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 and, partly as a consequence of this disgrace, in December 2019, suffering Labour's worst general election result since 1935. 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 Bick 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 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 and, partly as a consequence of this disgrace, in December 2019, suffering Labour's worst general election result since 1935. 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 Bick 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)

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 Corbyn himself was criticised by the Commission for protecting those committing such acts, and had the party whip withdrawn for rejecting its findings.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 fueled 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.

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 fueled 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)

Socialism is strangely impervious to refutation by real-world experience. Over the past hundred years, there have been more than two dozen attempts to build a socialist society, from the Soviet Union to Maoist China to Venezuela. All of them have ended in varying degrees of failure. But, according to socialism’s adherents, that is only because none of these experiments were “real socialism”. This book documents the history of this, by now, standard response. It shows how the claim of fake socialism is only ever made after the event. As long as a socialist project is in its prime, almost nobody claims that it is not real socialism. On the contrary, virtually every socialist project in history has gone through a honeymoon period, during which it was enthusiastically praised by prominent Western intellectuals. It was only when their failures became too obvious to deny that they got retroactively reclassified as “not real socialism”.

In 1989 the Berlin Wall came down. Two years later the Soviet Union disintegrated. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union discredited the idea of socialism for generations to come. It was seen as representing the final and irreversible victory of capitalism. This triumphal dominance was barely challenged until the 2008 financial crisis threw the Western world into a state of turmoil. Through analysis of post-socialist Russia and Central and Eastern Europe, as well as of the United Kingdom, China and the United States, Socialism, Capitalism and Alternatives confronts the difficulty we face in articulating alternatives to capitalism, socialism and threatening populist regimes. Beginning with accounts of the impact of capitalism on countries left behind by the planned economies, the volume moves on to consider how China has become a beacon of dynamic economic growth, aggressively expanding its global influence. The final section of the volume poses alternatives to the ideological dominance of neoliberalism in the West. Since the 2008 financial crisis, demands for social change have erupted across the world. Exposing the failure of neoliberalism in the United Kingdom and examining recent social movements in Europe and the United States, the closing chapters identify how elements of past ideas are re-emerging, among them Keynesianism and radical socialism. As those chapters indicate, these ideas might well have potential to mobilise support and challenge the dominance of neoliberalism.