Culture/Reviews | ukwatch.net

Humanitarianism went to war

JamieSW — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:49:41 +0000

Conor Foley’s new book, The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War, comes highly recommended. The author has been obliged to debate the oleaginous Oliver Kamm in the course of promoting his book, so I am doing my part to reduce the necessity of such an indignity. Foley does a number of things fairly effectively: first, he debunks ‘humanitarian intervention’ as an ideology from its origins in the Biafran War (there is some useful detail covering Bernard Kouchner’s early ascent here, though he is much more generous to Kouchner than I would be); secondly, he demonstrates conclusively that key examples of such ‘intervention’ were far from humanitarian in effect (he leaves the question of intent or strategy largely unexamined), for example the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999; thirdly, he shows how the regnant discourse of a ‘Responsibility To Protect’ that emerged principally during the Balkans Wars provided much of the legal and moral cover for the invasion of Iraq – indeed, a consistent theme is just how much of the present barbarity was prepared in the decade of vicarious militarism that was the 1990s.

One of the strongest chapters in the book is the discussion of the Kosovo war. Foley takes the time to examine the context in which the KLA emerged, outlines some of their provocative conduct, shows with the help of some personal experience how they were active in ethnically cleansing Serb and Roma in the immediate aftermath of the war, and how their successors have been engaged in murdering members of both groups for years afterward. He nicely dissects Clare Short’s post-hoc rationalising scheme for the war, and shows – with the assistance of the Campbell diaries – that even Blair, the most belligerent of the warmongers, was himself doubtful about what the bombing was supposed to achieve. Those doubts were obviously suppressed by the time Blair made his Chicago speech, adumbrating a new doctrine of interventionism, which explicitly bracketed Milosevic and Saddam Hussein as the main threats to global peace. Rigorously citing figures and context, he debunks the claim that the war prevented a genocide, showing that what was actually exacerbated by the intervention was an insurgency by an extremely dubious gang of ‘Greater Albanian’ nationalists, and a counterinsurgency by the Serbian military. The chapter closes with a quote from Tony Blair in 2001, bragging about the success of an intervention that had made a humanitarian crisis into a catastrophe, savouring the prospect of “one of the great dictators of the last century” ending up on trial, and citing it as a precedent for future action.

The overarching story of Foley’s is a part-biographical one in which he observes up close how humanitarian organisations, traditionally committed to the politically neutral delivery of aid, end up as often unwitting auxiliaries to war-making states. One of the recurring themes is the way in which human rights and humanitarianism merged, particularly as left-wing politics subsided, into what he calls ‘political humanitarianism’. He notes, for example, that Amnesty International today has over a million members, far higher than the Labour Party. Its advocacy on any particular issue can galvanise substantial constituencies and, even where it does not call for military action, it can provide the moral and intellectual case for such action with an authority that governments compromised by their own bloody actions cannot. Rony Brauman, the former head of Médecins Sans Frontières, makes the argument in my book (you know the one I mean) that this merger of the two trends is a dangerous one. The reason is that when supposedly neutral humanitarian agencies delivering relief end up calling for the enforcement of human rights standards, and then in turn become dependent on those making war, they become co-belligerents. The trust that they require from all sides in order to be able to deliver aid is ruined if they are seen as accessory to one party in a conflict. Further, in order to elicit support, they can all too often end up disseminating misleading or exaggerated information about a given conflict, which can feed into the propaganda for war or produce calls for solutions that are at best counterproductive. In this connection, Foley has been particularly scathing about the calls for military intervention into Darfur from advocacy groups like Save Darfur.

The trouble that ‘political humanitarians’ faced was that their criticisms of various governments were always blunted to the extent that they refused to take a clear position themselves on what might be done in a given circumstance. So, MSF can demand action on Kosovo, but without saying what that might entail, they exposed their urgent appeals to ridicule. And so, in a way that Alex de Waal and others have related previously, ‘political humanitarians’ – quietly at first, but with increasing openness – began to mandate military action as a necessary supplement to their own campaigns. The obvious question that occurs to an outsider is this: why should humanitarians, even those with a commitment to basic human rights standards, have the answers to the world’s problems? How do they come to be the arbiters of just political action? Foley provides a very good sense from the inside of how it felt to be trying to bring about humanitarian outcomes, and how compelling the appeal to military force is when relief workers are trying to deliver people from terrifying physical danger and feel compromised by the bureaucratic structures, legalism and neutralism under which they are obliged to work. But he also shows how arguments for war on humanitarian bases came to be alibis for obvious, outright aggression – as when the Blairite inner circle appealled to international humanitarian norms to justify the invasion of Iraq. Behind all the moral and political arguments foregrounded by this discussion, of course, are immense historical, political and geographical facts which intersect in the fate of the 20th Century Left. (More on which can be found in my own book – you know the one I mean).

Foley is by no means a radical anti-imperialist. He is himself a humanitarian worker with extensive background experience in various ‘theatres’ from northern Iraq to Afghanistan. Nor is he necessarily opposed to all such ventures – he is just far more sceptical about the arguments supporting them than most of his liberal cohorts have been. And if a solution emerges from this book clearly, it is that the UN must be strengthened and reformed, and that multilateral policies should be engaged instead of unilateral ones. Foley doesn’t take seriously the criticism that this refulgent Victorian humanitarianism is implicated in a renascent imperialism – in fact, it has to be said that his handling of these arguments is embarrassingly slight. While Foley is expertly equipped to deal with legalistic arguments about war, there is a basic failure to engage with theory on other levels: those of geopolitics and geoeconomics. To that extent, he seems to grapple with the arguments at their weakest – for example, he dismisses the idea that the invasion of Afghanistan was for the purpose of securing an oil pipeline dominated by Western energy concerns, as if this exhausted the anti-imperialist critique of that invasion. In general, it seems that unless there is some direct economic kickback, then there is no strategic interest involved – although we have just been through a dangerous Georgian spectacle in which the strategic ramifications of US action in Yugoslavia and southern Asia came increasingly to the fore. Similarly, he offers some shockingly blase justifications for the most controversial components of the failed Rambouillet Accords. Of the notorious clause admitting NATO personnel uninhibited access throughout the whole FRY, he dismissively refers to this as a normal part of UN peacekeeping: if this was so, why was it insisted on in the early negotiations phase and dropped in the final Ahtisaari-Chyrnomirdin-negotiated agreement that concluded the war? If it was so essential, why drop it? If inessential, why allow the negotiations to fail partially on account of it? Of the ‘free market’ clause, he says that Kosovo was going through a process of privatization and some stipulation had to be made about future property arrangements. One would not know that privatization in the former Yugoslavia was a deeply controversial matter, and that the process was itself implicated in the break-up of the country. A reading of Susan Woodward’s Balkan Tragedy would have helped here. (More on this in my own book – you know the one I mean). I could go on in this vein, but it would seem to be beside the point, as well unduly diluting the force of my earlier recommendation. Foley is trying to get to grips with how humanitarianism has in different ways been usurped, side-tracked, co-opted and diverted into the blind alley of Western militarism. To that extent, you are unlikely to get a more honest appraisal of how utterly mendacious our governments have been in casting their recent interventions as humanitarian.

How not to do a PhD on George Orwell

eddie — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 19:12:55 +0000

Any English-speaker to whom Vaclav Havel has mattered owes a debt they’re probably unaware of to Paul Wilson. His work as the Czech writer’s translator began thirty years ago but I discover, over a cup of coffee off Russell Square, that he first came to London from his native Canada ten years before that, to do a PhD on George Orwell. He’s dapper, friendly, the blonde hair mostly silver now. But as we talk the subject of those earlier studies recurs time after time.

As a post-graduate in London in the mid-sixties Wilson happened on a season of the new Czech cinema and felt attracted to its atmosphere. The PhD was left uncompleted: Orwell’s clairvoyance about Stalinism was already then proverbial – and already then controversial for many on the left – but clairvoyant is just what it was: except for very briefly in Barcelona, he had no direct experience of it.

It was in search of such experience that a younger, foot-loose Wilson travelled on to Czechoslovakia in 1967, where he taught English, learnt Czech and sang in a rock-band until being forcibly expelled in 1977. Those were the days. It was in Prague, not London, that he found writers and artists who seemed to be taking up where Orwell had left off. For the Czechs at that time, he explains, Orwell, ‘especially in 1984, was too pessimistic about the future of humankind… he under-estimated the natural ability of people to dig under Newspeak and create their own living language.’

The fluent Czech speaker who landed back in Canada was soon translating Vaclav Havel’s justly famous essay on this theme, The Power of the Powerless. It’s an exploration of the ways in which people do in fact, both spiritually and practically, resist dictatorship – and it’s an eloquent rejoinder to Orwell’s fatalism. Wilson’s own search for a ‘living language’ was by now well underway. The fiction by Bohumil Hrabal and Josef Škvorecky to which he also turned his hand, ‘represented the political reality that people were living without being explicit about it.’ It was their very lightness of touch which made them so threatening to a regime hampered by its own humourlessness.

Then was then, of course. For those who control our contemporary mediascape, humourlessness is not so much a symptom of existential malaise – it’s just the ultimate PR howler. ‘It’s harder to get around PR speak,’ as Wilson puts it, ‘because it’s a cleverer form of manipulation.’ But his work with the kind of language which opposes it, however undemonstratively, has continued. What had taken him to London and then on to Prague continued back in his native Canada: he edited literary magazines and got by as a freelancer for CBC and others. Such is the direction many in search of a living language end up taking – and that search is as troubled now as it ever has been.

In the anglosphere Orwell’s reputation, that barometer of political unease, has undergone a dramatic revival over the past decade. It’s English- not Czech-speakers these days who are anxiously holding up his dystopia alongside their own reality, for comparison. It is in Whitehall, after all, not Hradčany, that a man can now be arrested when he holds up a placard reading ‘In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.’ For thus quoting Orwell in too close proximity to Number 10 Downing Street, Steven Jago was charged under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, passed by the present government.

‘With the hindsight offered by history,’ as Drew Westen recently put it, ‘it’s fair to say that Orwell got the title of his book wrong by two decades. His seminal novel should have been called 2004.’ It’s not so much ‘that Big brother rules,’ another American, Martin Kaplan, has suggested, ‘but rather that entertainment reigns.’

You might think there would be little patience with such talk in today’s Central and Eastern Europe, most of which was quick to sign up to Bush’s ‘Coalition of the Willing’. Wilson can confirm: ‘OK, the bloom is off the rose as far as market capitalism goes in the Czech Republic, but I don’t think they quite understand the extent to which this PR speak and the Big Lie approach to politics have really taken over… The wars in 1984 have no other purpose than to keep people in a state of perpetual fear – the politics of fear may not be central to Orwell’s thinking but they’re certainly central to the way Bush has governed.’

The new play which Wilson is in London for, however, Havel’s first for twenty years, points to a new awareness of how badly let down ‘New Europe’ has been by its complacency about today’s PR speak. Mafia capitalists have taken over the post-Communist state where the action is set. The country’s vain, bombastic former President continues to treat his family and the occasional reporter to speeches about ‘putting the individual at the centre of politics.’ One by one the other characters repeat this phrase back at him, out and out gangsters included, until the message is clear: the promise to ‘put the individual at the centre of politics’ means in effect whatever suits the individual who is making the promise. For Wilson, ‘it’s a play about people who use the institutions and language of democracy to establish if not absolute then a very authoritarian kind of power.’

It’s a play, then, about concerns many in the English-speaking world now share, but none of the London reviews picked up on this. Wilson: ‘In the London production the former president is played as a bit of a buffoon, but he doesn’t have to be. In the Czech production his capitulation to the new order played more on an element of the sinister.’ More specifically it heralds the return of a surveillance society.

That nothing was made of this in the very country, Britain, where state surveillance is now the most intrusive in Europe, is itself noteworthy. Havel’s hero-status suits us just fine: it permits us to admire without listening. Or perhaps, as some reviewers suggested, the very medium of theatre for messages like this is now something of a throw-back. The translator’s art in particular, with all that meticulous verbal stitching and unstitching, might seem perhaps at best unglamorous, at worst downright quaint. Ill-suited to the present, anyway: just who in their right minds is banking on prose style or snappy dialogue in a world like this?

Actually all kinds of people are. Our ‘language of democracy’, or modern PR speak, is often written much more carefully the Newspeak Orwell satirised. As Wilson himself says, as a form of manipulation it is far cleverer than its predecessors. But translating from ‘obscure’ languages, reporting on far-away countries of which we know very little, editing small magazines – the kind of culture Wilson has devoted himself to suggests something we tend to overlook perhaps. That one way round PR speak might be via the right kind of attachment to something we already know.

We do ourselves a disservice when we overplay the impact of PR on human nature. Novelists and playwrights have after all understood, for centuries and millennia respectively, what advertisers and political advisers have only in the last few decades fully grasped: it’s stories that people listen to. Money which wants to talk has learnt to bear that in mind.

Writers as distinct from advertisers, however, have continued to insist on an idea the PR professionals long ago discarded: that severed from its roots in the truth, no story can flourish for long. The PR industry was built up on a very different premise: uncouple your story from any corresponding reality, it says, then repeat it often enough, flavour it with pleasurable associations, and people will go on listening. Even if they scoff outwardly, just enough inside each member of your audience will go on listening to make the continual repetitions worthwhile.

To that extent the mixture of trivia, crisis porn and political advertising which now passes for ‘news’ presents us with an authentically new problem, but is the vigilance it requires of us so unprecedented? The skills cultivated by good writers are essentially those by which we keep the stories we tell responsive to what is actually happening around us.

Wilson quotes the motto from Orwell at the top of a well known blogsite which he follows and which has set out to track each lie told during the US Presidential campaign. That’s a tall order but the motto runs ‘To see what is in front of your nose needs a constant struggle.’ It was as a novelist himself that Orwell once said that he had wanted above all ‘to make political writing into an art’. Far from some retreat into subjectivism he meant it should be held to the most exacting standards there are. The ghost of that unfinished PhD hovers over our discussion.

It is by operating within a verbal and narrative syntax which may not seem at all outwardly ‘original’ that genuine writing achieves its originality now. ‘When I was at school we were given these exercises where there was a sentence with a mistake in it which you had to find and correct,’ Wilson fondly recalls, ‘or there was a bad sentence and you had to turn it into a good one, or a weak sentence, say, and you had to turn it into a strong one.’

The inconspicuous labour of reading, understanding and then transposing a literary text from one language into another is surely as radical a challenge to the present mediascape as any. Because to translate well is never to translate merely from one language into another, but from one sensibility and history into another. To translate well is to believe in the kind of language which grows from an author’s clear-sighted, patiently integrated vision up, even if there is more and more language which grows from some well funded plausible deception down. Done properly, the creating and translation of such work cannot but mitigate against the sound-bite and the slogan, against everything slick and misleading.

Dvorak in Love, the superb novel by Josef Škvorecky, to take one example, had to be re-organised in its entirety because its narrative structure in Czech assumed an outline familiarity with the composer’s life, and with the emigrant experience of Czechs in North America. This could not be assumed for an English-speaking audience.

Wilson and Škvorecky collaborated and a new work emerged. To translate is often to act effectively as an editor too, which can require the skills of a diplomat as much as those of a linguist. ‘There’s this huge suspicion of editors in what was Czechoslovakia, because of the history of censorship – so you can talk even now to young writers who will say ‘Do not touch my work – I want it exactly the way it is.’ Even Havel can be like that.’

This version of culture, then, starts from a personal engagement with a particular vision and a particular place. It can only work as a collaborative venture. ‘A life that is not dedicated to that which gives it meaning is not worth living,’ the philosopher Jan Patočka once wrote – the quote is as rendered into English by Wilson, as quoted in a prison letter of Havel’s. In our ratings-driven world such sentiments might seem a risky strategy but they have always been a risky strategy: Patočka himself died ‘whilst in Police custody’ in 1977. Western societies have since perfected more entertaining ways to call off the search for a living language.

That the search for it continues is not only the achievement of the Orwells and the Havels – though they tend to get most of the credit. It is decisively down to the Paul Wilsons too. And if the present cycle of perpetual war abroad justifying ever more controls at home, is going to be broken, ‘old-fashioned’ literary culture like this could come in useful. Its long experience of how to phrase the awkward questions is still worth listening to.

Labour History Resurgent?

JamieSW — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 22:14:00 +0000

‘Live Working or Die Fighting : how the working class went global’ (Vintage paperback, London, 2008)
Paul Mason

A paperback edition of Paul Mason’s ‘Live Working or Die Fighting: how the working class went global‘ is most welcome. More accessibly than anything else I know, it offers a way forward for labour historians still largely locked in an agenda established in the 1960s – when E. P. Thompson inspired a generation with his ‘The Making of the English Working Class‘ and his call for “History from Below”. When Mason’s book was first published in 2007, The Guardian plugged it narrowly as, “required reading for the Seattle brigade”. It is that, but the book also deserves serious attention from those who think they already know all that matters about labour history. By a journalist rather than by a professional historian, it is both readable and timely. The fact that the author was, and is, a BBC Newsnight economics commentator perhaps limits his ability to draw the theoretical and political conclusions his work points to. But that needn’t stop others from doing so.

When the book first appeared, Mason was interviewed by former sociology professor, Laurie Taylor, for Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed programme. A cacophony of recorded noise introduced the show: the sound of protesting textile workers in Bangladesh, explained Taylor – the sort of sound we can expect to hear more frequently as workers in newly industrialising areas of the world organise to fight for their rights. Could it be, Taylor asked, that Asia, Latin America and Africa in the 21st century might become like 19th century Europe, with workers developing a similar trade union movement? This question, a critical one, was prompted by the form of Mason’s book.

It has eleven main chapters, all of which begin with one of the authors early 21st century journalistic encounters with workers in different corners of the world. Each of these accounts is juxtaposed with a well-researched retelling of an episode from the history of the European or American workers movement. The situation of Chinese sweatshop workers in 2003 leads into an account of the 1819 Peterloo massacre (at St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, four years after the battle of Waterloo). Then Indian textile workers in 2005 introduce the story of the 1831 Lyon silk workers revolt. The third chapter time-travels from Nigerian slum-dwellers in 2005 back to the Paris Commune; and the fourth translates the reader from the struggle of Iraqi oil workers in 2006 to episodes in the US labour-movement history of the 1870s and 1880s. Interviews with Canary Wharf immigrant cleaners, organising for trade-union recognition in 2004, head up an account of the heyday of international syndicalism; and Indian car workers Mason encountered a year later are paired with the emergent Chinese workers’ movement of the 1920s. The author then turns to Latin America, which he visited at various times between 2003 and 2006, giving an account of the Bolivian neighbourhood risings and comparing them to the events in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943. Finally, the experiences of the Argentine working class prompt an account of movements for workers control in Italy, France and the USA in the interwar years.

Taylor began by asking Mason which of his recent encounters he most vividly remembered. Mason replied:

“[In 2004] I was sitting in … a hotel room in China for an unauthorised meeting with some factory workers who were represented by a labour lawyer. That’s as near as you get to being represented by anybody. When they walked in … every single one of them was missing a limb … One of them, out of the six, had a prosthesis – everybody else couldnt afford one – and they told me the story of how theyd been injured by really crazy, avoidable accidents. And then [they were] immediately sacked because the practice in the sweatshop sector of the Shenzhen industrial sector … is not to take out insurance for the workers… [Yet] it struck me that these guys were part of probably the most decisive social force in the 21st century – thats the Chinese, and latterly the Indian, workforces – a billion strong and making history in many senses, economically, culturally even, but not yet politically.”

But what of more positive experiences of organisation rather than of impotence in the face of maltreatment? Mason responded:

“The developing world is awash with examples of workers organising both in the slums they live in and in the factories they work in… [But] very few of the struggles among the newly formed workforces of China, India, Latin America and Africa has reached the level yet of some of the historical symbolic acts that I write about [in ‘

Taylor’s second guest on the programme was a research fellow from Sussex University’s Institute of Development Studies (an academic field less popular today than it was in the 1960s when ‘development’ – then based on the idea that the miscalled Third World would follow the ‘model’ of the already-industrialised world – was all the rage). Was there perhaps a ‘top-down’ answer, which would offset the need for the disruptive ‘bottom-up’ struggles Mason seems to be predicting? And could the independent study which the developmentalist had been involved in (a study which produced the 2006 Ethical Trading Initiative’s ‘Ethical Trading Report’) point the way? Already one could hear – knocking metaphorically at the studio door – those figures so beloved of troubleshooting liberal academics, ‘progressive’ employers (versed in the jargon of partnership) who see commercial advantage in their workers feeling content and properly represented. Sure enough these shining knights soon entered the discussion, with Mason joining in by recounting a debate he had chaired in which one such multinational employer called for trade unions to become global so that he would have a representative ‘interlocutor’ to mediate his relations with an international workforce.

The BBC discussion was a sign of new times, in which the fashion for a sociology that declared the “end of class”, and sustained the nonsense that “there is no alternative” to neo-liberal, global capitalism, is fading, or certainly losing credibility; and it is a tribute to Mason’s book that it has brought this into the open. But there is also an echo of a more radical discourse in his work. In 1892, when Frederick Engels agreed to a reissue of his ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844‘, he wrote a new preface recognising that times had hugely changed over the intervening 50 years, but defending the relevance of his book on the grounds of his approach to what was often called ‘The Social Question’. And he observed that the response of the middle classes to the threat of social upheaval had changed too; that one-time ‘abomination of abominations’, socialism, “has not only become respectable, but has actually donned evening dress and lounges lazily on drawing-room causeuses [French ‘love seats’ or mini-sofas]. This shows the incurable fickleness of that terrible despot of ‘society’, middle-class public opinion, and once more justifies the contempt in which we socialists of a past generation always held public opinion.”

As a symptom of something real beneath the surface of ‘public opinion’, Engels wrote, serious socialists should pay attention to these changes, but, he argued:

“What I consider far more important than this momentary fashion among bourgeois circles of affecting a mild dilution of Socialism, and even more than the actual progress Socialism has made in England generally …is the revival of the East End of London. The immense haunt of misery is no longer the stagnant pool it was six years ago. It has shaken off its torpor of despair, has returned to life, and it has become the home of what is called the New Unionism…”

One of Mason’s chapters deals with the ‘New Unionism’, the organisation of the unemployed in trade unions in Britain in the 1890s, which led to major class struggles and, early in the 20th century, the foundation of the Labour Party, a radical step in its day and one that was to ensure that a form of class politics – albeit a pale reflection of the reality of the class struggle – was to prevail in Britain’s parliamentary politics until the 1970s or 1980s. Mason brings out – as Engels who died in 1895 could not have done – the way in which the new phase of capitalism emerging at the end of the 19th century found its opposite in the internationalisation of the labour movement. For Mason, the London dock strike of 1889 – introduced with his account of how, in 2004, the immigrant Canary Wharf cleaners knew nothing of the Wapping printers’ strike of 1986, far less the history of Tom Mann and “the dockers’ tanner”, and how powerful they found even a smattering of that knowledge – is only part of a much wider story.

The chapter moves on to France: Victor Griffuelhes and the radical Paris shoemakers, Aristide Briand and Fernand Pelloutier’s ‘Revolution Through General Strike’ and the formation of the ‘Confédération Général des Ouvriers’. It visits the ‘Red City’ of porcelain-producing Limoges, where the violent events of 1905 were triggered by workers in an American-owned factory standing up against managers who thought they had inherited the droit de cuissage (the right to get between the legs) from feudal times. It covers the syndicalist movement in pre-World War I France, before moving to contemporaneous actions in Latin America, and on to Big Bill Haywood and the Industrial Workers of the World in the USA. Thence to Tom Mann’s career in Australia and the strike, and battles, at the Broken Hill mines in 1908-09; to the Europe-wide unrest that began in Barcelona in 1909 and lasted until the eve of World War I; and to the Wobblies (IWW) ‘Bread and Roses’ strike in the textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912.

If it was the onset of this great movement in Britain that made talk of ‘socialism’ fashionable amongst the late-19th century middle classes (a ‘socialism’ that would act as a means of social control rather than ‘bottom-up’ universal liberation), in the Britain of the 1990s it was recognition that rampant neo-liberalism was endangering social stability that gave rise to another middle-class fad, this time echoed vociferously in key sections of the tabloid press. ‘New Labour’ thinking created the conversational buzz that contextualised a politics designed to rescue red-in-tooth-and-claw Thatcherism from its own implosion. ‘Public opinion’ found its latest fad to keep the dinner parties alive and consumerist luxury on the go. The term ‘Socialism’, emptied of its theoretical content by decades of bureaucratic welfarism, was now discounted; but the oxymoronic idea of a socially responsible capitalism (in which ‘ethical business’ has a central prominence) took its place.

But the link between Mason’s book and Engel’s preface goes beyond mere comparison. Theoretically speaking, Mason is no Engels, nor would he claim to be. But, in the socially explosive 1840s, when writing about the condition of the working class from his base in Manchester, Engels personally got to know the conditions at work and at home of the class he was writing about. Mason – taking advantage of his international journalistic remit – has visited, spoken to, and in a limited way perhaps, got to know workers all over the world in their homes and workplaces. By pursuing this method, he points the way to the sort of deeper empirical work that is needed as the basis for theorising the agency that can make “another world possible”. This may be of little interest to those concerned only with the excitement of simply asserting (often, to be sure, in courageous and creative ways) that ‘possibility’, far less to others locked into the rhetoric and forms of organisation of the 1960s and 1970s that centred on that long-tried and universally unproductive concept of “building the (revolutionary) party”. But Mason’s work – and once again perhaps that of Engels – will be read more carefully by everyone who understands that there is empirical groundwork to be done to establish the nature of the (global) working class as it is now.

It was Engels who played a key part in assisting Marx to show how the working class is the creation and victim of capital, but is also capital’s structural antagonist – an antagonist that can only assert and defend its own humanity by struggling against and ultimately overthrowing its oppressor. Further, they showed, for the first time in the history of class struggle, the interests of the oppressed class coincided with the needs of humanity as a whole to transcend the exploitation of class by class and create the conditions for the co-operative commonwealth (or ‘communism’ as properly understood). But simply to state that today is to reduce theory to dogma, a barrier to real human progress rather than an enabler of it. What does it mean in practice in the early 21st century, after all the defeats, false starts and disillusionments of the decades since this theorisation of agency was first understood in the 1840s? ‘Live Working or Die Fighting‘ is the work of an individual (one constrained by the codes of the BBC, by whom he presumably wants to remain employed), Mason could hardly be expected to answer that question alone. To do so, must be both a collective task, and a political task, not one merely confined to journalistic description and commentary. ‘Live Working or Die Fighting‘ gives an inkling of at least one aspect of what has to be done.

Mason’s particular declared objective is to address the loss of historical knowledge that is taking place because of the sense (the illusion) that, in the very exceptional period from the 1940s to the 1980s, the Western labour movement had accomplished the goals it was fighting for in the 19th and early 20th centuries: the Canary Wharf workers need to know about Wapping and about the ‘New Unionism’, but they dont. Now that the storms are gathering over globalised capitalism – and it becomes clearer than ever that, if there really is “no alternative”, then there is no human future in view at all – it is surely for those who recognise that we have entered a quite new period to find ways to accomplish in a 21st century way the task Engels set out on in the 1840s, and Mason hints at over a century and a half later.

To recognise the reality of the period – what the Marxist political theorist István Mészáros has defined as the structural, the truly historic, crisis not just of 19th and 20th century industrial capitalism, but of the much longer-lasting capital system itself – is to see that the forms of political organisation apparently appropriate to the 20th century, modelled on an often limited understanding of the 1917 Russian Revolution, are now entirely inappropriate. The protests of the ‘Seattle brigade’ show that the will to fight remains, but perhaps not the theoretical perspectives to take the fight beyond protest. ‘Live Working or Die Fighting’ is not a programmatic statement for new forms of socialist organisation that can meet the needs of the emerging global working-class movement he writes about, but it is certainly relevant to those who want to participate in creating them.
Mason himself contextualises his book, explains how he came to want to write it, in an instructive and moving way; his conclusion is highly personal and the book’s inspirational logic is thereby clarified. His father was a truck driver at a Lancashire electrical engineering factory by day, who played in a dance band by night. He was a trade unionist conscious that some of the separately-organised machine workers made twice the wages he did, and probably voted Tory. By the time he fathered Paul in 1960, he had bought their home – the first in his family to do so – but it had an outside toilet. Paul lived with his parents in this working-class community until he was 18, meeting no one who was not a trade unionist. He was used to Labour winning every election in the area. He lived through many industrial actions, including two miners’ strikes, the second of which brought down a Tory government, but never saw a political demonstration or the waving of a red flag. The demands he was aware of were for decent working conditions, pensions, health care and sports facilities. Recounted memories of the Depression of the 1930s told him more about the meaning of history than any textbook or film, and formed the background to the demand articulated in various ways in the community for “socialism through evolution”.

This labour movement as it existed from 1945 to 1989, Mason argues, was very different from the one his book describes that stretched from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to World War II. The unions, allied with the employers and the nation states in the 1940s war against fascism, were rewarded, more or less effectively, with welfarism and an implicit social contract in which they played a key role. The industrial democracy that had been built as an instrument of class struggle, with national variations, in the interwar years, for the most part continued only as a “parallel lifestyle, separate from but not opposed to that of the upper classes”, and even this eventually withered away, except perhaps in a few areas such as “the Welsh valleys … the Tuscan hill towns [and] the Buenos Aires docks”.

By the time Mason’s father died in 1986, the threat of mass unemployment had returned and governments were responding to shop-floor militancy by abandoning consensus, freeing capital to seek cheap labour transnationally, and – in the symbolic case of the air traffic controllers in Reagans America – chaining trade unionists hand and foot. In Britain the last battle for “progress and evolution” was fought by the miners and lost in 1985. By the 1990s, neo-liberal policies were being pursued in the post-Stalinist states and even by governments that continued to call themselves Communist in China and Vietnam.

In this self-conscious (but modestly presented) ‘life-story’ so much is encapsulated; it is a small-scale, very personal (but also typical) account of the sea-change in social opportunities and political attitudes that reflect, in an ‘advanced’ country, the underlying shifts in the tectonic plates of the capital system that have been at work since (say) the early 1970s. Such stories matter, particularly if they can be told in a way that – as Mason succeeds in doing – relates them to the much wider history of labour from which they have come. And even more do they matter if they can sharpen our minds in developing the theory necessary for us to understand the reality of the point in history that humanity has arrived at, in order to develop the thinking and forms of organisation that will enable the emergent ‘global’ working class to take ‘global’ society (in Mészáros’s words) “beyond capital”.

Mason himself ends on a rather different and more romantic note. In his chapter on the Paris Commune he writes a good deal about Louise Michel, the poor poet-schoolmistress from bohemian Montmartre who, a prosecuting lawyer claimed, “from her lectern in her spare moments … professed doctrines of free thought, and made her young pupils sing poems she had written, among which was a song entitled ‘The Avengers’.” He returns to her in conclusion, recounting a vision he imagined when covering the violently attacked protests at the 2005 G8 summit in Scotland. Against riot police got up like robocops were ranged, amongst many others, Latin American musicians, and dancers clad as fairies – symbolising the human rhythms to which the future must move and the touch of utopian magic that movement needs.

What Mason claims he saw in his mind’s eye was “the young Louise Michel dancing to a samba band in a field outside the Gleneagles summit: her face … painted and … wearing pink fairy wings.” “She still”, he concludes, “has a lot to learn.” But the real value of his book is that it tells all of us with ears to hear and minds open to new thinking: “So have we all!” If ‘labour history’, so optimistically embraced by a generation of E. P. Thompson-inspired postgraduate students in the 1960s as a way to fight the class struggle from the archives, is to be rescued from the strangling embrace of the academy and the uncertain insights of postmodernism, it could do worse than to start with this book. And political activists too might take it as a set of signposts, not to all they need to know, but to one important area of essential knowledge.

On enemy ground

eddie — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 23:08:49 +0000

Review: The Clash: Live at Shea Stadium

With the sheer over-saturation of Clash related material out there, Sony’s release of Live at Shea Stadium is most definitely a last-ditch effort to squeeze every last drop out of modern-day Clash nostalgia. Coming not too far behind Julien Temple’s The Future is Unwritten, Chris Salewicz’s Redemption Song, and a veritable mountain of reissues and remasters, it’s hard to think that Live at Shea isn’t just a textbook example of a major record label behaving, well, like a major record label.

Normally such a move would provoke all the derision this writer can muster. Live at Shea is an exception, however, for two reasons. One: this is the Clash! This is the band that politicized punk rock from its very inception, and brought rebellion back to rock ‘n’ roll in a way that still inspires to this very day.

Two: the album is a glimpse into a period in the band’s history that was simultaneously exhalting and tragic—between things begun and ended, between the power of great music and ideas and the power of right-wing fear and reaction.

The Clash’s decision to open up for the Who on the mega-stars’ “farewell” tour of American stadiums in the fall of ’82 was itself an ideological quandary. The Clash were the biggest they had ever been, and were arguably one of the biggest groups in the world. Combat Rock was proving to be their most successful release to date, and was fast on its way to platinum status.

It seemed that the band’s incendiary message was reaching more people than ever before. For a group poised to take over the world, a stadium tour seemed the logical next step. For a group that had always taken an unflinching radical stance, though, stadium tours represented all that was wrong with rock ‘n’ roll. Everything from the flashy stage-shows to the overpriced tickets smacked of how capitalism was ruining music.

Furthermore, as biographer Pat Gilbert puts it, “The group had always preferred the intimacy of medium-size venues. It was this philosophy of being able to see and communicate with their audience that lay behind their week-long residencies at modest venues…” In other words, stadiums were where all the democracy and solidarity of music was crushed by piles of cash and elitism.

The Clash justified the move by figuring (and rightly so) that the tour was a way to reach even more people. Sound logic, no doubt. The America that the Clash were returning to had entered a new and scary era. The rightward drift of official politics in the US mirrored the same in Britain. A year and a half into Reagan’s presidency, he had already crushed the air traffic controllers’ strike, and signaled that he had more of the same in store for women, blacks, and anyone who dared defy the new Washington consensus.

Combat Rock was filled with impassioned calls-to-arms, urging young people to dig their heels in and resist the upcoming onslaught. In an interview years later, Joe Strummer would recall his thoughts on the advent of Reagan/Thatcher: “[When] Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of England and Ronald Reagan became President of the U.S….it was hard to tell who would be worse, but we knew that a tremendous struggle was ahead…their tendencies leaned to the far-right if not fascism.”

*****

When the Clash took the stage at Shea on October 13th, rain was coming down in sheets. The prospect of playing in front of 50,000 screaming fans was indeed daunting. Bass player Paul Simonon recalls that “it felt a bit like miming because there were so many people there.”

Yet listening to the album today, one would never guess that the group was so nervous. Footage of the gig shot by documentarian Don Letts shows the four members throwing themselves around the massive stage with the same
swagger and confidence that they brought to the countless club dates they had performed in previous years. Strummer even jokes with the audience at one point: “Will you stop talking at the back, please? It’s too loud. It’s putting us off the song, here! We’re trying to concentrate so stop yakking!”

The moments of raw power and vitality are numerous on Live at Shea. The opening notes of “London Calling” are punched out so forcefully they could shatter concrete. “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” possesses a rolling raucousness that can’t even be heard in the studio recording. And “Career Opportunities”—the only song from their first album played that night—carries all the immediacy it had when it was first performed by four unemployed punks in North London five years previously.

By the time the group finish off their set with a blistering version of “I Fought the Law,” they are holding the audience in the palm of their hand.

And yet, it’s also apparent that this is a band not too far from disintegration. Just prior to the tour the group had sacked drummer Topper Headon due to his growing heroin addiction, thus putting an end to the “classic” Clash lineup. Terry Chimes, drummer for the Clash on their first album, had been brought in as a last minute replacement.

The sudden change in personnel is evident on some tracks. While Headon had a background in myriad musical styles, Chimes was much more of a straight rock drummer. While he pulls-off the rap and dub beats in during the group’s medley of “Magnificent Seven” and “Amagideon Time,” his playing is hollow and often sluggish.

Other more prominent schisms within the group are evident too. Those familiar with the group’s version of Eddy Grant’s “Police On My Back” will notice a section of the song when Mick Jones’ lead guitar part is strangely missing. The story here is that Strummer had walked up to Jones and physically grabbed the neck of his guitar to prevent him from
playing.

The rift between Jones and the rest of the group had been growing for quite some time. He had disagreed with bringing original manager Bernie Rhodes back on board. He claims to have merely “gone along” with Topper’s sacking. And his original mix of Combat Rock had been shelved in favor of bringing Glynn Johns in to produce the final version.

Chimes was privy to how this bitterness was affecting the daily workings of the Clash: “By then Joe and Mick obviously had a difference of opinions on a range of things… They had devised a system where they didn’t have to confront each other all the time—there was an avoidance going on, which covered up the fact there were deeper issues there.”

*****

Less than a year after the concert at Shea, Jones was kicked out of the Clash. That a founding member whose songwriting and virtuosity on the guitar had been an indispensable part of the group could be kicked out was evidence that their existence had become increasingly rudderless.

Combat Rock’s defiant protest hadn’t been enough to stave off the consolidation of Reagan/Thatcherism. As the heated struggles of the 70s were pushed into bitter defeat, anyone with the Clash’s firebrand left-wing politics was forced into either abject obscurity or milquetoast compromise.

Compromise was never something the Clash were good at, and they continued to soldier on sans-Jones. But with the movements that had long inspired the Clash—from the anti-racist forces to the Sandinistas—fighting for their very survival, the ground on which they stood became shakier by the day. It didn’t take long for one of rock’s most relevant groups to become a caricature, a music industry parody of what a “left-wing” band is supposed to look like.

“The worst moment was realizing that there was no way forward,” said Strummer some years later, “like the gap between rhetoric and the actuality. For example, talking about all the issues that the Clash raised and what your daily life would have been like if we’d have stayed together… You know, you’d never really have a life that would be real and
yet you’d be expected to say something real about life to real people and make some real sense.”

Not long after the release of their universally panned followup to Combat Rock, the group would call it a day. The concert at Shea would simultaneously be their apex and the beginning of the end for the Clash.

One can’t help but listen to Live at Shea Stadium without remembering Strummer’s quip that “rock ‘n’ roll is played on enemy ground.” If a group like the Clash can walk into the belly of the beast and bring the same verve and immediacy that they delivered to anyone who ever listened to them is a testament to the power of truly great music. Knowing that they would be among the many brilliant political acts that imploded in the Reagan 80s makes these fleeting and final moments of greatness all the more prescient.

Alexander Billet is a music journalist, writer and socialist living in Chicago. His weblog, Rebel Frequencies, can be viewed at http://rebelfrequencies.blogspot.com, and he can be reached at rebelfrequencies@gmail.com.

Delusions of war

eddie — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 14:25:18 +0000

During the 1990s, many one-time leftists in the west and elsewhere were drawn towards the idea that human rights could somehow fill the gap left by the decline in socialist politics. In the wake of the Bosnian bloodbath and the Rwandan genocide, that crystallised for some into support for unilateral humanitarian intervention and war.

A decade on, the hopes that were invested in such delusions lie buried in the graveyards of Falluja and Kandahar, the ethnically cleansed Serb and Roma districts of Kosovo and the torture, kidnapping and internment jails run by the self-proclaimed liberators and human rights champions of the war on terror.

As regular readers of comment is free will know, Conor Foley is a veteran aid worker who has seen from the inside how the human rights agenda has been conscripted to legitimise and underpin the US and British wars of occupation and domination of the past 10 years.

Part working travelogue from almost every recent major conflict zone, part political journey and analysis, Foley’s new book, The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War, is an important and thoughtful contribution to understanding why western “humanitarian interventions” – from Somalia and Yugoslavia to Sierra Leone – have largely failed in their own terms and left such a dismal and unstable legacy.

Foley is effective at deconstructing some of the mythology and deceit around these debacles – including the illegal Kosovo war of 1999, which paved the way for the aggression against Iraq, but is still seen as a successful humanitarian intervention by many who balk at the more nakedly imperial Iraqi and Afghan disasters. As Foley reminds us, the Nato bombing campaign was supposedly launched to stop war crimes and ethnic cleansing, grotesquely exaggerated in Anglo-American propaganda. But both increased dramatically as a result: it turned a “simmering crisis into a full-scale humanitarian disaster”. And in the months after Nato troops took over in Kosovo, a thousand people were killed or disappeared as up to 250,000 Serbs and Roma were driven from their homes in the new western protectorate.

But he is at his most insightful about the role played by the battalions of NGOs he has worked among, which follow the conquering armies like missionaries, often urging them on and providing the social infrastructure for the bloated occupation regimes that are then imposed on hostile lands.

As Foley highlights, most non-governmental organisations in the humanitarian line of work are no longer really NGOs at all – they’re increasingly sub-contracted GOs, which get the bulk of their funding from western governments with political strings attached. Foley describes returning to Afghanistan in 2004 to find that “the humanitarian effort had become part of a wider counter-insurgency operation”. The then US secretary of state Colin Powell hailed the humanitarian NGOs as “a force multiplier for us, such an important part of our combat team”. Against such a background, it’s hardly surprising that aid workers come to be seen as targets by some of those fighting occupation.

Steeped as he is in NGO-speak and thinking, Foley can often lapse into loaded terminology and assumptions: he repeatedly uses the term “international community”, for example, when he clearly means the US and its allies. In the same vein, he largely accepts the reasons given by the western powers for their interventions at face value, along with, say, the legitimacy of occupied Afghanistan’s fraudulent elections, in which political parties weren’t even allowed on the ballot paper. And so keen is Foley to dissociate himself from “anti-imperialists” that he reserves some of his sharpest – and least sure-footed – attacks for a writer such as Naomi Klein, over her analysis in The Shock Doctrine of disaster capitalism in post-tsunami Sri Lanka.

But in a sense that only strengthens the force of his critique, coming as it does from someone immersed in the ideology and practice of the “humanitarian community” – who has learned from personal experience how calamitous invading other people’s countries in the name of democracy and human rights has proved on the ground. When he describes the role played by western governments and NGOs in Sierra Leone and Liberia as a deeply resented “recolonisation”, you know it’s not meant as a rhetorical flourish.

Far from making another Rwanda less likely, the liberal interventionist wars of the past decade have postponed the development of a genuine rules-based system of international protection by discrediting humanitarian intervention as a mechanism of imperial power enforcement applied only to weak and recalcitrant anti-western states. In the circumstances, Foley’s conclusion that humanitarian NGOs should return to a policy of the strictest neutrality and broaden their focus from individual human rights to the wider inequalities of wealth and power that underlie conflict and humanitarian crises is surely only common sense.

A colourful revolution

JamieSW — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 18:15:03 +0000

In Stokes Croft, once dubbed ‘Bristol’s forgotten half mile’, a quiet but colourful revolution is taking place. A loose coalition, the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft (PRSC), is using public art to transform an area that used to be emblematic of urban decline.

For Chris Chalkley, the one-man dynamo behind the scheme, art has the power to give the district a greater sense of community, and turn it into Bristol’s ‘cultural quarter’. ‘It’s possible that groups of people could come together to form an alternative vision for the area,’ Chris enthuses, as he takes us on a whistle-stop tour of a few of the ‘street galleries’ that have sprung up across Stokes Croft.

Shop fronts, walls and even an electricity sub-station have been adorned with striking images by local artists. Almost anything can be turned into a feature of the area, Chris says. Even mundane objects like drainpipes and litter bins can impart a feeling of identity, safety and vibrancy when they have been decorated with eye-catching, unique designs.

The PSRC is funded and organised almost entirely by Chris himself. Having run a china shop for 25 years, he does not think of himself as either an activist or artist, and relies on local artists to donate their time. In April, around 20-30 volunteers painted the inside of a railway tunnel just outside Stokes Croft. In a single weekend, it became a canvas for myriad different designs. There is no doubting the potential of Bristol’s artists, which is only beginning to be harnessed.

Dissatisfaction and blight

The PRSC has grown out of a need to change the face of the area, and dissatisfaction with the council’s response to its problems. Connecting the shopping centre of the city with more affluent areas to the north, Stokes Croft is a mixture of residential buildings and shops that line the main road. While a number of its buildings are listed, about 30 are derelict, such as a three-storey carriage works from the area’s Victorian heyday, which has stood empty since 1979. A further blight on the district’s image in many people’s eyes is the large number of homeless people, many of them suffering from drug problems, who congregate in what is known locally as the ‘bear pit’: a largely tarmac-covered, sunken roundabout at the end of Stokes Croft, connected to the surrounding streets by forbidding, grimy underpasses. The main road also boasts two less-than-subtle brothels.

Chris is adamant that image problems cannot be fixed simply by moving homeless people on or shutting down the massage parlours. You have to ‘work with what you’ve got’, he says. In their effort to discourage rough sleeping and graffiti by providing only single person seats and covering surfaces in anti-graffiti paint, the council has inadvertently made the area unwelcoming for everyone, says Chris. ‘If the policy is to make public space inhospitable to the homeless, then it will become scary to the public.’

While the PRSC has no formal links with any political organisations, it explicitly challenges what it believes has been the council’s approach to urban development. The focus, the group claims, has been exclusively on attracting private investment and big brands, exemplified by the ongoing £500-million Cabot Circus project to rejuvenate Bristol’s retail heart just a few hundred metres away from Stokes Croft. Instead, the PRSC argues, the aim of regeneration should be to create welcoming public spaces and to promote creativity in the face of creeping corporate homogenisation, with public art a cheap way of doing so that can involve the local community.

‘This is the front line of the battle against the encroachment of Cabot Circus,’ Chris warns, ‘so it needs to have a strong identity.’ However, others think that the new shopping hub, currently festooned with cranes, might be beneficial. ‘Cabot Circus has had a good impact,’ says Lisa Blackwood, who works at the nearby Kuumba Arts and Community Centre. ‘Stokes Croft is too close to Cabot Circus not to be developed.’ Yet commercial enterprise is welcomed by the PRSC, so long as it fits with the area’s independent and eclectic feel. ‘If we change the perception of the area, then businesses will come,’ Chris says. Indeed, cafes, grocers, bookshops and t-shirt printers have sprung up, attracted by relatively low rents.

Character appraisal

Bristol council says that it is working with residents and groups such as the PRSC to improve Stokes Croft. In October 2007 it published a detailed ‘character appraisal’ of the area, assessing its aesthetic and social problems, and also acknowledging that the murals that now dot the area are part of its distinctive character.

They have recently undertaken a £1-million renovation of a hostel for homeless people, and a street-drinking ban in 2003 was largely successful in moving on drinkers from a central grassy patch known as ‘Turbo Island’ on the main road (though critics claim that this has done little more than displace them a few hundred metres down the street). But private investment is still central to renewing urban areas, the council argues: ‘The improvements to the image of the area effected by the work of PRSC are one part of the process, but not sustainable on their own – there needs to be commercial investment to back it up.’

One of the council’s biggest problems is getting private owners to preserve the historic character of their buildings and shop fronts. Some property holders simply hang on to derelict buildings, hoping that a lucrative development offer will come along. The council is currently battling to reclaim the towering Westmoreland House building from the developers Comer Homes, who have left it derelict for more than two decades. Seven people have died since the building was damaged by fire and abandoned in 1969.

As our tour of the Republic comes to an end, Chris is keen to stress that he doesn’t think he has all the answers to Stokes Croft’s problems. Most of the works done so far are temporary. ‘The project is constantly evolving. A year ago I was thinking differently, and next year it will have changed again.’

There may be a risk that street art, while visually exciting, will turn the area into an artistic ghetto, and be exclusive of those who are not a part of the graffiti community. Or, if businesses and affluent residents are drawn in, the resulting rent hikes may push out the very artists who are attempting to accelerate urban renewal. The next step planned for the PRSC is to set up as a social business, where donations are exchanged for a say in the future of the project. Whatever direction the PRSC takes next, there can be no doubt that public art created and funded by local artists can be a cost effective way of putting colour and life back into the inner city.

The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain

JamieSW — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 10:40:48 +0000

The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain
Arun Kundnani, 2007, Pluto Press, ISBN 978-0-7453-2645-0

For all the time that politicians, columnists and activists spend discussing it, racism is seldom defined with any precision or accuracy, or indeed in any way that might inculcate an awareness of its complex, multiple nature and origins. It’s most often understood simply (and yet very specifically) as discrimination, by an individual, on the basis of another individual’s skin colour. Sir William Macpherson’s report into ‘matters arising’ from the murder of Stephen Lawrence asserted that this discrimination may be practised, fostered or encouraged, even unwittingly, by institutions as well as individuals; a fairly mild, reasonably obvious statement, which nonetheless seemed to create consternation at the time.1

But Macpherson’s slight extension of racism’s mode of operation (refuted, at any rate, soon afterwards by the government who caused it to be written2) brings us no closer to describing what racism actually is, if indeed it’s more than just simple discrimination. Racism can be construed as an effect, arising from a broad range of conditions of disparity: historical, economic, ideological, and crudely political. In this interpretation, it is the expression of all of these conditions, and as such it is ultimately symptomatic of the inequalities inherent in what we now call ‘the global order’. But racism can simultaneously be understood to lie within the originary inequality itself, to be implicated at the cause, in the rationale lying behind policy and law; so it is in its nature cyclical – as a system of belief, a way of thinking difference, it is implicit in the basic legal and social structure of our modern state, and, expressed as a set of behaviours, it is then perpetuated by this structure.

One of the most persuasive and accessible historians of the roots and forms of racism, Paul Gilroy, emphasises what he terms ‘racialisation’, the ideological and historical processes by which thinking in terms of race became first possible, then predominant, and finally unavoidable.3 Gilroy details a history of ‘racialised thinking’, the positing of a type of ineluctable difference determined by biological categories of race. The basis of racism lies in this troubled history of the thinking of the concept of race itself. But this thinking is not static, and nor are the social contexts upon which it is brought to bear; so biological race is inflected now as cultural or ethnic difference, and is no less irreducible. As Kundnani points out,

“… race is a socially constructed concept that is both wider in its range and more profoundly rooted in the history of the nation than is commonly supposed. Moreover, the restriction of the concept of racism to ‘colour’ difference has concealed the full range of ways in which racism has operated in Britain, including against Jews, Gypsies and the Irish.”4

This is extremely pertinent to any current discussion of racism, which is now, in Britain as elsewhere, overwhelmingly directed against Muslims. Columnists and commentators of many political persuasions pronounce that anti-Muslim sentiment is not racism at all, since Islam is a religion, not a race; such argument betrays not only an ignorance of the workings, history and logic of racism, contemporary or otherwise, but also an adherence to a rather literal and outdated concept of ‘race’. As a legitimation of discrimination in law and vilification in society, anti-Muslim racism is every bit as real as the anti-Semitic racism that was propagated so blithely by the British rightwing press of the 1930s.

In order to substantiate this already complex definition of racism, one must also account for the way in which relations of power are implicated in racism. Racism (as effect) is the public enactment of a prior disparity of power between one group and another; indeed, far from being ‘anti-social’, racism is a violent demonstration that this disparity has already been sanctioned, historically, within society and the state.5 Most often, a group that experiences racism has received its identification, its definition as a coherent group, from the powerful group (it has been ‘overdetermined from without’), in order that it can be ‘acted upon’. (And, as Kundnani demonstrates, this identification can change to suit current policy: in the late 1990s, second- and third-generation British Pakistanis found that they had ceased to be ‘Asian’ and had become ‘Muslims’.) But racism is not merely the expression of this power relationship (calling someone a ‘black bastard’); for the power relationship is itself shaped and defined by racism. This is why, within a British context, anti-white feeling amongst, say, black or Asian groups cannot be called ‘black on white racism’: because the unequal relationship that defines racism is entirely absent in this situation.6

It might appear that The End of Tolerance is about far more than just racism; but then, racism itself is about far more than ‘just racism’. The task that Kundnani sets himself is to guide us through the many contributory factors to 21st-century British racism, to show how old arguments are given new articulation, how, in the process, racism becomes more, not less institutionalised, its causes becoming more tortuously misrepresented, and how, as a consequence, its comprehension grows more difficult. Most significantly, and most damningly, he examines rigorously the contribution made by government. Whilst any citizen of average intelligence is aware of the essential duplicity of their government, it is nevertheless extremely disturbing to realise, as one reads the book, the extent to which government action and policy – sometimes knowingly pernicious, sometimes merely feckless and populist – has been the single most active agent in the promulgation of a new racism. To this end, he describes in turn the details and effects of New Labour’s radical restructuring of immigration, asylum and nationality law; its reckless and calamitous foreign policy (both before and after the 11th of September 2001); its repressive and cavalier instincts in criminal justice; its contempt for international conventions and doctrines of universal human rights; its subservience to globalised corporate interests very often in direct conflict with the interests of British citizens; and its framing of, and pandering to, a populist agenda around issues of cultural identity, in the interests of maintaining its electoral base with white middle-class voters.

A picture emerges of policy and legislation that, accustomed as we are to viewing it always through the exigencies of the current moment, is usually only visible in fragments: the disparate statements and actions, consultation documents and acts of parliament are considered in painstaking detail, and one starts to appreciate that, incrementally, an entire regime of racist ideology has been constructed over the last decade, one which goes further in terms of law and consequence than anything enacted by the governments of Thatcher or Major (whose own more overtly racist, but, in many ways, less thoroughly invasive and far-reaching policies the Labour opposition of the time regularly spoke and voted against).

Multiculturalism

A great angst is at large in the country at present, amongst government ministers in particular, about communities (almost always Muslim) who ‘refuse’ to ‘integrate’ into British society and culture: they speak their own languages, at home and on the street; they follow an alien religion; they wilfully dress, eat and behave differently; and they live in ‘no-go’ areas that ‘British people’ (that is, white Britons) are afraid of entering. The main problem with this overall diagnosis lies not in its individual inaccuracies, but in the inference drawn: that these communities have willingly cut themselves off from the ‘shared values’ of society, that they are an alien and potentially hostile presence living amongst the host community (a phrase which carries obvious and intentional connotations of parasitism), and that we should not be expected to tolerate this any longer, as we have done, so blindly, for so many decades. After all (it is argued) it is precisely this toleration, under the guise of multiculturalism, which brought us to this situation in the first place.
There are a great many misrepresentations in this set of attitudes. Small distortions are piled upon greater falsifications to create a thoroughly mendacious, thoroughly racist picture of minority communities in Britain, and their situations and concerns. The notion that multiculturalism ‘allowed’ communities to ‘self-segregate’, by encouraging the expression of their culture on an equal footing, is one of a series of reversals of cause and effect that render the argument fairly worthless. As Kundnani writes,

“… the policies that were implemented in the 1980s in the name of multiculturalism were a mode of control rather than a line of defence. Multiculturalism in this sense referred to a set of policies directed towards taking African-Caribbean and Asian cultures off the streets – where they had been politicised and turned into rebellions against the state – and putting them in the council chamber, in the classroom and on television, where they could be institutionalised, managed and commodified. Black culture was turned from a living movement into an object of passive contemplation, something to be ‘celebrated’ rather than acted upon. The method for achieving this was the separation of different ethnic groups into distinct cultural blocs, to be managed by a new cadre of ethnically defined ‘community leaders’, and the rethinking of race relations in terms of a view of cultural identity that was rigid, closed and almost biological…7”

By refocusing communities on a politics of competitive recognition, multiculturalism had the desired effect of fragmenting a broad-based movement that had, by the time of the Brixton, Handsworth and Toxteth riots of 1981, become a dangerous challenge to state authority. “The often conservative community leaderships tried to insulate their clans from the wider world, not… to strengthen group identity… but rather to protect the structures on which their power depended. Ethnic identity became an escape from a racist society rather than the basis for a challenge to it.”8

So a partial segregation of minority communities, who were kept at arm’s length both from the ‘centre’ and from one another, was one of the consequences of multiculturalism9; this was exacerbated, particularly in northern England, by a combination of rapid industrial decline and openly discriminatory housing policies, which led to workers and families who had previously been side by side in the same mills, factories and streets gradually being screened out to separate parts of town. Over time, in towns like Oldham or Bradford, this division became entrenched and self-perpetuating; damp, cramped ghettoes, centred around the Victorian back-to-backs vacated by rehoused white families, at least offered some safety for Asians who didn’t wish to risk racist attacks on the overwhelmingly white estates. The 1988 Education Act and its doctrine of parental choice further encouraged segregation; infamously, a year earlier, parents in Dewsbury had set up their own ‘white’ school in a room above a pub, on the grounds that their local school had too many Asian students.

This portrayal of two decades of managed, multifaceted discrimination as self-segregation, a refusal to integrate, and as something which is therefore the fault of the communities in question, is typical of the insidious nature of contemporary racism. Its apparently ‘commonsensical’ explanation of the segregation that clearly exists is also difficult to counter. Through careful, detailed argument, Kundnani turns the proposition on its head: it was neither state pandering to cultural difference, nor unwillingness to mix, that led to our segregated cities and society; rather, it was years of conscious, racist manipulation and exclusion of communities, conducted for short-term political advantage.

The demand now made of these communities is that they surrender their obstinate difference and declare their allegiance to as-yet-undefined ‘British values’ (as far as they can be identified, these seem, paradoxically, to be the very ‘values’ attacked in successive government legislation over the last decade). That the call for integration must simultaneously be accompanied by an agonised quest to invent a ‘British’ identity into which to integrate is, in the circumstances, only mildly amusing. The current focus on Muslim communities’ non-integration is of course sharpened by the supposed threat they pose – a threat upon which there seems to be consensus across the political spectrum. Kundnani develops this: “What had before been interpreted as a problem of Asians living in separate cultures has, since 9/11, been taken to be a problem of Muslims living by separate values.”10

If the very existence of cultural diversity within the nation has now come to be perceived as a threat, what hope is there for anti-racism? The type of pluralist solidarity that Kundnani calmly advocates now seems tantamount, in the state’s terms, to a call for bloody racial rioting on the streets of Britain. Clearly, the potential for collective action is severely restricted by the demonisation and suspicion directed at British Muslims (who can nowadays only be framed in a positive manner when they are supporting spurious government-authored definitions of ‘moderate Islam’, and thus attacking the externally perceived and misrepresented ills of their community). Kundnani notes that, today, “ ‘anti-racism’ is reduced to a conflict-management exercise carried out by the state, which does not grasp the underlying causes of racism and leaves existing power relationships in place.”11 One could comment that the state grasps the underlying causes of racism only too well.

The distorted debate over integration has a corollary, which has also been discussed with tedious regularity lately, the issue of religious tolerance. Just as the state now depicts Islam as uniquely anti-democratic, violent and authoritarian, and therefore the ‘enemy within’ British society, so a raft of ‘secularists’ of various persuasions argue that it is directly opposed to the very Enlightenment values that define and guarantee the rights and freedoms that we in the West cherish. For both parties, the fact that the men who bombed London on the 7th of July 2005 were born and raised in this country adds to the apparent urgency of delivering this challenge to Islam. Notwithstanding the fact that these defenders of ‘the Enlightenment’ rarely acknowledge the limits of their own positivistic world view (Theodor Adorno was not the only Western citizen to suppose that imperialism, totalitarianism and the gas chambers were a culmination of scientific rationalism, rather than its monstrous, aberrant deviation), the broader question that this raises concerns the nature of solidarity. We find ourselves in a pale re-enactment of the political territory of the 1960s and ’70s, when the British Left was perfectly happy to welcome immigrant communities under its umbrella, so long as their ‘sectional’, identitarian demands could be made subservient to the movement’s programmatic ‘universalism’.

For ‘integrationist feminists’ as Kundnani calls them, denouncing practices such as wearing the veil, forced marriage and ‘honour killing’ (usually the only examples of the patriarchal nature of Islamic culture that these commentators can cite, because they are the most visible to the outsider, and so are disproportionately reported in the media), “combating violence against Muslim women is seen as fighting against a culture, while combating violence against white women is seen as a fight for rights”.12 Kundnani points out that denunciation of inequality in Muslim communities almost never amounts to actual solidarity with women’s groups within those communities. And when the government chose to target forced marriage, instead of working with Muslim women, “solutions were sought in tightening up immigration controls; those trying to escape abusive marriages faced the threat of deportation rather than support and protection”.13

“Renunciation of one’s identity becomes a prerequisite for emancipation, and a new kind of superiority is entrenched in the name of feminism. State coercion is then justified as a possible means for bringing about this “emancipation”… Behind this “integrationist feminism” lies the tendency to regard the West as the sole bearer of enlightened progress and the European Enlightenment, not as one particular expression of universal values, but as the only possible expression for all time.”14

Kundnani argues, fairly vaguely at times, it must be said, for a pluralist tolerance which can make this kind of ‘cultural supremacy’ obsolete, but the question that remains unanswered is whether one can voice disapproval of, or disagreement with, Islamic religious culture without automatically being co-opted into a mainstream ‘secularist Enlightenment’ agenda. The answer may lie in a reappraisal of the question; or rather, in stating that another question might be both more pressing and more revealing. Why is it that a defence of the ‘progressive’ gains of bourgeois Western society necessarily involves an attack, specifically and most immediately, on Islam, rather than on any of the reactionary tendencies in our own culture? It often appears that much of this attention is the result of ignorance and laziness, an uncritical rush to ‘comment’ on whatever appears to be most topical. Furthermore, it’s at least arguable that to set out one’s secularist or socialist argument solely in reference to the predominant, stereotypical portrayal of the repressive, alien nature of Islam is itself reactionary: it further alienates the very individuals struggling to build progressive politics from the basis of their membership of the Muslim community. This isn’t in any way a renunciation of the responsibility to criticise or to analyse, for fear of somehow causing offence. It’s simply a caution that anti-racism – the central, most fundamental element of any progressive politics – must be based on solidarity, and that solidarity requires a relationship between equals.

“In a context in which anti-Muslim racism is institutionalised by the ‘war on terror’, it is natural and necessary that Muslims organise as Muslim in fighting the specific racism they face. Confronted by an intensely anti-Muslim political culture, Muslims cannot be expected to leave their religious identity behind when they enter the public sphere. To do so would only reinforce the mistaken belief that there is an incompatibility between Islam and democracy.”15

Globalisation

British racism cannot be understood only in the context of conditions within Britain, and the larger part of Kundnani’s book sets about putting these conditions in the setting of the global factors that nourish racism everywhere. Ultimately, his plea is for a particular form of ‘global citizenship’, as the only ethical response to the structural inequalities of a world where corporations move capital unimpeded across borders and between territories, while nation states police the movement of people across the same borders.

Throughout, Kundnani combines historical overview with analysis of contemporary situations. So, for example, accounts of postwar immigration from the Commonwealth, the origins of International Monetary Fund (IMF) ‘structural adjustment’ programmes in the Third World, and historical conflicts in Sri Lanka and Afghanistan give important context to discussions of the development of present-day asylum and immigration law and foreign policy priorities. This gives Kundnani’s argument depth and authority, even if it can sometimes make the forces he describes seem depressingly unassailable. Many contemporary polemics fail adequately to historicise the mysterious and vaguely-defined phenomena that comprise globalisation; Kundnani’s measured descriptions of its origins and evolution make his work a valuable corrective. He describes the way in which IMF and World Bank debt ‘restructuring’ packages have repeatedly impoverished debtor nations and helped to breed repressive regimes, friendly to neo-colonial political and business interests, from Suharto in Indonesia, to Pinochet in Chile, Moi in Kenya and Abacha in Nigeria. He details how the US and UK over decades selectively sponsored other brutal administrations in Africa and the Middle East for the purposes of immediate regional leverage, only to turn away refugees subsequently displaced by conflict in those states. And through all such considerations he underlines the convergence of Western corporate and political interests at the global level.

This is most clearly the case in chapters on immigration, asylum and the ‘market-state’. Analysing the four major pieces of immigration legislation put onto the statute books by New Labour, Kundnani demonstrates how the treatment of refugees has deteriorated rapidly in ten years.16 During this decade, successive Home Secretaries have striven for two ends. Firstly, they have attempted to make conditions here so unattractive to potential refugees that they are deterred from attempting to come. Presumably, this is in large measure a populist approach, since the Home Office’s own research accepts that those fleeing their homes halfway round the world have very little knowledge of provision available here, and choose a destination based instead on existing or previous connections with a country, and perceptions of it as safe.17 Under Section 62 of the 2002 Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act, the Home Secretary has the power arbitrarily to detain an asylum seeker until the settlement of their case (this is euphemistically referred to as the ‘fast-track procedure’); an enlargement of the Home Office’s estate of detention centres was announced in May 2008. At any time, around two-thirds of those in detention under Immigration Act powers are asylum seekers, and roughly five per cent of all asylum seekers are in detention centres.18 Statistics do not even exist for the numbers kept in prisons or police cells.

Secondly, entry into the UK for those without papers has been made much more difficult. Former Home Secretary Jack Straw, quoted by Kundnani, comments that the Geneva Convention “gives us the obligation to consider any claims made within our territory… but no obligation to facilitate the arrival on our territory of those who wish to make a claim”.19 Nearly all refugees will only be able to have their case considered once they have arrived in the UK. “And the only way they can do that is by some form of clandestine entry into the country: either stowing away in a lorry or boat, clambering on the undercarriage of a moving Channel Tunnel train or using forged documents.”20 And whilst, in theory, Article 31 of the Geneva Convention recognises that illegal entry of a country is sometimes necessary for persons escaping persecution, the government continues to criminalise those who are forced to use people traffickers to get to the UK. Furthermore, “those asylum seekers who do travel to the UK legally with a valid passport are told by the Home Office that they could not be a genuine refugee, on the assumption that the authorities in the home country would refuse to allow a genuine dissident to obtain one.”21 Roughly two-thirds of all asylum applications are refused, even in many cases where the applicants have independently verified proof of torture. Out of 380 decisions made on applications by Iraqis in the first quarter of 2008, 280 were refusals.22

If the government’s approach to asylum has the effect of giving trade to the people traffickers, so too does the market’s continued demand for low-paid, unprotected labour; many failed asylum seekers, driven into destitution by the summary withdrawal of support and unable to return home, find themselves working illegally, with no rights and no legal protections. Others come expressly to work for ‘gang bosses’ in the agricultural industries, and find that after ‘deductions’ for accommodation and transport to work every day, they have next to nothing to live on (not that there is much living to be done after an 18-hour day picking crops). The new five-tier, points-based ‘managed migration’ system is supposed to streamline entry into the UK for those coming to work, but it institutes a ‘guest-worker’ system under which low-skilled workers will have limited or no access to employment protection during their stay in the country, and on termination of their contract will have no right to remain. Migrants are now valued only as economic assets: there must be free movement of ‘labour’ – that is, of individuals as productive resources, servicing the demands of the ‘flexible’ marketplace wherever it may need them – but the right of individuals to live safely, free from persecution, must be restricted and rationalised as much as possible.
The effect of an asylum policy principally aimed at deterring applicants, of failed claimants becoming destitute in large numbers, and of low-paid, unprotected workers finding themselves constantly on the brink of illegality, is the effective criminalisation of large numbers of non-EU migrants. The supposed ‘proud tradition’ of Britain’s welcome to the displaced of the world (something of a myth to begin with, as many Jews fleeing Nazi Germany or East African Asians escaping Idi Amin could testify) is reduced to a squalid, dehumanising numbers game, with the government eagerly setting itself targets for numbers it will deport by the end of the year.

The precise details of ministerial statements on the imminent existential threat posed by immigration, even those that gain some brief notoriety, have the habit of slipping from public consciousness very shortly after they’ve disappeared from the headlines and opinion columns. Successive acts of parliament redefine the territory until it’s unclear which rights exist and which have been repealed, who is welcome and who unwelcome. What persists, what is nurtured, is a generalised, non-specific fear and paranoia. The asylum seeker, the illegal immigrant, the economic migrant, all these various ‘underclasses’ of non-citizen or para-citizen come to represent the same thing: a gathering, innumerable encroachment, threatening the fragile ‘being’ of the state. The great merit of Kundnani’s work is his ability to trace the connections between the domestic contexts of racism and the many aspects that bear down on the discussion, and legislation, of immigration and asylum. Likewise, chapters linking Britain’s foreign policy adventures and their aftermaths (current, recent and more distant), with the progressive withdrawal of civil rights, the extension of arbitrary executive powers to detain and deport, and the new regime of control orders and internment, illustrate the bluntly racist motivations behind an extraordinarily repressive array of measures.

Nevertheless there are problems with the book, mostly editorial in nature. Many of the book’s different chapters originated as articles for Race & Class, of which Kundnani is editor. The original articles, closely argued, densely substantiated pieces of sociological research, could have been more extensively reworked to make them fit together better: the book’s 200 pages feel longer, partly because of the book’s great scope, but also because its chapters jump between complex topics fairly unpredictably. Also, because of the essentially hermetic nature of each chapter, there’s a certain amount of repetition or, conversely, spreading of related information between disparate chapters. There is a certain chronology imposed on the contents, but this soon becomes lost because of the number of subjects tackled by Kundnani in his twelve chapters. Closer editorial attention might also have achieved a greater evenness of tone throughout: some chapters begin with extensive historical or contextual notes (which in places, such as the first chapter, read like a school history textbook), and move to personalised ‘case study’ illustrations of the topic at hand, statistical or quantitative analysis, or passionate polemic. Kundnani is a sociologist first and foremost, and his expertise is the book’s strength, but he is also a perceptive and persuasive activist-writer, and he (or his editors) perhaps should have decided who might be the book’s primary audience.

There’s a narrowness to his terms of reference too, no doubt due in part to his social scientist’s suspicion of the ‘cultural turn’ in the politics of race and class. His cursory, two-page summary of everything in postcolonial theory from Stuart Hall to Homi Bhabha does him no favours (Gilroy doesn’t warrant a single mention); whilst it’s true that postcolonial critics challenged the ‘politically black’ identity of the 1970s (the discarding of which he presents as a uniquely retrograde step), just as they challenged all such overarching categorisations of identity, the solidarity of broad interests of culture, race and class that he espouses would be supported by those critics too; and ‘political blackness’ was already under attack, as he himself shows, from other directions. At this point his history is less than complete.

Finally, and most surprisingly, there are some basic errors in the use of statistics: in chapter 10, for example, he quotes Home Office asylum figures for the second quarter of 2006 to show the number of asylum seekers in detention, but reads the wrong column: “by June 2006, there were 2,285 being held in detention centres, despite a lower rate of asylum claims than in 1997”.23 There were indeed 2,285 people detained under Immigration Act powers as of the 24th of June 2006, but only 1,705 of these had ever sought asylum at any stage. This is a small, and perhaps quite pedantic quibble, but any text that straddles a line between pure sociology and anti-racist activism needs to be doubly sure of its numbers: it’s the easiest way for an opponent to discredit the whole enterprise.

Universal rights

“… asylum seekers do not ask for British charity; they claim rights as global citizens in an age when the national sovereignty of poorer nations has been eroded. Through its part in the empire of global capitalism, Britain carries with it a profound obligation to today’s migrants… It is an obligation that runs through the dirty politics of sponsoring foreign regimes that oppress their own people, in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and elsewhere… It runs through the wealth that Britain continues to extract from Africa and Asia… Ultimately, it is an obligation to treat today’s migrants, not as scroungers or opportunists or victims of some self-created calamity of which little is known, but as global citizens. It is in the very processes of globalising capitalism, which Britain has led and profited from, that their global citizenship derives.24

It turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their human rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them… The conception of human rights based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships except that they were still human.”25

Hannah Arendt’s words of half a century ago seem to ring with a new urgency (but nothing in this discussion is really new, just endlessly revisited; the phrase ‘never again’ really must be the most callous irony, the rhetorical equivalent of putting one’s hands over one’s eyes and ears). The governments of highly-developed nations carry out foreign invasions in the name of ‘humanitarian intervention’ – in the name, that is, of abstracted ‘human rights’, belonging to no-one and yet ultimately enforceable; at the same time, they abnegate their duty to protect those made destitute and stateless by their actions, and raise the possibility of ‘opting out’ of the Geneva Convention on Refugees (where extra-territorial rights were defined and promised for the first time), or the European Convention on Human Rights, because they no longer feel the lavish protections they afford are ‘appropriate’ to our age, with its new security concerns. As Arendt so mordantly points out, one’s universal rights are only an issue when it is finally impossible to protect them.

We might follow Slavoj Zizek in arguing that we must not therefore dismiss human rights as “a reified fetish”, well-intended but worthless: rather, this stage of globalised neocolonial capitalism is precisely the point at which these rights can posit the political space proper, the point at which the individual subject – the refugee, the internee, the illegal worker – is able to assert their exclusion, their statelessness, their absolute repudiation, as the only meaningful point from which to assert the “universality of the social itself”: and they become the universal political subject.26 On these terms, it could not be more essential for anti-racists in Britain to build positions of solidarity with those struggling to make this most fundamental of assertions, for the sake of every subject.

1. Sir William Macpherson (1999) The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry: Report of an Inquiry (London: The Stationery Office), http://www.archive.officialdocuments.co.uk/document/cm42/4262/4262.htm.

2. Kundnani quotes former Home Secretary David Blunkett, who in 2003 told Black and Asian Home Office workers that ‘institutional racism’ was ‘a slogan’ that ‘missed the point’. Kundnani, p. 131.
3. See particularly Gilroy (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (London: Verso) and (2000) Between Camps (London: Allen Lane).
4. Kundnani, p. 15.
5. Of course, certain types of crude, overtly racist behaviour are (often somewhat belatedly and begrudgingly) outlawed by the State, but this apparent paradox simply testifies to the gulf that can exist between appearance and actuality: whilst racialised thinking underpins the workings of the State, the government can distance itself from the ‘working out’ of this thinking, separating cause from effect in a manner that we shall return to later.
6. As has been exhaustively argued elsewhere, white people’s act of identifying themselves ‘as white’ is, in a curious way, an act of disidentification, of claiming to have no race, much in the same way as individuals often presume themselves to have no accent. See Theodore W. Allen (1994) The Invention of the White Race: Volume One; Racial Oppression and Social Control (London: Verso); Alastair Bonnett (2000) White Identities: Historical and International Perspectives (Harlow: Prentice Hall); David Roediger (1991) The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, Verso). Also see Suzanna Chan (2005) ‘Some notes on deconstructing Ireland’s Whiteness: Immigrants, emigrants and the perils of jazz’, Variant 22, available at http://www.variant.randomstate.org/22texts/Whiteness.html; and the journal Race Traitor, available at http://racetraitor.org.
7. Kundnani, pp. 44-45.
8. Ibid., p. 45.
9. For a further consideration of the history and problematics of multiculturalism, see Daniel Jewesbury (2006) ‘Show some disrespect!’ in Mute 2:2, available online at http://www.metamute.org/en/show-some-disrespect
10. Ibid., p. 127.
11. Ibid., p. 133.
12. Ibid., p. 138.
13. Ibid., p. 139.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., pp. 185-186.
16. The four acts are, in order of implementation, the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004 and the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006. Multiple Statutory Instruments have also been passed under the terms of these acts, for example, those providing for the ‘fast-track’ asylum procedure and the new five-tiered points-based managed migration system.
17. See Kundnani, p. 77.
18. Home Office Research Development Statistics (2008) Asylum Statistics: First Quarter 2008, at http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs08/asylumq108.pdf.
19. Kundnani, p. 68.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., p. 69.
22. Home Office, op. cit.
23. Kundnani, p. 159.
24. Ibid., p. 71.
25. Hannah Arendt (1958) The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland, Ohio: Meridian Books), pp. 292-297
26. Slavoj Zizek (2005) ‘Against Human Rights’, in New Left Review no. 34, p.131. Available to download free at http://libcom.org/library/against-human-rights-zizek.