racism

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 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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[i] Preston 2010; Chen 2013; Bhandar/Toscano 2015; White 2020.

[ii] Postone 1980. The works of Day 2016 and White 2020 are particularly closely based on Postone.

[iii] For an overview of the development of the new reading of Marx in Germany see Elbe 2013 and Hoff 2016. Postone and Schmitt-Egner together with other scholars such as Dan Diner, Barbara Brick and Helmut Reinicke belonged to the same discussion circle in Frankfurt in the 1970s (Van der Linden 1997, p. 449).

[iv] Schmitt-Egner 1980. On the Namibia-conflict and its importance for German politics of memory, see Brenke 1989.

[v] Ten Brink and Nachtwey (2008, p. 37) call the German world market debate in their introduction to it an ‘almost forgotten debate’.

[vi] The neo-Marxist debates on racism that were in full swing in France and Great Britain in the late 1970s were conducted only belatedly in Germany after reunification. The nationalist waves and racist rampages in the former GDR in 1991 and 1992 sparked a theoretical import of works by scholars such as Étienne Balibar, Stuart Hall or Robert Miles to try to make sense of what was happening (see Terkessidis 2018). Schmitt-Egner got some honorable mentions in these discussions by Althusserian and Foucauldian scholars such as Jost Müller (1995, pp. 91-93) and Mark Terkessidis (2004, p. 78), but his work was only engaged with superficially.

[vii] See for instance Heinrich 2004 or the translations of works by Backhaus and Reichelt in Bonefeld/Gunn et al. 1992 and 1995.

[viii] Schmitt-Egner 1975, pp. 5-8. All quotes by Schmitt-Egner and Marx in this article are my own translations.

[ix] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 350.

[x] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 351.

[xi] Ibid. – This is of course an observation that only applies to the German debates of the 1970s, especially around the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt where Schmitt-Egner was situated. The Freudo-Marxist tradition developed by Reich and the Frankfurt School was to my knowledge nowhere else as widespread in leftist circles.

[xii] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 351.

[xiii] Ibid.

[xiv] Heinrich 2012, p. 56; Marx 1964, p. 839.

[xv] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 364.

[xvi] Marx 1983, pp. 34-42.

[xvii] Some examples of power-centered understandings of racism and a defense of an understanding of racism as ideology can be found in Miles/Brown 2003, pp. 66-72.

[xviii] The best introduction to this understanding of ideology in German language, which is also quoted by Schmitt-Egner, is still Herbert Schnädelbach 1968. In my eyes, the Marxian understanding of ideology used in these German debates is very similar to the conception developed by Derek Sayer 1979.

[xix] Marx 1962, p. 74.

[xx] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p.

[xxi] Pashukanis 2003; Gonzalez 2013.

[xxii] Marx 1962, pp. 189-91.

[xxiii] Schmitt-Egner, 1976, p. 363. I will come back to Schmitt-Egners distinction between racism and what he calls ‚chauvinism‘ further below.

[xxiv] Marx 1981, p. 364.

[xxv] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 358.

[xxvi] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 359.

[xxvii] Marx 1983, p. 170.

[xxviii] Marx 1983, p. 539.

[xxix] Schmitt-Egner 1976, pp. 362-3.; Marx 1962, p. 562.

[xxx] Schmitt-Egner 1976, pp. 370-1.

[xxxi] Fields/Fields 2012, p. 123.

[xxxii] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 366. On this see also Malik 1996, pp. 61-68.

[xxxiii] Fields/Fields 2012, p. 144.

[xxxiv] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 369.

[xxxv] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 367. As I will discuss further below, Schmitt-Egner uses a very narrow definition of the term racism, under which he only understands the ‚scientific‘ racial doctrines that were formulated from the 19th century onwards.

[xxxvi] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 372.

[xxxvii] Schmitt-Egner is not referring here to the notion of ‚unequal exchange‘ put forward by dependency theory, but he is referring to the critique of this notion developed within the German world market debate. There it was argued, that there was no unequal exchange of values but only of magnitudes of labour between metropoles and peripheral countries, because there was no equalisation of profit rates on a world scale, as was asserted by dependency theorists. See Nachtwey/ten Brink 2008, p. 52-4.

[xxxviii] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 373.

[xxxix] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 375. – Later in the text Schmitt-Egner formulates the same point differently, when he argues that it was ‘the exchange value who gives itself a feudal form, while its essence remains determined by capital (formal subsumption).’ (Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 386)

[xl] Marx 1962, p. 187.

[xli] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 377. It is one of the major weaknesses of his text, that it is almost never clear which geographical spaces and time periods are actually addressed when Schmitt-Egner talks about ‚the colonies‘. In his dissertation he mostly analyses the German colonial ventures in Africa, while at some points in both his dissertation and the article he is obviously talking about South Africa. The huge differences of these colonial trajectories are glossed over. This imprecision shows up with even more severe consequences, when he uses ‚colonised‘ and ‚black‘ as well as ‚coloniser‘ and ‚white‘ as synonymous terms, not accounting for class differences within those populations or the differing colour-coded ascriptions imposed on colonised peoples.

[xlii] Ibid.

[xliii] Ibid.

[xliv] He sees this idea anticipated in Hobbes‘ argument according to which, ‘[t]he value, or WORTH of a man, is as of all other things, his Price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his Power: and therefore is not absolute; but a thing dependent on the need and judgement of another.’ (Hobbes 1996, p. 59). Marx already referred to this passage inValue, Price and Profit, see Marx 1962a, p. 130.

[xlv] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 379.

[xlvi] Wolfe 2016, p. 8.

[xlvii] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 390.

[xlviii] Marx 1972, p. 107. Schmitt-Egners argument is therefore comparable to that of Barbara and Karen Fields who have described as racecraft as the repression of racist violence and the transplantation of its effects onto its victims, whose inner traits then seem to have caused their pernicious situation in the first place, see Fields/Fields 2012.

[xlix] White 2020, p. 31.

[l] Marx 1968, pp. 510-22.

[li] White 2020, p. 32; Heinrich 2012, p. 50. Even in places, where Marx falls back on a – in my eyes mistaken – physiological definition of abstract labour as ‘the productive expenditure of human brain, muscle, nerve, hand etc.’ (Marx 1962, p. 58) this still wouldn’t fit Whites theory, because through racism black people may be seen as storages of muscle, nerve and hand, but not of brain, which explains why according to racists they needed a master to direct the expenditure of their unbridled labour power.

[lii] Bonefeld 2014, pp. 199-200. A similar critique could be made of Iyko Days work on anti-Asian racism. She understands the racialization of Asians in the sense that their bodies are seen as the “temporal embodiment of abstract labor”, i.e. as machine-like, see Day 2016, p. 56. This also seems to be an identification of abstract labour with a specific form of concrete labour.

[liii] White 2020, p. 30.

[liv] Fanon 2008, p. 127. The longing for a lost concreteness by workers who were absorbed into industrial capitalism, which is repressed and therefore projected onto black people, who are seen as still closer to nature, to indulgence and unrestrained sexuality, was for the US-case also recognised by Roediger 2007, pp. 95-7.

[lv] Grigat 2007, p. 314.

[lvi] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 366.

[lvii] Virdee 2021.

[lviii] Even if Edmund Morgans (2003) seminal study on the colonial history of Virginia, which firmly established the centrality of Bacon’s Rebellion, was only released shortly before Schmitt-Egners article was published, he still could have learned about the event and its significance for instance through Timothy Breens work from 1972, who already highlighted the importance of the rebellion for the emergence of colour-coded oppression in Virginia.

[lix] Banton cited in Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 364.

[lx] Miles 1993, pp. 88-97; also more recently Virdee 2021. On the definition and theorisation of so called ‚absolutist‘ states as ‘states of the type of Ancien Regime’, see Gerstenberger 2007, pp. 645-62.

[lxi] Hund 2010, p. 65.

[lxii] Martinez 2008.

[lxiii] Demel 2016. The reification of blackness as the substance of slavery has completely escaped Schmitt-Egners attention, which lead him to view the existence of black and white ‚races‘ as self-evident. It would therefore be worthwhile to rectify his approach by incorporating Harry Changs ingenious short notes on the reification and fetishization of blackness through slavery, see Chang 1985.

[lxiv] Marx 1980, p. 91.

[lxv] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 387.

[lxvi] Schmitt-Egner 1976, pp. 388-89.

[lxvii] A somehow comparable argument was made more recently by Grant 2015, who sees a dualism between civilisation and savagery as an intermediary step between religious and racial status hierarchies as politico-ideological safeguards of the slave system in eighteenth century South Carolina.

[lxviii] Wolfe 2016.

[lxix] For translations of some of the most important works of this debate see Holloway/Picciotto 1978.

[lxx] Pashukanis 2003.

[lxxi] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 383.

[lxxii] Fredrickson 2002, pp. 100.

[lxxiii] Schmitt-Egner 1976, pp. 379-83.

[lxxiv] Schmitt-Egner, pp. 396-97.

[lxxv] Balibar 1991b, p. 54.

[lxxvi] Balibar 1991c, p. 15.

[lxxvii] Miles 1987, pp.143-67.

[lxxviii] Miles 1993, p. 187.

[lxxix] Miles 1993, pp. 162-73.

[lxxx] Brenner 2006.

[lxxxi] Clegg/Usmani 2019, p. 51.

[lxxxii] McCarthy 2016.

[lxxxiii] Haug 2000, p. 91; Balibar 1991a. Although I would disagree with the idea that culturalism and class-racism are in any way a new phenomenon. Rather neoliberal capitalism in this case marks a return to older dividing lines between the ‚deserving and undeserving poor‘. On this see Shilliam 2018.

[lxxxiv] Botwinick 2017.

[lxxxv] Schmitt-Egner 1976, p. 395.

[lxxxvi] Post 2020.

[lxxxvii] Gerstenberger 2007, p. 7-8.

This essay explores four questions through a critical dialogue with Black Marxist, Decolonial, and Political Marxist accounts of racism. First, is it possible to speak of racism before the advent of colonisation in the Americas? Second, what were the determinants for the production of these earlier modalities of racism? Third, who were the key actors responsible for the production of such racism? And fourth, what were the linkages between these developments and racisms that would unfold with the capitalist colonisation of the Americas? I contend that the historical formation of racism as a material force lies in the formation and dissolution of absolutist states in Western Europe between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. By demonstrating how the political cultures of Western European societies were suffused with the logic of racialisation prior to the colonisation of the Americas, the essay helps make transparent hitherto occluded connections between histories focusing on the internal racialisation of Europe and the racialisation of the European exterior. And in doing so, it establishes the constitutive part racism played in the emergence of capitalist modernity.

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

There is a long-standing consensus that the origins of racism lie in the capitalist colonisation of the Americas.[1] [2] According to the Political Marxist Charles Post ‘race is crystalised’[3] in late seventeenth century English America in the ‘wake of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 when indentured servitude and other forms of unfree labour which had brought Europeans to the colonies disappeared in Virginia leaving only enslaved people of African descent unfree.’[4] Thereafter, racism became a ‘distinct way of differentiating human beings [which] developed with capitalist social property relations.’[5] More specifically, the ‘disjuncture between the lived experience of legal juridical equality in the labour market and the substantive inequality of capital and labour in capitalist production require[d] the invention of race.[6]

Like most scholars working within a historical-materialist problematic, decolonial thinkers also assert racism’s intimate entanglement with the development and expansion of colonial capitalism. However, reflecting their intellectual roots in world-systems analysis, they tend to push the historical formation of racism back in time to sixteenth century Spanish America. For one of the founders of decolonial theory - the Peruvian Anibal Quijano - ‘capitalism came into history, for the first time, with America,’[7] and ‘[o]ne of the foundations of that pattern of power was the social classification of the world population upon the basis of the idea of race, a mental construct that expresses colonial experience.’[8] Quijano continues that ‘[t]he racial axis has a colonial origin and character … The idea of race … does not have a known history before the colonisation of the Americas … it originated in reference to phenotypic differences between conquerors and conquered.’[9] This racialising process helped hierarchically order the populations of the Americas and legitimate the social relations of domination imposed by the conquest and ensured that race became ‘the fundamental criterion for the distribution of the world population into ranks, places, and roles in the new society’s structure of power.’[10]

There is undoubtedly much of intellectual and political value in both these perspectives. The production of transnational accounts of capitalist development and consolidation make an important contribution to unsettling still dominant Eurocentric perspectives that focus almost exclusively on the internal European mechanisms that facilitated the flourishing of capitalism.[11] Further, the returns of centring racism and colonialism within such accounts of global capitalism are equally compelling. At the same time, this essay contends there remain fundamental analytic blind spots with these competing schools of thought that mitigate against the development of a more comprehensive Marxist account of the historical formation of racism.

Political Marxists, as well as Anglo-American Marxism more broadly, tends to conceive racism in the singular as the anti-black ideology and exclusionary practices that English settler colonists deployed against those of African descent. This essential but nevertheless narrow understanding of racism has tended to not only occlude further investigation of the colonial English racialisation of the indigenous communities of the Americas but also an analysis of the patterns of racialisation deployed by the Spanish settler colonists who arrived in the Americas a century before the English. Thinking relationally about such modalities would reveal that racialised structures of domination involving the exploitation and oppression of indigenous and African communities were already being put into place long before the English set foot in North America. 

One of the most profound weaknesses of these accounts is the difficulty they have in theoretically accounting for the production of racisms within Europe itself. This is a product of understanding colonialism (including Atlantic slavery) as the universal mechanism for the production of racism. And because colonialism is understood to happen outwith Europe, racism comes to be narrowly understood in the singular as white supremacy. Or to put it more bluntly, it is the ideology that legitimated the damage, degradation and destruction Europeans inflicted on non-Europeans beyond the shores of Europe.

This is also why decolonial theorists like Walter Mignolo rule out the possibility of racisms being produced by processes and mechanisms within Europe itself because ‘the nation in Europe was constituted of one ethnicity, articulated as whiteness.’[12] Significantly, such a position is entwined with Mignolo’s wider project to paint historical materialism as Eurocentric as exemplified in his claim that Marxism is ‘a critical and liberating project dwelling in the local history of Europe, in a fairly homogenous community where workers and factory owners belonged to the same ethnicity.’[13]

Leaving aside the erasure of Marx’s own analytically perceptive writings about the significance of colonialism and slavery to Western European capitalist development, the structuring power of anti-Irish racism and anti-African racisms as well as the diverse traditions of anticolonial and anti-racist thought and practice that have germinated within the Marxism problematic subsequently,[14] what is particularly astonishing is the decolonial description of nineteenth century Europe as a ‘fairly homogenous community.’

Even Eurocentric metanarratives of modernity are alive to the existence of different ethnicities and religious schisms within Europe while the erasure of colonised and internal others in nineteenth century Europe is particularly surprising. In Britain for example, there is now a voluminous body of work that plots how the industrial revolution pulled diverse groups of racialised outsiders into Britain most notably Irish Catholics but also a sprinkling of Africans, and Caribbeans. This was followed over time by migrations from those of Jewish and Asian descent suggesting that the working class of imperial Britain was a multi-ethnic formation from the moment of its inception.[15]

Further, this decolonial deployment of a racialised and ahistorical understanding of European ethnicity as white has deleterious effects on our collective understanding of the emergence and consolidation of racism. In fact, operationalizing such a narrow conception of racism leaves them performing all sorts of conceptual gymnastics when confronted with empirical evidence of racism directed at European populations. For instance, Mignola, drawing on a one-dimensional reading of Cesaire’s powerful anticolonial essay ‘Discourse on Colonialism’,[16] reductively conceptualises the Holocaust as ‘a racial crime perpetrated against racialised whites in Europe applying the same logic that the coloniser had applied to people of colour outside of Europe.’[17] In this account, the Nazi genocide of European Jewry is derived from the racialised logic of coloniality, a sort of one-off racist blowback into Europe.

While there is much to be gleaned from mapping how certain repressive technologies of power in colonial Namibia were imported by the imperial officer class of the German Empire and eventually put to work by the apparatuses of the Nazi state to extinguish Europeans of Jewish descent,[18] we cannot derive an understanding of the Holocaust solely from the practices of colonial racisms but must also be cognisant of its unique logics and historical specificities. Where for example in decolonial studies is the same considered attentiveness to the long history of religious antisemitism within Europe itself, and the examination of how and when this was overdetermined by racist antisemitism as a result of social conflicts within and between European states? We need to build into our theoretical accounts a multi-directional flow of racializing ideas and exclusionary practices that accompanied the construction of racist orders across the world with each one representing a moment of elite learning from which flowed more refined ways of thinking and making ‘races’ with a view to expanding and legitimating the system of exploitation and oppression.  

In contrast, by conceiving the Holocaust as a singular event, Mignolo not only abstracts it from centuries of European history scarred by religious antisemitism but also the everyday and structural racist antisemitism that characterised Jewish lives in Europe long before the Shoah. This failure to consider internal developments and divisions within Europe relationally and alongside those outwith Europe is also what explains the wider decolonial erasure of anti-Roma racism, anti-Irish Catholic and anti-Slavic racisms within the European interior.[19]

The process of decolonising Europe cannot stop at the shoreline of Europe nor be achieved by marrying the so-called ‘inter-societal’ to already existing Eurocentric accounts of Europe’s rise[20]; instead, they must be entangled with and interrogate further what happened in Europe itself with a greater attentiveness to racism. We need to connect both parts of the story if we are to produce more comprehensive accounts of the emergence and evolution of racism. That is, a double determination and reconstruction is required and decoloniality only gives us one.

Operationalising an understanding of racism as white supremacy also carries with it the danger of presentism, of interpreting the past through the lens of the present. Such an approach tends to collapse and occlude the labyrinthine, contradictory and still unfinished processes and trajectories through which the populations of Europe were homogenised and came to understand themselves as Christian, European and white over historical time. Unlike in the settler colonies where white identifications were consolidated across most social classes by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a result of the establishment of structurally-based racialised orders of domination, it is problematic to claim that most Europeans understood themselves as white in this period, or for that matter the nineteenth century.

Whiteness within Europe remained by and large an identification restricted to elite Europeans and parts of the middling classes until the twentieth century. And its embrace by the working classes of Europe was always, and remains to this day, an uneven and unfinished process in formation. This does not mean there was an absence of long-standing structural racisms within Europe as I have already indicated with regard to antisemitism; just that the dominant modalities within European history were less likely to be colour-coded, and were more closely articulated to questions of class, culture, religion, and national belonging.[21] We must therefore pluralise our understanding of racism.

What is at stake here for Marxists is the question of how important racism is to our accounts of the emergence and consolidation of capitalist modernity. My suggestion is that to fully grasp the powerful structuring force of racism across the longue durée of capitalist modernity requires that we be more vigilant to the convoluted and relational ways in which the racisms of the European interior as well as those of its exterior helped produce the hegemonic and racialised structures, inequalities and identifications that we live with today. We must link and hold those histories together and endeavour to make connections thus far occluded while at the same time remaining attentive to their historically specific genealogies and logics. Unless we study and recognise the multiplicity of racisms and their different determinants, the danger is that we will end up underestimating, even obscuring the constitutive role that racism has played in capitalist modernity’s emergence and consolidation.

This essay contributes to this task through the production of a theoretically-informed historical account that unravels the connections between different modalities of racism and the formative part they played in the step-by-step transition from feudalism to capitalism. It not only contributes to the long-standing debates about how to understand racism and the conditions for its historical emergence but also links with and sheds light on its relationship to under-studied aspects of the historiography of absolutist state formation and historical capitalism. And from this, I develop an account which insists that racism and capitalism are inter-related in such a way that the essence of each can only be understood in its relation to the other.

Cedric Robinson and his critics

Against this backdrop, I believe a critical reading of the lines of argumentation pursued by Cedric Robinson in his landmark volume Black Marxism: the making of the black radical tradition[22] can contribute to an improved understanding of the theoretical and historical connections between racism in the Americas as well as its formation within Europe thereby enabling the production of a more comprehensive account of the emergence and consolidation of racism.

For Robinson, racism is ‘not simply a convention for ordering the relations of European to non-European peoples but has its genesis in the “internal” relations of European peoples’ forming an intrinsic ‘part of the inventory of Western civilization’ since the twelfth century.[23] Key to the production of this racialised sensibility within the European interior were the ‘antagonistic differences’ and conflicts arising from a division of labour where the migrant formed an indispensable component of the workforce. In particular, Robinson focuses his attention on the widespread use of migrant slavery in the Mediterranean region in occupations as diverse as domestic service and mining to make transparent the continuities and connections to the capitalist catastrophe yet to unfold:

This variety of uses to which slaves were put illustrates clearly the degree to which medieval colonial slavery served as a model for Atlantic colonial slavery….The only important change was that the white victims of slavery were replaced by a much greater number of African Negroes, captured in raids or brought by traders.[24]

Significantly, the prevalence and persistence of such slavery required justification, particularly after the consolidation of Christianity in Europe. And as Robinson shows, it is during the medieval period that the writings of ancient apologists for slavery including Aristotle and Plato were wrenched from their historically specific contexts to provide the intellectual legitimation for feudal elite oppression and exploitation of the migrant and slave.[25] Aristotle’s ‘racial constructs’[26] including the deliberative faculty of the soul being absent in the slave, that non-Greeks and labourers were ‘slavish in their tastes, preferring a life suitable to beasts’[27] alongside Plato’s evocation of Hesiod’s myth of the origins of human development and the threat to ruling class rule posed by ‘miscegenation’ between ‘those qualified to be rulers’ and ‘farmers and workers’[28] helped solidify a racialised understanding of the class structure such that ‘from the twelfth century on, one European ruling order after another, one cohort of clerical or secular propagandists following another, reiterated and embellished this racial calculus.’[29]

And because capitalism emerged from within this feudal order, an order that was already deeply stained with the logic of racialised difference and hierarchy, Robinson contends it was inevitable that capitalist development and expansion would also pursue ‘essentially racial directions’[30]

The historical development of world capitalism was influenced in a most fundamental way by the particularistic forces of racism and nationalism. This could only be true if the social, psychological, and cultural origins of racism and nationalism both anticipated capitalism in time and formed a piece with those events that contributed directly to its organization and production and exchange. Feudal society is the key.[31]

In this way, Robinson turns the dominant Marxist understanding of capitalism’s tendency to homogenise the world’s workforce on its head; instead of reducing difference, the emphasis in Robinson’s account is placed on the continuities with developments in feudal society and particularly the tendency of ‘racial capitalism’ to extend modes of racialised differentiation as the European elites moved to bring the world under its domain:[32]

The bourgeoisie that led the development of capitalism were drawn from particular ethnic and cultural groups; the European proletariats and the mercenaries of the leading states from another; its peasants from still other cultures; and its slaves from entirely different worlds. The tendency of European civilisation through capitalism was thus not to homogenise but to differentiate – to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into ‘racial ones.’ As the Slavs became the natural slaves, the racially inferior stock for domination and exploitation during the Middle Ages, the Tartars came to occupy a similar position in the Italian cities of the late Middle Ages, so at the systematic interlocking of capitalism in the sixteenth century, the peoples of the Third World began to fill this expanding category of a civilisation, reproduced by capitalism.[33]

There has been a sustained wave of interest in Robinson’s theorisation of racialised capitalism, particularly since the advent of the Movement for Black Lives in the United States and beyond with many academics and activists deploying the concept as a framing device to make theoretical sense of the contemporary crisis of global capitalism and the place of racism within it.[34] At the same time, others have been more critical of Robinson’s account, particularly its historical foundations. Political Marxists like Charles Post and Ellen Wood for example reject Robinson’s claim that racism existed in feudal Europe accusing him of ‘a fundamental confusion between precapitalist and capitalist modes of differentiating human beings.’[35] According to Post, racism and the idea of ‘inherent and unchangeable divisions among humans’ was unnecessary in feudal society because …social inequality was legally and juridically inscribed in pre-capitalist class relations. In modes of production based on serfdom, slavery and other forms of legal coercion, inequality wasassumed to be the natural condition of humanity.’[36]

Continuing in this functionalist vein, Ellen Wood argues racism was required only under capitalism when ‘relations of exploitation are not defined by a hierarchy of civic status’ but as social relations between ‘free and equal individuals, who…share every legal and political right, up to and including full citizenship’[37] Thus, for Wood, ‘it was only relatively recently that the human race was rigidly divided into racial categories…The modern slave-owner or imperialist, lacking more traditional civic categories, in a world where ideas of civic freedom and equality were becoming a major ideological weapon were obliged to find some more decisive ‘natural’ way of excluding his (sic) victims from the normal world of free and equal human beings.’[38]

The central defect with this Political Marxist argument rejecting racism in feudal society flows from its mode of a priori reasoning and theoretical deduction.No empirical investigation is conducted to examine Robinson’s claims of feudal racisms nor of the social conflicts that might have stimulated such a response; instead, Post and Wood proceed simply by reading off from their frozen theoretical model that inequality was a natural condition in the medieval period. And they continue with this line of argumentation by abstractly deriving a universal conception of racism, one that emerged specifically in the aftermath of the French Revolution to contain the global subaltern demand for equality and freedom.

This doctrine of racial typology or scientific racism as it came to be known held that i. humans could be sorted into a finite number of racialised groups using a limited set of physical markers; ii. these groups were endowed with differing capacities for cultural development with Europeans ranked at the top of this racial order and sub-Saharan Africans at the bottom; iii. each group’s capacity for civilisation was fixed and immutable over time and space such that African and Asian societies were effectively imagined as lying in a state of arrested development akin to European societies at an earlier stage in their civilisation.[39][40] If decolonial scholars like Quijano and Mignolo can only envision racism when social groups with different phenotypes came into contact with one another in the sixteenth century, then the rigid formalism of the Political Marxists pushes its emergence in world history into the late eighteenth century and the construction of ‘racial types.’[41]

This approach contrasts sharply with Marx’s own method, which is undergirded not only by the materialist premise, ‘that the analysis of political and ideological structures must be grounded in their material conditions of existence’ but also the historical premise which posits ‘that the specific forms of these relations cannot be deduced, a priori, from this level but must be made historically specific 'by supplying those further delineations which explain their differentiae specifica.’[42] And it is Robinson’s attentiveness to the historical archive that allows him to supply those ‘further delineations’ and demonstrate how racism emerged as a historically contingent mechanism to legitimate the widespread use of slavery and ruthless exploitation of migrant labour in societies that were outwardly informed by the ideals of Christian universalism and the redemptive powers of baptism.

In contrast, Wood’s approach erases these vital ‘traces of history,’[43] of earlier modalities of racism as well as the racialised orders of domination that were built and which formed an intrinsic component of the emergent structures of the world capitalist economy long before the advent of scientific racism.[44] That is, it not only prevents her from examining the degree to which racism might have shaped social relations under feudalism but also how it might have informed three centuries of subsequent colonial capitalist subjugation from the late fifteenth century, including the genocide of the Native Indian population and African enslavement that accompanied it. The theoretical and political consequences are disastrous as Wood’s conceptually deflated understanding of racism with its narrow association with Enlightenment thought means she effectively ends up marginalising the significance and structuring force of racism in the making of capitalist modernity.

Racism doesn’t emerge with the politicisation of phenotypical differences as decolonial scholars claim nor with the sifting and hierarchical ordering of humans into discrete biological categories as Political Marxists argue because there is no such thing as an absolute biological substance. Arguments like those above mistakenly attribute race with an ontological status it does not deserve by reifying skin colour as an active determinant of social relations. Instead, these understandings are expressions of racisms own epistemological schema which it uses both to justify itself as well as obscure its own historical, social and political contingencies.

In contrast, this essay is informed by an understanding that ‘the visibility of somatic characteristics is not inherent in the characteristics themselves but arises from a process of signification by which meaning is attributed to certain of them.’[45] Further, this visibility is socially constructed in a wider set of structural constraints, that is, within a set of relations of domination such that it is more appropriate to conceive of racism as ‘a set of sociopolitical processes of differentiation and hierarchization, which are projected onto the putatively biological human body’[46] with the intention of legitimating oppressive and exclusionary practices. In this sense, racism is a technology of power, ‘an inscription of power on the body’ as Lentin puts it[47] which also has the effect of making the rest of the population indifferent to the resultant suffering inflicted on those constructed as racialised outsiders. And because many physical characteristics (real and imagined) have been ‘signified as a mark of nature’[48] throughout history this understanding of racism allows us to not only encompass colour-coded modalities of racism but the entire plurality of racisms in world history including those which emerged within the European interior itself.[49]

By thinking of racism in this theoretical but historically-sensitised manner, we can proceed to re-connect the earlier modalities of racism that Robinson identified to those that followed in the post-Enlightenment world that Wood and Post refer to where science had displaced religion as the dominant idiom. And from this we can begin to surmise that the racialisation of intellectual thought in Europe in the late eighteenth century was not the moment of racism’s birth but an aftershock of the processes of state formation and original accumulation legitimated by earlier modalities of racism.

The aim of the early Enlightenment thinkers had been nothing less than to sweep away the idea that the world was ordered according to God’s will and craft a new moral and philosophical attitude informed by a secular outlook and reasoned judgement based on observation. However, because this project grew within a system in which Western European states were engaged in capitalist expansion involving the colonial subjugation of Asian, African and American peoples, intellectual thought emerged contaminated with racism.

Racism and the inequalities that flowed from them were already sedimented and institutionalised within the emergent structures of the capitalist world-system. That is why, for the intellectual and political elites of late eighteenth century Western Europe, the ongoing project of colonial conquest became a live data-set, a human zoo from which they distilled their magical theories of scientific racism. The ongoing reverberations of colonialism and the profound structural inequalities made it possible for European elites to think in new and disturbing ways about humanity.

By making these connections across time and space, we can see more clearly the convoluted, incremental and contingent manner in which different modalities of racism were assembled and sedimented over historical time to produce the global structures of racialised capitalism that we live with today. This is why I insist that racism must be understood as a constitutive feature of capitalist modernity, one that informed and consolidated itself alongside Western European capitalist development.

In the remainder of this essay, I want to focus on how this still unfolding world history begins by mapping how racism accompanied the formation and dissolution of absolutist states in Western Europe between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. When it comes to their accounts of racism, Wood and Post fail to consider the significance of the contentious developments in Western Europe during the age of absolutism.[50] This interregnum was witness to a multi-level crises of the European social formation defined by intra-elite conflicts and class struggles of an intensity not witnessed in centuries – precisely the kind of economic and political conditions under which dominant ideologies of the kind Wood and Post draw attention to would have become unsettled and new ways of thinking might have emerged as part of the elite repertoire of re-securing their rule.[51]

I contend that the emergence of racism as a material and cultural force can be more precisely located in these social and political conflicts and a phase of historical time that Marxists commonly refer to as the ‘transition’ between a feudal order that was in terminal crisis and a bourgeois order struggling to be born. In that sense, the racisms that I discuss should be classified as racisms of the transition.

My account invites the reader to interrogate possible connections between the racisms of Spanish and English America with the racialised political cultures from which the settler colonialists arrived. To what extent were these political cultures of Western European societies already suffused with the logic of racialisation and racism in the lead-in to the capitalist colonisation of the Americas? My intention is not simply to offer a “race-attentive” account of the internal history of Europe but rather to stimulate further discussion on the possible historical linkages between the internal racialisation of Europe and the racialisation of its exterior, linkages that have so far not received the attention they deserve. This could be framed more contentiously by inverting the usual logic that presumes racism blows back into Europe from the colonies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to ask, what if white supremacy in the colonies has important continuities with, and emerged out of the logics and lineages of, earlier modalities of racism born within Europe itself?

Further, and like Robinson’s Black Marxism, this essay opens up the possibility that racism no longer needs to be understood as a post-hoc, conspiratorial elite rationalisation of slavery and settler colonialism in the Americas but a set of ideologies and practices that built in different ways on processes of racialisation that had already stained elite Western European cultures prior to the Spanish and English settlers setting off on their so-called voyages of discovery. Or as Robinson puts it: ‘[t]his cultural tradition of a moral and social order that rested on racial distinctions was…readily available for the extension to Asian, African and other non-European peoples when it became appropriate.’[52]

Surprisingly, Robinson himself doesn’t place as much emphasis on the developments in Europe immediately preceding and co-terminus with the Spanish and English colonisation of the Americas in his account of racialised capitalism[53] whereas I insist this is the formative moment in the historical formation of racism in world history. In that regard, my essay both expands upon and challenges key aspects of Robinson’s account by periodizing more precisely the origins of racism as a material and cultural force in the transition from feudalism to capitalism.[54]

Before I move to this discussion, let me clarify briefly what I understand by absolutism. The feudal mode of production defined by the unity of economy and polity distributed in a chain of parcellised sovereignties throughout the social formation began to fall apart as a result of a systemic, multilevel crisis triggered by the fall-out from the Black Death, famine, and peasant resistance. Serfdom – the key mechanism of surplus extraction under feudalism - which fused economic and political coercion at the level of the village began to disappear with the commutation of dues into money rents. And these developments when taken together threatened the class power of feudal lords forcing the displacement of politico-legal power upwards towards a centralised and militarised summit such that absolutist monarchies replaced the parcellised sovereignties of the medieval social formations.[55]

Perry Anderson notes that while absolutism was a ‘recharged apparatus of feudal domination, designed to clamp the peasant masses back into their traditional social position,’[56] for the feudal nobility to retain state power required the forging of an alliance with an increasingly powerful urban bourgeoisie. In this sense, the absolutist monarchy was a ‘political balancing-mechanism between nobility and the bourgeoisie.’[57] Further, while it may have helped to temper the multi-level crisis of feudalism, absolutism generated its own structural contradictions and further economic, political, and social upheaval which would unintentionally upend the old (feudal) ways of working and thinking. And it is precisely amid these intra-elite as well as class conflicts that racism emerges as a material force for the first time in world history.

To fix racism’s causation more precisely in time and space requires a degree of historical concretisation because no absolutist state was the same. Specifically, it requires an analysis of what Tilly[58] refers to as ‘the interplay among causal mechanisms, idiosyncratic events and powerful contingencies’ and so illuminate what work racism accomplished across time and space, as well as for whom and why. For this reason, I will focus mainly on developments in Spain because it was the first episode of absolutist state reconstruction. However, more briefly, I will also touch on how Spanish developments informed English elite practices, including how racism accompanied the capitalist colonisation of Ireland and Virginia.

Intra-elite conflict and absolutist state formation in Spain

Absolutism was the first international state system in the modern world, and the first absolutist state was Spain, established in 1479 when the Kingdoms of Castille and Aragon were conjoined in dynastic union with the marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand.[59] The conquistadores who left for the Americas over the next few decades emerged from a social milieu that already understood itself as battle-hardened warriors with a strong attachment to a racialised religious superiority rooted in the purity of their Christian descent. Such a racialised worldview didn’t emerge overnight but developed incrementally as the unintended outcome of multiple determinants that included theReconquista – a retrospective imagining of an uninterrupted struggle to reclaim the Iberian Peninsula for Christianity after 800 years of Muslim rule; the multi-level crisis of the feudal mode of production; and the intra-elite struggles for power, wealth, and influence that accompanied the formation and consolidation of the absolutist state.

The Reconquista was a project launched by key elements of the Christian clergy to reclaim the Iberian Peninsula which had been under Islamic authority since the eighth century. However, it was only with the onset of the Crusades in the late eleventh century when the belief that military activity could have a penitential value if it was directed against the enemies of Christendom gained currency that parts of the nobility were won over to this mission.[60]  

Over the course of the next two centuries, much of the Iberian Peninsula other than the statelet of Granada was reclaimed through war by the Iberian Christian elites. However, as they moved through the previously Muslim South, they found themselves in charge of an increasingly multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and multicultural population of Muslims, Jews, and Christians. On the one hand, they understood that this ethnically diverse population, particularly Muslims, formed an indispensable component of the rural workforce and were therefore vital to ensuring the economic security of the newly-conquered Christian lands. Consequently, many like Alfonso X of Castille encouraged fellow Christians ‘to convert the Moors and cause them to believe in our faith by kind words and suitable preaching, not by force or compulsion…for our Lord is not pleased by service that men give Him through fear, but with that which they do willingly and without any pressure.’[61]

On the other hand, the regimes of representation perpetuated by important fractions of the Christian clergy imagined Islam as ‘barbaric, degenerate and tyrannical’[62] while elite discourse informing the Reconquista itself represented the Muslim population as fifth columnists who might at any time rise up in rebellion. Indicative was James I of Aragon who insisted that ‘the Moors of the Kingdom of Valencia are all traitors and have often made us understand that whereas we treat them well, they are ever seeking to do us harm.’[63]

This contradictory response emanated in large part from the fact that the thirteenth century remained an era of parcellised sovereignties where no unitary political authority traversed the entire Iberian Peninsula. On the whole, the life and property of Muslims was respected and religious and civil rights guaranteed. The goal remained a sort of voluntary assimilation through religious conversion. However, where the conquering Christians encountered armed resistance, it becomes possible to discern sparks in the night heralding a hardening of attitudes and the racisms to come. For example, in Minorca and Ibiza, Muslims were sold into slavery and their lands shared among Christian settlers, while elsewhere Muslims found themselves forced to live within walled ghettos and prevented from holding public office.

Perhaps most significantly when it comes to understanding the antecedents of modern racism, social interactions, particularly sexual relations, between Christians on the one hand and Muslims and Jews on the other came to be punishable by burning or stoning to death.[64] As early as the thirteenth century then, parts of the Christian elite were beginning to mentally close down the possibility of the redemption of non-Christian others through conversion and assimilation.

Significantly, the stalling of Christian expansion across the Iberian Peninsula as a result of the Black Death in the middle of the fourteenth century and the resulting crisis in the feudal mode of production further consolidated this direction of travel towards the emergence of racism. Shortages of labor were accompanied by rising prices and taxation, leading to a growth in agricultural unrest. Significantly, this unrest was accompanied by a marked hostility toward Jews, who were accused of instigating the Black Death by poisoning wells and of killing Christian children; increasingly they came to be represented as the Devil in popular mythology and folklore.[65]

While antisemitism was widespread throughout Europe in this period, what was striking about the Iberian Peninsula was the sheer scale of violence and the numbers impacted. By 1360, antisemitic violence was endemic with 4,000 Jews massacred in Seville, followed by attacks in Toledo, Valencia and Barcelona that resulted ‘in the deaths of thousands of Jews.’[66] What can be discerned in this moment is the beginning of `the repudiation of the Christian offer of salvation to all humanity’ and the pushing of Jews ‘outside the circle of potential Christian fellowship.’[67]

While these developments constituted the antecedents of racism, it would be the intra-elite social and political struggles accompanying the emergence and consolidation of the absolutist state that would prove to be decisive in birthing racism and sealing the tragic fate of Jews and Muslims on the Iberian Peninsula. The emergence of the absolutist state in 1479 was a historically contingent outcome of the elite desire to resolve the deep crisis of feudalism.  However, moves towards the creation of such a unitary and centralised political authority under royal command helped produce a highly contentious intra-elite turf war which quickly became racialised.

One of the ways in which Jews had tried to circumvent the summary violence they were subjected to in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was by accepting baptism and conversion to Christianity. Conversion implied assimilation into the dominant Christian society, the right to live outside Jewish residential quarters without any need to wear distinctive clothing as well as the freedom to marry other Christians. Significantly, for a minority it also allowed them to maintain influential positions in the secular and ecclesiastical hierarchy.[68]

However, this tendency towards conversion infuriated those elites who now came to understand themselves as Old Christians (Cristiano viejos) because they perceived theConversos as adversaries in the competition for power, wealth, and influence over the monarchy and the emergent apparatuses of absolutist power. As a result, these elements, drawn principally from the clergy and descendants of the military nobility who had participated in the Reconquista increasingly questioned the sincerity ofConverso Christian beliefs. They accused them of failing to sever their social and cultural ties with the wider Jewish community and many relied on genealogy to determine who was Christian and who was not.

In this sense, Jewishness came to be understood as transmitted in the blood, ‘a natural, inheritable condition’[69] such that Jewish ancestry was said to compromise ‘Christian identity, values and understandings.’[70] Old Christians insisted on the avoidance of sexual reproductive marital relations with Conversos as a way of protecting their pure Christian lineages from Jewish blood. Significantly, these efforts to naturalise a religious-cultural identification coincided with the emergence of a lexicon of terms like raza (race),casta (caste) andlinaje (lineage) that informed popular notions of biological reproduction in the natural world, particularly horsebreeding.[71]

Probably the first instance of how this modality of racism was deployed as a technology of power to marginalise and exclude Conversos from positions of influence within key public offices occurred in the city of Toledo in 1449 when the city’s religious and secular leaders rebelled against the tax policies of King Juan II by scapegoating the Conversos, some of whom worked as tax collectors. Toledo’s mayor, Pero Saramiento, drew up a decree making all converted Jews and their descendants permanently ineligible for public office and municipal appointments on the grounds that ‘New Christians could not be trusted because of the insincerity of their conversions; deep hatred of christionas viejos lindos (clean/ beautiful Old Christians); and crimes against God, king and the public good.’[72]

While Pope Nicholas V as well as many Christian Spaniards opposed this first blood purity statute (limpieza de sangre) on the grounds that it undermined the redemptive power of baptism, the direction of travel was towards the expansion and diffusion of such racist practices as a way of ensuring that only those with ‘unsullied’ Christian lineage could occupy positions of power and influence. Religious orders as well as universities in Cordoba and Seville followed Toledo in establishing such statutes in the 1460s and 1470s and accompanying such exclusionary practices was a dehumanised set of representations that depicted Jews and conversos as products of ‘monstrous mixtures’ including demons and animals.[73]

In this way, racist antisemitism became conjoined to the struggles that lead to the process of absolutist state formation in Spain, increasingly informing the political conflicts between nobility, clergy and the crown over taxation and local autonomy, the role of municipal government and the march towards political centralisation. Eventually, the Monarchy would reach an accommodation with the Christian religious orders, higher nobility and others keen to further their economic and political objectives at the direct expense of Jews and Muslims by accentuating the emphasis they placed on a racialising Christianity.

In 1478, just one year before the official inauguration of Spanish absolutism, Ferdinand and Isabella agreed to establish the Inquisition with the express intention to ‘root out heretical beliefs and practices from among the Converso population.’[74] Suspected heretics were required to appear before the tribunal of inquisition at a ceremony called the auto de fe (act of faith) whereConversos and others were subject to expropriation, expulsion, and execution. 700 Conversos were burned to death in Seville between 1480 and 1488 while another 5,000 received other punishments. In Catalonia, mostConversos fled the region in fear of their lives. The first fifty years of the Inquisition proved to be the ‘bloodiest, producing thousands of deaths at the stake.’[75] And the estates of such persons would be confiscated such that no descendant could lay claim to them, a racialised process of accumulation through forced dispossession that the Spanish would shortly launch on a mass scale in the Americas.

And such racialising Christian zeal was cemented with the declaration of war against the last remaining Muslim principality of Granada in 1482. Framed as the culmination of the Reconquista, by January 1492, 800 years of Islamic rule on the Iberian Peninsula came to an end with its annexation by Isabella and Ferdinand. More than 200,000 Muslims would emigrate to North Africa in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Granada.  And joining them would be the Jews of Castille and Aragon unless they converted under threat of expulsion and accepted the status of second-class Christian subjects in a new Spanish order obsessed with blood and descent.[76]

It is surely of some significance to our understanding of racism that just eight months after the fall of Granada in August 1492, the Genoese merchant and mariner Christopher Columbus would set off on his journey to the Americas, sponsored by that same dynastic union of Isabella and Ferdinand. The colonisation of the Americas would eventually bring into the Spanish state’s orbit a vast multi-ethnic empire comprising Native American, African, and settler colonial populations. Yet, here we see, literally a matter of months before, how the twin notions of Old Christian blood and genealogical purity were already being deployed by those same Spanish elites as powerful exclusionary technologies of power to cleanse the population within its internal state boundaries using the methods of expropriation, expulsion, and execution.

A decade later in 1502, Castille’s Muslims were offered the same constrained choice of expulsion or conversion as Iberia’s Jews, with Aragon following in 1526. Most of these Muslim artisans and farm workers chose to convert yet despite Moriscos(Muslim converts to Christianity) constituting around 6 per cent of the Spanish population, there was little effort made to integrate them into Christian society over the course of the sixteenth century. Instead, they continued to find themselves represented as an enemy within who at any time might lend their support to future invasions, especially from the Ottoman Turks.[77]

And in this moment of intensified racialised conflict within the Iberian Peninsula (alongside the onset of colonisation in the Americas) we see an expansion in the number of blood purity statutes. From the mid-sixteenth century in particular, the Vatican increased its support for the Inquisition which in turn encouraged more and more military orders, colleges, guilds and cathedral chapters to make membership conditional on the purity of one’s blood. Such statutes effectively debarred any Christian of Jewish or Muslim descent from holding public office. Instead, a certificate of pure Christian descent defined by blood was required such that ‘doctrinal heresy and enmity towards Christians came to be seen as the likely, even inevitable consequence of having Jewish [or Muslim] blood.’[78]

Alongside this, a sustained attack was launched on Morisco cultural identity during the first half of the sixteenth century which included the burning of more than a million Arabic books and manuscripts and the banning of traditional dress. This process of dehumanisation and discrimination would continue until 1609 when the entire Morisco population of around 300,000 would be expelled from Spain such that‘to be truly Spanish… one [now] had to claim to be of pure Christian descent.’[79]

This abbreviated account of the history of the interior of Spain, one that is more attentive to the process of racialisation makes transparent often neglected but important connections between the events that unfolded on the Iberian Peninsula and Spanish colonisation of the Americas. Significantly, what becomes more evident is that the Spanish who left for the Americas emerged from a political culture where they already understood themselves as battle-hardened Christian warriors imbued with a racialised religious superiority rooted in blood and descent. Only those thought to be of pure Christian ancestry were permitted to join the ranks of the conquistadores and missionaries.[80][81] And most of the 150,000 Spaniards who crossed the Americas between 1493 and 1550 came from Andalucía and Castille, the regions where such racialised conceptions of religious superiority were most strongly held.[82]

By 1600, ‘Madrid controlled the largest collection of territories the world had seen since the fall of the Roman Empire and the heyday of Genghis Khan.’[83] And confronted with the intensity of new desires, pressures, and conflicts in the New World, these Spanish conquistadores and missionaries would go onto adapt this racialised mental framework to make sense of the Native American and the African – except now, the tainted bloodlines could be discerned on the body itself, in the darker skin tone of the racialised other. The colour-coded hierarchical order of racist domination –sistema de castas – that would come to undergird Spanish colonial rule in the Americas in the late seventeenth century was based on proportions of Spanish, indigenous and African ancestry. To sit at the apex of this pyramid, that is, to be Spanish in the colonies, required not only pure Christian descent but purewhite Christian descent.[84][85]

Racialisation as contagion: English absolutism, the colonial conquest of Ireland and the Norman Yoke

But we cannot leave the historical account there because, as Perry Anderson puts it, this first episode of absolutist state reconstruction in Spain exercised a determining influence on the rest of western Europe. We know that many English merchants were resident in Andalucia and Castille during the years of the Inquisition and the completion of the Reconquista while in England, the elites of the absolutist Tudor state looked on with increasing envy as Spanish galleons returned from the Americas laden with looted gold and silver.[86]

It’s not surprising then that many of the English nobility – men like Walter Raleigh, Henry Sidney, Humphrey Gilbert, Richard Grenville, Robert Deveraux, and John Davies – who would go onto play a formative role in the colonisation of Ireland in the late sixteenth century were very familiar with the racist cleansing of the Iberian peninsula as well as the Spanish maltreatment of the Indian and the African in the Americas.[87] Davies, for example, justified the transplantation of English and Scottish settlers in Ulster using the precedent of ‘the Spaniards [who] lately removed all the Moors out of Granada into Barbary without providing them with any new seats there.’ Similarly, Robert Devereux, legitimating the conquest of Ireland, said he expected ‘that within two years, you shall make restraint for the English to come hither [to Ireland] without license as at this date it is in Spaine for going to the Indyes.’[88]Leicester – another nobleman – openly acknowledged his ideas about the Gaelic Irish were informed by the Spanish understanding of other subjugated populations leading him to classify the Irish as ‘a wild, barbarous and treacherous people. I would deall as I have hard and redd of such lyke how they have byn used’[89]

At the same time, the English colonisation of Ireland had its own historically-specific dynamics which over-determined what they learnt from the Spanish. For example, unlike the Spanish who were fervent Catholics, the English were Protestants and hypercritical of Catholicism. And compounding this was the fact that when they arrived in Ireland, they were confronted with a form of religious observance among the Gaelic communities that did not even resemble the Catholicism they despised so vehemently. This quickly led the English colonists to brand the Irish as pagans with their alleged behaviour making it seem that ‘they neyther love nor dredd God nor yet hate the Devell, they are superstycyous and worshippers of images and idolaters.’[90]

And this categorisation was the first step to representing the Irish as barbarians, or even ‘beasts in the shape of men,’[91] - an unreasonable people who could not be bargained with. All sorts of inhumane acts would follow in the slipstream of this symbolic and material devaluation. Gilbert, Sidney, and others came to understand that in dealing with the native Irish population they were absolved from all normal ethical constraints – one of the quintessential hallmarks of racialisation. In 1574, when Robert Devereaux led a raid which resulted in the execution of the entire population of Rathlin Island, his lieutenant Edward Barkley offered the following justification: ‘How godly a dede it is to overthrowe so wicked a race the world may judge; for my part I think there cannot be a greater sacryfice to God.’[92]

Here we can discern the emergence of a discourse of race as lineage deployed to make sense of the ways of the Gaelic Irish; such an understanding acquired an ever-increasing degree of material force across this period of profound economic and political turbulence. Richard Verstegan, in his then influential book Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, published in 1605, argued that ‘Englishmen are descended of the German race and were heretofore generally called Saxons.’[93] Others followed suit. By the onset of the English Civil War – itself triggered by the Gaelic Irish rebellion against colonial subjugation in 1641 – we see the deployment of the theory of the Norman Yoke as part of the intra-elite conflict between a Stuart monarchy, keen to weaken the power of Parliament and rule by divine right, and the defenders of Parliament, who turned to the historical record to legitimate their argument.

According to Christopher Hill,[94] key elements of this latter group contended that before 1066, the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of England lived as free and equal citizens governing themselves through representative institutions. However, the Norman conquest had deprived them of this liberty and established a tyranny of an alien King and landlords, which weighed heavily on the Anglo-Saxons. In such accounts, the ruling class were constructed as descended from a foreign and oppressing people who therefore had no right to be in the country and no claim to the obedience of Englishmen – themselves forged from the original stock of Anglo-Saxons. And it was only by reversing this conquest and its legacies that the English could ever return to a life of liberty and equality.

So, as in Spain a century earlier, we can discern the racialisation of bitter intra-elite (as well as colonial) conflicts informing efforts to reconstruct the absolutist state. Unlike in Spain however, where it was the clergy and the nobility who deployed the racialising discourse of pure Christian descent rooted in blood, in England – reflecting the later period where capitalism was increasingly dominant - the idea of race was taken up by a very different set of actors, namely, elements of the emergent bourgeoisie and middling classes who deployed it to cohere the Third Estate against the Crown, Church and landlords. In this sense, the idea of race was used by social groups invested in democratising the English state.[95]

This ascendency of the bourgeois order in England also heralded the consolidation of English colonialism in the Americas. And accompanying this was a further iteration of regimes of racialised representations. Just as in Spain, where the internal struggles over state formation helped produce a racialised Christian consciousness, including among the Conquistadores who travelled to the Americas, so it was that that the conflicts in Ireland and within England itself helped produce a racialised self-understanding among the Puritans migrating to the Chesapeake region of colonial English America. And no doubt this would have been reinforced by the active presence of men like Davies,[96] Gilbert, Raleigh and Grenville, who played such a formative role in the conquest of Ireland as well as the second and third generation of English settlers escaping the fall-out from the English Civil War, a conflict undergirded ideologically by the theory of the foreign Norman Yoke on the neck of the indigenous Anglo-Saxon.

Political Marxists like Charles Post and Ellen Wood, by uncoupling the emergence of racism in the English colony of Virginia from this prior history and the racialised political cultures from which the settler colonialists emerged, effectively end up occluding and even erasing the continuities and discontinuities between the respective forms of racialisation to be seen on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps if we re-imagine the conquest of Ireland as ‘a dress rehearsal for a grander exploitation across the Atlantic,’[97] we can finally dispense with the understanding of racism as a post-hoc capitalist conspiracy. Ideas of race as lineage were already in play in conflicts in Ireland as well as within England itself which is why they also informed the structural foundations of the Virginia colony almost from the moment the English settlers arrived.  

Specifically, with the surplus threatened by a persistently non-compliant multi-ethnic workforce comprising English and Africans labourers, court records from the 1640s reveal how the elites of the Virginia legislative assembly turned to sifting the workforce using the relational categorisation of English and ‘Negro’ – the latter term denoting black in the Hispanic languages.[98] This encoding of the category ‘Negro’ in law was a formative moment in this racialisation process in English America because a darker skin complexion was explicitly used to distinguish labourers of African descent from those of English descent. Further, this categorisation was but a prelude to institutionalising systematic forms of discrimination against African labourers which would eventually reduce their legal status to that of a slave. And it is deserving of the classification racism because in this new hierarchical order of labour any possibility of the African changing their status was made impossible because difference was essentialised through the racialisation of ancestry.

Remaining attentive to class divisions within the English-descended population however reveals that it was not until the 1680s that English labourers as a social group came to fully embrace such a racialised order. Significantly, this bifurcation within the labouring class occurred in the aftermath of the defeat of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 when 1,000 English and African labourers rose up in armed rebellion against the Governor William Berkeley demanding nothing less than the end of ‘chattel bond-servitude.’[99] Horrified by the fact that more than three decades since their institutionalisation of racism they had failed to fully break the affective ties forged by subaltern groups who shared neither ancestry nor faith but class position, the Virginian elite turned towards the explicit deployment of the language of whiteness.

From the 1680s, racism not only did its work through the signification of the categories ‘English’ and ‘Negro’ but the related categorisations of ‘white’ and ‘black’. That is, legislators began to differentiate the labouring population using colour as a sorting mechanism, and because chromatic differences laid seamlessly on top of already existing racialised ancestral differences, the unequal treatment of African and English labour based on descent morphed easily into one informed by absolutist colour differences. Terms like ‘Christian woman’ and ‘Christian indentured servants’ were now prefixed with ‘white’ and used to regulate everything from intimate relations to the granting of land to English labourers.[100] Within the space of three generations, the vocabulary of difference shifted decisively from that based on religion (for example Christian and heathen) and racialised ancestry (for example English and ‘Negro’ where the African’s so-called blackness was used as a marker of ancestry) to one informed by an explicit colour-coded racism (for example White and Black).

The success of white supremacy in affectively attaching the English labourer to the colonial elite was bound up with the imperialist expansion of the plantation economy westwards, such that accompanying the invention of a ‘screen of racial contempt’ were material advantages such as the ownership of land, the freedom to move freely without a pass, and, to marry without upper class consent.[101] But the wages of whiteness extended well beyond the material. In the same moment that English labourers were acquiring an enhanced status in colonial society, the humanity of African labourers was annihilated as they found themselves reduced to a commodity to be bought and sold in market squares. The recalibration of the moral worth of English and African labouring lives generated a structural and symbolic chasm that could no longer be bridged. Having witnessed this tragedy unfold in real time, perhaps English labourers determined they would embrace their newly-conferred whiteness fearful that relinquishing it might mean being reduced to the status of a slave, of becoming ‘Negro’.[102]

But in choosing to become white, these English subalterns also became complicit in the catastrophe that was visited upon the African. While racism was a class project of the English colonial state, its ultimate success rested on subaltern assent. From this moment on, the expansion of rights and liberties for white labourers in the colonies was made dependent on the confirmation of the hereditary slave status of the African.[103]

The wider significance of these events lies in the fact that the social processes and conflicts associated with state formation and colonial capitalism which helped birth racism first in the Iberian Peninsula and Spanish America and then England and its American colonies would go onto reproduce racism on a global scale with the consolidation of capitalism. The competitive nature of predatory state-building among Western European nations meant the French rapidly followed suit with the introduction of a Code Noir in 1685, versions of which were adapted throughout the colonial French Americas. This process of elite European learning, of coming to an understanding that commodity production and capitalist accumulation would proceed more efficiently by producing a heightened sense of esentialised difference among the global subaltern classes was, like capitalism itself, ‘a value-added process gaining in complexity as it moved along a chain of inter-related sites.’[104]

Conclusion

This essay challenges the long-standing understanding that capitalist colonialisation of the Americas forms the universal explanation for the historical formation of racism. Through a critical engagement with Decolonial, Political Marxist, and Black Marxist accounts of racism it invites the reader to consider what if white supremacy in the colonies had important continuities with, and emerged out of the logics and lineages of, earlier modalities of racism born within Europe itself? Concretely, it demonstrates how a racialised religious superiority rooted in the purity of Christian blood developed incrementally among the Spanish elites as the unintended outcome of multiple determinants including the completion of the Reconquista, the multi-level crisis of the feudal mode of production and the intra-elite struggles for power, wealth and influence that accompanied the formation of the absolutist state. In contrast, in England, racism emerged later than in Spain and was intimately entwined with intra-elite and class conflicts that heralded the dissolution of the absolutist state and the rise of capitalism. Consequently, it was deployed not by the absolutist monarchy and nobility as in Spain but by the emergent bourgeoisie and middling classes seeking to legitimate their conquest of Ireland alongside cohering the English population against the Crown and Church as it attempted to capture state power.

Over the past half century or more, there have been multiple debates about the transition to capitalism, but no school of thought thus far has had particularly much to say about how these debates might speak to the historical formation of racism. Racism has almost always been post-hoc, a sort of calculated effort on the part of the colonial elites to resolve the labour problem in the Americas and thereby facilitate the process of capitalist accumulation on a world scale. This essay, by re-orienting discussions regarding the temporal and spatial origins of racism as a material and cultural force towards developments within the European interior - including on the Iberian Peninsula as well as England - helps make transparent that we can no longer ignore the constitutive part racism played in the transition to capitalist modernity.   

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