There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack

Paul Gilroy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134438655
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This classic book is a powerful indictment of contemporary attitudes to race. By accusing British intellectuals and politicians on both sides of the political divide of refusing to take race seriously, Paul Gilroy caused immediate uproar when this book was first published in 1987. A brilliant and explosive exploration of racial discourses, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack provided a powerful new direction for race relations in Britain. Still dynamite today and as relevant as ever, this Routledge Classics edition includes a new introduction by the author.

1

‘RACE’, CLASS AND AGENCY

The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.

(C. L. R. James)

Hearing… that you are a zealous friend for the Abolition of that Accursed traffick denominated the Slave Trade I inferred from that you was a friend to freedom on the broad basis of the Rights of Man for I am pretty persuaded that no Man who is an advocate from principle for liberty for a Black Man but will strenuously promote and support the rights of a white man & vice versa.

(Thomas Hardy, 1792)

This chapter is not intended to provide an account of ‘race’ which is designed to function as an alternative to the sociology of ‘race relations’ as it is presently defined.¹* However, as an introduction to what follows, a brief critique of that subdiscipline of sociology can serve to clarify some basic theoretical and political issues. It has been pointed out (Gabriel and Ben-Tovim, 1979) that sociological writing on ‘race relations’ falls into three categories reflecting the analysis of structures, meanings and culture. The sociology of ‘race’ can therefore be seen to fracture along the ‘fault lines’ (Craib, 1984) which traverse its parent discipline. These are the effects of the epistemological and ontological problems which arise in trying to reconcile the study of structures with the study of meaning and action.

These tensions are not confined to academic theories. They also appear in explicitly political writing on ‘race’ and racism. Here the most sophisticated and ambitious writers have tried to operate across these divisions. But the problems are particularly acute where writers have resisted the idea that ‘race’ and class belong to separate spheres of experience with different epistemological and ontological valencies and used Marxian and neo-Marxian approaches to confront the question of historical agency posed by the relationship between ‘race’ and class.

A non-reductive understanding of how these different collectivities interrelate has been sought by various black writers within the approach broadly suggested by C. L. R. James's words above. Hall's use of the concept of ‘articulation’ (UNESCO, 1980) is, for example, an attempt to address the political and intellectual problems which arise in combining analysis of ‘race’ and racism as structuring relations in society with an understanding of them as ideologies shaping political action and giving it powerful common-sense meanings. The distinction between racism and racialism which emerges in the work of Sivanandan (1982) serves a similar function.

Roy Bhaskar (1979; 1980) has argued that societies and agents have different properties even if there are complex relationships of dependency between them. His position suggests that it may be useful to be more explicit about the different ways in which racism is both a property of structures and a source of meanings. He proposes a ‘transformative’ model of human action in which societies provide raw material for human agents to act on and thereby produce societies over time. This insight emphasizes a view of society as a process rather than a finished edifice. It can provide a framework for separating out the different analytical issues surrounding ‘race’. The discourse of ‘race’, its ontology and the articulation between them are three interrelated aspects of a single political and theoretical problem. Their analytical separation takes place in the context of a theoretical position which can be enhanced and extended by a theory of culture. Indeed, this perspective on ‘race’ and racism depends on a theory which presents the cultural not as an intrinsic property of ethnic particularity but as a mediating space between agents and structures in which their reciprocal dependency is created and secured. It is, in Craib's phrase, a ‘hinge linking the teleological “door” of agency to the structural frame of society’ (1984).

In the sociology of ‘race relations’, idealists of various political persuasions have studied racial meanings as an autonomous tradition of scientific inquiry (Banton and Harwood, 1977) or in an ideological instance which, entire of itself, ‘intervenes only subsequently’ if at all in the economic relations of British society (Gabriel and Ben-Tovim, 1978). On the other side, there are writers who have sought to reduce ‘race’ to the inherent effects of various structures – relations of production, and markets (Sivanandan, 1982; Rex, 1979). Between these poles, sometimes literally papering over the stress-induced cracks, is a third tendency which has defined ‘race’ as a cultural phenomenon. This group has made ‘race’ into a synonym for ethnicity and a sign for the sense of separateness which endows groups with an exclusive, collective identity (Lawrence, 1982). For these writers, blacks live not in the castle of their skin but behind the sturdy walls of discrete ethnic identities.

This book aims to highlight some of the limitations in each of these approaches. It criticizes their conceptualizations of culture and provides an extended argument, both implicit and explicit, that a materialist theory of culture has much to contribute to ‘race relations’ analysis. The initiative must be recaptured from those whose view of culture is less supple, more absolute and reluctant to address the complex syncretisms which have been a feature of the junction between ‘race’ and class in contemporary Britain.

Culture can be presented as a field articulating the life-world of subjects (albeit de-centered) and the structures created by human activity. However the contemporary tendency towards ethnic absolutism, explored in Chapter 2, comes to view it as an impermeable shell, eternally dividing one ‘race’ or ethnic group from another. Apart from the theoretical difficulties with this position, it has crucial political deficiencies. I shall argue that it replicates among black and anti-racists, positions which are characteristic of the new right.

The argument below seeks to introduce a more sophisticated theory of culture into the political analysis of ‘race’ and racism in Britain by claiming the term back from ethnicity. The active, dynamic aspects of cultural life have been emphasized. This is a calculated challenge to the absolutist definitions of ‘race’ and ethnicity which are shared by contemporary racism, a substantial current in the sociology of ‘race’, and much liberal anti-racism.

Racial meanings are examined not as an autonomous branch of ideology, but as a salient feature in a general process whereby culture mediates the world of agents and the structures which are created by their social praxis. These meanings are sources of the individual and collective actions which give culture its materiality. The terrain of meaning and action is also a field of historical development through struggle. The view of ‘race’ as an eternal, essential factor of division in society will also be challenged by showing some of the ways in which ‘race’ and racism have featured in contemporary Britain's complex political antagonisms, marking distinct patterns of social and political subordination and de-subordination, resistance and negotiation.

These aims take this book inevitably into areas in which various forms of class theory have made important contributions. Class analysis has helped to illuminate the contours of historical development which have seen racism change from one determinate period to the next. It is necessary then to clarify how the concepts ‘race’ and class will be used below and how they will be thought to combine and contradict. The final chapter argues in detail that the vocabulary of class analysis may itself be insufficient to address the political struggles charted in Chapters 3, 4 and 5. It is useful, therefore, to begin with a critical evaluation of the work of some of the writers who have tried to bring the terms ‘race’ and class into some sort of mutual relation.

Though its presence makes life difficult for the theorist, the concept of class cannot be entirely banished from inquiries into racial politics, not least because it has an obvious value in locating the practice of racial groups in relation to the contradiction between capital and labour. However, where forms of political action develop which demand more than the reappropriation of material production, and where that production and the accumulation of capital depend not on exploitation alone but on control of information and communication systems, its use must be carefully specified. It is important to recognize the difficulties which attend the concept and to appreciate that its use in the politics and history of Britain's black settlers has often been economistic and reductive, seeking to subordinate the self-organization of blacks to the mythical discipline of a unified working class and its representative political institutions.

Theoretical and political debates over the status of ‘race’ relative to class exemplify a more general crisis in the field of Marxist analytical writing. This has its roots not only in the strategic political crises of the workers’ movements in the over-developed countries (Mouffe and Laclau, 1985; Gorz, 1982) but also in the theoretical challenges posed for class-based analysis by writers and thinkers from radical traditions struggling against forms of subordination which are not obviously or directly related to class. These may be based on gender, ‘race’, ethnicity or age and are often found in political locations removed from the workplace. Mass unemployment and consumer-oriented people's capitalism have combined in novel ways to further undermine both the theory and practice of the left. Marx's own method ought to have taught his disciples that there are necessarily historical and political limits to the validity of his insights. Unfortunately some of the most anachronistic strands in Marxian thought have lived on like residual dinosaurs in the lost valley of ‘race relations’ analysis.

At the structural level, it has become imperative to question the analytic priority accorded by the Marxian tradition to forms of production which directly generate surplus value. This priority is no longer justified either by the diminishing size or the political character of this group of workers. Less than 30 per cent of Britain's working population now performs work of this type.

The failure of these workers to match the predictive logic of reductive Marxism and constitute a socialist vanguard, advancing towards the transformation of society, has been recently underlined. The masculinism and craft traditions which distinguish them as a group have been successfully appealed to by the family-centred populist ideology of Thatcherite conservatism. Bea Campbell (1983) puts it bluntly: ‘The Tories have claimed [the] tradition of male craft and sex chauvinism, so important in the organization of the working class men's movement, for the right.’

Millions of women (who now form 40 per cent of the total working population) and low-paid workers have now been unionized in the public sector. Here the junction between ‘race’, gender and organized class politics is being encountered as an urgent problem. The immediate issues raised by the presence of women, blacks and other subordinate groups in the political institutions of the working class carry with them profound theoretical questions which reach into the heart of Marxian explanation. What is the working class today? What gender is it? What colour is it? How, in the light of its obvious segmentation, is it to be unified? Is this unification still possible or even desirable?

The relationship between manufacturing and service work, the role of the state as an employer and as a provider of income, and the growth of structural unemployment, all indicate the need to rework contemporary class analysis and the conceptions of class struggle which support it. Class analysis must be opened up so that it can be supplemented by additional categories which reflect different histories of subordination as well as the ‘historical and moral’ elements Marx identified as determining different values for different types of labour power (Capital I quoted by G. Rubin, 1975).

A third of Britain's workforce is now employed by the state in central or local government as well as in publicly owned corporations. The complex experiential chemistry of class, ‘race’ and gender revealed, for example, by examination of public sector employment, yields an important reminder of the limitations of analysis based exclusively on a narrow conception of class. Where the conditions of subordination constructed by these forms of oppression are lived out, they cannot be empirically disentangled.

Feminist critiques of Marxism have emphasized the political privileges attached by it to work outside the home and the way it has devalued labour performed in the private sphere. They point towards the same critical conclusion even when, as in some socialist feminist writing, a reconstruction of class theory is proposed.² If class analysis is to retain a place in explaining contemporary politics in general and the relationships between black and white workers, citizens, neighbours and friends in particular, it must be ruthlessly modernized.

Though it is a necessary part of the analytic framework proposed here, the contradiction between capital and labour is not sufficient; it simply cannot by itself generate a complete account of the struggles through which the social movement of blacks dissolves and then transcends the formal divisions of class. In some struggles, workers and shopkeepers have created political solidarity in the name of ‘race’ and community. In others, the action of black workers may be linked in complex ways to those of the black unemployed. It has been suggested, for example, that the industrial action in which health service workers confronted the government during the autumn and winter of 1982–3 cannot be understood unless the issue of its relationship to the urban protests of summer 1981 is explained. The Race Today Collective have argued that these two apparently distinct conflicts can be shown to have common roots not simply in the black populations that spearheaded them, but in a self-conscious community's struggles against various, different manifestations of pauperization. The political activities of black workers in the health service are necessarily tied to those of their children in the streets.³

This example illustrates the need for a political and theoretical vocabulary capable of linking the organization of service workers to that of unemployed young people. It underlines the fact that there is nothing to be gained from attempts to use the concept class as if its meaning had been unaffected by the changes in capital accumulation and the division of labour which have resulted from the revolution in new technology.

The place of black labour in the processes which transform workers into a class and distribute surplus labour power in society raises a series of fundamental doubts about the degree of homogeneity which can be ascribed to today's ‘English working Class’. It is severely divided not only between those in and out of work, but between workers in the various sectors of waged employment, between men and women, and between older and younger people. Conflicts around ‘race’, nation and ethnicity must be examined in the light of these other divisions where the unity of a single ‘working class’ cannot be assumed but remains to be created. It must be emphasized, then, that class is used below in a tentative and even provisional manner. The concept is useful to the extent that it ties political struggles to the goal of reappropriating the material structures of production but the antagonisms which form around ‘race’ and racism are not limited by this aim. Accordingly, class has been shorn of the positivistic certainties which came to be associated with it in the period when industrial production was ascendant. These are now an outmoded, residual presence in both sociological writing on ‘race’ and socialist political analysis of racism.

RACE FOR ITSELF AND CLASS IN ITSELF

Writers who have tried to theorize the relationship between ‘race’ and class in contemporary Britain can be divided into three basic tendencies. These form around the same ‘fault lines’ which divide the sociologies of systems from the sociologies of action. Each features a distinct paradigm or problematic for the ‘race’/class relationship and each is marked by an equally clear political orientation.

The first tendency operates on the boundaries of Weberian and Marxist analysis and argues that economic relations have a primacy in determining the character of ‘race’ politics. In its Weberian inflection, it views blacks as members of an ‘underclass’ (Rex and Tomlinson, 1979) while in the parallel Marxist version, this idea is conveyed by the term ‘sub-proleteriat’. The point of departure for both variations is recognition of the ways in which Britain's black populations are subject to particularly intense forms of disadvantage and exploitation. For the Weberians, an underclass status results from the accumulated effect of losing struggles in the distributive sphere. In other words, faring consistently badly in the markets for jobs, housing and education. This structural position constitutes the objective basis for an ‘underclass in itself’. This appears where ‘instead of identifying with working-class culture [my emphasis] community or politics they [the blacks] formed their own organisations and became in effect a separate under-privileged class’ (Rex and Tomlinson, 1979, p. 275).

The version of this argument, which is cast in Marxist language, lays greater emphasis on the effect of production relations in generating and reproducing the underclass/...