capitalism

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.

This paper examines the critique of capitalism provided by the New World Group. Emerging from the West Indian Society for the Study of Social Issues at The University of The West Indies, Mona, the Group was formed in 1963 specifically to address the reformation of social and political forces in the wake of Caribbean territories gaining formal independence from European colonial powers. This reformation was broader than the political-economy, it included psychological and ideological reworkings, all items necessary to evaluate the kinds societies West Indians could strive for. Set within intra-Marxist debates on early capitalist development, this paper focuses on the collaboration and creative tensions between Norman Girvan, George Beckford, and Lloyd Best as they helped one another construct their respective political philosophy, social theory, and economic analysis of the logic of plantation societies, which while incomplete from our vantage, did mostly capture the historical dynamics found in the Caribbean.

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

Introduction

The plantation was a total social and economic unit, supplemented with a system of routine surveillance to support nakedly unapologetic authoritarian governance that greatly shaped the very horizon of development in Caribbean societies, even long after political independence. Combining vertical relations of domination integral to extracting labour with some limited horizontal relations to aid the day-to-day functioning, the plantation fostered anticipatory obedience and instinctual habituation to unspoken imperatives. While eagerly catering towards aggressively extractive market relations this unit actively dismissed viewpoints that countered the supremacy of market forces. The interplay between domination and egalitarianism enabled processes of creolization leading to new cultural forms in speech, like picong and kas kas; new modes of kinship, like extending fictive kin and religious syncretism. But social and economic relations of production remained rooted in extraction. There may have been individual acts of resistance, but the unit’s overseers stymied democratic change the moment resistance became inconvenient.

Well aware of these conditions, West Indian intellectuals in the post-war era sought to explain the economic structures of Caribbean societies by reference to path determinacy set by European colonial formations and the associated sequestering of surpluses. Known as ‘a Theory of Plantation Economy and Society,’ this body of thought was developed by the New World Group comprising George Beckford, Lloyd Best, Norman Girvan, complimented by people like C. Y. Thomas, H. R. Brewster, Joan Robinson, Owen Jefferson, Gordon Lewis and Trevor Monroe among others, and then joined by Kari Polanyi Levitt and Archie Singham from abroad.[1] This interdisciplinary project had many intellectual tributaries and confluences, in addition to a wide delta of applications and interpretations.^[2] In the spirit of independence, Girvan writes, the theory sought to “reflect the political aspect of decolonization on the intellectual, economic, social and cultural spheres.”^[3] Put differently, one aim of the Group was to decolonize hereto accounts of the ‘general process’ to better comprehend the functional role of race and empire in capital accumulation.^[4]

Emerging from the incubator of the West Indian Society for the Study of Social Issues at The University of The West Indies, Mona in Jamaica, the Group was formed in 1963 specifically to address the reformation of social and political forces in the wake of Caribbean territories gaining formal independence from European colonial powers. The year before Jamaica had become independent of British direct rule, with University College (as it was known then) severing its ties in the same year from the University of London to become The University of The West Indies. Led by students and young lecturers, this reformation was broader than the critique of political economy. It included psychological and ideological reworkings, all items necessary to evaluate the kinds of societies West Indians could strive for.

Across the West Indies, Independence also brought pragmatic matters to the fore—the need to produce constitutions, currencies, and passports being some basic examples. Well read and highly educated, members of the New World Group knew that independence would not automatically produce tidy democratic states. Formal decolonization and democratization were conjunctures of vicious contest; the stakes were setting an enduring social trajectory. Even to this day, the mythology of Independence in the West Indies sanitizes how in this decisive political moment there was a quick realignment of interests and deal-making as local factions sought to build constituencies to win power electorally, and otherwise occupy the commanding heights of their societies as British flags were lowered.[5] Along with trade unionists, urban radical social movements and the organized poor,[6] these intellectuals sought to better conceptualize the workings of power in their national, regional, and international contexts. They strove throughout to understand how rule by markets was constituted through historical and material forces.

In the case of members of the New World Group this activity was undertaken inside of key state institutions, like public universities, at least in the 1960s. However as the 1970s unfolded some members, like Best, had been driven from these same institutions. Best responded by forming Tapia in 1968, which ran in Trinidad and Tobago’s 1976 election as a political party.[7] It won 3.81% of the vote.[8] Other members like Girvan stayed in academia longer, but left to do development work, becoming the Secretary General of the Association of Caribbean States. Although there are some exceptions in more radical spaces,[9] arguably it has only really been since the CLR James Centennial Conference in 2001 that the New World Group has received recognition for their theorizing by members of the local establishment. That said, this ‘bump of a revival’ to use Brian Meeks’ turn of phrase has been selective.[10] The Group’s critique of the US and UK ruling classes are permitted; critiques of the local ruling class remain less welcome.

Set within intra-Marxist debates on early accounts of capitalist development, this paper focuses on the collaboration and creative tensions between Girvan, Beckford, and Best as they helped one another construct their respective political philosophy, social theory, and economic analysis of the logic of plantation societies, which while incomplete from our vantage, did mostly capture the historical dynamics found in the Caribbean. As either founders, editors or key contributors, these three figures are notable for their early involvement in the transnational publication, New World, of which 14 issues were published between 1963 and 1972 between Georgetown, Guyana and Mona, Jamaica.[11] University work was a centralizing force keeping Girvan, Beckford, and Best in frequent contact. The by-product of this close collaboration was that all three had multiple ground-breaking academic monographs which draw upon the work of the others. I will elaborate upon these ties in the third part of the paper.

At the same time I also want to be cautious in this essay to not perpetuate the trope of extraordinary figures. Even while the West Indies is comprised of small societies where interpersonal relations are visible and traceable, it would still be an error to reify any person—they could not and did not have the singular influence of which they are credited. It is better to think more about a generational cluster of scholarship advancing lines of critique and the circumstances that enabled or constrained that critique.

Accordingly, in this paper I survey the arguments and analysis offered by the Group as their historical studies intervene in the debates on race, capitalism, and Marxism. Through doing so, I aim to contribute to a non-European and non-American centric approach to the historical study of racism and exploitation. There are several steps involved in making the argument that the Group has much to offer Political Marxism. The first portion of the paper covers the intramural debates in Marxian accounts for capitalist development. I then turn to revisionist inter-war economic historiography of the Black Atlantic, as this was an archive for the Group’s later synthesis of modernity and conceptualization of how the ‘general process’ involves the realization of civic ascriptions and their associated modes of articulation as they dynamically respond to the imposed demands of production and circuits of accumulation. Looking forward, for my claim that the Group can contribute much to Political Marxism to make sense, it is worthwhile revisiting some standard Marxist accounts of capitalist development.

Standard Marxist Accounts of Early Capitalist Development

The transition from feudalism to capitalism has generated a vast historical literature of which the Brenner–Wood exchange on the Low Countries is emblematic of how the role of race has occasionally been overlooked in the analysis of early capitalist development.^[12] Robert Brenner attributed the development of capitalist property relations there to declining soil fertility and a resultant resource gradient leading to a division of labor within rural commodity production. Farmers subsequently turned to the market to purchase consumptive goods, which in turn created new instruments and urban development. Still, Ellen Meiksins Wood objected that there are “fundamental differences between commercial and capitalist societies.”[13] While granting that the Low Countries had active markets in land, labour, and capital, and some mechanized manufacturing (most notably in shipbuilding), for Wood this society lacked social reproduction predicated upon market dependence, meaning that it lacked other necessary characteristics of capitalism, like the accumulation imperative or the revolutionary need to overhaul forces of production. But in their back and forth, both Wood and Brenner fail to give attention to the role played by the transfer of surpluses from the East and West Indies, or how enslaved people provided the fiscal security for the commercial ventures undertaken by the VOC.

Lest one suspect that these errors belong to Political Marxism exclusively, similar kinds of oversights also exist in the classic debates on manorialism over where and when primacy between urban or rural sectors emerged during the transition from feudalism to capitalism. To briefly elaborate, Pierre-Philippe Rey argues that the process of converting feudal obligations into money rents was external to capitalism, like the already existing practice of expropriating peasant’s surpluses. Guy Bois notes how basic units of feudal production were agnostic to increasing productivity nor sought profit-orientated investment. Instead, small-scale peasant holdings preferred subsistence routines sufficient to meet levies and satisfy ideologies of self-sufficiency. Lords, on the other hand, were primarily concerned with preserving civic hierarchies. Still, as technology (and its organization) slowly improved over two centuries—like village plow teams becoming more efficient—so lords increasingly appropriated surpluses in the form of money. In time these reconfigurations of manorialism weakened feudal institutions and strengthened commercialism that by the 16^th century rural areas had been commodified and many smallholders pauperized. These processes culminated in levies being exceeded by rents, and thus a preference given to the later.^[14] But while Pierre-Philippe Rey and Guys Bois offer strong empirical evidence for their respective arguments, in general they discount the role of international trade with the Western Hemisphere in aiding urban development. Moreover, while it is not quite true that plantations were simply manors taken abroad, neither is it entirely false.

Even Perry Anderson’s more expansive conception of “the feudal dynamic” and its contradictions neglects the role of Atlantic imperialism.^[15] He writes that the “private sovereignty” of the “parcelized” manor weakened the power of centralized authority due to overlapping jurisdictions. Medieval towns took advantage of the uneven capabilities of the state and intra-feudal rivalries to acquire relative autonomy, in turn making them conducive to nascent urbanization as peasants fled serfdom. These developments were not without revanche as the feudal system sought to seize this wealth generated by these sites of agrarian commerce. Against the backdrop of commodity production and exchange, absolutist states emerged. Justified by the traditions of Roman law which emphasised sovereignty and unconditional private property, absolutist states swept away parcelized sovereignty and feudal rights to land. Violence proliferated as national monarchies consolidated, culminating in an inversion of the feudal system; sovereignty became public and property became private.

As Anderson points out, absolutist states were contradictory war machines. They combined feudal era dispossession of rival economies through military force with modern directed economic investment. To direct war and wealth, a bureaucracy was built to collect taxes which weakened the levy system, while also diminishing peasants’ holdings. To offset their lost feudal standing, aristocrats oversaw this planned predation. Being placed in charge of the military and administrative apparatus well positioned them to engage in rent seeking activities. Nevertheless, warfare and dispossession undermined the development of markets, supply chains and the collection of taxes therefrom. And so, absolutist states sought loans from the commercial-financial complex. Over time, these loans represent the relative power shifts in European classes.

New claims, expropriations, and exploitations stemmed from this re-organization of power, but this power was nevertheless predicated upon a primordial conceptualization of trade as a zero-sum exercise. Provided the bourgeoisie produced weapon systems they were granted considerable autonomy which allowed for capitalist forces and relations of production to expand. The primary beneficiaries of early capitalist expansion were aristocrats and the bourgeoisie, who were integrated in the state; what Pierre-Philippe Rey terms a ‘double mix.’ In their respective ways, these classes used the absolutist state to construct a ‘national interest’ to pursue their prerogatives by managing the enclosure, commodification and conversion of existing goods into private property. The costs of this transition were borne by peasants who became cottagers and journeymen who became wage labourers. To the extent they could, these groups resisted and fought a long war against this transition. While Anderson’s account of the uneven and combined development of Europe well primes us to review the unseen, uneven and combined development occurring concurrently in the Western Hemisphere, the account also illustrates how issues of race, enslavement and imperialism are treated as somewhat peripheral concerns in early capitalist development, framed as effects rather than contributing factors.

Even contemporary analysis of capitalist development under-explores the role of race. For instance, reminiscent of Karl Polanyi’s ‘double movement,’ Wolfgang Streeck recounts the antinomies of European industrialisation. It brought “expulsion from the land, proletarianization, exploitation, repression and cruel discipline” as well as “emancipation from traditional ways of life, new solidarities, trade unions with the capacity to fight for higher wages and better conditions, and the possibility of industrial citizenship and social reform.” The development of co-ordinated, co-operative large-scale production presented new stakes and techniques over the “division of the proceeds” between capital and labour, which also appeared in the organization of factories.^[16] With their power to strike, labour gained considerable bargaining power, at least relative to other preceding forms of organized production.

In response, between 1840 and 1920 capitalists seized upon new technologies like telegraphy, rotary power printing, the telephone, punch card processing and the like to improve their means of calculation and communication, while taking steps to safeguard this control through intellectual property regimes. Many of these technologies were enrolled to support Frederick Taylor’s scientific management, a project Caitlin Rosenthal characterizes as adapting and refining techniques practiced in the new world plantation system.[17] What was conceptualised as innovative business practices was simply the use of technology to re-establish control on the labour process. In the post war era, microprocessors simply continued this trajectory by consolidating power and control with capitalists.^[18]

To help erode recent concessions and recapture lost dividends, capitalists sought to offset labour power by interpolating workers to their project while begrudgingly commissioning the state to provide welfare programs to quell grievances and unrest. For example, in the wake of the 1968 revolts, European manufacturers cooperated with unions to humanize industrial work to forestall anti-capitalist protests. “Some workers and their representatives gained the right, not just to be informed and consulted,” Streeck writes, “but also to contribute to decisions about work organisation, technology, working hours and training.”^[19] Nevertheless these defensive concessionary tactics were coupled with more aggressive investments in transportation and communication technologies. Factories were relocated to towns without a labour tradition while vulnerable migrants were employed, all this in hopes of preventing worker self-organization. In Britain, the latter was accomplished by importing labour “obviously of a selective type.” West Indians migrants “largely [came] to [fill] vacancies created by the upward mobility of British labour and were acting as a replacement population.”^[20]

Of interest, Streeck does not mention how “crumbs from the colonial table,” as Walter Rodney described it, were used as loyalty rents for the proletariat to create wedge issues. Neither does Streeck refer to how “capitalists misinformed and mis-educated workers in the metropoles to the point where they became allies in colonial exploitation.”^[21] Where race implicitly emerges as a topic is when he discusses how production was outsourced to the Global South, a process that gained traction throughout the 1990s. “The hellish Manchester of early industrialisation still exists, but on the global periphery,” Streeck writes, “too far away for school trips.”^[22] But as WEB Du Bois might add, there were never school trips to working plantations.

Given Brenner, Wood, Rey, Bois, Anderson and Streeck’s neglect of the role of race and imperialism in capitalist development it is perhaps more than understandable that scholars like Cedric Robinson have complicated relationships with Marxist historiography. Although hardly the first or last scholar to think about the role of race in capitalism, Robinson provided one quintessential account of the role of racial hierarchy by arguing that “the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force, then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism.”^[23] With brevity in mind, he suggests that the reason European and American Marxists make race-relations incidental and contingent whereas class relations are necessity is because Marxism is irrevocably locked to the West’s “racialist architectonic”. Herein “race was its epistemology, its ordering principle, its organizing structure, its moral authority, its economy of justice, commerce and power” because racism “runs deep in the bowels of western thought.”^[24] As such, for Robinson there are explanatory limits to Marxian categories on matters of race.

While there is value in critiquing his details, Robinson’s remarks provide a useful prompt for a richer synthetic account of early capitalist development, one which can greatly benefit from the explanatory insight offered by the literature which analyzes the triangular trade in the Black Atlantic. Indeed, the Black Radical tradition is especially good at pressing home the deep connection between (and still reverberating effects of) enslavement in the Western Hemisphere and contemporary capitalism;^[25] what Robinson calls the “dialectic of imperialism and liberation.”^[26] This connection is racial capitalism, a market-system propped up by states that permits, nay relies upon racial and gendered violence as an ‘extra-economic’ means to force reproduction to occur through the market. From this vantage, the capitalism-slavery debate very much informs the race-class debate, the debate about modern state formation and racial formation are all roughly equivalent attempts to plot the realizations of domination and dominion that emerged during the expansion of markets during modernity.    

The Initial Caribbean Counter-Analysis

The reason I have spent a few pages overviewing the debates on early capitalist development is to show the terrain on which The New World Group struggled. Yet even while their analysis emerges from positions on the margins of this terrain, by no means are they marginal to these discussions. In this respect, the Group inherited much from Caribbeanists like CLR James, WEB Du Bois, and Eric Williams.[27] In providing a “counter-culture of modernity”—to poach a term of art from Paul Gilroy—James, Du Bois and Williams had an ambivalent relationship to the centers of analysis, “sometimes as defenders of the West, sometimes as its sharpest critics.”^[28] As such it is instructive to review their interpretation of the histories of, and contradictions in, the global political economy. Doing so allows us to see the subsequent continuities of themes and iteration of topics in the New World Group’s analysis of the role of drainage in uneven and combined development during modernity.

To begin with Williams, he foregrounds the role of mercantile trade wars in the latter half of the 17^th century between major European powers as setting in motion a series of nested contests, amongst which were control over the Western Hemisphere and India. Through private interests and royal chartered companies, Britain pivoted from purchasing goods from the Dutch and instead invested in domestic industry and colonial agriculture. Regarding the Caribbean colonies, anticipating development economists like Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson,^[29] Williams demonstrates how due to the interplay of the characteristics of specific crops, land markets and labour demands led to different institutional arrangements. For example, sugar production was particularly labour intensive. This meant that planters initially sought to enslave indigenous populations, but when this finite labour pool was depleted due to genocide, then planters drew upon the English poor and convicts through servitude and indentureship. While there are clear differences between white servitude and black enslavement, these contracts were treated as a property relation thereby providing the template for enslavement.^[30] Moreover, “the capital accumulated from the one financed the other.”

While the Colonial Board unsuccessfully sought to curtail the abuses of servitude, these legal protections did not encompass West Africans. As the legal space was provided, planters turned to mass enslavement to leverage economies of scale for high rates of profit. This consolidated into triangular trade, wherein slavers from Liverpool purchased slaves in West Africa, sold the enslaved to Caribbean planters, then returned with agricultural goods to Britain. This new labour regime led to rapid social change. As an illustration, in 1645 Barbados had 11’200 small white farmers and 5’680 black slaves. By 1667, there were 745 large plantations and 82’023 slaves. A 500-acre plantation in 1640 cost £400, yet by 1648 the price had increased by 3500%. In 1650, its agriculture was worth £3 million, just under £670 million in contemporary terms, and so became a vital component of the wider British economy. To select but one of his examples, Williams relays how “in 1697 British imports from Barbados were five times the combined imports from the bread colonies; the exports to Barbados were slightly larger.” He adds that “little Barbados, with its 166 square miles, was worth more to British capitalism than New England, New York, and Pennsylvania combined.”^[31]

Unable to survive in this market without land to expand into, many whites left the colonies despite incentives to remain, like restrictions of trades and qualified franchises for Colonial Assemblies. A diminishing tax base led Colonial Assemblies to impose high duties on imported slaves to raise revenue, and to which merchants predictably objected. While colonies were contested, in the end “the plantation economy had no room for poor whites,” Williams wrote. “The victims were the Negroes in Africa and the small white farmer.” Intense social inequality of this kind meant that only wealthy planters and the enslaved remained, thereby revealing the general tendency of capitalism. Between 1763 and 1778 London merchants avoided investment in the Liverpool slave trade because they thought it was running at a loss.

Douglas Hall’s assessment of the early 19^th West Indian sugar industry was that irrespective of how “well-equipped and well managed” estates might have been (and many were not), planters “lacked the basic permissives of calculability of success or failure in their businesses. They seldom had any realistic idea of how the enterprise stood financially, or what its prospects were.” Hall relays how British Merchants were aware of how financial illiteracy caused debts and mortgages to accumulate interest.^[32] Nevertheless “industrial expansion required finance.”^[33] And for the bulk of the 18^th Century those best positioned to invest capital were big planters and slave traders.^[34] Concurrently, their wealth allowed them to exert considerable influence as well as the ability to purchase political office which in turns shaped the governance of triangular trade system. In summary, Williams argues that “the contribution of slavery to the development of British capitalism,” specifically the role of the “slave trade [provided] the capital which financed the Industrial Revolution in England.” The wealth generated by Atlantic trade provided demand for consumptive goods which stoked domestic economic activity. Effectively sugar cultivation in the West Indies provided solutions for the various economic crises in Europe, meaning that the so-called periphery was at the center of European capitalist development. In short, ‘slavery drove growth.’ For Williams, this system only ended when planters’ desires for monopoly threatened profits and expansion in other sectors.

Given that context creates conceptualization, Williams argued that depending on land and labour colonial economic formations divide into two models. The first was “the self-sufficient and diversified economy of small farmers, while the second “has the facilities for the production of staple articles on large scale for an export market,” and can be illustrated by the American and Caribbean colonies respectively.^[35] Accordingly, while they write about 18^th Century Caribbean agricultural production and 19^th Century American industrialism respectively, there is comparative value in comparing and triangulating James’ and Du Bois’ insights into race and capitalism. In doing so they offer good templates to go beyond provincializing accounts by noting the global nature of capitalism.

James’ analysis of 18^th century capitalism vividly demonstrates how systematic sexual violation, starvation, racialization and natal alienation were inseparable from the balance of payments in international trade. Against the backdrop of the shifting balance of power in Europe, the wars to capture these spaces generally testify to the value of colonial agricultural production and extraction: few states would bother if it was not ultimately profitable. Similarly, James notes how the possession and repression of the enslaved became central to the ruling ideology of San Domingo. This ideology included latent fear of insurrections by the 500’000 enslaved, or the enslaved being recruited by invading armies.^[36] Within this context James provides a social history of mutable identities, one in which politics greatly shapes interests and affiliations. As an example of this refusal to flatten thought, he details the antagonisms between the Governor and the Intendant, given that “the source of its power [was] so many thousands of miles away.” On the eve of the Haitian revolution, the Governor had just over 500 personnel to act as “a counterweight to the power of the planters in the small whites of town and country,” who numbered “about 30’000.” Ideologically opposed to budding absolutism and independently minded, the bureaucracy “frequently encroached on the Intendant’s administration of justice and finance,” but themselves lacked capacity for the reach and enforcement of rule.^[37] Building upon these cleavages, James’ language of “small whites” and “big whites” is analytically perceptive. For example, most of the big landowners and rentiers—big whites—lived in Europe and employed white labour—small whites—to safeguard their property.^[38]

Neither did James shy away from discussions of how racial hierarchy intersected with differentiated class positions themselves shaped by alliance building, and aspirations of upward social mobility.^[39] Small whites were reticent about Mulattos’ rising social status: while Mulattoes’ increasing wealth was resented, small whites courted them lest they “swell the ranks of their enemies.”^[40] While big whites sought an alliance with Mulattos to suppress revolts, nevertheless the French Assembly worried that “to give rights to Mulattoes who outnumbered them would be to hand over the colony, military and civil, to these bastard upstarts and their allies of the counter-revolution.”^[41] Similarly, the dividends from enslavement were a source of factional contests within European states. For example, James points out how in the wake of their revolution, the French Republic deemed the colonial surpluses vital to consolidate rule, both internally and externally, while creditors, not wanting to lose their investments, went to considerable lengths to protect their property which eventually culminated in the 1802 expedition to put down the revolution. In the end, supposedly the freedom of some required the enslavement of others.

Notwithstanding politics and positions—and he places considerable emphasis on these in his analysis—James’ indictment is systematic, as one of his most famous passages illustrates: “There were good and bad Governors, good and bad Intendants, as there were good and bad slave owners. But this was a matter of pure chance. It was the system that was bad.”^[42] This system was not localized, confined to a specific place and specific time, but rather the realization of a dynamic tri-continental economy designed to perpetuate subordination which was maintained by routine acts of extreme violence. James’ analysis illustrated how enslavement was not residue of a by-gone era, some pre-capitalist endeavour that wage-labour surpassed, but rather was emblematic of a mature supra-national capitalist system that could only be escaped through savvy revolutionary action.

Turning to the United States Du Bois discusses how enslavement created a subject of capital and white supremacy which became an immutable category and an indicator in racial formation. “Black labor became the foundation stone not only of the Southern social structure, but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-wide scale,” Du Bois wrote.^[43] The effects of this consolidating racial formation were not confined to the United States, rather “new cities were built on the results of black labor, and a new labor problem, involving all white labor, arose in both Europe and America.”^[44] Du Bois’s analysis argues that racial formation was leveraged to extract surpluses that were then transferred across the Atlantic.

In the empire of cotton enslaved people were both labour and capital. As for the later, in the 19^th century British merchants made advances to American cotton planters, who in turn used this credit to produce, hoping to use slavery to cover expenses and gain a profit. Likewise, “sugar cultivation” Williams wrote “was a lottery.”^[45] The enslaved were the collateral upon which advances in this mode of production depended. In the early part of the Atlantic slave trade black women were disposable, but once colonies settled, as the slave trade was outlawed, so Black women became integral components to reproducing the whole. The system relied upon sexual violation to produce capital. As commodities and capital themselves, through reproduction Black women produced capital for planters. One consequence of this rich analysis of the social relations of production showed the historical interconnection of the global geographies of commodity chains, labour processes, and class and civic ascriptions, and the silences around the peculiar institutions that formed the bedrock of the accumulation of capital. Accordingly, the social history of the white European working class cannot be separated from the entitlements, privileges, wages, and spoils of whiteness, which was used to make demands for political rights and higher social standing.

In summary, the core features of capitalism are racialization and instrumentalization, commodification and securitization, financialization and violence, with cascading effects felt the world over. During the Black Atlantic sphere of circulation, new grammars of difference came to justify and legitimate enslavement, which in turn produced a myriad of class, status, and identity distinctions. This returns us to the work of Robinson. He argued that there were severe limitations to orthodox Marxism and black nationalism. He found in both a common dogma; fictitious essentialism that produced uncritical narratives about the proletariat or Black subjects leading credence to the belief that capturing the commanding heights was sufficient to change patterns of domination. But in assuming that identity gave rise to political consciousness these projects neither had an adequate understanding of domination nor the basis of its institutional implementation. Inter alia simply changing the names and faces of the people in charge would be little genuine democratic emancipation, points that harken back to James’ analysis of the Caribbean. Rather, what was required was a programmatic agenda that channelled the Black revolutionary thought that encountered the raw violence that sustained tri-angular trade.

In their respective ways Williams, James, and Du Bois identified an Atlantic political economy where the movement of people, goods, and surpluses in this sphere of circulation directed the rise of industrialism. This system was spatially differentiated, had a global division of labour as well as several modes of articulation, but nevertheless comprised a single system. Within the proletariat, metropolitan whites received loyalty rents for their affiliation with this system, which included status and other civic ascriptions that were initially plotted against the enslaved and then later colonial subjects. In addition to entitlements, small whites received a (narrow) share of the spoils from the imperial system, calculated to be just enough to divide the proletariat, quell moral dilemmas, and stall class struggles. The dialectic between whiteness and blackness takes place against the backdrop that is the dialectic between metropole and hinterland, between empire and slavery, all mutably co-defined. In short, the legacies of imperial class relations connect capitalist exploitation and racial distinctions. And so there is nothing to gain from giving analytical priority to Europe over Africa, factory over field, white proletarians over the black enslaved. For Williams, James and Du Bois there were no distinction between histories of modern slavery and histories of capitalism, the distinction between them only seeks to propagandize in capitalism’s favour. It was this analysis that brought incredulity from the European intellectuals. “For years,” James wrote, “we seemed, to the official and the learned world, to be at best, political illiterates.”^[46]

The Theory of The New World Group

As I suggested in the previous section, pressing against ‘white ignorance’[47] the Caribbean critique of political economy produced a unique social imaginary that offers a credible counter-analysis of modernity. This counter-analysis is at the heart of a Caribbean lineage of imaginative acts of self-invention that seek to find new, and arguably more potential for, just social relations. Doing so was an inter- and multi-disciplinary venture. For example, Girvan noted that the New World Group deliberately courted the views and insights from “historians, poets, literary critics, economists, political scientists, sociologists and journalists,”[48] linking their views with the pursuit of a Caribbean critique of political economy. For Girvan, the Group was a “demonstration of the potential for the development of a unified Caribbean consciousness, and of the feasibility of collaborative efforts that transcend the sterile divisions of discipline, occupation and territory.”[49]

From the main three protagonists, Beckford’s contribution was perhaps the strongest, if also the least known, because his work was essentially the Caribbean counterpart to Marx’s detailing of the social transformations in England between 1750 and 1850 brought by capital. In greater detail than Williams, and with a wider lens than James or Du Bois, in Persistent Poverty Beckford describes a metropolitan economy centred on London and other European ports.[50] Merchants and emerging industrialists provided the working capital for New World planters. Planters worked with colonial land proprietors, where contracted to provide agriculture, and imported enslaved persons to work the field and serve the house. Some of the enslaved escaped to form Maroon communities. In compressed form, Beckford described the Atlantic economy with its various class, race, legal and occupational components as these work within and make institutional frameworks that govern the use and abuse of power. The ultimate end of this project was to externalize costs in the Caribbean and repatriate benefits out of it, stoke racial conflict to redirect local energies, then create a local elite that was both psychological dependent and ideologically affiliated with metropolitan interests.[51] Unable to be fully captured by equations, all these relations and structures factor into the long run determinants of import and export prices.

Although close friends, Best thought that while Beckford did generate a robust and dynamic “theory of income distribution” wherein metropolitan merchants exercised first claim, it was through “a quite gratuitous embrace of the cosmology of historical materialism.”[52] Still, it was this gratuitous embrace that Beckford used to demonstrate how capitalist-directed investments and the rationality of profitability explains the location of particular industries on the world scale, while the falling rate of profit is offset by ever more severe repression of the enslaved (and later apprenticed) workforce. Beckford’s agenda to redress these issues is standard—land and property regime reform, significant redistribution, economic integration—insofar that social scientists generally understand that these actions aid egalitarian goals. One difficulty, Beckford admitted, was the legitimation required for these domestic policy targets, especially when there was much psychological dependency. And so Beckford charted a James-like revolutionary course: “change must begin in the minds of people, relating to the concept they have of themselves.”[53]

For his part Best, along with Levitt, argued that colonial governors had designed domestic economies to ‘simply be’ hinterlands of exploitation revolving around a kernel of enclave mono-crop production. Although these plantations had weak formal linkages to other local industries they nevertheless constituted “a well-defined set of institutions” and “a distinct pattern of economic behaviour.” To wit: “our central hypothesis,” they write, “is that this legacy represents an endowment of mechanisms of economic adjustment that deprive the region of internal dynamic.”[54] At stake in this theorization was the viability of the Sir Arthur Lewis’s model of development, which to simplify for present purposes is a social democratic economic conjecture about the necessity and suitability of foreign capital in facilitating national development strategies. Sir Arthur Lewis proposed that because Caribbean countries had cheap labour, they were well positioned to discard the production of staple goods and instead industrialize if external capital was courted. Capital inflows would subsequently restructure the economy generating, in time, local capital that could be redeployed to produce social goods. Effectively within this ‘dual economy’, surpluses could be concentrated then redirected for national development goals.[55] Best recoiled at this suggestion: blacks were more than a source of cheap labour. “Our fundamental difference with Lewis was not that he saw imperialism and foreign capital as part of the solution while we saw it as the heart of the problem,” Best wrote.[56] Put differently, his work insisted that the Caribbean industrialization projects were a continuation of metropolitan interests restructuring and under-developing the region, with the one major change in the post-independence period being administrative. Colonial officials were replaced by local elites acting as compradors while erstwhile continuing the elite enrichment practices of their forebears.

There is another area where the Group had useful insights, and this was the critique of orthodox post-war development economics.[57] More than his companions, Best was the most willing to appreciate the limitations of the epistemic capabilities of development economics, but also preserve it. Rather than the kind of Leninism Beckford deployed, or the kind of dependency model Girvan gravitated towards, Best thought that advances in method would come when led by Caribbean imagination. The difficulty was that Best’s skills as a political philosopher lagged his skills as an economic historian. His views around ethnicity are a good example of this. Best maintained that Marxists treated race ‘simply as’ a class problem, not a distinct set of prejudices that constitute society in their own right. By contrast he foregrounded ethnicity to such an extent that it became akin to ethnic reductionism wherein “class is merely a special case of ethnicity”[58] To tease this out, Best believed that social bonds precede property relations, that class analysis properly conducted discounts meaningful cultural attachments. The chief difficulty with this conclusion is that it neglects that Marx’s critique of alienation tackles the same ground; that the commodification of labour upends the social bonds that humans wish to freely pursue.

Lastly, Girvan had a much greater interest in demonstrating how multinational extractive industries, whether sugar in Jamaica, bauxite in Guyana, or oil in Trinidad and Tobago did not serve the interests of Caribbean people.[59] Many of these were contemporary empirical studies of firms, sectors, and complexes in the 20^th century. Girvan undertook them primarily to show how the development strategies adopted by West Indian governments were unlikely to generate self-sustaining growth with full employment because their economies were structured to be perpetually dependent on metropoles, consistent with the models created by Beckford and Best. Notwithstanding their respective differences, the common theme of the New World Group was economic dependence to metropolitan interests and the work of local collaborators and compradors to legally entrench that dependence. As an alternative Girvan proposed enhancing regional economic integration through a Caribbean Free Trade Association, a point which generated considerable technical debate, and which I will address in the next section.

Given pressing matters of governance, how these political economists conceptualised decolonization as involving both thought and action had a sizable impact in the postcolonial English-speaking Caribbean. Beckford provides a tidy statement of the New World Group’s agenda: “Our aim remains clear: to promote radical change in all aspects of Caribbean life and society so as to release the long-suppressed creative energies of the peoples of the region”.[60] Still the Group insisted that historical analysis had to be the starting point for a development programme capable of producing a synthesis which could temper the warring ethno-political blocs that traversed the region. In doing so the Group challenged the intellectual and disciplinary insularities of economics in the mid-20th century. “Self-consciously adopting the perceived interests of the people,” Michael Witter writes “these scholars waged a long and distinguished struggle against the ideas in economic theory that justified and rationalized the disenfranchisement and exploitation of the working people.”[61] Attentive to history but not beholden to it, altogether their analysis of the path dependency borne from early capitalism sought to better account for the role of race and class in modernity. Equally important, the plantation theory was purposefully antagonistic to modernization theory, which was prescriptive in international development agencies during the period when the Group was active. Contra modernization theory, the Group argued that development was not possible based on a set of ‘prudent’ policy choices because the legacies of colonial policies meant the local economy was built to cater to the imperatives of metropolitan capital above all else. In short, economic configurations had a material history, and in the Caribbean these configurations were resistant, if not wholly antagonistic, to democratic desires.

Although some participants like Lloyd Best were feverishly anti-Marxist, the New World Group’s theorization can best be understood as an intervention in intra-mural Marxian debates through front loading issues of racialization and the class characteristics of a global division of labour. At stake here was to what extent were Marxist explanations of social history capable of grasping the many dimensions of racial oppression.^[62] These were not ill-informed critiques. For example, while at Oxford, Best was frequently Stuart Hall’s lunch companion when the later was editing Universities and Left Review.[63] Conversely for Girvan, what deficiencies existed in Marxism were of application, not foundational or methodological.^[64]

In this regard the Group had several main contributions to post-war 20^th century social thought. Building upon the observation that sugar plantations were different from tobacco plantations, tenant plantations were different from company plantations and so on, they sought to explain how these differences conditioned subsequent political structures. For example, in Appendix II ofPersistent Poverty, Beckford outlines four primary types of plantations: company, tenant, family and state. While they all are characterised by a “high degree of central control and co-ordination” they are distinguished by forms of capital at disposal and the ratio of assets on the books between land, machinery, and the enslaved. For example, the bulk percentage of investment for tenet and family types was in land, while for companies it was in equipment, processing machinery, and enslaved persons. These differences are also expressed in management. Resident family plantations tended to combine ownership and management roles, while tenant farms had supervisors. Company plantations management tended to be on behalf of owners living abroad, and it tended to be more authoritarian and sought to undermine the community in which it was located.^[65] These differences explain the specific nature of politics in and over Colonial Assemblies. To simplify for this paper, family and tenet planters sought representation, while state and company plantations undermined those initiatives.

Second, the Group sought to correct for economic and ideological dependence on the West; demonstrating how plantations and multinational corporations were the institutional means keeping Caribbean economies stagnant,^[66] while framing any resistance to the retelling of capitalist development from the Caribbean point of view as intellectual institutional racism. In this spirit, the Group was aware of the historical contradiction between liberal universalism and the lived experience of enslavement and colonialism. For example, in the Caribbean, legal codes enforced racial segregation and subordination. It was not rule of law, but rule by law. In this vein, they had extensive discussion about neo-colonialism, that being fiscal rule without occupation in the post-independence era.^[67] In short, the legacy of centuries in a colonial condition would not be wiped out merely by a legal instrument conferring constitutional sovereignty.

Accordingly, arguments around reparations are not confined to fiscal concerns. It involves decentering notions of justice that arise from the standpoint of the Northern metropolitan bourgeoises. Taking its place would be approaches that foreground the dialectical relationship between the South and North, seeking to account for native genocide - approaches that also acknowledge the ways in which gendered and racialized social reproduction occurred through stratification and subordination were pivotal.^[68] When doing so, this line of analysis demonstrates that race and class are different realizations of generative logic which aims to subordinate people to the global operations of capital, that they are both expressions of relationships to the means of production. Altogether, the Group outlined a conception of justice predicated upon attention to extensive harms caused by long causal production chains that developed during the modernity.^[69]

The great value of the Group was to conceptualize then demonstrate how multiple historically contingent modes of domination co-articulate in ways that can amplify or dampen one another. Through mutual reinforcement or occasional antagonism, these modes have their own effects. This granular approach allows scholars and researchers to identify the mechanisms by which capitalist rule occurs in a specific times and places, and how this rule is connected to other times and places. For example, if Robert Paxton is correct to note how fascism is the application of technologies of colonialism to subjects in the metropole^[70]—like how factories and the task system were tested in the Caribbean before being imported to Europe—then the Group offers a prescient critique of how and why authoritarian tendencies are presently emerging in the North. The point is not about blowback (or even comeuppance) but about the geographic connections of contemporary governance. In doing so, the Group’s scholarship reaffirms how the subordinated have a history of responding to unfavorable conditions not solely with agony, but with political acumen. Acknowledging this reality can greatly improve the contemporary analysis of value struggles as well as accurately comprehend the authoritarianism consolidating the world over.

In the post-independence period the Group took stock of the various contradictions, competitions, and antagonisms that circulated in the social life in the West Indies and suggested that efforts to induce modernization were short-sighted. Rather as Best wrote, first it was necessary to “erode the intellectual and philosophical foundations of the old order so as to guard against the mere substitution of one political elite for another.”^[71] This agenda put the group in conflict with the post-independence political class, whose budding radicalism was tempered and redirected into cultural nationalism.[72] For example, contra the views of notable Caribbean political economists like Sir Arthur Lewis who thought that Caribbean development was hampered by unemployment and a weak local capitalist class and so required ‘industrialization by invitation,’ James stressed how propensity could be achieved through labor taking a greater control of production. Effectively, moving Caribbean societies from an agricultural base to industrialism would likely prove difficult unless there was greater attention to the legacies of colonial governance created by racial capitalism. In summary, for James emancipation can best be achieved through a social reconstruction of the way people relate to one another. Sadly, James’ views did not prevail.

Legacies of The New World Group

So what of the impact of the Group? Given that he spent time in James’ London reading groups and wrote for the Group’s journal,[73] Walter Rodney’s work on the history of capital in Africa can provide an example of the operationalization of the Group’s conceptualization of capitalist development, a topic discussed in the beginning of this paper. Rodney’s thesis is that over centuries, the war machines Anderson describes were used by European imperialists to loot and otherwise reverse African social development. “The wealth that was created by African labor and from African resources was grabbed by the capitalist countries of Europe; and in the second place, restrictions were placed upon African capacity to make the maximum use of its economic potential,” he wrote.^[74] Simple, but hardly simplistic. Echoing Williams’, James’ and the Group’s insight that so-called peripheral spaces were not marginal to global economic flows, Rodney argues that it is the prevailing ideology that marginalizes and diminished Africa’s central role in the expansion of European capitalist development. Indeed, the human and ecological damage was so intense and so enduring that only “an act of the most fraud” could “arrive at the conclusion that the good outweighed the bad.”^[75] This looting—accumulation by dispossession in current parlance—reflected capitalist tendencies to forcefully exploit humans and nature to produce wealth for a few by immersing the many.

To wit, between 1445 and 1870, Portuguese, French and British mercantilism enslaved Africans for use in their Western Hemisphere colonies. With trade narrowed to the enslaved and a few other goods, as well as with depleted labour, and social shockwaves of internal conflicts for enslavement, this undermined the development of African productive capacities. Technical stagnation, even in regions not directly affected by enslavement, was the result. “A loss of development opportunity” that was “destructive…or at best extractive.”^[76] From 1870s onwards European capitalist states occupied African territory to extract raw materials like metals and so on. The sad contradiction was “what was called ‘profits’ in one year came back as ‘capital’ the next”, Rodney wrote, “what was foreign about the capital in colonial Africa was its ownership and not its initial source.”^[77]

As in the Caribbean and North America, racist ideologies sought to justify this naked power restructuring Africa from Cape to Cairo. And like enclosure before, policies were designed to make Africans build infrastructures for extraction and the means of their oppression. Peasants were turned into wage labourers and a reserve industrial army. Subsistence farming was replaced by cash crops. Political organizations were outlawed. Suitable local agents were cultivated that by independence, the African nationalists who came to power were “frankly capitalist, and shared fully the ideology of their bourgeois masters.”^[78] Rodney’s analysis demonstrates the explanatory utility of the Group to understand the dynamics of post-colonial institutions, norms, and relationships, and how these same things undermined universal needs. In short, Rodney uses his initial situation in Caribbean social theory to argue for matters pertaining to (neo)colonial economic drainage, facilitated by compradors who themselves partake in practices of elite enrichment, often at the expense of workers. As Rodney’s work demonstrates, the Group had an influence in shaping the agenda in the critique of neo-colonialism.

The New World Group had other intra-Caribbean discussions that revolved around how independent Caribbean countries be part of the late 20th century world economy. In short, the terms were whether these countries would be vulnerable to metropolitan capital inducing competition between countries if they industrialised independently of one another, or whether it would be more prudent for the region to form a trading bloc. While generally against Sir Arthur Lewis’s industrialization agenda, the Group was split. Best and Beckford argued that the Caribbean consisted of distinct differently plantation economies with associated institutions, meaning that any regional agreements had to take account of these factors. This observation was related to the debate on pluralism: was the Caribbean composed of plural societies with persons who only shared functions to produce, as M.G. Smith argued, or were there other unifying factors, again like worldviews and social values, as R.T. Smith had argued. Ultimately this theorization amounted to little as the new ruling class endorsed and implemented the Lewis model because it allowed for more opportunities for elite enrichment.

It is beyond the purview of this paper to extensively discuss why the Group disbanded in 1973, “why...this rich flowering of creative, Pan-Caribbean intellectual effort [withered], and eventually died,” as Girvan wrote. For most members, the fracture was nominally over debates about the Caribbean Free Trade Association in Trinidad and the Rodney Riots in Jamaica that played out through unreconcilable personality clashes. Another common explanation is that a younger generation of scholar-activists like Walter Rodney and Trevor Munroe did not share Best’s hostility to Marxism, nor did they treat it as an ‘imported’ ideology. Conversely, Best argued that the younger generation were impatient to take political power while being ill-equipped to govern well. For his part, Best was wary of Caribbean Marxism, which he thought displayed neo-Stalinist tendencies and was prone to “simply fudge from Monthly Review.”[79] Instead, a prerequisite course of action was to “erode the intellectual and philosophical foundations of the old order so as to guard against the mere substitution of one political elite for another”, Best argued.[80] (Best’s assessment would only grow stronger from the mid-1980s following the Grenada Revolution, a moment where as Charles Mills wrote “the left spectacularly discredited itself.”)[81] Another immediate reason is that the Group’s scholarship did not have much purchase within the rising Black Power movement.[82] But these accounts are rather unsatisfying because while they may involve events in history, regrettably they are insufficiently historical. Rather the rollout of neoliberalism in the region did much to reorientate scholarship away from critical questions while positioning potential collaborators as present competitors, as I explain below.

With the passage of time, the failure to form the West Indian Federation ever more appears to be a key political error for the Anglo-Caribbean. As Girvan writes, regardless of the design at the time, the failure to pursue economic integration meant there was little material delivery to support the ideals of independence. “Insular statehood”, he writes brought about a situation where “Caricom economies are probably more dependent, with less autonomy in policy-making, than fifty years ago.”[83] The result is that their economies are more susceptible to global recessions, meaning many countries that would have been in the bloc have had to relinquish policy control in any case, but now it is the IMF whose austerity programme is even stringent by the standards of those that endorse that policy course. Structural adjustments have caused a cascade of other problems, like dependency on food imports, criminogenic environments that aid transnational crime networks, extremely high murder rates, and compromised political systems. Granted Caricom has commissioned innumerable technical reports on economic transformation, but as Girvan notes, regardless of the soundness of these policy suggestions, they lack sovereign legal enforcement. There is, he writes, “no real machinery to ensure implementation.”[84]

Another factor in the wain of the Group’s influence can be attributed to the rise of neoliberalism and its local impact on the production, circulation, and consumption of research and scholarship. For the most part Anglo-Caribbean social scientists were on hand to undertake commissioned research, consult on policy, or undertake technical reports for governments and international organizations. Undeniably government contracting re-directs the focus and efforts of research activities while also greatly narrowing the scope for radical analysis and critique. Writing in Jamaica, Brian Meeks testifies to how nascent neoliberal hegemony “contributed to a hermetic atmosphere in which many intellectuals abandoned the occupation of creative thinking for narrowly conceived consultancies”; lamentably, “little has changed” Meeks writes in “thirty years” hence.[85] One consequence was intellectual flight abroad, “to migrate to a place where the university professors and their projects where still valued.”[86]

Meanwhile as neoliberalism consolidated in the Caribbean in the 1980s, so social scientists found that they could supplement their incomes by conducting research for NGOs, development banks, and international organizations. There was also the prospect of earning dollars or pounds through overseeing research directed by foreign universities. For radicals facing entrenched administrators who frequently saw little value in critical projects, like Best did when Sir Arthur Lewis was principal of UWI, Mona, they left the academy to pursue private ventures.[87] Given the already small pool of academics, the shift from focusing on publishing critical peer-reviewed scholarship to unpublished internal consultancy reports curtailed the dissemination and preservation of critical ideas, but it also reflects how the international political economy more broadly shapes how and what gets studied in the Caribbean. Migration also shaped the scholarly agenda as many academics emigrated. With the main site of Caribbean Studies moving to North American and the UK academic spaces, so Meeks is very adamant that academics studying the Caribbean were “insulated from the worse corrosive effects” of local experiences of neoliberalism; with distance these scholars were more willing to forgive the local political class their sins. In these conditions, each successive generation of diasporic Caribbeanists overlooked the New World Group’s critique of capitalism.

In later years Girvan was despondent about the Group’s intellectual contributions. But this self-assessment is too harsh, I believe. The theory that they produced was a good precursor to 1990s analysis of globalization and 2010s analysis of enclave extractivism, thus validating the general tendency of capital to restructure societies in line with the imperatives of value in motion. While I endorse Girvan’s insights about the current provincialism in the Caribbean academy (it would be a mistake to provincialize Caribbean Studies because from the beginning it was always global^[88]) I otherwise find his pessimistic assessment unwarranted. In broad strokes, perhaps even to first approximation, it is correct. Granted, the Group needed to broaden its scope to include due attention to the global dispossession and genocide of indigenous peoples. They also needed to acknowledge the role of gender in capitalism, with women as commodities and—through birthing—the main producers of capital. But I want to be clear: additions are not negations.

For the purposes of this essay, in addition to a rich archive of empirical social scientific studies on firms, industries, and the circulation of commodities in the Atlantic, the Group’s most important contribution was to provide a perspective on early capitalist development that differed from the accounts typically circulated in white metropolitan Marxist parties. It is for this reason that I fully endorse Brian Meek’s assessment that “New World still remains the most ambitious attempt to build a postcolonial, Pan Caribbean movement of radical intellectuals.”[89] Along these lines there is one related point worth making. As a broad tradition encumbered with a complex genealogy that shapes the structure of inquiry, Marxism nevertheless is perhaps the most perceptive critique of capitalist modernity. Within this tradition, the Group’s output stands as testament to help scholars better appreciate how the entrenched forces in metropoles and the lay assumptions that they generate can inadvertently creep into Marxist critique thereby sidelining work that is equally perceptive and comprehensive. This acknowledgement can perhaps make current critical practitioners less hubristic, recognising that the current fashion in the theorising might not represent the best theorising taking place today.

So to return to Girvan’s self-criticism, if he had cause to be critical of his compatriots in the Group, it would have been interesting to hear his critique of the historiographies in The New History of Capitalism. While this turn displays an array of new data, new methods, new techniques, and new concepts, it is still very much either mainstreaming or catching up to the insights that Black Radicals had in the first half of the 20^th century. Indeed, much of this turn comes without reference to the enslaved ways of life. As Walter Johnson writes, “uncannily, the most ambitious and perceptive examples of the “new history of capitalism” turn out to have been written over seventy years ago.”^[90] But inclusion of Black Radical insights means little if it amounts to simply inviting these insights into pre-existing and unchanged spaces. The proper barometer is whether those included have a say and resources to shape the structure of and relations in that space. And it is why the work of Group remains the benchmark that this turn still must meet. They accomplished far greater insight through a Black internationalist imagination fostered by movement and migration. So, while the scholars in this turn are being awarded tenure at Ivy League intuitions, it is important to remember that in his old age James languished in absolute poverty, starving in a room above the OWTU Building in South Trinidad.

Conclusion

Although members had different stances and intramural debates with Marxism more broadly, the New World Group—well known for offering interventions on what Stuart Hall called “the contradictory, stony ground of the present conjuncture”^[91]—arguably sets the stage and agenda for much of the critical scholarship on capitalism, through for instance focusing attention to the role of Black labour in creating the value of billion-dollar digital corporations. Extending the range and utility of this line of critique is especially important when noticing how Black Radicals more broadly have been marginalized in the New History of Capitalism.^[92] In my estimation the Group has had one of the most comprehensive critiques of modernity, but due to the coloniality of knowledge and ‘white ignorance’ much of this has been insufficiently recognised. So altogether the Group have earned a place to weigh in on the current debates on race and class, and more. Indeed, through their emphasis on totality as well as in their social commitments, the Group presents a model of scholarship that very much stands adjacent to the ones practiced in the late 20^th early 21^st century academy, models that reward increased narrow disciplinary specialization all but ensuring that holistic revolutionary activism is thoroughly excommunicated.

During its decade of operation, the Group produced a considered conceptualization of how the West Indian plantation was the instrumentalization of human beings in service of capitalist forms of exploitation and expropriation; technical mechanisms coded distinctions while operative civic hierarchies working hand-in-hand with fiscal instruments to support the extraction of surplus value, with all of the above policed by a combination of public and private interests. Involving the spheres of circulation, conflicts, and constraints, black bodies were sites of financial experimentation. Throughout, plantations feature and foster racial discrimination, white supremacy, and massive exploitation, features that are all too common in our contemporary social relations. And indeed, the degree to which the vulgar nationalism version of the plantation society thesis had adherence and purchase in the Caribbean Girvan believed it was indicative of an isolated regional intellectual politics more concerned with performative claims than empirical demonstration.

Although capitalism has undergone tremendous change since the early 19^th century, there are also certain continuities that persist in the early 21^st century. The path determinacy of the commodities associated with the plantation still haunts distributions of privilege and abjection the world over. With respect to research and practice, scholars need to appreciate how this legacy (mis)shapes contemporary politics across the globe. One response to these conditions is to develop a politics centered on expanding the autonomy to ultimately ensure that subordination becomes a relic of the past. This cannot simply be about redistribution, recognition, or reparation. It calls forth an alternative kind of polity with new social relations that do not feature value struggle. As a prerequisite step, this means addressing powerlessness and establishing egalitarian demos that can steer an economy orientated towards priority and sufficiency. In Walter Rodney’s spirit, this line of analysis seeks to reinforce the conclusion that development is possible “only on the basis of a radical break with the international capitalist system.”^[93]

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Girvan, Norman 2007, ‘Lloyd Best and the birth of the New World Group’, Trinidad and Tobago Review, April 2007normangirvan.files.wordpress.com/2007/07/lloyd-best-and-the-birth-of-the-new-world-group-april-2007.pdf.

Girvan, Norman nd, ‘Introduction to The New World’, https://newworldjournal.org/independence/introduction/

Girvan, Norman, 1973, ‘The Development of Dependency Economics In The Caribbean And Latin America: Review And Comparison’, Social and Economic Studies 22(1) pp 1-33.

Girvan, Norman, 2011, ‘The Future of the Caribbean’, Counterpunch, May 20, 2011, https://www.counterpunch.org/2011/05/20/the-future-of-the-caribbean/

Gomes, Shelene and Timcke, Scott 2021, ‘The Decolonial Ends of Caribbean Ethnography: Notes of dialectics, imagination and the state of practice’, in Rhoda Reddock and Encarnacion Gutierrez-Rodriguez (eds) Decolonial Perspectives on Entangled Inequalities: On Europe and The Caribbean, Anthem Press. pp155-172.

Gray, Obika 1991, Radicalism and Social Change in Jamaica, 1960-1972, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Hall, Douglas 1961, ‘Incalculability as a Feature of Sugar Production during the Eighteenth Century’, Social and Economic Studies, 10,3:  340-352.

Hall, Douglas 1962, ‘Slaves and Slavery in the British West Indies’, Social and Economic Studies, 11,4: 305-318.

Hall, Stuart 1989, ‘Then and Now: A Re-evaulation of the New Left’, Out of Apathy, Voices of the New Left Thirty Years On, edited by Oxford University Socialist Group, London: Verso.

Henry, Paget, 2002, Ethnicity and Independent Thought, Lloyd Best and Indo-Caribbean Philosophy, The Institute of Social and Economic Studies.

Hudson, Peter James 2016, ‘The Racist Dawn of Capitalism: Unearthing the economy of bondage’, Boston Review, 16 Match 2016,http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/peter-james-hudson-slavery-capitalism, accessed 22 July 2019.

James, CLR. 1989, The Black Jacobins, Vintage, New York.

James, CLR. nd, ‘Tomorrow and Today: A Vision’, New World Journal,https://newworldjournal.org/british-guyana/tomorrow-and-today-a-vision/

Johnson, Walter 2018, ‘To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice’, Boston Review, February 20, 2018,http://bostonreview.net/forum/walter-johnson-to-remake-the-world

Kumar, Krishan 2005, From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society, Malden: Blackwell.

Lewis, Arthur 1950, ‘The Industrialisation of the West Indies’, in Dennis Pantin (ed) The Caribbean Development: A Reader, Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 5-43.

Lewis, Arthur 1954, ‘Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour’, The Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies 22(2), 139-191.

Lindsay, Louis, 1975. ‘The Myth of Independence: Middle Class Politics and Non-Mobilization in Jamaica’. Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (SALISES) Working Paper No. 6, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1822826

Maharaj-Best, Sunity, nd, ‘On Lloyd Best’, https://newworldjournal.org/independence/on-lloyd/

Marx, Karl 1859, ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm.

Meeks, Brian 2001, ‘On a Bump of a Revival’ in Brian Meeks and Folke Lindahl (eds) New Caribbean Thought: A Reader, Jamaica: The University of The West Indies Press.

Meeks, Brian 2014, Critical Interventions in Caribbean Politics and Theory, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Mills, Charles 2010, Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality, Kingston: The University of West Indies Press.

Mills, Charles W 1998, The Racial Contract, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Mintz, Sidney, 2010, Three Ancient Colonies, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Oxaal, Ivar 1968, Black Intellectuals Come to Power: The Rise of Creole Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago, Cambridge: Schenkman Publishing.

Patterson, Orlando 1970, ‘Slavery and Slave Revolts: A Socio-Historical Analysis of The First Maroon War Jamaica, 1655 – 1740’, Social and Economic Studies, 19, 3: 289-325.

Patterson, Orlando 1982, Slavery and Social Death, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Paxton, Robert 2004, The Anatomy of Fascism, New York: Knopf.

Peach, G. C. K. 1967, ‘West Indians as a Replacement Population in England and Wales’, Social and Economic Studies, 16,3: 289-294.

Quinn, Kate (ed.) 2014, Black Power in the Caribbean, Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Ramphal, S. S. 1962, ‘Fundamental Rights — The Need For A New Jurisprudence’, Caribbean Quarterly, 8, 3: 139-144.

Rey, Pierre-Philippe 1982, ‘Class Alliances’ (translation), International Journal of Sociology, 12,2: 1-120.

Robinson, Cedric 2000, Black Marxism, Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press.

Rodney, Walter 1972. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Nairobi and Washington, D.C.: East African Educational Publishers and Howard University Press.

Rodney, Walter, 1966, ‘Masses in Action’, New World Quarterly 2:3 (1966), 30-37, https://newworldjournal.org/africa/masses-in-action/

Rosenthal, Caitlin 2019, Accounting for Slavery, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Ryan, Selwyn 2002, ‘Tapia and the Elections of 1976’, Independent Thought and Caribbean Freedom, The Institute of Social and Economic Studies.

Streeck, Wolfgang 2019, ‘Through Unending Halls’, London Review of Books, 41,3:https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n03/wolfgang-streeck/through-unendi….

Tidrick, Gene 1966, ‘Some Aspects of Jamaican Emigration to the United Kingdom 1953-1962’, Social and Economic Studies, 15,1: 22-39.

Waldstreicher, David 2009, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification, New York: Hill and Wang.

West, Cornel 1988, ‘Black Radicalism and the Marxist Tradition’, Monthly Review (September 1988).

Williams, Eric 1994, Capitalism and Slavery, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

Witter, Michael, nd, ‘On George Beckford: Brief Notes’, https://newworldjournal.org/independence/on-george-beckford-brief-notes/

Wolf, Eric 1982, Europe and The People Without History, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wood, Ellen Meiksins 2002, ‘The Question of Market Dependence’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 2,1: 50-87.

[1] Strictly, Thomas and Brewster would not include themselves in the Group, but their companionship, orbit and influence in heterodox Caribbean political economy warrants recognition.

[2] For Girvan, these tributaries included Marxist economists ranging from Paul Sweezy to Andre Gunder Frank, with supplementation by Caribbeanist anthropologists like Sidney Mintz’s ideas about a creolized oikouménē and American sociologists like Erving Goffman’s ideas about total institutions. Girvan 2006.

[3] As Girvan 2007 wrote, “The 1960s in the Anglophone Caribbean was a time of transition—psychological, no less than political. The old colonial order was in dying, but there was much debate over what would replace it.”

[4] On the general process see Marx 1859.

[5] Lindsay 1975.

[6] See Gray’s 1991 extraordinary study of radicalism and social change in Jamaica in the post-Independence era for an example of the kinds of national contests taking place in West Indian countries.

[7] Tapia’s main electoral planks were constitutional reform through devolution of power away from central government, the pursuit of full employment policies, and “a fully blown welfare state which would ensure cheap and adequate social services.” Ryan 2002, p. 47. The aim was to eliminate gross social inequalities.  

[8]Ryan, 2002, p. 55.

[9] Meeks 2001

[10] Meeks 2001

[11]Part of the journal’s archive can be found at https://newworldjournal.org/.

[12] See Brenner 2001, Wood 2002.

[13] Wood, 2002, p. 50.

[14] Rey 1982, Bois 1984.

[15] Anderson 2013, Anderson 1974.

[16] Streeck 2019.

[17] Rosenthal 2019.

[18] Also see Beniger 1986.

[19] Streeck 2019.

[20] Peach 1967. Also see Tidrick 1986

[21] Rodney, 1972, p. 199-200.

[22] Streeck 2019.

[23] Robinson 2000, p. 2.

[24] Robinson 2000 p. xxxi, p. 76. For more on Robinson’s critique of Marxism see Timcke 2022.

[25] Orlando Patterson defines enslavement as “the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons” with Moses Finley adding that “The slave was himself a privately owned commodity, denied in perpetuity ownership of the means of production, denied control over his labour or the products of his labour and over his own reproduction.” Herein, a person’s reproduction depends entirely on the will of those that own the enslaved. Rife with ‘social death’ the discretion over life and death makes the system conducive to atrocities. Patterson 1982 13; Finley 2001 496.

[26] Robinson 2000, p. 166.

[27] I follow Sidney Mintz in including Du Bois as a contributor to the Caribbean archive. In addition to Haitian paternal linages, trips to the Antilles, like to Jamaica in 1915, helped cultivate a sense of what society could be “beyond the color line” Mintz, 2010, p. 3.

[28] Gilroy 1993, p. 1, p. ix.

[29] Acemoğlu and Robinson 2005; Acemoğlu and Robinson 2012.

[30] Planters distorted the voluntary limited contacts of servitude into a property relation, while Williams claims was accomplished because it accentuated prevailing European norms where “subordination was considered essential.” Williams 1994, p. 9.

[31] Williams 1994, p. 54-55. Douglas Hall provides comparable figures for Jamaica in 1790. See Hall 1962.

[32] See Hall 1961.

[33] Williams 1994, p. 98.

[34] Williams 1994, p. 98.

[35] Williams 1994, p. 1.

[36] For more details on some of these points see Patterson 1970.

[37] James 1989, p. 35.

[38] An example of the transnational movements of Big Whites as well as the politics between governors and planters, see Cudjoe 2018.

[39] This complicated politics is crisply encapsulated by James when he writes that, “The higher bureaucrats, cultivated Frenchmen, arrived in the island without prejudice; and looking for mass support used to help the Mulattoes a little. And Mulattoes and big whites had a common bond-property. Once the revolution was well under way the big whites would have to choose between their allies of race and their allies of property. They would not hesitate long.” James 1989, p. 44.

[40] James provides some background for this jockeying. He writes that “the Negro Code in 1685 authorized marriage between the white and the slave who had children by him, the ceremony freeing herself and her children. The Code gave the free Mulattoes and the free Negroes equal rights with the whites.” In the decades following the Negro Code, Mulattoes “were beginning to fill the colony, and their growing numbers and riches were causing alarm to the whites.” So Mulattoes were begrudgingly accepted to the extent that they could provide numbers to repress slave insurrections. James 1989, p. 36-37.

[41] James 1989, p. 100.

[42] James 1989, p. 35.

[43] Du Bois 2013, p. 3.

[44]Du Bois 2013, p. 3.

[45] Williams 1994, p. 23.

[46] James nd.

[47] Mills, 1998.

[48]Girvan nd.

[49]Girvan nd.

[50] Beckford, 1972.

[51] Beckford, 1972, p. 155-156, p. 37.

[52] Best 1992, p12, p 6.

[53] Best 1992, p. 233.

[54] Best and Levitt, 2009, p. 19.

[55] See Lewis, 1950; Lewis 1954.

[56] Best 1992, 11.

[57] Girvan 1973.

[58] Best 1992, p. 15.

[59] Girvan 1971, Girvan 1973.

[60] Editor’s Introduction 1967.

[61] Witter, nd.

[62]Writing in another context but to a similar debate, Cornel West asked, “to what extent are Marxist explanations of social history capable of grasping the many dimensions of racial oppression?” West 1988, p. 51.

[63] See Maharaj-Bell, nd.

[64] While the New World Group did not have access to the full archive of Marx’s work, they very much anticipate some of Kevin Anderson’s conclusions, these being that Marxism was not wedded to a singular view of history nor periodization. The Group also followed Marx’s internationalism to find the anti-colonial analysis in this tradition thereby coming to reject the claims that Marxism was Eurocentric and unable to adequately account for race. Anderson 2010.

[65] See Beckford 1999, p. 259.

[66] Beckford 1999, p. 259.

[67] E.g., Charle 1966.

[68] Beckles 2013.

[69]E.g., Ramphal 1962. Beckles 2013 following in this spirit.

[70] Paxton 2004.

[71] Best 1967.

[72] See Oxaal 1968. Farler 1968.

[73] Rodney, 1966.

[74] Rodney 1972, p. 25.

[75] Rodney 1972, p. 206.

[76] Rodney 1972, p. 105, p. 107.

[77] Rodney 1972, p. 212.

[78] Rodney 1972, p. 279.

[79]Best, 2002, p. 63.

[80]Best 1967.

[81]Mills, 2010, p. 146.

[82] See Quinn, 2014 for context.

[83] Girvan, 2011.

[84] Girvan, 2011

[85]Meeks, 2014, p. viii.

[86]Meeks, 2001, p. xiv.

[87] See Maharaj-Bell, nd; also Meeks 2001.

[88] Wolf 1982. Gomes and Timcke 2021.

[89] Meeks, nd.

[90] Johnson 2018.

[91] Hall 1989, p. 151.

[92] For a critique of how some of these scholars in this turn have overlooked Black Radicals see Hudson 2016.

[93] Rodney 1972, p. ix.

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

Since the financial collapse of 2008 and the unfolding struggles in its aftermath, one can observe a rising interest in Marxist theories on race and racism. In this context some efforts were made to make use of Marx’s value theory for explaining the emergence and persistence of anti-black racism.[i]Some of the most promising approaches within this theoretical tendency make use of Moishe Postones work on antisemitism and the value-form, which is indeed a good place to start.[ii] Nevertheless, these recent theoretical investigations ignore, to no fault of their own, an already existing elaborate attempt that tried to bring together a theory of racism and Marx’s value-form analysis – namely the work of Peter Schmitt-Egner from the 1970s.

At the same time when Postone was studying in Frankfurt, where he was partaking in the debates around the reconstruction of Marx’s critique of political economy, now usually called the new reading of Marx (Neue Marx-Lektüre), Schmitt-Egner attempted to investigate colonial racism through a systematic-dialectic method owing much to the contemporary Hegelian reading ofCapital established in Germany by scholars such as Alfred Schmidt, Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt.[iii]Around this time, a public discussion unfolded, which was triggered by the Namibian independence movement against the occupation by South Africa, which brought the questions of apartheid and Germanys genocidal history during its colonial ventures in Africa into focus. Schmitt-Egner tried, as he put it in an article from 1980, to counter the tendency in Germany at the time to overcome this colonial past by ignoring its continuities and its importance for the present.[iv] In his dissertation Kolonialismus und Faschismus (‚Colonialism and Fascism‘) from 1975 as well as in an article from the following year calledWertgesetz und Rassismus (‚Racism and the Law of Value‘) for theGesellschaft-book series, which was initiated by Hans Georg Backhaus, Schmitt-Egner tried to conceptually derive racism from the functioning of the law of value under conditions of a world market constituted through colonial violence. To that effect, he was obviously inspired by the German world-market debate, which was happening at around the same time. Just like this debate, which revolved around the question if there was a modification of the law of value on the world market and how Marx’s critique of political economy can be used to explain modern imperialism, Schmitt-Egners work can be designated as almost forgotten.[v]Even within German anti-racist theory, his work is almost never mentioned.[vi]While some important texts within the German new reading of Marx have been made accessible to English-speaking audiences,[vii] Schmitt-Egner’s, as well as many other important works, are not among them. Therefore, this paper aims to make the outline of his main argument accessible to the ongoing international debate on racism and capitalism. While, as I am going to show, Schmitt-Egners theoretical endeavour has some serious flaws, it nevertheless constitutes one of the most developed theoretical investigations of racism from a Marxian point of view. Its weaknesses notwithstanding, it can bring important insights to current discussions.

Historical and Theoretical Preliminaries

In his dissertation, which was the basis of his article on racism and the law of value from 1976, Schmitt-Egner situates his work within the debates around the relation of racism, colonialism and fascism. He approvingly cites Arendt, Césaire and Fanon who argued for an understanding of colonial domination in the periphery as deeply connected with the emergence of fascism in the metropoles. While he commends these thinkers for looking at colonialism and fascism as related forms of unmediated domination, he also thinks that they lack an investigation of the economic substance of these forms.[viii]According to him, this theoretical desideratum also led to a ‘confusion of the scientific debate’ around the question of racism and how it relates to both colonialism and fascism.[ix]The only way out of this conceptual perplexity, as stated by Schmitt-Egner, would be a proper Marxian conceptual development of racist ideology, that starts ‘from the contradictions of the economic form’.[x]

But even within the Marxist tradition such a theoretical derivation, he contends, was not yet developed. The two most prominent approaches to the theorisation of racist ideology within historical materialism, the social-psychological tradition in the aftermath of Wilhelm Reichs Mass Psychology of Fascism, as well as the orthodox Marxist approach, that developed out of the Second and Third Internationals are deemed deficient by Schmitt-Egner.[xi] Reich, who is mentioned explicitly by Schmitt-Egner, and the proponents of the Frankfurt School like Erich Fromm, who are only hinted at, are criticised for essentially bypassing the economic form-nexus in their socio-psychological accounts of prejudices. All of them, he adds, would adhere to a rather orthodox Marxist view of the economy as becoming objectively more and more socialised, while the subjective consciousness of the proletariat in Germany and other industrialised nations wouldn’t follow suit. Reich and others thought that this discrepancy could only be explained by looking at the agents of psychological socialisation which are deemed to produce authoritarian personality-types, vulnerable to be lured in by racist and other chauvinist ideologies. According to Schmitt-Egner, this kind of argumentation lacks a thorough investigation of the internal relation between matter and mind, artificially seperates economic and psycho-cultural instances and remains trapped in a somewhat modified base-superstructure-model.[xii]

Nevertheless, he lauds the social-psychological approach for at least attempting to explain the genesis of racism. The Marxist traditions of the Second and Third International are criticised by him for having not even tried to explain the structural emergence of racism, but rather reducing it to itsfunction in the preservation of imperialist domination. This approach couldn‘t relate the function of racism – as a means of legitimation, ideological distortion and social cohesion – to its form-determination and therefore failed to establish a relation of necessity between racism and capitalism. This mistake is grounded, according to Schmitt-Egner, in the orthodox Marxists inability ‘to grasp racism as a socially necessary form of consciousness of the commodity-producing and -exchanging society’.[xiii]

Before I lay out Schmitt-Egners argument, some methodological comments are in order. When Schmitt-Egner talks of genesis it shouldn’t be understood as refering to the historical genealogy of racism. Rather it refers to ‘aconceptual relationship of development’, that has to be established via a theoretical reconstruction of the relation of racism to the capitalist mode of production ‘in its ideal average’.[xiv] Schmitt-Egner explicitly states that this kind of conceptual investigation has to forego any kind of historical exposition of the origins of racism – which of course doesn’t mean that one should engage in abstract model-building before engaging with actual history, but that the internal relations between the object under investigation, which were already conceptually reproduced through theoretical and empirical inquiry, should be at the beginning and the center of the theoretical presentation.[xv] In this Schmitt-Egner is a very orthodox follower of Marx’s notes on the method of political economy in his Introduction of 1857.[xvi]

Additionally, another preliminary remark is necessary on Schmitt-Egners conception of ideology. It has become quite ubiquitous for Marxists and non-Marxists alike, to reject any conception of racism as primarily an ideology and to discuss it as a question of power and domination instead. This has the reasonable and most welcome aspect to it, that it highlights the excessive violence, suffering and oppression that was and still is the consequence of racism. To the effect that focusing on the practical, structural and institutional sides of racism emphasises these morally and politically most important dimensions it was a necessary corrective. At times however, the emphasis on ‘power’ contrary to ‘prejudice’ in my eyes tends to reproduce the questionable separation of being and consciousness and conveys an understanding of ideologies as ‚mere ideas‘.[xvii] But the term ideology, in a Marxian sense, denotes not only cognitive processes, but stresses the unity and relative autonomy of forms of consciousness as parts of the totality of social practices. Therefore, when Schmitt-Egner talks of racism as an ideology, he sees it as a conceptual reflection (and distortion) of social actions and social power relations mediated by capitalist forms of wealth (commodities, value, money, capital). These relations can be empirically observed by agents only in their inverted phenomenal forms which conceal their real origin. In contrast to Althusserian accounts of ideology, the distinction between essential relations and phenomenal forms is paramount here.  Ideologies seem only plausible to actors, because they are anchored in social practices, which are in turn co-constituted by these forms of consciousness.[xviii] They are therefore never ‘merely’ ideas.

The Commodity-Form, Human Rights and their Negation

In his theoretical derivation of racism Schmitt-Egner differentiates between three successive levels of abstraction. First, it needed to be established how racism is even possible in a capitalist society in which the idea of human equality ‘already aquired the permanance’, according to Marx, of a ‘popular prejudice’ (Volksvorurteil).[xix] Second, it has to be investigated how the possibility of racism becomes an actuality, that means under which outer circumstances the contradictions of abstract equality encountered on level one develops into actual racism. And finally, it had to be shown under which conditions racism becomes not only a possible and actual but the dominant form of consciousness.[xx]

Schmitt-Egner‘s point of departure is Marx’s analysis of bourgeois rights and the sphere of commodity circulation. He does not try to extrapolate a theory of racism from Marx’s scattered comments on the race-question, such as his now well-known remarks on the hostility between Irish and English workers, but rather he situates it in the conceptual architecture of the critique of the political economy, where supposedly it was left out by Marx. Therefore, he proceeds in a similar way as for instance Pashukanis did regarding the law or as Marxist-Feminists did with reproductive labour.[xxi]

Schmitt-Egners starting point – the sphere of simple commodity circulation – seemed to be a reasonable place to start his endeavour from, because it is where abstract freedom and equality (together with Bentham) have their natural habitat.[xxii]Commodity circulation as the real material basis of the normative orientations of the bourgeois subject is therefore also the level of abstraction where the possibility of racism has to be established:

If we want to follow the genesis of colonial ideology, whose central forms of appearance are racism and chauvinism, it should be possible on this level of abstraction to derive why the bourgeois society casts off its ‚own‘ ideology and chooses, in denial of the bourgeois revolution, the inequality of human beings as its new ideology.[xxiii]

Marx already in his early philosophical writings developed a well-known critique of human rights as the rights of the egoistic, isolated, bourgeois man.[xxiv] He arrived at this argument through an engagement with Hegels Philosophy of Right and took over his notion of the duplication (Verdopplung) of the individual within capitalist society intobourgeois andcitoyen – which is the reflection of the seperation of the economic and political spheres within society as a whole under capitalism. But while he already postulates from very early on a nexus between capitalism and the idea of an inborn equality of men, he, according to Schmitt-Egner, couldn’t yet conceptualise the real material basis of this idea. Only decades later, through the analysis of the commodity-form inCapital and its preparatory works was this achieved.[xxv]

In his mature writings on the critique of political economy Marx found out that the equality of men could only become a plausible and generalizable notion in a society where the products of social labour have turned into commodities, which are exchanged as equivalents by their owners. In this social act, that mediates the whole metabolism of capitalist societies, individuals encounter each other as equal subjects. Buyer and seller of a commodity both are active subjects, both ideally give and receive an equal amount of value and the act of exchange constitutes a contractual relationship both of them enter at their (formally) free choosing.[xxvi]

If therefore the economic form, the act of exchange, on all sides precludes the equality of the subjects, the content, the substance, individually as well as objectively, which drives the exchange precludes freedom. Equality and freedom are not only respected in exchange based on exchange values, but the exchange of exchange values is the productive, real base of allequality andfreedom. As pure ideas they are merely idealised manifestations of it.[xxvii]

But this sphere of abstract freedom and equality already presupposes universal commodity exchange and therefore the commodification of labour power. Circulation, according to Marx, is a ‘haze, hiding a whole world beneath it.’[xxviii]It presupposes a sphere of production based on the exploitation of wage labour. In other words, the existence of commodity-exchange as a social act of free and equal individuals is only the appearance of unfreedom and inequality, of class and exploitation which reigns in the sphere of production.

Freedom and equality remain insubstantial as long as they are based on the appropriation of surplus labour. This contradiction between the determinations of circulation and of production, who are parts of an integrated whole, only find a modus vivendi in which they can simultaneously exist through the mystification of the wage form. As it appears that the all hours of the workday were paid by the capitalist, it seems that there was no exploitation happening at all, which is, according to Marx, the basis for a range of illusions that are spreading also within the working class.[xxix]

One of the most important of these illusions, is that the rights conveyed by the sphere of circulation to the owners of commodities are not seen as socially determined and historically specific products of a class society, but as conveyed by nature. Reified as natural rights, the legal form of mediation of commodity exchange appears as a consequence of the nature of the exchanging homo oeconomicus. Human equality seems natural through exchange value and those who are socially inferiorised accordingly seem to be naturally inferior. This is ultimately the point, according to Schmitt-Egner, from where it is possible to make sense of racism. Once we established the contradictions of bourgeois equality, which are determined by the internal relation of exploitation and commodity-exchange, we see that we have to look for the racist negation of this equality in the sphere of production and how this is naturalized through circulation. We have to look at labour not only as a commodity, but as a form of capital. Then we see racism as anchored in the difference between only formally subsumed labour processes in the colonies and really subsumed labour processes in the metropoles.[xxx]

The Genesis of Racism in the Colonial Labour Regime

According to Schmitt-Egner racism was not a product of slavery per se. As is well known, slavery didn’t need racial classifications to be a feasible form of exploitation for a very long time.[xxxi] Even during the age of revolutions in the late 17th and 18th century, which also marked the climax of the transatlantic slave trade, slavery, for the most part, needed no justification apart from its utility. As chattel slavery and plantation production more and more became incorporated into a system of industrial capitalism based on free wage labour, this contradiction was solved by subsuming the slave under the rubric of property, thereby using the ideological hegemony of private property against the emerged radical notions of human liberty as a vindication of the slave system.[xxxii]

As Barbara Fields notes, ‘in the [U.S.] South, the heyday of scientific racism … came after, not during, slavery.’[xxxiii]Schmitt-Egner explains this apparent aberration by relating it to the dominance of merchant capital. As long as it was dominating, he contends, the sanctity of property ranked above everything else and ‘there was no need for slave-trading nations to solve this contradiction through a “theory”, as the person of the slave merged into property.’[xxxiv] As a chattel the slave was not partaking in circulation as a subject, but was treated as a passive object. Exploitation in production was out in the open without a mystification of the wage form in effect. No contradiction emerged between the slaves appearance in circulation and production – they were treated as tools, as fixed capital in both spheres. As long as merchants capital and slave labour was dominating, Schmitt-Egner writes, there was no objective basis for a theory of radical, unbridgable, natural inequality between ‚races‘ to emerge.[xxxv]

This only changes when industrial capital spreads out into the colonies, a process Schmitt-Egner dates to the 19th century, with the expansion of the British empire in Asia and the colonisation of large parts of sub-saharan Africa. In this process the colonies‘ insertion into ‘the world market, which was formally subsumed by industrial capital’ didn’t lead to a developmental pattern similar to the process of original accumulation in England that was analysed by Marx.[xxxvi]In comparison with the metropoles, the colonies were integrated through a system based on unequal exchange and unequal relations of production. Unequal quantities of labour were exchanged because of the comparatively labour intensive production in the colonies and the absence of a tendency of profit rates to equalise on a world scale. At the same time – in contrast to the open plunder conducted by merchant capital – this relationship of subordination is veiled, because it rests on formally free exchange of economic magnitudes.[xxxvii]

The real subsumption promoted by industrial capital asserts itself only sectorally, where capital-exports from the metropoles are involved, other labour processes remain only formally subsumed and therefore very labour intensive. The colonised themselves, according to Schmitt-Egner, only participate in local small-scale trade as they were still to a large degree enmeshed in subsistence-oriented production and were therefore excluded from commercial exchange. While at the same time the local traditional forms of interaction and social ties are violently dissolved, so that the colonised ‘indeed appears “cultureless”, as he is neither part of bourgeois society nor of any old traditional organisation’.[xxxviii] This lack of integration through social ties or meaningful participation in the market requires, according to Schmitt-Egner, the application of sheer force as the primary means of social cohesion.

Schmitt-Egner sees the alignment of the economy according to the requirements of production in the metropoles as the basis of the merely formal subsumption of labour under capital in the colonies. This relation of dependence brings with it that the state of labour productivity is not determined by the necessary average labour time. Instead, what kind of machinery is used is determined be the wants of individual and productive consumption in the colonizing countries. Those made use of the colonies, according to Schmitt-Egner, almost exclusively for extractive purposes, that is, as producers of raw material through agrarian production or mining. Expenditures for constant capital were artificially held down to guarantee a labour intensive form of production, which was further cheapened by violently pressing down the price of labour power and the lenghtening of the work day, that is through the increase of absolute surplus value. The relative displacement of direct coercion as a stimulus for extracting labour, which was achieved in the metropoles, wasn’t allowed to happen in the colonial mode of production:

The depressed unfolding of the productive power of labour necessitates the form of a master-servant-relationship [einesHerr-Knecht-Verhältnisses]. In this surplus-value-yielding production also an unmediated relation of violence is mediated through exchange value. This form of production therefore is in no way feudal (as it was sometimes claimed in the dependency-debate), but commodified and directed by capital through its world-market based mediation, which is at the same time the constituting element of this relation of production.[xxxix]

Therefore, while the development of capitalism and the struggles of the workers movement in Western Europe produced a variety of capitalism which allowed for a historical and moral element as part of the value-determination of labour power, this wasn’t the case for the colonised labourer. According to Marx, the lower limit of the value of labour power is set by the wage being sufficient to buy the ‘physically indispensable provisions’ without which the worker cannot reproduce her labour power in full. If this minimum is undercut by the capitalist, the labourer can only reproduce her labour power ‘in stunted form’.[xl]

In the case of the colonies, where production is built around extraction for the economies of the metropoles and is based on a low organic composition of capital, it becomes the primary motive of the colonising capitalist to extent surplus value ‘in contrast to the metropole primarily through the lenghtening of the work day and the permanent depression of the commodity of labour power under its value.’[xli] Here we find, according to Schmitt-Egner, the condition for the emergence of racist ideology. The colonised labourer is seen as inferior and subhuman, because her labour power is under-valued compared to that of the white worker. She is seen as a human being of lesser value, because that’s how she appears within circulation.

‘[T]hat is to say, if the colonial worker is not able anymore to sell his labour power on the surface according to its value, then his exchange value doesn’t represent an equivalent anymore, therefore he also can’t be recognised as an equal within the sphere of circulation.’[xlii] Racism, Schmitt-Egner writes, translates the differences in the value-determination of labour power between black and white workers into natural differences of human ‚races‘. Those, who are compelled to work for wages under the value of their labour power are seen as not fully human, because they are de-valued not only in the sphere of production – as is the case with wage workers in general – but they are also de-valued in circulation. The colonised worker, according to Schmitt-Egner, ‘is reduced to brutish nature’,[xliii] because the historical and moral element of the value of labour power, which is missing in the case of this kind of worker, in bourgeois society became the badge of being fully human.[xliv]

While racism is seen by Schmitt-Egner as an ideology that was only possible to emerge under the condition of the commodification of colonised labour power, he nevertheless finds that slavery ‘lives on in ideological form within race ideology’, because the colonised worker is seen within circulation and production similar to a slave, only as a tool or an object. At the same time her labour power is her own property, not that of some master. This contradiction, according to Schmitt-Egner, could only be ‚solved‘ through the mystification of race, which is re-enforced within the production process, where, for instance in South Africa, the black workers were relegated by law to simple, manual labour. Dequalification therefore is another feature these workers become associated with. Even when there is no formal barrier, the dull compulsion of economic relations reproduces this relegation by itself, as Schmitt-Egner explains, pointing to the U.S. after abolition.[xlv]

In summary, the objective precondition of racism is to be found in the contradictions of bourgeois equality, which has its base in commodity circulation and the exploitation of wage labour. This uneasy synchronicity of formal equality and material inequality holds the possibility – but only the possibility – of racism. Solely through the historical tracing of this contradiction in the constitution of a world-market through colonialism, can it be said, that racism became a necessary form of consciousness under capitalism. Therefore, Schmitt-Egner‘s argument echoes that of Patrick Wolfe, according to whom ‘the emergence of the ideology of race accords with the shift from mercantilism to an industrial economy which transformed colonial social organisation’ in a way that ‘production and consumption were reconstituted to suit the requirements of metropolitan factories.’[xlvi]The specific form under which capital subsumed labour in the colonies destroyed traditional social ties without integrating the colonised into bourgeois society. Therefore they were seen as beings without culture. They were relegated to hard and unskilled manual labour, which was the basis for their construction as human tools by nature. At the same time they were still proprietors of their own labour power, even if it was strongly coerced wage labour. But it was a labour power whose price was permanently depressed under the social average: ‘The notion of necessary labour time is stripped in the colonies of its social necessity, the historical-moral element disappears; the worker in this case is reduced tomere nature, mere physical subsistence.’[xlvii]

The colonial violence which lead to this extraordinary position within capitalist circulation and production was hidden by the mystifications of the commodity form. Circulation, according to Marx, as was already mentioned, is a haze hiding a whole world beneath it. What it hides is the violence that produced the racialised worker. Through the ideology of racism the features with which she enters the labour market are seen as established not by brute force, but by her own deficient biology. ‘The intermediate steps of the process vanish in the result and leave no trace behind.’[xlviii] Because human equality seems to be a self-evident fact of nature for the bourgeois commodity-exchanging subject, those who can participate in this exchange only with an under-valued embodied commodity – their racialised labour power – seem with the same self-evidence as being deficient by nature. And the reason for said inferiority is accordingly seen as an inner trait of the carrier of said labour power.

Hylton Whites‘ ambitious theoretical derivation of anti-black racism comes quite close to Schmitt-Egners approach, but suffers from the mistake of theorising it as a result of an identification of the black body with abstract labour. White defines abstract labour as labour which ‘by coercion or by technology and corporate organisation … becomes a social force abstracted from individual or willful action.’[xlix] But this is a definition of alienated labour in accordance with the definition given in Marx’s earlyParis Manuscripts.[l] Abstract labour on the contrary is not ‘amassed biological energy’,[li] but the purely social character of labour. Value is ‘arelation of social validation’, in which concrete labours are recognised ‘as a particular quantum of value-constituting abstract labour’ through the exchange of commodities.

White is right, that through the history of slavery and other forms of unfree labour black people are seen as bearers of unbridled, ‚raw‘ labour power and are identified with unskilled, simple and manual labour – but this means they are identified with a specific kind of concrete labour. While anti-semitism indeed affirms the concrete against the abstract, affirming blood and nation against the jew as the symbol of abstract modernity, the fetishistic dualism of (good) concreteness and (bad) abstraction can’t explain anti-black racism.[lii]This racism sees its victims as beeing too concrete, meaning too close to the simplicity of nature, rather than as completely remote from nature as the ‚rootless‘ jews are seen by antisemites. This ‘strongly polarised pair’ of anti-black racism and antisemitism has at its root the projection of the all too concrete, use-value side of capitalism onto the black body as inanimate nature, while projecting its abstract and impersonal dimension onto the jew as the personification of impersonal power.[liii] Fanon was one of the first authors who also recognized the social-psychological aspect of this, which results in identifying ‘the intellectual and the sexual’ in the former case with the jews and in the latter with black people.[liv]This dichotomy can be observed best by looking at racist propagandistic imagery, where African men are usually depicted as musculous brutes, who lure in defenseless women through the force of their sheer unlimited sexual potency, while jewish men are depicted as ugly old leechers, who nevertheless lure in the nation-signifying women by virtue of their manipulative capabilities.[lv]

‘Chauvinism’ and the Pre-History of Race

At this point, readers of this article may have already spotted some of the weaknesses in Schmitt-Egners theory. His derivation remains very speculative and is situated at an extremely high level of abstraction, while at the same time it is filled with sweeping statements intended to capture the essence of social processes which unfolded over vast periods of time and geographical space. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if they were backed up by a sufficient amount of historical material. But when it comes to the history of colonialism and racism, Schmitt-Egners sources are extremely scarce, even for the mid-1970s.

For instance, he ignored large parts of the debate on the origins of racial slavery in Virginia, which was in full swing by the time he was writing. This made it possible for him to argue that the fact that ‘the first labour struggles in the New England colonies were fought out together by blacks and whites’[lvi]was evidence for the absence of racism. Not only were those struggles situated not in the New England but in the Southern Colonies, they were also not fought out by ‚blacks and whites‘, but by slaves and indentured servants who were signified not yet as ‚races‘ but for instance as heathenish ‚Negroes‘ and as dissolute ‚rabble‘.[lvii] The category of whiteness was at this point still in its infancy and, at least in Virginia, became formalised as a legal category only at the end of the seventeenth century following the repercussions of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676.[lviii]

If he would have taken notice of this history, he might have recognised that the biologistic racial doctrine he takes for the substance of racism was only the culmination of a process that took off long before the year of 1850, which he understands following Michael Banton as the beginning of the ‘century of racism’.[lix] The idea of race didn’t originate in the colonial context in the 19th century, but in the class struggles and structural transformations within Europe at the time of the formation and dissolution of the states of the type of the Ancièn Regime.[lx] Notions of race were mobilised by nobles to anchor their claims to aristocratic privileges in ideological ideas of unbridgeable natural difference. Aristocrats and bureaucrats of ‚non-noble blood‘ as well as the domestic underclasses were seen by the old elites as inferior by nature.[lxi] In medieval Spain aristocrats made use of already established religious modes of inferiorisation against muslims and jews in the competition for state offices. Conversed ‚New Christians‘ were driven out from such offices (if they weren’t driven out of Spain altogether or killed), whose former religious confessions were seen as having tainted their blood, which resulted in the laws of blood purity.[lxii]But these ascriptive hierarchization were quite different from modern notions of race and were at first not connected to skin colour at all.

Only at the beginning of the 17th century, with thinkers such as Francois Bernier in France and William Petty in England, was it, that the notion of race was mobilised to sort and hierarchise populations on a global scale. Even later, against the background of the plantation systems in the ‚New World‘, the ‚Negroes‘ ultimately became racialised, while Europeans became white, Indigenous Americans – whose skin was considered to be olive or even white before – suddenly were deemed red, and Asians, in some cases formerly known for their pale skin, became the yellow race. Indigenous Americans and Asians were therefore integrated in a colour-coded taxonomy, which was built around African slavery in the 18th century and which was used in later colonial ventures into Asia and Africa as a system of ascriptive hierarchy as well.[lxiii]

One has to take notice of this history to understand why Africans were racialised differently in modern scientific racism than for example Native Americans were, even though both were colonised and racialised and are therefore thrown together by Schmitt-Egner under one category. Even if one wants to look at racism from a form-theoretical angle, as Schmitt-Egner does, without the intention to write a history of racism, he nevertheless has to make a detour to the history of colonialism, because his purely conceptual derivation finds its limits as soon as he leaves the sphere of commodity circulation. ‘The dialectical mode of presentation’ as was clear for Marx ‘is only correct, when it is aware of its limits.’[lxiv] Beyond these limits actual history has to enter – and concerning racism, the writing of its history simply cannot begin with the colonial expansion of capitalism in the 19th century, but has to start much earlier. If one agrees with Schmitt-Egner that modern racism is a reflection of the way different colonised and enslaved populations were violently integrated into a capitalist economy based on formal freedom and equality, one still has to look at the history of this integration in its structural and ideological dimensions to understand why this process took on the form it did. Without recognizing the pre-history of 19th century colonial subjugation and racist inferiorisation one simply cannot grasp the shape and the function of modern racial taxonomies.

At one point in his article, Schmitt-Egner recognises this pre-history of modern racial doctrine. He postulates an ideology he calls ‚chauvinism‘, which he says was also based on inferiorising the colonised, but not along the lines of race but along the lines of peoples and nations. Chauvinism, he contends, was the fitting ideology for colonial expansion, while racism was a form of consciousness geared to already established colonial domination.[lxv] He seems to understand as chauvinism the ideologies that legitimised land grab, dispossession and displacement of native peoples, who were signified as ‚savages‘ and ‚barbarians‘. The objective basis for these ideologies, according to Schmitt-Egner, was the difference between colonising societies, who already produced for exchange value, which was equated with progressiveness, and indigenous peoples who engaged in subsistence-oriented small scale agriculture. Therefore, the export of capitalism into the colonies was seen as the export of civilisation.[lxvi]

While he acknowledges this pre-history of scientific racism, he makes the mistake to understand what he calls chauvinism as a simple precursor to racism, which was later replaced.[lxvii] But ‚chauvinism‘ – the signification of natives as idle savages, who are not able to productively improve land through their labour – was not just a precursor, but the beginning of an ongoing process, which was later justified via race theory. This becomes most obvious, when one looks at the signification of indigenous peoples in the U.S., who were dispossessed as unproductive ‚savages‘, as were Aboriginal people in Australia, but at the same time were seen as ‚red‘ in contrast to ‚black‘ and were racialised in many ways dissimilar to African-Americans. Accordingly, black Americans were not seen as a ‚dying race‘ and were not forcefully assimilated but kept separate, in contrast to indigenous peoples, because the reason for their subjugation was not the appropriation of land, but the appropriation of labour.[lxviii]Both forms of appropriation weren’t successive stages but simultaneously existing forms of colonial violence, which led to different forms of inferiorisation. These differences escape Schmitt-Egner due to his cursory and flawed reconstruction of history.

No State in Sight

Another severe weakness in Schmitt-Egners theoretical derivation is his almost complete disregard for the role of the state in the emergence of racism. This is even more surprising, because Schmitt-Egner was writing at the climax of the German state-derivation debate, which had as its goal the conceptual development of the political form of capitalism proceeding from Marx’s Capital.[lxix] The debate often made reference to the works of Pashukanis, who argued as early as the 1930s, that freedom and equality in the capitalist exchange relation had as their necessary corollary a political force that guarantees legally that both parties in the economic transaction respect each other as private proprietors.[lxx]

Therefore, it is also within colonial law and colonial state power that we find the reason why colonised subjects could only appear in circulation as debased participants in commodity exchange. It was above all through law and state power that racism became a material force that differentiated populations and endowed them with different rights, capabilities and liabilities. It is not racist legal coding that follows economic relations, but because of the unity of economic and political power in the colonies, racism was primarily established through the violence of the state, not the compulsion of the market. Schmitt-Egner hints at this fact, but doesn’t further elaborate on it, when he argues that the ‘political implementation’ of the colonial mode of production presupposes that ‘all organs‘ like trade unions and so on ‘are liquidated which ensure in the metropoles that labour power is sold according to its value.’[lxxi]

Understanding the role of the state is also important for two other issues Schmitt-Egner is weak on: the attraction of racism to its subjects and the transformation of racism after the formal end of colonialism and what George Frederickson called ‘overtly racist regimes’.[lxxii]On the first matter, Schmitt-Egner designates the ‚poor whites‘ and the small planters in the colonies as well as the pressured petty bourgeoisie in the metropoles as the most obvious subjects of racism. The unskilled white worker in the colonies, according to Schmitt-Egner, has nothing which sets himself apart from the racialised worker, so he has to cultivate the colour line in order not to sink to the level of inferiority the colonised is already placed at. The small planter, on the other hand, had the objective interest to remain competitive through ruthless over-exploitation of colonised labour, which is reinforced by his dependency on credit to acquire the means of production. Therefore, although for different reasons, he also had a vital interest in the cultivation of racist degradation.[lxxiii] In the metropoles, it would be the moribund petty bourgeoisie, which cultivates antisemitism and a ‚blood-and-soil‘-world view as a mystified way to make sense of its material position in competition with industrial capital and stifled by finance capital.[lxxiv]

What Schmitt-Egner overlooks is that, especially in settler colonies but also in nation states more generally, racism is tightly bound up with national belonging and the legitimacy of the state. As Balibar formulated it, racism is an inner supplement and an exaggeration of nationalism.[lxxv] The entanglement of race and nation makes it look like the state is grounded in nature, something even deeper than common culture and history. But in the eyes of his subjects the state has to continually give proof of serving the racialised nation by modes of inclusion and exclusion along the lines of race, nationality, religion and so on. Also workers can, if they act as racists, demand from the state to act as a facilitator of social closure: privileging the dominant fraction of workers in certain ways over the demeaned ‚others‘.

But because racism might overdetermine but never cancels out class, the state actions almost never seem enough for the racist, because they can never do away with the existential insecurities capitalism produces. Racism is therefore, again with Balibar, ‘a conflictual relationship to the state which is ‘lived’ distortedly and ‘projected’ as a relationship to the Other.’[lxxvi] Because of the entanglement of racism and nationalism, the ‚others‘ are not only the potential enemies of specific class elements in the colonies and metropoles – like Schmitt-Egners poor whites, small farmers and the petty bourgeoisie – but they can be seen by all classes as contaminants of the nation as a whole. All of them, in theory, can try to assert their interests, at least to a certain extent, vis-à-vis the state through racist exclusion – which of course makes more sense to some class fractions rather than others and also yields very different ‘wages of whiteness’ according to their respective material position.

Under-valued Labour Power and Inferiorisation Today

Seeing the state as fundamentally imbricated in the inferiorisation of racialised populations in production and circulation also allows one to transplant Schmitt-Egners rudiments of a value-form-theory of racism to the question of how racism articulates itself today, which I will try to do in the following admittedly very cursory remarks.

The allocation of demeaned, manual and unskilled labour to racialised populations through legal means was not only characteristic of colonial production, but also a defining feature of for instance European guest worker schemes.[lxxvii] These workers from poorer economies, in some cases from former colonies, came to the metropoles in order to supplement metropolitan labour as a cheap and semi-unfree work force, which could be payed below the social average value of labour power. This led again to the appearance of a fraction of the working class, whose labour power was already under-valued and unequal in comparison to their metropolitan counter parts. At the same time, racist and culturalist tropes were mobilised by political parties, intellectuals and even parts of organised labour to signify them as ‚other‘, brutish and dangerous.[lxxviii]

Even in other Western countries such as Britain, where there was no comparable guest worker program, the migration from former colonies led to analogous outcomes. The migrants until 1962 were formally deemed as British subjects and held full citizenship, but were allocated through formal and informal mechanisms of discrimination as well as through the identity-blind workings of the market to the lower end of the division of labour.[lxxix] These formal and informal disadvantages for migrants in Europe closed them off from many of the opportunities for advancement granted to the working class during the decades of the economic boom after the end of the Second World War. When anti-racist struggles finally did away with many of the formal discriminatory mechanisms the trente glorieuses were already coming to an end, leaving the majority within those groups with unfavorable requisites for the neoliberal onslaught to come.

Likewise, black Americans after the epochal successes of the Civil Rights Movement for the first time entered capitalist markets as formal equals, but it was an economy that was already entering a period of a long downturn.[lxxx] African-Americans were, as Clegg and Usmani recently put it, ‘bypassed by America’s industrial boom.’[lxxxi] The dull compulsion of economic relations enacted through competition for jobs, housing and public resources reproduces and even exaggerates this detrimental position for black workers, leading to persistent racialised disparities, even if there would be no formal or informal discriminations in place.[lxxxii]

Furthermore, laws regarding ‚aliens‘ put additional pressures on migrants to take jobs even if they are over-qualified, threatening them with deportation in case of non-compliance. In areas near borders to poorer countries, industrialised nations over-exploit semi-unfree migrant workers for harvest and other manual and underpaid work. Even, in some cases, full citizens who are descendents of migrants in the second or even third generation are highly overrepresented among the unemployed and inside labour-intensive lines of work. All of these state sanctioned or informally induced regimes of differentiation produce fractions within the working class who are under-valued, concentrated in and therefore affiliated with unskilled work and are at the same time seen as ethnic, ‚racial‘ or religious ‚others‘.

This, one could argue with Schmitt-Egner, has its structural precondition in the politically mediated and economically reproduced inequality of the exchange value of labour power that produces inequalities within circulation, which is ideologically rationalised via old racist and (not so) new culturalist ideologies of essential difference between populations. Following this line of thought, the return of long-lost quasi-racialised underclass ideologies, which some authors have identified, can be explained as a consequence of the breakdown of the dividing line, which kept ‚racially‘ dominant groups of workers in an over-valued position in comparison to racialised stratas of the labouring classes. German Marxist Wolfgang Fritz-Haug has defined one of the major staples of the racism he was seeing on the horizon in the 1990es in that it tendentially doesn’t postulate the inferiority of specific ‚races‘ as a whole, but that it designates inferiors through all cultures.[lxxxiii]This led to the confusion of the colour line and the resurgence of racialised underclasses and the ascent of privileged strata within the (former) migrant populations in Europe or within the black population in the U.S. – a situation, which lead to the embittered intellectual and political struggles around identity and race we are witnessing today.

The post-colonial, globalised world we inhabit reproduces in many ways comparable structural conditions as those analysed by Schmitt-Egner in respect to the relationship between metropoles and periphery. Developing nations are still often used as sources of under-valued and disenfranchised labour, while labour processes in the same countries, because of the cheapness of variable capital, are labour-intensive and display a low organic composition of capital. Tendentially, the dualism of under-valued and adequately-valued labour power, respectively of only formally and really subsumed labour processes, is still existent within the world economy, even though the lines are more blurry today. Additionally, the antagonism between an integrated working class and a globally existing surplus population may now have eclipsed the antagonism of exploitation and over-exploitation as the central structural carrier of racism.

Also, as is ignored by Schmitt-Egner, even within the metropoles competition within industries leads to persistent inequalities in wages and therefore to differences in the position of workers on the labour market.[lxxxiv] Through discrimination and also through the identity-blind workings of capitalist competition the lower class positions in low-wage lines of work are allocated to already vulnerable often racialised groups within the working class. If it is true, that ‘circulation carries racism’,[lxxxv] we have to recognise these wage and profit differentials within advanced economies as important elements of ‘the social matrix’ that produces and reproduces ‘race and racism’ as Charles Post recently argued.[lxxxvi]

Conclusion

Even as there are plenty of weaknesses in his speculative approach, Schmitt-Egners theory can help to make sense of how race ideas are related to the capitalist mode of production. While it definitely needs a more history-conscious re-working and further theoretical elaboration, it is an elaborate attempt to explain the structurally induced plausibility and some central features of racist ideologies directed against colonised and other ‘under-valued’ populations from a value-form-theoretical perspective. This approach could play an important, ideology-critical part in a larger historical-materialist framework for the analysis of racisms. According to Schmitt-Egner the ‚inferiority‘ attributed to some groups can be deciphered as their inferior position on the labour market and the interrelated de-valuation of their labour power with contradicts the bourgeois ideal of equality within commodity circulation and therefore serves as the basis for the racist negation of human rights which are seen by the bourgeois subject as a self-evident fact of nature. The ‚brutishness‘ and ‚simpleness‘ which is especially attributed to black people can be related to their insertion into capitalism via unfree labour regimes, the connected depression of their standard of life and the tendency to still be allocated into lines of work based on unskilled labour – a social relation that is reproduced with different subjects and a different objective through intra-metropolitan competition and the migratory regimes which were established in the past decades. Schmitt-Egners conceptual derivations help to make sense of some aspects of these ongoing processes and of the way racism functions as an ideological mystification of a history of economically motivated violence, whose long-running effects are hidden under the haze of abstract freedom and equality within capitalist markets.

Nevertheless, as is the case with value-form-theoretical approaches in general, they are no surrogate for more empirically oriented scholarship. In my eyes, form-theory constitutes a meta-theory of the conditions of possibility of a phenomenon under the totality of capitalist social relations. It rarely helps to fully grasp the specifics of time and space or gives adequate theoretical guidance for political action. The most dangerous handling of value-form-approaches is to take them as a theory that was directly applicable across the board, without having any mid-range theories or empirical studies to mediate between the abstract and the concrete. In that case, form-theory, by nature of its characteristic abstraction from concrete actors and institutions, would turn into a form of structural functionalism, that supplants structure for agency as Heide Gerstenberger has argued correctly.[lxxxvii]The limits of form-derivations and the importance of concrete history, both of whom were obvious to Marx, therefore should always be kept in mind.

Nevertheless, form-theory is also no abstract ideal model-building, but has at its core the deduction of form determinations, that is macro-explanations of internally related structures and mechanism which are in place as long as capitalism is. And as long as capitalism is in place, we need to understand how these form-determinations work. Schmitt-Egners theory, as I tried to show in this article, can help us to a certain extent to make sense of how these forms are bound up with race-ideology. But in the end, a rigorous Marxist framework for the analysis of racism has to go way beyond value-form theory.

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