I was asked by Inference Review to write a response to an article by the German Marxist economist, Wolfgang Streeck, ‘Trump and the Trumpists‘. I thank Inference for the opportunity to write this response which I learnt a lot from. I am also very grateful that so many people have…
Comments closedTag: class
This week we read Satnam Virdee’s Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider, a book which takes seriously the role of Irish Catholics, Jews, African and South Asian migrants in the British left from the 1700s to the 1980s. I have committed to writing shorter blogs in the interests of leaving room for other work, so this week’s reflections are quite short and respond directly to the book’s content. In particular, I was interested in three elements of the book: the role of nationalism in the cooptation of the white working class into Britishness and away from internationalist class solidarity, the often unspoken significance of whiteness in the construction of class from a left-wing perspective, and thirdly, the legacy of politic; blackness and its discontents.
Comments closed
I was invited by Luqman Onikosi at Sussex University to address Black History Month, an event I used to enjoy immensely during my time there. I highlight for me was chairing the Black Panther speaking tour back in 2008. Luqman asked me to speak on the problematic separation between race, class and gender, and I’m not sure how much justice I did to that massive subject. However, the following text include some reflections on the question of what race is, the problematic misunderstanding of race in the approach taken by Lisa McKenzie in her recent Guardian article, ‘The Refugee crisis will hit the UK’s working class areas the hardest‘, and what I see as the blindness of the white left opposition to identity politics. Please note that these reflections are schematic and I might work it up into a longer article in due course.