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Mike Marqusee's Top Ten Books

tim — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 11:58:55 +0000

A Scots Quair by Lewis Grassic Gibbon

Once you get accustomed to the invented prose idiom, the groundedness of this epic takes a grip. The architecture of the trilogy embodies a big (Marxist) picture of historical development, but it's built out of emotional intimacy and physical immediacy. The conclusion of Sunset Song, the second volume in the trilogy, with its invocation of the sufferings of the first World War, moved me as much as anything I've encountered in British fiction.

Poor Things by Alasdair Gray

A wildly inventive yet in its own way utterly logical fictional confection. What's great is that the bravura assemblage of voices, styles and narrative gimmicks all tend to a purpose; they're not only immense fun, they're fused and directed by Gray's compassion for aspirant humanity and his contempt for power and hierarchy. This is a wonderfully partisan novel.

Beyond a Boundary by CLR James

This is not only by some way the best book ever written about the sport of cricket, it's also a wonderful piece of inventive prose artistry, genre-busting in its mix of memoir, history, theory and political polemic. It ranges from colonial Trinidad to industrial Lancashire by way of ancient Greece and Victorian England -- all swept along by the radical verve of James' intelligence. He saw cricket in context, shaped by and giving shape to the conflicts of the world in which it was played. James took cricket seriously -- perhaps too seriously -- as an art form, and he was demanding in his judgements, which have a terrific elan, even when they're wrong. Be warned: cricket's most eminent Marxist has a surprising soft spot for the English public school ethos!

A Wet Afternoon by Sadat Hassan Manto

Toba Tek Singh -- set in an asylum for the insane on the newly drawn India-Pakistan border in 1947 -- is the great fictional comment on the tragedy of partition. Manto (who was also a screenwriter and journalist) wrote stories in a plain-spoken Urdu about prostitutes, dissolute intellectuals, compromised small businessmen and imprisoned housewives. He's a sour but compassionate observer, and he leaves the big judgements up to the reader. Even in translation, this jaded epicurean with a stubborn moral core speaks with a distinctive voice. He died in 1955, at the age of 42.

Leon Trotsky trilogy by Isaac Deutscher: The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, The Prophet Outcast

You don't have to be a Trotskyist to derive pleasure and enrichment from Deutscher's beautifully written biographical trilogy. This is more than Trotsky's story -- which itself is one of the most dramatic, and tragic, of the 20th century -- it's a supple study in the rhythms of political and historical change. It's clear and fluent and deeply considered and introduces you painlessly to a wide range of people, places, ideas and debates. The Polish-born Deutscher was himself an anti-Stalinist Marxist, a brave and independent intellect, whose essay The Non-Jewish Jew I'd also recommend.

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

As Indira Gandhi's 'emergency' grips the country, four characters -- a Parsee widow, a middle class student, and two lower caste tailors -- find their lives squashed together in a Bombay flat. Among other things, this book is a chronicle of the cruelties of that era, and provides a much sharper commentary on Indian politics than is found in more celebrated novels. The method here is unapologetically, and masterfully, naturalistic. The suffering in this book comes in many forms, is at times unbearable, but is always concrete and credible; so are the moments of hope or relief, buoyed up by the humour and idiosyncracy of the characters.

Out Stealing Horses by Per Pettersen

It's hard to describe how and why Pettersen's novel becomes so deeply engrossing. Like his previous works, this one shifts between past trauma and present uncertainties, and accumulates its insights, builds its very tangible world, sentence by sentence. In Out Stealing Horses an old man retires to a cottage in northern Norway and reflects on the events of a summer holiday some fifty years earlier. As the story unwinds, the long-term effects of these events become apparent. Pettersen refuses easy closures. His narrative is mostly close-up, but there are also sidelong glances at Norwegian history, at the Nazi occupation, at class and poverty. Despite the subject matter, and the real sadness, it's anything but glum. When I read this book, I really felt I was seeing -- feeling -- the world afresh.

Walden, or Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau

In 1845, Thoreau beat a retreat from the polite society of Concord, Massachusetts, to live in the woods by Walden Pond. The book is the record of his experiment: to see how many of the 'necessities' of civilisation we can really do without. But it's more: it embodies an attempt to live fully and deliberately, to find a deep meaning in daily life. He didn't go the woods just to prove it could be done, but to re-appropriate himself, to live a more authentic life than the one offered us, ready-packaged, off the shelf. Thoreau was one of the first critics of what we now call consumerism, which he sees as destructive of the environment and the human spirit. The book is full of wry humour, as Thoreau mocks himself and his society, and the prose has an un-showy solidity, like skilled carpentry.

King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild

There's not much in modern history that exceeds the depravity of the 'Congo Free State', the vast territory appropriated by the Belgian King in 1885 as a kind of private enterprise free-fire zone. In the end, millions were killed, millions more mutilated, tortured, enslaved, by a small, sophisticated European business coterie. This is the story of that atrocity, but also of the global campaign protesting against it, a forerunner of the modern human rights movement. So among the genocidal villains and amoral rogues are genuine heroes: Hochschild makes sure neither are forgotten.

Complete Writings by William Blake

I take Blake at his own estimation: as a prophet. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a startling act of literary and intellectual insurgency. The conclusion of the epic illustrated book Jerusalem something for which here is no parallel in English poetry. Blake struck deep into me when I was a teenager and I've gone back to him repeatedly over the years, each time finding more than I expected. The 'gentle mystic' is largely a creation of literary legend; Blake was ferocious: "half friendship is the bitterest enmity." The revolutionary republican prosecuted a kind of one-man 'culture war' for much of his life. Result: poverty and obscurity. Don't worry about the details of Blake's weird invented mythology; there's more than enough that's arrestingly transparent to compensate for the obscure bits.

Book Review: A People's History of the World

tim — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 11:51:49 +0000

Flavour of the moment academic philosopher guru Slavoj Zizek recently proclaimed: “One of the clearest lessons of the last few decades is that capitalism is indestructible.”

Bombarded with daily news of international events as we are, it might be understandable that those living in less esoteric circumstances and with memories limited to the result of the last TV football match could well believe that history is simply one damn thing after another, lacking all understandable coherence. But a self-professed Marxist should surely see the world in a longer perspective than decades.

On the other hand, you need to have heroic ambitions to tackle history “from the Stone Age to the New Millennium.”

Chris Harman fulfils those ambitions magnificently in this new edition of his 1999 world history which demonstrates a breadth of scholarship coupled to a lucid style and a clear understanding of the unfolding patterns of human experience.

This last comes from his Marxist analysis, which, along with history itself, we are often told is dead. Without some rational framework, however – and Marx provides the only one that holds water – our world has been and still is a living nightmare.

Moving from the hunter-gatherer societies of pre-history – increasingly a misnomer as we learn more about our early forebears, who seemed to have shared none of the exploitative gender and racial values that inform our brave new world – Harman charts a course through the emerging civilisations which increasingly failed to reconcile internal conflicting social forces.

Throughout, he points his argument with needle-sharp examples. Slavery, which underpinned empires such as Rome, resulted in a lack of technological progress. With a limitless slave workforce, society has nothing to gain from investing in new methodologies of production, consequently providing easy prey for more dynamic predators.

Understandably, the greater part of Harman’s history is devoted to the world that emerged from medieval feudalism and the rise of capitalism.

Here, he takes on the labyrinthine complications of world power politics with deceptive ease. In his analyses of the revolutions that have punctuated the modern period, he demonstrates how the leaders of these movements – Cromwell, Robespierre, Lenin – were circumscribed by the social conditions of their times. As Marx knew, “human beings make history, but not under conditions of their own choosing.”

Harman believes that there is an essential logic to the apparently bewildering confusion of history. For instance, he answers a question that has always puzzled me.

Was it simply a psychopathic Hitler-imposed decision to continue the Holocaust programme even when, facing defeat, German communications and vital war resources would be overtaxed?

Harman suggests that, by then, anti-semitism provided the only binding ideological element for the corrupt nazi hierarchy.

Acknowledging that “capitalism is a more dynamic form of class society than any before in history,” Harman nevertheless demolishes the parroted post-modernist claim of the end of ideology and class conflict.

The industrial workers may have virtually disappeared from the Western imperialist world, but, characteristically using statistics tellingly, Harman points out that, “by the 1980s, South Korea alone contained more industrial workers than the whole world had when Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto.”

Our own teachers, nurses, local authority and post office workers know that overalls are not an essential qualification for membership of an exploited class.

Zizek needs reminding of Marx’s dictum. Philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it. And the times, they are a-changing.

Balfour’s Deceit

Ellie Keen — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 23:28:47 +0000

Michael Makovsky’s study of Churchill’s views on Palestine is a work of immense labour. Its documentation reveals a lot. Consistency was not Churchill’s strong point. He advocated a Jewish homeland as far back as in 1906. If in 1915 Lloyd George advocated grabbing Palestine “owing to the prestige it would give us”, Churchill scribbled to Foreign Secretary Edward Grey “Palestine must be given to Christian, liberal and now noble Belgium”.

Makovsky’s researches fully establish Balfour’s deceit: “The definition of ‘national home’ was left intentionally ambiguous. The Zionists purposely used the term ‘home’ in Basle in 1897, so as not to provoke the Gentiles, but had made conflicting statements since then about whether they intended a state or not. Weizmann considered development of a state a slow process, which certainly would have been necessary for the Jews to become a majority in Palestine. (At the time of the Declaration, there were estimated to be 50,000-65,000 Jews out of a total population of 700,000). Balfour told the War Cabinet on October 31, 1917, that ‘national home’ meant an entity under British or American protectorate which permitted the Jews to ‘build up… a real centre of national culture and focus of national life. It did not necessarily involve the early establishment of an independent Jewish State, which was a matter of gradual development in accordance with the ordinary laws of political evolution’. With ‘centre’, he borrowed the vague term which Herbert Samuel employed in 1915. Balfour did not commit to a definition in public, but privately confided in 1918. ‘My personal hope is that the Jews will make good in Palestine and eventually found a Jewish state.’ The British press mostly understood the Declaration as promising a Jewish state.” Curzon was right after all. But, as Balfour minuted on August 6, 1919, “I am an ardent Zionist.” (Documents, page 330).

The Documents confirm the evidence of deceit. Col. Richard Meinertzhagen, a pro-Zionist political officer in the British military administration in Palestine, warned Curzon on September 26, 1919: “The people of Palestine are not at present in a fit state to be told openly that the establishment of Zionism in Palestine is the policy to which H.M.G., America and France are committed. They certainly do not realise this fact.” (Documents, page 472).
Balfour himself was more candid in a talk with Justice Brandeis of the U.S. Supreme Court, and Felix Frankfurter, who became a judge in the court later. Both were Zionist activists. They met in Paris on June 24, 1919, when Balfour referred to the King-Crane Commission of Inquiry set up by President Woodrow Wilson in order to ascertain what “the people [of the region] really wanted”. Frankfurter pressed the view that “Palestine should be the Jewish homeland and not merely that there be a Jewish homeland” there. Balfour replied that he had tried unsuccessfully to exclude Palestine from the Commission’s remit, “because the powers had committed themselves to the Zionist programme, which inevitably excluded numerical self-determination. Palestine presented a unique situation. We are dealing not with the wishes of an existing community but are consciously seeking to re-constitute a new community and definitely building for a numerical majority in the future.” (Emphasis added, throughout.) That was not what he said in public.
Frankfurter remarked: “No statesman could have been more sympathetic than Mr. Balfour was with the underlying philosophy and aims of Zionism… nor more eager that they should be realised.” (Documents, pages 1277-1278).

Short shrift to Zionists

The King-Crane Commission’s Report gave short shrift to Zionist aims after a thorough probe into the people’s view: “We recommend, in the fifth place, serious modification of the extreme Zionist programme for Palestine of unlimited immigration of Jews, looking finally to making Palestine distinctly a Jewish state.

The Commissioners began their study of Zionism with minds predisposed in its favour, but the actual facts in Palestine, coupled with the force of the general principles proclaimed by the Allies and accepted by the Syrians have driven them to the recommendation here made. …The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission’s conferences with Jewish representatives, that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, by various forms of purchase [of land].”

It cited Wilson’s emphasis on the democratic principle and said: “If that principle is to rule, and so the wishes of Palestine’s population are to be decisive as to what is to be done with Palestine, then it is to be remembered that the non-Jewish population of Palestine – nearly nine-tenths of the whole – are emphatically against the entire Zionist programme… there was no one thing upon which the population of Palestine were more agreed than upon this. To subject a people so minded to unlimited Jewish immigration, and to steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land, would be a gross violation of the principle just quoted, and of the people’s rights, though it kept within the forms of law… the initial claim, often submitted by Zionist representatives, that they have a ‘right’ to Palestine, based on an occupation of 2,000 years ago, can hardly be seriously considered.”

But Henry King, President of the Oberlin College, and Charles Crane, an industrialist from Chicago, could not weaken the British Cabinet’s resolve despite the fact that they were appointed on the Commission by President Wilson. President Wilson’s fortunes were already in decline. Significantly, an ardent Zionist, Herbert Samuel, was appointed as the first British High Commissioner for Palestine. When they fell out later, Lloyd George taunted him: “I made him the first Procurator of Judea since Pontius Pilate.”

Tom Segev rightly holds that “there is no basis for the frequent assertion that the State [of Israel] was established as a result of the Holocaust… That sympathy helped the Zionists advance their diplomatic campaign and their propaganda”. Prof. Peter Clarke agrees. “The escalating crisis for European Jewry under the Nazis had not created the case for Zionist immigration. It simply reinforced it.” (The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire, page 86). He recalls Churchill’s evidence to the Peel Commission in 1937 – the British government had all along envisaged “a great Jewish state there, numbered by millions, far exceeding the present inhabitants of the country”. Labour was as pro-Zionist. “Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out, as the Jews come in,” Hugh Dalton wrote.

Imperial concerns were not absent. The Jewish state, alien to its environment, would be the West’s outpost in West Asia. A reader of the Documents on British Policy is struck by the Arabs’ ardour for unity. The barter of Palestine was of a piece with the disruption of Arab unity. The General Syrian Congress declared on July 2, 1919: “We reject the claims of the Zionists for the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth in that part of Southern Syria which is known as Palestine, and we are opposed to Jewish immigration into any part of the country… We desire that there should be no dismemberment of Syria, and no separation of Palestine or the coastal regions in the West or the Lebanon from the mother country; and we ask that the unity of the country be maintained under any circumstances.” If Nasser moved “the Arab street”, it was because he spoke as an Arab, rather than an Egyptian, nationalist. Dismemberment created separate and vested interests.

The sell-out

However, the tragic truth is that not only were Arab leaders of the times inept, but they were also corrupt. Sherif Hussein’s sons, Abdullah and Feisal, were foremost among them. Abdullah took £5,000 to accept the deal by which he was given Transjordan. Among those who sold lands to the Jews were “leaders of the Arab national movement – patriots on the outside, traitors on the inside”, Tom Segev records. Zionist officials prepared a list of their names. Musa Kazim al-Husseini, former mayor of Jerusalem and a recognised leader of the movement, was on the list as were eight other Arab mayors.

“The Arab leaders’ willingness to sell land to the Jews heightened the contempt Zionist figures felt for the Arab national movement. After a meeting with Arab dignitaries, Chaim Weizmann concluded, ‘They are ready to sell their souls to the highest bidder.’ The compact Weizmann reached with Prince Faisal in 1918 had also been based on the assumption that the prince would make money off his peace with the Zionists. One of Faisal’s aides had received a down payment of £1,000 and then demanded more. This experience contributed to the Jews’ conclusion that the national consciousness of the Palestinian Arabs could be bought. Indeed, politicians and petty thieves, dignitaries as well as hoodlums – all offered the Zionists their services in espionage and sabotage, in rumour-mongering, defamation, extortion, and all kinds of intimidation; the supply often outstripped the demand.” The British kept company with the Jewish agency in paying bribes. President Roosevelt told Chaim Weizmann that, in his opinion, the Arabs could be bought. The word “baksheesh” (tip) appears in the minutes of their talks.

Land transfers alone could not have achieved Jewish aims. Recourse to terror was inescapable to drive out the Arabs from their homes. This should not have caused any surprise. The Central Intelligence Agency prepared a paper, “The consequences of the Partition of Palestine”, dated November 28, 1947 (“The View from 1947” by Thomas W. Lippman; Middle East Journal; Vol. 61, No. 1; Winter 2007). It predicted the outbreak of war if a Jewish state was created. In 1943, Roosevelt’s special envoy Col. Harold Hoskins reported that “only by military force can a Zionist State be imposed upon the Arabs”. The CIA’s paper noted the Zionists’ capacity as well as their ambitions. Their fighting forces would consist of 70,000 to 90,000 members of Hagana, the “Zionist army”; the 6,000 to 8,000 members of the Irgun Zvai Leumi, an underground organisation that “employs sabotage and terrorism” as its preferred tactics in its campaign for independence; and the “extreme fanatics” known as the Stern Gang or Lehi, about 500 men who, the CIA said, “do not hesitate to assassinate government officials and police officers or to obtain funds by acts of violence against Jews as well as others”.

Its prediction of the Arabs’ victory was proved wrong. The only army worth the name was the Arab Legion of Transjordan led by Sir John Glubb. But King Abdullah, true to form, had secretly agreed with the Jews that he would not go beyond capturing the West Bank. According to the CIA, Arab fears of Jewish expansionism was justified: “In the long run no Zionists in Palestine will be satisfied with the territorial arrangements of the partition settlement,” though it allocated about 50% of Palestine to the Jews and called for Jerusalem to be a neutral, international city.”

Prof. Ilan Pappe has rendered high service by documenting the Jews’ ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Israel was established on May 14, 1948. Plan Dalet was formulated by “the Consultancy” on March 10, 1948. “That same evening military orders were dispatched to the units on the ground to prepare for the systematic expulsion of the Palestinians from vast areas of the country. The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be employed to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centres; setting fire to homes, properties and goods; expulsion; demolition; and, finally, planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning. Each unit was issued with its own list of villages and neighbourhoods as the targets of this master plan. Codenamed Plan D [Dalet in Hebrew], this was the fourth and final version of less substantial plans that outlined the fate the Zionists had in store for Palestine and consequently for its native population. The previous three schemes had articulated only obscurely how the Zionist leadership contemplated dealing with the presence of so many Palestinians living in the land the Jewish national movement coveted as its own. This fourth and last blueprint spelled it out clearly and unambiguously: the Palestinians had to go.” He bases his summary on the records of the caucus’ meetings. Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon were its members.

Ethnic cleansing is recognised in international law as “a crime against humanity”. The International Criminal Court has been created to punish its perpetrators, not to forget the special ICCs for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

Plan D of 1948 was a revised version of previous ones, Plan A, B and C. A was drafted in 1937; B in 1946.

They were meshed into C in 1948 which spelt out the actions to be taken. “Killing the Palestinian political leadership. Killing Palestinian inciters and their financial supporters. Killing Palestinians who acted against Jews. Killing senior Palestinian officers and officials (in the Mandatory system). Damaging Palestinian transportation. Damaging the sources of Palestinian livelihoods; water wells, mills, etc. Attacking nearby Palestinian villages likely to assist in future attacks. Attacking Palestinian clubs, coffee houses, meeting places, etc. Plan C added that all data required for the performance of these actions could be found in the village files; lists of leaders, activists, ‘potential human targets’, the precise layout of villages, and so on.”

A passage from Plan D read: “These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their debris) and especially of those population centres which are difficult to control continuously; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state.”

Pappe notes that “the ideology that enabled the depopulation of half of Palestine’s native people in 1948 is still alive, and continues to drive the inexorable, sometimes discernable, cleansing of those Palestinians who live there today”.

It is to this Israel that, on January 11, 2008, President George W. Bush asked the Arab States to “reach out”. He has done nothing to prevent Israel from building new settlements or from violating basic human rights. Israel’s policies are inspired by the ideology that led to its creation. “Neither Palestinians nor Jews will be saved, from one another or from themselves, if the ideology that still drives the Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is not correctly identified. The problem with Israel was never its Jewishness – Judaism has many faces and many of them provide a solid basis for peace and cohabitation; it is the ethnic Zionist character. Zionism does not have the same margins of pluralism that Judaism offers, especially not for the Palestinians. They can never be part of the Zionist state and space, and will continue to fight – and hopefully their struggle will be peaceful and successful. If not, it will be desperate and vengeful and, like a whirlwind, will suck all up in a huge perpetual sandstorm that will rage not only through the Arab and Muslim worlds, but also within Britain and the United States, the powers which, each in their turn, feed the tempest that threatens to ruin us all.”

Can a state established by deceit and forcible ouster of the people of the land expect them to accept its legitimacy by mere efflux of time? What are 60 years to an ancient people, the Arabs? International recognition of Israel as a state cannot wipe out the facts of history or erase from the memories of the people it has wronged the brutalities it has perpetrated. International law is based on the states quo. For long it legitimised colonial rule. In law the colony was part of the territory of its overlord. It has nothing to do with morality. Israel simply lacks moral legitimacy. Itself a product of terror, it cannot complain if the people under occupation take to arms.

But will that be of any avail to them? Human blood, whether Jewish or Arab, is priceless. Violence has not accomplished and will not accomplish anything. Fortunately, there is growing acceptance within and outside Israel of the facts of history. The Arabs in Palestine can stir the Israelis’ and the world’s conscience by recourse to a non-violent campaign of revolt till justice is done to them in the light of the realities of today, however painful they are.

More cannot be demanded of the Palestinians. As Thycidides said, “It may be your interest to be our masters, but how can it be ours to be your slaves?”

Denshawai,1906

Ellie Keen — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 01:50:05 +0000

The struggle for land that never ends

On 16 November 2005 Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, expressed his satisfaction at the 7 July bombings in London. He announced that Britain was one of Islam’s worst enemies; it had been responsible for the deaths of thousands of Muslims across the ages, from Palestine to Afghanistan, Delhi to Denshawai. This reference to a small town in Egypt may have perplexed the western audience, but Denshawai meant more to millions of others. Gamal Abdel Nasser mentioned it on 26 July 1956 in his historic announcement of the nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company.

On 13 June 1906 a small group of British soldiers on a pigeon shoot in the Egyptian countryside quarrelled with locals in Denshawai on the Nile delta. An officer died. Lord Cromer, the British viceroy in Egypt (which had been under British rule since 1882), called for a military tribunal to make an example of the villagers, making clear that it would deliver death sentences. Four villagers were condemned to hang; some were flogged in front of their families, and others were sentenced to hard labour.

The injustices outraged Egypt and rekindled the nationalist movement that had been 20 years in abeyance. Ahmed Shawqi, the “prince of poets”, wrote verses about the incident, and Mustafa Kemal, the editor of Liwaa, a journal that had previously attracted little attention, managed to mobilise opinion and establish Egypt’s first great nationalist party.

Lord Cromer returned to London to receive the Order of Merit. But British public opinion, the press and members of parliament were soon concerned at the tribunal’s response. As early as 21 June 1906 The Manchester Guardian protested against the sentences, as did the playwright George Bernard Shaw.

When it was finally announced that the Denshawai prisoners had been released, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who knew the Muslim world and its intellectuals well, wrote in his diary (24 December 1907): “... the episode is over, but it has done more towards shaking the British Empire in the East than anything that has happened for years. It smashed Cromer [who was forced to leave office]... its sound has gone out into all lands, into India, Persia, and throughout Asia. Egypt has been saved from her long apathy and it will continue to inspire the new Nationalism.”

Stories of Black Britain in Pictures

Ellie Keen — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 01:18:21 +0000

Your new book, Black Britain: a photographic history, is a very different type of book from those that have made your name. What persuaded you to curate and write a book based around photographs?

I’d been living in the US for a number of years, and I returned to Britain and felt the environment around the politics of racism has been radically changed, on the one hand by the issue of security, and on the other by some of the things that New Labour has done. A whole generation of activists – my generation – seem to be management consultants! Even the black nationalists are busy managing the health service and the police.

On the other hand, young people are in transition from a Caribbean majority to an African majority. Many of them do not have the kind of information at their disposal to understand their predicament properly. So those young people are disoriented, and they’ve been abandoned by that managerial turn of the 1970s activist group.

I felt that a lot of these young people think they’re African American in the way that they model their style, habits, analysis of their situation, rapping their postcode and wearing their trousers low. They’ve been transformed by a sort of generic blackness they’ve drawn from the music they listen to and the videos they watch. They don’t really have a historical sense of themselves as a group. There are a few refugee families, but they are mostly kids who were born here.

I wanted to put some images back into their pathway and stimulate their curiosity, and these are people who are not reading for the most part – communication is already skewed towards the visual by video and other technologies.

In terms of your own analysis of black Britain, what do you think has changed in the period over which you have captured the photographs?

The integration of Caribbean descendants and early African settlers of the 1950s into the working class of this country has sort of happened. It’s regionally complicated, but basically that’s sorted.

There are still issues, but if you look at the rates of inter-marriage, and particular strands in employment, you begin to see that most of the grandchildren and great grandchildren of the original migrants have moved into a kind of working class life. That’s something that we can afford to feel good about.

It wasn’t in any sense the product of government policy. It resulted from the work done in workplaces, schools and criminal justice by people who said that the far right, the nationalists and racists had no place there. Many young people will now stand up and say, “I am British and whatever,” but they don’t necessarily understand how that came to be possible, and I wanted the photographs to offer some insight.

You talk about the transition from invisibility to visibility not as a smooth process but as the product of a series of bitter struggles.

I used to be against tokenism, but actually I think it’s necessary to have a bit of it, so long as you don’t think by having the tokens in visible positions you’ve solved the problem of racism.

The tokenism isn’t for the benefit of the black tokens – it’s for the benefit of a white public which is phobic about its proximity to the dangers and perils of blackness.

The issue of tokenism poses the question about the current debate about absent fathers, gun crime, role models and so on.

I know there are people and institutional voices who are working very hard to racialise the question of gun crime, but I don’t think those are issues taking us back to 1970s arguments of black violence, with the gunman standing in for the mugger.

I don’t believe that offering people role models is the answer. It’s so short of what needs to be thought through and what needs to be done that it’s embarrassing.

A couple of weeks ago Darcus Howe wrote a piece on the “New Nation Power List” in which he used the example of the head of the Prison Officers’ Union, Colin Moses. He said, “If we are going to have lists let’s have someone like that, let’s deal with someone who has gone into the deepest, worst, National Front heartland of the criminal justice system and came out of it saying ‘I’m a trade unionist – given that we’ve been given an impossible job by the government, we’re going to do a humane job if we can.’”

I don’t want to be starry eyed about prison officers but if you are going to have role models pick them more carefully than business people. I was ashamed to be included in all that rubbish.

How did you go about choosing the images?

A lot of the tone came through conversations with Stuart Hall who was the original co-author but whose health prevented him from playing a full role. He emphasised the need for pictures of everyday life. It was difficult. When people are at work, at play, when they’re loving, when they’re loose, there aren’t so many photographs. It was newsworthy when it was pathology, crime and violence, but it wasn’t interesting when it was just ordinary life.

I was also very keen on the military aspects. There is a lot of talk about Britishness these days. The test of any national identity is whether you are prepared to die and kill for your country. That is the bottom line. It’s clear that the black population, commonwealth people, colonial subjects, were always prepared to die and kill for this country, and I wanted that absolutely in the centre.

In the earlier part of the book there are a lot of images from outside of London.

I didn’t want to tell a London centred story. There is a London centred story, and it’s beautiful and I know it very well. But I felt it was essential that this wasn’t just a London landscape. So of course the port cities like Cardiff and Liverpool are represented, but also Scotland, Wales and what little I could find from Ireland.

What do you mean by the London story being beautiful?

Part of the organic transformation of working class life in London means that I don’t see many young people being chased for their life any more.

When my mum came to England in 1952 she used to have to run for her life from the teddy boys in Brixton; when I was a teenager I used to run for my life from the skinheads. The generation of people a bit older than me couldn’t walk the street with a white woman – they had to walk 30 yards behind them. So in that sense I’m happy that those things have been largely resolved. I don’t say there aren’t the Anthony Walkers and the Stephen Lawrences, but that doesn’t happen on every street corner. There are pockets of it, but it’s not like it was, when the city was saturated. Nowadays it’s deaths in custody we have to worry about.

You should look at the resolutions from the TUC conferences of the late 1950s. The nurses’ unions were saying, “We don’t want black nurses to have special treatment: they’re being given heaters when we don’t get heaters.” On the buses Sikhs wanted to wear their turbans. People talk about the veil now but don’t remember the battle over turbans. The white women conductors in the union said, “If they’ve got their turbans, we want to be able to wear our headscarves.”

It’s not just the way racism works, although that’s part of it. The general temper of postmodern life isn’t friendly to recovering any history.

When you talk about US culture, do you mean hip hop culture?

When I say hip hop culture it sounds like I’m saying the cultures of the black working class but that’s not what I mean. 50 Cent isn’t that – he’s a corporate projection. It’s the entertainment business, which has a strong commercial interest in circulating an official version of defiance while piling up large amounts of loot and voting for George Bush.

Even the tension between 50 Cent and Kanye West, it’s all ritualised. But don’t get the idea I’m blaming black culture because how much that’s got to do with black culture I can’t even see. I went to see Get Rich or Die Trying with my daughter. Everyone else in the cinema was Polish, so that should be telling you something too. Thirty years on it’s mainstream.

A few years ago the role models debate was being turned round. Some argued that black boys didn’t have low esteem, they had high esteem because of the dominance of all these images, but the problem was it wasn’t focusing on academic achievement.

Why would it focus on academic achievement in a situation where to be educated is to be in debt? There’s no mystery in that. People say, “It’s a corporate good to train people up for our great and glorious industry; it’s a private good because you can earn more money than others, so it’s appropriate for you to make a contribution.”

The idea that it might be a social good to have people who can read and write and communicate at a high level – not to someone else’s specification of what a docile worker might need to know – is never discussed. We’re all better off if people are more highly educated. I’ve never said this before, but in my little core of Orwellian English patriotism, my heart breaks when I see the generation of people coming up learning less than we learned, and the next generation will learn even less.

There are really difficult issues in how all these people are “managing change”. They were activists. Now they are complicit in the privatisation of whole layers of social services and local government.

I get a letter a week asking if I would sign up for some consultancy “reforming” the NHS or the army and I reply saying that I don’t believe in privatising these things and I don’t want any part in it. The consultancy hustle is really out of control. I know it isn’t just something black people do, but it seems to have a specific sort of appeal to us and helps to explain the emergence of this black middle class, which isn’t really middle class at all; it’s an insecure group.

I think there was a real sense of that in the immediate aftermath of the publication of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry when the government laid itself down and admitted there was institutional racism.

They’ve rolled back quite a distance since then. Not only are we not supposed to talk about racism any longer, but in a number of areas there has been a very extensive fightback from people who understood that was going to take away a large degree of their power, not least in education where the number of black students and academics is pitiful.

The London School of Economics always seems to do very well in being able to show there are black and minority ethnic people here. But they are not local – they are sons and daughters of an international class. They help to buffer the institution from accusations that they don’t serve the needs of local people.

When I was working at Yale in the US they had a substantial number of minority students, but most were one generation away from migration – Caribbean or African. For the most part they were not African Americans in the sense that they had historic attachments to that place.

What’s interesting is that the pressure to integrate culturally arises at a moment when people don’t really know what British culture is. If you ask people what it means to be British you’ll get a range of answers. If there was football going on you’d get a lot of answers about sport; you’d probably get answers about monarchy. You might get arguments about the Second World War as a place people like to revisit as a source of national pride – “We stood against fascism and we won.”

This is another reason why I want to put some black people in that story into my book. But for the most part there wouldn’t be a consensus over what it is to be British. English, maybe. They might say that’s beer, cricket, fish and chips. A lot of it is imported, of course. But British culture? Something that brings together Welsh and Scottish and Scouse and Geordie and the protestant Irish and the Cockneys? It doesn’t make sense. They want to make a statement of British values, and beat up the incomers as a way of telling themselves who they are.

Did you have a particular audience in mind for the book?

No. My ideal reader would be someone under the age of 25 with a curiosity about the past, people who aren’t content with having 50 Cent as the measure of blackness. Maybe people can develop a different kind of appreciation of their grandparents and the things that they suffered, the things they gave up, to make life habitable now. That’s really what I wanted to do.

Some of those pictures really transmit that. There’s the guy demonstrating by the roadside with homemade banners about house prices, inflation, “Britain invaded”, “White Britons – who’s taking care of us?” and so on. It’s all the same stuff that the BNP are still coming out with. Now you’ve got New Labour people – many of them migrants – saying, “We can migrate to this country but other people can’t.” They pull up the ladder behind them.

But that sort of defensive, white, nationalist, racist eruption of feeling – and the anxiety and the fear that drive it – is not something that comes out of the present, not something that actually comes out of having refugees and asylum seekers competing in your labour market.

The fact that this picture’s 40 years old shows that it isn’t just something that’s growing out of present conditions. There’s a historical weight to it that ties it to past experiences. That’s important for people to realise.

Paul Gilroy’s Black Britain is published by Saqi, £19.99.