Catching History on the Wing

Race, Culture and Globalisation

A. Sivanandan

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2008
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781783715671
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Part of Pluto's 21st birthday series Get Political, which brings essential political writing in a range of fields to a new audience. A. Sivanandan is a highly influential thinker on race, racism, globalisation and resistance. Since 1972, he has been the director of the Institute of Race Relations and the editor of Race & Class, which set the policy agenda on ethnicity and race in the UK and worldwide. Sivanandan has been writing for over forty years and this is the definitive collection of his work. The articles selected span his entire career and are chosen for their relevance to today's most pressing issues. Included is a complete bibliography of Sivanandan's writings, and an introduction by Colin Prescod (chair of the IRR), which sets the writings in context. This book is highly relevant to undergraduate politics students and anyone reading or writing on race, ethnicity and immigration.

PART II

STATE RACISM AND RESISTANCE

Within the space of a few years, from the early 1960s on, the terms of debate on ‘race’ in Britain had been set, a common language developed in which that debate was conducted and its fundamental assumptions established. Blacks were the problem; fewer blacks made for better race relations; immigration control was the answer; social control would follow. The intellectual backing for these assumptions was provided by the policy-oriented research of the Institute of Race Relations. The struggle to change the assumptions led to a struggle within the Institute itself and transformed both the Institute and the terms of debate.

‘Race, class and the state’ emerged from that struggle and the author’s involvement in it – to provide the first coherent class analysis of the black experience in Britain, overturning in the process the old race relations orthodoxies of both Right and Left.

This pioneering analysis of the political economy of race and migration, throwing a light on the real intent behind government strategies, has set the standard for all future analysis of state racism.

The changing nature of racism, of the state and of black people’s resistances and of the relationship between all three inform all the essays here. Black organisations and movements are examined critically and dialectically too. And when they depart from the struggles for justice, become partial, self-serving or even ‘a part of the problem not the solution’, Sivanandan is the first to say so.

‘From resistance to rebellion’ is a landmark history of black protest from 1940 to 1981 in the UK, which has become the starting point for black historiography. ‘RAT and the degradation of black struggle’ – written to expose the dangers in personalising anti-racist programmes – succeeded in changing the parameters of town-hall funded anti-racist work. It also enunciates the crucial, strategic distinction between personal racialism and institutional or state racism.

Racism does not stay still, but changes its shape, size, contours, purpose, function with changes in the system. After 9/11 and 7/7, the war on terror at home and abroad, multiculturalism itself came under attack as anti-Muslim racism became institutionalised. ‘Race, terror and civil society’ examines the interconnections between the new racism thrown up by globalisation and modern empire, the increasing threat to civil liberties and the alienation of young Muslims.

4

RACE, CLASS AND THE STATE: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF IMMIGRATION^*

For Wesley Dick¹ – poet and prisoner

In some answer to his questions

Within ten years Britain will have solved its ‘black problem’ – but ‘solved’ in the sense of having diverted revolutionary aspiration into nationalist achievement, reduced militancy to rhetoric, put protest to profit and, above all, kept a black underclass from bringing to the struggles of the white workers political dimensions peculiar to its own historic battle against capital. All these have been achieved in some considerable measure in the past decade and a half – and the process has already thrown up the class of collaborators so essential to a solution of the next stage of the problem: the political control of a rebellious ‘second generation’. And it is to this exercise that the White Paper of 1975 addresses itself.

The political economy of immigration

The laissez-faire era

But to understand the politics of the White Paper, to see what it tells us about state power in one particular aspect – black labour – but an aspect which, like a barium meal, reveals the whole organism of the state and relates black experience to white struggle – one must first reappraise the Immigration Acts. Britain, after the war, like most Western European countries, was faced with a chronic shortage of labour. This shortage was in some measure alleviated by the half a million or so refugees, displaced persons and prisoners of war who were admitted to Britain between 1946 and 1951. But even so, the Ministry of Labour found it necessary to systematise the recruitment of workers from other parts of Europe. Between 1945 and 1957 there was a net immigration of more than 350,000 European nationals into the United Kingdom.²

Unlike most other European countries, however, Britain was in a position to turn to an alternative and comparatively uncompetitive source of labour in its colonies and ex-colonies in Asia and the Caribbean. Colonialism had already under-developed these countries and thrown up a reserve army of labour which now waited in readiness to serve the needs of the metropolitan economy. To put it more graphically, colonialism perverts the economy of the colonies to its own ends, drains their wealth into the coffers of the metropolitan country and leaves them at independence with a large labour force and no capital with which to make that labour productive. And it is to these vast and cheap resources of labour that Britain turned in the 1950s.

At first the supply of labour from these countries was governed by the demand for it in the metropolis. Except for a few thousand workers who were recruited directly into London Transport and the British Hotels and Restaurants Association from Barbados (from 1956), no effort was made to relate employment to vacancies. Instead it was left to the free market forces to determine the size of immigration. And this on the whole, as the excellent study by Ceri Peach shows, worked very well.³ Thus periods of economic expansion led to a rise in immigration, periods of recession to a decline – and this sensitiveness of supply to demand characterised the whole ‘stop-go’ period of the 1950s.

But if the free market economy decided the numbers of immigrants, economic growth and the colonial legacy determined the nature of the work they were put to. It was inevitable that in a period of full employment the indigenous worker would move upwards into better paid jobs, skilled apprenticeships, training programmes, etc., leaving the dirty, hard, low-paid work to immigrant labour. Although, that is, the shortage of labour was general, the more dynamic and attractive sectors of industry were able to draw the best qualified labour from both the non-growth industries as well as the immigrant labour force. The non-growth sector (including the public services), on the other hand, had only new entrants to the labour market to turn to. (In practice, though, prejudice decreed that qualified immigrants were more available to the latter than to the former.) Thus the jobs which ‘coloured immigrants’ found themselves in were the largely unskilled and low status ones for which white labour was unavailable or which white workers were unwilling to fill – in the textile and clothing industries, engineering and foundry works, transport and communication, or as waiters, porters, kitchen hands.

And since the opportunities for such work obtained chiefly in the already overcrowded conurbations, immigrants came to occupy some of the worst housing in the country. The situation was further exacerbated by the exorbitant rents charged by slum landlords. Attempts on the part of the newcomers to break the landlords’ hold by buying their own homes were often frustrated either by the difficulties of obtaining loans from regular sources or by the prohibitive rates of interest charged by the irregular ones – or even by the refusal of owners to sell to ‘wogs’ and ‘nignogs’. When immigrants eventually managed to buy their own property and were able to house their fellows, they were accused of overcrowding – sometimes sleeping five and ten to a room. (That there was excellent precedent for this in the dormitories of Eton and Harrow went unnoticed and unremarked.) In the course of time the ‘immigrants’ became ghetto-ised and locked into the decaying areas of the inner city. And a ghetto, in the words of Ceri Peach, ‘is the geographical expression of complete social rejection’.⁴

Everyone made money on the immigrant worker – from the big-time capitalist to the slum landlord – from exploiting his labour, his colour, his customs, his culture. He himself had cost the country nothing. He had been paid for by the country of his origin – reared and raised, as capitalist under-development had willed it, for the labour markets of Europe. If anything, he represented a saving for Britain of all the expense involved in feeding and clothing and housing him till he had come of working age. For, as André Gorz has pointed out, ‘the import of “ready-made” workers amounts to a saving, for the country of immigration, of between £8000 and £16000 per migrant worker, if the social cost of a man is estimated for Western European countries as between five and ten years of work’.⁵ And the fact that in the early years of migration, the ‘coloured’ worker came to Britain as a single man – as a unit of labour – unaccompanied by his family meant an additional saving to the country in terms of social capital: schools, housing, hospitals, transport and other infra-structural facilities. A fraction of the saving made from the import of these ready-made workers – let alone their active contribution in labour and taxes – could have served to increase social stock and improve social conditions if the government had so willed. But capital and the state were concerned with the maximisation of profit, not with the alleviation of social need.

By the late 1950s, however, the contradiction between the social and economic needs of Britain, thrown up – not caused – by immigration, became more defined. The shortage of workers, as Ceri Peach shows, made immigrants economically acceptable; the shortage of housing made them socially undesirable. ‘The colour prejudice of landlords and landladies coupled with the shortage of houses made the crowding, and in some cases the overcrowding, of much of the accommodation available to the migrants inevitable and this, in turn increased their image of undesirability.’ From being refused accommodation on the grounds that they were coloured, they were now refused houses on the grounds that they would overcrowd. ‘It is surely an ideal system,’ concludes Peach, ‘in which prediction produces its own justification.’⁶

Ideal, that is, for capital – for it gets labour without the overheads (so to speak), profit without pain, gain without cost. Having already deprived one section of the working class (the indigenous) of its basic needs, it now deprives it further in order to exploit another section (the blacks) even more – but, at the same time, prevents them both from coming to a common consciousness of class by intruding that other consciousness of race. It prevents, in other words, the horizontal conflict of classes through the vertical integration of race – and, in the process, exploits both race and class at once.

To put it differently, the profit from immigrant labour had not benefited the whole of society but only certain sections of it (including some sections of the white working class) whereas the infrastructural ‘cost’ of immigrant labour had been borne by those in greatest need. That is not to say that immigrants (qua immigrants) had caused social problems – Britain, after all, was a country of net emigration – but that the forced concentration of immigrants in the deprived and decaying areas of the big cities highlighted (and reinforced) existing social deprivation; racism defined them as its cause. To put it crudely, the economic profit from immigration had gone to capital, the social cost had gone to labour, but the resulting conflict between the two had been mediated by a common ‘ideology’ of racism.

Prelude to control

That same ‘ideology’ detonated the race riots of 1958 – and revealed to the state that considerations of social need had now to be weighed against considerations of economic gain. Racism, though economically useful, was becoming socially counterproductive. And the state, which had hitherto acted in the economic interests of the ruling class, was now compelled to modify that role and assume its other function of appearing to act in the interests of society as a whole – in the ‘national interest’. The first step was to slow down immigration, thin out the black presence, the second to manage racism, keep it within profitable proportions – relief for the depressed areas, urban aid, would follow. The economy in any case had, for the time being, absorbed all the unskilled labour it could (though it still required skilled and professional workers). Additional units of labour applied to existing (outworn, outmoded) plant would not yield the returns that would make such addition justifiable. On the other hand, automation and new technology – capital intensive production – would help Britain to compete with the rest of Europe in markets made more competitive by the loss of its colonies. That same ‘loss’, however, would make it possible for Britain to renege on its Commonwealth ties and look to the Common Market for the labour it required – when the time was ripe. The stage was set for immigration control.

To end immigration altogether would have been one answer. But given the periodic labour shortages characteristic of the capitalist countries of Western Europe, given the structural needs of late capitalism for the import of foreign workers, it was no answer at all. Migrant labour, precisely because it was migrant – seasonal and contractual, filling in the labour gaps in times of expansion and being fired in times of recession – served to absorb the shocks of alternating booms and depressions. And by virtue of the fact that it was foreign, migrant labour yielded extra profit to the employer.⁷ Most of Western Europe had worked out a migratory mechanism combining both these functions. Labour, on short-term permits, on contract, ensured the buffer function; and the fact that it was foreign, recruited from the under-developed southern extremities of Europe, ensured that it would not – by virtue of nationality laws freely agreed to – have the same rights as the indigenous worker and could therefore be discriminated against. And to discriminate is to exploit, to derive a surplus value larger than that afforded by the exploitation of the native worker.⁸ Together they, contract labour and nationality laws, fulfilled a third function – a political one: they prevented the integration of migrant labour into the indigenous proletariat and thereby mediated class conflict.

Britain, still outside the European community but periodically knocking at its door and gifted with a vast reserve of labour in the colonies and Commonwealth, was loath to let go of either and tried to hang on to both. Initially it recruited migrant workers from Europe on a permit basis. Between 1946 and 1951, 100,000 European workers had entered Britain. But the availability of labour in the colonies and ex-colonies and its sensitivity to demand made labour on contract unnecessary.⁹ And as for a discriminatory mechanism, in place of nationality laws there was the fact of race. Black labour was inherently ‘discriminatable’. It was alien per se – and automatically excluded from integration into a racist white working class.

It had suited Britain, therefore, to import the workers it needed from its colonies and ex-colonies: it was the quickest way of getting the cheapest labour at minimum (infrastructural) cost – and without the fuss and bother of barriers. It worked, in effect, like any internal migratory movement: a movement of population from the periphery to the centre as and when the need arose. And in that sense it was unrestrained, laissez-faire. But to characterise the laissez-faire period of immigration as an essay in British absentmindedness – the sort of aristocratic whimsy that gathers and loses empires on the spin of a wheel – or as a conscious ‘open-door’ policy designed to benefit the poor orphaned children of empire as befitted a once and only mother country – an aspect of British high-mindedness – is a load of bull-shit.¹⁰ So ingrained were these views among radical analysts that when, over the ‘Kenyan Asian’ affair (in 1968), Labour went even more Tory than Tory, the ‘experts’ instead of abandoning their analysis, mourned instead the death of Labour idealism or, more concretely, the passing of ‘the liberal hour’ – and of Roy Jenkins, its finest flower.

The fact of the matter was that laissez-faire immigration and laissez-faire discrimination had thrown up social problems which, after the riots of 1958 and the growing militancy of a black underclass were taking on political proportions that the government – irrespective of party – could not ignore. It had to put an end to ‘coloured immigration’ and yet have recourse to a reserve pool of labour when required. The crux of the problem, therefore, was not migration, but settlement – and not discrimination but racial discrimination. For the purposes of exploitation, it was labour and not colour that had to be discriminated against – and that could be done on the basis of citizenship, of nationality, rather than of race. And since nationality laws by definition distinguished between citizen and alien, foreign or migrant labour would be automatically subject to discrimination. To change British nationality laws so as to put Commonwealth citizens on a par with aliens was the most obvious solution – and it had the added advantage of debarring settlement as a matter of right. But, on the other had, it would spell the end of a historical relationship which ensured the continuing dependency of the colonial periphery on the centre....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Colin Prescod
• Introduction: Unity of struggle
• I The Personal and the Political
• II State Racism and Resistance
• III Globalisation and Displacement
• Notes
• Bibliography of writings by A. Sivanandan
• Index