The UKIPisation of English politics II posted by Richard Seymour

It's only funny until you realise they're not going to stop.

Let's talk about the 'white working class'.  For more than a decade, a twin discourse about class has been building up.

'Two souls' of the working class
On the one hand, there is this melancholic representation of a forgotten, disenfranchised 'white working class'.  There were documentaries, articles, tea towel memoirs, focus groups, policy documents.  This 'white working class' was never discussed in terms of what made it (part of) a class, but always in terms of its supposed cultural tics.  I still remember, with cringing embarrassment, the spectacle of Matthew Taylor - then the head of the IPPR - patronising some skinheaded East End codger about pie n mash, and jellied eels, in the context of a documentary about multiculturalism.  This is the working class we have supposedly lost, gone with the empire, and all those manufacturing jobs: an industrious, clean, virtuous, jolly, culturally vibrant working class.  It is important to stress just how much this is a mythical mobilisation of affect.  Historically, in certain contexts, it has been possible to speak of a 'white working class' in a meaningful sense, as something that was historically and politically produced through practices like segregation.  There is no equivalent experience in the UK today.

On the other hand, there is the vicious, punitive demonisation of a section of the working class whom both the Thatcherites and Third Way politicos referred to as 'the underclass' or, in politically correct New Labour terminology, the 'socially excluded'.  Later, the idea was popularised through the meme of chavs.  These were people identified by their failure to integrate into societal norms, their 'dependency culture', their crass consumption patterns, their mobbishness, their unfamiliar speech patterns, and their moral degeneracy.  They represented the decay of 'British values'.  This was linked to racial anxiety in obvious ways, which became explicit during and after the England riots: "the whites have become black".  Even today's rioters aren't like rioters in the good old days.

This discourse began to develop only a few years after Tony Blair had declared the class war over.  It very visibly wasn't over.  However, this was because the symptoms of class were visible rather than because there was a well-organised labour movement putting class on the agenda.  And the symptoms of class life under neoliberalism did not have to be explained in a leftist idiom.

Three changes in class life
The entrenchment of neoliberalism in everyday life, with the destruction of collective organisation and the removal of social protections and provision, ensured that more and more of ordinary experience was characterised by vicious competition.   The more that competition was accepted and valorised, the more hierarchy was worshipped, and those lower down the chain treated simultaneously as potential competitors, losers who should be spat upon, and dangerous elements who needed to be controlled.  Thus, the resentments deriving from class injuries could be effectively canalised into competition and aggression toward others of the same class.

Also important was the growing stratification of the working class based on working patterns, education and lifestyle.  It had never been the case that factory workers made up the majority of the working class.  However, their experiences were sufficiently like those of other workers, that they were able to 'stand in' for the class, figuratively.  Their degree of organisation commanded respect, as did the cultural salience they had achieved in post-war Britain.  There is no such easy metonym for the working class today.  It is far easier to speak of the class in terms of cultural cliches: the estuary accent, poor education, social conservatism and traditionalism.  Skinheads, white vans, England flags, and sports tops, became synecdoches for class.  And two small businessmen, Tommy Robinson and now Daniel Ware, were able to 'stand in' for the 'white working class'.

Finally, just as important was the transformation of social democracy and its adaptation to Thatcherism.  If capitalism creates its own gravediggers, you could argue, so does the working class.  When New Labour took office, it was not sufficient for them to administer neoliberal capitalism and police its breakdowns.  They had to discipline their own working class base, and react to breakdowns as challenges to their project of transforming Labour into New Labour.  These sporadic strikes, protests, civil disobedience and occasional political defections were manifestations of backward-looking tendencies within the working class which had held back Labour's necessary modernisation.  This resort to non-market solutions was linked to the cultural pathologies producing 'social exclusion' and trapping people in poverty.   Hence, the variety of authoritarian panaceas, from the demand that British Asians 'integrate', to Asbos, to Blair's proposal to monitor potential problem children from before birth - all intended to adjust working class people to life in neoliberal Britain.

Racecraft and neoliberal dysfunction
Race, as became evident after the northern riots and the Cantle report into them, is a convenient ready-made strategy for policing the dysfunctions arising from neoliberal politics.  These riots - like almost all riots - were not about one simple issue.  Hundreds of young people became spontaneously embroiled in open combat with the police, as well as gangs of fascist bovver boys, over a range of issues.  The immediate issue was fascist provocation and police brutality.  The longer-range issues were local government under-funding, de facto segregation in local housing and service provision, and the tendency for racist local police forces to criminalise Asian youths.

The almost instinctive, learned response of the British media, the government and the Labour leadership both in Westminster and in local councils, was to boil all this down to 'race riots'.  Long before an official report was produced, local politicians and police chiefs, as well as Labour MPs, were describing a failure of multiculturalism.  It was a lack of integration, the failure of locals to internalise British values, self-segregation, and so on, which had made local whites resentful, kept the communities divided and fostered distrust of the police.

Such claims only made sense as a malevolent twist a particularly toothless kind of liberal multicultural discourse according to which racism is not about hierarchies and oppression, but rather about different groups needing to tolerate one another, get along, respect one another's right to narrate, and so on.  The malevolent twist took the form of an insidious white nationalism in which British Asians were assumed to be essentially outsiders rather than citizens, and troublemaking outsiders at that.  Thus, the problem was that British Asians had failed to tolerate whites, to respect their diversity, and to acknowledge their right to narrate.  This was when New Labour and its allied intelligentsia adopted in fully the neo-Powellite idiom that was to become its disgrace note on questions of race, nationality and immigration.  The 'war on terror' merely accelerated the trend, and ushered in the spectacle of the melancholic 'white working class', marginalised and forgotten, undermined by a new multicultural 'underclass' filled with 'feral youths' and brooding would-be terrorists.

The fertile terrain of reaction
At the early stages, this class discourse was simply one element in a complex set of racial representations that centred on culture, and particularly on Islam as the folk devil menacing British values.  It helped create fertile territory for the far right.  The BNP was the first beneficiary, increasing its votes between 2000 and 2009 by over 1000%.  Often its successes derived from effectively manipulating the language already popularised by New Labour.  For example, when the government made it a priority to 'crack down' on asylum seekers, with a range of measures from voucher schemes to detention camps, the BNP leader Nick Griffin expressed his gratitude: "The asylum seeker issue has been great for us.  It legitimates us."  And: "If Blunkett deports one asylum seeker, we can deport all of them".  Likewise, it was Gordon Brown who legitimised the "British jobs for British workers" slogan by uttering it as Prime Minister to a Labour conference.

However, it seems likely that it was the credit crunch and ensuing recession that decisively shifted the focus of racist politics.  Islam was replaced by immigration as the most salient enemy.  Were it not for the economy still being rather parlous, polls suggest that immigration would have been the number one issue in the 2010 election.  This was when the discourse of the 'white working class' began to assume the prominence that it has today.  And just as the BNP began to collapse - the new post-crunch climate imposing challenges that the schismatic organisation failed to handle with aplomb - the EDL had arrived with its strategy of street violence.  Partly, this very spectacle was linked to a media strategy in which Tommy Robinson, evidently hamming up his educational handicap, moved in on the cultural space marked 'abandoned white working class'.  And when the EDL fell apart, it was not long before Britain First had half a million 'likes' on Facebook and was doing its bomber jacket and cloth cap routine.

Now UKIP is using the BNP's strategy in hollowed out Labour 'heartlands', talking up racialised local issues - to be precise, issues which local Labour elites have often assiduously racialised - and strongly suggesting that Labour has stopped caring about white working class people because it's too busy being politically correct and sucking up to immigrants and the EU.  And if UKIP were to fall apart, which seems incredibly unlikely, a new organisation would spring up in its place.

This is the meaning of 'fertile ground': however organisationally fractious the far right are, however much they are projecting influence insanely above their social weight, they are able to do so because the terrain has been produced over a long period.  What is more, because of the prolonged social and political crisis unleashed by the credit crunch, they have the initiative.  The dominant parties are locked in their own dynamics of stalemate and decline.  Any semblance of representative democracy is paralysed by the Westminster consensus on all essential matters.  The unions are too busy conserving whatever remains of the union premium to take the lead on anything.  And the left is shattered.  So what we get instead of a broad popular mobilisation is a kind of ersatz resistance led by a dissident tributary of the Tories; instead of class struggle, this bitterly melancholic politics of whiteness and class authenticity.

The 'white van' working class
So here we are.  The Labour leader is so utterly petrified of alienating this quasi-mythical figure, 'white van man', lest it turns out that he speaks for the whole 'white working class', that he fires a shadow cabinet member for even obliquely possibly offending them.

The government are so desperate to get in on this game that they have Michael Gove telling us that prejudice toward 'white van man' is as abhorrent as prejudice to an ethnic minority.  And Ed Miliband, absurdly, is probably kicking himself not to have thought of that line.

This is the UKIPisation of English politics.  It has been a long time in the making.

Labels: 'chav', blue labour, class, racism, white working class, whiteness

Social Chauvinism as a Political Category in the French Metropolis posted by Richard Seymour

This is the paper presented at Historical Materialism 2013 by Félix Boggio Éwanjé-Épée and Stella Magliani-Belkacem.  I am grateful to them for allowing me to republish it here.

 

We would like to thank Lars Lih, Paul Le Blanc and John Riddel for their precious advices and references. Of course, they cannot be blamed for the potential errors that may follow and they cannot be associated with the political views expressed here. 

What did we try, Stella and I? Two years ago, we were in HM London talking about “What the fuck is up with French feminism”. We then tried to answer to a quite understandable amazement over French feminist endorsement of islamophobia and colorblindnes. Now, we would like to tackle another complex phenomenon: the French left attitude towards race and its contemporary implications for political organization. We tried to see the French left attitude towards race and racism as a historical product, as a cumulative process that is not simply “traditional” but contingent on specific historical events and struggles. To do this we proceed as follows: first assessing the relevance of Lenin’s concept of “social-chauvinism” to the French left, and then, proceeding to understand how social-chauvinism can be, in a nutshell, associated with historical materialist theorizing of political categories and with racial formations. Finally, we will delineate the consequences of these concepts in the practice of the Third International in the early twenties-thirties France and in the theoretical failures of the last thirty years’ left to tackle race as a specific phenomenon. 

 

I

 

Social-chauvinism is a term repeatedly used by Lenin in numerous texts and speeches that accompanied his assessment of the collapse of the Second International. Social-chauvinism meant precisely one of the features of the crisis of social democracy. It referred to the alliance between major social democratic forces with their own imperialist State in the advent of the First World War. 

Social-chauvinism was not a political category clearly defined by Lenin. It is a blurry word, even a slur. However, this slur echoes to our present day. Social chauvinism referred in the past to an analysis of the positioning of social-democracy at a geopolitical level. However, the echo, the “todayness” of social-chauvinism is, from our perspective, a domestic political category. Social chauvinism designates a contemporary disdain of the French left for racial relations and even an endorsement of various strands of racism (islamophobia, law and order issues, warmongering against drugs) and an unclear stance against imperialism. Indeed, Mélenchon – and his “Left Party” [Parti de gauche] (among the most important organizations of the Front de gauche, Left Front) – is famously associated with a very harsh attitude towards minority self-organization, public expressions of religious identities, with women wearing the veil in associative nurseries, and an anti-imperialist impulse biased against mostly US imperialism, NATO (Mélenchon’s stance remains very soft on the French military and its imperial take on Africa, Afghanistan, merely calling for feeble reform. Front de gauche MPs have voted and supported the French war in Mali).

Social-chauvinism is therefore the name of an increasingly hegemonic political articulation of radical reformism in French left organizing. As revolutionary Marxists, this evolution is indeed very worrying to us and needs a careful longer-term analysis. Social-chauvinism is not without contradictions and countervailing tendencies. To introduce social-chauvinism, in our perspective, as a political domestic phenomenon more generally, we should emphasize several points, that we would like to relate in our opinion to the main defects of social-democracy that Lenin outlined in his famous texts about the crisis of the Second International:

First of all, a narrow and very domestically focused conception of the worker’s movement. It is a characteristic that can be termed: “internationalism in form, chauvinism in essence”. Today as yesterday, verbal appeals to “workers of the world” are overlapped with a form of cultural and political indebtedness to the French State and its legacies. It is related to an idea of the State as a somehow neutral apparatus that can be manipulated at will, to the interest of a class or another. The French Nation as an imagined community is associated with an imagined “progressive” popular history of France that can be counterpoised to a reactionary France. This is at the very heart of Mélenchon’s and the Front de gauche’s reappraisal of the national anthem and their very effective marches during the presidential campaign that mimicked the taking of Bastille of 1789. 

Second, we can outline a general hostility to minoritarian expressions of non-whites, often taken as potentially disruptive to French polity (either in the form of what appears to be “petty delinquency” or in the form of ostentatious display of religious belief). This chauvinistic emphasis on French unity and “vivre-ensemble” (“living together”) is covered by a socialistic call for class against identity. By contrast, in our opinion, it crucially relates to an age-long relationship between the French worker’s movement and parties to the workforce based in the colonies and the colonial movements that emerged against white supremacy and colonialism.

 

 

II

 

Analysis of contemporary social-chauvinism therefore needs to take into account age-long aspects of social democracy and working class consciousness in a French context. To assess the emergence of a social-chauvinist problematic, we have to focus on the First World War as a shifting point in the French social structure: it is a moment when, instead of mainly Italian and Belgian immigrants, subalterns from the French colonial empires are for the first time introduced in the metropolitan workforce on a large scale: notably workers from North-Africa, what we term “Black Africa”, and workers from Indochina (that is Vietnam). This change amounted to a growing relevance of anticolonial agitation in the metropolitan area for left organizations and a growing strata of intellectuals who were subjects of the colonial Empire. 

According to Lars Lih “Lenin’s political outlook and strategy from 1914 on stemmed from a definition of the situation that he took lock, stock and barrel from the writings of “Kautsky when he was a Marxist.”

What did Kautsky’s scenario entail before what Lenin saw as a betrayal of his very principles? According to Lars Lih, Kautsky’s analysis in the early years of the twentieth century was premised on a thesis of global revolutionary interaction, that is, interaction between a socialist revolutionary agenda in Europe and political and anticolonial revolutions  on the agenda in so-called “backward” or dominated nations. Meanwhile, this global interaction is inscribed within global imperialist rivalries, capital exports in the global South and increasing “world war” tendencies.

Therefore, Lenin’s point, after Kautsky, was to analyze the demise of social-democracy as failures to consider crucial aspects of this global revolutionary scenario, its pitfalls and challenges for the worker’s movement. And Lenin connects that failure to a social analysis of European workers’ movement:

 

The period of imperialism is the period in which the distribution of the world amongst the ‘great’ and privileged nations, by whom all other nations are oppressed, is completed. Scraps of the booty enjoyed by the privileged as a result of this oppression undoubtedly fall to the lot of certain sections of the petty bourgeoisie and the aristocracy and bureaucracy of the working class.

 

Well, these quotes are fairly known. There is a great deal of controversy against the labor aristocracy thesis, that is, the idea of a very small portion of the working class being bribed, bought off, with imperialist superprofits. Nonetheless, let me read a comment by a famous opponent of the labour aristocracy thesis, namely, Tony Cliff:

 

The expansion of capitalism through imperialism made it possible for the trade unions and Labour Parties to wrest concessions for the workers from capitalism without overthrowing it. This gives rise to a large Reformist bureaucracy which in its turn becomes a brake on the revolutionary development of the working class. The major function of this bureaucracy is to serve as a go-between the workers and the bosses, to mediate, negotiate agreements between them, and “keep the peace” between the classes. This bureaucracy aims at prosperous capitalism, not its overthrow. It wants the workers’ organisations to be not a revolutionary force, but Reformist pressure groups. This bureaucracy is a major disciplinary officer of the working class in the interests of capitalism. It is a major conservative force in modern capitalism. 

 

Well, there is a great difficulty in Cliff’s thesis that economic roots of reformism lie in “economic prosperity”. There is a mechanistic bias here that can lead to the dangerous idea of reformism being prone to disappear in the advent of crisis. However, what is interesting here is that economic privilege secured by imperialism can entice a section of the working class movement to support the State, even in its imperial aspects. Again, Cliff says, “If Reformism is rooted in Imperialism, it becomes also an important shield for it, supporting its ‘own’ national Imperialism against its Imperialist competitors and against the rising colonial movements.”

There is thus a clear connection between the crisis of social democracy on the one hand, and imperial rivalries notably around colonial possessions on the other. Actually, you can find in social-chauvinistic literature (in Lenin’s sense), socialistic colonial utopias – not only in Bernstein’s and opportunists’ speeches and writings, but also on the left of European social democracy. Paul Lensch, one of the early opponents of revisionism in the SPD, has later on written a book that was an open endorsement of Germany in the World War. In his plea for German imperialism, Lensch wrote: 

 

After the war, colonial policy will be of the nature of a social policy, for only if the colonial representatives of a government were conscious of their responsibilities as guardians of the interests of the colony, would there be any prospect of making the Colonies what, in the interests of our whole culture and material conduct of life it is essential that they should be: the pillars of that international, or rather intercontinental, division of labour by which the temperate zones are supplied with those indispensable raw materials and fodder stuffs, without which the maintenance of our industrial and agricultural development is impossible. In other words, the revolution which the war has brought about in the capitalistic world means a new epoch also for the colonial world.

 

Lensch, in his social chauvinistic approval of colonialism, envisions a future development of State Socialism where the colonies would be integrated in a global division of labor. Therefore, social-chauvinism can be told to arise precisely in an endorsement of the very position that imperialist countries and States do have in the international division of labor, that is, social-chauvinism means one form or another of integration into social democratic demands, strategy, analysis of the central tenets of a global division of labor (and, domestically, of metropolitan consequences of it, e.g. in the racialization of the workforce). 

What these developments show is that Lenin’s term, his slur, about social chauvinism, cannot be separated from a specific relationship that working class formations develop towards colonies. This relationship lies in the apparent link between capital expansion and accumulation on the one hand, and on employment and better-wage opportunities on the other. That association between accumulation and job creation is an illusory and fetishistic one, obviously. We know from Marx onwards that capital actually produces unemployment and surplus populations, industrial reserve armies, and drives wages down. However, the real appearance of capital, brought about by the separation between the workers and means of productions, produces the illusion that capital is the origin of wealth and jobs. Therefore the specific features of imperialistic accumulation – and one might add, the racial advantage of white workers in the labor market – can lead to a form of attachment of the worker’s movement to a national imaginary community. That form of attachment, linked to the global division of labour, carries with it a whole social and cultural racial formation. 

 

III

 

We would argue then that the Komintern’s policies addressing the question of the colonial question offer a crucial counterpoint to a longstanding political current in the worker’s movement that can be termed “social-chauvinistic”. Addressing France, it is interesting to see how the implementation of these policies has taken place. In the very early twenties, the French Communist Party established an “Intercolonial Union” that gathered several activists from the colonies. I cannot provide a comprehensive history of the colonial policy of the CP in France. However, one can pinpoint several aspects:

First, colonial policy of the CP was fuzzy and quite unfocused. There were very heroic campaigns for the independence of a region of Morocco that had made session in 1921 and with which France was at war. But that work was being done erratically.

This erratic developments led to autonomist tendencies in the Black communist movement that broke into a separate “negro” organization, the Committee of Defense of the Negro Race

That organization, CDRN has had a very complicated history, the CP gaining hegemony in it at once in the early thirties. What is remarkable is the way in which the CP was involved, often against its own will, in a very tortuous politics of collaborating with nationalistic Black tendencies, with building all-Black unions among Black toilers in Marseille, with tendencies more involved in cultural self-consciousness, with various strand of garveyism.

This is just to take as an example revolutionary Black organizing in France. It is a very complicated example. In this whole story, the CP scrapped many Black activists for being “too autonomist”, and it often sacrificed potential political advances to political lines decided in Moscow. For instance, more sectarian policies towards moderate or nationalistic “negro” organizations or figures were implied by policies of Class against Class in the International Communist Movement. What it amounts to, from our perspective, is that the way in which the Komintern outlined a global “negro question”, an early idea of the Black Atlantic, really contributed to a very rich culture of racial pride alongside with working class identity and solidarity, leading to a more complex tactics of class building. That kind of politics provide a compelling resistance to social-chauvinism in the way in which it ties working class politics with specific issues and oppressions. If the Komintern and the French CP gave credit to Black (or other non-white) autonomism out of pragmatism, that pragmatism teaches an important lesson for practice and theory. In practice, it meant that the racialization of the working class brought about during the First World War and after, meant for communist organizing that an important contradiction was at work in Black autonomist impulses. Indeed, as long as social-chauvinism is a bulwark to revolutionary consciousness, breaking the “white blindspot” (a term taken from Noel Ignatiev and Theodore Allen), breaking the white blindspot, integrating various strands of non-white organizing at the center of the predominantly white working class, can challenge working class focus on the stability and reformability of imperialism.

To elaborate on the disruptive aspects of autonomous organizing and its integration to a left strategy, we can focus on the politics of the revolutionary left during the French Popular Front of 1936. Daniel Guérin and his comrades of the left tendencies of the Socialist Party did uphold during this period the legacy of anti-imperialism and antiracism that the CP was embodying several years ago. Now, from 1937 onwards, the CP abandoned its stance for colonial independence, in order to secure the coalition of the left with the centrists in parliament and government, and also to avoid any interference with democratic France. In other words, the CP had become clearly social-chauvinistic, leading to their approval of the dissolution of the “North-African Star”, a revolutionary nationalist group strong both in Algeria and in the French metropolis among Algerian immigrants. 

Guérin and the left revolutionary current of the Socialist Party opposed on many occasions the colonial policies of the Popular Front as part of a general strategy of undermining the counter-revolutionary impulses of that government. Through this, they established an anti-imperialist center, creating links with British panafricans, George Padmore and Jomo Kenyatta. These currents were numerically weak, but no doubt that today’s trotskyst would better reread that story and how the idea of working along with non-white autonomous groupings can be part of a general struggle against social chauvinism, that is, a struggle against reformism.

 

IV

 

Now, theoretically, we will try to show that the consequences of the struggle against social-chauvinism are very relevant to our current situation. Through this, we will assess contemporary problems of the left and how its theoretical biases prevent it from tackling these problems. The following questions must be asked:

- how does the social chauvinist current has taken roots in the French situation and become hegemonic electorally and on the ground, even as far as silencing or even erasing a whole far left anti-imperialist commitment? We can clearly connect that hegemonic take of social chauvinists over the whole left as a consequence of an inability of the anti-imperialist far left to have a principled stance on race, theoretically, and we can further relate it to the far-left’s compromises with more mainstream theories of racism and antidiscrimination policies. It therefore lies in the radical left’s inability to grapple theoretically with its own legacy. 

- How did social-chauvinism evolve through the years and survive to the ’68 social unrest? The answer must lie in the way in which the left and the unions reacted to capitalist restructuring in the 1970’s onwards. For instance, the main lay offs that occurred in the deskilled sector of the working class during the 1970’s were politically organized to favour French workers in taking the workers from the colonies back to “their countries”. How did the left and unions react to these? They often accompanied the process, while the sections opposing it were not theoretically armed to tackle white privilege as a political construction here, and how autonomous immigrants, or immigrants’ sons and daughters struggles were connected to the racialization of the economic crisis.

- how can we conceptualize here and now race in France and fight social-chauvinism? There has been a unique contribution to a French theoretical approach to race in the practical work of Indigènes de la république and the theoretical work of their founding member Sadri Khiari. Really a historical analysis must begin there. Then, we can learn from their work a very important distinction to do between racial strands of the working class, that is, the idea of separate (while intermingled) Time-Spaces. This notion is connected to the idea of global worker historians of integrating geography, demographics and mobility studies into a framework of class, assessing the different temporalities of class formations. This would permit us to understand how different working class constituencies constitute different identities, different movements and different parties (including racially defined parties) and how to work out a real internationalist articulation of social demands. 

 

V

 

It means for us to be creative. To imagine the revolutionary subject as a process of self-reformation, of tensions and conflicts between parties, unions, movements, between white and non-whites (and at another level, between different non-white ethnicities). To imagine the “Modern Prince” as a broad subject that would coordinate out of a process of mutual correcting impulses. The revolutionary party of tomorrow may not be one unitary working class party, but several social movements, parties and associations, organic intellectuals, hegemonic apparatuses, that would collectively, and through fierce internal controversy and conflict, challenge reformism and social chauvinism (I do not mention “sexism” because it is not at the center of our focus here, but it is clearly to be integrated to our perspective). 

As a matter of conclusion, and to defend this perspective from an orthodox tradition, I would like to mention Trotsky’s late rejection of the One-party system in the Soviet Union, in The Revolution Betrayed:

 

Every word is a mistake and some of them two! It appears from this that classes are homogeneous; that the boundaries of classes are outlined sharply and once for all; that the consciousness of a class strictly corresponds to its place in society. The Marxist teaching of the class nature of the party is thus turned into a caricature. The dynamic of political consciousness is excluded from the historical process in the interests of administrative order. In reality classes are heterogeneous; they are torn by inner antagonisms, and arrive at the solution of common problems no otherwise than through an inner struggle of tendencies, groups and parties. It is possible, with certain qualifications, to concede that “a party is part of a class.” But since a class has many “parts” – some look forward and some back – one and the same class may create several parties. For the same reason one party may rest upon parts of different classes. An example of only one party corresponding to one class is not to be found in the whole course of political history – provided, of course, you do not take the police appearance for the reality.

 

 

Labels: 'race', chauvinism, france, racism

Historical Materialism panel: Theorising Contemporary Racisms posted by Richard Seymour

This is the audio of the panel featuring myself, Félix Boggio Éwanjé-Épée, and Razmig Keucheyan on the subject of ‘Theorising Contemporary Racisms’.  My own segment, on 'Poulantzas and racial states in crisis', is first.  Felix’s speech is based on a paper co-written with Stella Magliani-Belkacem, which I will be hosting on this blog.

Labels: anti-racism, poulantzas, race, racial formation, racism, state, tea party

From the EDL to what? On anti-racism strategy. posted by Richard Seymour

This is a document I submitted for the bulletin of the last IS Network conference.  It is partially based on a post I wrote a few months ago.

I. The EDL may be finished, its method of street demonstrations having run out of steam according to its former orange eminence, Tommy Robinson.  The scattered forces of the far right may be declining - if still resourceful, still too numerous, still dangerous.  However sanguine our assumptions on this point may be, though, the wider situation is as toxic as it has ever been, fertile ground for a more effective populist-racist formation.  The strong performance of UKIP demonstrates this potential.  This new organisation Robinson intends to form with his wooden double act, Kevin Carroll, backed by his comprador allies, the state-sponsored ex-Islamist Qilliam Foundation, will surely seek to plough the same terrain.

 

II.  The EDL was formed in 2009, fusing a number of heterogeneous energies.  In one sense, it was a belated expression of a certain type of ‘war on terror’ politics, defending good old British boys against Anjem Choudary’s coffin-botherers.  In another, it represented a perverse reanimation of Ulster Loyalism in the English context - the slogan ‘no surrender’ being taken straight from the death squads of the dear six counties.  But it also represented the failure of New Labour’s ‘Britishness’ project.  Having English, Scottish and Welsh defence leagues was not merely a function of basing the organisation on football casuals and thus deferring to the national division of teams.  It underlined just how the axis of xenophobic nationalism had shifted.  It also very effectively drew upon and organised the popular mytheme of ‘the white working class’ - supposedly ignored by liberal elites, abused by multicultural politicians, and oppressed by political correctness.  This ideology initially began to be articulated under New Labour, and represented a right-ward shift within the Blairite section of the ideological-state apparatuses.  But as with so much material that begins life as part of a neoliberal triangulation strategy, it was far more potent in the hands of bovver boys.  At the core of it, of course, is the EDL’s contention that Islam is ‘extremist’, that it wages a genocidal war on all Christians, and as such represents an enemy within ‘Christian’ or ‘Western civilisation’.  The spread of this style of thinking, conspiracism, is linked to the rise of political paranoia in an increasingly competitive, dog-eat-dog social world.  At any rate, this interpellation of ‘culture’ - or a racialised conception of culture - into the political terrain of post-credit crunch Britain achieved one very salient effect.  It articulated the concrete experiences of decline - relative national, imperialist decline; economic decline; the declining living standards of workers and a section of the middle class - within a single narrative of resentment structured by Islamophobia.  The EDL’s narrative obliquely ‘mentioned’ real social facts, and provided a schema through which supporters could live their relationship to those facts.  And of course, it mobilised those supporters to address the ostensible ‘cause’ of those facts in what was at first a highly effective strategy of street mobilisations with football casuals at their core.

 

III.  This immediately posed a unique kind of challenge to traditional anti-fascist strategy in the UK, as the pivot on which a wider anti-racist politics turned.  The logic went something like this: fascists are both the most dangerous spearhead of racist reaction and potentially its weakest point.  We can and should mobilise the broadest possible unity against the far right; in doing so we have to challenge their racism and we can force our allies in this fight to adopt a more consistently anti-racist position.  Of course, even where we do not succeed in this wider objective, a conjunctural defeat for fascism is no small thing.  However, the EDL, for all that it knowingly drew in significant strata of the old far right, never became a fascist organisation.  This is why the formulations from the SWP and UAF were, some slips notwithstanding, generally very careful: for example, the EDL was “a racist organisation with Nazis at its core”.  It resembled a fascist organisation in some respects.  For example, its emphasis on control of the streets.  Or, its forms of alcohol-greased, macho solidarity, its rabble-paramilitarism.  Or, its focus on visual communication and symbolism invoking a cod national mythology (the crusades).  Or, finally, the fitful tendencies of the EDL leadership to try to broaden its range of targets (to include students, for example) so that its counter-subversive activities begin to vaguely resemble traditional fascist anticommunism.  Yet, it did not become a fascist organisation dedicated to the overthrow of parliamentary democracy and the smashing of workers organisations.  In its overall make-up, its strategy, its ideological orientation, it was closer to Geert Wilders, a populist-rightist on the far right of liberal democracy, than to Nick Griffin.  And the existence of such an ambiguous, ‘contradictory’, hybrid formation posed, as I say, a challenge to the anti-fascist strategy.  The tactical response of antifascists, sensible in its way, was to treat the EDL as a kind of fascism-in-becoming.  Since fascism was its telos, it had to be dealt with as would any fascist organisation operating in the same way: broad antifascist coalitions harnessed, where possible, to a strategy of militant confrontation led by the radical wing of the antifascist movement.  This usefully limited the EDL’s physical advances, in part by forcing the police to adopt different containment strategies, and among other factors it helped prevent their demonstrations from acquiring a certain critical mass.  However, this was only ever useful as a holding response.  The underlying problem was that the EDL were building on ideologies that were profoundly mainstream.  This is why the media, and certain politicians, can often be found treating the EDL as if they were merely misguided and pursuing counterproductive strategies.  And a strategy of harassing the EDL without also doing work on the underlying political and ideological ground could only ever yield short term results.

 

IV. The fight against racism is a long-term fight that has to be conducted on many different levels.  It is not just a question of winning immediate political battles - a glorious victory in Walthamstow or whatever.  The tempo of political struggles is extremely rapid, and the half-life of a particular struggle can be very brief indeed.  But these struggles are fought on a terrain formed by years of cultural and ideological work, between forces shaped by that same work over a long duration.  The tempo of cultural and ideological battles is, compared to political fights, glacial.  But just because there are no immediate successes in these fronts doesn't mean they are of no value - they are absolutely central.  The intense racist backlash around the English riots, or that following the Woolwich killing, was not inevitable.  Such episodes take place on the basis of efforts by diverse forces to elaborate new racist ideologies over a long period.

 

V. We cannot fight the EDL without also combatting the other major forces of racism in society.  The EDL would be nothing without the tabloids, the police, the neoliberal parties in parliament, and so on.  The ideologies which legitimise the EDL's actions or at least render them as explicable reactions to extreme provocation, originate in Whitehall, the BBC, the press, parliament and the business funders of reaction.  And to defeat those forces we need a different range of tactics.  The EDL is primarily based on street violence, so the onus is on counter-mobilisation and self-defence.  The same tactics could not be deployed against UKIP, the Murdoch press, or the Home Office.  I don't propose a smorgasbord of alternative tactics here; I merely highlight the need for something more than counter-mobilisations.

 

VI. There is no future in attempting to collapse anti-racism into anti-austerity struggles.  Such attempts represent a strain of workerism, and have emerged from some surprising quarters - including Alexis Tsipras.  Racism does not simply emerge as a displaced form of despair over deprivation or insecurity.  Its development and spread may be accelerated by profound political crisis, the breakdown of authority, crises of overproduction, financial collapses, and so on.  As I have suggested, one of the things that EDL racism organises is the experience of certain social classes in the context of crisis and decline.  And certainly, as a consequence, the struggles over the capitalist crisis and its resolution have a relationship to the struggle against racism: this means that initiatives such as Left Unity and the People's Assembly should take anti-racism seriously as a semi-autonomous component of their broader strategy.  But to understand the relationship between racism, economic crisis and emerging political subjectivities requires an analysis light years ahead of the lingering 'capitalist crisis = hard times = racism' model.

 

VII.  There can likewise be no attempt to collapse anti-racism into the antiwar movement, such as it is.  That is no less reductive.  For example, the analyses of the Woolwich killing that attempt to ascribe it to the 'war on terror', and therefore to orient analysis primarily toward antiwar activism, strike me as unconvincing.  Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale certainly seem to have responded to the context of the 'war on terror', and to have explained their actions in that context.  But the processes through which they decided to join the most marginal and militant of Islamist sects in the first place are likely to be rooted in the daily processes of British capitalism.  We need to fight and win that argument: that Britain is a profoundly racist and unjust society in which black people are humiliated and deprived in all sorts of highly visible ways.  More generally, the forces of racist reaction in our society are not monomaniacally obsessed with the categories of the ‘war on terror’.  UKIP, for example, is Islamophopic, but just as importantly it is anti-immigrant and xenophobically anti-European.  There is a rich brew of bigotries fusing together in provincial, parochial England, and their specific relationship to the daily workings of capitalism must be grasped as well as their imbrication with imperialist violence.

 

VIII. It's been obvious for a while, and it is more obvious now.  One cannot segment off different types of racism as if they are completely separate; they are mutually reinforcing.  The rise in Islamophobia, as we saw during the riots, and as is becoming clear from the intriguing raciologies arising from the Woolwich killing - the EDL speaker in Newcastle urged his audience to "send the black cunts back" - is not exclusive of a long-term regeneration of other types of racism.  Indeed, Islamophobia's role as the dominant form of culturalist racism permits the rehabilitation of the discredited elements of racial essentialism, while at the same time articulating them in a new form. What this means is not simply that Islamophobia is simply a cover for 'traditional' types of racism.  It used to be argued that it was merely a way of being racist toward Pakistanis.  No, current forms of racism do not simply reanimate older forms. As Stuart Hall put it, "Racism is always historically specific. Though it may draw on the cultural traces deposited by previous historical phases, it always takes on specific forms. It arises out of present - not past - conditions, its effects are specific to the present organisation of society, to the present unfolding of its dynamic political and cultural processes - not simply to its repressed past."  The current forms of racism refer to and organise current antagonisms, expressed in complex political struggles, from the 2001 riots to the 2012 riots.  And there is something very specific about Islamophobia and its content - the obsession with religious identities, with the amateurish hermeneutics of the Quran, and so on - something very current.  The point is not that Islamophobia is a cover, but rather that there is a convergence in the techniques of racialisation, the political forces involved, and the ideational content involved in the types of racism in Britain today.  I think this means that it would a political mistake to try to identify one type of racism as the 'respectable racism' and simply campaign against that - the tendency is for racism in general to be made 'more respectable', and therefore we need a multi-pronged assault on racism in general.

 

Richard Seymour

 

 

Labels: 'british values', 'extremism, 'race', british state, edl, english defence league, islamophobia, New Category, racism, racists

Israeli assault on Gaza posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: colonialism, gaza, Israel, middle east, racism, revolution, US imperialism, zionism

Meme logic posted by Richard Seymour

Memes are an interesting way in which people appropriate mass culture seemingly for their own ends - pictures taken from movie stills, stolen photographs, domestic cat pictures, or crude sketches, fixed to a slogan that is either cute, snarky, ironical, or emetically sentimental.  The ways in which these work politically are complex, but particularly where sentiment is involved, a simple Barthesian analysis, with all its limitations, can be sufficient to indicate the dominant tendency.  This is a particularly irritating example:





The logic of this image is profoundly ideological (Islamophobic, imperialist, chauvinist, etc), but in what way?  It isn't obvious, but nor is it concealed.  There is no smoke screen.  The ideology works by chains of connotation. 

In and of itself, this image depicts a well-known 'ex-Muslim' neoconservative, who has participated in racist reaction in the Netherlands before joining the US right, next to a particularly banal sentiment that one assumes she has uttered at some point. Putting it more kindly, and in the light it is intended to be seen in, it shows a woman who has been raised as a Muslim and described her suffering due to a particular type of religious dogma, articulating a lapidary defence of secular liberal virtues.  She has a dignified comportment and dress, a handsome face (yes, it shouldn't matter, but...) and an intelligent expression.  That's the literal signification, or denotation.

The connotative signification goes something like this: 

"Muslims are violently intolerant, a threat to liberal values of religious toleration going back to Locke. To refuse to acknowledge this and take the appropriate measures (kulturkampf), or to dispute it in any serious way, is to defer to a politically correct consensus that denies reality in the name of polite anti-racism. And what better answer to the politically correct brigade than this black woman who has experienced the worst practices of Muslims, who was raised Muslim and knows the threat that Islam poses in detail? Surely she is the one defending Western values, while their historical champions, liberal intellectuals, capitulate to obscurantism and reaction!" 

As I say, nothing is concealed - everything is there in the open. The image works, rather, by establishing a myth, and naturalising the ideology it articulates.  That is, if the signification of the image is accepted by its intended myth-consumer, it establishes an apparently natural link between the literal signification and the connotative signification. If read critically, the connotations begin to dissolve: one notices that tolerance is not an obvious, but a contested term; that Hirsi Ali's idea of waging cultural war against Islam (banning Muslim schools, going to war, etc) has at the very least a dubious claim to tolerance; that the Islam she remonstrates and mobilises against is a static, essentialised, literalised, homogeneous bloc which by no means coincides with the complex, contested families of meanings and practices that one actually encounters as Islam; that the political forces she has allied herself with and supported aren't even allies of liberal virtue, or Enlightnment in its real, historical sense; that the 'West' itself is every bit as dubious a concept as 'the white race', onto which it largely maps; and so on.

But the ideal consumer doesn't read critically.  S/he absorbes the whole mythological chain of meanings attached to the image, and thus absorbes a racist, belligerent ideology in pseudo-progressive get-up.  It is exactly like an advertisement in its logic.  One looks at Kate Moss advertising eye mascara; her indifferent, made-up visage, gazing at the consumer against a backdrop of swirling blacks and reds.  The image connotes rebelliousness, power, sexuality, self-control and presence, both in terms of the colour scheme and fonts and the well-known back story of the 'troubled' model.  There is no concealment of the advertisement's meaning.  The literal meaning (here is a beautiful model who is advertising her line of make-up) is as explicit as the mythical meaning (possessing this make-up gives one the presence, social power and independence of Kate Moss!).  The connection between the two is naturalised, as are a chain of profoundly ideological, contested ideas - like 'beauty' for example, or like the idea that a woman's worthiness for attention and power are contingent on her identifying at a symbolic level with the male gaze.  Memes in this sense, and of this type, are advertisements for a usually dominant ideology, circulated voluntarily through social media, as unpaid labour.

There are a host of other examples I could have picked; one sees dozens daily.  Earlier today, I saw a popular one: an image of a 'poppy' represented as a stainless steel lapel pin, with a banner slogan on it - "try burning this".  It was obviously a defiant, ironical retort to those Islamist desperadoes who (treason! infamy!) reportedly burned poppies a couple of years ago.  And I believe the chain of connotations attached to this image are just as obvious, as is the reactionary ideology that the image reinforces.  There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of images like this colonizing the internet.  One senses that in the rise of memes, the dissident, subversive possibilities are more than compensated for by their potential role as a new technique of governmentality made possible by social media.

Labels: barthes, connotation, cruise missile liberals, islamophobia, liberalism, marxism, memes, racism, structuralism, the liberal defence of murder, war on terror

Mad dogs and Englishmen: Stuart Hall on 'Englishness' posted by Richard Seymour

My latest for Jacobin, should you be interested (of course you are):

Stuart Hall, prelate of British cultural studies, has intervened in the Labour Party’s current debates about ‘Englishness’.  He is brief, but nonetheless interesting: “I talked to Cruddas about this … I think I understand his preoccupations rather more than Maurice Glasman’s. In a constituency like Cruddas’s, where you’re fighting the far right, you have to think about those things [English identity, immigration]. But you have to be careful about how you recruit them. He came to talk to me about the New Left, which, of course, was interested in the popular language of the nation.  But I had the feeling he was raiding the past, out of context, in a way.  I do think Englishness is something we need to talk about, but it’s contested terrain that is structured powerfully against a contemporary radical appropriation.”

This is perhaps a more pointed intervention than the tone of guarded scepticism would lead one to believe...

Labels: 'british values', britishness, class, englishness, gramsci, labour party, labourism, nationalism, populism, racism, stuart hall

From the mouths of idiots posted by Richard Seymour

As you will have heard, the English Defence League were humiliated in Walthamstow last Saturday.  I knew it would go badly for them, but even when I saw how big the march was, it wasn't clear just how badly it would end. You can read the reports here, but it's probably a good idea to look at it from the EDL's point of view as well. In these videos you can see both Tommy Robinson and his deputy Kev Carroll have a massive breakdown, while a section of the UAF rally - most of which is blockading the EDL march - gathers opposite.  Robinson cuts a particularly foolish figure, attempting to channel a bit of Mussolini while he shouts and gesticulates at a hostile crowd.  I am not complacent about this, but after about a decade of fascist upsurge, this is a real pleasure to witness.

Labels: anti-fascism, bnp, edl, fascism, islamophobia, nazi scum, racism, uaf

Anders Behring Breivik and 21st Century Fascism posted by Richard Seymour

I contributed a chapter to the excellent ebook, On Utoya, which I strongly recommend you read and digest before taking the mainstream media too seriously on the Breivik verdict.  I have the editors' permission to post up a version of the article I wrote, making the case that Breivik signifies the emergence of a specifically 21st Century fascism.  What I'm posting here is the unedited, unexpurgated version, warts and all.

Labels: antisemitism, breivik, fascism, feminism, gramsci, hitler, islamophobia, laclau, multiculturalism, mussolini, nazism, political correctness, racism, socialism, third reich