Race to the Bottom: Reclaiming Antiracism
Azfar Shafi and Ilyas Nagdee, Pluto Press 2022, 192pp, £9.99 paperback
This book is unusual in several ways. It is a short manifesto written with intent to persuade. It is also a potted history of Black movements in Britain referencing the 1945 Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester up to the Black Lives Matter explosion of protest on the streets in 2020. There is no consistent chronological order with pauses in the text to analyse themes on the way. As a result, many historical references are fleeting and so many protagonists are named that it must be challenging for readers unfamiliar with the material. Reclaiming Antiracism is not an academic book: there is no index or bibliography and citations are mostly from websites. However it is a pleasure to read a passionate and powerful dissection of modern antiracism where the authors have an argument to make and are not afraid to show their partiality. Their often-personal tone starts with the Acknowledgments where siblings are named, and it is hoped that ‘God, the most merciful, the most compassionate’ will accept their efforts.
It is helpful, however, that the authors’ argument is repeated throughout. They say that there is a need to reclaim antiracism from current practice. A revitalised authentic movement must follow the political lead of the British Black Panthers and the Black Unity and Freedom Party active in Britain between 1970 and 1999. The struggle must ‘re-insert itself within the struggles against imperialism and capitalism, turn the movement into a broader struggle for popular democracy, include the dynamics of race, class, gender, and citizenship in order to develop a truly universalist project’.
A Tricontinental ‘black power’ struggle
The book points out that the 1979 election of Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher began decades of reaction leading to the defeat of the miners and the trade union movement, the attack on social housing and privatisation of the public sector, but also to hostile state manoeuvres against ‘Antiracism from Below’ or, as it was known, Political Blackness. Britain in the late 1960s had seen the emergence of a ‘deeply internationalist and anti-imperialist consciousness [that] was crystallised in the signature framework of Black Power, commonly known today as “Political Blackness” which defined “Black” in opposition to the global power structure’.
Inspired by the Cuban Organisation of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America, the political struggle was perceived as the mobilisation of all radical, exploited people against the power of global white authority which symbolised the enemy Empire. The authors cite the address given to the British Black Panther Movement in July 1968 by former Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah:
‘By Black Power we mean the power of the four-fifths of the world population which has been systematically dammed into a state of underdevelopment by colonialism and neo-colonialism’.
The influence of this globalising politics became evident in the growth of solidarity movements and in several domestic protests and strikes led predominantly by migrant workers in Britain. Their struggles were given an international context, as for example in the 1972 Mansfield Hosiery Strike in Loughborough.
The ruling class reacted violently to disarm such movements. Thus Political Blackness ‘has been fragmented’ into a ‘litany of single-issue “antiracist” initiatives that have impeded the development of wide-ranging radical antiracist politics’.
Antiracism from above
The years 1980-1981 saw the outbreak of widespread inner-city uprisings by black and white youth across Britain in response to police aggression and in particular, the use of ‘sus’ (suspected person) stop and search laws to harass and intimidate poor communities. The increasingly racist media largely supported police aggression and were implicated in identifying ‘mugging’ as a crime of black youth. A generalised national xenophobia, nourished by reactionary Thatcherism fed widespread support for a series of Tory immigration laws added to Labour’s previous rulings.
The government appointed Lord Scarman to report on race relations in 1981. This resulted in the establishment of a number of institutional initiatives designed, as the authors say, to implement ‘antiracism as status quo’. The Scarman Report made clear what was at stake:
‘The question of the inner cities, therefore, is are we to become a successful multi-racial nation or are we on a course for a revolutionary phase in our history?’
That the state viewed racism as an issue that could be legislated for was not new. In 1965 the Labour Government introduced the first of several Race Relations Acts. This outlawed discrimination on the ‘grounds of colour, race, or ethnic or national origins’ in public places in Great Britain and was intended to put an end to public notices: ‘No dogs, No Irish, No Gypsies, No Blacks’. The trend to identify ‘racism’ as personal prejudice begins here. After 1981 institutional antiracist organisations grew rapidly with professional antiracists employed in organisations like the Racism Awareness Programme Unit.
The ruling class needed to crush the political potential of working-class unity in the struggle for justice at home and solidarity with anti-imperialism abroad. They saw the need to separate and then incorporate minority groups by what this book calls ‘the politics of recognition’. ‘To be recognised as a unit or constituency by the state, by its institutions – and, increasingly, by forces of the market – enables a turn to civic politics’ – and consequently, entry into the parliamentary process. As a gesture to the special interests of their voters the Labour Party Black Sections was established in 1983. While not officially recognised, local Black Sections activists mobilised across the country and their efforts were rewarded in the election of four black and Asian Labour MPs at the 1987 General Election: Diane Abbott, Paul Boateng, Bernie Grant and Keith Vaz. Today there are 41 ethnic minority Labour MPs and 22 Tories. A passive opposition and a reactionary government are currently imposing hostile racist legislation in defiance of the United Nations ruling on the right to asylum for refugees. All the indices of public sector provision in housing, education and health services continue to show inequalities of delivery to ethnic minority (and working-class) people. Clearly the pathway of parliamentary representation has made little impact on defeating racism.
The spectacular growth of what has been called ‘the race relations industry’ took off with the Commission for Racial Equality founded in 1976, repurposed in 2006 as the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) whose stated objective is ‘to help make Britain fairer’. With over 3,000 employees and an annual budget of £18,250,000, it is fully integrated into supporting each successive governments’ policies, such as the ‘levelling up’ agenda and equal pay for women. After all, parliament is its paymaster and the EHRC is threatened with a 25% cut in income this year. The watchwords of this still flourishing institution are ‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’.
The state backlash against multiculturalism
The rise of migrants fleeing from Muslim countries after war, invasion, occupation and destruction by western powers, together with the rise of Muslim ‘extremism’ in Europe and Britain led to a change in government perspective. The Prevent strategy was launched by the Labour government in 2007 as part of its counter-terrorism strategy. In 2011, Tory Prime Minister David Cameron announced that state multiculturalism had ‘failed’ because it encouraged different cultures to live separate lives ‘in ways counter to our values’. Two branches of state policy on the question of ‘race’, the encouragement of identity and the antagonism to racial groups, exist uneasily side by side today.
In the community?
The book’s most astute judgments are directed at the extra parliamentarian organisations, the NGOs and Black Voluntary Sector which continue to flourish ‘and serve as a lid on grassroots organising’. They do this by ‘buying activists off the street and into advocacy roles, tying them down to the strictures of funding conditions and charity laws.’
The authors also expose the destructive endless hostilities about language and categories that have come to dominate the substantial question of racism, saying:
‘In the summer of 2020 we witnessed how the hope and promise of the Black Lives Matter protests offline soon devolved into a fractious debate about the term “BAME” (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) online.’
Some argue that the term BAME supposes a false unity imposed from above and in reality, there is little in common between groups as separate as Roma and Africans. Behind this view is the fact that so much of what counts for political activism today has taken the form of lobbying for financial aid for special interest groups, what the authors call ‘subsidised revolution’.
Another ideological block that weighs heavily on the antiracism struggle comes under the head of Legalism and Rights. ‘An uncritical dependency on legal rights produces a tendency towards depoliticisation, and laws and legal processes are embedded within the domain of state power rather than undercutting it …It may ameliorate the worst excesses of state violence, but cannot undermine the system that produces them’.
Indeed, the term ‘human rights’ is itself frequently abused and subverted for reactionary ends. The two decades-long occupation of Afghanistan by the US, Britain and their monopoly armament corporations was justified from time to time by reference to women’s human rights. A bitter irony, then, that following the retreat of the imperialist forces, the expenditure of trillions of dollars, the deaths, the bereavement of children, the devastated infrastructure, a Taliban government is now in power. Busy NGOs like Human Rights Watch are encouraged by donations from large corporations as ‘tame substitutes for mass action by mass parties on the ground’. Finally, as the authors rightly note, Palestinian rights are ignored by most commentators.
A powerful case
The political influencers of this book are clearly Novara Media and the work of Ambalavaner Sivanandan, past Director of the Institute of Race Relations and editor of its journal, Race & Class. There is no mention here of Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! the newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist Group (RCG) which has published on virtually every one of the movements and events mentioned here since 1979 and whose comrades have been active in most. This is not unusual. The works of the RCG have been boycotted by all ‘respectable’ outlets and the distribution of our literature is carried out on the streets, in the community and from our own web pages. Our starting point is that racism is the product of imperialism and is necessary to capitalist state power as one of many means to divide and rule the working class. Consequently, we must fight state racism and imperialism at the same time. We argue that the only alternative to global monopoly capitalism is socialist state planning, a position that is supported by many but that frightens off most bourgeois commentators. It is a positive, therefore, that this book was sent to us for review. Despite its somewhat lumpy text, the authors make a powerful case about the limitations of the antiracist movements of today.
Susan Davidson
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 293 April/May 2023
