'Race' and Class or 'Race', Class, Gender and Community?: A Critical Appraisal of the Radicalised Fraction of the Working-Class Thesis

Abstract

This paper recognizes the contribution made by Robert Miles to marxist scholarship on 'race' and class in Britain but it suggests that his central thesis is flawed in that a consideration of gender and community should be as central to the analysis as that of social class. TOWARDS A MARXIST THEORY OF RACISM Robert Miles, in my opinion, has provided the best marxist analysis of'race' in Britain today.l However, his central thesis that Black people represent a racialised fraction of the working-class has to date not to my knowledge been subject to critical appraisal. In this paper I will therefore attempt such an appraisal. Although in Marx's time there were Black people living in Britain, it was not until after the Second World War that Black workers entered Britain in substantial numbers. Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, Marx noted that whereas the state went 'naked' in the colonies, at home it tended to assume 'respectable forms'.2 For these reasons, it is understandable why racism directed at Black people did not figure prominently in Marx's writings.3 However, given the theoretical structure of classical marxism, it is perhaps unlikely that he would have centralised 'race' even if there had been substantial numbers of Black workers in Britain when Marx was writing.4 How then might an approach based on marxism proceed? Rather than beginning with a search for empirical evidence of discrimination or the expression of racism or analysing 'the problems' of Black people, a marxist approach begins with an analysis of the material processes themselves, the complex relationship between the state and capital and between capital and labour and the way in which racism is ideologically constructed. The British Journal of Sociologe Volume 40 Number I This content downloaded from 157.55.39.215 on Tue, 30 Aug 2016 04:57:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 'Race' and class or 'race', class gender and community? 119 THE RACIALISED FRACTION OF THE WORKING-CLASS THESIS Following Miles (p. 167) I would argue that migrants from the Caribbean and Indian sub-continent did not enter a neutral political and ideological context when they came to B<ritain. On the one hand, they entered a politico-legal context which defined them as British citizens while, on the other, they entered an ideological context shaped in part by the need to justify and rationalise the colonial exploitation of the previous three centuries. Racist imagery, Miles suggests, was available as part of British national culture, able to be reproduced to categorise these migrants whose labour power was so much needed. However, with the exception of the various fascist groups, much of the reaction was not expressed in terms of the racist ideology of the amateur scientists of the nineteenth century, but rather racist images were expressed in a piecemeal and often inconsistent form. Rejecting what he calls the Unitary workingclass thesis (which suggests that racial discrimination only serves to increase the impact of disadvantages common to all members of the working class and is based on the writing of Westergaard and Resler) the Underclass thesis (which suggests that Black people constitute a class beneath the working-class by virtue of their inferior circumstances and life chances, based on Rex and Tomlinson's work) and the Divided working class thesis (which claims that the working-class is divided into two distinct strata; Black and White based on Castles and Kosack and Robert Moore), Miles argues that Black people should be considered a racialised fraction of the working class. He gives three reasons for this. First of all, since the demand was for wage labour, Black workers entered production' in a proletarian class'position. Secondly, the demand for labour was not spread equally across all sections of the economy but rather was limited to certain sectors of production and distribution, mainly semiand unskilled work with low wages and poor working conditions. Thirdly, the migrant labour was recruited from colonial and ex-colonial social formations. There are two dimensions to this. First, the presence of'colonial subjects' in Britain could be grasped by sections of all classes as witness to the decline of British capitalism as an imperial power. Secondly, the aforementioned negative imagery was readily available for reinterpretation if the stimulus existed. Hence, as I would interpret it, there was the potentially explosive mixture of living in a declining social formation, having readilyfavailable evidence of that decline and a ready-made presence of people, who, because of their phenotypical difference, were potentially the recipients of discriminatory practice. As a result of these three characteristics of immigrant workers together with the political initiative, through immigration legislation, to change the legal status of migrants from one of Commonwealth This content downloaded from 157.55.39.215 on Tue, 30 Aug 2016 04:57:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms