Interview with the academic Evan Smith in the Weekly Worker on his forthcoming book 'British Communism and the Politics of Race', From Powell to Brexit - Weekly Worker:
How do you evaluate the anti-fascism presented by the Anti-Nazi League at the end of the 1970s and later by Unite Against Fascism? Was its politically ‘broad’, popular front-styled approach adequate to combat racism and street fascism?
I do understand the critique made by the likes of Red Action and Anti-Fascist Action - ie, that the Anti-Nazi League was far too broad-based to fight some of the more extreme elements of the far right. What I think the ANL did very well was to break away support in that nebulous zone between the Tories and the NF - a place today occupied by the likes of Ukip. In my view, the ANL was part of the reason why support for the NF declined as massively as it did within a two- or three-year period.
However, as the National Front split in the early 1980s, it changed its strategy and became all about street violence, and the ANL was not the best vehicle to counter that. Nonetheless, it did succeed in creating an anti-racist consciousness among that generation of British youth.
The gentrification of the left and its inability to engage with the manual working class was criticised at the time by the likes of Red Action, which I think was justified. However, the political groups that emerged out of Red Action and AFA - such as the Independent Working Class Association - then indulged in a twisted workerism that ‘takes real concerns about immigration seriously’. It’s a slippery slope.
Indeed. What we often have today is people saying that ‘we need to talk about the white working class’ and that there are ‘real concerns about immigration’. One side of this is that one does need to understand what people are concerned about - but the slope to giving credence to racist and anti-immigration sentiments is certainly very slippery.
As Richard Seymour observed on his blog, Lenin’s Tomb, the ‘white working class’ is seen in the relevant discussions of the Labour right in terms of being white: ie, white British people who happen to be working class. Their agency as workers is completely removed, and their lack of agency fixated on their whiteness. While people like Andy Burnham or Owen Smith talk about the white working class, they would really prefer to talk about a white lumpenproletariat, devoid of any agency and differentiated only by being white. They are spoken of in terms of being victims, including in the rhetoric employed in the wake of the European Union referendum: they are people who have no voice and no agency, so the Brexit protest vote is all they had. It’s dangerous to look at them as an apolitical mass.
In his infamous speech, Powell lamented the “growth of positive forces acting against integration, of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of racial and religious differences”. Today, in contrast, there seem to be two contending bourgeois ideologies: the pro-integration one that never quite places immigrants above suspicion of constituting a fifth column; and, on the other hand, multiculturalism - separate ethnic communities to which the state communicates through ‘community leaders’. These days, the left tends to defend multiculturalism against the idea of integration. Is that not parasitic on bourgeois discourse - and does the working class not have a long-term interest in integration?
The way integration operated, migrants had to abandon their cultures and assimilate into white British society, so you can see how progressive multiculturalism came about as a reaction to it - in the same way that identity politics is about experiences outside the dominant paradigm. However, as the likes of Red Action criticised, multiculturalism can separate people into essentialised groups.
Also, as is the case with official anti-racism, people like Cameron may celebrate something innocuous like chicken tikka masala, but not necessarily other aspects of migrant culture. So, while multiculturalism is a way of being officially non-racist, the left has taken to defending it because this multiculturalism is undermined by the way parts of the state act in a racially discriminatory fashion.
How do you evaluate the anti-fascism presented by the Anti-Nazi League at the end of the 1970s and later by Unite Against Fascism? Was its politically ‘broad’, popular front-styled approach adequate to combat racism and street fascism?
I do understand the critique made by the likes of Red Action and Anti-Fascist Action - ie, that the Anti-Nazi League was far too broad-based to fight some of the more extreme elements of the far right. What I think the ANL did very well was to break away support in that nebulous zone between the Tories and the NF - a place today occupied by the likes of Ukip. In my view, the ANL was part of the reason why support for the NF declined as massively as it did within a two- or three-year period.
However, as the National Front split in the early 1980s, it changed its strategy and became all about street violence, and the ANL was not the best vehicle to counter that. Nonetheless, it did succeed in creating an anti-racist consciousness among that generation of British youth.
The gentrification of the left and its inability to engage with the manual working class was criticised at the time by the likes of Red Action, which I think was justified. However, the political groups that emerged out of Red Action and AFA - such as the Independent Working Class Association - then indulged in a twisted workerism that ‘takes real concerns about immigration seriously’. It’s a slippery slope.
Indeed. What we often have today is people saying that ‘we need to talk about the white working class’ and that there are ‘real concerns about immigration’. One side of this is that one does need to understand what people are concerned about - but the slope to giving credence to racist and anti-immigration sentiments is certainly very slippery.
As Richard Seymour observed on his blog, Lenin’s Tomb, the ‘white working class’ is seen in the relevant discussions of the Labour right in terms of being white: ie, white British people who happen to be working class. Their agency as workers is completely removed, and their lack of agency fixated on their whiteness. While people like Andy Burnham or Owen Smith talk about the white working class, they would really prefer to talk about a white lumpenproletariat, devoid of any agency and differentiated only by being white. They are spoken of in terms of being victims, including in the rhetoric employed in the wake of the European Union referendum: they are people who have no voice and no agency, so the Brexit protest vote is all they had. It’s dangerous to look at them as an apolitical mass.
In his infamous speech, Powell lamented the “growth of positive forces acting against integration, of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of racial and religious differences”. Today, in contrast, there seem to be two contending bourgeois ideologies: the pro-integration one that never quite places immigrants above suspicion of constituting a fifth column; and, on the other hand, multiculturalism - separate ethnic communities to which the state communicates through ‘community leaders’. These days, the left tends to defend multiculturalism against the idea of integration. Is that not parasitic on bourgeois discourse - and does the working class not have a long-term interest in integration?
The way integration operated, migrants had to abandon their cultures and assimilate into white British society, so you can see how progressive multiculturalism came about as a reaction to it - in the same way that identity politics is about experiences outside the dominant paradigm. However, as the likes of Red Action criticised, multiculturalism can separate people into essentialised groups.
Also, as is the case with official anti-racism, people like Cameron may celebrate something innocuous like chicken tikka masala, but not necessarily other aspects of migrant culture. So, while multiculturalism is a way of being officially non-racist, the left has taken to defending it because this multiculturalism is undermined by the way parts of the state act in a racially discriminatory fashion.
