Anti-fascism

Mr. Hoffman: Your idea of justice is the only obscenity in the room. You schtunk. Schande vor de goyim, huh?

The Court: Mr. Marshal, will you ask the defendant Hoffman to –

Mr. Hoffman: This ain’t the Standard Club.

The marshal: Mr. Hoffman –

Mr. Hoffman: Oh, tell him to stick it up his bowling ball. How is your war stock doing Julie? You don’t have any power. They didn’t have any power in the Third Reich, either.

The Court: Will you ask him to sit down, Mr. Marshal?

The marshal: Mr. Hoffman, I am asking you to shut up.

Mr. Rubin: Gestapo.

Mr. Hoffman: Show him your .45. He ain’t never seen a gun.

The Court: Bring in the jury, Mr. Marshal.

Mr. Rubin: You are the laughing stock of the world, Julius Hoffman; the laughing stock of the world. Every kid in the world hates you, knows what you represent.

Marshal Dobkowski: Be quiet, Mr. Rubin.

Mr. Rubin: You are synonymous with the name Adolf Hitler. Julius Hoffman equals Adolf Hitler today.

~“At the Chicago Conspiracy Trial,” Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin et al.[1]

This piece is being made available as a preprint edition of the double-volume Marxism and the Critique of Antisemitism special issue of Historical Materialism. Further additions will still be made before then. The final published version of this text will be made available on the Brill website in the coming months. We ask that citations refer to the Brill edition.All Illustrations are by Natalia Podpora.

Early in the research for this project, I interviewed a long-time comrade in Chicago, Joel Finkel, who I knew as a socialist, 4th Internationalist, and active anti-Zionist with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP).[2]  Eager to learn how his socialism, anti-Zionism and Jewish identity intersected, I sat him down for a long, nearly three-hour conversation at the famous Jewish deli in the strip mall zone west of the Loop, the last fragment of what used to be a thriving Jewish neighborhood before urban renewal and the expanding University of Illinois obliterated it -- a reminder that the suburbanization of Jews was done as much by bulldozer as it was funded by racially restricted FHA housing loans.  Like a number of other Jewish activists of his generation I have known through the years, Joel downplayed how much his Jewishness was central to his becoming a revolutionary: he wasn't religious, his parents were progressives but not in the Jewish left, and he underscored that the primary movers of his political life were objective and historical events such as the war in Vietnam and the civil rights movement.  He had a clear analysis of the contradictions of capitalism, the historical conjuncture of the 1960s, the role of Zionism in global imperialism, and thought of questions of personal identity as slightly foreign to his ears, as if I had asked him about his moon sign.  And then, perhaps two hours into the conversation about how he got involved in the movement and developed his political outlook, he choked up, flushed, and almost sobbed, "we couldn't let it happen to anyone else."  It, I asked?  "The Holocaust.  It couldn't happen again."[3] 

Finkel's formation is one I encountered often while reading memoirs and interviewing Jewish activists who were part of the New Left of the 1960s and early 1970s.  In another interview with Susan Eanet (now Klonsky), a former Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) activist and founder of the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) and later the new communist October League, explained her own dedication to Palestinian liberation through Holocaust memory.  After talking for several hours in her northwest Chicago home about her Jewish upbringing, about her father who was a founder of a liberal temple in Washington D.C., and about how that related to her anti-Zionist writings for the SDS newspaper New Left Notes, she finally explained:  "we couldn't be good Germans."[4]  Jews, she said, more than anyone, should know the price of the world's silence as a genocide is taking place.  Tellingly, also Mark Rudd framed his resistance to the Vietnam War in the exact same way in his memoir of SDS, saying he "can't be a good German.”[5]  "In my home, as in millions of Jewish homes, "Hitler" was the name for Absolute Evil," Rudd explains, going to further to say "only this time, it was us, the Americans."  Like Klonsky, Rudd evoked the Holocaust not to suggest that Jews are special victims of a unique tragedy or to justify or rationalize their behavior, but to explain why they felt a personal responsibility to oppose fascism and colonialism done in their name, either as Jews and/or Americans.  Shortly after her release from prison, for Weather Underground member Kathy Boudine recollected that her decision to support the Black Liberation Army's campaign of bank robberies and jailbreaks rested on her analysis that America was in the process of committing multiple genocides and that she, like Rudd and Klonsky, thought "a lot about Germany" during the Holocaust: "how do you live a life when your government is doing what its doing?"[6]  In other words, she neither could be a "good German."

The idea that there is a particular Jewish responsibility to oppose fascism and the genocidal race theory behind it was expressed clearly by another member of SDS and early friend of Rudd, David Gilbert.  "For myself and many other Jews in the movement," Gilbert wrote in his memoir, "the bedrock lesson from the Holocaust was to passionately oppose all forms of racism" explaining also that he because of the Holocaust, he could "never join the oppression of other people.”[7]  And even though Gilbert's describes his parents as apolitical, he asserts "they taught me racism was wrong" a conclusion drawn from witnessing the violence of antisemitism.[8]  Rudd also locates the meaning of the Holocaust not only with destruction of European Jewry, but specifically with "racism; that's what anti-Semitism was.”[9] "Racism" as an explanation of antisemitism does not locate antisemitism as something unique to Jews, but as part of a larger structure of white supremacy, in so far as it connects the persecution of Jews to the oppression of people of color. In this way Rudd connects his support for SNCC not only with a political project, but his own personal story.  "With the solipsism of a child," he writes of reading Anne Frank's diary and looking at the death camp tattoos of his relatives, and "saw myself among the dead.”[10]  For Rudd and for many Jews in the movement, their attachment to fighting racism was a way of articulating their own feelings about being Jewish.  As historian Arlene Stein suggests, "I developed an intense, vicarious identification with the struggles of African Americans" as a means to better understand "the collective experience of trauma" after the Holocaust.[11] While Stein articulates this as a form of displacement, for Rudd and others it was a way to passionately connect with and honor their Jewish heritage.

It is often assumed that the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and the emergence of the Black Power movement engendered a split between Jews and the New Left.[12]  This story is told by both progressive and reactionary historians alike, and is memorialized in iconic images such as the Jewish Defense League standing in front of a Brooklyn synagogue in sunglasses to “defend” it from a planned speech by Black Panther James Forman or Abbie Hoffman’s 1967 editorial for the Village Voice decrying to expulsion of the mostly Jewish white activists from Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (a position he soon, nonetheless, recanted after conversations with Stokely Carmichael and others).[13]  This split between Black Power and the anti-imperialist left is often said to coincide with the emergence of Holocaust memorialization.  Some, such as Norm Finkelstein understand the sudden rise of Holocaust memorialization in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a cynical move to “exploit Jewish suffering” for the project of Jewish nationalism, while others such as Michael Staub locates increased public expression of Holocaust memory within the context of a late 1960s Jewish revival.[14]  Either way, both narratives assume a tension between left-wing Jews and Black Power and anti-imperialism as given, and locate a new American Jewish commonsense of Jewish nationalism abroad and a quickening of Jewish identity politics at home as both totalizing and hegemonic.  The only problem with this narrative is that the most prominent, and visible, Jewish radicals of the 1960s and early 1970s – Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Mark Rudd, Susan Eanet/Klonsky, Rennie Davis, Dick/Mickey Flacks, David Gilbert – did not agree.  Not only did much of the Jewish New Left in organizations such as SDS and SWP continue to back the anti-Zionist Black Panther Party, many deployed Jewish memory of the Holocaust, the Red Scare, and antisemitism to formulate their revolutionary global politics. It is not so much that Finkelstein and Staub are incorrect, as their readings of a Jewish 1960s tend to write out of history how Jews in revolutionary – and non-Jewish -- organizations formulated a Jewish sensibility through Jewish memory, particularly of the Holocaust and the experience of right-wing antisemitism.

In this sense, Rudd, Klonsky, Gilbert, Hoffman, and Finkel’s deployment of the Holocaust speaks to ongoing and present debates about its meaning and relevance in the politics of Jewish memory and identity. There is a growing consensus that supposed silence among American Jews around the Holocaust was at best partial.  Scholar Hasia Diner counters the narrative that the Holocaust was "unspeakable" until the late 1960s, or that Jews refused to remember or honor the dead out of fear of antisemitism, or shame of victimhood.[15]  Diner documents how memorials, religious ritual, journal articles and art were created and disseminated by Jewish organizations, synagogues, and in private homes and community events.  Far from distant from the minds of Jewish Americans, the presence of the Holocaust reconstructed Jewish American life in personal and public ways.  Indeed, the Holocaust was a common enough reference point in Jewish life that Philip Roth's first published story in the late 1950s not only evokes the genocide, uses it as the punchline of an ironic joke.  Grossbart, the Jewish private who wants to avoid combat in the Pacific and leave base for treyf eggrolls on Passover, manipulates the scrupulous Sergeant Marx by suggesting Jews "let themselves get pushed around" in Germany and needed to "stick together."[16]  Indeed, one can read the entire collection of stories in Goodbye Columbus as a kind of meditation on the Holocaust, from "The Conversion of the Jews" to "Eli, the Fanatic."  The Jewish community in "Eli" are so desperate to not attract antisemitism they wish to ban a Yeshiva, but also so concerned about Jewish cultural continuance after the Holocaust, they do whatever their children ask of them, even convert to Christianity.  In evoking the Holocaust with irony and complexity, Roth signals less a silence on the topic, as much as an intimate knowledge of it and of the many ways it complicated and animated Jewish American life - a near decade before the 1967 War.

 Even for scholars like Diner acknowledge the "myth of silence" is a construction, however, there is an assumption that the Holocaust made the Jewish community fundamentally conservative and assimilationist.  As Norman Finkelstein documents, the 1967 Arab Israeli War sparked not only a wave of support for the victorious Israeli armies, government officials from the State Department to the Pentagon began to understand how Israel could be a strategic ally. “The Holocaust proved to be the best defensive weapon deflecting criticism of Israel,” Finkelstein writes.[17]  In service of Israeli nationalism, the Holocaust he argued was transformed from a fascist genocide that was part of a larger far-right racial project, to something very particular and “unique” that happened only to Jews.[18]  European historian Enzo Traverso takes this analysis a step further to suggest "the Shoah closed a cycle of European intellectual history, in which Jews had been a central part," transforming Jews from a "pariah" class to an integrated part of Western culture.  It is Henry Kissinger for Traverso, not Trotsky who inherits the meaning of the Holocaust in global politics.[19]  Citing the ways the Nuremburg Laws and American triumphalism celebrated both the inclusion of Jews into the fabric of mainstream American life and Israel into the sphere of the capitalist West, "the Jew" for Traverso has gone from being counter-modality to European modernity to its most ideal subject.  Citing both Israel and human rights law, Traverso argues that the "former trouble makers and disrupters of order had become its pillars.[20]  Historian of antisemitism Paul Hanebrink frames it another way:  as the victory over Nazi Germany became absorbed into the narrative of global American power, so did the Jews go from being a "Judeo-Bolshevik menace" to part of the "Judeo-Christian West.”[21] 

In an essay by Mark Tseng-Putterman in Protocols, he argues that the mobilization of the Holocaust not only justifies the state of Israel for a Zionist Jewish establishment, its very memory actually makes Jews less likely to see Israeli "culpability in the so-called conflict."[22]  For Tseng-Putterman, Holocaust narratives create a kind of "Jewish-exceptionalism" that serves as the ideological infrastructure for Zionism, and more broadly, blinds white Jews to ways in which they mobilize their own whiteness.  "Far from progressive," Tseng-Putterman continues, "the absolution of Jewish participation in white supremacy" by focusing on the Holocaust as the singular event defining antisemitism, "halts opportunities to challenge Jewish complicity."  Indeed, the article argues it is precisely through the American narrative of the Holocaust that Jews have been conscripted into the institutional relations of American liberalism and American empire.  That the U.S. can place itself as the protector of the Jews reinforces and can be understood to be the modality through which liberal white supremacist state maintains is legitimacy.  Not only are the Nuremburg Laws part of the legal superstructure of the global American empire, the incorporation of a certain kind of Jewish suffering is the way the state disavows its own history with eugenics and genocide.  "There is an order" to state violence, the author declares, and by centering the Holocaust as a primary part of that order, Jews literally whitewash their own complicity with whiteness and empire as well as allow the state to benefit from Jewish investments in a normative history of antisemitism.  In the order of state violence, the Holocaust is low on the hierarchy, and more silence, rather than less, is necessary.  The article suggests that Holocaust narratives cannot be mobilized outside of a context of whiteness and cannot but help, in such as a context, redeploy it. 

“Just as organized Jewry remembered The Holocaust when Israeli power peaked, so it remembered The Holocaust when American Jewish power peaked,” Finkelstein argues, suggesting that the Holocaust not only deflected criticism of Israel, but also deflected white Jews from criticism of their whiteness.[23]  As Jewish studies scholar Ben Ratskoff wrote in Jewish Currents, Jewish analogies to the Holocaust are the "narcissistic" means by which Jews "disavow" concern for and their complicity in white racism and the normative violence of liberalism.[24]  "2017 may have offered a strange solace" Tseng-Putterman writes, posing that antisemitism actually reassures Jews of their safety in the world, rather than threatens it, as it mobilizes the state in their defense.  Jewish memory of antisemitism not only exaggerates the threat of antisemitism, antisemitism is the very means by which Jews align their interests with the state – antisemitism is a form of state power.  Antisemitism in this formation, makes white Jews whiter; it solidifies their relationship to narratives and institutions of American power.  One may look no further than attacks against Jeremy Corbyn and progressive American socialists to see the ways in which a discourse of antisemitism protects the powerful, and is deployed as a weapon against democracy. 

Rudd, Klonsky, Gilbert and other New Left radicals articulate however a challenge both to the mainstream Jewish establishment’s Zionist conscription of the Holocaust, as well as to Traverso and Tseng-Putterman's narrative about post-Holocaust memory and Jewish identity.  While Traverso, Finkelstein and Tseng-Putterman are certainly accurate to point fingers at an increasingly reactionary Jewish establishment, their analysis tends to evacuate other possibilities for progressive Jewish life outside of or even oppositional to such institutions, with a logic, history, and subjectivity of its own.  Such discourse tends to flatten Jewish experience into an expression only of large – if quite powerful – Jewish institutions. As Michael Rothberg documents, Holocaust memory is "multidirectional," and emerged in the context of anti-fascism and de-colonial discourse in the 1940s and 1950s long before it emerged as a pillar for a muscular Israeli and/or U.S. nationalism.[25] While widely divergent in their political commitments and perspectives, both Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism and Aimé Césaire'sDiscourse on Colonialism, published in the early 1950s, locate both the origins of fascism and the roots of the Holocaust in European imperialism, in transnational, or perhaps supra-national projects of economic expansion and political repression.  Indeed, as Norm Fruchter wrote for the summer 1965 edition ofStudies on the Left, the wide-ranging anger at Hannah Arendt for her condemnation of both Jewish nationalists and Jewish leadership during and after the Holocaust was a markeddeparture for an American Jewish community that substituted the "secular values...of social justice, use of intellect, the pursuit of knowledge" for Zionism and its "myth of the victim which Jews tend to substitute for their history."[26]  This Rudd and Klonsky who do not wish to be "good Germans," the violence of fascism is not something that happens only to Jews, or can be accounted solely through Jewish history or Jewish victimization.  The violence of fascism is a structural part of imperialism, whether the genocidal levels of violence deployed against the Vietnamese during the U.S. invasion, or ethnic cleansing and militarism of the Israeli state.  The question for Jews is less how to memorialize the Holocaust as a uniquely Jewish tragedy, but rather what is the ethico-political stance the Holocaust requires of a Jew.

As Gilbert makes plain, Jewish survival is not the primary lesson the Holocaust imparts. While it is clear that Gilbert, Klonsky, Rudd, Deutscher and others understood Jews to be targets of fascist violence, they also understood that social solidarity, not Jewish particularism, or nationalism, was what Holocaust memory should mean. As Deutscher writes "I am a Jew by force of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated."[27]  Note the construction - it is not solidarity with other Jews that makes Deutscher Jewish, it is particular "force" that marks his passion and his solidarity.  It is the depth of commitment against persecution and extermination that makes the Jew.  While Gilbert does not explicitly say this, one could possibly derive that the lengths was willing to go, eventually to a life sentence in prison, marks the "force" of his solidarity, and hence his Jewishness. And yet Gilbert is also clear to normalize such feeling.  His parents, who he describes as apolitical, his father an Eisenhower Republican, mother a relatively liberal but not zealous Democrat, explicitly articulated that the lesson of the Holocaust was to stand against racism.  That this was the opinion of Jews who were otherwise politically in no way remarkable suggests less their idiosyncrasy by the articulation of a Jewish commonsense in the decades immediately following the Shoah, not an aberration.  When Rudd writes, "I saw myself among the dead" when he imagined the Holocaust as a child, it did not lead him to think Jews were exceptional - rather it led him into the struggle to oppose genocide and imperialism wherever he encountered it. 

Perhaps the most sustained engagement with the radical usable past of the Holocaust is Suzanne Weiss’ memoir, Holocaust to Resistance:  My Journey.  Weiss, a Polish survivor who spend the last years of the war in hiding and then in a Jewish orphanage in France, emigrated to the United States when two Jewish members of the Communist Party in New York adopted her in 1950.  The first time Weiss articulates herself as a Holocaust survivor in public however is many years later, during an official state visit by Ariel Sharon to Toronto in 2003.  Framing her own experience as both unique and yet at the same time part of larger structures of racialized state violence, she spoke the following at a rally outside of Sharon’s hotel:

Hitler's Holocaust is unique in history; nothing is 'similar' to it.  Still, many Israeli techniques -- the expulsions, the ghettoization, the pervasive checkpoints -- have a disquieting resemblance to Nazi methods. To oppose Sharon is not anti-Jewish....a united resistance can, like the anti-Nazi Resistance of my childhood, win out against the aggressors.[28]

Before this point, Weiss was no stranger to politics:  she had been a member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) since her teenage years, and had organized antiwar demonstrations, visited Cuba on an official delegation, and worked in heavy industry trying to form unions among other workers.  And yet it wasn’t until she undertook a personal journey first to Poland, then as a social worker among Holocaust survivors that she articulated the meaning of her experience:  “I wondered whether Holocaust survivors differed from survivors of other traumas, tragedies, or genocides, such as Palestinian families subjected to daily terror, the destruction of their families, and the loss of their homes, possessions, and homeland,” she asked. “Holocaust survivors, I concluded, must be addressed not through comparison with other historic disasters…Yet working with Holocaust survivors sharpened my awareness of the suffering of all peoples emerging from genocide and societal traumas.”[29]  This double turn, in which Weiss recognizes the specificity of Jewish trauma does not make it perfectly analogous to other forms of oppression, yet her increasing awareness – unlike Traverso and Tseng-Putterman’s claims – increases her feelings of solidarity with other oppressed people, especially with Palestinians. 

It’s also clear in Weiss’ narrative that her conclusions regarding the Holocaust are not a rupture with her family’s past or her experience, but rather as she articulates it, a final culmination.  Throughout her text she sprinkles comments from her mother, such as “’Jewish people have a natural affinity to Negroes seeking human dignity,’ Mom said” on walking past a lunch-counter protest, or “The Ku Klux Klan hated Jews just as much as they hated Blacks," noting a synagogue was dynamited the same week as a Black church.[30]  During the Suez crisis in 1956, Weiss’ father confirmed his continued critique of Zionism by noting “Israel is on the wrong side again,” aligned with imperial west.[31]   Weiss’ most succinct articulation of a Jewish anti-Zionist subjectivity was in high school.  Troubled one day when a Jewish friend ask if she was a Zionist, she replied “no, I’m Jewish.”  For Weiss, her Jewish identity both preceded the question of Zionism, and also excluded it.  When she asked her red-diaper baby boyfriend about the incident, he explained that a “Zionist is anyone, Jewish or not, who defense the settlement of Israel as the Jewish homeland.”[32] 

Neatly separating Zionist politics from Jewish identity, Weiss’ sense of Jewish identity was reaffirmed, and reflected that Jews will experience antisemitism wherever they go, no matter the location or country – and couldn’t see how a nation-state would solve such a question.  She asked her rhetorically, “wouldn’t it be a convenient place to get rid of us all at once?” In this way Weiss both articulates an anti-Zionist common sense, in which Zionism is something both alien from her point of view, but also troubling:  she didn’t understand why it seemed important to her friend when it was something that seemed so far, so removed.  And her response – though equally laconic, was common diasporic reason – antisemitism is global, it makes sense then to be a global and dispersed people, on the move.  More than anything else, it was the brevity of the passage that was remarkable – in less than a page in a 300 page memoir, the question of Zionism was settled in her mind.  Are you a Zionist?  No I’m Jewish, seems paradoxical, yet it is the governing logic of the 1960s Jewish New Left.

While the central political “journey” in My Journey is from Holocaust survivor to revolutionary, the physical journey Weiss undertakes is from Poland, to France, to the United States, and then finally, in the 1980s, back to Poland.  While one cannot call it kind of reverse-Aliyah back to Europe, it is clear that Weiss finds a kind emotional and historical sense of closure by visiting the towns in which her family once lived.  For Weiss the return back to Poland is filled both with melancholy and also optimism. She travels to the Jewish cemetery in Piotrkow, where her mother and grandmother ran a bakery.  Finding the cemetery “overgrown with weeds” and the townspeople unconcerned with its upkeep, Weiss writes that “alone, I listened to the melancholic murmur of the breeze swaying leaves” before returning to Warsaw.[33]  Yet while in Warsaw, she is heartened to learn that the Solidarnosc movement, which the SWP supported, printed “anti-racist leaflets and posters…as proof that the union stood firm against xenophobic sentiment.”[34]  These twin feelings, that the murder, and erasure of her family from Poland, and the “Polish Spring” with the Solidarity movement, suggests that whatever her fight around Jewish identity and the Holocaust may be, there are European problems to be resolved in Europe.  The entire journey of the text, from survival to finally awakening of the political implications of the Holocaust, live within a political cycle around questions of capitalism, fascism, human rights, the state, and Jewish memory.  Israel’s only presence in the text is read only as an interloper, literally – as Ariel Sharon visits Toronto, much to the dismay of the Weiss and her comrades. 

The Anti-Zionism of the Jewish New Left

It is often assumed that with some exceptions, that the emergence of Holocaust memory among American Jews coincided with general American jubilance over the Israeli victory in the 1967 War.  As Norm Finkelstein writes, “American Jewish elites suddenly discovered Israel” after the Six-Day War, while Keith Feldman takes this step further to suggest, after Norm Podhoretz, “nothing less than the mass conversion of the American Jews to Zionism.”[35]  Amy Kaplan, Eric Dollinger and Melanie McAlister also document how the U.S. press and much of the Jewish and non-Jewish institutional world deeply identified with Israeli's lightening victory over Arab states, contrasting Israeli missiles blowing up Soviet jets before soaring over Africa to free hostages with "with images of Americans fleeing in helicopters from rooftops in Saigon."[36]  Many Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, identified on a personal level the Israeli victories as if they were their own.  For many scholars of Jewish life, the sudden identification of the United States with Israel, combined with Jewish class ascendency after World War II, marks the end of Jewish otherness in the United States:  internationally, and domestically, Jews had entered the mainstream of American life.  Rudd’s narrative it would seem, asks us to question that assumption.

On the level of large Jewish institutions, this narrative of Jewish “conversion to Zionism” and the sense of belonging it implies would seem to bare itself out.  Historian Matt Berkman notes how such jubilation followed the money:  he tracks how after the 1967 War, a massive institutional shift in communication strategies, donor accounts, and political priorities towards supporting Israel -- even among mainstream Jewish institutions such as the American Committee for Judaism (ACJ) that had up to this point remain non-Zionist.[37]  Prior to the late 1960s, most Berman comments that large Jewish institutions mostly focused on the plight of Jews in the U.S., including refugees and Holocaust survivors.[38]  This shift in funding not only suggests a turn to Zionism as definitional for American Jewish life, it also suggests that large Jewish institutions felt Jews were no longer, in the main, a special case needing extensive extra-governmental support.  And more than this, for many Jewish liberals who were turning away from what they understood as the excesses of the radical left, Israel seemed to be like America, only better - "there were no draft dodgers in Israel," historian Michael Fischbach writes of the new pro-Israel consensus, and Vietnam War, no burning ghettos, no drug addicts, no crime.[39]  This merger between liberals and conservatives on Israel was perfected by Otto Preminger and Dalton Trumbo's 1960 film Exodus, based on Leon Uris' novel of the same name.  As Kaplan notes, it frames Uris' narrative of Israel's founding as violent retribution for the Holocaust, while also maintaining concern with international legitimacy, the United Nations, and world peace after World War II.[40]  The new support for Israel seemed to both be a progressive war of liberation by a persecuted people, while also magically defeating America’s enemies supported by the Soviet Union.  Jews were America’s best story.  

For center-right and even liberal commentators such as Nathan Glazer and Irving Howe, supporting Israel took on a "mystical" importance, cementing Israel for the first time as not only a center, but the center of Jewish American life.[41]  For liberals such as Howe and liberals-turned-neocon such as Glazer, Jews who were outspoken in their antagonism against Israel or support for Palestinians, ceased to be Jews. As troubling as Howe and Glazer's conclusions are for their gate-keeping of Jewish identity, there are a number of radical historians who ironically uphold Glazer and Howe's thesis:  as Keith Feldman argues in his study on the role of Palestine in the formation of American empire, "both the Jewish left and the Jewish right felt threatened by the Black Power movement," especially Black Power activists' critique of Israel after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.[42]  For the right, the Black left was dangerous because of their attention to Jewish practices of economic exploitation and their rising class status.  Jews Glazer felt, were singled out as the enemy of Black Power.  While for Feldman, the Jewish left does not descend into such racist rhetoric, Black Power organizations' increasingly hostile stance towards Israel and ouster of Jewish activists from Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) meant for them the historic and often quite material alliance was over.  In titling his chapter "Jewish Conversions," Feldman documents the right-ward drift of former Jewish leftists, as their support for Zionism and multiethnic democracy isolated them from the radicalizing currents of the anti-imperialist left. 

While the convergence of Holocaust memory and support for the state of Israel became a mainstay of Jewish institutional life on both the center and right, it is often forgotten how marginalized Jewish centrists and conservatives felt themselves to be in the 1960s, especially on the question of Zionism.  Indeed, if anything, the Jewish mood by the late 1960s was quite the opposite: from the overheated rhetoric of the Jewish Defense League (JDL) to the more dulcet tones of Jewish professors and the Jewish press, the assumption was that Zionism was in crisis on the Left, even and perhaps especially because of the left's Jewish constitution.  The sense among Jewish right wing radicals, and liberal intellectuals seemed to be that Jewish youth sided far more with SDS than with the IDF, let along the JDL.  The mood was so dire that in 1970, a conference was convened by the Histradrut Cultural Exchange Institute in New York's Arden House, gathering over a dozen leading liberal to left Jewish intellectuals to discuss the crisis. The lineup included sociologist Nathan Glazer, socialist historian Irving Howe, distinguished Hebrew professor Robert Alter, Mordecai Chertoff, Harvard professor Seymour Lipset, journalist Leonard Fein among others, and with the exception of Noam Chomsky, there was broad consensus that the Jewish left had turned against Zionism and thus, in their reading, the Jewish people.  For Jewish activist and journalist Leonard Fein, he summed up the mood of the New Left by saying "considerable intellectual support the left once had for Israel is gone.”[43]

One fact that perhaps also would puzzle a contemporary readership was how Jewish these dignitaries of liberal Jewish life also assumed the left to be. Irving Howe laments that “Jewish boys and girls, children of the generation that saw Auschwitz, hate democratic Israel and celebrate as revolutionary the Egyptian dictatorship…a few go so far as to collect money for Al Fatah.”[44]  Buried in Howe’s lament is not only the grief over Jewish youth’s rejection of Zionism, but that in their revolutionary fervor, they are “indifferent to the antisemitism of the Black Panthers,” suggesting that Black Power and Jewish nationalism are diametrically opposed.[45]  Seymour Lipset also notes accurately that the "New Left is disproportionately Jewish," and concludes that then the New Left Jewish youth have joined a tendency " opposed to the Jewish people as a people.[46]  For Lipset and many others on the panel, the post-Bolshevik left has long opposed Jewish nationalism and Jewish culture, and the opposition to the state of Israel was not about American empire, but rather, the long war of the left to destroy Judaism in the name of universalism and advocacy for the most marginalized.   While some such as Walter Laqueur and Chertoff, this was explicable as a Jewish rebellion against one's liberal Zionist parents, and attributable the wider youth movement.[47] And for others such as Lipset, joining the left is blended with the desire to "assimilate" and to use the left as a vehicle to become fully American, for nearly all, there was an assumption that Yet for most, there was a broad recognition that the New Jewish Left, like the Old Jewish Left, was hostile to Jewish nationalism, or "particularism," especially as it manifested in the Israeli state.  For Glazer, this was all about race, as he cogently and perhaps aptly summed up the many alliances and solidarities of the left by saying bluntly:  "the New Left supports the Arabs because the blacks do" - which for Rudd and Klonsky would be a point of pride; for Glazer, an act of "sycophancy.”[48]  For nearly all the authors, again, Chomsky excepted, "there are Jewish interests and it is the thrust of the New Left to oppose them.”[49]  Or as SWP leader Gus Horowitz dryly summarized in 1971, "the Zionist forces are...on the defensive.  They are much less confident of public sympathy than they used to be.”[50]

What makes the New Left's anti-Zionism legible beyond just the opinions of individual activists and appear as an existential threat to Zionists and the Jewish right is that anti-imperialism had become perhaps the central slogan, the ideological anchor of New Left movements by the late 1960s.  The U.S. invasion of Vietnam was increasingly understood as part of the left commonsense as less a policy mistake, or even a crime, but an expression of U.S. imperialism, and one episode in a global fight between the Third World and the West.  As Martin Luther King reframed the War in his famous "Beyond Vietnam," no longer was the call for the U.S. to fulfill its own principles of democracy, but rather to grasp U.S. was on the "wrong side of a worldwide revolution," a phrase that would be understood commonly in the 1960s to mean the anticolonial uprisings from Vietnam to Cuba to Algeria to Ghana to South Africa.  King's shift in this moment was not only surprising to many because he "broke the silence," but he also signaled his support for New Left and their analysis of the War and the role of America in the world.  This connection between Black liberation and the struggle against imperialism was the core focus of the Black Panther Party, and came to be the dominant frame of radical analysis for the leadership and much of the membership of SDS.[51]  As David Gilbert summarized Eldridge Cleaver, “You’re either part of the solution or part of the problem; either on the side of the people of the world or of imperialism.”[52]  For the Jewish intellectuals gathered by the Center for Cultural Exchange, they understood very well what this broad global analysis would mean for Jewish nationalism - and indeed, the 1967 War seemed to cement Israel in the minds of much of the New Left as yet another imperial power.[53]

While high profile Jewish, left wing writers and activists such as I.F. Stone, Isaac Deutscher, Irwin Silber of the National Guardian and Noam Chomsky were publicly critical of Israel after the 1967 War, what obscures the Jewish left critique of Zionism obscured today (even if it was quite clear in the 1960s), is that the liberation of Palestine was understood by members of SDS and SWP as part of a larger anti-imperialist struggle against Western capitalism.  Rather than summarize the conflict as between competing religions or ethnic groups, SDS, SWP and their allies tended to frame Palestine, much as they did the struggle in Vietnam and Cuba, as part of a wider global conflict between the Third World and the capitalist West.  As Richard Saks, a member of SDS and later the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), framed it: in so far as “imperialism was at the center of our analysis of American capitalism,” we also understood that “Israel was an outpost of American empire.”[54] As Rudd summarized, support for Palestinians “It distinguished the true anti-imperialists from the liberals” and he wanted to be on the side of anti-imperialism.[55]   It was an issue that marked the New Left’s rupture with the liberal 1960s consensus, clarifying that the U.S. failure in Vietnam or the unpopularity with the draft were not particular issues to be solved, but systemic crises in a world system they meant to overthrow.  In 1968 the SDS leadership decided to explain its position Palestine in a series of articles by Eanet a staff writer for New Left Notes and someone close to leadership.  Eanet also expressed in an interview that it would be strategic for the articles on Palestine to be authored by someone who was not only known to be Jewish, but the daughter of the founder of a major synagogue in Washington D.C.[56]

Despite or perhaps because of Eanet’s background, her articles to do not frame the conflict in the Middle East as a Jewish and Arab issue, but rather in an editorial note describing the series, the editor argues that "outside of Vietnam" the "movement against imperialism in the Arab countries....may be the leading struggle against U.S. imperialism in the world today."[57]  Turning the New Right thesis that Israel is like America, but better, Eanet describes a country like the United States, only perhaps worse - as the dispossession of Palestinians from their land and Israel's expansive agenda is far from complete, and the Israeli working class saturated with racism. Eanet marks in the beginning of the article that the "situation in Palestine was analogous to the flight of early colonists in America...to a land already occupied by Indian people." Noting that the it was the racism of early Jewish colonists that prevented them from joining with the Arabs against the British, Eanet also argues that it was Jewish racism that informed the Kibbutzim labor policy of hiring only Jews, not socialism.  Divesting Palestinians from their land and "means of production" in the cities was just a start:  "Zionism was an ever expanding policy," Eanet writes, and given the "metaphysical concept of a 'homeland' and 'chosen people'" the Israelis will "expand as they can militarily."  With the rise of Al-Fatah and its "support of the Arab masses" one should not only see the analogy to Vietnam, but the analogy to the United States:  one can stop an Indian War before it is over.  This analogy was furthered by a second SDS pamphlet by Larry Hochman, who argued the "fundamental...central issue in Southwest Asia is the fact that a Jewish state has been established in the Arab midst without the invitation or consent of the indigenous population...at the aegis of Western imperial rule."[58]  

The SWP was generally aligned with SDS and with Black power positions on Israel-Palestine.  And like SDS, it was largely the Jewish members who argued and debated the policy on Palestine, at least in print – Peter Buch, Pete Seidman, Gus Horowitz, and John Rothschild.  In part the Jewish authorship of SWP pamphlets was explained by the need to defend the organizations against claims of antisemitism.  But it also seemed to come from a sincere desire by the Jewish members to not only shield the organization, but also address the ways in which SWP’s position is derived from a long, and proud, history of American Trotskyists taking a principled stand against Zionism, antisemitism and fascism, even when other Marxists were quiet.  The adopted resolutions and supporting materials, later published as a small book of around 80 pages titled “Israel and the Arab Revolutions,” was chiefly authored by Gus Horowitz, one of the few Jews in SWP who had grown up in an orthodox, Zionist household.  The pamphlet offered two major lines of argument – the first, that the Palestinian movement for self-determination was, unlike Nasserism and Ba’athism, a democratic people’s movement of the broader Middle East, and as such, an “advance” over the anti-colonial bourgeois nationalism that had come before in the region.  And because the movement was democratic in nature, Horowitz argued, it had the real chance to “appeal to the Jewish masses” and win them “away from Zionism.”[59] 

While SDS approached Israelis through the lens of “white skin privilege,” Horowitz tended to view the Israelis as both exploited by nationalism at the same time as they formed an “oppressor nationality” in relationship to Palestinians.[60]  Arguing that SWP is not only the strongest voice “against Zionism” on the left, it also is the “strongest opponent of anti-Semitism,” Zionism for Horowitz “does not advance the interests of the Jewish people – in Israel or anywhere else in the world.[61]  While Horowitz grants that Zionists have constructed their own “Hebrew nationality” that is distinct from diasporic Jewish identity, a Jewish-only state aligns Jews with “imperialism” and with their own bourgeoisie.[62]  It is for this reason that Jews in Israel do not have an independent working-class movement, fear invasion from the Arab world, and fear their growing pariah status globally – Israelis have sacrificed the possibility for peaceful cohabitation with their neighbors for a violent bourgeois nationalism.  Yet unlike the Arab national governments that are neither serious about Palestinian liberation and will deploy antisemitic rhetoric, Horowitz argues, the democratic nature of the Palestinian liberation struggle offers a place for Jews within it, if they are willing to give up on an ethnic state.  The fear that Palestinians will drive Jews into the sea is not the fear of antisemitism, but fear of revolution:  “to consider that the Arab revolution will necessarily threaten the national oppression of the Israeli Jews is an unfounded fear of the revolution itself, a fear which is incited for counterrevolutionary reasons by the imperialists and Zionists.”[63]  The situation for Jews in Israel Horowitz concludes, is not that of a religious or ethnic minority as it is in other countries, but as an oppressor – and the liberation of Palestinians will be their own liberation. 

While neither Eanet nor Horowitz identify themselves as Jewish in their articles, nor do their articles claim a particular Jewish subjectivity, for them as well as the other two-dozen or so New Left revolutionaries I interviewed, they understood their socialist anti-imperialism, including their anti-Zionism, as a continuation rather than a rupture with their Jewish sense of self.  For some such as Horowitz, Saks and SDS activist Steve Goldman, they identified primarily as Marxists and anti-imperialists, and yet, toward the end of the interview, echoed similar sentiments, that the “Jewish tradition” is to “side with the underdog,” and “the oppressed,” and because of this, most Jews are “less inclined to anti-communism,” and probably “more likely to sympathize with people of color.”[64]  This position – that they were both inside a tradition they could define and yet also, not defined by the tradition – was a common, perhaps the most common, sentiment among the activists – so much so I might almost call it a kind of Jewish subjectivity itself.  For for former SWP organizer Linda Loew, who like Saks came from a red diaper background, she summed it up simply by saying that she both liked being part of a multi-ethnic movement in which she could organize with farmworkers, students, and civil rights activists, and not feel that she was burdened by a sense of identity – which she thought of as her father’s intense sensitivity around perceived and real antisemitism.[65]  Yet she also prided herself on being the kind of Jew who opposed Zionism, and felt very much that she was carrying on the legacy of her parents.  “I didn’t feel there was a break,” she said, between her life in the New Left and her parents’ life, either in the kind of revolutionary work she was committed to in the SWP, or with her sense of what it meant to be Jewish.  Like Yuri Slezkine’s commentary on Sholem Aleichem’s “Tevye the Dairyman” Hodel running off to be a revolutionary – even or especially an anti-Zionist one -- is in a larger Jewish sense, still all in the family.[66] 

New Left Anti-Fascism and (Jewish) Red Scare Memory

One reason for a Jewish left to oppose Zionism during the 1960s while also affirming a Jewish subjectivity may have been due to the way progressives tended to see the post-war prosperity in very different terms than large mainstream Jewish institutions such as AJC and ACJ and their adherents.  As Marc Dollinger writes, “American Jews celebrated the postwar consensus,” enjoying their “integrating into the suburbs” and finding “common ties” with their new often white, Christian neighbors.[67]  Along with this new consensus, of course, there was also a rapid rise in class ascension, fueled by the GI Bill, university entrance in greater numbers, and the beginning of the end of restrictive covenants backed by FHA loans – all things, it should be noted, denied to most African-Americans during the same period.  Yet while large numbers of Jews ascended into the middle class, for the many hundreds of thousands of Jews on the Communist and socialist left of the 1940s and the decade of the 1950s, the era of course, looked quite different.  For Jews on the left, whether in the Communist Party, as members of Communist affiliated unions and organizations, or simply people with strong left sympathies, the era appeared less as the birth of a new post-war consensus, and more like the emergence of a post-war fascism.                                                                                                                      

Several years before Philip Roth ironized Jewish assimilation in Goodbye Columbus, Jewish Communist writer Howard Fast published a different tale about Cold War Jewish life in the United States:Peekskill USA.  The short book is a first-person narrative of Fast’s role in the infamous Peekskill riot of 1949, in which gangs of right-wing vigilantes twice attacked the concert goers and supporters of Paul Robeson.  Fast was part of the initial organizing committee, using his name and reputation to help publicize the event, and on the first night, was also one of the concert attendees who organized resistance to the mobs: he and two dozen other men fought off the fascist attackers, protecting the concert space while others fled to safety. Fast’s analysis, supported by the Civil Rights Congress that urged him to write it, was that this event was the opening salvo of a new form of fascism that was emergent in American life.  As Fast writes, “thePeekskill affair was an important step in the preparation for the fascization of America and for the creation of receptive soil for the promulgation of World War III,” as a way he concluded to both prepare the U.S. for necessary “violence” to put down the left, and also begin preparations for new military conflict.[68]  As one of the many instances of “force and violence against the left” Fast saw the coming Cold War, what Dollinger refers to as “consensus,” as less a coming sign integration and liberal democracy, than as a right-wing purge of the left, and the intensification of a militarized state.[69]

The racial and political coordinates of the vigilante violence were quite stark to Fast.  The crowd that assaulted the concert goers shouted racist and antisemitic slurs, “screaming at us in a full frenzy…full of the taste of death,” promising that “every n- bastard dies here tonight!  Every Jew bastard dies here tonight.”[70]  Rather than just a random event or stray racial epithets, Fast cites both the ACLU and the Civil Rights Congress documentation of how both riots were premeditated, and done in full view of local and state police.  Fast not only witnessed police intermingling with the vigilantes, he watches as a cop “beat the windshield of the car in with his club while he drew his revolver with another hand, while “another policeman” was “smashing in the windshield of a car that asked for directions.”[71]  The racist and antisemitic rhetoric Fast also documents as systemic and premeditated.  Stickers were printed and plastered all over town reading “COMMUNISM IS TREASON.  BEHIND COMMUNISM THE JEW” and a statement from one of the groups organizing the riot read:

You Jews, and we mean you Communist Jews, have made yourself obnoxious and offensive to the American people, and you are only using the American Negro as a “Front” in your criminal un-American activities.[72]

Fast additionally documented an attempt to assassinate Robeson, with a sniper’s nest discovered in the trees behind the stage, and even before the full assault on the concert goers, black people were dragged out of cars in town and beaten in broad daylight.  Fast described the mob not as “lumpen” but as “prosperous-appearing men, well set up, well dressed, real estate men, grocery clerks, lunch counter attendants…” – not a rabble but “decent citizens” and civic leaders.[73]  It was an organized assault, from the top down.

Fast said he wrote the book to wake Americans up, for he felt Americans have an “amazing resistance…toward” the “acceptance” of an “unmistakable phenomenon – the cultivation and growth of American fascism.  We simply do not believe it.”[74]  As if to prove his own point, Fast himself documents multiple moments in the text when he either refuses to recognize what he is seeing, or refuses to listen to advice from people who had a better understanding of what transpired that week.  Frequently “Mrs M,” his children’s nurse, and a Black woman, admonished Fast for not understanding how “white folks behave” and left town before the second concert.[75]  Likwise, the night of the second concert, Fast frequently documents how he fails to comprehend what he sees:

"Then suddenly we had to slow down. The car ahead of us had fared worse than we; every window was smashed, even the rear window. I remember saying to R-

"The road is wet. They must have gotten the gas tank or the radiator."

There was a dark wetness that flowed out of the car ahead of us; and then we realized that it was blood, but an enormous flow of blood that ran from the car that way and into the road."

Even at the level of Fast's sentence, the "but" creates an opposition between what he sees and the enormity of it, revealing his own sense of unreality as he faced yet again another barrage of violence on the way out of the concert grounds. Through his Black nurse and his own feelings of unreality, Fast quietly documents not only the slowness of his own perceptual response, the much longer lineages of fascism his nurse seems far more aware of: “how white folks behave.”

Perhaps the most important Communist organization to make the connection between the U.S. and home-grown fascism was the Civil Rights Congress (CRC).   Founded in 1946 to replace the International Labor Defense, it took an explicitly antifascist approach to organizing against racism and anti-union suppression.  Placing the Holocaust at the center of its analysis of capitalism, William Patterson, its director, compared the fate of African-Americans in the United States to Jews under the Holocaust.  Furthering the analysis of Negritude theorist Aimé Césaire, Patterson held the origins of fascism lay in colonialism and slavery, systems that in an era of crisis, returned back to Europe to form fascism.  Following this logic, perhaps the CRC's most famous and controversial act was the We Charge Genocide petition delivered to the United Nations in 1951, claiming that under the U.N. charter, the United States was committing genocide against African-Americans, and U.N. intervention against lynching and Jim Crow was necessary.  What was remarkable about the CRC was that it was one of the few organizations with a sizeable grassroots Jewish and African-American membership and leadership to denounce the Rosenberg trial as a site of fascist violence.  One might even say that because of its Jewish and African-American members and leadership, it was uniquely suited to make such comparisons.  Unlike the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the NAACP that both denounced the Rosenbergs, the CRC connected the execution of the Rosenbergs to lynchings of African-Americans in the deep south and Nazi genocide in Europe[76].  The CRC, like the Communist Party and later the BPP saw the violent backlash against Communism, including the execution of the Rosenbergs, the bloody riot at Peekskill against Paul Robeson, and the jailing of Communists under the Smith Act as signs of incipient fascism.  Had the CRC not been banned in 1956 as a "subversive organization" under the same Act, it is very possible that it would have been among the groups sponsoring the BPP's "United Against Fascism" conference.  

Stanley Aronowitz's 1960s pamphlet on the specificity of American fascism likewise connects the Holocaust to the "systematic and conscious genocide against generations of blacks, both North and South," linking the Nazi mass murder to "lynchings" and the "brutality" with which "American Indians" were treated by an "advanced industrial country.”[77]  Aronowitz, who comes out of the left-labor tradition and was not allied with SDS, nonetheless saw in the Panther's description of the United States as fascist something that aligned with a longer left tradition in the United States.  Fascism for Aronowitz, is not merely a kind of lower middle-class populism, but a modality of rule that arises when the traditional modes of parliamentary hegemony are no longer sufficient to resolve contradictions or quell rebellion.  But rather than see fascism as a departure from normative modes of rule, fascism exists within and is an expression of U.S. liberal institutions, founded as they were on forms of capitalist violence.  Thus Aronowitz concludes, much like the CRC, that the "anticommunist purges" of the late 1940s and 1950s constituted a "prefascist stage" of American capitalism, which culminated in the "public trials of countless communists...the murder of Rosenbergs....witchhunts against trade unions....and the McCarren Act" which banned any organization affiliated with the Communist Party.[78]  Unlike the Zionists who might refer to the Holocaust as a form of Jewish exceptionalism, or radicals such as Tseng-Putterman who would order the Holocaust on a hierarchy, the CRC, Aronowitz, the CP and others thing of racial genocide and fascism in its many intersecting forms as a totality of capitalist rule. 

In this context, it makes sense that the most serious left-wing pamphlets and articles on antisemitism in the 1960s would appear from Marxist organizations.  While most New Left organizations had significant Jewish presence, their considerations centered on defending groups like SNCC and the BPP against charges of antisemitism for calls against Zionism.  In part because there is a lengthy Marxist literature on antisemitism, and in part from their own analysis of the role antisemitism plays in the construction of fascism, both the CPUSA and SWP devoted extensive resources to discussing the present role of antisemitism in America and its relationship to Zionism and the right.  Both CP and SWP publications do not single out antisemitism as a transcendent evil, nor mark the Holocaust as a singular event in human history.  Like Marcuse and the BPP, they locate the Holocaust within the larger structures of capitalism and imperialism, and see antisemitism as a structural and reoccurring feature of capitalist life.  In collection of essays in late 1970s on antisemitism and Zionism from Jewish Affairs, Communist author Hyman Lumer documents still active presence of antisemitism in American life.  Quoting from a University of California study, Lumer writes that two-thirds of Americans are antisemitic, one of third hold such views "private," another third are "outspoken antisemites" and a last tenth "advocate doing something to take 'power' from the Jews.”[79]  Lumer roots antisemitism in capitalism and imperialism, and in doing, places the "Nazi Holocaust" alongside the "millions of Africans" who "suffered death at the hands of slave traders" and the "genocidal extermination of the Indian people in the Western hemisphere.[80]  Like Hannah Arendt, Lumer locates antisemitism in both the economy in so far as he documents Jews' exclusion from "top executive and administrative positions" in banks, corporations, and elite universities, but he primarily aligns antisemitism as part of a political formation, the far right.[81]  "With a sharp swing toward reaction on the part of the Nixon administration....fascist elements...rise in an open, virulent expression of antisemitism," Lumer argues, further documenting the "desecration of synagogues" in recent months.[82]  Lumer who was one of the members of the Communist leadership who went underground in the 1950s and later arrested and jailed for a year under the Taft-Hartley Act for "conspiring to lie about membership in Communist Party" as an organizer in a labor union, was very familiar with both the fascist and antisemitic nature of the American state.  Like generations of Marxist critics before him, Lumer locates the rise of antisemitism as a means to deflect from the power of global capitalism, and shield the ruling classes from scrutiny. 

The specificity of antisemitism for the left, was not then simply an afterthought.  Pete Seidman, a red diaper baby whose father lost his job during the red scare, wrote the position paper for SWP on antisemitism.  While Seidman had been personally aware of antisemitism from a young age, as he was bullied and school and his father was a blacklisted former communist, it was the experience of being attacked by the ADL for SWP's support for Palestinians that goaded him into serious study on the question.  What is perhaps most remarkable about Seidman's study is the emphasis it places on the failures of liberal democracy to protect Jews from structural antisemitism both before and after WWII.  Antisemitism, for Seidman, is less a means for market liberalism to disavow the racial modalities of capital accumulation as Tseng-Putterman and Ratskoff suggest, than a structural part of the liberal state itself.  Focusing on the Roosevelt administration, Seidman shows how even while Roosevelt made token gestures toward Jewish inclusion and courted Jewish leaders of well-heeled organizations, on its most fateful policy decision, whether to allow Jewish refugees from Europe fleeing fascism, Roosevelt collaborated with assimilationist Jewish organizations to keep Jewish refugees out.  Not only did the Roosevelt administration not raise quotas, it intervened to ensure that even existing quotas were not filled, even after Kristallnacht made the Nazis' plans quite clear.  This did not change even after the full knowledge of the Holocaust was widely shared:  Roosevelt and later Truman's policy of keeping Jewish refugees out of the United States remained -- fearing that Jews, as the Nazis felt, would bring with them communism and other "unassimilable" ideas.  For Seidman, the Roosevelt administration's refusal to allow Jewish refugees was entirely in line with the antisemitic culture of assimilation, enthusiastically embraced by many Jewish organizations, including B'nai B'rith and the AJC, which felt that becoming "good Americans" was important than rescuing Jews from the Holocaust.  Seidman goes so far as to accuse the Roosevelt administration of conscious antisemitism, noting that despite the "carefully cultivated reputation as a friend and benefactor of the Jews," placed a know antisemite and fascist sympathizer, Breckinridge Long, in charge the administration's Jewish refugee policy.[83]

This article explores how Britain's Black Power movement challenged the political outlook of the anti-fascist left in the 1960s-70s. While the established left interpreted the National Front (NF) as an aberrant threat to Britain's social democracy, Black political groups foregrounded the systemic racial violence of the British state. By addressing intensifying racial oppression during a critical early phase in the transition to neoliberalism, they prefigured Stuart Hall's analysis of 'authoritarian populism'. The British Black Power movement especially criticised the high-profile Ant-Nazi League (ANL) for its singular focus on the NF, which was framed as a revived Hitlerite peril. For British Black radicals, the larger strategic problem was the populist racism, inflected by imperial nostalgia, which propelled Thatcher's New Right to power. Instead of narrow Nazi analogies, they related the re-emergence of white nationalism to British social democracy's racist treatment of Black immigrants, as well as its neo-colonial role abroad.

This piece is being made available as a preprint edition of the Race and Capital special issue of Historical Materialism. The final published version of this text will be made available on the Brill website in the coming months, we ask that citations refer to the Brill edition.

Issue 32(2&3): Race and Capital

You see we black people know that racism is the first manifestation of fascism – we’ve been telling you this for a long time.

Ambalavaner Sivanandan[1]

Alberto Toscano, drawing on Cedric Robinson, has identified a distinctive approach to fascism within the Black radical tradition. Toscano highlights how thinkers from W.E.B. Du Bois to Angela Davis ‘sought to expand the historical and political imagination of an anti-fascist left’, by emphasising fascism’s continuities with ‘the history of colonial dispossession and racial slavery’.[2] Unlike the new historiography of anti-fascism in North America, however, Black radical perspectives in the British context have often been overlooked.[3] Michael Higgs identifies that while far-right violence in post-war Britain was concentrated against African-Caribbean and Asian immigrants, prevailing accounts situate the organised response to the National Front (NF) in the lineage of inter-war anti-fascism and ‘orthodox class struggle’. They have neglected ‘the way that Britain’s anti-fascist tradition was changed by the black resistance to racism’.[4]

More recently, historian Liam Liburd has usefully deployed an analytical framework of ‘thinking Black’ about British fascism, foregrounding insights from theorists such as Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall.[5] While seconding Liburd’s argument for incorporating critical Black thinkers into fascism studies, this article charts the development of a post-war British Black anti-fascism ‘from below’. Whereas the labour movement mainstream interpreted the NF as an aberrant threat to Britain’s social democracy, Black political groups traced fascism’s re-emergence from 1967 to the racial violence of the British state – including under the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan (1964–70 and 1974–79) which preceded Thatcherism. By addressing heightened racial oppression during a critical early phase in the transition to neoliberalism, Britain’s Black Power movement of the 1960s–70s prefigured Hall’s influential analysis of ‘authoritarian populism’. The article argues that conflicting approaches to the problem of post-war fascism among British leftists and Black radicals reflected divergent perspectives on wider questions of race, class, and imperialism in the era of decolonisation.

Tensions between orthodox Marxist and Black radical responses to the National Front came to a head with the launching of what remains a central reference point for anti-fascists: the Anti-Nazi League (ANL), initiated by the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1977.[6] David Renton, a prominent Marxist scholar of fascism who authored a semi-official history of the ANL in 2006, has since reflected that he had absorbed the SWP narrative ‘in which the Anti-Nazi League was the most important part of the anti-fascist coalition’, and particularly downplayed the role of ‘black Marxists from groups like Race Today’.[7]

The most widely referenced criticism of the ANL’s racial politics is that provided by cultural theorist Gilroy, whose interrogation of the League’s patriotic anti-Nazi framework was written off by the SWP’s Alex Callinicos as the work of a ‘black nationalist’.[8] As this article will show, Gilroy’s scholarly critique derived from a grassroots Black political movement that took issue with the ANL’s singular focus on the NF, which the League portrayed as a revived Hitlerite peril. For Black radicals, the larger strategic problem was the populist racism, inflected by imperial nostalgia, which would help propel Thatcher’s New Right to power. The SWP’s approach of courting ‘anti-Nazi’ alliances with governing Labour politicians was at variance with Black radicals’ emphasis on the state violence of racist immigration laws and police harassment. British Black Power groups also drew attention to the League’s perceived failure to confront NF support amongst white trade unionists. They argued that colonialism’s imprint on social democracy had generated deep obstacles to anti-racist solidarities, which needed to be confronted by the left.

This article further looks at how Britain’s Black Power movement posed an intellectual counter to the anti-fascist mainstream, which it criticised for dissociating fascism from the colonialist foundations of the ‘democratic’ West. Understanding the contemporary far-right in Britain required looking beyond narrow Nazi analogies. British Black radicals adapted the Black Panther Party’s framing of the settler-colonial US state as itself fascistic, while also echoing earlier metropolitan anti-imperialists like C.L.R. James who compared Italo-German fascism with the racial horrors of the British Empire. Periodicals such as Race Today,Race & Class andThe Black Liberator related the re-emergence of white nationalism to not only the British state’s oppression of Black and Asian immigrants, but also its neo-colonial role abroad, including its ongoing links with apartheid South Africa. Their assessment was shared by a significant minority of far-left groups and activists who confronted the government’s repressive role in relation to struggles in Vietnam, southern Africa, and Ireland.

Foregrounding Black political challenges to the ANL is not to dismiss its achievement as the largest extra-parliamentary mobilisation in Britain since the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Vietnam Solidarity Campaign.[9] Even Race Today’s Darcus Howe, a former member of the British Black Panthers and staunch contemporary critic of the ANL, later stated that his youngest child was able to grow up ‘black in ease’ thanks to the impact of the League, and the preceding Rock Against Racism (RAR) campaign.[10] Localised anti-fascist cultures of resistance forged during the 1970s have enduring legacies today in Southall, Tower Hamlets, Bradford and elsewhere.[11]

Nonetheless, David Roediger has rightly warned that an ‘enervating desire for solidarity to be easy’ among left-leaning historians can lead to a flattening of the difficulties and contradictions involved in constructing progressive multiracial coalitions.[12] As Stuart Schrader notes in his survey of scholarship on RAR and the ANL, ‘[r]econstruction of left-wing strategic decisions is painstaking historical work, and criticism of political strategy for the purpose of refining it is important.’[13] Rethinking the priorities of anti-fascism remains necessary in our present era of intensifying state racism and resurgent far-right hostility against migrants and racialised minorities.

Black Power and White Reaction

After the Second World War, immigrant workers were recruited from the decolonising Empire to assist in Britain’s economic reconstruction, only to be greeted with the segregationist ‘colour bar’ in employment and housing allocation. Racist hostility intensified with the waning of the post-war economic boom, and in 1968 the recently formed National Front was given a fillip when Conservative MP Enoch Powell advocated the repatriation of ‘New Commonwealth’ immigrants in his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. This had been preceded by the Labour government’s rapid imposition of immigration restrictions barring Kenyan Asian refugees.[14] In the 1950s and early 1960s, the British Communist Party (CPGB) had taken a lead in organising trade union opposition to the colour bar. However, the party’s anti-racist stance was increasingly compromised by its allegiance to Labour, and its approach of tackling racism through official state channels – for instance, calling for the strengthening of the Race Relations Act which had been used to prosecute Black activists advocating militant self-defence measures.[15]

Disillusionment with Labour, the Communist Party, and the assimilationist race relations industry caused a generation of immigrant radicals to turn to the assertion of Black political power. Black Power in Britain took a specific trajectory, owing to the intertwined legacy of British colonialism in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. The inclusive concept of ‘political Blackness’ developed as a response to shared experiences of racial oppression, and most of the Black Power groups established in Britain, including the Black Panther Movement, contained Asian members. Black Power was also advocated by Jagmohan Joshi, the Maoist leader of the formidable Indian Workers Association (IWA) in Birmingham. In 1965, the IWA invited Malcolm X to visit the South Asian community in Smethwick, where another Tory MP had run an openly racist campaign the previous year. Malcolm told the British press he had learned that ‘Blacks’ in Smethwick were being ‘treated like Negroes in Alabama – like Hitler treated the Jews.’[16] After Powell’s inflammatory diatribe, Joshi convened an umbrella Black People’s Alliance, advocating defensive action against emboldened fascists, the repeal of racist immigration laws, and an end to the colour bar, which was analogised to apartheid.[17]

British Black Power also championed anti-imperialist causes taken up by the wider radical left. The late 1960s saw the emergence of student protests targeting the government’s support for the Vietnam War, and ongoing links with South Africa and Rhodesia. In the same year the NF was formed in 1967, the Universal Coloured People’s Association (Britain’s earliest Black Power group) highlighted British social democracy’s complicity in white supremacism, declaring that ‘the only difference between the Ian Smiths and Harold Wilsons of the white world is … a quarrel between frankness and hypocrisy within a fascist framework.’^[18] An additional anti-imperialist vector during this period was the re-emergence of Irish republicanism, interpreted by the Black Power movement as a neighbouring struggle against British colonial occupation.[19] Like Rhodesia, Northern Ireland was a special interest of the British far-right: Powell was a vocal Unionist, and the National Front developed ties with the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force.[20]

New alliances between Black radicals and anti-imperialists were evident in the organised response to a spate of fascist attacks on Asian properties in East London, where white dockworkers and meatpackers had struck in support of Powell. After the racist murder of Tosir Ali on 6 April 1970, there arose ‘a network of Black Power groups, anti-imperialists and socialists’ led by the Pakistani Progressive Party and the Pakistani Workers’ Union, in alliance with Maoists in the Irish National Liberation Solidarity Front.[21] In the same year, joint protests against immigration laws and imperialism were organised by the British Black Panthers and the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, which had been initiated by the Guevarist-Trotskyist International Marxist Group (IMG). When these protests led to arrests of Black activists, the IMG co-formed the Black Defence Committee in 1970 as ‘a militant group to counter racist and fascist activities’.[22] Another organisation that took a proactive anti-fascist stance was the International Socialist Group (ISG), the forerunner of the SWP, which was prominently involved in shopfloor struggles during the late 1960s and early 1970s and in the opposition to Powellism.

Despite the extent of violence against Black and Asian communities, serious concern about the far-right only materialised within the wider labour movement in 1974, when a counterdemonstration against an NF ‘Send Them Back’ march in London’s Red Lion Square involving the IMG resulted in the killing of anti-fascist student Kevin Gately in a clash with police. The Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU) subsequently issued an anti-fascist pamphlet exhorting trade unionists to combat racism, but the general secretary’s foreword made ‘no mention of Britain’s black population’ and contained ‘no acknowledgement of the problem of racism as something distinct from, though connected to, fascism’, instead presenting the NF as a modern version of Nazism. Nevertheless, over the next several years there continued to develop an ‘informal and locally-based network of antifascist/anti-racist committees’ encompassing elements from the Labour movement and Communist Party, Trotskyists, anti-imperialists, and Black radicals.[23]

However, tensions between Black radicals and white Marxists remained present which are glossed over or downplayed in conventional accounts. Satnam Virdee’s influential thesis that the 1970s witnessed a novel convergence of anti-racist and class-based struggles in Britain, with socialists playing a ‘mediating role in politically re-aligning the class struggles against exploitation to those on-going struggles against exploitation enveloped in racism by the black and Asian population’, holds much merit. Nevertheless, his argument that the catalysing factor was British Trotskyism taking up the mantle of ‘socialist internationalism’ from the ‘Stalinized’ CPGB is an oversimplification.[24] As Roediger points out, when it came to tackling racism specifically, ‘the revolutionary left unsullied by Stalinism’ was not ‘structurally’ in an automatically better position.[25] Former International Socialist Group member Martin Shaw’s assessment that the group’s anti-racist work ‘was very much a propaganda drive aimed at recruitment’ was shared by many Black and Asian activists.[26]

In April 1976, during a 600-strong NF march through Bradford, the larger anti-fascist camp was divided ‘with a predominantly white demonstration marching into the city centre, while most black activists insisted on protecting Manningham’, the heart of the South Asian community. Marsha Singh of the Trotskyist Militant Tendency was angered when most of the white socialists were happy to leave Manningham for the city centre: ‘I just thought it was a betrayal of everything they were supposed to have taught me’. Tariq Mehmood, then an ISG member, likewise became convinced of the need for ‘Black’ self-defence: ‘Manningham was ours and we had to protect it’. Singh and Mehmood both subsequently abandoned Trotskyism, and became leading figures in the Black Power-inflected Asian Youth Movement.[27]

Racial Fascism comes to Britain

British Black radicals’ divergent organising strategy was accompanied by an intellectual counter to the anti-fascist mainstream, which drew on prior traditions of anti-imperialist, pan-African, and Black Marxist anti-fascisms.

Fascism’s ethno-nationalist violence appears less of an aberration when contextualised in the continuum of European colonialism and slavery, which is the basis of what Cedric Robinson, an associate of Race & Class, called a ‘Black signification of fascism’ opposed to the ‘historical manufacture of fascism as a negation of WesternGeist’.[28] Aimé Césaire’s exposure of the hypocrisy latent in ‘civilised’ Europe’s outrage at Nazism had been anticipated in the 1920s–30s by Marxist anti-imperialists like Rajani Palme Dutt, C.L.R. James, and George Padmore who decried Britain’s ‘colonial fascism’.[29] Shortly after the Second World War, in 1948, the Black American communist Harry Haywood’s Negro Liberation countered anti-fascist triumphalism by identifying a ‘native fascism’ on ‘democratic’ US soil, expressed in the horrors of slavery and its afterlives.[30] The same year, the London-based India League published South Africa: On the Road to Fascism, condemning the West’s enabling of a state whose ‘graph of racial laws has risen rapidly to a number far beyond that of Nazi Germany’.[31]

While the domestic imprint of a settler-colonial society was absent in Britain, the tendency for colonialist violence to manifest within the metropole was underscored in Race Today, which proclaimed: ‘Handsworth, Notting Hill, Brixton, Southall are colonies and the struggles which emerge from within these enclaves are clearly anti-colonial in content.’[32] Continuities between inter-war anti-colonialism and post-war Black Power were reflected in the role of C.L.R. James, who was a primary influence on the Race Today Collective, and the uncle of Darcus Howe.[33]

Another formative influence on the British Black Power movement were the writings of the prisoner revolutionary and Black Panther martyr George Jackson.[34] In dialogue with the US New Left, Jackson articulated an updated anti-fascism that took its bearings ‘not from analogies with the European interwar scene, but instead from the materiality of the prison-industrial complex, from the “concrete and steel”, from the devices and personnel of surveillance and repression.’[35] Jackson’s description of ‘fascist’ state repression in America could be organically related to local conditions. As one West Indian resident in Handsworth, Birmingham declared in 1969: ‘If these fascist pigs were armed with guns, then people would realise just how like America this place really is.’[36] A member of the roots reggae band Steel Pulse stated in an interview for Rock Against Racism that the ‘Babylons’ (police) in Handsworth ‘are the NF’, and when police infiltrated a Black Panther carnival at Brixton’s Oval House in August 1970, attendees shouted ‘Get out, fascist fuzz!’[37] During the Mangrove Nine trial of Black activists including Howe prosecuted for demonstrating against police raids on a Caribbean restaurant, the defendants explained they were picketing ‘the three main centres of fascist repression in the area – Notting Hill, Notting Dale and Harrow Road Police Stations’.[38]  

Writing in Race & Class, Ian Macdonald, the radical white barrister representing one of the Mangrove Nine, stated his agreement with Jackson that ‘we are already living under fascism’. Macdonald provocatively argued that ‘the young black men and women who swarmed round Caledonian Road police station in 1970’ were ‘engaged in far more effective anti-fascist activities than the red battalions of Red Lion Square.’[39] In a response article Maurice Ludmer, editor of the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight who later helped kickstart the Anti-Nazi League, derided the conceptual ‘confusion’ of implying the British state was literally fascist. Ludmer, a former communist and a veteran campaigner against the colour bar in Birmingham with his comrade Joshi, was understandably irked by Macdonald’s dismissive attitude to the organised left. Nevertheless, his suggestion that Macdonald and Jackson should look to the experience of workers living under real dictatorships in southern Europe and Chile ignored the rhetorical and analytical utility of invoking fascism to expose the ‘white left’’s indifference to racial oppression.[40] As Bill Mullen and Christopher Vials explain, ‘while a fascist state and a white supremacist democracy have very different mechanisms of power, the experience of racialized rightlessness within a liberal democracy can make the distinction between it and fascism murky at the level of lived experience.’[41]

British Black radicals particularly foregrounded the seamless feedback between germinal fascist formations and the coercive instruments of the state. Race & Class editor Ambalavaner Sivanandan, who orchestrated a Black Power ‘coup’ at the Institute of Race Relations in 1972, stressed the connection between the NF’s ‘racialist outbreaks’, and ‘the state’s long-term strategy of intimidating, repressing and ultimately incorporating the black working class into a structure of domestic neo-colonialism.’[42] That far-right thuggery on the streets fed directly on the respectable racism reproduced by the governing institutions of society was further evidenced by the manufactured ‘mugging’ scare. During this moral panic, Callaghan’s Labour put the ‘sus’ stop-and-search law into full force in Britain’s inner cities. The policy culminated in the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival ‘disturbances’, when Black youths confronted an invading metropolitan police force while chanting ‘Soweto, Soweto!’, in reference to the uprising in South Africa earlier that year.[43] When the Front called for an ‘anti-muggers’ march through Lewisham on 13 August 1977, ‘they were not only targeting an area for its multicultural population, but purposely following where the state and the media had led.’[44]

Anti-Fascist Mythos and the Battle of Lewisham

In preparation for the NF march, a counter-protest of around 4,000 anti-fascists was organised by the All-Lewisham Campaign Against Racism and Fascism. While the Communist Party was opposed to open confrontation with the fascists, the SWP contingent broke through police lines and helped give the NF a humiliating rout.[45] The conflict at Lewisham was the direct inspiration for launching the Anti-Nazi League, and Higgs notes the significance that ‘the organisation that would later become the sine qua non of anti-fascist organising emerged when it did on the back of what was essentially a black protest against the state’. In the preceding months, police had raided homes across south-east London, smashing down doors and arresting dozens of Black men. Anti-racist activists responded by organising the Lewisham 21 Defence Campaign.[46] For the local community, the Battle of Lewisham again underscored the limits of state anti-racism. Despite legislation banning incitement to racial hatred, ‘the very instruments of “law and order”’ were seen ‘merrily escorting a band of racist thugs, crying “w*** out”, “n****** go home” and worse, into the heart of a black area, battoning aside all opposition’.[47]

The spontaneous aspect of the Black community’s response on 13 August is highlighted by an anecdote from a demonstrator: ‘The cry went up from the marchers, “Let’s go to Ladywell station”, but we [SWP members] meant to go to the train station, to go home. The black youth took it up, “To Ladywell, Ladywell police station” … They stoned the station.’[48] Darcus Howe of the Race Today Collective was there on the day too, ‘a Trinidadian giant with a hand megaphone … thoughtfully advising the crowd, rather as a cricket captain might place his field.’[49] Echoing communist MP Phil Piratin’s account of the multi-ethnic proletarian unity witnessed from the barricades at Cable Street, one Lewisham resident described the bonds of solidarity forged on the ground:

There was a very friendly feeling. At times I saw guys sitting on walls – a really militant black guy sittin chattin with a white guy which normally he’d never do. In the crowd they were drawn together.[50]

A pivotal role in synchronising anti-fascism and Black self-defence through the Lewisham Defence Campaign was played by Anthony Bogues and Kim Gordon of the SWP’s Black caucus, which published Flame – a newspaper that ‘sought to connect struggles of black workers in Britain and the Caribbean to ongoing anti-colonial movements in Africa and elsewhere’.[51] Bogues, a Jamaican socialist who is now an eminent scholar of C.L.R. James, recalled that Flame developed ‘a different style from the British left’:

We didn’t leaflet people. We asked what they thought … I made initial contacts, with the people in Flame and also with family, friends … The International Marxist Group had a guy called Fitzroy, from Nigeria. There was the Black Marxist Collective in Croydon. It was a different kind of politics, based on the immigrant cultures.[52]

Flame celebrated the foray as ‘the day that the Black youth gave the police a beating’.[53] Lewisham has a central place in SWP mythology, and it is frequently invoked as evidence of the group’s anti-racist credentials. But what is glossed over is the leading role of Black socialists whose autonomous organisation was shortly shutdown by the party leadership. In the context of wider centralising impulses within the SWP, leader Tony Cliff initiated moves to shut down the Black caucus in 1978, with accusations about its members confusing oppression for exploitation.[54] As Gordon pointed out, the ‘underlying assumption behind much of the CC [Central Committee]’s argumentation against Flame is that the struggle against oppression is external to the working class and the workplace.’ Cliff and his supporters ignored Flame’s successes in linking the fight against state racism with anti-fascist and shop-floor struggles, in addition to building ties with Black women’s groups.[55]

Bogues’s ‘different kind of politics’ were to remain marginal. The launching of the ANL in November 1977 dramatically broadened the popular support for anti-fascism, but the initiative largely failed to respond to the questions raised over the last decade about the relationship between the NF and state racism/imperialism, and the significance of Black political power. There is much evidence to support Sivanandan’s lament, that ‘the direction of the battle got deflected from a fight against racism and, therefore, fascism to a fight against fascism and, incidentally, racism.’[56]

The Price of Popularity

The SWP had previously chided the Communist Party for entering ‘class-collaborationist anti-racialist committees stuffed full of reformist[s]’, but the ANL was a similarly broad-church affair, and many of the steering committee members were Labour MPs.[57] Labour had historically been a very unreliable anti-fascist ally, but it now had a self-interested concern to counteract the NF’s electoral gains.[58] The result was that the ANL appeared to be primarily responding to an embarrassment to Britain’s parliamentary democracy, rather than the racial terror meted out to Black and Asian people. For West Indian communist Trevor Carter, the League’s emphasis on being anti-Nazi, as opposed to anti-racist, ‘signalled to us that here again was another white organisation which … had overlooked the perspective, needs and demands of our community.’[59]

Local anti-fascist committees complained that the ANL, ‘apart from embracing nationalist overtones itself, has attracted such a wide base of support that racist elements have crept into [its] list of supporters.’[60] Among the League’s prominent sponsors was the Southall Labour left MP Sydney Bidwell, who in 1978 signed the Select Committee on Race Relations and Immigration report recommending even tighter restrictions on immigration from the Indian subcontinent. An Indian Workers Association leaflet on the NF could argue with some merit that ‘the greater part of the blame must rest here in Britain, as it did in the 30s in Germany, on the failure of social democracy … to wage any effective struggle against racialism’.[61] Although ANL literature criticised institutional racism and immigration laws, by attaching itself to the parliamentary Labour Party it risked reinforcing the legitimacy of a social democracy complicit in constructing racial categories of belonging and exclusion.[62] This brought a practical dimension to contemporary and posthumous debates about whether the League was sufficiently autonomous of Labour to be considered a revolutionary ‘united front’.^[63]

Tensions also arose during the ANL music festivals staged in collaboration with the existing Rock Against Racism campaign which, according to Gilroy, had been very successful in winning the support of white youths.[64] However, some anti-racist activists were concerned that in equating ‘music with Punk’ and ‘black identity with Afro-Caribbean’, both RAR and the ANL ‘neglected the British Asians who were the primary target of the NF on the streets.’[65] At one ANL carnival, an IWA representative ‘was greeted by incomprehension when he chose to discuss imperialism and workers’ issues rather than the “suffering” of Asians and support of anti-Nazism.’[66]

The dangers of prioritising popular mobilisations over community-oriented resistance were underscored during the two high-profile ANL carnivals in 1978. The day after the first carnival in London, fascists were able to march through the East End unopposed on workers’ May Day. An estimated 100,000 people attended the second carnival held in Brixton, but a mile away in Brick Lane, where 25-year-old Altab Ali had been murdered months earlier, the Bangladeshi community was facing down another NF march with minimal reinforcement from anti-fascists.[67] On both occasions, the ANL organisers had received prior warning of the fascists’ plans. In the aftermath of the second carnival, some SWP members criticised the party leadership for being preoccupied with extravagant festivals and courting celebrity MPs, at the expense of a targeted anti-racist strategy.[68] However, rank-and-file calls for the ANL to be democratically restructured fell on deaf ears.

The Black radical rejoinder to the ANL achieved organisational expression in the coalition Black People Against State Harassment (BASH), formed a week after the second carnival by several Black political groups including the Indian Workers Association. BASH overlapped with other networks such as the Campaign Against Racist Laws, and was directed pointedly against state racism – particularly the 1971 ‘whites-only’ Immigration Act, and associated deportations. In June 1979, a month after an anti-racist protest in Southall at which SWP member Blair Peach was killed by a policeman, BASH organised a large demonstration of some 4,000 mostly Asian protestors against the Tories’ impending British Nationality Act, during which key organiser Joshi suffered a fatal heart attack.[69] At another mobilisation in November, Labour MP and regular ANL spokesperson Tony Benn was reportedly booed for attempting to defend his party’s record on immigration.[70]

A particular strength of BASH (and its successor, Black People Against State Brutality) was its involvement of Black women’s groups that drew attention to the gendered nature of state racism, notably the ‘virginity testing’ of migrant Asian women at Heathrow airport.[71] In a Spare Rib article in July 1979, Perminder Dhillon of Southall Black Sisters suggested that immigrant women ‘know what police protection means—being beaten with their truncheons, while a few streets away a black sister is sexually assaulted by white youths.’ Dhillon further reported how during the June demonstration, in a well-worn pattern, ‘the (mostly white) Socialist Workers Party showed complete insensitivity both to racism and sexism by insisting on carrying their own placards, against the request of the women organisers [who were protesting the Heathrow scandal], that mentioned neither black people or women but just advertised the SWP’.[72]

Patriotic Anti-Fascist Teleology

While the need to confront nascent fascism is not in doubt, in justifying the League’s singular focus on the National Front and its electoral advances there was perhaps a danger of crying wolf. An SWP pamphlet on the NF authored by Colin Sparks for instance argued that it ‘is possible for [the Front] to build a mass Nazi party in Britain in the next few years.’[73] Black radicals rather more credibly held that in the context of 1970s Britain, the repressive function of the existing state was a larger strategic problem – not least because this was the actual feeding ground of the neo-fascists. It was thus a tactical miscalculation on the ANL’s part to prioritise ‘anti-Nazi’ alliances with Labour MPs, thereby diminishing the space that previously existed in RAR to challenge the government’s racist (and anti-working class) record. Particularly notable was the ANL steering committee’s decision to veto a rank-and-file proposal to make opposition to immigration controls a condition of affiliation, since this would directly contradict Labour Party policy.[74]

As Gilroy has emphasised, the central framing of the NF as a revived Nazi threat (‘The National Front is a Nazi Front’) further entailed a certain manipulation of popular patriotic sentiment. The cry of ‘Never Again’ and some of the League’s propaganda materials implicitly or explicitly conjured the ‘genuine nationalist spirit which had been created in Britain’s finest hour’ during WWII, and exposed the NF as ‘inauthentic’ patriots. In this way, anti-Nazism brushed over the indigenous origins of British fascism, and suggested there was something ‘foreign’ about the NF’s racism.[75] The limitations of inter-war analogies were also emphasised by future director of the Institute of Race Relations, Colin Prescod. Writing in The Black Liberator – the journal of the Black Unity and Freedom Party – Prescod suggested that ‘those Europeans who fear and abhor fascism, and who look back to the 1930’s for their fascism, were they to look closely at the Black experience in Britain, would find that they have been looking the wrong way’.[76] This aligns with Alana Lentin’s contention that the ANL reinforced ‘a teleological view of racism which identifies Hitlerism as the specific form of racism to which British extremists aspire.’[77]

As Powellism brought overt racism into the mainstream, ‘the fascist Right began to discard its overtly Nazi tropes, replacing its anti-Semitic conspiracy theory (at least in public, most of the time) with the anti-immigrant mantra.’[78] In an observation that was prescient given the direction of the post-NF far-right, Gilroy and Errol Lawrence pinpointed that: ‘However frequently the Nazis are “kicked out”, the populist and resilient nature of British racism means that most racist Britons do not recognise themselves as Nazis’.[79] Already in 1974, an International Marxist Group pamphlet observed that while NF leaders posed as ‘jack-booted Nazi stormtroopers’, which was easy to sensationalise, this was not the image of the wider movement. Rather, ‘many people are taken by surprise by its “Britishness”’, and ‘many workers who hate “fascism” find that the policies of the Front correspond rather closely with many of their own prejudices.’[80]

The anti-Nazi paradigm neglected a native fascist tradition that had its genesis in the wellspring of imperial racism.[81] After WWII, the British far-right coalesced around opposition to decolonisation: A.K. Chesterton’s League of Empire Loyalists was the ‘conveyor belt’ through which all the major names of the NF passed. The early NF was also sponsored by disgruntled Tory imperialists and Ulster Unionists in the pro-apartheid Monday Club. As Evan Smith shows, the Front envisioned the British Commonwealth ‘reconstituted as an expression of white supremacist solidarity – particularly as South Africa and Rhodesia were deemed to be on the frontline of a battle between multi-racialist communism and “white civilisation” in this period of the Cold War.’[82]

As Gilroy argued, the perils of populism in a declining imperial power were often lost on the ANL’s parliamentary left backers including Tony Benn, whose Alternative Economic Strategy was frequently framed in terms of a socialist patriotism.^[83] Labour was also ill-placed to take the moral high ground on apartheid given that it continued to trade with South Africa, a source of immense mining profits for Britain. The ANL did have a link to anti-apartheid activism through the prominent role of Peter Hain, a leading figure in the British Anti-Apartheid Movement. However, this campaign, like the ANL, largely excluded Black radical perspectives and was ‘constrained to what was acceptable to the official trade unions and Labour Party’.[84]

Certainly, there was some organic correspondence between pre-1945 anti-fascism and post-war movements against racism and imperialism. Sean Hosey, an Irish Londoner in the Young Communist League who undertook covert activities for the ANC-SACP, spoke for many of his generation when he referred to ‘a thread that ran through my upbringing, Spain, the Second World War, American Civil Rights, Vietnam and of course South Africa.’[85] As Virdee suggests, Gilroy tends to caricature the ANL as operating within a ‘hermetically sealed box’ that prevented ideas about racism and capitalism ‘leaking’ into its anti-fascism.[86] In reality, the need to connect anti-fascism with broader struggles against white supremacy was taken up by many activists within the ANL’s orbit. However, these connections were only systematically advanced by a minority of anti-imperialist inclined groups. These included the IMG, the Revolutionary Communist Group (a splinter from the SWP), and the libertarian-socialist Big Flame. The latter, sometimes described as a ‘soft Maoist’ group, was loosely associated with Gilroy and the Centre for Contemporary Culture Studies, and in 1978 it publishedA Close Look at Fascism and Racism, which contained an interview with Sivanandan.[87] A follow up pamphlet two years later situated British fascism within the context of empire, the white Commonwealth, and Irish occupation, while tracing the NF’s patriarchal politics to the imperial ideology of racial hygiene. It concluded by calling for combined anti-fascist and anti-imperialist solidarities, pointing out how the overthrow of the Salazar dictatorship in 1974 was ‘prompted by the defeat of Portuguese imperialism in Angola and Mozambique’ – the prelude to the final victory over apartheid.[88]

The unifying thread in Black radical and anti-imperialist criticisms of the ANL was that it isolated outgrowths of far-right extremism from underlying capitalist and colonialist structures of domination. As Olive Morris of the Brixton Black Women’s Group (an affiliate of BASH) emphasised, it was ‘not enough to like reggae and jump around the streets wearing badges’. Fascism had to be tackled at its systemic roots: ‘institutional racism, the police force, the education system, the trade unions and imperialism.’[89]

White Labourism, Proletarian Fascism?

The fascist penetration of the labour movement was another overlooked weak spot of the ANL. While working-class fascists were certainly ‘a minority compared to the multitudes of trade unionist anti-fascists’, NF membership was nevertheless disproportionately comprised of ‘skilled’ manual workers.[90] Despite this, the SWP officially upheld the orthodox Trotskyist framing of fascism as ‘a specific means of mobilising and organising the petty bourgeoisie in the social interests of finance capital’, downplaying white working-class agency within contemporary far-right formations.[91] Sparks somewhat crudely separated ‘petit bourgeois fascism’ from ‘proletarian racialism’: the latter was argued to exist in tension with the ‘real experience of class’.[92] 

Working-class susceptibility to fascism had been apparent in the composition of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) in the 1930s. The BUF garnered support not only from Lord Rothermere and the colonial officer class, but also minorities of the unemployed and trade unionists disillusioned with the Labour Party, as reflected in the creation of the Fascist Union of British Workers.[93] Renton’s assertion that trade unions’ ‘underlying principles of solidarity were inimical to the tradition of radical inequality on which fascism was based’ rather neglects the counter-pulls of white racial solidarity and social-imperialism.[94] In the early twentieth century, labour movements across the white Commonwealth and within the imperial metropole inculcated a shared ideology of racial solidarity, which historian Jonathon Hyslop has termed ‘White Labourism’.[95] After the First World War, the scapegoating of colonial maritime workers for unemployment by white trade union officials encouraged murderous ‘race riots’ in several British port towns.[96] The Mosleyites capitalised on such racial chauvinism with literature accusing the Communist Party of putting the interests of ‘foreigners’ before the imperial working class, and the by-line of the BUF’s Blackshirtbecame ‘the patriotic workers’ paper’.[97] Mosley’s ‘socialistic imperialism’ was also initially supported by prominent Labour left MPs, including Aneurin Bevan.^[98]

White labour’s prolonged entanglement with imperialism was noted by Britain’s Black Power movement, which as John Narayan shows posited ‘a direct link between the formation of British social democracy, super-exploitation in the Third World and ideas of white nationalism in the UK.’[99] In contrast, more orthodox Marxist theorists in the SWP viewed instances of working-class racism as simply an ideological product of capitalist divide-and-rule trickery. Nigel Harris, also on the ANL steering committee, claimed Britain’s use of Black labour meant there could be no ‘structured’ racism; rather, it operated solely ‘on a personal and cultural level’.[100] Rather more convincingly, Big Flame argued that while ‘no other class but the working class is capable of reconciling its own class interests with an anti-imperialist struggle’, this did not negate the ‘material reasons for the racialism of white workers towards black immigrants’.[101] It was for instance racialised norms of entitlement and exclusion in employment and housing that underlay the anti-Black riots of 1958, which Hall identified as ‘the appearance, for the first time in real terms since the 1940s, of an active fascist political element’ in Britain.[102]

In the trade unions themselves, racial exclusionism meshed with ingrained habits of craft sectionalism. After WWII, ‘skilled’ white workers in core industries often enforced a quota system restricting ‘Black’ labour to five per cent of employees.[103] Shirin Hirsch notes how Powell’s rhetoric was ‘carefully directed towards a newly constructed white working-class identity in association with employers, both reflecting and creating new divisions within the British workforce.’[104] Working-class support for Powell in turn ‘impressed on the National Front that racism could be a potentially powerful force in the trade unions’.[105] When South Asian workers in textile mills and metal foundries took industrial action with IWA support against the racist wage hierarchy, and such humiliating practices as segregated toilets, the NF intervened by organising white strike-breakers. During the April 1970 council elections, one of the NF’s two Wolverhampton candidates was an Amalgamated Union of Engineering and Foundry Workers member, and the other a TGWU shop steward.[106]

The Front’s fastest area of growth was Leicestershire, where some of its candidates achieved over a quarter of the vote in local elections on the back of popular hostility to Ugandan Asian refugees.[107] Asian and Black militants in the area, along with Trotskyist and communist allies, took up a protracted struggle against fascism and the industrial colour bar. The new alliances culminated in several landmark anti-racist trade union conferences in 1973, securing official Trades Union Congress recognition for the first time that unions should ‘actively oppose racialism within their own ranks’.[108]

However, the dangers of assuming a simple correspondence between anti-fascism and anti-racism remained. In August 1974, the fascists organised a protest in Leicester in support of white scabs during the prominent Imperial Typewriters dispute, one of whom stood as an NF candidate in the October general election. The International Socialist Group’s main involvement at Imperial was in an anti-fascist demonstration on 24 August. Race Today published a letter by the Imperial Typewriters Strike Committee, arguing that the International Socialists’ intervention was a counterproductive ‘recruiting campaign’ which concentrated on ‘smashing the fascism of the NF’, rather than giving ‘support for Black workers in their struggle for democratic rights’.[109]

Existing accounts of anti-NF activity have missed the significance of Black and Asian workers’ self-organisation in pushing back against reactionary white solidarity, which was complementary to the organised street presence against fascist marches. The struggles at Mansfield and Imperial, along with national strikes involving African-Caribbean porters and nurses, challenged racist (and gendered) assumptions about immigrant workers’ passivity. Race Today noted that a ‘new element’ had emerged among the Imperial strikers: ‘young, long-haired, golden-earringed, bedenimed and brown-skinned … They have no qualms about attacking the National Front [and] cheeking the police’.[110]

The Anti-Nazi League encouraged the formation of local anti-fascist workers’ groups, but it missed an opportunity to champion Black radicals’ strategic push for self-organisation within the labour movement. From 1974, the National Front continued to target workers alienated by Labour’s imposition of wage controls during an inflationary boom.^[111] According to the IMG, an ANL trade union conference in November 1978 ‘failed to grapple with the political debates which are being raised by anti-Nazi activity in the trade unions’.[112] The League’s antipathy to Black political organising was related to a superficial equation of Black Power with Black ‘separatism’ by leading SWP theorists such as Cliff and Harris.[113]Indeed, ANL organising secretary Paul Holborow still reduces the divergent anti-fascist approaches to a dichotomy ‘between the black nationalists and people who argue for black and white unity’.[114] However, in practice most Black radicals advocated strategic autonomy, not racial separatism.[115]

By connecting racial populism to neoliberal capitalist renewal, Britain’s Black Power movement revived the strategic universalism articulated within what Robbie Shilliam calls ‘the tradition of anti-colonial anti-fascism’ in 1930s London.[116] The British Black Panthers exhorted white workers to recognise how racialised oppression was central to ‘the reconstitution of class domination in the midst of the crisis of global capitalism’.[117] Hall’s influential analysis of the function of racism in ‘discipling the nation to consent’ in Policing the Crisis (1978), co-authored with colleagues at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, drew heavily fromRace Today andThe Black Liberator.[118] Writing in the latter on the eve of Thatcher’s war on labour, Prescod noted how the paramilitary Special Patrol Group, to which the ‘white left’ paid little notice when it was used against Black people at Lewisham and elsewhere, was now being used ‘as the shock troops of the state in industrial actions’. Prescod warned that so long as white workers opted to focus on their narrow and relative ‘privileges’, they would ‘suffer in the long run as much as the Black sector of the working class.’[119]

As Sivanandan concluded, that the ANL was a movement against sub-state fascism, and only ‘incidentally against racism’, meant that when the Thatcher’s New Right ‘moved in and stole the National Front’s clothes, the ANL was denuded of its purpose.’[120] The League was wound down in the winter of 1981–2, at a time of ascendant racial populism under a Prime Minister who had warned of Britain being ‘swamped’ by immigrants.

Conclusion

For Black Britain, Kobena Mercer tells us, ‘the 1980s were lived as a relentless vertigo of displacement.’[121] Police harassment combined with high levels of youth unemployment provoked a series of inner-city insurrections in the summer of 1981. Racist attacks were unrelenting, and had reached a rate of 15,000 a year.[122] State repression under Thatcher was accompanied by a concerted ‘disaggregation’ of Black political power, when in the aftermath of the urban uprisings the government began to sponsor a new buffer class of ‘ethnic representatives’.[123] More generally, the decline of Black Power corresponded with setbacks for anti-systemic forces globally in the last decade of the Cold War.

While the NF’s street and electoral presence had been diminished, Sivanandan observed that the fascists had been driven ‘in to the crevices and ratholes of the inner cities in which they breed – where they then resort to vicious and violent attacks on the black community’.[124] Into the 1990s, the British National Party (BNP) gained considerable support in the de-industrialised north-west of England, where it could capitalise on New Labour’s demonising of migrants and asylum-seekers. The ANL had been relaunched on a reduced scale in 1992, but the utility of anti-Nazi propaganda was again called into question, when Burnley’s three elected BNP councillors could declare ten years later: ‘We’re just normal people.’[125]

Today, it remains the case that the immediate threat is not a rerun of 1920s/30s-style mass fascist movements, which were products of a historical conjuncture of inter-imperialist war, economic turmoil, and Europe-wide counterrevolution. Vis-à-vis Jackson and the US New Left, Hall was rightly careful to distinguish between ‘true’ fascism, and the unexceptional racial authoritarianism of a beleaguered bourgeois-democratic state.[126] Like Jackson, though, Hall viewed fascism as a process, with sub-state fascist elements like the NF feeding on state-driven racial populism, and vice versa. Social discontent in the neoliberal era continues to be met with intensifying racial authoritarianism from above, including the hardening of borders in response to refugee crises caused by successive imperialist invasions in West Asia. Within Britain, political elites have effectively manipulated the colonial nostalgia that surrounded the Brexit campaign, with government officials referring to ‘Empire 2.0’.[127] Resurgent far-right movements have existed in a symbiotic relationship with such developments.

For the left, this should underscore the dangers of the social-democratic nativism which still characterised elements of the 2015–19 Labour left revival when it came to issues of immigration, policing, and ‘national security’.^[128] Complacent assumptions about trade union immunity to racism are also belied by the internalisation of elite-driven narratives about the ‘white working class’ being singularly ‘left behind’.^[129] The organised left missed an opportunity to advance what Barnaby Raine referred to as ‘a genuinely anti-establishment insurgency, pitted both against the EU and the nativist, anti-migrant miseries that the EU and the British Right breed.’[130]

As in the 1970s, heightened carceral powers targeting racialised minorities have also facilitated a generalised offensive against workers and the left. The racially-charged language of crime, security, and public order has helped to propel legislation that will enhance law enforcers’ ability to penalise protestors and workplace organisers. With the defeat of Corbynism, Labour has hastened to demonstrate its commitment to ‘law and order’, and to suppressing criticism of NATO militarism and Britain’s support for Israeli apartheid.[131] The present authoritarian populist conjuncture calls for solidarities among diverse segments of the working class, but deep fissures remain to be overcome. Important historical lessons therefore remain to be drawn from the role of Black radicals and anti-imperialists in broadening the liberatory horizons of socialism and anti-fascism in the 1970s.

There can be no quick victories against the far-right, and the dominant paradigm of bureaucratic anti-fascist fronts headed by trade union officials and Labour MPs has questionable strategic utility. In addition to clearing newer fascist formations like Patriotic Alternative off the streets, the left needs to return to the unfinished business of confronting ‘the totality of state racism’.[132] Sivanandan’s entreaty for a combined anti-fascist and anti-racist struggle, sealed with a nod to James Baldwin, is still poignant:

[Fascism] affects white and black people alike … The fight against fascism is a fight that is common to both of us, we come at it from two different directions, two different perspectives. We are the immediate victims. If they come for us in the morning, they will come for you that night. So be with us that morning and we will be with you that night….[133]

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[1] Sivanandan 1978a, p. 5.

[2] Toscano 2020.

[3] Mullen and Vials 2020.

[4] Higgs 2016, p. 67.

[5] Liburd and Jackson 2021, p. 332.

[6] In 2018, prominent Labour left MP John McDonnell and founding ANL member Paul Holborow called for a revived ‘Anti-Nazi League-type’ campaign to resist the rise of far-right politics. Sabbagh 2018.

[7] Renton 2020.

[8] Gilroy 2002, pp. 146–77; Callinicos 1992.

[9] Copsey 2000, p. 115.

[10] Foot 1992, p. 122.

[11] Nijjar 2019.

[12] Roediger 2016, p. 240.

[13] Schrader 2020, p. 139.

[14] Virdee 2014, pp. 112–13.

[15] Smith 2017, p. 71.

[16] Narayan and Andrews, 2015.

[17] Hirsch 2018, pp. 53; 64.

[18] Higgs 2016, pp. 78–9.

[19] Narayan 2019, p. 955.

[20] Renton 2019, p. 40.

[21] Ashe et al. 2016, pp. 34–41.

[22] Waters 2019, p. 117.

[23] Gilroy 2002, pp. 153–4.

[24] Virdee 2014, pp. 124; 118–19.

[25] Roediger 2015, p. 2235.

[26] Shaw 1978, p. 130.

[27] Renton 2019, p. 41; Ramamurthy 2013, pp. 25–38.

[28] Robinson 2019, pp. 149–52.

[29] Buchanan 2016.

[30] Haywood 1948, pp. 121; 140.

[31] Dadoo and Jadwat 1948, p. 7.

[32]Race Today Collective 1976a, p. 27.

[33] Bunce and Field 2011.

[34] Waters 2019, pp. 55–6. The campaign in support of Jackson and the other Soledad Brothers in 1971 ‘brought together black political London at a key moment of international Black Power politics’. Ibid, p. 79.

[35] Toscano 2020.

[36] John 1972, p. 25.

[37] Birmingham Rock Against Racism c. 1976; Angelo 2009, p. 25.

[38] Higgs 2016, p. 79.

[39] Macdonald 1975, pp. 297; 303.

[40] Ludmer 1975, p. 418.

[41] Mullen and Vials 2020, p. 270.

[42] Sivanandan 1976, p. 1.

[43] Gilroy 2013, p. 552.

[44] Higgs 2016, p. 72.

[45] Renton 2019, pp. 77–82.

[46] Higgs 2016, p. 75.

[47]Socialist Challenge 1977, p. 2.

[48] Higgs 2016, p. 74.

[49] Renton 2019, p. 81.

[50] Copsey 2000, p. 60; Big Flame 1978, p. 6.

[51] Myers 2022.

[52] Renton 2019, p. 72.

[53] Smith 2017, p. 187.

[54] Cliff 2000, p. 152.

[55] Gordon 1979, p. 34.

[56] Sivanandan 1985, p. 9.

[57] Higgs 2016, p. 73.

[58] Copsey 2005.

[59] Carter 1986, p. 118.

[60] Leamington Anti-Racist, Anti-Fascist Committee 1978, p. 4.

[61] Indian Workers’ Front 1976. The IWF was the Southall branch of Joshi’s IWA(GB).

[62] Renton 2019, p. 115.

[63] Copsey 2000, pp. 132, 144.

[64] Gilroy 2002, pp. 162–3; Gilroy and Lawrence 1988, p. 141.

[65] Robinson 2011, p. 114.

[66] Kalra et al. 1996, p. 134.

[67] Higgs 2016, pp. 75–6.

[68] Welch and Hearn 1978, p. 31.

[69] Ramamurthy 2013, pp. 101–2.

[70] Clough 2014, p. 166.

[71] Ramamurthy 2013, p. 93.

[72] Dhillon 1979, pp. 32–3.

[73] Sparks 1978, p. 35.

[74] Gilroy 2002, p. 174.

[75] Gilroy 2002, pp. 171–8.

[76] Prescod 1978, p. 5.

[77] Lentin 2004, p. 225.

[78] Higgs 2016, p. 69.

[79] Gilroy and Lawrence 1988, p. 150.

[80] International Marxist Group 1974, p. 13.

[81] Liburd 2018.

[82] Smith 2018, pp. 75; 70.

[83] Gilroy 2002, p. 62.

[84] Higginbottom 2016, p. 555.

[85] Hyslop 2020, p. 77.

[86] Virdee 2014, p. 140.

[87] Big Flame 1978.

[88] Big Flame 1980, p. 30.

[89] Narayan 2019, p. 965, n. 46.

[90] Renton 2005, p. 142.

[91] Renton 1999, p. 72.

[92] Sparks 1979.

[93] Coupland 2005, pp. 42–3.

[94] Renton 2005, p. 142.

[95] Hyslop 1999.

[96] Virdee 2014, pp. 79–83.

[97] Coupland 2005, p. 58.

[98] Coupland 2005, p. 40.

[99] Narayan 2019, p. 956.

[100] Harris 1975, p. 23.

[101] Big Flame 1980, p. 18.

[102] Hall 2017, p. 147.

[103] Virdee 2014, p. 102.

[104] Hirsch 2018, p. 22.

[105] Copsey 2000, pp. 117–18.

[106] Husbands 1983, pp. 68–9.

[107] Asher 1976, pp. 16–19.

[108] Virdee 2014, p. 129.

[109] Khetani 1974, p. 287.

[110] Sen 1974, p. 202.

[111] Smith 2018, p. 76.

[112] Talbot 1978, p. 6.

[113]Harris 1975, pp. 23–4; Callinicos 1992.

[114] Holborow 2019.

[115] Narayan 2019; Bunce and Field 2011.

[116] Shilliam 2016, p. 33

[117] Narayan 2019, p. 957.

[118] Hall et al. 1978.

[119] Prescod 1978, p. 7.

[120] Sivanandan 1980, p. 296.

[121] Mercer 1994, p. 2.

[122] Renton 2019, p. 162.

[123] Sivanandan 1985.

[124] Sivanandan 1978b, p. 3.

[125] Copsey 2005, p. 192.

[126] Hall et al. 1978, p. 303.

[127] Koram and Nisancioglu 2017.

[128] Narayan 2019.

[129] Ashe 2019.

[130] Raine 2019.

[131] Eagleton 2021.

[132] Nagdee and Shafi 2020.

[133] Sivanandan 1978a, p. 5.