[...] Treating anti-Semitism simply as racism pulls analysts into a search for bigots frothing with hatred for Jews, which significantly _under_estimates [...] the preponderance of anti-Semitic was of thinking across the political spectrum, while also wrongly supposing that its danger lies exclusively in targeting Jews. It is instead a whole vision of politics, a desperately conservative vision that nonetheless finds some adherents on the Left and plenty among liberals. Think of the current American panic about Russian conspiracies, through which liberals dodge the conclusion that votes for Donald Trump suggest some fundamental malady in their social order by instead pinning the blame on Kremlin hackers: a structure of thinking just like the anti-Semitic frame. And amid fears about the rise of China, anti-Asian racism might easily morph into a total social theory, an ethnically constituted conservative articulation of anti-elitism: again, just like anti-Semitism.

[...] Anti-Zionists should learn the story of the Holocaust as the summit of aeons of persecution not to rescue them from their anti-Zionism but for a host of other reasons, combatting anti-Semitism among them. It is important to understand the basis of paranoia, the avalanche of brutality from which violence seemed the only escape to very many Jews. It is important to know that Zionists do not kill Palestinians because they were born with an inhuman blood lust. [...]

[...] in an active site of colonial violence, the dispossession of a people is an ongoing process, and yet calling Israel a racist endeavour is to be outlawed as itself racist. These are times to remind oneself that slavery was once bourgeois common-sense, that the world prayed for twelve children in a Thai cave this summer while hundreds of children drowned barely noticed in the Mediterranean. This saga was has been a study in the selective blindness that makes hierarchy possible everywhere. Some of us are sustained by the thought of days when illusions and delusions now ubiquitous will be scorned just as easily s the opulence of pharaohs and the myths of their magicians. [...]

July 1917, Petrograd. The mood tense and militant. There was popular hunger for action, even insurgency. The Bolshevik leadership were more cautious. They prepared an appeal for the front page of their paper Pravda, pleading for readers not to come onto the streets. But with scant hours to go, late at night, they realised that Petrograd's masses would not heed their injunction: the next day would bring great demonstrations. Ignored, disobeyed, the words would be an embarrassment. But there was neither time nor focus to replace it, nor any certainty of what the party line should be. The offending piece was simply cut.

Thus on 4 July 1917, when Pravda hit the streets, its front page was a masterpiece of unintended activist apophasis, rich in what Catherine Robson has said of poetry is the 'aura of unmarked space'. In the centre of the page was a white, textless hole.

[...]

It is from scraps and practices, then, from hints and intuitions, that we might construct an apophatic Marxism, certain of the indispensability of silence, and of the limits of certainty.

[...] there is little reason to suppose that some putatively pure, 'mere' Marxism should be any healthier. A strictly cataphatic Marxism is, at best, in denial. A Marxism afraid of silence is a Marxism afraid of the declaratory. It is afraid of politics. It is afraid of the human, and of the fear that it perceives in itself.

And it is afraid, too, of the vatic and exhortatory. Apophatic Marxism might be not only more curious and rigorous, but more subtle and effective in its interventions than any silenceless Marxism. Apophasis may not be sufficient, but it is necessary.

When in The German Ideology, Marx insists that communism is not 'an ideal to which reality will have to conform itself' but 'the real movement which abolishes the present condition', it is precisely the immanence of a radical alterity that precludes its being spoken. Whatever Marx may at times have thought, or thought he thought, was possible, whatever passing glimmers of vision one might glean from him, it is no surprise that he never, despite Engels' pleas, wrote 'the famous Positive, what you "really" want'. Because '[w]hat we have here,' as Colon O'Connell astutely puts it in 'Marxism and the Logic of Futural Discourse', 'is an image of the future primarily based on the via negativa'.

How could it be otherwise? Social totality is fractured and fractious, but as David McLellan says, '[i]f all ideas were a product of contemporary social reality' - and they are - 'then a detailed projection of those ideas into a distant future was bound to result in idealism - ideas that were completely imaginary since they lacked an empirical referent'. It is not that no notions can be entertained, as he rich traditions of utopianism attest: it is to insist that whatever their undoubted uses, as dreamwork, provocation, thought experiment or myth, and no matter how things ultimately turn out, such projection cannot, properly, be rigorous predictions. Our thinking is a function of our reality: the beyond, definitionally, is unthinkable. [...]

There are those for whom such apophatic Marxist eschatology is dereliction. On the left, some insist that blueprints for a realistic alternative, the more precise the better, will be the most effective mobiliser. [...]

[...] The request that capitalism be replaced with 'something nicer' should be criticised - for its tweeness, its mannered, unthreatening cuteness in place of the fire and salt the moment demands. Its apohasis, however, is by far its best element.

Such unsaying is not evasion but respect, taking seriously the scale of potential, of alterity necessary and possible beyond capitalism, escaping 'realistic', articulable, reformist visions truncated by the real, actually-existing hope. It is thus, to appropriate from the eschatology of the theologian Jurgen Moltmann, a hope against hope. Its horizon, like that he recalls from his youth, 'is a boundary which does not confine but rather invites one to go beyond'.

It is in such unsaying, rather than in anxious left assurance that the world can be said, that true radical Prometheanism inheres.

As a general rule, an identity group is understood to have political demands insofar as it can address the state with the claim to have been injured on the basis of its identity, and demand redress for those injuries. According to this logic, the challenge to the hegemony of the white ruling class by social movements is the same injury as that experienced by white residents of poor rust-belt towns who are unable to afford basic necessities of life [...] if poor whites were to decide that they rejected the white identity, if they refused to identify with the white ruling class, the national-popular bloc at the foundation of Trump's strategy would be undermined.

What is instead necessary is a far more difficult task: to reject the assumption that movements against racial oppression can be effectively understood in terms of the category of identity. When the ruling class encourages us to reduce the struggle against racial oppression to the ultimately individual demand to redress an identity-based injury, this is not a milder version of the collective struggles of the past: it is their neutralisation.

[...] Bases of traditional Conservative power, such as the fabled entrepeneur, are sacrificed to the exigencies of the corporate multinational, to Tesco and Costa, and to the rationales of the market. [...] Neoliberalism is first and foremost an ideology of enterprise, and all objects come under its purview, including the nation. Construed as competitive, cost-effective engines of pure accumulation, the nation too is then reimagined as enterprise - a visualisation with overtly colonial overtones. It is the ghost of the EEast India Company that haunts Liam Fox's desire for Empire 2.0.