"This is a bad time to be a black man in Libya," reports Alex Thomson in this worrying segment:

There is frightening evidence of racist killings taking place across Libya as elements in the opposition-cum-regime now act on the unfounded rumours that "African" mercenaries acted as Qadhafi's fifth column.  As Kim Septunga reports:

There have been lynchings, mass arrests and beatings previously.  A painted slogan of the rebels in Misrata read, "the brigade for purging slaves, black skin".  But this, taking place as it does in the aftermath of triumph, is a qualitatively distinct phase, and it is a disgrace to the original emancipatory upsurge.  I argued previously that the more conservative, bourgeois elements in the opposition had every reason to promote racist scapegoating.  Since they had no interest in revolutionising Libyan society, it made perfect sense for them to say that the problem is just Qadhafi and some imported mercenaries, that all of Libya was united against the dictator and would throw him off were it not for the fifth columnists.  By mobilising the elements of racism that had thrived under Qadhafi, it displaces social antagonisms that are internal to Libya, reflecting class and other divisions, onto a nationalist plane.  No one need think of expropriating the wealth of the capitalist dissident if they're busy usurping the life of the black worker.  I also argued that this was one area in which the rebels could even do worse than Qadhafi.  If racism was never the dominant motive in the rebellion, it was nonetheless a motive of those dominant in the rebellion.  The prisons of Benghazi and elsewhere would not have filled with black and immigrant workers without the approval of the rebel leadership.  The coming days will tell whether this barbarism is to last.  I suspect the pressure from the new regime's international sponsors will be to come down hard on it, as racist lynch mobs tend to make a fool of anyone calling them - I don't know - "human rights dissidents".  But the new regime does have a promise to keep with the EU, viz. upholding the blockade on immigration from Africa to Europe, which will tend to institutionalise racist practises.

For interesting reasons, some parts of the Left, who are otherwise consistently anti-racist, are amenable to the argument that migration drives down wages and, perhaps, places a burden on welfare systems and the public sector. This is an argument that many in the Labour establishment, and its supporters in the media such as Polly Toynbee, have been trying to popularise. It is accepted by Ed Miliband, and Ed Balls sank his leadership campaign early on with a stance on immigration that allowed the Tory leader to characterise him as Labour's Alf Garnett. The fact that Labour is behind many of these arguments means that they become much more widely accepted than they would among working class communities.

While most leftists would not accept the argument put out by some that migrant workers are today's equivalents of industrial scabs, helping the bosses break the 'indigenous' working class, there is a seemingly powerful motivation for (usually white) leftists to accept parts of the right-wing orthodoxy about immigration. Unfortunately, what this does is externalise a problem that is constitutive to capitalism: that being the necessity for a reserve army of labour*, and enforced competition for resources among workers**. It misreads symptoms of neoliberal capitalism as effects of migration. As it is particularly bound up in the British context with EU expansion, and the arrival of hundreds of thousands of workers from A8 and A2 countries, it also involves a particular mis-reading of the EU itself, which has to be understood as part of the global regionalisation of capitalism which is also evident in North America and south-east Asia, for example. That regionalisation, its institutionalisation (the EU Treaty), securitisation ('Fortress Europe') and militarisation (through NATO expansion and various attempts at building an EU defence force to suitably manage crises like that in the former Yugoslavia), has been the basis for all of the elegiac tributes and militant screeds concerning Europe and its Enlightened legacy.

What has happened in the UK is that those frequently at the margins of the capitalist system have made for timely scapegoats for acute crises in employment and local services that in fact express chronic stresses. Though the evidence is overwhelming that migrant workers bring added growth, added value and thus greater tax receipts to any local economy, there have been attempts by politicians, locally and nationally, to blame an increase in the local migrant worker population for failures in service delivery.

In fact, the added demand on local services that is blamed on immigration has been vastly over-stated. A combination of legislative hurdles and reluctance to claim means that in the case of housing and benefits, most migrant workers don't claim. At the height of migration from A8 countries in 2006, less than 1% of social housing lettings went to those migrant workers - this belies the claims that immigrants are being placed at the front of the queue for such services. To the extent that the demand for public goods did increase in certain areas, the government had more than enough opportunity to anticipate what was coming and then adjust for the difference. The evidence shows that the increase in funds resulting from migration was more than sufficient to meet the challenge. The vast majority of immigrants, over 80%, are of the ages 18-35. They do not tend to bring dependents, and they offset problems posed by the ageing of the UK population. Were they to not here, the resources available for public services would be less, or national insurance contributions or other taxes would have to rise. Where there were acute problems, whether there was local immigration or not, this was the result of systemic under-funding produced by the endemic problems of capital accumulation and the reluctance of social democracy to add to the tax burden. The attempt to square that circle with the use of PFIs only stored up further fiscal problems.

By some, usually right-wing populist, accounts, it would seem that the EU just is a scheme to reduce labour costs by allowing unimpeded free migration and thus increasing the demand for jobs. But there are good reasons why migration does not simply increase the reserve army of labour. First of all, as I've argued before, migration can increase total employment in a country because the lower costs of reproducing labour mean it is feasible for an employer to open up a job that would otherwise not be available, and also because the increase in growth tends to result in an increase in investment. Secondly, migration in the EU does not flow in one direction. What happens is that people move where the jobs are, where their skills are most needed, and thus the employment of available labour is maximised within the constraints of efficient capital accumulation.

This is the whole point: the EU is a regionalised accumulation system, and the effect of immigration within it will not be greatly different from that of migration between Glasgow and Sunderland, which no one finds objectionable. The fact this spatial re-organisation of capitalism took place under a neoliberal regime where the aim was to reduce the bargaining power of labour, hold down public expenditures (and thus corporate taxation) and increase the rate of profit, means that there will be attempts to organise the system in such a way as to weaken labour. But there is not much evidence for any profound distributive effects of migration. Such effects as do exist are sectoral, not significant, offset by countervailing effects elsewhere, and contingent on a host of other factors such as the strength of trade unions in an industry and the enforcement of regulations like minimum wage laws. (See here, here, here and here). The growth effect, however, is significant, and all workers benefit from that. In fact, the erection of barriers to the movement of labour is the most effective way to undermine those advantages.

The blaming of immigrants, usually accompanied by scaremongering about there being too many people, is precisely a way of racialising a social problem produced by capitalism. This goes much deeper than the distribution of resources, and the rising level of unemployment required to make capitalism efficient. Rather, these are attributes partially of the hollowing out of parliamentary democracy, the whittling away of the franchise and of the ability of the working class to impose some of its interests on capital. Neoliberal capitalism was designed to exclude certain political options, to exclude much of the working class from the electoral system, and coopt its leadership on new, subordinate terms. What is happening is that this disenfranchisement is culturalised, expressed as the cultural and identitarian emasculation of this spectral 'white working class'. This gives the Right the opportunity to rephrase its political slogans. Its hostility to the EU is based on its preference for a national capitalism hitched to US-led 'hyper-globalisation' (Andrew Gamble's phrase) which, if anything, entails an even weaker position for labour. But it can articulate its demands in terms of democracy (usually interpreted as 'sovereignty') because the EU, while it isn't the cause of Britain's democratic nadir, is a profoundly undemocratic set of institutions. It can appear to offer something to the working class because while the EU did not produce high unemployment and low public spending, it has supported and bolstered this particular capitalist praxis.

The attacks on immigrants by those evincing concern for the working class, and often 'the white working class', are themselves an attack on the working class and the Left. It is tried and tested, effective right-wing political mobilisation. People on the Left, even the centre-left orbiting Labour, should not be tempted to reproduce the assumptions of the Right in this argument, because if they do they will lose. The most effective response is to mobilise within the working class, particularly the organised working class, to defend immigrants and combat the racism which aims at their marginalisation and subjection.

*This is variously called the 'natural rate of unemployment' (Milton Friedman), the 'non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment', or 'structural unemployment'.
**This is called relative scarcity.

Zizek has dusted off some of his old routines - the tolerant liberal, the chocolate laxative, decaffeinated Otherness - and tenuously connected them to some current political controversies in order to visit this upon us. As amusing as these whiskered old gags may once have been, and as much as I once thought Zizek quite sharp on the limitations of multiculturalism, the more he repeats himself (or repeats on himself), the less persuasive he becomes. And that's when he's not, you know, bigging up empire, traducing Lenin, reflating Euro-supremacism in the guise of the liberal tolerance that he criticises, and generally carving out a niche as the Roy Chubby Brown of European philosophy.

The basis of Zizek's polemic is that while once European politics was polarised between centre-right and centre-left, it is now increasingly polarised between a large pro-globalisation centre, and a smaller but growing anti-globalisation xenophobic right. The pro-globalisation centre is the hypocritical tolerant liberal who 'respects' the Other in a certain way, but only respects a non-invasive Otherness that doesn't intrude on his/her private space, this being the political space of Europe. Thus, while the centrists attack the populist right, they celebrate diversity and Otherness in the same way that 'moderate' antisemite Robert Brasillach celebrated the achievements of Chaplin, Proust and Yehudi Menuhin, while insisting that instinctive antisemitism could only be constrained by the practise of moderate antisemitism. The populist right can only be appeased by the practise of a moderate anti-immigrant racism. The example of Brasillach does, admittedly, resonate. Bourgeois politicians whipping up racism do indeed rely on the idea that there's something instinctive and commonsensical about it, and that it can only be controlled through moderate, sensible, prudent racism.

But the rest completely fails as an index of the concrete political realities on race and globalisation in Europe. First of all, when the pro-globalisation "centre" attacks the xenophobic right, it is usually not in the name of liberal multiculturalism. Rather, it is in the name of an alternative nationalism based on cohesion, integrationism, an acceptance of "legitimate concerns", and a regretful conclusion that multiculturalism (read: multi-racial society) "didn't work" and that immigration has to be severely limited while minorities are to be disciplined and coerced into internalising some core set of national or European or Western values. It is culturally dominative, hierarchical and authoritarian, not 'tolerant', libertarian or egalitarian. Official multiculturalism has its limits, but it is not to blame for the right-wing anti-immigrant turn of mainstream politics. Indeed, the tolerant liberal, Zizek's sock puppet opponent, is entirely innocent of this bullying. He, let's suppose it's a he, is obviously white, but he's not all bad. He supports attempts to attack and undermine the material legacy of white supremacy, such as affirmative action. His worst crime is that he doesn't want to hear loud rap music in the privacy of his home. (Because, as I'm sure you already know, black people uniformly walk around white neighbourhoods with ghetto blasters playing NWA's 'Fuck The Police' at top volume. White people, by contrast, play Bach on gramophones while writhing with ecstasy over Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right. This has been confirmed by our finest evolutionary psychologists - it's hard-wired behaviour, and there's nothing we can do about it.) It seems rather unfair to blame him for those who want to destroy affirmative action and purge the country of immigrants.

Secondly, it fails because some of the most hawkishly pro-globalisation forces in European and American politics are also the most right-wing xenophobic anti-immigrant forces. If you look at the Tory Right and UKIP, or even the Law and Justice Party, they may be Eurosceptic, but they aggressively favour US-led globalisation. In the US, many the same right-wingers who favour 'free trade' and other shibboleths of globalisation are also among the most pungent anti-immigrant racists. There are, of course, nativists and fascists who fit into Zizek's characterisation of the xenophobic right as anti-globalisation, but these are still minority fringe currents, and not by and large the people who lead Law and Justice, or the Dutch Freedom Party, for example. The Tea Partiers, meanwhile, may have some nativists among them, but their texts are Austrian, and their 'Contract from America' contains a great deal about economic freedom and nothing at all about restricting globalisation or free trade. The opposition being created here between multiculturalist globalisation and xenophobic reaction is illusory. This is because globalisation is an imperialist process that is entirely compatible with restrictions to migration. It does not entail free movement for labour, except on terms amenable to Euro-American capital, since its purpose is precisely to facilitate the exploitation of labour and the extraction of surplus largely for shareholders based in the core capitalist economies.

Lastly, Poland, Zizek's "best example", is not actually typical of a European trend. The legacy of Stalinism, and the postcommunist purges, has meant that politics has been narrowed to a division between liberal-conservatism and right-wing nationalism. But there is a new left emerging there, reflecting dissatisfaction with - well - 'globalisation' among other things. The bulk of the continent is still bissected between left and right, weakly reflected at parliamentary level by parties of the centre-left and centre-right. Despite the best efforts of capital to coopt electoral processes, and despite the illusory transcendence of left and right by 'Third Way' politicians, organised labour retains the ability to uphold some basic social democracy. Indeed, the capitalist crisis is accentuating this polarisation between left and right, and bringing that struggle to a head, as the victor will determine whether labour bears the costs of crisis, or whether the bankers and the rich do. It goes without saying that if the right wins, immigrants and minorities will be among the first to suffer, and the fragile institutions of multiculturalism will be in tatters.

The author is wrong to claim, as he does, that New Labour started off with good intentions on this issue. For example: "Remember where we came in ... Scrapping of vouchers for asylum seekers." It was New Labour which introduced the vouchers scheme with the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, based on a 1998 white paper, which is the same piece of legislation that introduced detention camps. The right-ward lurch on immigration, and the attack on the multicultural consensus, was part of the New Labour package from the off. Still, the influence of New Labour's ultra-Blairite leadership in pushing the agenda even further to the right is certainly noteworthy. It would also be interesting of the author was correct to claim that Woolas, behind his race-baiting facade, is a lovely geezer who secretly tried to shape a fair and progressive asylum system under right-wing pressure, though it seems improbable. But such a mea culpa is welcome when some Labour candidates, especially Ed Balls, want to move in a more openly racist direction.

A number of people asked for hard copies of this talk. This is it, for anyone else who needs it.

The changing face of racism in Britain today
MARXISM 2010

I don’t know how many of you use social media service, ‘Twitter’, but those who do may be aware that some months back there was a trending topic called #thingsracistssay. Among these were: “I’m not a racist, but...”; “You can’t say anything these days...”; and, a growing favourite, “Islam ain’t a race, duh!” This talk is about the things that racists say and do, the alibis they use to cover their racism, and the reasons why racism has had to shift in the course of a generation or so, from focusing on biology and colour, to creed and culture.


I want to start by acknowledging a recent success. The BNP wiped out, 51-0, in Barking, decimated in Stoke and Barnsley, and showing dreadful returns in all their target areas. They spent a fortune on the 2010 campaign, believing they were on the verge of an electoral breakthrough, and an heroic campaign by anti-fascists stopped that from happening. They lost deposits up and down the land, which means that a lot of the money they get from being elected to the European parliament in 2009 has been squandered already.

However, the BNP still got close to 600,000 votes. And coupled with support for the Islamophobic UKIP, explicitly racist parties got about 1.5 million votes in 2010, or about 5% of the total vote. If there was proportional representation, things would look rather different today. The strategy of anti-fascists in mobilising the anti-fascist vote, and containing the BNP by ensuring that everyone was aware of their Nazi politics and their violent, criminal background, was successful in preventing the BNP from taking control of councils, or win their first parliamentary seat. But the results suggest that we still need to keep up the campaign, and to mount a wider attack on the bases of racism in the UK today.

Look at the last decade. The BNP have increased their support in elections by some 2000%. They have raised their membership to as high as 14,000. We have seen the rise of English Defence League street gangs. We’ve also seen a shocking rise in the level of racist incidents – quadrupling between 1995 and 2005, and continuing to rise dramatically since then. We’ve seen a rise in specifically anti-Muslim racism, coupled with growing hostility to immigrants, and the more muted return of racism toward older targets such as young black men. Immigration was the number two issue in voters’ priorities in the 2010 election, below the economy. It may possibly have contributed a little to the Liberals’ collapse, and certainly was a factor in some of the limited gains that the Tories made.

But in all this, there are some novelties. Racism is changing. It no longer focuses so explicitly on biology and skin colour. The major focus is on culture, and religion. The specific targets are not necessarily black. In fact, many Islamophobes would try to persuade you that they aren’t racist by insisting that they aren’t hostile to black people as such. Now, some people say that Islamophobia is just a cover for ‘Paki’ bashing; that the hostility is not toward Islam itself, which is just a convenient excuse, but toward Asians in general. There are certainly many for whom this is true, but that’s not the end of the story. There is a specificity about Islamophobia, a particular emphasis on Muslims, their purported culture, what is supposedly said and implied by the Quran and hadiths - and the fact that this is so, and that the target appears to be a religious group, doesn’t make it any less racist. Or so I will argue.

We can look at examples of this specifically cultural racism in the media, and two recent examples stand out – notably for coming from self-styled liberal intellectuals:

1) Rod Liddle notoriously demonised young black men in London for being responsible for the overwhelming majority of violent crime in the capital. Now, this was simply false. There was an article in the Telegraph attempting to give some credence to the idea, which reported that statistics provided by the Metropolitan police show that the majority of violent crimes where someone is proceeded against by police in the capital were black. What it didn’t really explain is what the Home Affairs select committee reported in 2007, which is that surveys carried out for the Home Office suggest that young white males aged 10 to 25 were far more likely to have committed a crime in the preceding year than males of the same age from any other ethnic or racial group – even adjusting for proportionality. But it also noted that once young black men had committed a crime, they were far more likely to come to the attention of the police. The reality is that most people convicted for such crimes, despite an institutionally racist criminal justice system, are white. That the police disproportionately proceed against young black men says more about the police force than it does about black people and crime. However, when Liddle was challenged about his claims, he retorted that he wasn’t being racist, because his claim concerned culture, not race. There was a culture specific to young black Britons that led to violent criminal behaviour. And he complained that the real problem was a multicultural ideology that didn’t permit criticism of any culture, no matter how anti-social or deviant from the norm. This is a straw man account of multiculturalism. The forms of behaviour he is speaking of are criminal, they’re against the law, therefore they are certainly susceptible to criticism. Moreover, they are marginal forms of behaviour both in society as a whole and among the young black men whom he chose to vilify.

2) A second example is when Martin Amis complained about ‘honour killing’, saying that multiculturalism had meant allowing outrageous forms of behaviour purely on the grounds that it could be traced to someone’s tradition, a form of religious piety or ethnic ritual. He assumed, incorrectly, that honour killing is a particularly Islamic form of behaviour. It is not. It is a form of patriarchal violence that is practised in numerous countries, from Latin America to Europe to south Asia. It is sometimes called dowry killing; sometimes called a ‘crime of passion’; and sometimes it’s just known as murdering your spouse, two cases of which take place every week in the UK. But, again, he repeated this nonsensical claim that multiculturalism means tolerating murder – repeat and underline, it’s not tolerated, it’s against the law.

What’s interesting about these examples, and what they say about the critique of multiculturalism that is coming alongside anti-Muslim racism, is that this partakes of the very static and essentialist account of culture that official multiculturalism of the kind pursued in the 1980s and 1990s, helped produce.

The confusion which enables people like Liddle and Amis to spout this kind of hysterical racist nonsense, while professing to be anti-racist, partly results from the exaggeration of the role of biology in racist ideology. Historically, cultural tropes have always been built in to racist ideology. Many variants of Enlightenment racism were explicitly culturalist rather than biological, but even those forms of racism that have historically privileged some idea of the biological race have always supplemented it with cultural stereotyping and essentialism – from wily Orientals, to avaricious Jews, to violent African Americans. More to the point, the way in which ‘race’ was constructed as a political category had surprisingly little to do with biological notions of race.

Historically, the act of oppression that produced the category of race preceded the systematic pseudo-scientific classification of human variation along racial lines. This was true, according to Theodore Allen, in Ireland under the Protestant Ascendancy, and it was true in colonial America. What happened first was that a group would be singled out on the basis of some characteristic or other, and excluded from the normal citizenship rights enjoyed by the rest of society no matter how poor. Then, that group would be racialised – a process known as ‘race-making’. As David Roediger points out, this was a very efficient way of stratifying labour markets – colour-coding them, dividing them, making them politically more manageable, and increasing the rate at which it is possible to exploit them. In the history of US industrial relations, ‘race management’ is thus a prominent strategy.

And once this process begins, it doesn’t simply stop and ossify. It transforms in response to new political developments. So, new immigrant groups to America such as European Jews, Italians, the Irish, Poles, Hungarians, etc., would always be initially racialised. But as they consolidated their position in civil society, improved their bargaining power as labourers, and achieved political representation, they became ‘white’. It’s important, when assessing whether a particular speech-act is racist, to consider race as a process rather than a static entity. Racism, like fascism, is a ‘scavenger ideology’ which draws on national, regional, gender, class and cultural stereotypes. As such, it won’t do to say “Islam isn’t a race”, and consider that the end of any discussion about Islamophobia. The question is whether processes are at work separating Muslims out for particular oppression and surveillance, and whether the discursive practises of people like Liddle and Amis, among others, are part of a race-making process.


To properly understand how the shift in emphasis from biology to culture took place, we have to look at certain developments in post-war Britain. This means I’m not going to be focusing too much in the remainder of my talk on colonial and imperial racism, though that is a constant and very important context for what I am about to say, that you should bear in mind. For those who are interested, I cover some of this subject in my book The Liberal Defence of Murder. The colonial context that I will touch upon concerns changing patterns of labour migration in the post-war world. The British economy was short some 1.25 million workers according to the government, in 1945 – because of the war. Now, at that time, it was perfectly legal for any subject of the New Commonwealth (that is those countries of the empire that were not run by white people) to migrate to the United Kingdom, without restriction. In 1948, this status was confirmed with the creation of a new citizenship category in which residents of a formerly colonial country could consider themselves a “Citizen of the UK and the Colonies”.

BUT, both Labour and the Tories believed that social harmony would only be maintained if they met the labour shortfall by importing migrants that were, in the official language, of “good stock”. Therefore, they sought to recruit from Europe, particularly Ireland and Poland. However, there did begin a small amount of migration from the Commonwealth, particularly from the Caribbean, in response to advertisements from would-be employers in the UK. And the story of Windrush, and of how black immigrants then began to take up important public service roles, is now quite familiar.

What is less well understood is why, in 1962, the first legislation introducing restrictions on Commonwealth migration to the UK was applied. Marxists interpret immigration policy in terms of employers’ demand for labour. That is, if employers need more labour than the society can produce, they prefer a liberal migration policy; if the demand for labour falls, immigration policy would tighten up. But there had been no fall in demand for labour. And in fact, the legislation didn’t at first reduce the flow of migration from the Commonwealth. 80% of Commonwealth migrants who lived in the UK in 1982 had arrived after the passing of the Commonwealth Immigration Act in 1962. But what the legislation did was make the right of citizenship for Commonwealth subjects dependent on the needs of capital – they set quotas which the government could alter as it saw fit. This was a policy that was a long time in coming, and the only reason it came in 1962 was that they found a way that they could do it without being explicitly racist – explicit racism was considered 'vulgar'.

As has become wearily familiar, Labour opposed the legislation in opposition, saying that it was racist, but not only supported it when elected, but actually tightened its restrictions with a 1965 White Paper and further legislation in 1968. It was in this context that the New Right began to develop. Its chief spokesperson was Enoch Powell who had, until that point, been an old Tory imperialist. He had stood for the Tory leadership in 1965, the first time that a descendant of the lower middle classes from the Black Country could have stood to be Tory leader, and lost to Ted Heath. Until that point he had never had a problem with immigration, and in fact had opposed restrictions and overseen Commonwealth migration to support the NHS while he was health minister. But he took a couple of years to think about it, reflected on the success of Peter Griffiths, the Tory MP who had been elected in Smethwick – not far from Powell’s Wolverhampton constituency – on the slogan: “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour”.

And so he emerged in 1967 with a new tune. He began in a number of newspaper articles and speeches, to berate immigrants for reducing property prices, for crowding out white people, and for engaging in anti-social behaviour. He had an anecdotal style of oratory, citing the opinions and observations of constituents. In talking about race in this way, he could do two things simultaneously: he could avoid responsibility for his remarks by claiming that he was merely reporting what his voters told him; and he could evoke a kind of racist “common sense” – I’m just saying what people are thinking. The second thing that he did that was very important was that he spoke of cultural difference rather than biological difference. In fact, he didn’t believe that there were many important biological differences between black and white people. But he believed that people of different cultures could not happily co-exist. And this sort of claim was given a patina of respectability by sociobiologists who asserted that it was natural for people to be hostile to members of an out-group, and to cluster around tribes with their own established way of doing things. So, a ‘new racism’ began to emerge with two elements: first, that it mainly concerned culture, rather than skin colour; secondly, that it was not explicitly supremacist, but rather argued that white Britons could simply not peaceably co-exist with non-white migrants due to that cultural difference.

In the immediate interim, the primary beneficiaries of this Powellite racism were the National Front, who grew in leaps and bounds throughout the 1970s – never to the scale of success that the BNP has achieved, by the way – before being out-numbered and defeated by a confident anti-fascist movement whose organising hub was the legendary Anti-Nazi League. But the politics of Powellism persisted. Thatcher’s famous interview in 1978, in which she spoke of being “swamped” by immigrants was interpreted as simply inflammatory. But, while it was that, it was also a chapter and verse recital of Powellism. The full statement she made was that people are rather afraid that they may be swamped by people of a different culture. And she went on to cite various achievements and virtues supposedly belonging to British culture that it would be a shame to see 'swamped'. The two key points were, 1) the evocation of a racist common sense ('people are rather afraid'); and 2) the focus on culture ('people of a different culture'). When Thatcher was elected, she passed the 1981 Nationality Act which consecrated existing racist practice by revising the citizenship status of Commonwealth subjects – and primary migration came to a near standstill. Subsequently, changes in demography, in political culture resulting from insurgency and the official multicultural policies that I mentioned earlier, meant that it became less political acceptable to engage in explicit racism, even of the Powellite variety.

But then by 1991, a new target of race-baiting emerged. This was when the issue of asylum seekers came to the fore. Partly it was because of a change in the nature of migration after the collapse of the USSR when many of the people moving about from the newly created countries sought refugee status – particularly if they were from Yugoslavia. And the government started to worry, because refugees were not considered migrants, and therefore weren’t covered by existing racist immigration legislation. The government was determined that it would be able to take control of this issue. It started to slander asylum seekers as “bogus”. They weren’t refugees, they were “economic migrants”, and moreover they tended to be both anti-social and parasitic on existing social services. This was taken up in the press, and it produced two rounds of legislation in 1992 and 1996, intended to reclassify refugees as economic migrants, restrict their right of entry, and reduce any entitlement they had to public services and employment once in the country.

Here it becomes interesting because one of the justifications, you will recall, for having a racist immigration policy is that it promotes domestic racial harmony, by controlling the fears of the white majority and enabling anti-racist initiatives to be promoted. And in fact, if you look at how it works legally, until 2000, immigration policy was entirely exempt from the provisions of race relations. New Labour amended this, but still said that in matters of migration the authorities could discriminate on the grounds of nationality or ethnicity if mandated to do so either by legislation or ministerial authority. But what the 1996 anti-asylum legislation actually did was to add to the problems of non-white British citizens. For example, if they sought a job, or sought access to public services – both fundamental rights – researched showed that because of the new legislation, black people were more likely to be turned down for a job by employers fearing a fine for employing illegal immigrant workers, and more likely to be subjected to inappropriate checks if they entered a hospital or something.

Again, as is traditional, Labour opposed the legislation in opposition, on the grounds that it was racist, then embraced it once elected, tightened it up with new legislation, introduced a vouchers scheme run by a private consortium, and launched a system of ‘detention centres’ where those who appealed against their eviction, for example, could be imprisoned despite having committed no crime. These have subsequently been the centre of serious human rights abuses, including against children.


We return, at long last, to the last decade. And what you see in the 2000s is a New Labour government introducing an authoritarian “Britishness” agenda, which was already on the go before 9/11, and which David Blunkett had already hinted at when the Lawrence Inquiry delivered its verdict of institutional racism in the police – a verdict he disputed because, he said, we are insufficiently “proud of what we’ve got”. It was an agenda that was given a real kick-start after the riots in north-west towns and cities, essentially pitting young Asian men against racists, fascists and police. These were areas where councils had long pursued policies of de facto segregation in housing and schooling, and where the police had a long history of conflict with young Asian men. But the official response, in the form of the Cantle report, blamed Asians for being “self-segregating” – a verdict dismantled by Nissa Finney and Ludi Simpson, the latter of whom is speaking at Marxism this year on that very topic. David Blunkett said that Asians needed to speak English in their own houses, and started to talk about the need for some sort of Britishness test that immigrants would have to pass to be able to stay here. From then on, the government no longer practised the formal separation of immigration policy from race relations.

What happened later was that a vein of Islamophobia that had been developing in the 1990s, which has some immediate roots in the Rushdie affair, but more distant roots in the colonial period, started to come to the fore – not immediately in response to 9/11, but more as the government started to see the need to discipline Muslim populations in response to the antiwar movement in 2003. The evidence certainly shows that this was when the press hostility was really jacked up, and even before 7/7 the government was talking about the need for “integration”, specifically for non-white communities to internalise some “core of Britishness”.

It was at this time that New Labour friendly intellectuals such as David Goodheart and Trevor Phillips began to reinvent Powellism. They argued that social solidarity was only possible in a sustained way among people of a similar culture. They argued that welfare depended on people pooling their resources to help those who lose out in the market economy, but that they would be less willing to do so for people who were culturally very different from them. Thus, any significant degree of migration poses a threat to welfare, and for migration to work at any level, the migrants have to be coerced into culturally assimilating. Now that involved setting up a poorly defined cultural norm which immigrants, and Muslims in particularly, would be accused of militating against. For example, no one knows what Britishness is. If I were to judge by the kinds of people who talk about it, and the kinds of behaviours that make one successful in this country, then I would say that Britishness amounts to petty, back-stabbing, cut-throat, property-obsessed egoism masquerading as social solidarity. But minorities are being told more and more that they have to aspire toward this specious vision of Britishness if they are to enjoy full citizenship rights.

Muslims have been then main targets of this coercion in a number of ways. First of all, they are subject to suspicion and hostility in the press. A study for the London mayor’s office some years ago found that 91% of all press coverage of Muslims was negative. Secondly, they are subject to political oppression, in the form illegal incarceration, kidnapping and torture flights. That is accompanied by elevated discrimination in other areas, for example in increased police surveillance and repression, manifested most obviously in shootings such as those in Forest Hill, and also in more discrimination in employment. One recent example of the surveillance I’m referring to involved the use of CCTV in Birmingham to track the movements of Muslims around the city.

Thirdly, at just the same time, politicians have begun to single out Muslims, and Muslim groups, for ideological coercion and moral panics alleging that they aren’t fitting in. Famously, Blair refused to accept any role of the Iraq war in producing 7/7, but did ascribe to Muslims a collective responsibility for rooting out what he called the ‘evil within’ their communities. That was followed by various political interventions, such as Jack Straw’s complaint about Muslim women wearing burqas, in a climate in which such garments are being banned in some European states. Tory MP Philip Hollobone is currently engaged in a cheap and pathetic attempt to garner attention for himself by trying to push similar legislation in the UK. The interesting thing about such attempts is that they usually offer two conflicting justifications – a humanitarian one, and a securitarian one. On the one hand, Muslim women who wear such garments are held to be oppressed, in need of liberation by non-Muslims; on the other hand, the same women are held to represent a security threat, because the garments they wear signal a rejection of the values of the societies in which they live. In some of the more hysterical screeds – in my ISJ article, I cite the case of Joan Smith – the garment goes from being a symbol of oppression to being a part of a terrorist conspiracy to overthrow Western civilization.

Lastly, Muslims are subject to physical violence and intimidation on the streets - including, notably, Muslim women who wear the hijab. A study by the University of Essex finds that this is directly and strongly correlated to the Islamophobic rhetoric of politicians and newspapers – the offenders, whether small-time belligerents or that expanding number of far right would-be terrorists accumulating arsenals in their own homes, are almost invariably motivated by what they have heard from politicians and read in the newspapers. This is what is driving the growth of groups like the English Defence League, and the success of the BNP.


I’ll finish on this. My talk has focused on the way in which racism is driven from above by political elites, and by the ruling class more generally. That isn’t to say that racism is exclusively perpetrated from above. Obviously, there are segments of the population that are more likely to accept racist ideas than others. And there are those for whom racist ideas appear to explain their experience of the world – particularly, I think, the lower middle classes and those workers whose situation is not completely impoverished, but is insecure. And that insecurity leads them to see their situation as being in competition with other groups, be they national, religious, ethnic, or racial. I think those are the social layers in the UK who are most likely to vote for racist parties and express racist beliefs. Moreover, there is a real overlap – not complete, but nonetheless there – between different forms of racism. Someone who is racist toward Muslims is more likely to be anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, racist toward black people, etc.

But if I was right earlier in arguing that racism has historically worked as an efficient way of stratifying and controlling labour systems, and facilitating the efficient extraction of profit, it follows that racism has an enduring utility for those who own and run the system. If I was right in arguing that race is a social construct, a process of political oppression, then it also follows that racism can always adapt, and doesn’t have to respect previously existing boundaries of racial discourse. That means that for as long as there are systems of domination and exploitation, for as long as societies are run on the basis of producing surplus value, profit, for the few, there will always be new ways of dividing people. And when capitalism enters a crisis, those singled out for racialisation will be the first to suffer – which is exactly what’s happening to migrant workers all over the world now. Because when capitalism is in a crisis, the first response is to try and coerce more and harder work out of people, more surplus value – in Marxist terms, to increase the rate of exploitation. In the short run, the best response to this is provided by the campaigns that we are seeing in America, the attempts to repeal racist legislation, and to get workers organised in unions. If we want to put an end to racism in the long-term, we have to challenge the system itself.

Ed Balls, like the other right-wing candidates for the Labour leadership, is trying to use anti-immigrant racism to support his campaign. Today, he offers a mea culpa on behalf of the Labour government - not for the consistently racist policies on immigration on asylum, nor for baiting Muslims, and pursuing an authoritarian 'Britishness' agenda, but for letting in too many Eastern Europeans:

Free movement of goods and services works to our mutual advantage. But the free movement of labour is another matter entirely.There have been real economic gains from the arrival of young, hard-working migrants from eastern Europe over the past six years. But there has also been a direct impact on the wages, terms and conditions of too many people – in communities ill-prepared to deal with the reality of globalisation, including the one I represent. The result was, as many of us found in the election, our arguments on immigration were not good enough.

...

While it is true that one million British people do migrate to work in the rest of Europe, they are more likely to be working for higher wages in Brussels, Frankfurt and Milan than undercutting unskilled wages in the poorer parts of Europe. As Labour seeks to rebuild trust with the British people, it is important we are honest about what we got wrong. In retrospect, Britain should not have rejected transitional controls on migration from the first wave of new EU member states in 2004, which we were legally entitled to impose.

Balls twice asserts that Eastern European workers undercut the wages, terms and conditions of British workers. There has been a great deal of research into this issue, and no one can find a trace of it. Two recent studies have looked specifically into the issue of Eastern European immigration and its impact. One was carried out by UCL for the Low Pay Commission (here) and the other by the IPPR (here). If anything, there tends to be a slightly positive impact on wages, but this is so negligible as to not be worth bothering about. Nigel Harris has pointed out (Thinking the Unthinkable, IB Tauris, 2002) that econometric studies have consistently looked for this effect where there is large amounts of immigration, for example across the Mexican-US border. They can't find a trace of any downward pressure on wages or conditions. The idea that it would negatively affect the wages and conditions of 'native' workers is based on simplistic economic reasoning, wherein more and less expensive workers means a weaker bargaining position for labour, but that's not the way the migrant labour economy works.

Notably, Balls says nothing about the free movement of capital, which brings us to a more pressing problem with his argument. New Labour really did energetically embrace policies that manifestly reduced workers' incomes, and these are policies that Balls shares responsibility for, having been in the Treasury when they were implemented. These policies are based on Gordon Brown's acceptance of the doctrine of NAIRU (the 'non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment', or the 'natural rate of unemployment' as it used to be called). This doctrine says that the government cannot reduce unemployment through economic stimulus, by demand management, or by redistributing wealth, because otherwise it will lead to unmanageable levels of inflation. The only way to reduce unemployment is to reduce the 'non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment', by cutting the costs of hiring. This means keeping a 'flexible labour market', and some of the toughest anti-union laws in Europe.

The result has been a severe downward pressure on wages in the UK, relative to the rest of the EU. Average pay of manufacturing workers at the zenith of New Labour's rule in 2001 was, according to David Coates, lower than most advanced European competitor states, and even lower than in the US, while the pay gap was the highest in Europe. Low pay is at higher rates in the UK than in Poland, Estonia, Malta, the Czech Republic, and Italy. Even deferred wages compare badly, with pensions being the worst in Europe because of the government's commitment to a more privatised system, ideally modelled on Chilean lines.

The British government opted out of workers' protections in EU legislation in 2007, specifically denying that Title IV in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights implied any legally enforceable rights for British workers, and in 2002 allied with Berlusconi to oppose workers' rights in Europe. Where is Balls on these questions? Where he has always been: at the heart of the New Labour project, suppressing wages to benefit employers, in the name of neoliberal orthodoxy. The only context in which Balls wants to discuss "labour protections" is, ironically, that of bashing workers from a different part of Europe. He wants to "protect" one group of workers from another, as if they are mortal enemies and his job is to support the British "side". No doubt the idiotic phrase "the white working class" will pass from his lips soon, if it hasn't already. Balls' article is both a cheek and a barely sublimated appeal to crude, scapegoating racism.

A new report from the IPPR suggests that support for the BNP is not fuelled by immigration. It draws on the finding, which has been repeated elsewhere, that the BNP's support is largely not stronger in areas where there has been recent immigration:

"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.

The Sunday Times' latest poll has the Tory lead down to 2% which, even if not reproduced uniformly in a general election, would produce a Labour minority government. The change is produced by a drop in the Tories' support from 39% to 37%, and a rise for Labour from 33% to 35%, thus cutting a six point lead to a 2 point lead. The change in each party's standing is in the margin of error (this is how it works, right?), so this probably an outlier. But it does fit into a broader trend of Labour recovery, and it does add to the indications that the Tories' lead was always fragile, and their support reluctant. Polls have shown that 82% of voters want 'change' in the government, but just over a third of voters think the Tories are that change. Some commentators had wondered if the entertaining pseudo-revelations of Blairite gossip columnist Andrew Rawnsley would land a fatal blow on the Brown government. This is possibly because of a natural tendency to overestimate the prestige in which the public hold their profession. But Brown's alleged personality defects probably only register in the public mind as the first vaguely interesting thing that has ever been known about him. And I can't help thinking that it helps Brown to remind people of his long overdue coup against his emetic predecessor.

Another thing to bear in mind is that Yougov has consistently given Labour a better rating than other polls such as Angus Reid and ICM in the recent period. On the other hand, Yougov also has a reputation for accuracy as a result of more closely predicting election results than other agencies, so my suspicion is that the Tory leads have been exaggerated in other polls. Also of interest is the fact that on several important indicators, particularly the economy, the Tories have lost a hard-won advantage. The attacks on Tories as spending slashers, upper class scum, millionaires out to reduce taxes on the rich, etc., is working. 'Class war', though denounced by the Tories, some Blairites, and every respectable newspaper columnist and leader-writer in the land, is an effective electoral strategy.

Interestingly, the Tories may have been following the advice of MigrationWatch in pushing some dog-whistling about immigration, despite strenuous denials that the issue is a central theme of theirs. Essentially, they want to allow the grass-roots to use the issue as much as possible, without tarnishing the national campaign with racism in the way that the disastrous 2005 campaign was. Previous polling shows that this is the one issue on which a plurality trusts the Tories to do what the majority want. They don't trust them to fix schools, look after the NHS or represent all groups in society equitably (whatever that would mean). But they trust them to smack black people around. All these years, all those Cameronite cries of 'change', all the soft focus touchy-feely hug-a-hoody compassionate conservatism sales pitches, and the Tories are still the nasty party. That's not just their Unique Selling Point, it's their only selling point, and they just can't seem to shake it off.

Occasionally, if you open the Economist or the FT, you'll read an argument that runs something like this: people shouldn't be bigoted toward immigrants, because by they do jobs that British workers won't do for pay that British workers won't accept. In a similar way, you often hear members of the Institute of Directors or the CBI explain that 'globalisation' and international outsourcing is an excellent thing because it gives jobs to hard-working people in Third World countries who work much harder, and are much less demanding, than spoilt, recalcitrant Western workers. This is the zenith of ruling class anti-racism, and it's just another argument for exploitation. And it is, of course, deeply racist toward the recipients of its supposed benediction.

I mention this by way of introducing a popular BBC programme that aired the other day, called The Day The Immigrants Left. Featuring the economics commentator from Newsnight:

This programme begins with a series of vox pops involving working class, usually unemployed, white people regurgitating scaremongering headlines. The explicit remit of the programme is to challenge the racism of those workers by proving to them that they couldn't do the jobs that immigrant workers do. It essentially shares the purview of the employers of migrant labour, who explain that they would be out of business if they had to recruit from the local unemployed. Of course there's a heavy selection bias in the programme, because it can only feature those employers of migrant labour who are happy to have their workplaces filmed and have their practises discussed on air. And the programme backs up their claim that the reason they have turned to migrant labour is because, somehow and at some point, local workers just stopped being interested in such jobs and opted for the dole instead. Unemployment, in this light, is voluntary, and arises from some sort of psychic shift in the workforce. The truth behind this convoluted tale is much more simple: the politico-legal oppression of migrant workers makes the cost of their labour (ie, the cost of reproducing their labour) much less expensive, and it usually works to render those workers much more submissive. Employers like that.

Historically, systems of migrant and segregated labour work very similarly in that the costs of reproducing their labour power are reduced by the conditions of oppression. In pre-apartheid South Africa, for example, segregated and migratory labour were combined. African workers were imported from the rural economy, housed in cramped, collective living quarters, fed a standardised diet purchased in bulk, and transported collectively to the mineral mines (where they were admitted only to the most menial jobs on account of 'colour bar' policies). They may have had a family to support, but not in the city centre, and thus the remittance they needed to provide their family with was not elevated by city prices. All of this was much less expensive than the process of feeding, housing and transporting the white workers who lived in individual houses in the Witwatersrand core with high rents, ate in individualised units, had families to support and travelled individually. Hence, the politico-legal oppression of African workers meant that the cost of reproducing their labour was reduced, thus increasing profits.

In today's migration economy, similar principles apply. Migrants often have shaky legal status, even if they have documentation. The TUC points out that even where the legal status of migrant workers is insuperable, they are made unaware of their rights and are usually unable to enforce them short of high-risk militancy. This is a situation that is maintained on purpose as it provides low cost labour to both private and public sector institutions. Most migrants live in cramped, collective accomodation, are transported collectively, eat collectively, and any families they support are based in poorer countries where average incomes and prices are lower, thus reducing the amount of any remittance that needs to be sent. Hence, the cost of their labour is reduced. This means that more jobs are created that otherwise could not possibly have been created. The effect of the last big wave of labour migration in the UK, consistent with this outline, was to increase total employment without decreasing unemployment or job vacancies. New jobs were created because employers could afford the cheaper labour, but the old jobs were not filled because they weren't available to migrant workers and because a set of geographical and skill factors excluded local workers from taking those jobs.

What this means is that British workers could not, even if they were masochistic enough to want to, work in the same conditions that most migrant workers have to accept. To attempt it would be to attempt a perverse hoax in which one abandoned one's status as a British citizen, fled with one's family to a relatively poor country and gained citizenship there, accepted lower living standards, and then left one's family behind to try to get into the UK, legally or otherwise. Oh, and one would have to forget almost everything one had ever learned, because the first sign that one was socialised in the UK might alert any handler or employer that there's something awry. And the only thing that one would learn from such zaniness is that a worker's position in the global labour market is socially produced, maintained by politico-legal institutions and social forces much larger than any individual worker. The cost of labour is determined by all of these factors, and unemployment is not voluntary. The BBC's programme is an argument for exploitation.

One last point. Ruling class ideology on this subject oscillates between two mutually reinforcing poles. On the one hand, there is a patronising concern for the 'white working class', which scapegoats migrants, black people and 'politically correct' policies for the supposed alienation of white workers from politics. On the other hand, there is a condescending endorsement of the 'work ethic' of immigrants, as if their oppression and exploitation was a fact about their personalities or culture. From a different perspective, this attitude also blames immigrants, in this case for being more available for undignified, hyper-exploitative, low-paid labour than their local counterparts. What neither attitude can admit, what the ruling dogma can never allow, is that workers of whatever status have more in common with one another than with their bosses.

Polls are now consistently showing a reduction in the poll lead enjoyed by the Tories from double digits to single digits, now at about 7%. That's still a big lead, but the assumption of the newspaper headline writers is that the Tories need a bigger swing to win an outright majority. Thus, the spectre of a 'hung parliament' has been raised. Martin Wolf of the FT would be happy to see a coalition government, perhaps styled on Germany's recent experience with the 'Grand Alliance'. One can certainly see why: it would enable the political class to consolidate their minority consensus in favour of some form of fiscal contraction, thus edging out all signs of popular dissensus on the question. But it isn't going to happen, and here's why.

Labour's recovery is based substantially on the germinal economic recovery, which is the number one issue concerning voters - 56% say it's one of their top three issues (see figures). But issue number two is - disgracefully, and entirely New Labour's fault - asylum and immigration, with 43% saying it's a top three issue. That issue will almost certaily be prominently pushed in the marginals, where it might actually trump the economy with some middle class voters. And the marginal constituencies are where the Tories need to make gains, not in Labour 'heartlands' where its support is slightly hardening in response to the naked class aggression in Tory policies. The reactionary think-tank MigrationWatch UK got Yougov to carry out a push-poll in the key marginals for Labour and Liberals in the coming election, and it basically found that most of those voters are hysterical over the issue of immigration, trust the Tories most to handle the issue, and would be more likely to vote for any party that promised severe crackdowns. We will undoubtedly see cack-handed attempts by Liberals and Labour to pander to such bigotry, but only the right-wing parties can benefit from this game, and in the marginals the beneficiaries will be the Tories.

Of course, a lot can happen between now and election day. The Greek general strikes may presage a broader European labour insurgency against austerity measures being pushed through by mainstream parties, as the Indie claims today. Anything that pushes the economy and public opposition to spending cuts to the top of the agenda can damage the Tories - unless, of course, that 'thing' is a speculative attack or a new lurch into negative growth. But at the moment, the figures still point to a Tory majority come 6 May.

One of the most interesting meetings at the very well-attended Historical Materialism conference was that addressed by Kim Moody on the effects of crisis on labour. (I should mention that the meeting was also addressed by two Turkish comrades on the impact of recession on female labour but, alas, that is for another post). For, although organised labour threw its weight behind Obama's election, it has so far been unable to extract much advantage from it. The two key policies that labour was pressing for was healthcare, and the Employee Free Choice Act. But the union movement in America has been in crisis for upward of thirty years now, and it has yet to recover. All the major unions have experienced substantial declines in membership, all are experiencing a profound financial crisis in part because they had investments that have turned to ordure during the crisis, and all are trapped in an impossible model of 'business unionism' that has consistently crippled the American working class. American labour has thus lacked the ability to put enough pressure on Obama to see its key policies through. Obamacare is proving to be a corporate-driven shambles, and the EFCA will be seriously watered down.

Moody tracked the origins of this crisis to the late 1970s when, beginning in 1979, there was a sudden nosedive in membership, strike rate, NLRB negotiations and - as a consequence - wages. Part of the background for this sudden crisis of unionism in 1979-81 was that the union leadership had expended much of its energies combatting the rank and file insurgencies of the Sixties and Seventies that had challenged the norms of business unionism, thus evaporating activists energies on internal struggles. The dependence on the Democratic Party machinery was also fatal. The AFL-CIO helped Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford, with the promise of a labour-friendly bill, but it was filibustered and contained. And when Chrysler was going under, labour depended on Carter to organise a bail-out and thus engaged in its first, fatal, pre-Reaganite round of concessionary bargaining. Job losses were conceded and the union movement subsequently lost members and leverage. It was already ripe for plucking apart by the time Reagan destroyed the air traffic controllers union.

This nosedive in unionism reached a plateau by 1982 and it facilitated a wave of restructuring and spatial re-organisation in American industry, including auto, steel, meatpacking, trucking, mining, telecommunications and building. The US steel industry alone lost a quarter of a million jobs by the end of the 1980s, as larger firms downsized and smaller groups such as Birmingham Steel and Oregon Steel pioneered new successful models of accumulation. As in Europe, the manufacturing sector shed jobs in bulk and waged a bitter but often successful war against shop floor organisation. Through intensified labour regimes and technical innovation, capital was able to raise productivity while wages remained static rather than rising with productivity gains as had been the case in previous decades. Between 1973 and 1998, productivity in US industry rose by 46.5%, but the median wage fell by 8%. (Figures from Harman's Zombie Economics). Notwithstanding a brief period of growth at the end of the 1990s, real wages continued to fall in the Bush years, and are still falling while productivity has soared during this crisis. (Though, typically, a number of US economists writing in the New York Times have taken the opportunity to argue that US wages are actually far too high and should be reduced to the global "market-clearing rate"). The intensification of work included a crude increase in the rate of exploitation by way of increased working hours, so that the average labourer in the US worked almost as many hours in 2004 as a Mexican worker (1,824 and 1,848, respectively). This process, technically known as 'class struggle from above', did facilitate a substantial recovery in aggregate profit rates until about 1997 - not to the levels of the post-war boom, but certainly above the troughs of the late 1970s and early 1980s. (For figures, see David McNally, 'From Finance Crisis to World-Slump: Accumulation, Financialisation and the Global Slow Down', Historical Materialism, 17.2).

The model of business unionism that persisted and still persists involves the acceptance of capitalism not just de facto but in explicit ideological terms - the language of class politics is specifically eschewed. It involves reliance on the Democratic Party which is, both in terms of its outlook and leading personnel, a capitalist party, not even a reformist party akin to European social democracy. It involves bureaucratic top-down methods of organising and growth in which the latter is the preserve of 'professionals', long-term sweetheart deals, no-strike agreements, and the exclusion of would-be members if they do not belong to existing bargaining units.

The effect of this depoliticised, professionalised model of unionism is not only to forestall struggles but to substantially weaken them where they arise. Moody gave the example of auto-workers striking at a BMW plant who met with European trade union delegates. They explained that they were not against the company - they liked the company - but they just wanted a voice, a seat at the table. The delegates said 'they're going to get beaten', and of course they were beaten, because they didn't understand that it was a class conflict not a family quarrel. Another problem facing US workers is the one I mentioned in a previous post - older forms of community-based workers' organisation have suffered because labour is much more mobile than before. American workers can travel a hundred miles to get a job now, whereas once it was common to live within walking distance of work. Moreover, they are unlikely to work at the same plant, where common union representation would signify a common struggle. They are atomised, fragmented, and dispersed. The only workers' constituency that resembles those old communities is among immigrants.

The formation of 'Change to Win', which was supposed to break with the more bureaucratic methods of the AFL-CIO, did not augur a new period of growth. This was in part because the split didn't involve any substantial political or tactical disagreement. It was entirely driven by the unions' respective leaderships. The Change to Win federation essentially accepted the same model of recruitment as the AFL-CIO, based on professionalised campaigns and economies of scale. The SEIU, one major constituent of the Change to Win coalition, was supposed to have recruited tens of thousands of new members, but its net growth after factoring in losses amounted to approx. 10,000 - not really that large given that the SEIU represents 1.8m workers. Its leadership has publicly eschewed any idea of class politics, instead vaunting that old shibboleth, 'partnership'. And it has increasingly resorted to carrying out raids on other, smaller unions - a nasty and rightly scorned tactic in the labour movement. The UAW and USWA unions experienced losses. Only the smaller unions have made gains. There are positive developments, however. Unions are changing their attitude to immigration and increasingly looking to organise the 12 million Mexican workers in the US. The SEIU, despite its commitment to business unionism, did take some pioneering steps in this direction with its famous janitors campaigns in the 1990s. (The campaigns featured in Ken Loach's Bread and Roses). But it has not organised a great deal in the South, which is ripe for a recruitment drive, and where tentative efforts in, eg, the meatpacking industry have met with success.

Moody has long advocated a version of 'social movement unionism' to combat the conservatism and limitations of the 'business unionism' model. Rather than reserved for members of bargaining units, unions should be thrown open to all - not least those many workers who regularly volunteer their time and efforts to help union recruitment drives, but are not union members themselves. The unions should campaign on broader issues and be integrated into larger campaigns rather than restrict themselves to narrowly 'economic' issues. We had a glimpse of this with Seattle and after, and with the massive organisation of immigrant workers in 2006, subsequently crushed under a wave of ICE raids and horrendous repression. But as yet the model of business unionism has not been broken with on a large scale and, as a result, recruitment still doesn't make up for lost members, and union density continues to decline. It will require a painstaking accumulation of forces before the necessary shift can take place, but it would also require an ideological break with the Democratic Party to be sustainable - now a much more delicate and difficult matter with the Obama executive. To the extent that white workers break with Obama, it may just as well be to the right as to the left.

(Yet another whinging, pessimistic post. Where is the Hope? Where is the change-you-can-believe-in? Tsk.)