right. And if we were to interrogate why people have decided to attach their aspirations for women’s improvement to the militant exclusion of trans women, broader processes are at work (for example, it seems that exclusionary feminism has succeeded in telling people that its rival intersectionist feminist is superficial, focuses only on the performance of gender, not such biological phenomena as pregnancy, menopause of specific women’s illnesses). To the extent that trans-exclusionary feminism is a social movement – it is a much more powerful phenomenon than the purely “political” processes of a few British women picking Hitler.

Those thoughts shouldn’t detract from my admiration for the authors of these books. At a moment when we are all smarting in the aftermath of sharp political defeat, it is a real delight to read both Enemy Feminisms and Fascism and the Women’s Cause – unambiguous as the books are in defence of trans people – and serious as they are in trying to comprehend the adversaries of the past in order to build a more generous future.