I recently read this article:
https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/ev8kxj/how-labour-could-start-to-solv...
I would be interested to hear people's views on it. This passage is especially worrying.
To be on the left is to spend much of your time thinking about power relations between groups. Poor, weak countries bullied by the imperialism of aggressive wealthier powers; governments kowtowing to the whims of unaccountable lobbyists pushing the interests of brazen capital; the structural racism and sexism within Western society and its institutions.And the problem which the left must address, if its fight for a more equitable society is to include Jews, is that a traditionally antisemitic worldview fits in very neatly into a leftist analysis of power structures. The German socialist August Bebel described antisemitism as "the socialism of fools", precisely because the wrong intellectual shortcuts can easily lead a dim leftist to the same conclusions as the far-right.
It is only a few steps from an interrogation of the influence of capital and lobbyists on governments to an interrogation of specifically Jewish capital and lobbyists on the functioning of the state. Denouncing military and economic superpowers bullying smaller countries into doing their bidding needs only a small prompt to include an outsize caricature of Israeli influence in international affairs, too.
I think the answer is that "left-wing thought" itself doesn't inherently do this*, but "wrong intellectual shortcuts" do, which is why people influenced by this line of ideas tend to place a lot of stress on the importance of understanding capital as a system, not a conspiracy by bad people. There's a lot to read on this stuff if you're interested - I've never actually read Postone myself, so I have no idea if he's at all readable, but like the Reflections on J18 collection has a lot of stuff about the dangers of simplistic caricatures of capital, Spencer Sunshine wrote about some of these issues in Occupy, and the final section of the Housing Monster, "Getting Rid of Monsters" also talks about similar problems.
*depending on how you define "left-wing" thought in the first place