A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

[American Dream]

More from Miguel Amorós regarding the same very important period of social struggle:

The perpetual present is the basis of modern society; the abundance of pseudo-events reaches such a point of banalization that it simultaneously abolishes and distorts time: once memory disappears, all past events recede into the antiquity of the epoch of the Patriarchs. Facts such as May ’68, the Portuguese revolution of 1974 or the assembly movement of the Spanish workers of 1976-78, all seem strangely remote, as if they had not really occurred; and even though tens of thousands of people participated in them, almost all of them still alive, it is extremely difficult to provide an account of these events that makes any sense, an account that recalls them as recent episodes of the social war, as moments of a historical process. Likewise, if we consult the entry under “Italy” in an encyclopedia or a digest of current affairs, or if we stumble across some ephemera concerning 1977-78 in the press, we may be sure that we will encounter the kidnapping of Moro, an inexplicable terrorism and, at most, Negri and the Red Brigades. No one would ever know that the Movement of ’77 was a movement without leaders, the most profound subversive movement of modern times, nor will there be any discussion of the situation that was most pregnant with revolutionary possibilities that ever arose in modern capitalism, which is why no one will ever be able to acquire the least understanding of the stage-managed State terrorism—the “strategy of tension”—or the essentially counterrevolutionary function of the so-called communist party and the trade unions; nor the manipulative role of the communications media or that of partial and recuperative contestation; nor the disastrous effect of the pseudo-debate about armed struggle or the depressing spectacle of the “dissociated” and the “repentant”, the ultimate consequence of the armed struggle, and, finally, no one will know anything about the decisive role played by drugs in the acceleration of the decomposition of the rebel milieu.

The social war in memory - Miguel Amorós

http://libcom.org/library/social-war-memory-miguel-amorós





.

[American Dream]

http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php ... in_britain

Racialized Lives: Ethnic Mixing And Mixed Ethnicity In Britain

by Karis Campion

Racialization has had a deeply personal impact on the lives of people in Britain, but history shows us it can be challenged.

First published: 06 March, 2015

In Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider, Satnam Virdee presents an original, alternative history of the English working class, interrogating the dominant scholarly arguments which, he claims, have too often portrayed it as synonymous with the working white male. Focusing on a period spanning 200 years (1780-1990), Virdee thoroughly explores how the boundaries which have encompassed the working class as a distinct social (white) category have been continuously in flux.

The book details important events and developments over this period when the boundaries of the working class were extended to include what Virdee refers to as ‘racialized outsiders’. Importantly though, whilst Virdee offers a close analysis of the specific conditions in which the boundaries of the English working class protracted to subsume working class ethnic Others, he does not shy away from dealing with less collective periods for the working class, when boundaries were tightened to exclude those same Others. It is racialization which, as he often explains in the book, has historically been a key factor in encouraging the working class to retreat from becoming a multi-ethnic collective.

Virdee documents the Chartist movement and the period which followed in the 19th century as one key moment when the boundaries of the working class were tightened in order to exclude. The Irish presence in the struggle and the potentially multi-ethnic working class solidarity movement which might have followed, unsettled the state. In response, it utilised various tactics to racialize the movement. It was constructed as something ‘foreign and alien,’ more aligned to the wishes of the Irish Catholics who led it than ‘an authentic expression of the wishes of the English masses.’[1] Alongside this racist rhetoric, a new version of British nationalism was conjured up. ‘The nation was re-imagined as an Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation’[2] by elites, and sections of the English working class were gradually incorporated into this. Within this image of the nation, there was little space for the Irish Catholic working class, and this racist rhetoric and method of rule would eventually lead to the downfall of Chartism.

The history of ethnic mixing in Britain

The process of racialization has emerged as a recurrent theme in the first year of my PhD work researching the history of mixed ethnic identity in Britain, with a particular focus on the Mixed White and Black Caribbean group. The period under focus is post-1945 up to the present day. However, in my research thus far I have extended my historical analysis of mixing farther back, identifying when mixed race and mixing have become salient (or not) in British history, and exploring the possible reasons for this.

What is evident is that mixing becomes a salient issue when racial meanings are attached to the phenomenon and to the groups involved in it. This attachment process, which creates groups as distinct racial categories, is racialization. The consequence of this is that mixing and mixed race have come to represent the crossing of racialized boundaries. Thus, not only do they become salient; more significantly, they become problematic.

To understand how this process develops, it is important to understand the contexts in which the racialization of particular groups occur and the consequence this has for the movements, relationships or issues that they impact upon. In Virdee’s analysis, the 19th century is identified as a key historical juncture in which the Irish working class were increasingly racialized within the Chartist movement. This also features as a significant period in which black Britons were increasingly racialized in my historical analysis of mixing. Contrary to common assumption, there was a substantial black presence in Victorian Britain – which Virdee importantly acknowledges in the book and which has also been the focus of a recent London exhibition and feature film.[3] Moreover, evidence suggests that there was a sizeable black population in Britain as far back as the 18th century.[4]

Mixed relationships as a result of this black presence were a likely consequence, and they occurred mainly amongst the lower classes who worked side by side.[5] These early incidences of mixed relationships in Britain serve as an example of inter-ethnic unions within the working class. This extends Virdee’s argument that racialized outsiders have always been a part of working class struggle. But they go further, since they represent the most personal and intense forms of inter-ethnic encounters within the working class. These were multi-ethnic working class unions which took place outside of labour movement struggles, at home.

Racialization and ethnic boundaries

So what is the importance of racialization here? An historical approach to analysing this process allows one to comprehend the complexities of racialization over time. In Virdee’s book, he notes that the racialized outsider took many different forms in different periods. Most often, it was the waves of migration which determined who was the best fit for this category. From the Irish Catholics, to the Jewish immigrants, to the workers from the Caribbean; all of these groups at one point or another became racialized outsiders in Britain. The non-white black Britons I described above were not racialized as ‘black people’. In the context of the 18th and 19th centuries, black Britons are better described as British colonial subjects. ‘Black’ as a descriptor emerged later out of black political projects of the 20th century. The civil rights and black power movements that swept across America in the 1960s challenged European aesthetics which had continuously conjured up negative connotations of the Negro slave. Black became beautiful – a symbol of power and resistance. The momentum of the American Black Power movement was later felt on the other side of the Atlantic. In the UK, throughout the 1970s, the term black was increasingly used as an umbrella term for ethnic minority groups in their collective resistance racism.

The consequences of crossing ethnic boundaries via intimate relationships with white British subjects are profoundly different depending on whether the black subject has been racialized as a black British colonial subject or a black ethnic foreign Other. The idea of the former, an interaction between two British subjects, was seen to represent less of a threat than the latter. But this was subject to change as groups became racialized in different ways and the notion of Britishness and the British subject changed.

The key point here is that prior to the 19th century, ethnic Others had long been present in Britain and were indeed a part of the working class. As Virdee argues in his book, it was throughout the 19th century that ideas regarding who and what the British nation should be significantly developed. Over the course of the 19th century there was an increasing belief in the superiority of white subjects over ‘the dark races’,[6] and as Virdee reminds us, the Irish were not spared from this. They too were positioned outside of the category of whiteness. It is this which set the conditions for the questioning of inter-ethnic unions to flourish within the eugenics movement. In the 1920s and 1930s, mixed race people and mixed relationships were increasingly considered as social issues in Britain. It is at this point that the idea of the threat of the ‘half-caste’ in Britain’s port towns and cities became prominent, and it is then that the potential for a multi-ethnic English working class became limited. This was evident in the 1919 race riots in London, Cardiff and Liverpool where mixed relationships were not uncommon. The riots erupted at a time of economic decline following WWI and an increased disapproval, fear and condemnation of mixed relationships which had been rumbling under the surface within these communities following the return of British soldiers.

Fast forward almost one hundred years and the mixed race group is the fastest growing ethnic group in Britain and the working class is as diverse as ever. However, without doubt, these groups have continued to be racialized. Historically, black men in relationships with white women have been constructed as hyper-masculine and highly sexualised and the white women who cross racialized boundaries by entering into relationships with black men (racialized outsiders) have in turn often been constructed as promiscuous.[7] Although not as explicitly as in the early 20th century, mixed relationships continue to be racialized.

Furthermore, as diverse as the working classes have become here in Britain, new members have become racialized outsiders as the labour market shifts over time. Like the Irish workers before them, new members, such as Polish migrant workers, are not quite white enough, not quite able to be seen as a legitimate member of the English working class. Moreover, since 9/11, working class Muslims have continued to occupy the position of the racialized outsider, with no room to manoeuvre into the English working class in the collective way it once could. Even the white members of the English working class are themselves not free from the complexity of racialization. The stigmatization of ‘Chavs’ on benefits and the notion of the ‘underclass’ positions them outside the boundaries of the employed white working class. The group becomes residualised and are constructed as a different shade of white – a ‘hyper-whitened white working class’.[8] Or alternatively, at times, they are racialized as a fragment darker than white, in accusations like the one from David Starkey after the London riots that ‘the whites have become black’.

Racialization prevails, but under what circumstances? This is what Virdee’s book helps us to comprehend. He does a brilliant job of bringing attention to the conditions in which top down racialization from the state can flourish and fragment the working class, and groups more generally. But he has also pointed out that members of the working class have countered racialization through a bottom-up process of anti-racist collective action. This is an important lesson from the book. We must celebrate when racialized ethnic boundaries are broken, but must also be aware that they might be redrawn just as quickly as they were torn down.


Karis Campion is a Sociology PhD student at The University of Manchester and is part of the ESRC Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE).

This article is part of our series, Race and Class in Britain.

[jakell]

Racialisation sounds like a bullshit made up term to me.

Is it a process? (it sounds like one). In which case we need to identify what the alleged initial conditions and end points are, and I suspect that there we will see some assumptions being sneaked in.

[jakell]

Maybe some slightly dyslexic academic wrote/read radicalisation, and prior to correcting it, mused there might be a PhD in there with some suitable padding.
...and so a new word was born.

[Searcher08]

Maybe some slightly dyslexic academic wrote/read radicalisation, and prior to correcting it, mused there might be a PhD in there with some suitable padding.
...and so a new word was born.

A word / concept for pomo sociologists to argue -isms over.

International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences | 2008 | Copyright
Racialization


The concept of racialization has developed over time. In his 1989 book Racism, sociologist Robert Miles described racialization as “a dialectical process by which meaning is attributed to particular biological features of human beings, as a result of which individuals may be assigned to a general category of persons which reproduces itself biologically.… The process of racialization of human beings entails the racialization of the processes in which they participate and the structures and institutions that result” (Miles 1989, p. 76). Earlier, in The Wretched of the Earth, the political theorist Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) had described the “racialization of thought” in reference to the failure of early Europeans to recognize that Africans had a distinct culture that was unique to them. Instead Europeans, “set up white culture to fill the gap left by [what they believed was] the absence of other cultures” (Fanon 2001, p. 171). Sociologist Yehudi Webster later defined the concept of racialization as “a systemic accentuation of certain physical attributes to allocate persons to races that are projected as real and thereby become the basis for analyzing all social relations” (Webster 1992, p. 3). Webster goes on to argue that “the second foundations of racialization are provided by social scientific research on race relations, in which the disciplines of history and sociology play an eminent role” (p. 4).

Culture is a key aspect in both Miles’s and Fanon’s definitions of racialization. Historically, there have been intense debates over the issue of race as a social construction versus race based on biology. Omi and Winant addressed the debate and articulated the concept of racialization that many scholars use today. They defined racial formation as “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed.… Race is a matter of both social structure and cultural representation” (Omi and Winant 1994, pp. 55–56). This view revolutionized the conception of race as a process and as a social construction.

CRITIQUING “RACIALIZATION”

Some scholars have critiqued current definitions of racialization. Karim Murji and John Solomos, for example, argue that the idea of racialization “has become a core concept in the analysis of racial phenomena, particularly to signal the processes by which ideas about race are constructed, come to be regarded as meaningful, and are acted upon.… Racialization is applied to whole institutions such as the police, educational or legal systems, or entire religions, nations, and countries” (Solomos 2005, p. 1).

Sociologist Joe Feagin argues that “Omi and Winant view the past of North American slavery and legal segregation as not weighing ‘like a nightmare on the brain of the living,’ but rather as lingering on ‘like a hangover’ that is gradually going away” (Feagin 2006, p. 7). Feagin adds that what is “missing in both the mainstream race-ethnic relations approach and much of the racial formation approach is a full recognition of the big picture—the reality of this whole society being founded on, and firmly grounded in, oppression targeting African Americans (and other people of color) now for several centuries. Given that deep underlying reality of this society, all racialethnic relationships and events, past and present, must be placed within that racial oppression context in order to be well-understood” (p. 7).

Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva notes that although the perspective of Omi and Winant “represents a breakthrough, it still gives undue attention to ideological/cultural processes, does not regard races as truly social collectivities, and overemphasizes the racial projects … of certain actors (neoconservatives, members of the far right, liberals), thus obscuring the social and general character of racialized societies” (Bonilla-Silva 1997, p. 466). Bonilla-Silva further states:

Although all racialized systems are hierarchical, the particular character of the hierarchy, and thus the racial structure, is variable.… The racial practices and mechanisms that have kept Blacks subordinated changed from overt to eminently racist to covert and indirectly racist. The unchanging element throughout these stages is that Blacks’ life chances are significantly lower than those of Whites, and ultimately a racialized social order is distinguished by this difference in life chances.… The historical struggle against chattel slavery led not to the development of race-free societies but to the establishment of social system with a different kind of racialization. (Bonilla-Silva 1997, p. 470)

In their 2005 book Racialization, Murji and Solomos summarize the arguments that suggest that the conception of racialization introduced by Omi and Winant may not have represented a breakthrough:

Barot and Bird feel that Omi and Winant “use the concept of racial formation as a perspective that is not fundamentally different from the concept of racialization as deployed in British literature in the 1980’s.… Miles himself has argued that Omi and Winant’s conception of racialization is underdeveloped and not used systematically.… Miles and Torres state, ‘Omi and Winant’s defence of the race concept is a classic example of the way in which the academy in the US continues to racialize the world.’” (Murji and Solomos 2005, p. 22–23)

RETHINKING RACIALIZATION

Bonilla-Silva proposes use of “the more general concept of racialized social systems as the starting point for an alternative framework. This term refers to societies in which economic, political, social and ideological levels are partially structured by the placement of actors in racial categories or races” (Bonilla-Silva 1997, p. 469). In rethinking a theory of racial oppression, Feagin suggests three elements: “It should indicate clearly the major features— both the structures and the counterforces—of the social phenomenon being studied; it should show the relationships between the important structures and forces; and it should assist in understanding both the patterns of social change and the lack of social change” (Feagin 2006, p. 7). As the critiques of these scholars suggest, the concept of racialization has changed over time and continues to change.

[American Dream]

1962 - Thousands of antifascist protesters show up to oppose Oswald Mosley and his fascists during a demonstration in Trafalgar Square, London. [video]

http://class-struggle-anarchism.tumblr. ... ousands-of

[American Dream]

https://jonathansaha.wordpress.com/2015 ... eethorpes/

Race and Empire on the 13.24 Train from Cleethorpes

Posted on September 2, 2015 by jonathansaha
[Trigger Warning: Racism, Homophobia]

“Go on, drink up. Don’t be a faggot.” A can of lager was pushed in front of me. The gesture was a demand. I was being told to demonstrate whether I should be included or not—to show them that I wasn’t queer, to show them I belonged. “No”, cut in the large, middle-aged pub landlord sat opposite me, “You don’t drink, do ya’.” It was clear that he thought I was Muslim. I’d been read, named and excluded.

These are the dangers of choosing a table seat on the train. You can quickly find yourself overwhelmed by a group of unwanted travel companions. A couple of weeks ago on a routine journey, I thought I’d nabbed a whole table to myself—but moments before the doors closed, a platoon of white men filed on and occupied the seats around me. And they were hammered. Just steaming drunk. I’d felt uneasy as soon as they got on the train. A couple of shaved heads. Multiple Tattoos. But this was class prejudice on my part. Nevertheless, this early show of homophobic abuse did not bode well for the next hour on the train. I immediately regretted staying put.

“So, what’s your name?”, the landlord asked after we’d struck an unspoken deal that he would surreptitiously drink the lager given to me and pretend that I’d drunk it (by Scunthorpe I was being credited with finishing three cans of Carling). “Jonathan”, I replied. He pulled a face. “Don’t say it”, cut in his son, who was in his twenties and lanky and laconic, “I know what you’re gonna say, and don’t say it.”

“Jonathan?”, he went on, ignoring these pleas and his son’s obvious discomfort, “how can you be called Jonathan!? You should be called Abu Dhabi or summat. That’s what they’re all called ’round my way.” My insistence that it was my name and, not only that, but that I’d been born and brought up in the North, just appeared to make it harder to believe. When some other Asian men also got on the train a couple of stops later, he jokingly complained to me that us English couldn’t even get room on trains these days because of all the immigrants, amused by the fact that he was sharing this with me, a brown person.

There was some embarrassment about this among the others in the group. Mostly, they were harmless enough, and their antics amused some of the passengers. But others in the seats around me were clearly put on edge by their presence. After every loud outburst of profanity from one of them, there was a chorus “ssshh!!” from the rest, concerned about a toddler sat behind them—and given the amount they’d drunk, this happened regularly. More intrusively, the stocky guy sat next to me kept putting his hand on my knee and putting me in a loose headlock, as he pretended to some women on the table opposite that he was “a gay” in an ill-conceived attempt to woo them. Everyone in the carriage was collateral to their cluster-banter, but I was in the centre of it. When I picked up my rucksack and got up to leave the train at Doncaster, one of them put their ear to my bag and shouted out, “is it ticking?” This was followed by widespread laughter.

***

This week I started a new job. I am now University Academic Fellow in the History of Race and Empire at Leeds University. My encounter on this recent journey made me aware, once again, of how histories that uncover and deconstruct the homophobic, misogynistic and racist dominant ideologies of British imperialism remain as relevant as ever. The logic that governed whether or not I was included as British on the TransPennine Express to Manchester Airport in 2015, echoed that which was used to justify white rule across the empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And this concern with preserving and policing an idea of what constitutes ‘British’, an idea always entangled in the history of imperialism, is a concern held by more than a group of drunken men on a train. It has been implicitly expressed in the dehumanising language and callous state response to the plight of refugees seeking sanctuary in Europe. We’re constantly being asked to take into account what is best for Britain on this ‘issue’. But we should pause to consider how this demand has been used in the past and the political work this demand still does. Being asked to put Britain first is like being offered a can of lager by a homophobe. It’s also a way of demanding a show of belonging by excluding others. And the politics of belonging in Britain are never far removed from the history of race and empire.

Anti-Racism, Working Class Formation And The Significance Of The Racialized Outsider

by Satnam Virdee

The second of a two part essay on race, racism and the making of the English working class.

First published: 21 December, 2014


Part I of this essay highlighted the powerful structuring force of racism in English society over two centuries, including within the English working class. However, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there were also periods of multi-ethnic class solidarity when parts of the English working class collectively suppressed expressions of racism and, on occasion, actively rejected it altogether. Central to these moments were socialist men and women belonging to minority groups – Irish Catholic, Jewish, Indian, Caribbean and African – whom I describe as racialized outsiders. It is these men and women against whom the dominant conception of English/ British nationalism was constructed, and whose attachment to such conceptions therefore tended to be weaker, while their participation in subaltern conflicts gave them a unique capacity to see through the fog of blood, soil and belonging and thereby to universalise the militant, yet often particularistic, fights of the working class. Informed by their unique perspective on society, they thus acted as a leavening agent, nourishing the struggles of all.

Such racialized outsiders played a formative role in bringing together concern about racialized oppression with that of class exploitation during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – the heroic age of the proletariat. For example, the anti-slavery movement was intellectually and politically nourished by the growing population of freed slaves of African descent. While small numbers of Africans had been resident in England since the sixteenth century, this population had grown to between ten and twenty thousand people by the late eighteenth century.[1] It was a freed slave, Olaudah Equiano, who brought firsthand experience of slavery to the attention of the British public. Equiano recounted the story of the slave ship Zong and how in 1781 its captain had thrown 122 sick slaves overboard, with another ten committing suicide in despair. The captain’s motivation was that because the slaves were considered cargo, the ship's owners were entitled to £30 a head compensation for their loss at sea, whereas if the slaves had died on land they would have received no compensation. Equiano’s remarkable autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) – an account of his suffering as a slave, as well as his subsequent life in Britain – rapidly went through several editions, and, was one of the earliest books promoted by the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

And it was Robert Wedderburn – born in Jamaica in 1762 to an enslaved African woman and a Scottish doctor and sugar planter – who helped make visible the links between the suffering and struggles of African enslaved peoples abroad and working class struggles at home.[2] By 1813, Wedderburn appears to have joined the Spencean Philanthropists – a left-wing group inspired by Thomas Spence’s writings. Shortly afterwards, he went on to publish six editions of a magazine called The Axe Laid To The Root. Through this remarkable magazine and countless meetings of the Speancean Philanthropists, he linked the plight of the ‘African slave’ to the difficulties faced by the English working poor for, ‘The means to obtain justice is so expensive, that justice cannot be obtained’.[3] This attempt to conjoin the struggles against slavery with social justice for the working poor found political expression in his calls for a Jubilee – a free and egalitarian community. According to Wedderburn, Spence

…knew that the earth was given to the children of men, making no difference for colour or character, just or unjust; and that any person calling a piece of land his own private property, was a criminal; and though they may sell it, or will it to their children, it is only transferring of that which was first obtained by force or fraud.[4]

Attempts to forge this kind of multi-ethnic working class solidarity became less evident after the catastrophic defeat of Chartism and the consolidation of racist, nationalist and imperialist discourses and practices within the working class. Between 1848 and 1973, the current of proletarian internationalism largely became the preserve of those socialists who were racialized minorities. Apart from some notable exceptions like William Morris, Belfort Bax, Sylvia Pankhurst and John Mclean – it was minority men and women like Eleanor Marx, James Connolly, Zelda Kahan, Theodore Rothstein, Arthur McManus, Shapurji Saklatvala and Claudia Jones who attempted against great odds to challenge racist divisions within the working class. In the course of the new unionism of the 1880s and 1890s, Eleanor Marx, William Morris and other socialist internationalists were able, albeit briefly, to broaden the development of the emergent English-Irish working class solidarity such that it also came to encompass the newly-arrived Jewish migrants. Similarly, in the 1920s and 1930s, racialized minorities within the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) like Shapurji Saklatvala, Arthur McManus and Phil Piratin played important roles in challenging the hold of racist, anti-Semitic and imperialist ideas within the working class, culminating in the solidarity action instigated in support of Arab seafarers in the North-East of England and the defence of the Jewish community in the East End of London.

However, it was in the aftermath of the ‘world revolution of 1968’[5] that significant parts of the English working class finally began to challenge racism. This was a conjuncture shaped on the one hand by decolonisation in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, the struggle for civil rights in the US, and black resistance at home and, on the other hand, by the organic crisis of British capitalism, the collapsing welfare settlement and the intensification of the class struggle. In that transitional moment in the 1970s – between a welfare state settlement that was in crisis and a neoliberalism that had not yet been named, and whose victory was not assured – Britain experienced an unprecedented wave of social unrest.

Under these changing circumstances, the organised labour movement shifted from its long-standing indifference towards racism, towards actively challenging it - most notably in support of Asian women workers on strike at Grunwick, a film processing plant in north-west London. When Jayaben Desai – along with 137 of her mainly female Asian colleagues – struck against terrible working conditions and managerial racism, solidarity action flowed not only from national trade union leaders but large numbers of rank and file workers. Donations came in from local workers at the ‘Milliner Park Ward, Rolls Royce Works Committee, Express Dairies, Associated Automation (GEC), TGWU, and the UPW Cricklewood Office Branch’.[6] Significantly, on 1 November 1976, the post office workers in the UPW stopped delivering Grunwick’s mail. Ten months on from the start of the dispute, mass picketing began in the week of 13 June 1977 with between 1,000 and 2,000 pickets present. By the end of that week, those numbers had swelled to 3,000, including miners from the coalfields of South Wales and Yorkshire – the latter led by Arthur Scargill.[7] The largest picket occurred on 11 July 1977 when an estimated 18,000 people – among them workers, feminists and anti-racists – joined Desai and the strikers in an unprecedented show of solidarity.[8] Particularly significant was the solidarity action from the London dockers who in 1968 had marched to the Houses of Parliament in support of Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech shouting ‘Back Britain, not Black Britain’ demanding an end to black immigration. Less than a decade later at Grunwick, amid a rising tide of industrial and political radicalisation, some of those same dockers carried the Royal Docks Shop Stewards’ banner at the head of a mass picket in support of the predominately Asian workforce at Grunwick.

Alongside such anti-racist action in the workplace, parts of organised labour and youth helped fashion anti-racist and anti-fascist social movements of a scale unprecedented in Britain. From Rock Against Racism (RAR) to the Anti-Nazi League (ANL), a new popular politics against racism and fascism was emergent with the socialist left (both within the Labour Party and without) at its centre. The ANL attempted to counterpose its own embryonic vision of the alternative society – one based on love not hate and multi-ethnic solidarity not racial division. This was most clearly visible at the major carnivals it organised alongside RAR throughout 1978 and 1979. The first, held at Victoria Park on 30 April 1978, was a genuinely national gathering with among others more than 40 coaches arriving from Glasgow, a whole train from Manchester, and a further 15 coaches from Sheffield.[9] The march to the carnival site at Victoria Park in East London was led by giant papier maché models of Adolf Hitler and others, built by Peter Fluck and Roger Law – the makers of Spitting Image. At the carnival itself, the Clash, X-Ray Spex, Tom Robinson and Steel Pulse played to 80,000 people. Peter Hain, Vishnu Sharma – of the Indian Workers Association (IWA) – Miriam Karlin and Ray Buckton made speeches against racism and fascism. Raphael Samuel – a key member of the CPGB historians group – described the march to the carnival as one of ‘the most working-class demonstrations I have been on, and one of the very few of my adult lifetime to have sensibly changed the climate of public opinion’.[10]

Significantly, the part played by socialist activists, particularly those of racialized minority descent, was decisive. They proved to be the conduit through which anti-racist ideas, consciousness and political practice – until then, narrowly confined to the minority communities – came to be transmitted to the left-wing of the organised labour movement and beyond. In that moment when class struggles were brought into alignment with those against racism, an uneven but nevertheless significant organic fusion of social forces took place in which to paraphrase Sivanandan,[11] racialized minority workers ‘through a consciousness of their colour…arrive[d] at a consciousness of class’ and in which parts of the white working class ‘in recovering its class instinct…arrive[d] at a consciousness of racial oppression.’

The experiment in municipal anti-racism in radical Labour-run local authorities further extended such anti-racist sentiment within society opening up areas of non-manual local state employment to racialized minorities for the first time. And through black self-organisation and the alliance with the socialist left in trade unions such changes were consolidated throughout much of the public sector and trade union movement. While racism remained a powerful structuring force throughout the 1980s, the outcome of such collective action was the consolidation of a more durable current of anti-racism in British society, one that had been incrementally constructed over the course of the black struggles against racism in the 1960s, the anti-racist and anti-fascist social movements in the 1970s, and which by the 1980s, had become institutionalised in key sectors of the organised labour movement, the public sector and everyday life within the main urban conurbations. Such anti-racism was the legacy bequeathed to English society by the racialized outsiders of Irish Catholic, Jewish, African and Asian descent.

Continues at: http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php ... racialized

[tapitsbo]

I can't find the article posted about the virulent anti-Semite Jeremy Corbyn

[American Dream]

A New Chapter in the Fascist Internationale

by ALEXANDER REID ROSS

With an insignia of a shield crossed by broadswords on a granite background, the World National-Conservative Movement announced its birth with the declaration, “The time has arrived to take responsibility for our peoples and nations of the world!” The confluence of some 58 parties, organizations, and groups, the World National-Conservative Movement (WNCM) developed out of the efforts of the Russian radical-right party, Rodina.

While its public document declares that “Communism, Nazism, and Islamism” comprise a “false alternative to totalitarian ideologies,” the WNCM’s ideology reads like a run-of-the-mill document of the radical right, which remains inextricably linked to fascism. Lamenting the sexual perversity of the super-national organizations like the EU and NATO, and calling for the return to the traditional “family and healthy moral values,” the WNCM attacks “the erosion of nations, massive migration,” which it blames on “liberalism, multiculturalism, and tolerance.” Instead, WNCM advocates “healthy nationalism and religious beliefs, patriotism, respect of one’s own and foreign traditional moral and ethical values, in other words, national conservatism.” Subverting the “global cabal” (read: Jews) requires a chain of “conservative revolutions” that will restore nations to themselves; “Victory of the conservative revolution even in one country without fail will provide an example for other countries.”

With participants including Golden Dawn, Jobbik, the Finns Party, and the British National Party, the WNCM hosts some of the most powerful radical right populist names in Europe. However, the umbrella group also includes some overtly-fascist groups and groupuscles like Poland’s Falanga, Italy’s Millennium and Forza Nuova, and the US’s American Freedom Party. Visiting senior fellow at London’s Legatum Institute, Anton Shekhovtsov, who broke this story on Thursday, characterizes the group as “clearly on the extreme right, verging on neo-Nazism.” That is putting it lightly. In spite of its formal denial, the WNCM seems more like a continuation of a potentially-disastrous formula combining fascist vanguards and populist radical right parties that continues to build steam around the world.

The Origins of the Fascist Internationale

In broad terms, it a “Fascist Internationale” that seems to be in the offing in the World National-Conservative Movement. The notion of a “left-wing” fascism, or a fascist system that would respect the autonomy of different nations while working co-operatively, developed out of the original “National Bolshevik” group, Association for the Study of Russian Planned Economy (ARPLAN), which featured Ernst Jünger and Georgi Lukacs, among others. These thinkers ideated, against the Hitlerite faction of National Socialism, that a bond between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany could work, because, in the words of völkisch thinker Artur Dinter, Bolshevik Russia would become “a ‘Russian National Socialism.’”

While ARPLAN found significant traction in the early Nazi Party, with Gregor Strasser featuring prominently as Hitler’s number two, their hopes would be dashed in the Night of the Long Knives. Gregor was murdered, and his brother Otto fled the country. After the war, Otto Strasser rose to prominence on the neo-fascist circuit along with French intellectual, Maurice Bardèche, Italian occultist Julius Evola, US agent Francis Parker Yockey, and Belgian odd-ball Jean-François Thiriart. These thinkers helped model a European Social Movement (known today as the “second position”) that looked to a European Nation highly influenced by British fascist Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement. The European Social Movement effectively passed out of existence by 1957, due to a split over the difference between racist politics and cultural hegemony. Although the idea of a European Nation continued, a “Third Position” would develop to carry on the banner of “neither left nor right, neither communist nor capitalist.”

After the decline of the European Social Movement, US fascist leader George Lincoln Rockwell set up a World Union of National Socialists (WUNS) in 1962 with founder of the White Defense League (predecessor to the current English Defense League) and British National Party, Colin Jordan, at the helm. While the WUNS is still around, it lacks the Strasserist edge, the focus on cultural hegemony, National Bolshevism, and Eurasianism, that has stimulated the supposedly anti-Imperialist politics that accompanied the outbreak of the Third Position. Another movement continued to build through European conferences and journals of the neo-fascist movement.

In the words of Francis Parker Yockey’s two-volume Imperium, “The Internationale of our times appears in a time when the Spirit of the Age has outgrown political nationalism. The Age of Absolute Politics will not tolerate petty-Stateism [sic].” Antagonistic to NATO forces in Europe, the neo-fascist movement developed a two-tiered dual power strategy known as the “strategy of tension” to at once gradually infiltrate European government and form direct action groups to engage in terrorist attacks that would push the citizenry closer to State protection. As fascist agents entered the governments of Perón’s Argentina and Nasser’s Egypt, a “true” Internationale seemed possible, if not in name then in deed. However, the negation of the modern nation-state required renewed cultural efforts to not only loosen the tension, but reposition politics in the aristocratic world of Empire. That is where Alain de Benoist entered the scene.

First affiliated with the fascist (Yockeyist) publication Western Destinies, Benoist joined the left-to-right magazine L’Idiot International, started by Jean-Edern Hallier with the initial support of Sartre and Beauvoir (though the latter distanced herself from the publication fairly quickly). As he climbed through the ranks of the post-68 political miasma, Benoist became the cultural editor at Le Figaro, and exploded onto the intellectual scene during the “hot summer” of 1979. It was the year after Italian authorities incarcerated Antonio Negri for allegedly masterminding all of European terrorism from his small professor’s office in Padua, Italy, and the “Gramsci of the Right,” Alain de Benoist, helped to fill the empty space.

Sponsored by Marco Tarchi in Italy and the National Front’s Michael Walker in Britain, among others, the New Right affected a strategy of cultural hegemony to embrace the diversity and “grey eminences” of European life. With direct affiliations to National Bolshevism and Third Positionism, the New Right tethered a kind of sophisticated fascist cultural subtext to Italian terrorism and skinhead street violence. The themes of the revolutionary “new man” through the rebirth of European cultural greatness gained currency not only on the right, but on the left as well. In 1992, during the collapse of the Soviet Union, the New Right passed the proverbial baton to the New Russia.

About Russian Politics

Russian politics is sensitive business. Accusations of affiliation with the KGB were virtually ubiquitous throughout the radical right during the collapse of the Soviet Union (and in some cases not unfounded). One of the early converts to the idea of pan-European right wing through an International Center of Right-wing Parties, Zhirinovsky developed important ties to Western right-wing populist parties like the National Front almost overnight. Key technological contributions from Le Pen in 1992, as well as an early relationship with elements of the New Right, helped galvanize his career at the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, a party that Stephen Shenfield describes as “a nationalist and imperialist ideology of a composite liberal-fascist character.”

While Zhirinovsky, with his thick-rimmed glasses and burly figure, has become the perennial bully of Russian politics, the ideological slant of the modern radical right comes from Alexander Dugin, who the National Review called an “evil” ringleader of a “Satanist cult” last year (so much for conservatism). Craving a truly “fascist fascism,” Dugin became attached to Zhirinovsky early on through the powerful nationalist movement, Pamyat, which featured a swastika in the center of its official symbol. Dugin’s ideal of a pan-European “large space” (Grossraum) of Eurasia is modeled after the ideas of Rudolph Hess’s mentor, Karl Haushofer, and gained key early allies from the New Right.

The solidarity of Eurasianism calls for something completely new, beyond right and left, against all preconceived notions that divide, against communism, fascism, national socialism, racism, materialism. Instead, Dugin calls for a “Fourth Political Theory” beyond the Strasserist Third Position, calling for a reduction that includes freedom from the “first position” (Nazism and Fascism), social justice from the “second position” (European Social Movement), and “traditional identity” from the Third Position. With its roots in the three forms of 20th Century fascism, the “fourth position” Eurasianism and its friends in formal populist radical right parties provides a serious challenge to the supporters of the EU. That the discourse of the fourth position circumvents racism through the overwrought detour of torture provides testimony to the unpopularity of neo-fascism’s ontological positions, however. This is why Dugin insists that not a mass movement, but a “qualified minority” is required to develop the conservative revolution.

A member of the National Bolshevik movement, which ended its collaboration with Zhirinovsky after discovering his Jewish ancestry, Dugin’s influence is inescapable on the radical right today. The figure Dugin is most clearly connected with is a former expatriot and decadent named Limonov, who said of Zhirinovsky, “a Jew masquerading as a Russian nationalist is a sickness.” While Limonov may have worked with Zhirinovsky in 1992 to help him with European contacts, he took leave of his place at the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, and developed an independent pseudo-political career melding Stalinism and Hitlerism into a cult of the self. Formerly of the Studio 51 disco-punk scene of New York’s seedy underbelly, Limonov moved to France, where he grew to know the leader of Europe’s New Right movement, Alain de Benoist, and the Maoist-fascist Jean-François Thiriart. It was through this pedigree that he became the leader (though not undisputed) of the Europe’s National Bolshevik movement to overthrow parliamentary democracy and replace it with a fascist Internationale.

As a metric for the position of Rodina, which spearheads the movement to create a pan-Eurasian movement and the WNCM, the drunken bear of the Russian radical right, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, finds Rodina extreme. Its name meaning “Motherland,” Rodina stands tall among the Russian radical right. In 2005, while namby-pamby Putin was commemorating Auschwitz, Rodina joined Zyuganov’s Communist Party of the Russian Federation (the remnants of the old Communist Party of the Soviet Union) in calling for an outright ban of Jewish organizations. That same year, Zhirinovsky conducted a walkout of the Russian Duma, but words muttered underneath the breath of Rodina’s Andrei Saveliyev sparked an extended brawl that sent the two tumbling around in the isles. In the aftermath, Zhirinovsky got Rodina banned from a regional election for circulating an advertisement featuring a sidewalk littered with watermelon rinds and the comment: “Let’s clean up the trash from our city.”

The Brown List

The year after the rumble in the Duma, a coordinating organization of fascist parties and groups called the European National Front emerged, including many who now make WNCM their roost: Italy’s Forza Nuova, the National Democratic Party of Germany, Renouveau Français, and Golden Dawn. Among others, the European National Front was co-founded by Roberto Fiore, formerly of the Italian terrorist group Terza Posizione, who fled charges of participating in a bombing of a Bologna train station in Italy for the posh London digs of British New Rightist, Michael Walker. Although the European National Front dissolved in 2009, many of its old alliances and connections began to reconnect during the ouster of Yanukovich in Ukraine sponsored by pro-EU forces in the winter of 2013-2014, which included some well-known fascist groups like Svoboda and Right Sector. Responding to pro-EU fascism, National Bolshevik and Eurasian fascist groups like Hungary’s Jobbik, Italy’s Millennium, Poland’s Falanga and Ruch Narodowy, and the Franco-Serbian joint project, Unité Continentale, joined up with separatists in the east, and attempted to create ethno-separatist movements in the west. All four groups are currently featured along with the “not dead yet” British National Party on the WNCM’s roster.

Out of renewed organizing efforts against “global hegemony” after the Crimea Crisis came the Alliance of Peace and Freedom last year, cobbled together out of the old European National Front by Nick Griffin, and featuring the National Democratic Party of Germany, Golden Dawn, and Forza Nuova. In March of this year, on the anniversary of Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, Rodina convened the International Russian Conservative Forum in St Petersburg. Originally boasting the participation of the entire Alliance of Peace and Freedom, along with the Austrian Freedom Party and the cultural wing of Italy’s Northern League, the International Russian Conservative Forum laid the seeds for the WNCM.

One only has to look at the list of groups in line with the World National-Conservative Movement (WNCM) to catch a glimpse of its geneology. The denomination of “revolutionary conservative” that it uses developed out of the New Right’s attempts to avoid the label of “fascist” by adopting as its intellectual figureheads people like Martin Heidegger, who extolled the “inner truth and greatness of national socialism,” Carl Schmitt, who formalized the juridical side of Grossraum, and Ernst Jünger, who sent Hitler an autographed copy of his essay “Fire and Blood,” and later served on the staff of the military occupation of Paris, overseeing the execution of deserters with “higher curiosity.” In a recent lecture during the conference, Grossraum: Russia and Europe: Dialogue of Resistance, Alexander Dugin lists off a number of fascists of the “old generation,” including Thiriart, and calls on his young audience to take up the banner of “new conservatives” comparing them to “the first Christian martyrs” as “fighters” against the “global hegemony” and the “money and so-called human rights” that “perverts nature.”

One of the top representatives of the New Right in the WNCM’s inaugural list is Tom Sunic from Croatia, who appeared in an interview with Alain de Benoist, himself, for the Holocaust-denying organ Institute for Historical Review. Also represented in the WNCM is the 1-2,000-member Romanian Noua Dreaptă, whose name literally means “New Right.” With a deep reverence for the old Iron Guard, Noua Dreaptă members famously attacked a Gay Pride march in 2006 and a Hungarian celebration in 2008.

Leftism and Rightism

Most of the members of the WNCM have welfare chauvinist views that can take on the semblance of leftist politics. The early warning sign for the creation of the Russia-oriented WNCM might have been in December, 2014, when Moscow hosted a conference including WNCM collaborators (League of the South and Rodina, for instance) called “Right of Peoples to Self-Determination and Building a Multi-Polar World.” While the Multi-Polar World conference attacked “predatory foreign policy of the US and its NATO allies” and included US leftists with the Workers World Party, it bent heavily toward Dugan’s brand of fascism. It would not be surprising to see future conferences and groupings in which certain leftist groups are integrated with or within the WNCM.

The creation of the WNCM indicates a growing international solidarity between revolutionary fascist groups from South Africa, Syria, Chile, and Japan, which share similar ideologies. If it may not be true that the organizations outside of Europe have less representation, in spite of the WNCM’sclaims that it is “formed on a voluntary and equal basis by representatives of various countries and peoples,” they remain largely white supremacist and white separatist. Many of the groups listed by the WNCM are also immediately dangerous to immigrants, people of color, and LGBTQA people.

The connections between Jobbik, Golden Dawn, and the British National Party to anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, and racist violence are well known, and the WNCM’s list deepens the connection. Fiore notoriously organized Europe’s Hammerskins a few years prior to founding the European National Front in 2006. What is more troubling, Shekhovtsov points out, is that the WNCM’s program identifies “joint camps for military and athletic instruction” as part of the agreement. These “joint camps” are, most importantly, part of the Eurasian movement, which is represented by Unité Continentale, Belgium’s Euro-Russia, Ukraine’s Network Carpatho-Russian Movement, and Germany’s Die Russlanddeutschen Konservativen.

The association of the Finns Party, as well as the other populist groups, is also noteworthy. The second largest party in Finnish parliament, the Finns Party received nearly 18% of the vote in this year’s election. They are known for economic leftism mixed with nationalist policies that include the sterilization of African immigrants. Another WNCM member, Poland’s Kongres Nowej Prawicy, won four seats in last year’s disastrous European Parliament election. WNCM participant, the National Democratic Party of Germany, also won a seat in European Parliament, and its representative, Udo Voigt, is on the WNCM’s “esteemed” guest list.

A small joke lies at the bottom of the insistence on the “qualified minority”—particularly glancing over the US’s participants in the WNCM, which include the League of the South and the American Freedom Party. While these groups boast some impressive political ties to a host of more-prominent right-wing organizations like the white separatist Council of Conservative Citizens, as well as pan-separatist groups linked to the fourth position, they remain relatively miniscule compared to groups like Jobbick. Seeking representation for “European Americans,” the American Freedom Party emerged from the American Third Position, which in turn came from the Golden State Party, established by a fascist skinhead gang. Their auspices have not improved much. However, the name American Renaissance does provide a glimpse into an increasingly revolutionary tilt to conservatism in US politics, which could prove more auspicious for international fascism.

Revolution and Renaissance

Established and edited by the New Century Foundation’s Jared Taylor, who joins David Duke in the WNCM, American Renaissance magazine fills its pages with attacks against “welfare mothers” and articles on eugenics, while annual American Renaissance conferences play host to Nick Griffin and the Front National’s Bruno Gollnisch. However, Taylor’s fourth position philosophy enables the inclusion of Jews in his conferences, bringing an awkward air of confusion to other contributors like Stormfront’s Don Black and Jamie Kelso (formerly of the American Third Position). After an explosion of controversy following a 2006 disruption led by David Duke, in which he insisted that the New Right speaker Guillaume Faye “touched my genes,” exciting him to “rise and defend… and restore our heritage” against the internal subversion of “another non-European… Middle Eastern community… that dominates our media, influences our government, and has led us to this internal destruction of our will and our spirit.” Duke was interrupted by Jewish astrophysicist Michael Hart, who cried out, “You fucking Nazi, you’re a disgrace to this meeting!” Faye responded (Faye’s response beginning at 4:35), “you cannot directly speak about the Jews as the cause that arrived to us, but worse than the Jews are the … Jews in the mind[.]”

The American Renaissance was forced to sharpen its position around separatism. In a 2013 conference in Tennessee, Matthew Heimbach, a rising leader in the “white movement,” asked speaker Paul Ramsey “How do we create our ethno state?” The latter responded, “We need to Balkanize, and create our own homeland.”

That year was a difficult one for Mr. Heimbach. After appearing at an event put on by fascist skinhead gang, Aryan Terrorist Brigade, the National Socialist Movement, and the Imperial Klans of America, Heimbach found himself excommunicated from the League of the South, but they reinstated him soon after. The director of the Traditionalist Youth Network, Heimbach has since given tailgate speeches in defense of the Confederate flag, and after paying homage to the families of Dylann Roof’s victims, declared, “Dylann Roof is a victim in regards to he was a white man born to a society that actively hates him and hates his people, hates his culture and his identity.” Heimbach hopes to provide a framework “to make victories in the political sphere” by uniting fascist groups around the US.

Although Heimbach’s softer rhetoric has brought him beneficial media attention on Al Jazeera and Russia Today, his baseline politics are grounded in forced removal of people of color from a “white homeland,” along with the violent liquidation of sexual diversity. Heimbach’s “solidarity” for Palestinians is exposed also by his avowed support for the Assad regime in Syria, Golden Dawn, and Russian nationalists. Writing about the Russian International Conservative Forum that prefigured WNCM, Heimbach declared, “To break the chains of oppression that are keeping our people down, Europeans must rally together to create a Traditionalist International. Russia has the finances and the spiritual position to be a leader in uniting various nationalist and Traditionalist factions to work to destabilize and eventually destroy the agenda of the European Union, NATO and the United States. By pushing for a new global crusade against the enemy we are beginning a Holy war [sic] to save everything that we hold dear.”

While his anti-Americanism has rubbed some conservatives the wrong way, Heimbach’s “revolutionary traditionalism” falls into line with the European radical right, as well as the fascist vanguardists. The perspective of the fourth position is something that one might call über-fascism—it is, in a way, over the label of fascism, while retaining its characteristic “palingenetic ultranationalism,” and looking for appropriate political opportunity structures to disseminate its creed. The anger brought by the tenure of Obama has led to an increasingly revolutionary ideological position against NATO, while furthering important fascist entryism into the conservative movement. This revolutionary conservative movement finds its main mouthpiece in Donald Trump, who has proclaimed his intention to “get along very well with Vladimir Putin.”

It may be that Trump is already more like a US version of Zhirinovsky: a kind of popular burlesque sideshow with tremendous political power. Should Trump be elected to the office of president, however, there is a strong likelihood that the stature of the League of the South, American Renaissance, the American Freedom Party, and groups like it, would gain a great deal of power—much like Rodina in Russia. That scenario would prove deadly for the geopolitical composition of the world as we know it.


Alexander Reid Ross is a contributing moderator of the Earth First! Newswire. He is the editor of Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab (AK Press 2014) and a contributor to Life During Wartime (AK Press 2013). His most recent book Against the Fascist Creep is forthcoming through AK Press.

[American Dream]

Saskia Sassen Talks Finance, Climate, Race, Immigration and How We Can Begin to Fix Our Planet

By Nato Thompson Philadelphia, PA, USA and Saskia Sassen New York, NY, USA
October 27, 2014

The pioneering sociologist Saskia Sassen speaks with Creative Time Chief Curator Nato Thompson as part of Creative Time Reports’ Summit Series, which features articles related to themes at the heart of the 2014 Creative Time Summit Stockholm, a collaboration with the Public Art Agency Sweden, for which Sassen will be a keynote speaker.


Alexandra Pirici, If You Don’t Want Us, We Want You, 2011. An intervention in public space in Bucharest, which was followed with interventions around the monuments of Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and the Lenin Statue at the Finland Station for Soft Power – Sculptural Additions to Petersburg Monuments, 2014. Photo courtesy the artist.


Nato Thompson: What are your thoughts about the recent European parliamentary elections, particularly the rise of right-wing nationalist parties and people’s sentiments toward immigration?

Saskia Sassen: First, I don’t think we can put the blame for these right-wing politics on the people who voted for the right-wing politicians, because their actions are only symptoms of a much larger, more destructive dynamic fueled by those with power depriving more and more people of real opportunities. People arecrawling into what was once a prosperous middle-class situation only to find that the stable livelihoods that they expected for themselves or their children have disappeared. The third and fourth generations after World War II are not getting anywhere near where they or their parents expected to get. From the extraordinary downward push of wages to the elimination of choices and the weakening of citizens’ rights, a vast assemblage of negative forces has pushed people against the wall.

Art can be very important: you can suggest other worlds, through other ways of seeing and narrating the world in which we live.
A second factor contributing to Europe’s rightward shift is that there is no political speech, no voice, that can move public discourse into some alternative zone of narrating the current condition, so people fall back on familiar, elementary nationalisms. This is where I think that art can be very important: you can suggest other worlds, through other ways of seeing and narrating the world in which we live. The average voter—who does not have a lot of power, who is losing resources, whose children are not doing very well—confronts a lack of choices when it comes to apparently simple questions like “How do we speak about this crisis?” “How do we explain it to ourselves?” “How do we explain it to our children?” And so out come these absolutely, horribly regressive statements.

Europe has always had various forms of racism, as I attempted to show in a book I wrote about the history of migrations, Guests and Aliens, which focused on Europe in the last 200 years. Take what happened when Haussmann, as he prepared to rebuild Paris, recognized that he needed more workers. Since France is predominantly Catholic, he brought in Catholic workers from Belgium and Germany. They were immediately attacked by French workers for being the wrong kind of Catholics. Coming back to today’s situation, when you feel exploited or when you feel your unions are getting devastated, there is going to be a reductionist construction, a scapegoating, of whoever is seen as the cause of these conditions. Racism is part of Europe’s history, profoundly so, but there has been a surge in the right wing—even in a murderous right wing—whose actions resemble those of terrorized people. I think that the disaster of economic loss—the impoverishment of the middle classes—and the lack of politicians who can really articulate an alternative are partly responsible for this movement.

NT: What forces would you say are responsible for this erosion of possibilities, these diminishing horizons, for the working class?

SS: The political logics at work in today’s economy are not, in my view, adequately captured by the discussion about inequality. Inequality has always been with us; inequality is a distributional question. I want to situate that distributional process, which inheres to all complex social forms, within a larger, systemic framework. I find that language like “growing inequality” or “rising poverty” ceases to be helpful at some point. For my latest book, I came up with the term “expulsions,” which I distinguish from the far more familiar “social exclusions,” in the sense that social exclusion happens inside a system. It’s an internal distortion. When I talk about expulsions, I argue that we’re seeing a multiplication of systemic edges in our society—edges of economic systems, political systems or simply “the system,” so to speak. Once you’ve reached that systemic edge, you’re dealing with an extreme condition, and in that sense an edge makes something visible. But at the same time, when you cross that systemic edge, you are expelled from the system completely, and you become invisible.

Finance is not about money, unlike the traditional bank. The traditional bank sells what it has: money. Finance sells something it does not have.
When the very long-term unemployed are no longer counted in the unemployment rate, they cease being, statistically speaking. They are material beings—you can see the bodies—but they are literally made invisible according to the standard statistics we use to explain what is happening in the economy. I argue that this expulsion has the effect of an economic cleansing. It allows the U.S. government, the Greek government, the Spanish government, whatever, to say, “We’re back on track; we have a little bit of growth now.” But it’s because they have eliminated all kinds of workers who would drag down the positive indicators. When a small farmer in India or a small shopkeeper in Greece commits suicide because s/he can’t sustain his or her business, which is happening more and more often, if that person does not declare bankruptcy before s/he commits suicide, it doesn’t get counted in the economy. It’s an invisible event. The challenge, then, becomes to understand what all is expelled from our standard economic measures.

We are living in a brutal period, partly because we have reached these extreme conditions but also because once those extreme conditions are in place, whatever crosses that edge becomes invisible. Rendering such conditions or trends invisible allows our leaders to speak of progress and stability. To me, this mix of negative developments is a defining feature of our time. It’s the opposite of the post–World War II era of mass manufacturing, with its boom in the construction of suburbs and highways—projects that expanded the demand for workers. Back then, the workers were also the consumers, a situation that produced incentives to pay a decent wage. That was a dynamic that in effect expanded the space of the economy, even taking into account the racism and exclusions that happened during that period. Today the dynamic is geared toward shrinking the space of the economy and pretending that all the people who have fallen out don’t exist.



Cover photo for Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy, 2014.

http://creativetimereports.org/2014/10/ ... me-summit/

[American Dream]

The Battle of Cable Street - October 4th 1936

In 1936, fascism was gaining ground across Europe. In Britain, Sir Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirted British Union of Fascists (BUF) portrayed Jewish people as the cause of the country’s problems. East London had the largest Jewish population in Britain and the announcement that Mosley and his Blackshirts planned a provocative march through the area on October the 4th was greeted with anger and a determination that it should be stopped. A petition was signed and local politicians tried to have the march called off - but to no avail.

On the day, up to 250,000 people gathered to defend the East End. There was a fierce battle with the police when they attempted to clear a path for the march and a barricade was erected and defended in Cable Street. People in their houses threw eggs, milk bottles and the contents of chamber pots from upstairs’ windows, whilst at ground level, marbles were rolled under police horses’ hooves. The march could not proceed and Mosley was ordered to abandon his plans. It was a blow against fascism and that night there was dancing in the streets.

The anti-fascists were made up of communist, socialist, anarchist, Jewish, and Irish groups amongst the local residents and far outnumbered the Blackshirts, and indeed the Metropolitan Police. It was a significant factor in the decline of the BUF prior to the second world war.

NO PASARAN!





Happy Cable Street Day - when the people of London said ‘fuck you’ to fascism.

[American Dream]

via Manchester Plan C

[American Dream]

"The Barriers come down: Antisemitism and the Coalitions of Extremes" by Dave Rich

http://www.thecst.org.uk/docs/rich%5Fes ... v%5F04.pdf

[American Dream]

http://roarmag.org/2015/10/welcoming-re ... on-future/

Welcoming refugees: our future is common

by Jerome Roos on October 13, 2015



The EU’s external borders are rapidly becoming untenable. Rather than resist, Europe should embrace its future as a continent of great diversity.

This piece was originally written for teleSUR English.

The “refugee crisis” of recent months has split Europe in two. But unlike the liberal press would have us believe, the main dividing line runs not between those states (like Germany) that have taken a more humane approach to the crisis by accepting more refugees, and those (like Hungary) that have shut their borders and cracked down violently on anyone attempting to cross them.

Rather, the real schism is the one between states and institutions that jealously guard their borders, clinging on to an exclusionary territorial logic that is rapidly becoming untenable, and the ordinary people on the ground – refugees, activists and locals alike – who are self-organizing solidarity beyond borders and creating a radically different kind of Europe from below.

The former play on the fears of the continent’s increasingly precarious middle classes to exploit short-term electoral opportunities and to transform the world’s largest migration flows since World War II into a “crisis of border control,” rather than the humanitarian crisis it really is. While some EU leaders – most notably Angela Merkel – have inclined towards a more lenient approach, their superficial compassion nevertheless betrays the same logic of control.

The latter, by contrast, are the true face of a changing Europe. From the beaches of Lesbos and Kos to the border crossings in the Balkans, from the fences at the Serbo-Hungarian border to the train stations of Munich and Vienna, and from detention centers across the continent to self-organized spaces like the refugee camp in Calais, the hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants who have made their way to Europe in recent months are injecting a healthy infusion of bottom-up social change into the lifeblood of a moribund European community.

In the process, they have inspired the birth of a transnational movement that is uniting Europeans across borders in solidarity with the newly arrived. Coming on the heels of the continent-wide solidarity movement with Greece around the July referendum, the “refugees welcome” mobilizations are already changing the face of European politics by decisively shifting discursive momentum away from the nationalists and xenophobes.

The nature and extent of the changes produced by these two simultaneous and interconnected processes can only be properly assessed in hindsight several years from now, but the long-term impact on European society is likely to be tremendous and irreversible.

For one, refugees are breaking down borders in the very act of crossing them. The large movements of human beings over the past months have revealed just how weak and unprepared Europe’s ailing nation states really are, and how ineffective the EU’s external border regime remains. Fortress Europe, for all its evils and atrocities, is far more porous than its defenders like to think (or want us to believe). In truth, its walls are being breached daily by the thousands.

As the influx of people intensifies, Europe is certain to throw up more fences and step up its external border patrols. But wherever there is a will, there is a way – and since the will for life will always be stronger than the capacity to withstand endless poverty, war and oppression, people will keep coming to Europe in search of a better future. And rightfully so.

To be sure, there will be immense individual suffering in the process – from the tragedies of sunken boats to the brutalities of forced deportation. At a more systemic level, however, the hundreds of thousands of people who are currently making their way into Europe illuminate an incontrovertible fact at the heart of twenty-first century politics: no matter how hard national governments may try, it will simply prove impossible to stop the immense flows of human beings who are bound to make their way across in the years and decades ahead. No amount of border fences or Frontex patrols will be able to stop them.

For an aging and privileged continent like Europe, this is actually a good thing: migration offers an opportunity to organically rejuvenate and enrich its greying societies. Merkel, for one, is well aware that with the lowest birth rate in the world, Germany is doomed without a large influx of labor power. For German capitalists, the Syrian exodus is nothing short of a godsend. Combined with a historical sense of guilt, naked opportunism explains at least part of Merkel’s relatively open-armed approach.

But regardless of the question whether migration is “profitable” or “desirable”, there is a much more elementary reality Europeans are going to have to confront somehow: like it or not, a decade and a half into the twenty-first century, mass migration is here to stay. The so-called refugee crisis of the summer of 2015 was really only just the beginning. This year some 850,000 people fled to Europe. Similar numbers, if not more, are expected next year, and millions more will join them in the years to come. Tens, if not hundreds of millions are likely to follow as a result of climate change in future decades.

How is Europe to adapt to such dramatic patterns of human relocation and the resultant demographic changes?

To begin with, anxious Europeans will have to place the actual numbers and the reality of mass migration in perspective: the 850,000 people applying for asylum in Europe this year really do not amount to very much on a total population of half a billion Europeans. The numbers also pale in comparison to the 4 million registered Syrian refugees in the region (Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt), or the 7.5 million internally displaced. Syria’s tiny neighbor Lebanon alone has taken in 1.3 million refugees – on a local population of 4 million. Seen in this light, it is difficult to understand what European leaders are complaining about.

Secondly, if Europeans are serious about halting the flows of desperate people pouring into the continent, they will have to stop endlessly reproducing the underlying causes of the refugee crisis and of mass migration more generally. Europe’s responsibilities in this respect are not just historical; they are equally contemporary. War, poverty and persecution remain the principal drivers of migration – and the West has had a hand in furthering all of those through foreign interventions, predatory financial and commercial practices, and support for authoritarian regimes across Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East. We will soon be able to add anthropogenic climate change to this list.

Third, if Europe really wants refugees and migrants to stop coming in “illegally” on inflatable dinghies and overloaded fishing boats, it will simply have to secure safe passage to those fleeing war, poverty and persecution. Nobody would pay in excess of 1.000 euros per head for a life-endangering boat journey across the Mediterranean if they could apply for their papers and permits abroad and pay 200 euros for a commercial flight to their destination of choice. Transport has to be “regularized” before migration can be regulated.

Lastly, to accommodate the people who have already arrived and those who will continue to arrive in the future, Europe itself will have to change from within. Instead of jealously guarding their borders and privileges, Europeans will have to embrace the international responsibilities that come with their great wealth and power. If the continent is to avoid falling into another episode of world-historical darkness, it will have to rekindle the ideal of “solidarity beyond borders” that was always supposed to lie at the heart of the postwar European project to begin with.

Luckily, the erosion of national borders is going hand in hand with the active mobilization of European society and of refugees and migrants themselves. As these developments continue to converge, it will become clearer and clearer that Europe is inexorably bound to become a continent of great diversity. Rather than resist this, Europeans should simply embrace the realities of the twenty-first century and welcome their new neighbors as their own. Our histories may differ but our future is common.

Jerome Roos is a PhD researcher in International Political Economy at the European University Institute, and founding editor of ROAR Magazine. Follow him on Twitter at @JeromeRoos.

[American Dream]

https://medium.com/@twlldun/the-sociali ... 3426fc10bf

The Socialism of fools.

It’s 2012 and Tower Hamlets council – which, as you may remember, was at the time run by a dubious group with links to Bangladeshi Islamists – orders the removal of this mural:



It’s not really hard to guess why. I mean, even the most charitable of us could see that a picture of a bunch of large nosed businessmen sat around a table made from the bodies of the poor, plotting their rule of the world, may be a teensy weensy bit “problematic”, as I believe the kids have it.

The artist in question – in true tabloid terms – “takes to Facebook” to angrily protest it being taken down. And in the thread of comments that follows, a voice pops up. An MP from a near-by constituency.



Now. Leaving aside the congestion of this paranoid stoner’s work with Diego Viera, the thing that stands out for me here is the opening – “Why?”.

When the Labour leadership election was in full swing, a lot of people misidentified as “Blairites” or “neo-liberals” (the latest meaningless buzzword that seems to encapsulate “everything I don’t like”, like its comrade-in-arms “Zionist” but with the racial element removed) asked some serious, hard questions about Jeremy Corbyn’s associations.

We – because I was one of that motley group of voices – were accused of accusing Jeremy of being antisemitic. But the truth is, I wasn’t accusing him of that. I don’t know many who were. My accusation – which ties into the “Why?” here – was a lot more simple. We were concerned that he didn’t know what antisemitism was. He didn’t acknowledge its existence when it came from sources he viewed as “progressive”. To him, antisemitism is Mosley marching through Cable Street.

Such a blindness may be excusable in any human being – it can mark you out as ignorant, or a naive holy fool rather than malign. It’s a flaw in an elected politician. It shows lack of judgement to a serious degree.

And it’s a huge flaw in an elected politician who has made as his foreign policy cause the one area that (as well as the decent and honest, or – as Anthony Julius describes them in his “Trials of the Diaspora” – the rational enemies of Israel – IE/ those who have a legitimate connection to the conflict and have cause to be *on the other side*) lures in Jew haters of all stripes. If you want justice for Palestine to be attainable, you have to put a firewall between the racists and the cause. Both as a moral consideration and as a tactical one.

But, as the stories show and the above illustrates, Jeremy isn’t very good at recognising that.

Again, this wouldn’t be a huge issue. All political parties have their outliers, their cranks and seers, their wild-eyed men of the back-benches, their awkward squad with awkward associations and awkward views.

But what is infuriating, for me, is that on being told of this, the Labour Party members dismissed or glossed over it. Ignored it or pretended it wasn’t an issue. And elected him. Made the decision that it’s support of Corbyn’s economic proposals could override any other considerations.

Today, there’s a protest march in Manchester. The usual assembly of union members and fringe groups are there, proclaiming a message that I in large part agree with. Protesting cuts and talking about public service. 13 year old Morgan is there with this banner:



What strikes me most about this is not Morgan. Look, he’s a 13 year old boy with silly reductionist ideas of the world. Fine. We were all stupid at 13. But he made this banner. His parents watched and let him. And let him leave the house. People are helping him carry it. People are standing around it. Nobody is saying to him “HANG ON, Rothschild bankers? LAD!”.

Excuse it all you like. Until the left accepts that it glosses over antisemitism in its ranks, that it turns a blind eye, or makes some hand-waving justification, until the left wakes up to this shit, then it betrays the morals that it claims to stand for.