There was once a general consensus on the Left that anti-Semitism, derided as 'the socialism of fools', had no place in the Labour movement. No longer. Having led his party to its worst defeat since 1935, Jeremy Corbyn's humiliation was compounded when in October 2020, Labour was found by the Equality and Human Rights Commission to have been in breach of the Equality Act of 2010 on three separate counts of unlawful anti-Semitic acts while he was Party Leader. Corbyn himself was criticised by the Commission for protecting those committing such acts, and had the party whip withdrawn for rejecting its findings. This book places the Corbyn affair in the context of a general crisis of the global Left, one that has been fuelled by a toxic mix of an obsessive anti-Zionism, Islamophilia, political correctness, a loathing of western civilisation, 'critical race theory' and an abandonment of its historical roots in the working class.

In the years following the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in September 2015, he and his party had to endure the unprecedented humiliation of accusations of anti-Semitism. The story of how this came about takes the reader into the seemingly remote worlds of Islamic theology, global terrorism and the history of Zionism, revealing how they converged in the party and politics of Comrade Corbyn. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Robin Blick is the author under the pen name of Robert Black of: Workers Councils in the Hungarian Revolution (1966) Moscow Trials Anthology, with B. Pearce and L. Trotsky (1967) Conflicts in the Bolshevik Party -1917, with J. Crawford (1967) Stalinism In Britain (1970) The Fight for Bangladesh (1971) Fascism in Germany (1975) And under his own name: The Seeds of Evil (1995) Through Frosted Glass (2018)

In Socialism of Fools, Michele Battini focuses on the critical moment during the Enlightenment in which anti-Jewish stereotypes morphed into a sophisticated, modern social anti-Semitism. He recovers the potent anti-Jewish, anticapitalist propaganda that cemented the idea of a Jewish conspiracy in the European mind and connects it to the atrocities that characterized the Jewish experience in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beginning in the eighteenth century, counter-Enlightenment intellectuals and intransigent Catholic writers singled out Jews for conspiring to exploit self-sustaining markets and the liberal state. These ideas spread among socialist and labor movements in the nineteenth century and intensified during the Long Depression of the 1870s. Anti-Jewish anticapitalism then migrated to the Habsburg Empire with the Christian Social Party; to Germany with the Anti-Semitic Leagues; to France with the nationalist movements; and to Italy, where Revolutionary Syndicalists made anti-Jewish anticapitalism the basis of an alliance with the nationalists. Exemplified best in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous document that "leaked" Jewish plans to conquer the world, the Jewish-conspiracy myth inverts reality and creates a perverse relationship to historical and judicial truth. Isolating the intellectual roots of this phenomenon and its contemporary resonances, Battini shows us why, so many decades after the Holocaust, Jewish people continue to be a powerful political target.

Vols. for 1871-76, 1913-14 include an extra number, The Christmas bookseller, separately paged and not included in the consecutive numbering of the regular series.

Often the liberal movement has been viewed through the lens of its later German nationalism. This presents only one facet of a wide-ranging, all-encompassing project to regenerate the Habsburg Monarchy. By analysing its various nuances, this volume provides a new, more positive interpretation of Austro-German liberalism.