LENIN'S TOMB

Saturday, November 22, 2014

The UKIPisation of English politics II posted by Richard Seymour

It's only funny until you realise they're not going to stop.

Let's talk about the 'white working class'. For more than a decade, a twin discourse about class has been building up.

'Two souls' of the working class
On the one hand, there is this melancholic representation of a forgotten, disenfranchised 'white working class'. There were documentaries, articles, tea towel memoirs, focus groups, policy documents. This 'white working class' was never discussed in terms of what made it (part of) a class, but always in terms of its supposed cultural tics. I still remember, with cringing embarrassment, the spectacle of Matthew Taylor - then the head of the IPPR - patronising some skinheaded East End codger about pie n mash, and jellied eels, in the context of a documentary about multiculturalism. This is the working class we have supposedly lost, gone with the empire, and all those manufacturing jobs: an industrious, clean, virtuous, jolly, culturally vibrant working class. It is important to stress just how much this is a mythical mobilisation of affect. Historically, in certain contexts, it has been possible to speak of a 'white working class' in a meaningful sense, as something that was historically and politically produced through practices like segregation. There is no equivalent experience in the UK today.

On the other hand, there is the vicious, punitive demonisation of a section of the working class whom both the Thatcherites and Third Way politicos referred to as 'the underclass' or, in politically correct New Labour terminology, the 'socially excluded'. Later, the idea was popularised through the meme of chavs. These were people identified by their failure to integrate into societal norms, their 'dependency culture', their crass consumption patterns, their mobbishness, their unfamiliar speech patterns, and their moral degeneracy. They represented the decay of 'British values'. This was linked to racial anxiety in obvious ways, which became explicit during and after the England riots: "the whites have become black". Even today's rioters aren't like rioters in the good old days.

This discourse began to develop only a few years after Tony Blair had declared the class war over. It very visibly wasn't over. However, this was because the symptoms of class were visible rather than because there was a well-organised labour movement putting class on the agenda. And the symptoms of class life under neoliberalism did not have to be explained in a leftist idiom.

Three changes in class life
The entrenchment of neoliberalism in everyday life, with the destruction of collective organisation and the removal of social protections and provision, ensured that more and more of ordinary experience was characterised by vicious competition. The more that competition was accepted and valorised, the more hierarchy was worshipped, and those lower down the chain treated simultaneously as potential competitors, losers who should be spat upon, and dangerous elements who needed to be controlled. Thus, the resentments deriving from class injuries could be effectively canalised into competition and aggression toward others of the same class.

Also important was the growing stratification of the working class based on working patterns, education and lifestyle. It had never been the case that factory workers made up the majority of the working class. However, their experiences were sufficiently like those of other workers, that they were able to 'stand in' for the class, figuratively. Their degree of organisation commanded respect, as did the cultural salience they had achieved in post-war Britain. There is no such easy metonym for the working class today. It is far easier to speak of the class in terms of cultural cliches: the estuary accent, poor education, social conservatism and traditionalism. Skinheads, white vans, England flags, and sports tops, became synecdoches for class. And two small businessmen, Tommy Robinson and now Daniel Ware, were able to 'stand in' for the 'white working class'.

Finally, just as important was the transformation of social democracy and its adaptation to Thatcherism. If capitalism creates its own gravediggers, you could argue, so does the working class. When New Labour took office, it was not sufficient for them to administer neoliberal capitalism and police its breakdowns. They had to discipline their own working class base, and react to breakdowns as challenges to their project of transforming Labour into New Labour. These sporadic strikes, protests, civil disobedience and occasional political defections were manifestations of backward-looking tendencies within the working class which had held back Labour's necessary modernisation. This resort to non-market solutions was linked to the cultural pathologies producing 'social exclusion' and trapping people in poverty. Hence, the variety of authoritarian panaceas, from the demand that British Asians 'integrate', to Asbos, to Blair's proposal to monitor potential problem children from before birth - all intended to adjust working class people to life in neoliberal Britain.

Racecraft and neoliberal dysfunction
Race, as became evident after the northern riots and the Cantle report into them, is a convenient ready-made strategy for policing the dysfunctions arising from neoliberal politics. These riots - like almost all riots - were not about one simple issue. Hundreds of young people became spontaneously embroiled in open combat with the police, as well as gangs of fascist bovver boys, over a range of issues. The immediate issue was fascist provocation and police brutality. The longer-range issues were local government under-funding, de facto segregation in local housing and service provision, and the tendency for racist local police forces to criminalise Asian youths.

The almost instinctive, learned response of the British media, the government and the Labour leadership both in Westminster and in local councils, was to boil all this down to 'race riots'. Long before an official report was produced, local politicians and police chiefs, as well as Labour MPs, were describing a failure of multiculturalism. It was a lack of integration, the failure of locals to internalise British values, self-segregation, and so on, which had made local whites resentful, kept the communities divided and fostered distrust of the police.

Such claims only made sense as a malevolent twist a particularly toothless kind of liberal multicultural discourse according to which racism is not about hierarchies and oppression, but rather about different groups needing to tolerate one another, get along, respect one another's right to narrate, and so on. The malevolent twist took the form of an insidious white nationalism in which British Asians were assumed to be essentially outsiders rather than citizens, and troublemaking outsiders at that. Thus, the problem was that British Asians had failed to tolerate whites, to respect their diversity, and to acknowledge their right to narrate. This was when New Labour and its allied intelligentsia adopted in fully the neo-Powellite idiom that was to become its disgrace note on questions of race, nationality and immigration. The 'war on terror' merely accelerated the trend, and ushered in the spectacle of the melancholic 'white working class', marginalised and forgotten, undermined by a new multicultural 'underclass' filled with 'feral youths' and brooding would-be terrorists.

The fertile terrain of reaction
At the early stages, this class discourse was simply one element in a complex set of racial representations that centred on culture, and particularly on Islam as the folk devil menacing British values. It helped create fertile territory for the far right. The BNP was the first beneficiary, increasing its votes between 2000 and 2009 by over 1000%. Often its successes derived from effectively manipulating the language already popularised by New Labour. For example, when the government made it a priority to 'crack down' on asylum seekers, with a range of measures from voucher schemes to detention camps, the BNP leader Nick Griffin expressed his gratitude: "The asylum seeker issue has been great for us. It legitimates us." And: "If Blunkett deports one asylum seeker, we can deport all of them". Likewise, it was Gordon Brown who legitimised the "British jobs for British workers" slogan by uttering it as Prime Minister to a Labour conference.

However, it seems likely that it was the credit crunch and ensuing recession that decisively shifted the focus of racist politics. Islam was replaced by immigration as the most salient enemy. Were it not for the economy still being rather parlous, polls suggest that immigration would have been the number one issue in the 2010 election. This was when the discourse of the 'white working class' began to assume the prominence that it has today. And just as the BNP began to collapse - the new post-crunch climate imposing challenges that the schismatic organisation failed to handle with aplomb - the EDL had arrived with its strategy of street violence. Partly, this very spectacle was linked to a media strategy in which Tommy Robinson, evidently hamming up his educational handicap, moved in on the cultural space marked 'abandoned white working class'. And when the EDL fell apart, it was not long before Britain First had half a million 'likes' on Facebook and was doing its bomber jacket and cloth cap routine.

Now UKIP is using the BNP's strategy in hollowed out Labour 'heartlands', talking up racialised local issues - to be precise, issues which local Labour elites have often assiduously racialised - and strongly suggesting that Labour has stopped caring about white working class people because it's too busy being politically correct and sucking up to immigrants and the EU. And if UKIP were to fall apart, which seems incredibly unlikely, a new organisation would spring up in its place.

This is the meaning of 'fertile ground': however organisationally fractious the far right are, however much they are projecting influence insanely above their social weight, they are able to do so because the terrain has been produced over a long period. What is more, because of the prolonged social and political crisis unleashed by the credit crunch, they have the initiative. The dominant parties are locked in their own dynamics of stalemate and decline. Any semblance of representative democracy is paralysed by the Westminster consensus on all essential matters. The unions are too busy conserving whatever remains of the union premium to take the lead on anything. And the left is shattered. So what we get instead of a broad popular mobilisation is a kind of ersatz resistance led by a dissident tributary of the Tories; instead of class struggle, this bitterly melancholic politics of whiteness and class authenticity.

The 'white van' working class
So here we are. The Labour leader is so utterly petrified of alienating this quasi-mythical figure, 'white van man', lest it turns out that he speaks for the whole 'white working class', that he fires a shadow cabinet member for even obliquely possibly offending them.

The government are so desperate to get in on this game that they have Michael Gove telling us that prejudice toward 'white van man' is as abhorrent as prejudice to an ethnic minority. And Ed Miliband, absurdly, is probably kicking himself not to have thought of that line.

This is the UKIPisation of English politics. It has been a long time in the making.

Labels: 'chav', blue labour, class, racism, white working class, whiteness

Sunday, April 01, 2012

Guess who's coming to vote? posted by Richard Seymour

BBC to Galloway: will you represent Muslims or the white working class? Labour to press: we have a problem with incorrigibly reactionary Muslims voting for left-wing Catholics, or with the incorrigibly reactionary white working class who won't vote for a Muslim candidate. Salma Yaqoob:

The fact that Respect won in every ward in the constituency, and won by a massive 10,000 majority, testifies that that disillusionment goes way beyond the Muslim community. In the predominately white, middle-class ward of Clayton approximately 900 votes were cast for Respect compared to 40 for Labour.

Labels: capitalist ideology, george galloway, islam, labour, muslims, respect, social democracy, white working class

Monday, September 19, 2011

The 'white working class' again posted by Richard Seymour

Shall we ever tire, I wonder, of dignifying racists and fascists with the mantle of oppression? They, the pitiable, neglected "white working class". They, the underdogs, oppressed in their own nation, by the politically correct, the educated, the middle classes and (sotto voce) the uppity minorities. No matter how many faces they kick in, no matter how many people they stab, no matter how many times they pose with guns as if in tribute to their co-ideologue Breivik, there will always be those who entertain a patronising sympathy for these primitive oiks and their native moxie.

For example, here is the knuckle-dragging bore, Brendan O'Neill, late of the RCP, explaining to his rich, white audiences that opposition to the EDL is the behaviour of a rich, white clique motivated by class hatred. Here, he is followed by the Telegraph's leader-writer Damian Thompson, an Islamophobic reactionary who takes up the same theme while bringing his historical acumen to bear on it: "The street battles between the Anti-Nazi League and the National Front in the 1970s pitted white middle-class students against white working-class thugs: in both cases there was a sense that the ethnic minorities they were fighting over were almost irrelevant." (Here, just for reference, is a picture of white middle-class students seeing off the National Front in the 1970s). Why do I bother with these idiots? Only because there's a sort of interesting story behind this.

After the recent success for anti-fascists in Tower Hamlets (again, here is a picture of the white middle-class students protesting against the EDL), there was a video that was circulated supposedly involving two UAF supporters giggling like schoolboys over a humiliating kicking allegedly inflicted on a female EDL member while their bus was caught in the middle of Whitechapel Road. I do not know whether the assault took place. But let us just say that from my perspective it would be indefensible if it did, as it would not appear to involve self-defence but merely a brutal beatdown. Further, the two men laughing about it on the video appear to take a misogynistic glee in seeing a 'dog' beaten like this. That is one reason why I instantly distrusted the video upon viewing it. They don't sound like anti-fascists. I know of no one in Unite Against Fascism or its periphery who thinks that misogynistic violence is a tactic of anti-fascism.

Still, the reason Brendan O'Neill decided to write about the subject is that he reads Laurie Penny's columns. And Laurie Penny had written this frankly strange piece attacking 'class snobbery' against the EDL, in response to the Youtube video. She wrote:

It's not just the incident itself which is shocking, but the attitude the video bears out, a smug, nasty condescension replacing real political analysis. The video was posted on EDLRaw – a pro-EDL YouTube channel – and its source has not yet been verified. However, when I shared it on social media, asking for confirmation, a handful attempted to excuse the jeering with the mantra "a fascist is a fascist". The implication was that violence, class prejudice and misogyny can be tolerated on the left as long as its targets have attended a terrifying racist intimidation parade.

Now, having been involved in that social media conversation, I know that the argument "a fascist is a fascist" was not made by someone defending "the jeering". Rather, the person claimed (wrongly in my view), that it made no difference whether the victim of the assault was male or female. This issue should be judged, the person suggested, not as a case of potential misogynistic violence, but rather as an understandable, if tactically misguided case of someone lashing out at a fascist who had come to beat up Muslims. This was poor, but it was also the closest anyone came to 'defending' any part of it, and no one defended "the jeering". However, in the discussion a number of people did make the claim, which Laurie Penny also makes in this article, that said jeering reflects "a distaste for the far-right's working-class base that is as much about prejudice as it is about politics ... Class snobbery is part of the reason that the EDL are on the streets in the first place." I will return to this claim in a moment.

To her credit, Penny acknowledged that "the jeering" reflected nothing about UAF, or any other anti-fascist organisation. O'Neill and Thompson were not as scrupulous. While O'Neill used the issue to incriminate the left and anti-fascists in general, Thompson went further and asserted falsely that UAF describes EDL supporters as "chavs", and had no problem declaring the two men on the video to be "middle class [sigh] supporters of United Against Fascism". Making up quotes and playing fast and loose with the facts is roughly the sort of behaviour that this weaselly scribe was lambasting Johann Hari for not long ago. So, before going any further, it is worth noting that the men behind the video have nothing to do with Unite Against Fascism. The charming personality on-screen is that of comedic hopeful, Anthony Richardson. He, in a public apology for the video (to the best of my knowledge, this is genuine), explains that "We were bystanders and had not been actively involved in either side of the protest." He goes on to say that: "I can categorically state that I am not part of any political party or particular leaning". The pair were not anti-fascist protesters, middle class or otherwise. Nothing they did or said, and nothing about how they did or said it, tells us anything about why people protest against the EDL.

So, let us return to this business about the EDL, the far right and their "working class base". There are a number of things to say here. First of all, just as a rule of thumb, any organisation that aspires to have any degree of political success, will develop some sort of working class support. It is not possible to build an organisation that entirely excludes the class making up the majority of the population. Even the Conservative Party has a sizeable working class electorate. This does not make it a working class organization. Secondly, the research on the far right is limited. What research there is suggests that fascists do not identify themselves in class terms - it is not an idiom they are overly concerned with. They are not motivated by class snobbery. Far from it, they seem to be highly sensitive to minute hierarchical differentiations, particularly to ways in which they are superior to their neighbours. (True, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon claims to represent the 'white working class', but as a wag put it, the guy is a small business man who owns a tanning salon - he actually represents the orange petty bourgeoisie). Further, they tend not to be class-motivated voters abandoning Labourism for some nebulous fascist proletarianism, but rather tend to be traditional right-wing voters - people shifting their votes from Tories, UKIP and other right-wing parties. And inasmuch as there is any research on their class basis, it concerns the BNP's electoral bloc. And that shows that the BNP's working class supporters tend not to be the poorest of the working class, but rather is concentrated in the posher end of towns and estates. Moreover, their acquisition of significant working class support is recent. Like most fascist outfits, the BNP began with a largely lower middle class electorate, as the Democracy Audit survey published in 2005 suggested. Later, they expanded into working class areas. There is no such research into the EDL's base, or even any sure sign that they yet have much of a base beyond the extant far right, racist and hooligan fringe.

Thirdly, it follows from the above that no one who identifies the EDL or far right as having a working class base is doing so on the basis of the evidence - for such evidence is thin on the ground. How, then, do they identify this salt-of-the-earth working class volk? Laurie Penny's article is clear on where the class contempt lies - the two buffoons in the video refer to the woman whose assault they describe as a tattooed "scrote", implying that she deserved a good kicking for being just that. But how do we know what class this woman, or indeed any of the assorted weirdos, thugs and quacks accompanying her on the bus, belonged to? How do O'Neill and Thompson divine the class location of EDL supporters? How do they know so much about what estates they live in, and with whom they share those estates? How, in short, do we divine what their class base is? Did these writers simply look at the EDL dirt, the rabble, the scum, the ordure, and think "this is what working class people look like?" Because, if so, it would seem that the snobbery is entirely on their side.*

* I mean this in a very precise way. There is a conception of class implicit in this argument that has nothing to do with class as a category of political economy. It is not even the old status-culture model of class that underpins official statistical classifications. It is a chimera, a purely sentimental, pseudo-ethnic model of class, in which a working class person is defined by certain sumptuary and sartorial habits, attributes which make for convenient genre markers but which by themselves yield no sociological insight. It is an object of nostalgia and melancholia, the deus ex machina of reactionary polemic that strictly does not coincide with the working class as it actually lives and reproduces itself. That working class, the 'actually existing working class' for want of a better term, has anti-fascists and anti-racists in it. And leftists, and trade unionists. And students, and autodidacts, and other educated people. And people who dress well. Once this is clear, the identification of the working class as the natural home of the far right cannot but appear as a patronising slur; and talk of the 'white working class' a sleight against the actual working class, which stubbornly resists colour-coding.

Labels: anti-fascism, bnp, edl, fascism, islamophobia, misogyny, racism, sexism, tories, white working class

Sunday, March 06, 2011

Excursus on the 'white working class' posted by Richard Seymour

When Harriet Harman, the Leader of the House of Commons and Minister for Equalities, released her transcript to the press ahead of her speech at the Trades Union Congress conference on 10 September 2008, certain sections of the media reacted with outrage. The object of their acrimony was the word ‘class’. Within her broader argument that equality should not be placed on the back burner during uncertain economic times, Harman’s speech had originally stated that the most important predictor of an individual’s life chances “is where you live, your family background, your wealth and social class”.1

This statement may appear as a truism, even verging on banal.2 But the ire it generated in the press was such that Harman dropped the ‘c-word’ (as the Telegraph referred to it) from her speech altogether. The thrust of the critique levelled against Harman was that she was breaking Britain’s political ‘class war’ truce which had been struck around the time Labour came to power in 1997. The Shadow Leader of the House of Commons Theresa May said that “Harriet Harman is stuck in the class warfare rhetoric of 20 years ago”, and that “trying to move the agenda on to class and background is outdated and distracts from the real issues facing people in this country today”.3 The Telegraph boldly stated: “The class war is over – do tell Labour”.4 The Independent leader headline read: “The class struggle is over, it’s all about social mobility”.5 Thus, the word ‘class’ was dropped from Harman’s speech, and although the Telegraph surreptitiously claimed victory, it was not entirely appeased: “we know now where Labour is heading, and that the language of class war is back”.6

The harsh response from the press and opposition politicians is revealing in two important ways. Firstly, it reveals how and when it is acceptable to talk about class. Three months earlier, the Telegraph – along with every other major newspaper – reported: “White working-class boys [are] becoming an underclass”.7 This headline refers to a report published by the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, which was primarily concerned with gender gaps in higher education participation, but added an analysis of ethnicity in “order to put the gender finding into perspective”.8 Nonetheless, the press reported on the findings as if white working class pupils’ ethnic disadvantage was the main aim of the research, where “[w]hite teenagers are less likely to go to university than school-leavers from other ethnic groups – even with the same A-level results, according to official figures”.9 Thus, it was not the ‘c-word’ itself in Harman’s speech that caused offence – since the same papers that derided her are happy to use the term in a different context – but the social reality to which she was drawing attention. Where the media habitually uses the word ‘class’ in the context of multiculturalism (‘the white working class is losing out to ethnic minorities’), Harman was using the word in the context of inequality (‘the white working class is losing out to the middle classes’). That is what was so objectionable.

Secondly, a closer look at the media’s treatment of Harman reveals how commentators think about the white working class itself. Acknowledging that some social groups may be at a disadvantage, the Independent leader goes on to argue that this is ultimately their own fault, and in particular their culture of poverty:

Generations are being brought up on sink estates mired in welfare dependency, drug abuse and a culture of joblessness. And the majority of children born in such wretched circumstances are simply not making it out later in life. This is not a class problem; it is an underclass problem. And it is the failure of these sections of society to get on that is responsible for the fact that social mobility is in decline.10

In a similar vein, the Telegraph stated:

We all already know that poorer areas are beset by problems such as family breakdown and educational failure. We know that badly off children are growing up with a poverty of aspiration: what they need is structure, competition, exercise, encouragement and hope. Yet Ms Harman and her like persist in endless data-collecting and tinkering attempts to lean on universities artificially to redress the balance nearly two decades after a child is born.11

Thus, the issue of class is not a problem of structure, but a problem of culture. There is no working class any more, only an underclass. Unless, of course, we are talking about multiculturalism, in which case the working class resurfaces from the depths of British history. In other words, it is permissible to use class as a stick to beat multiculturalism with, but not as a demand for increased equality for all.

(Kjartan Páll Sveinsson, The White Working Class and Multiculturalism: Is There Space for a Progressive Agenda?, Runnymede Trust, 2009)

Labels: capitalism, capitalist ideology, class struggle, labour, meritocracy, neoliberalism, social mobility, white working class, working class

Friday, January 28, 2011

Europe, immigration and the Right. posted by Richard Seymour

For interesting reasons, some parts of the Left, who are otherwise consistently anti-racist, are amenable to the argument that migration drives down wages and, perhaps, places a burden on welfare systems and the public sector. This is an argument that many in the Labour establishment, and its supporters in the media such as Polly Toynbee, have been trying to popularise. It is accepted by Ed Miliband, and Ed Balls sank his leadership campaign early on with a stance on immigration that allowed the Tory leader to characterise him as Labour's Alf Garnett. The fact that Labour is behind many of these arguments means that they become much more widely accepted than they would among working class communities.

While most leftists would not accept the argument put out by some that migrant workers are today's equivalents of industrial scabs, helping the bosses break the 'indigenous' working class, there is a seemingly powerful motivation for (usually white) leftists to accept parts of the right-wing orthodoxy about immigration. Unfortunately, what this does is externalise a problem that is constitutive to capitalism: that being the necessity for a reserve army of labour*, and enforced competition for resources among workers**. It misreads symptoms of neoliberal capitalism as effects of migration. As it is particularly bound up in the British context with EU expansion, and the arrival of hundreds of thousands of workers from A8 and A2 countries, it also involves a particular mis-reading of the EU itself, which has to be understood as part of the global regionalisation of capitalism which is also evident in North America and south-east Asia, for example. That regionalisation, its institutionalisation (the EU Treaty), securitisation ('Fortress Europe') and militarisation (through NATO expansion and various attempts at building an EU defence force to suitably manage crises like that in the former Yugoslavia), has been the basis for all of the elegiac tributes and militant screeds concerning Europe and its Enlightened legacy.

What has happened in the UK is that those frequently at the margins of the capitalist system have made for timely scapegoats for acute crises in employment and local services that in fact express chronic stresses. Though the evidence is overwhelming that migrant workers bring added growth, added value and thus greater tax receipts to any local economy, there have been attempts by politicians, locally and nationally, to blame an increase in the local migrant worker population for failures in service delivery.

In fact, the added demand on local services that is blamed on immigration has been vastly over-stated. A combination of legislative hurdles and reluctance to claim means that in the case of housing and benefits, most migrant workers don't claim. At the height of migration from A8 countries in 2006, less than 1% of social housing lettings went to those migrant workers - this belies the claims that immigrants are being placed at the front of the queue for such services. To the extent that the demand for public goods did increase in certain areas, the government had more than enough opportunity to anticipate what was coming and then adjust for the difference. The evidence shows that the increase in funds resulting from migration was more than sufficient to meet the challenge. The vast majority of immigrants, over 80%, are of the ages 18-35. They do not tend to bring dependents, and they offset problems posed by the ageing of the UK population. Were they to not here, the resources available for public services would be less, or national insurance contributions or other taxes would have to rise. Where there were acute problems, whether there was local immigration or not, this was the result of systemic under-funding produced by the endemic problems of capital accumulation and the reluctance of social democracy to add to the tax burden. The attempt to square that circle with the use of PFIs only stored up further fiscal problems.

By some, usually right-wing populist, accounts, it would seem that the EU just is a scheme to reduce labour costs by allowing unimpeded free migration and thus increasing the demand for jobs. But there are good reasons why migration does not simply increase the reserve army of labour. First of all, as I've argued before, migration can increase total employment in a country because the lower costs of reproducing labour mean it is feasible for an employer to open up a job that would otherwise not be available, and also because the increase in growth tends to result in an increase in investment. Secondly, migration in the EU does not flow in one direction. What happens is that people move where the jobs are, where their skills are most needed, and thus the employment of available labour is maximised within the constraints of efficient capital accumulation.

This is the whole point: the EU is a regionalised accumulation system, and the effect of immigration within it will not be greatly different from that of migration between Glasgow and Sunderland, which no one finds objectionable. The fact this spatial re-organisation of capitalism took place under a neoliberal regime where the aim was to reduce the bargaining power of labour, hold down public expenditures (and thus corporate taxation) and increase the rate of profit, means that there will be attempts to organise the system in such a way as to weaken labour. But there is not much evidence for any profound distributive effects of migration. Such effects as do exist are sectoral, not significant, offset by countervailing effects elsewhere, and contingent on a host of other factors such as the strength of trade unions in an industry and the enforcement of regulations like minimum wage laws. (See here, here, here and here). The growth effect, however, is significant, and all workers benefit from that. In fact, the erection of barriers to the movement of labour is the most effective way to undermine those advantages.

The blaming of immigrants, usually accompanied by scaremongering about there being too many people, is precisely a way of racialising a social problem produced by capitalism. This goes much deeper than the distribution of resources, and the rising level of unemployment required to make capitalism efficient. Rather, these are attributes partially of the hollowing out of parliamentary democracy, the whittling away of the franchise and of the ability of the working class to impose some of its interests on capital. Neoliberal capitalism was designed to exclude certain political options, to exclude much of the working class from the electoral system, and coopt its leadership on new, subordinate terms. What is happening is that this disenfranchisement is culturalised, expressed as the cultural and identitarian emasculation of this spectral 'white working class'. This gives the Right the opportunity to rephrase its political slogans. Its hostility to the EU is based on its preference for a national capitalism hitched to US-led 'hyper-globalisation' (Andrew Gamble's phrase) which, if anything, entails an even weaker position for labour. But it can articulate its demands in terms of democracy (usually interpreted as 'sovereignty') because the EU, while it isn't the cause of Britain's democratic nadir, is a profoundly undemocratic set of institutions. It can appear to offer something to the working class because while the EU did not produce high unemployment and low public spending, it has supported and bolstered this particular capitalist praxis.

The attacks on immigrants by those evincing concern for the working class, and often 'the white working class', are themselves an attack on the working class and the Left. It is tried and tested, effective right-wing political mobilisation. People on the Left, even the centre-left orbiting Labour, should not be tempted to reproduce the assumptions of the Right in this argument, because if they do they will lose. The most effective response is to mobilise within the working class, particularly the organised working class, to defend immigrants and combat the racism which aims at their marginalisation and subjection.

*This is variously called the 'natural rate of unemployment' (Milton Friedman), the 'non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment', or 'structural unemployment'.
**This is called relative scarcity.

Labels: capitalist crisis, eu, europe, immigration, multiculturalism, neoliberalism, racism, reactionaries, socialism, white working class, working class

Friday, August 13, 2010

Myths of class posted by Richard Seymour

How do we come to our understandings of class? As bell hooks has argued, most of the pedagogy on such subjects is taking place at the level of culture, in the news, the films, the soaps, etc. For example, you learn from soaps like Eastenders that whatever class once meant, it is not an important structuring principle of people's lives.

This is simply because the characters get by without ever having to confront such issues. Even if the accents are ostentatiously proletarian, even if all the clothing, cultural and environmental markers are carefully chosen to depict a normal looking working class suburb, even if the subject is ostensibly a working class 'community', the reality of class is never allowed to pervade the lives of the often cartoonish, scheming, semi-criminal fraternity that exists around Albert Square. People are rarely shown working, and inasmuch as they do work, it is usually in small businesses, stalls, and other petty entrepreneurial outlets. There is no social space where a clash between workers and management might take place. There aren't mass redundancies, strikes, and wholesale social breakdown wrought by the closure of big local employers, which is a normal fate for urban centres in the UK.

What is true of Eastenders is not entirely true of Coronation Street, where there have in the past been regular scenes of class struggle in Mike Baldwin's sewing factory, in one instance featuring a victorious strike which ended with the women workers marching into the 'Rover's Return' pub chanting "the workers, united, will never be defeated!" Still, these are the exception. In contrast to the general suppression of class issues, there are regular homilies on race, sexuality and gender, though the soaps tend to handle these topics extremely badly. Eastenders' depiction of socially conservative "Muslim thugs" beating up a gay character named Christian (yeah) is a recent, poor example of a storyline that trades on a progressive angle for reactionary ends. This is not unrelated to the invisibility of class. If there is no social background that structures various forms of oppression, they can merely be treated as unfortunate prejudices or cultural atavisms. This is, of course, excellent material for spurious controversy.

But the cultural product is also shaped by officialdom, by politicians and bureaucrats, by the academics and intelligentsia, by the think-tanks and literati. To put it crudely, today's television writers were yesterday's students, and their fantasies of a post-class, individualist consumerist society (in which an actual, functioning, working class community is somehow mysteriously embedded) will undoubtedly have been shaped by the pedagogy of the state. Further to yesterday's Stakhanovite effort on New Labour mythologies, therefore, I recently came across an old essay by the sociologist Theo Nichols on the way in which official statistics shape our perception of class. Nichols' essay, 'Social Class: official, sociological and marxist', was published in a collective work by the marxist wing of the very excellent Radical Statistics Group, whose most recent journal contains this excellent demolition of the myth of self-segregating minorities. The book in question, Demystifying Social Statistics, is probably out of print, but second hand copies can be obtained for a few quid online, and it's well worth that price. The essay itself is concerned with how knowledge about class is produced in such a way as to provide potentially useful data for the capitalist state, but fails to properly situate class with respect to (capitalist) society's fundamental structures. Nichols argues for the importance of theory in accounts of class.

The way in which official statistics on 'social class' work is to produce purely descriptive categories based on certain outcomes, such as pay or occupation, without explaining them. These categories then shape the majority of research carried out on the topic, which has a profound effect on the production of knowledge. Thus, what most official and sociological work on 'social class' produces is an account of class-by-reference-to-conditions. Nicos Poulantzas, in Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, offered as an alternative a conception of class-by-reference-to-place, that is to the individual's situation within the division of labour. This obviously has structural functionalist implications oweing themselves to the influence of Louis Althusser, but the point of the example is that it's possible to discuss class in a way that is explanatory and not merely descriptive. (For what it's worth, Poulantzas' writing on this was an attempt to overcome the weaknesses of the conception of class deployed by Communist Parties in France and the UK, which tended toward social democratic conclusions.) The statistics appropriate to each level of analysis will perforce be different, Nichols argues.

The emergence of the concept of 'social class' in official censuses took shape in the 19th Century, settling in 1851 with a list of seventeen classes and sub-classes that were principally concerned with occupational status - imperial or local government, medicine, agriculture, religion, law, etc. In 1911, these classes were condensed into a system of social grades that are similar to the 'social classes' used by the Registrar-General today. These split society into grades of occupation, from professional to intermediate to skilled, partially skilled, and unskilled. There has, since 1951, also been a list of 17 socio-economic groups with no particular order or rank among them. Government surveys have tended to use a compressed version of these categories, which have sometimes been confused with social class. But the social grades are the closest to the contemporary definitions of social class, and are notable for omitting the actual ruling class, the owners of capital - something the national readership survey classifications are also notable for. What is the principle underlying these grades?

In 1928, the Statistical Officer at the General Register Office, argued against basing social class gradings on the income proxy, insisting that "any scheme of social class should take account of culture", which he felt occupational gradings had "a wholesome tendency to emphasise". The emphasis on culture in this sense, that is on status, is what distinguishes these official classifications from the marxist explanation of class as a relationship to the means of production. The census wording later explained that what was important about occupational groupings was "the general standing within the community of the occupations concerned" - that is, their status and their cultural prestige.

Building on the official conceptions of social class, sociologists also concerned themselves primarily with class-as-status, either in the sense of esteem, or in the sense of lifestyle. In this treatment, class is not only a descriptive (as opposed to explanatory) category, it is also static (as opposed to fluid and antagonistic). Nichols argued: "in so far as it concerns itself with hierarchic notions of social stratification (something which, incidentally, ties in with the stress on social mobility and studies of the recruitment to elites), it does not treat class relations as historical forces of explanatory power. Sociology gives us ‘social class’ in plenty, but along with political parties, race/ethnicity and various status rankings (for instance those based on educational qualification)—in fact it gives us many potential and actual bases of power, without the prior situation of these into class relations."

It is this treatment of class, in its myriad variations and elaborations, that produces the cultural, lifestyle-based ideas of social class that underpin the output of polling companies. It is this which leads to discussions of class based on the 'white collar' vs 'blue collar' dichotomy, in which a white collar profession is assumed to be 'middle class', no matter the situation of the worker with respect to the means of production. It is this which leads to constructions such as the 'underclass', the 'deserving poor' and the 'respectable poor'. It is this deliberately cultural conception of class, forged in the state bureaucracy, that leads to a curiously racialised, ethnicised discussion of class - as in 'chavs', the 'white working class', and so on. And it is this conception of class as a ladder of status and esteem that ties so neatly into 'aspirational', careerist ideology, obscuring the reality of class as a relational structure.

Labels: 'chav', capitalism, class, culture industry, knowledge production, marxism, middle class, ruling class, socialism, sociology, white working class, working class

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Obama, the Democrats, and the American working class posted by Richard Seymour

Obama rarely mentions the working class, and when he does it is usually in the past tense. It comes up from time to time, as when Michelle Obama referred to herself as a "working class girl", but as a rule the Obama-Biden ticket prefers to flatter American workers as "middle class". And Obama's own prejudices about the working class aren't particular pretty: his discussion of blue-collar workers in Pennsylvania was rather condescending. Finally, though Obama's centrist platform is preferable to McCain's rightist one, he shows no sign of being able to deliver the kinds of policies that American workers need - whether black or white. As Michael Yates has pointed out, whether the worker in question belongs to America's shamefully large population of prisoners, or to a union, or has a child in education, Obama doesn't have much to offer - he has something to offer, but just not very much. As Alexander Cockburn has pointed out, moreover, what he does offer is subject to being ditched at the last moment or at the first hurdle.

Even so, the enthusiastic support that Obama is getting from American workers is unmistakeable. Just this morning, I was pondering a headline that said Obama was leading the polls in the 'Buckeye State'. Two things occurred to me: 1) what the fuck is the 'Buckeye State'?; 2) the reason they said he was ahead by 9 points in that state (turned out to be Ohio) was because of Obama's massive lead among working class voters. Not just working class voters: "white working class voters". Even those supposedly reactionary blue-collar workers in Pennsylvania give Barack a lead of 11%. All the major unions, who have committed unprecedented funds to this election campaign, are backing Obama, and they are supplying footsoldiers and funding for the campaign. That includes the union that Joe the Plumber belongs to, by the way. By contrast, as far as I can discover, there is not a single union backing McCain, who is relying on the NRA, Joe Lieberman, Donald Trump and the literary giant Joe Eszterhas for his props. Even those rural and small town workers that are supposedly hanging on every word from the hockey mom are shifting. The McCain campaign has been going round trying to scare voters that Obama's proposed modest redistribution of wealth constitutes 'socialism', but they are losing on this issue. The reason is because Obama's proposals are not a nasty little secret, but a part of his appeal. Blue Dog Democrats won't want to acknowledge it, the media won't mention it, the Republicans will keep it very much under their phoney ten-gallon hats, but the vote for Obama is overwhelmingly going to be a class vote. This gives the lie to the idea that America's white working class is irredeemably racist and reactionary. Even Sarah Palin's efforts to connect Obama to Palestinian 'terrorism' (by way of an old association with the extraordinary Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi) don't appear to do the trick. (I might add that three quarters of Jewish voters are siding with Obama, so they don't appear to be desperately worried by the urgent security threat posed by Arab academics.) The enthusiasm of Obama's supporters, plain in the turnouts to his rallies (I'm not impressed by the weeping, but the turnout is consistently massive), is also obvious in the turnout for early voting where, despite GOP blocking efforts, the overwhelming majority of voters to make their way to the polling booths have been Democrats - 52% versus 34% for the Republicans, last time I checked. Of course, this doesn't remotely represent the likely outcome on polling day. The average Obama lead nationwide is 6%, and that is probably an overestimate given that many of those most likely to support Obama either won't vote or will be prevented from voting. Nonetheless, the Democrats are unlikely to find this much momentum again, and if they can't turn the GOP inside out this time, they're not going to do it.

Socialist Worker points out this week a little-noticed but significant fact: American trade union membership has risen as a share of the total workforce for the first time since 1983, rising last year by 311,000 members. The best chances for organised labour in the US remain in the public sector, and to the extent that Obama is likely to increase employment in that sector this bodes moderately well. Further, it is much easier for unions to organise with a strong social security system and a decent healthcare system - Obama doesn't exactly promise either of these, but he is at least not planning to destroy social security, as the McCain campaign is, and he does promise some limited reforms in healthcare. But, as Kim Moody reports, America's unions are now engaged in a struggle to roll back some of Reagan's repressive anti-union legislation so that they can improve their performance in the difficult private sector. This is because employers have found various ways to frustrate and limit unionisation drives, whether via the pathetic National Labor Relations Board (a shadow cast on the present by the New Deal past) or through a 'card check' agreement with those employers. To even have a chance of the Employee Free Choice Act passing, they need to turf Republicans out of the legislature as well as the executive. This is part of what's driving their support for the Democrats. The union leadership may be wrong in assuming that Democrats will be amenable to their goals, and their bureaucratic approach means that grassroots struggles are being subordinated to this top-down effort. Nonetheless, it seems obvious enough that having a massive popular purge of the Republicans will make the prospects for organising less hostile.

Candidates like Nader or McKinney are far more sympathetic to organised labour and not at all beholden to corporate capital. But, of course, they aren't likely to beat the Republicans, and that is the single determining factor among working class Democrats when it comes to this election. While Nader has performed well in some polls, he now doesn't get more than 4% in any state, his support squeezed by the increasingly ugly struggle between the Obama and McCain. It would be good if he got a solid 5% in non-swing-states, the better to act as a pressure on the Democrats from the Left, but this is unlikely to happen. What is happening, however, is that in unleashing a movement tied to an electoral outcome, the Democrats are raising expectations that no future administration can live up to. If the Democrats not only net all three branches of government but also, as is being suggested may happen, get a sufficient majority to block GOP filibustering, then they have no excuses.

Labels: american working class, barack obama, john mccain, us elections, white working class

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

The Making of a 'White Working Class' posted by Richard Seymour

It is far from obvious why class should be colour-coded. We can see how 'race' has been contiguous with strata within classes, so that the lowest wages and the least skilled occupations are dispensed to non-white members of the working class. We can also see how class is often construed as a kind of ethnicity, and how ethnic designations often overlap with economic positions. But the question of why there should ever be an identity such as a 'white working class' is clearly a social psychological one. One way of looking at this is to identify an extreme example to look for salient traits, and I think I have such in the 1922 Rand Rising. The Rand, or Witwatersrand, is of course the core of the gold and mineral mining industry of South Africa, and has been since the late nineteenth century. As such, it was the centre of capital accumulation at the time of the Rising, with the overwhelming (distorting) emphasis on mining capital.

Historically, the modern doctrine of ‘race’ emerged in two ways. The first was in the course of military confrontation, as in the combat between European farmers and American Indians. Originally considered the colour of the ‘juyce of Mulberries’ or ‘Olive coloured of a sad French green’, they were understood as having been ‘naturally white’, but darkened by the climate. Only when relations between them and Europeans were characterized increasingly by military combat were the racial codes introduced. Similarly, the battles of white Afrikan frontiersmen with 'natives' co-produce a colonial-racial ideology, which would be referenced during the 1922 rising. The second way in which 'race' emerged was precisely in the global ordering of the labour-system, and the replacement of white indentured labour with African slaves. Race had always ordered the colonial labour system in South Africa, whether when Africans worked as slaves until 1834, or during the period of 'colour bar' legislation in the Cape and elsewhere. The "colour bar" that emerged after the Mineral Revolution turned what had been a stratification according to skill into a stratification by race. But what was the cause of such policies. According to one well-known aqccount (HJ & RE Simons, Class and Colour in SA, 1850-1950), "White Labourism" was a "primary cause of policies that incite racial hostility", which implies that the political ideology of white workers intruded into the running of the labour system, redistributing the structure of wages and privileges to the benefit of the 'white working class'. It is certainly true, as I mentioned in a previous post, that white workers (mainly British workers trained in the Cornish mines, as part of what Jonathan Hyslop calls an 'imperial working class') pressed for the imposition of forms of colour bar legislation some time before employers were ubiquitously in favour of such means. However, as I also said, the demand became effective when employers and state administrators decided to back it. There is a rationale for this. As Harold Wolpe points out ('The White Working Class', Economy and Society, 1976), the particular demand for a skilled, supervisorial bloc of labour directing unskilled labour, resulted from the particular conditions of early mining capitalism, where the risks were high and the scope of the labour force too large for an individual capitalist manager-owner to handle (nowadays, of course, we have byzantine bureaucracies known as 'human resources' and 'personnel', as well as an apparatus of junior managers, to deal with this). British immigrant workers may have accepted colonial ideology. Used to being at or near the bottom of a vertiginous class pyramid in Britain, they were now part of a 'master race'. And arguably they had a shared grounding in the imperial experience that was quite different from their metropolitan cohorts. However, the drive for a colour bar was still at the stage of the 1890s an expression of an interested defined more by status and the desire to preserve it than anything else. Keeping the main labour competition out of skilled occupations preserved a skill monopoly. Further, just as a refinement to the point, the 'white working class' was not yet defined by whiteness - it didn't include, for example, proletarianised Afrikaners, who only became a majority of miners in the Rand by 1918, after a period of the state promoting Afrikaner employment in the mines. And 'white labour' had no serious political platform then of the kind that would gradually acquire and which was expressed in a way in the Labour-Nationalist Pact administration of 1924. (David Yudelman, in The Emergence of Modern South Africa convincingly disputes the idea that the Pact was a genuine political victory for white workers, but that is not quite my point: the point is that they were recognised as a special and particular constituency by that time). So, had employers not turned to segregationist measures in the mid-1890s, and had state personnel under the British not encouraged this in various ways, it is difficult to imagine a 'white working class' identity of the coherence that was later displayed emerging.

Afrikaners had to compete with African labour for access to employment during the early 1900s for a number of reasons. The social historian Timothy Keegan describes (in Konczacki et al, Studies in the Economic History of South Africa, Volume II) how an older Boer way of life had been squeezed by British capitalist penetration and land speculation. Previously they might have relied upon only guns and ammo for hunting, and wagons and oxen for travel and trade. But by the end of the Anglo-Boer War, they were political and militarily defeated, as well as economically transformed. The diminishing scope of 'free land' produced class stratification within the community, with some becoming reasonably profitable landowners and others becoming 'bywoners' (tenant farmers). They were, however, unable to compete with experienced African sharecroppers, whose advantages included their emphasis on communal life which helped them weather the vicissitudes of crop cycles. Keegan rather unflatteringly describes it in these words: "Mostly, they ended up in the industrial centres as unskilled proletariat, where the white supremacist state was eventually to save them from the consequences of their economic ineffectuality". This is not quite right. As Charles van Onselen shows (in Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand: Volume II, 1982), the initial tendency - quite successful for a while - was to join the local petit-bourgeoisie, involving themselves in two key economic areas: cab driving, and brick-making. Oh, laugh if you want: white bigots in the cabbie or brickie industry? I never in all my days! But of course the mining industry demanded a proper national transport system, which Kruger duly provided toward the end of the 1890s, just as the rinderpest was destroying the cattle that would pull the cabs, and the artisanal brick-makers lost out to mass production with Victorian technology. So, yes, Afrikaners were eventually forced into proletarianisation en masse. And, as more of them fled into the urban centres, dislocated by war and disease, they became more and more of a political problem.

It is sometimes claimed that Afrikaners remained unemployed through choice, by their refusal to accept conditions and jobs that their lack of 'economic effectuality' would have assigned them to - the jobs being done by the 'Kaffir', the 'native', African labour. Were they already so suicidally 'white' that they would rather starve than lower themselves to the status of the African working class? Robert Davies (in 'Mining Capital, The State and Unskilled White Workers in South Africa, 1901-1913', Journal of Southern African Studies, 1976) suggests otherwise. The truth is that it simply cost more to hire Afrikaner labour because it cost more to support the reproduction of their labour. As they were not subject to the migrant labour system and the various system of colour bars, they were not housed in vast cheap compounds, and fed with bulk bought meat. Their families, moreover, were not supported outside the capitalist sphere of production. Petit-bourgeois Afrikaner nationalist and labour politicians were sure that white workers would make up for it by superior productivity, unable to see a social logic to what they took to be a perversion of the capitalist class. And it is by the mid-1900s that you start to hear for the first time calls for a 'White Labour' policy. Previously, Afrikaner social struggles and complaints had been met with indifference, repression and occasional palliatives. By 1906, however, there was a recession in the Rand economy and huge numbers of displaced, unemployed Afrikaners - with not a few trained soldiers among them, who had recently come close to defeating the mighty British Empire. The protest had to be met in some way, particularly as it was noticed that British mine-workers during their 1907 strike against productivity speed-ups had gained the solidarity of Afrikaner labourers, whom they addressed as "fellow South Africans".

David Roediger points out that the 'labour republicanism' of American workers in the 19th Century involved its adherents measuring their status both against the dream of an egalitarian republic of small producers and the nightmare of chattel slavery. (David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, Verso, 2007) Similarly, white workers in early twentieth century South Africa could compare their lot with that of the indentured migrant 'Kaffir'. From 1910 onward, the mining industry was suffering a crisis of profitability which it sought to recover by boosting productivity, and increasing the number of machines that technicians supervised. The number of white employees per 1,000 tons hoisted declined continually between 1911 and 1915. Besides which, the employers were accelerating the fragmentation of skilled jobs into semi-skilled jobs that black workers could hold (still subordinate, of course). This was among the issues that drove the 1913 strike on the Rand which resulted in a humiliating defeat for the Smuts government. Lionel Phillips, the mine industrialist and Unionist politician concluded that it was nonetheless better to back down on this occasion than risk a general strike which might stimulate a revolt among the far larger mass of African labour. The state and mining capital adopted two strategies to meet the problem. The first was to devise a military strategy to defeat the strikers next time (and it seems there may have been deliberate efforts to provoke the next strike that took place in January 1914, and which was defeated by the recently constituted Union Defense Force). The second was to co-opt labour - but this meant white labour. For example, when African workers held a strike shortly after the white workers strike in 1913, they were simply brutally crushed - and don't appear to have gained any solidarity from white workers. There was no sense of accomodating their demands. So, among other measures, the government opened daily lines of communication with trade unions (which, I should point out, were segregated and had been since they were formed against stiff resistance from employers), and moved to impose state regulation on the industry. White labour, previously making demands from without the state, were now seen as fit subjects for incorporation into it - not, of course, as co-equals with capital or any such thing, but certainly as superior to their African co-workers.

Trade union leaders were given to expressing their demands in terms of preserving the 'colour bar' and holding back the 'black peril' - often as a disingenuous means of galvanising wider support for mundane economic strikes, but in fact the colour bar issue did come up repeatedly. In the post-WWI period, there was actually a steady erosion of the colour bar, because employers figured it would be cheaper just to alleviate the restrictions. The Low Grade Mines Commission went so far at one point as to recommend the legal abolition of segregation. A 1920 strike by African workers had - though it was pummelled relentlessly - scared the hell out of the employers, and even forced a few concessions out of them. And at the same time, the co-optation of white workers was having less and less success, and employers were anxious amid plummeting gold prices to reduce workers' wages. So, it was that the stage was set for the 1922 Rising on the Rand. Jeremy Krikler points out in White Rising (Manchester University Press, 2005) that at the time of the strike there were 200,000 workers in the Rand mines, but approximately only 10% were white workers. Yet, and this is the crucial thing, they made no appeal for solidarity from African workers. Not only that, but when African workers crossed the picket line, they were not considered scabs in the way that white workers were. The slogan of the strike was, infamously, 'Workers of the World Unite for a White South Africa'. It is worth pointing out that this didn't have the effect of galvanising mass cross-class support from white communities, as was presumably intended. So, what was going on?

Let's review: by 1922, Afrikaaners had fully entered the labour force in the mines, so the sector protected by colour bar legislation and custom was fully, inclusively 'white'; the fate of 'white labour' had become an explicit concern of the political class; the insitutions of segregated labour had been thoroughly entrenched, and the 1913 Native Land Act allotted three quarters of the land to white people or corporations, with rules restricting the sale of land to Africans; and neither the 1913 nor 1920 African miners strikes had resulted in much solidarity from white workers. So, I think that by this point it is safe to say that a 'white working class' identity had developed with some coherence. It competed with communist identities, of course, particularly after the electrifying revolution in Russia, which had also stimulated a wave of African revolt in the cities and would later infuse the countryside rebellion by the ICU (as in "I See You"). But my argument here is that to the extent that it is possible to conceive of a coherent 'white working class' identity, here it was. Now look at the sequel.

As the strike wore on, and it became clear that the Smuts government was intransigent (Smuts was viciously hostile to labour all his political life), the strike was developing into an open, armed insurrection. The Smuts government was plotting the most vicious military force, including aerial bombardment, against the strikers. As this ominous prospect unfolded, a staggering series of racial massacres occurred, comparable with similar riots and pogroms in America and Russia in the same era. I noted that African miners were not considered 'scabs' and they weren't. They were rarely attacked, and unions insisted that they be kept out of the fight, which was between themselves and management. And when the massacres did start, it was not of African mine workers, or even of labourers as such. It was random killing of civilians - there are eyewitness reports of women and children fleeing squads of armed white workers, and being shot down in cold blood. 150 were wounded, and 44 killed, by one estimate. Jeremy Krikler (in 'The Inner Mechanics of a South African Racial Massacre', The Historical Journal, 1999) supplies the background. In the weeks prior to the massacres, an hysteria had built up in white communities about the 'black peril'. A palpable terror of an uprising took hold: 'the Kaffir will kill us all'. This fear had apparently been stimulated by one relatively isolated confrontation between African and white labourers at the New Primrose Mine, but the preparatory conditions were: a) the strikers knew that a terrible intensification of the class struggle was coming; and b) they had justified their strike by appealling to race pride, and race privilege, to keeping the African down, and perhaps their own guilt would have led them to expect an African uprising. But Krikler suggests another aspect of this: they took their appeal to be part of the white community seriously, and in their murders dramatised their desire to be in solidarity with the institutions of white supremacy that were about to massacre them: it was as if to re-direct the fire onto the 'real' menace, as opposed to the respectable white workers who only wanted their fair share.

The consequence was that they were cruelly defeated. They didn't take the insurrectionary class logic of their fight as seriously as they took the racial element. One consequence was that they lost approximately 17.7% of their wages - which, as Yudelman points out, was not really recovered by the Pact administration, whose policies of segregation, wage controls and state regulation were closer to the opposition than most like to admit. The workers were unable to see beyond a sectional interest because they racialised it. They were in part defeated by their commitment to the idea of a 'white working class', which in turn was produced in the furnace of colonialism, and the prevailing global system of white supremacy.

Labels: apartheid, racism, segregation, south africa, white working class