Ash Sarkar writes:
So much for the sans-culottes of the deindustrialised
rust-belt: when the citizenry of Trump’s “forgotten” America showed up in
Charlottesville last weekend, it was in sports jackets and chinos.
This was not the culture war the commentariat
had prepared us for.
Rather than Arlie Hochschild’s blue-collar
Joe consigned to the scrap-heap by globalisation or indeed Joan Williams’ “ordinary
working stiff” beset by cultural and economic anxiety, the ruddy faces of Unite
the Right looked positively boujee.
It’s become a truism repeated to the point of
banality: that across the global north, a revival of working class political
engagement has driven electoral successes for the nationalist right.
Dispossessed by globalist elites and mocked by a cosmopolitan intelligentsia,
this demographic has been long underserved by our political classes, and
neglected by the identitarian gatekeepers of cultural relevance.
Better writers than myself have debunked much
of this narrative.
In the UK as well as the US, the economically downtrodden
are not racially homogenous.
What’s more the existence of racial inequality
makes itself known in economic outcomes: BAME households in the UK are twice as likely as their white
counterparts to be amongst those hardest hit by austerity and BAME workers are
over-represented in insecure and low-paid forms of employment.
Between 2010 and 2015 long-term youth unemployment fell by 2 per cent for white
people; in the same time period it rose by 50 per cent for BAME youth.
As Maya Goodfellow observed, the media
fixation on the white working class is not only misleading, it is an example of
the very identity politics it claims to deride.
We find ourselves in a
landscape where, in Owen Hatherley’s words, class is depoliticised: framed as
“a sort of nationality, based on accent, culture and a particular set of views”
rather than an economic relation.
This has not always been the case
in the UK.
While cultural anxieties regarding race and immigration have plagued
the British political imaginary since the days of empire, left-wing and
antiracist movements of the 1970s and 1980s suggested a different basis for
understanding inequality.
The Grunwick
Strike of 1976 saw 137 (predominantly Asian and female) striking
workers joined by 20,000 protesters, with Arthur Scargill and striking (mostly
white and male) miners backing their dispute.
Working class Londoners of colour set up “monitoring
shops” in every borough in response to far-right and police
violence.
Organisations such as Black People Against State Harassment (BASH) were
set up as community self-defence initiatives, and while it wasn’t without its
internal divisions and problems, there was a lively and populous antiracist
movement in the UK.
The breaking of the miner’s
strike in 1985, and the anti-trade union crusade that followed, has long been
held as the demise of working class political organisation
in the UK.
Arguably just as important is the response of Thatcher’s
government to the riots of 1981 and 1985.
After decades of police harassment
under racist “suss” powers (an informal name for a stop and search law),
“managed decline” of urban centres and high-profile instances of deaths following
police contact, tensions twice boiled over into outbreaks of mass disorder
across the UK as working class people of colour took to the streets.
Thatcher had previously been to the right of
the Conservative Party on issues of race and immigration: following the Brixton
riots, however, her government set about implementing the findings of the
Scarman Report, which recommended nationwide funding of cultural projects to
include ethnic minority communities in a sense of national belonging.
The Urban
Programme’s budget blossomed to £270m and 200 new
“ethnic projects” were approved in 1982-3.
Such “ethnic projects” did little to mitigate
the rampant inequalities in housing, employment and healthcare which grew under
Thatcher’s neoliberal agenda.
State multiculturalism was a programme to
constrain the political effectiveness of anti-racist and industrial movements –
the watchword of the day became representation rather than wealth
redistribution.
By focusing on race relations, Thatcher turned a project of
anti-racist socioeconomic justice into one of ethnic representation – and the
working class was split along racialised lines.
The contradictions of the
multicultural project continued under Tony Blair.
While the 1997 government
were hailed as diverse modernisers,
income inequalities (and associated racialised outcomes) widened under New
Labour.
The 1999 Macpherson Report’s identification of
“institutional racism” in the Metropolitan Police and the protection of
minority rights by the Race Relations Act 2000 made it seem like Blair’s brand
of cosmopolitan social democracy was a victory for the anti-racist organisers
of the 1980s.
However in 2003, Home Secretary David Blunkett dismissed
institutional racism as a mere “slogan” which “missed the point”; immigration
enforcement officers were made exempt from the Race Relations Act, which called
open season on state harassment of non-EU migrants.
Having separated out BAME
communities from the national conception of class, Blair’s agenda began to
exclude working class migrants too.
As the BNP made electoral inroads in the white-flight
ring around London, New Labour became intent on being seen as just has hard on asylum seekers as
their far-right competitors in order to preserve “community cohesion”.
However
as Arun Kundnani has noted in The End
of Tolerance, the case for being tough on immigration was as much about
capital as it was about culture.
Under New Labour the number of
successfully granted asylum applications halved in the space of two years. In
the same time period, the number of temporary work visas doubled – creating a
precarious, hyper-exploitable, racialised working class.
These workers are the
“forgotten forgotten”: the most vulnerable amongst a working class that was
never as white as we’d like to imagine it.
Who are the white working class?
If anything
they are as much a product of state multiculturalism as the diversity tsars
decried in the pages of right-wing tabloids.
A cultural analysis – with its attendant
vocabulary of identity, community and belonging – fails to tackle the very real
material inequalities that continue to widen in our society, and
disproportionately impact people of colour.
It would be a mistake for Corbyn’s Labour
Party to hark back to a socialism which assumes racial homogeneity, or to
continue the discourse of an authentocracy in which class is just a set of
cultural distinctions.
The disintegration of neoliberal consensus across the
global north presents us with an opportunity for a renewed politics of social
and economic justice.
Projects of wealth redistribution are nothing without an
anti-racist backbone.
It’s the alt-right who want a culture war – the rest of
us are just after a decent living.
No comments:
Post a Comment