Wednesday, September 05, 2012
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
Monday, September 19, 2011
The 'white working class' again posted by Richard Seymour
It's not just the incident itself which is shocking, but the attitude the video bears out, a smug, nasty condescension replacing real political analysis. The video was posted on EDLRaw – a pro-EDL YouTube channel – and its source has not yet been verified. However, when I shared it on social media, asking for confirmation, a handful attempted to excuse the jeering with the mantra "a fascist is a fascist". The implication was that violence, class prejudice and misogyny can be tolerated on the left as long as its targets have attended a terrifying racist intimidation parade.
Labels: anti-fascism, bnp, edl, fascism, islamophobia, misogyny, racism, sexism, tories, white working class
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Starkey staring racist posted by Richard Seymour
Labels: bnp, islamophobia, multiculturalism, racism, racists, reactionaries, riots, tories, tottenham
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Breivik: Hitler should have been a Zionist posted by Richard Seymour
An interesting insight onto the specific kind of antisemitism prevalent on much of the far right - Tony Karon quotes from the mass murderer's manifesto:"Were the majority of the German and European Jews disloyal? Yes, at least the so called liberal Jews, similar to the liberal Jews today that opposes nationalism/Zionism and supports multiculturalism. Jews that support multiculturalism today are as much of athreat to Israel and Zionism (Israeli nationalism) as they are to us. So let us fight together with Israel, with our Zionist brothers against all anti-Zionists, against all culturalMarxists/multiculturalists. Conservative Jews were loyal to Europe and should have been rewarded. Instead, [Hitler] just targeted them all ... He could have easily worked out an agreement with the UK and France to liberate the ancient Jewish Christian lands with the purpose of giving the Jews back their ancestral lands ... The UK and France would perhaps even contribute to such a campaign in an effort to support European reconciliation. The deportation of the Jews from Germany wouldn't be popular but eventually, the Jewish people would regard Hitler as a hero because he returned the Holy land to them."
Labels: bnp, edl, fascism, hitler, islamophobia, multiculturalism, nazism, racism, terror, third reich
Mainstreaming fascism, again posted by Richard Seymour
The EDL are in fact anti-racist, anti-fascist and anti-Nazi. They have many members and leaders with non-European background (African and Asian)…EDL and KT (Brievik) principles can never be reconciled as we are miles apart ideologically…The EDL harshly condemns any movement that use terror as a tool, such as the KT. This is why, we, the KT, view the EDL as naïve fools.
ps: There's a petition being circulated over this issue, please sign.
Labels: anti-fascism, bbc, bnp, edl, fascism, islamophobia, norway, racism
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Still blaming Muslims posted by Richard Seymour
Labels: 'war on terror', anti-fascism, bnp, clash of civilisations, edl, fascism, islam, islamophobia, norway, racism
Thursday, April 21, 2011
The English ideology III: the 'white working class' posted by Richard Seymour
Of course, Glasman does not mean to target the EDL and its thousands of supporters with this intervention. He means to mobilise the ideologeme of 'the white working class' as a sort of puppet boxer with which to belabour the left in the party. As he complains: "working-class men can't really speak at Labour party meetings about what causes them grief, concerns about their family, concerns about immigration, love of country, without being falsely stereotyped as sexist, racist, nationalist". As you will see if you peruse that link, Glasman uses 'working class' to describe any silly idea that he likes the sound of, particularly if - as will usually be the case - it is a right-wing idea. Don Paskini rightly points out that this latest is a libel on the working class, the vast majority of whom detest the EDL. But that's almost to miss the point. Of course Glasman is mobilising a (deeply patronising) image of "working class men" to hammer the anti-racists and feminists in the Labour Party. But V N Volosinov argued that the word is the most sensitive index of social change, and we should be very attentive to the changes that such terminological nuances advert to. There's something very important going on when the Labour Right, which worked so hard to end the class war, are anxious to be seen and heard evoking class.
Recently, there was a very useful analysis of the BNP and the 'white working class' by James Rhodes in the Sociology journal. It took issue with the idea, circulated by politicians and journalists alike, that the BNP's support comes from the most deprived among whites. In this respect, he points out that while the BNP have made real inroads into working class areas, there is no natural affinity between the BNP and white workers, and nor is it the poorest they appeal to. The two class fractions most likely to be represented among BNP supporters are 'skilled workers', and the lower middle class. The journalistic accounts are led astray by the 'ecological fallacy' - that is, if BNP voters can be found in a known industrial heartland, then they must be the traditional supporters of Labourism. In fact, Rhodes points out, the BNP support is typically found in the poshest areas of these towns and cities, a fact that has a huge impact on far right politics. BNP supporters and members tend to articulate their sense of class location indirectly, by reference to locality. Their scale is extremely small, as they tend to focus on this street, that area, etc. They are "rooted" and small town, rather than metropolitan; parochial rather than urbane. So, interviews with fascist voters and activists disclose that struggles over resources and entitlements are refracted through particular geographical references - ie, that street is filled with poor people who behave like animals, and the council throws all the money at them; while this street is respectable and well-maintained but gets nothing. Through such spatial distinctions, they carve out a moral and cultural economy, based on authenticity and respectability.
Authenticity merely consists in 'being from here', not merely being British and white, but being of this particular small community. Try leafleting in a BNP target area and one of the challenges that fascist sympathisers are likely to throw at you (assuming they aren't numerous enough to kick your head in) is that you're not from the area. Respectability consists of two intersecting aspects: employment, in which one can be said to be contributing something to the pot deserving of entitlement to services and funding; and conformity to certain social mores, in which one can be said to be integrated. The fascists and their supporters view the poorest of the working class with utter horror and disdain, as being almost as bad as immigrants. For them, 'welfare dependency' is an utter scandal, allowing people to be lazy and parasitic without ever contributing to society. They do not favour more money being spent on poorer areas, even if they do happen to be 'white', and in general don't support big state expenditure. They believe that only a sturdy police intervention can stop poor whites "from behaving how they've always behaved" and compel them to integrate and contribute, while "Asians" and "Muslims" can never be integrated as they aren't authentically "from here".
Of course, those BNP supporters who are themselves dependent on benefits must have their own way of asserting their respectability, and thus entitlement, within the context of fascist ideology. And they stake their claim principally on the fact of their being British and white: "locals first" as they are wont to say. But this merely defers an antagonism within the fascist constituencies - between, if you like, the petty bourgeois and lumpenproletarian elements - over entitlement to resources. And moreover, it's an antagonism where the latter are at a decided disadvantage, since fascist ideology, as is made abundantly plain in the newspapers, magazines and pamphlets of fascists, does hold the unemployed, the poor and the disabled in particularly low regard. Indeed, far from channelling the latent fears and resentments of the 'white working class', it's clear that the far right trade on a language very different from that of class, and mobilise an unstable alliance of localised constituencies often on the basis of hostility to much of the working class. Recall that Nick Griffin dubbed the people of the East End "stupid" and "decadent". This is because they comprise just those sectors of the working class - who are representative of the majority - who are either poor, 'unskilled', black, gay, leftist, culturally liberal, or in some other way not the right side of 'whiteness', of 'Britishness'. One thing James Rhodes' article doesn't discuss is the fascists' relationship to trade unionism. Perhaps this is because it's too obvious, but it's worth just saying that the BNP's long history of hostility to working class militancy has included their participation in major scabbing operations during the Miners' Strike, during which epic battle they called for the army to be deployed against striking workers.
If it is striking just how closely the apparition of 'working class' authenticity invoked by the Labour Right resembles the notion of 'white' respectability circulated by fascists, this is because there are elements of the petty bourgeois weltanschauung which have resonate with other social experiences, and which the Thatcherites in both the Conservative and Labour parties worked so hard to univeralise. The fact that some in the Labour Right want to go farther in this direction, trying to construct an electoral bloc by pandering to the most backward elements in society, who would never vote Labour anyway, is not the issue here. Rather, it is the fact that they have felt the need to do so using the language of class in a racialised way. They could just stick with standard Poujadist talk about 'ordinary decent people', 'the little man in the street' and so on, but they feel compelled to phrase it in 'class' terms that the far right are actually less comfortable with using, even if 'class' is heavily racialised.
It could be argued that this is a hegemonic operation within Labourism. The evisceration of several of Labour's working class 'heartlands' throughout the 2000s as a result of New Labour's commitment to warmongering, privatization and aggressive social authoritarianism has cost the party 5 million mainly working class votes. The pseudo-explanation, the way this can be incorporated without anything too significant having to change, is that the 'white working class' became fed up with immigration and in a world of increasing insecurity, become ever more committed to the security blankets of nation and ethnic identity, which politicians did not sufficiently articulate. This manouevering has been going on since Blair went and it became clear that Brown would not stay on for long. As the bye-election losses piled up, the Right leaked to the papers that Harriet Harman was responsible, the weasely line being that "we've got a problem with white working class males, and Harriet Harman wants to pass a Bill to help the gays, blacks and women!" But the losses still came, even harder when Labour tacked to the right on immigration and criminal justice. Labour voters didn't respond well to this sort of campaigning and boycotted the election. But it didn't matter, just as it doesn't matter now that Blue Labour or whatever it is called tomorrow won't actually win back all of those lost voters - they already know this perfectly well. Revulsion against the Tories will, they are betting, throw an election victory their way soon. The 'Blue Labour' stuff will, if anything, lessen the scale of any comeback. But the narrative provides a seemingly compelling reason why the Left, who would naturally be expected to make some small advances in the case of a big social struggle against austerity, must be kept out of the way, disenfranchised and neutralised at all costs. This also explains the tendency among the Labour Right (and centre) to favour reforms which either demote the trade unions within Labour, or give votes to largely passive groups outwith the party. But the language of class also provides a raiment of insurgency to what is actually a continuity exercise, a matey populist facade for an elitist politics. By adding the word 'white', moreover, the 'working class' becomes de-odorised, neutralised, cleansed of menacing cadences of militancy and leftism. It becomes an object of pathos and melancholia, inherently reactionary, and typified by the middle aged white male emoting about family and country, and probably organising one of the mythical millions of street parties to erupt in spontaneous planned celebration over the royal wedding next week. This sort of 'working class' is tame, dull, conformist, and deferential, but also vicious, sadistic, and vindictive. It is in this, and so many other ways, the ideal alibi for the Blairites. The actual working class will be a more fissile, combustible and less manageable matter in the coming months and years.
Labels: bnp, bnp scum, britishness, english defence league, englishness, fascism, islamophobia, labour, new labour, reactionaries, socialism
Friday, January 14, 2011
Coalition thumped, BNP down, in Oldham posted by Richard Seymour
The lost Tory vote didn't just break away to the Liberals. Maybe a fraction went to Labour, but a seemingly marginal development worth noticing is that UKIP have seen their vote share rise gradually since 2001, from about 1% to 3.86% in May 2010 and have added almost 2 percent points since the general election, to push them to 5.8%. They keep their deposit for the first time in this seat. Partly, this will be because of the protracted decline of the BNP, to which we'll return in a moment. But I think it will be due also to dissatisfaction from the right with Cameron's leadership of the Tories. UKIP's problems in the middle of the decade, partly caused by the Kilroy-Silk's split which saw votes siphoned to his new (and now late) Veritas party, were probably an interruption in a secular trend. A section of the hard Thatcherite right is slowly seceding from the Conservative Party, staking out independent territory on Europe, the pound, immigration, and crime. Another way to put this is that the alliance between big business and the petit-bourgeoisie, on which crucial axis the Conservative Party rests, is in crisis.
The BNP has seen its vote share painstakingly eroded by anti-fascist work since 2001, when it made a shock breakthrough in Oldham by getting 11.3% of the vote. They gained 5.72% in May 2010, and 4.5% last night. Usually the far right would expect to see its vote share increase outside of a general election, as voters for the main parties decline to turn out. If you were so minded, you could amuse yourself by scanning the dejected reactions on fascist web forums. The interesting question is whether this signals a real, lasting resolution of the acute social problems that brought the BNP to prominence in Oldham in the first place.
This most centrally involved institutional racism in local government, which systematically declined to hire representative numbers of people from ethnic minorities, de facto segregation in housing [pdf] and education [pdf], and constant conflict between police and local Asian youths, underpinned by the collapse of local industries such as textiles. This toxic combination had fed into a series of political interventions by police and local media designed to scapegoat and demonise local Asians for the area's social problems. The result, which the Ritchie report [pdf] described at the time, had been a surge in racist abuse from white neighbours such that many Asian residents felt unable to leave their homes after dark. Some of this has abated. The acute crisis of 2001 has not returned, and patient community work has helped undermine fearmongering over local mosques, for example. But the chronic problems remain as they were. There was some investment in amenities, some government-sponsored cross-community work, but the main response from the authorities was to blame Asians for self-segregating. The local MP, Phil Woolas, claimed that the main problem was unacknowledged 'anti-white racism'. The government's Prevent strategy, moreover, has helped undermine those progressive initiatives launched under the rubric of 'community cohesion' by enforcing a disciplinarian agenda through 'community gatekeepers', and by singling out Muslims as the source of 'violent extremism' while ignoring the far right. The race-baiting by Phil Woolas before the 2010 general election, and more recently by Jack Straw, suggests that a section of the Labour Right still thinks that there is mileage in tapping resentment toward Asians, and Muslims in particular.
And here it becomes very dangerous. People like Woolas and Straw never believed that Labour should offer a real alternative to the Tories on cuts. That's why they think you have to play with racism. But if the Tories succeed in imposing the cuts without a serious fightback, then places like Oldham are fucked, and Labour will pay the price. Unemployment is rising across the borough, which contains the seats of Oldham East and Saddleworth, and Oldham West and Royton (Michael Meacher's constituency). However, it is not concentrated in Liberal redoubts like Saddleworth north and south, or the Tory areas like Chaddleton north, but chiefly in the central wards like Alexandra and Werneth. Youth unemployment is especially concentrated in Alexandra, the ward with the highest percentage of Asian constituents, some of which was added to the Oldham East and Saddleworth constituency in 2010. It's true that over the last decade the Liberals have built up their support by wooing Labour voters in poorer wards like Coldhurst, St Marys and Waterhead. But the Liberal retreat from those areas will probably be accompanied by growth in Tory wards - bearing in mind that many of the current Liberal strongholds were won from Tory control back in the Nineties. Those wards will suffer from the cuts, but not as much as elsewhere. Labour's base in the organised working class, already suffering from the destruction of the manufacturing core, is about to suffer most terribly, as public sector employees are laid off. And what has been particularly worrying about the fascist vote has been the way in which it was able to build in the poorest working class areas like Alexandra because of racism and de facto segregation. Throw in soaring unemployment, and the further destruction of Labour's base, and you've got the potential for another conflagration, much more serious.
So, Labour's victory is a positive sign. It shows that the core working class constituencies in this area want to fight the cuts. There was realistically no other way, electorally, for them to express such a desire. The Greens were the only left-of-Labour alternative, and they have no tradition of significant support in Oldham East and Saddleworth. The decline in the BNP vote is good, because it throws the party into further disarray, and adds to the dissatisfaction with Nick Griffin's leadership. But all of this is contingent on whether the trade union movement in these areas is ready to put up a fight. Nothing short of a protracted social and industrial struggle is going to stop the destruction of communities like those in Oldham.
Labels: austerity, bnp, bnp scum, fascism, islamophobia, labour, liberals, oldham, racism, tories, unite against fascism, working class
Thursday, December 16, 2010
EDL turns on students posted by Richard Seymour
[I]n a speech to EDL supporters in Peterborough on 11 December, EDL leader “Tommy Robinson” – a former BNP member whose real name is Stephen Yaxley Lennon – issued a threat to student demonstrators.His speech alternated attempts to whip up anti-Muslim hatred with attacks on the thousands of school and college students who have protested against fees and education cuts over the past weeks. He threatened:
The next time the students want to protest in our capital, the English Defence League will be there.
In terms that will come as news to millions of working class school and university students, he claimed:
You had students living off their dads’ f***ing bank cards who have never lived a normal way in their life. They do not understand what it is to be a working class member of this community.
And in a single scattergun blast, he lashed out at students, Unite Against Fascism and “communist scum”. His speech followed streams of hate directed at students on the EDL’s forums.
The EDL has so far been an organisation that united violent rightists, racists and outright Nazis in a common cause against British Muslims. But in the recent past, it has started to denounce trade unionists and disrupt left-wing political meetings, and with this shift is becoming much more like a traditional far right street organisation, though not yet one with sufficient cadres to actually control the streets anywhere. Unite Against Fascism argues that the EDL is doing this because the fascist core is trying to ideologically harden its membership and supporters. This makes sense in terms of who and what the EDL are. In my ISJ piece, I argued that the Nazi strategy in the EDL was analogous to past strategies of fascist paramilitarism:
What appears to be happening is that the organisational and “intellectual” spine of the organisation is being supplied by organised Nazis while the foot-soldiers are recruited from among football casuals and other violent right wing, but non-Nazi, groups. This is not the first time that such a tactic has been pursued. The National Front used to infiltrate and mobilise skinhead and football hooligan groups during the 1970s in order to attack the left and ethnic minorities. It is also analogous to the general tendency by fascist organisations to use paramilitaries, comprising many who are not ideologically committed fascists, both as weapons against opponents and as socialising institutions that can help produce a disciplined fascist cadre.76 This is one reason why it is a mistake to simply dismiss the EDL as thugs who can be dealt with by police as a public order issue.
I see that the BNP has declared that its strategy for the future will be much more oriented toward street activity, as its 2010 general election failure has made the electoralist approach resoundingly unpopular with the membership. Again, this would be congruent with a strategy of hardening the political support of the organisation. But there may be more to the EDL's turn than pressure from the fascist hardcore. I think there will be an element of competition and antagonism between different factions in the EDL - its schismatic nature was made clear when Paul Ray and Tommy Robinson were issuing Youtube threats to one another. And perhaps the aim is to make the EDL a broader rightist political movement than the BNP can be. Perhaps, as the cuts take hold, and the anti-cuts coalition emerges, the EDL may be trying to position itself at the helm of militant reaction, waving the flag and sticking up for authority when the traditional parties of the right don't seem able to do so. However that turns out, it is vital that as the EDL broadens its targets, the coalition organised against the EDL and like-minded groups broadens commensurately. If the EDL want to have a go at students, organised workers and the left, rather than just beating up Asian women and smashing up shops, they'll find themselves rapidly outnumbered and outgunned.
Labels: bnp, bnp scum, edl, english defence league, fascism, islamophobia, nationalism, racism, reactionaries
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Racism and the recession talk posted by Richard Seymour
In the United States, the state of Arizona has passed a new law that makes it a crime for immigrants to be in public without carrying documents, and which allows police to detain anyone suspected of being an illegal immigrant whatever the circumstances. This isn’t uncontested, and the immigrant movements are one of the signs of real hope in America. The ‘tea party’ Right is also leading a vicious campaign not just against the so-called ‘ground zero mosque’, but against a wide array of actual mosques or mosque-building projects. In Italy and Hungary, there have been fresh pogroms against Roma gypsies. Across the continent, the far right has made gains – in Holland and Belgium, for example, and recently in Sweden.
The era of the ‘war on terror’ has, of course, seen a revival in civilizational discourse that sees Muslims in particular as a barbarian and antipathetic menace, a solvent of ‘Western values’. Thus, in a very obvious way, imperialism has intersected with and amplified already existing domestic racism towards largely South Asian and North African minorities in Western Europe. The global economic crisis is accelerating this, partly by the way in which it intensifies competition between different groups of workers, so that migrant labourers are increasingly seen as a problem rather than a solution, but partly also because of the way in which it adds appeal to the false security offered by integrationist models of nationality and citizenship.
With echoes of the 1930s so abundant, this accelerating political polarisation should not surprise us. But the racism of the 2010s will not be the racism of the 1930s. This is not the colonial world any more. Antisemitism, though it still matters, is unlikely to be the major focus of European racism - although it has an occult fascination for the authentic far right – and it is certainly marginal in the United States. The primarily somatic discourses of race have been largely supplanted, notwithstanding the confused and ultimately hapless attempts to revive biological discourse through the genome. Not that biological reductionism is irrelevant here. As I will come to argue, it has played an important role in legitimising new forms of racism. But the idea that there are colour-coded races – white, black, red, yellow – or that you could refer to someone meaningfully as being of the ‘Mongol’ race, for example, has become faintly absurd.
Today, in place of rigid schemas assigning people to races based on some supposed ‘bloodline’ or ancestry in an original human family – Aryan, Semitic or Hamitic as the case may be - we increasingly have a slightly less static, less schematic, but nonetheless essentialist hierarchy of cultures: we have moved from colour to culture, from body to belief. A recent example of this, though seemingly a relatively benign one, was when Richard Dawkins described the Pope as the head of the second most evil religion in the world. Number one, I suspect, was Islam, which has since the colonial era been characterised by its opponents in the tropes of fanaticism, irrationalism and violence. This should also alert us to the changing gender codes to which racism relates. Racism has always been bound up with patriarchy, with the nuclear family as the privileged site of racial reproduction. In ‘old Europe’, as it were, the supremacy of white men was exercised over women and children as much as over colonial subjects. However, there has long been a trend, dubbed ‘imperial feminism’, wherein non-white men are depicted as being particularly savage in their treatment of women – and thus, the defence of empire was seen as somehow coextensive with the protection of women. ‘Imperial feminism’ in this sense has come to the fore – we’ve even had attempts by the boneheads of the English Defence League to claim that they support womens’ rights. They even purport to have a ‘gay division’, which is probably as populous as their ‘Newport Pagnell division’
And that shift has facilitated a certain amount of confusion about what racism is, and has provided an alibi not merely for anti-Muslim racism, but for more traditional forms of racism that single out, for example, young black men. The latter were the subject of a short screed by the Spectator’s in-house provocateur and shock-commentator Rod Liddle last year. The basis of his attack was that these men were responsible for the overwhelming majority of robberies, muggings and violent crimes in the capital. The statistics for convictions did not actually back this up, although intriguingly, statistics on police actions against individuals for these crimes was later cited as if it did – in fact, a Home Office report published some years back pointed out that research on youth crime had shown that while young white men were far more likely to have committed a crime in a given a year, young black and Asian men were more likely to have been proceeded against by police. However, the empirical claim was almost secondary. When challenged on his claim, Liddle explained that he wasn’t talking about ‘race’, but about ‘culture’. He suggested that there was a particular culture among these men that valued and encouraged anti-social attitudes and behaviours. This implies that there is this ‘thing’ called culture which is not a complex, evolving, interwoven process, but which is soluble into discrete, relatively imporous and stable entities. This, ironically, is precisely the reified model of culture that was promoted by the official multiculturalism that Liddle is attacking.
This sordid little tale is representative, I think, of the broader trend. It exemplifies the shift that I’ve been speaking of, from biological reductionism to cultural essentialism, and what I want to do is first contextualise this shift in a particular British history, and secondly to elaborate, briefly, a theoretical understanding of racism that can comprehend this change
Cultural racism, if you like, is not new. It has a long-standing history in imperialist ideology, it was central to the foundation of apartheid, it was an alibi of Jim Crow, and it played a crucial supporting role in even the most scientistic and biologically determinist forms of racism – an example being the Nazi extermination of the gypsies which, because of the confusion about their racial status (race theory had it that they were originally Aryan) had to be justified in part on the grounds of culture, namely the allegedly anti-social propensities of gypsies, a stereotype that is still with is today when we hear scaremongering stories about Roma gypsies and Travellers.
But the shift in emphasis in racist ideologies that we see today really began after WWII, and in the UK it tracked a move from an aggressive global white supremacism to a defensive white nationalism. In the immediate years after the war, British capitalism faced a number of challenges. It faced the rising dominion of the United States alongside its own diminishing ability to maintain its colonies, losing the ‘jewel of the empire’s crown’, India, in 1947. It faced a national economy with labour shortages, and labour insurgency. Many of its core industries were weak, and nationalisation was the only answer in some cases. The British state, under both Labour and Tory governments, elaborated a consensual answer to this, a social democratic settlement based on extensive public ownership, the pursuit of economic stability through Keynesian demand management, and the maintenance of some form of British dominion through a close, though subordinate, relationship with the United States, which was then encroaching on many of its colonies and ex-colonies. To answer the labour shortage, it was agreed that some 1.25m workers were needed. There was a bipartisan belief that Britain could not tolerate a rapid influx of non-white workers from the ‘New Commonwealth’ – for the sake of social peace, they maintained that such immigrants as did arrive in the UK had to be of “good stock”, which meant white.
There was at that time freedom of movement within the UK and colonies. Subjects of the colonies had their status confirmed as ‘Citizen of the UK and Colonies’ in 1948. But the state preferred not to encourage such migration if they could avoid it. Inevitably, the needs of capital meant that at first small numbers of African-Caribbean migrants started to arrive in the UK. And the state responded by trying to come up with ways to discriminate against non-white labour without appearing to do so. In 1962, with the passing of the Commonwealth Immigration Act, they hit upon a legal measure that would enable the government to discriminate through the use of quotas. Now this wasn’t because the demand for migrant labour had fallen. Actually, by 1982, about 80% of ‘New Commonwealth’ migrants who lived in the UK had arrived after 1962. What the legislation did was not reduce the amount of black and Asian workers moving to then UK, but make their citizenship – remember they were citizens – dependent on the needs of capital. If the demand for labour fell, the quotas could be tightened. And Labour, in time-honoured fashion, opposed the legislation for a bunch of racist eyewash in opposition, but embraced it and tightened its provisions with further legislation once in office.
In that climate of a racist state crackdown on immigration, right-wing Tory politicians began to find that they could gain support not only for themselves but for a whole policy mix that challenged the social democratic consensus by attacking immigrants in the name of a politics of ‘the nation’. The most notorious example of this trend is Enoch Powell, who had until he lost the 1965 Tory leadership election, never expressed anti-immigrant sentiment. He had always been a right-wing free marketeer, and he was a committed imperialist. He had entertained ambitions to become Viceroy of India, the local proxy to the British crown, and about as close to being a King as the progeny of lower-middle class Black Country folks could dream of being. His attitude on migration was shaped by this imperial perspective. As long as Britain could dominate non-white labour through empire, it didn’t need immigration restrictions. But from 1967 he began to attack immigrants for driving down house prices and making life difficult for white neighbourhoods. The burden of his polemic was that too large a number of immigrants brought with them a culture that was inappropriate to Britain, and which the white majority would not be able to live happily alongside. This was a claim that was given some dubious support in the claims of socio-biology in the 1970s, which maintained that it was natural for people to be hostile to those with whom they were unfamiliar. People had hardwired ‘tribal’ instincts, and the tribe in this case was white Britons.
Such was the politics that the New Right espoused, and it became the basis of Thatcher’s Poujadist crusade after taking the Tory leadership in 1975. Attempting to restore the Conservative Party’s hegemonic role in British politics, she sought to use a kind of authoritarian populism to fuse a new electoral coalition uniting capital with the petit-bourgeoisie and a sector of workers. She notoriously gave an interview in which she referred to a supposed popular fear of being ‘swamped’ by people of other cultures to justify immigration crackdowns. Like Powell before her, her key reference was to nation and culture not biology and skin colour, and her mandate was a sort of ‘common sense’ – if people couldn’t help reacting negatively to ‘outsiders’, then it was not racist but merely an articulation of natural grievances to oppose immigration. Thatcher’s British Nationality Act (1981) crowned the repeated anti-immigrant acts since 1962 by revising the category of ‘Citizen of the UK and Colonies’, and effectively ensuring that primary migration from the ‘New Commonwealth’ came to a near standstill
I would say that this politics of ‘the nation’ was exhausted by the time of the Poll Tax riots. Inner city riots, black political advances both in the trade union movement and in the Labour Party, official multiculturalism and the transformed demographic situation meant that it was impossible for explicitly racist politics to survive in a mainstream electoral vehicle. There were still occasions for politicians to whip up a coded racism toward immigrants. Asylum was the main issue in the 1990s, as the Tories sought to justify blocking the entry of refugees to the United Kingdom – which they really weren’t permitted to do because of Britain’s commitment to the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. They did this by trying to find ways to re-classify them as economic migrants, thus subject to the same racist legislation that all other migrants were. The language of the time suggested that asylum seekers were ‘bogus’ – a term first used by Michael Howard as Home Secretary, and then popularised by the media. Refugees, far from being needy, were greedy, anti-social, and parasitic. Britain was a ‘soft touch’.
Again, as is traditional, the Labour Party opposed two rounds of legislation designed to curb asylum rights in the 1990s. But when it came to power, it embraced these laws and added new restrictions including a system of detention camps run by private security firms to imprison refugees while they had their cases processed. Importantly, this was related to another trend in New Labour thinking, which was to revitalise this politics of ‘the nation’ with a new progressive veneer. So while the Lawrence Inquiry delivered a relatively progressive verdict on policing in the UK, David Blunkett was upset by it because he believed that we were not sufficiently proud of “what we’ve got”. The justification for racist immigration legislation in the UK has always been the Powellite one: by controlling the fears of the white majority, it will be possible to legislate against the discrimination of existing ethnic minorities and ensure a tolerant, harmonious society. But in fact the logic, as Roy Hattersley pointed out, is to say that ‘they’ are a problem and a danger who have to be controlled. It leads inescapably to domestic repression and discrimination.
So, fast-forward to 2001, when riots broke out in northern towns and cities. These were places where manufacturing industries were breaking down, where local councils had practised de facto segregation in housing, and where the police had a long-term conflictual relationship with Asian youths. These riots followed racist provocations by fascists and football hooligans in Asian areas, which the police refused to prevent. Instead, when local kids defended themselves, the police suited themselves up in riot gear and attacked the victims. The government response, in the form of the Cantle report, instead of blaming the institutional racism of the police, and the violence of the fascists, was to accuse local Asian communities of being ‘self-segregating’. The problem was that they needed to ‘integrate’. David Blunkett, as Home Secretary, delighted in expressing this integrationist politics in the most provocative manner possible, ordering Asian families to speak English when in their homes and so on. And this became a rallying cry for New Labour-friendly intellectuals, especially in light of the ‘war on terror’, and the drive to contain politically assertive Muslim communities
The long-term effect of this has been to erase oppression, exploitation, inequality and injustice as issues. By treating ‘racial’ issues as problems of how to ensure that everyone internalises some ‘core of Britishness’, whatever that may be, New Labour blamed the victim. It has also led to a situation where significant minorities of the British population feel threatened by mosques, believe that Muslims are given too many advantages, and think the real victims of racism are white. This is obviously related to global dynamics – pressingly, the need to justify the invasion of Iraq by reference to a supposed worldwide threat from ‘radical Muslims’. But it can’t be stressed enough that it is not just a special case inflamed by imperialism, but has roots in the daily processes of British society, and specifically in the insecurity experienced by millions of people, workers and small businessmen, and by the intensified competition that leads people to think that their being unemployed or on low wages is somehow caused by the presence of other workers.
To finish, I want to outline an account of ‘race’ that can help us understand better how culture can replace biology as the main reference for racism, and how Muslims can be subject to racism even though – as many earnest Islamophobes take piteous pains to explain – “Islam ain’t a race”.
First of all, the origins of race as a political category have little to do with the pseudo-scientic anthropological classifications that sprang up in the late eighteenth century, took hold in the nineteenth century and led to colonial genocides and ultimately the Nazi holocaust. Race emerged as a practise before any of these discourses were solidified. According to Theodore Allen, the first example of a racial or perhaps proto-racial system of oppression is in the colonial plantation of Ulster where, he argues, the racialised minority (Catholics) were systematically excluded from certain basic civil, political and legal rights that Protestants, however poor, were entitled to. And this system, pioneered in Ulster, was transplanted to North America’s colonial, indentured labour system. In response to the Bacon Rebellion of 1676, where it seemed possible that a more numerous population of Europeans labourers and farmers might take up arms against their masters and successfully overthrow them, the ruling class began to divide labourers on the basis of new ‘racial’ categories. Whiteness was invented as a legal category, and non-whites were subordinate in various ways – African labour was demoted to chattel slavery with no prospect of manumission, while Native Americans were subject to extermination where they could not be ‘Christianised’. It is important to see that this couldn’t have happened without the emergence of a specifically capitalist social order, as it was the emerging norm of free labour with equal political and citizenship rights that was being tested on the colonial frontiers. And stratifying workers by ‘race’ was a very effective way of depriving some workers of those full rights, and ultimately of reducing the total bargaining power and long-term remuneration of those workers.
That being the case, ‘racialization’ is a process, a political act, and not a static category. Throughout the 19th Century, ‘race-making’ processes were very important to American capital, and David Roediger has written of industry’s use of ‘race management’, wherein different groups of workers would be assigned different payrolls and statuses based on race, nationality, gender, etc. Many groups of workers who would today be called ‘white’ were not necessarily ‘white’ in the 19th Century – Jews, the Irish, Hungarians, Poles, Italians, and so on. They had to fight a socio-political struggle to achieve ‘whiteness’. Other groups, such as Indian Americans, who fought legal battles to win ‘whiteness’, (on the basis of their ‘Aryan’ roots), were unsuccessful. The demarcations of ‘scientific racism’ were usually not strictly relevant to these processes. Indeed, like fascism, racism could be said to be a ‘scavenger ideology’, appropriating ideological bric-a-brac from other traditions – incorporating regional, national, ethnic, religious, class and gender stereotypes. Biology just happens to be the most convenient form of essentialism.
Once this is understood, it is easy to see how Muslims in particular have been subject to ‘race-making’ processes. I will argue that this is happening in the following ways: 1) Muslims are subject to suspicion and hostility in the press, and to persecution from politicians who spread moral panics alleging that they are not ‘fitting in’, and that their customs are somehow a threat to ‘British values’. They are held collectively responsible for acts of terrorism by Muslims, though not even the Prime Minister is prepared to be held responsible for acts of terrorism by the British armed forces; 2) They are subject to political oppression in the form of police harassment, beatings, internment, kidnapping, torture flights, and in some extreme cases, unlawful shootings by police; 3) They are increasingly subject to politicised surveillance, particularly on university campuses, and recently through CCTV recording of goings on in estates in Birmingham; 4) Partly as a consequence of the above, they are more likely to be subject to racist violence and harassment in communities. A study by the University of Essex found a direct correlation between political statements and media reports vilifying Muslims, and violence by fascist and racist thugs on the streets. Thus, Muslims are de facto deprived of the normal range of political and civil rights that every other member of the society claims, and stigmatised with the usual racialising tropes to justify this. The role that this fulfils for the state is to manage a potentially troublesome minority that has suffered particularly from the evisceration of manufacturing economies, from the low wage economy of neoliberalism, while offering everyone else the false security of a robust national belonging. This preserves a divided, stratified labour market in which Muslims are generally among those who suffer lower pay, higher unemployment, less access to good education and more bruising confrontations with the criminal justice system. That is how race-making lends itself as easily to creed as to colour.
This doesn’t have to stay that way, of course. It may be that biological racial schemas, anti-Semitism, and old school Nazism will return with force. The longer the crisis goes on, the more that millions are exposed to life-wrecking capitalist degeneration, and the less that the Left does to combat racism, the greater are the chances of that happening. But it’s important to recognise that fascism doesn’t necessarily need the biological race theories of the Third Reich, and we shouldn’t expect tomorrow’s enemies to look the same as yesterday’s.
Labels: bnp, capitalist crisis, english defence league, fascism, new racism, racism, recession, uaf, unite against fascism
Monday, September 13, 2010
On Martin Smith's conviction. posted by Richard Seymour
I've written an article for Socialist Worker (US) about this travesty, part of - in my view - a wide-ranging effort by police to crackdown on antifascists, and certainly a serious abridgement of the right to protest against racism and fascism. Read here...Labels: antifascism, bnp, english defence league, fascism, racism, uaf, unite against fascism
Friday, August 20, 2010
Labourite repents on immigration posted by Richard Seymour
This is a very interesting piece by Dan Hodges, a friend of Phil Woolas and - if I'm not mistaken - the son of Glenda Jackson MP. Woolas' race-baiting in the 2010 election is currently being investigated, but it produces this reflection from Hodges:The slide into the abyss can be clearly dated. Soon after the election of William Hague as Conservative leader, Philip Gould did a presentation to the cabinet identifying immigration as one of the few issues where the Tories, and Hague, could still outscore Labour. Suitably terrified by the prospect of young William tossing aside his baseball cap, donning a Union Jack t-shirt, and marching his crumbling blue rinse base down Dagenham Heathway, our attempted triangulation of race and immigration began.
How successful did this strategy for managing immigration as a political issue, as opposed to the management of migration itself, prove to be? At the time of the 1997 election, MORI’s Issue Tracker recorded the number of people citing race or immigration as the most important issue facing the nation at 3%. By last May’s election it was 38%. In 1997 the BNP stood 54 candidates and secured 36,000 votes, at an average of 664 votes per candidate. In 2010 they stood 339 candidates and obtained 566,000 votes, an average of 1,663 votes per candidate. A YouGov poll taken in March found that 69% of those questioned believed Labour’s management of immigration had been bad for the country, compared to 21% who thought it had been beneficial.
Set aside principles or morality. Even on its own terms, our political management of immigration has been a disaster. Trying to ape the language of the BNP succeeded only in boosting the BNP. Our use of inflammatory rhetoric to demonstrate our ‘toughness’, served only to draw attention to what the public viewed as one of our greatest policy failures. Take the heat out of the issue? We pumped the entire contents of an oil refinery on to the flames.
A Conservative Shadow Minister I met before the election expressed total incredulity at our strategy; “Does Peter Mandelson really think he can make the Conservative Party look weak on immigration? If you keep talking up the issue, the only winners will be us and the BNP”.
He was right. And we will pay an even heavier electoral price in the future if we don’t radically reassess how we negotiate the complex terrain of migration and race. Because if we don’t invest in a new compass, David Cameron will.
Labels: bnp, ed balls, immigration, islamophobia, labour, multiculturalism, new labour, racism
Friday, August 06, 2010
HP Sauce in racist harassment shocker posted by Richard Seymour
Lately, Harry's Place awarded posting rights to the deranged racist Terry Fitzpatrick, who has established himself at the Socialist Unity blog as an unpleasant and dangerously deluded man with a persecution complex. Apparently, Andy Newman tolerated him because of his glorious past as an anarchist bank robber and anti-racist, sometime back in the 1970s. It transpires that Fitzpatrick has been engaging in a campaign of racist harassment against Lee Jasper for some years now. He accuses Jasper of crack dealing and pimping, and calls him, among other things, a "fucking n*****r ponce". Under Socialist Unity's post on the subject, Fitzpatrick is allowed to repeat his charges.
Lately, Harry's Place launched one of their routine psycho-ceramic campaigns to vilify an opponent as antisemitic - an accusation that Fitzpatrick is handy with too, which is why he was welcome at Harry's Place. Their target was Operation Black Vote, which criticised a heavy-handed police raid on a Nation of Islam mosque in Brixton (the police alleged that they believed it was a "cannabis factory"). The accusation was a variation of the 'Links' game that Justin Horton described on this blog a few years ago. OBV sided with the Nation of Islam, which is antisemitic, so therefore OBV must be antisemitic too. That particular attack was composed by Edmund Standing, whose bilious attacks on Muslims, Muslim organisations, the Quran, political correctness, the left (etc etc) have now spilled over into a libel against a moderately left-of-centre anti-racist organisation.
Lee Jasper, of OBV, wrote a rejoinder to the attack, while also pointing out that Harry's Place hosted an outright racist crank among its writers. He pointed out that Fitzpatrick had been stalking him and subjecting him to the most vile racist abuse. The usual Harry's Place dirt piled on, refusing to take his claims seriously, minimising their import, changing the subject, denouncing the victim of said racism. For such people, the only real victims of racism are Israeli war criminals. As Andy Newman puts it, "Jasper was then not shown solidarity as a victim of racism, but further harassed, and harried over unrelated issues of what his views are on Louis Farrakhan. ... Jasper was accused of being a liar, and being obsessed with race."
Lee Jasper himself writes that "Harry’s Place refused to take my complaint seriously. They trivialised that compliant, they denigrated me as a victim of serious racist abuse and they sought to obscure that compliant by constant counter accusation and showering me with personal abuse." Evidently, some of Fitzpatrick's grotesque racist abuse was allowed to appear on the HP blog itself. Jasper notes that the blog sought to cover for Fitzpatrick, since as soon as Fitzpatrick's racist harassment was reported to the police, and he was charged, "all of his most rabid and racist comments were removed by Harrys Place overnight". Finally, reluctantly, Harry's Place withdrew Fitzpatrick's posting rights, and barred him from the blog. Their final act of arse-covering was to note that Fitzpatrick has long had an association with the anti-fascist Searchlight magazine, for which he has written articles in the past. Searchlight, Jasper notes, has been curiously, sadly silent on this issue. They too migh wish to consider why Fitzpatrick has been allowed to draw on Searchlight's immense bank of credibility long after it had become clear that he was a delusional bigot.
Labels: bnp, cruise missile liberals, hp scum, islamophobia, lee jasper, liberal imperialism, operation black vote, racism, zionism
Monday, April 26, 2010
The changing face of racism posted by Richard Seymour
Me in the latest ISJ, on racism in Britain today:Instead of looking for a reference to supposed static entities called “races” to define acts of racism, it makes more sense to consider racialisation as a constant process. Just as fascism is notoriously a “scavenger” ideology, opportunistically appropriating ideological bric-a-brac from other outlooks and traditions, so racist ideologies are continually constructed and reconstructed with a variety of elements of national, regional, religious, sectional and class stereotypes. What they have in common is their relationship to the practice of racial oppression in which a minority is systemically excluded from the opportunities and entitlements of normal citizenship. Nor are they strictly literal in their expression. Racism operates to a great extent by allusion and conflation—mark the speed with which “Muslim” was substituted for “Asian” in the target of racist polemics after 2001. Indeed, that very shift tells us that the cultural racism currently directed against Muslims is rooted in several generations of anti-immigrant racism and, before it, imperial racism.
Labels: bnp, fascism, international socialism, racism, socialism, the complete and utter works of richard seymour, unite against fascism
Monday, April 19, 2010
Immigration and the BNP posted by Richard Seymour
"In fact the more immigration an area has experienced, the lower its support for the far right. It seems that direct contact with migrants dissuades people from supporting the BNP. For example, of the 10 local authorities where the BNP gained most support in the 2009 European elections, nine had lower than average immigration".
This much is, or should be, common sense. Racist ideas about black people, immigrants, Muslims, etc. tend to be diminished by exposure to the targets of racism. And the IPPR argues from this that the government shouldn't try to sieze the BNP's territory on immigration. This is welcome. But there's an invalid inference, which is that the real cause of the BNP's success is "social exclusion", isolation and dejection among voters. This implies that BNP voters aren't primarily driven by racism, a canard that has led some to suggest that we shouldn't focus on fighting racism but instead on addressing only the bread and butter issues that supposedly drive the inchoate anger that leads people to vote for the fascists. The trouble is that the evidence shows that BNP voters are far more racist than the rest of the population, and that racism - not necessarily the hard racism of the BNP, but certainly a general hostility to Muslims and immigrants - is a big motivating factor for them. (My upcoming ISJ article deals with some of this). There are, to be sure, economic issues which might be more fruitfully dealt with in terms other than those of "social exclusion".
This is how I would put it: the specific ecology in which the BNP has thrived in the last decade has been in formerly strong manufacturing centres with big organised labour forces and strong local Labour Parties. As New Labour has allowed manufacturing to go under, it has hacked at the roots of its base. It has allowed unemployment to soar in these areas on the spurious pretext that a service economy will make up for the loss of, eg, car production - a strange phenomenon in a country with soaring road traffic due to suburbanisation and decrepit public transport. Tellingly, one area of manufacturing that the government has protected is aerospace and defence, which is one of the few manufacturing strengths of the UK economy. At any rate, the destruction of unionised labour forces has both deprived local councils of tax receipts, contributing to the generally poor services they offer, and deprived local Labour parties of potential members, door-knockers and fund-raisers. It is in these areas that former Labour voters have been boycotting elections for over a decade.
Even in 1997, as New Labour won its 'landslide' on a (then) record low turnout, the party's support among core working class voters was down by 5% on 1992, which was partially made up for by an increase of 4% in middle class support. In 2001, a further 2.8m Labour voters refused to cast a vote, and the turnout collapsed to an historic nadir of 59%. Approximately another million refused to back Labour in 2005, even as the turnout increased. The votes lost were in former heartland seats, de-industrialised wastelands where job insecurity and low wages now reigned. New Labour's electoral coalition has continually shrank, hollowing out from the core, but the fact that it was its mountainous majorities in core areas that were declining allowed for a certain amount of complacency. The rotten first-past-the-post electoral system gave them an alibi for keeping to the right - an alibi that, I would wager, is about to collapse. But it is largely because of these Labour abstentions that the BNP, benefiting from the climate of racism cultivated by the government and the media, has been able to make gains.
Strategically, then, one obvious response is to mobilise the anti-fascist vote in the short-term, and combat the broader climate of racism in the medium-term. Long-term, we have to be about rebuilding the Left in those areas, getting workers in the new industries organised, and (re)constructing a radical left-wing electoral challenge to New Labour.
Labels: bnp, fascism, immigration, racism, unite against fascism