Fragments in a Setting Sun

It is with the heuristics developed in these volumes that both authors approach Britain in Fragments. It portrays a double movement across the course of British history. On the one hand, the multiracial, multinational British working classes engaged in explosive cycles of class struggle, challenging the power of capital and empire. On the other hand, the rulers of British imperial capitalism, under the threat of insurgency, regularly sought to stymie popular radicalisms by expanding the democratic settlement and absorbing strata of popular society into the orbit of the national community. This process was borne out episodically in moments like the Chartist upheaval of the mid-nineteenth century.

Part of their argument, drawing critically upon the Nairn–Anderson thesis, is that the raw materials which enabled the absorption of layers of the popular classes into the national community already existed in the traditions, cultures, and lifeworlds of the English working classes.⁵5. Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn, “Origins of the Present Crisis,” New Left Review I–23 (January/February, 1964): 26–53.  According to the authors, this was in no small part the consequence of Britain’s archaic political structures—the result of an incomplete bourgeois revolution—which held it back from completing its capitalist development.

As the nation is modernity’s political form, one has to develop a sense of its ideological valences and structuring effects. The stringent separation between the political and economic spheres which would become the common sense of Labourism, and sections of the extra-Parliamentary left, was only realizable alongside racisms which “could secure the acquiescence of parts of the subaltern class.”⁶6. Satnam Virdee and Brendan McGeever, Britain in Fragments: Why Things Are Falling Apart (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023), 22.

As Virdee and McGeever write, racism was pivotal to “symbolically and materially revaluing some parts of the population while simultaneously devaluing others,” and it was deployed by elites with the intent of “engineering a chasm within the working class.”⁷7. Ibid.  This chasm would bolster a separation within working class consciousness between economics and politics, obstructing a broader critique of the British social formation as a racial, national, and imperial force.

Underlying Virdee’s and McGeever’s intervention is a concern that “the working class had been invited to forget the contentious history of class war” and reimagine “themselves afresh as integral members of an imperial nation united by race.”⁸8. Ibid., 35. The period inaugurated after the second world war reflected this concern. As the authors detail, in office, the post-war Labour government was committed to preserving the British empire. As Ernest Bevin, former trade union leader and Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in the post-war Atlee-led government made clear, “I am not prepared to sacrifice the British Empire … because I know that if the British Empire fell … it would mean the standard of life of our constituents would fall considerably.”⁹9. Ibid., 44. The claim that the working classes of the Global North benefit from imperialism is contested among Marxists.

Out of power, the DIY trade unionism of the Fordist factory floor was accompanied by a DIY racism too, as shopfloor workers practiced a form of “social closure” against newly arrived Caribbean and Asian workers, reimagining themselves as white in the process.¹⁰10. Ibid., 47.  Before Enoch Powell’s racist “Rivers of Blood” speech against the Race Relations Bill inspired dockers and porters to strike in support, unionized workplaces were already using closed shops, quota systems, and the threat of wildcat strikes to ensure the exclusion of Caribbean and Asian workers.

The backdrop to this racially hierarchized class system was a shift in the locus of British capitalism. Contrary to the perspective articulated by Virdee and McGeever, Britain in the sixties was gripped by what David Edgerton in The Rise and Fall of the British Nation has described as an “economic nationalism” channelled through a “developmental state.”¹¹11. David Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth Century History (London: Penguin Books, 2018). While Virdee and McGeever see the period as one characterized by “archaic imperial structures no longer fit for purpose, over-dependence on finance capital and signs of a decline in the productivity of British industry,”¹²12. Virdee and McGeever, Britain in Fragments, 52. Edgerton argues that in fact manufacturing had become the productive hotbed of a British national capitalism, secured by “national and nationalist policy … [such as] protection, support for investment, discriminatory taxes and nationalistic procurement.”¹³13. Edgerton, Rise and Fall of the British Nation, 311.

This national capitalism was structured around the birth of a specifically “proletarian whiteness,” as coined by Alastair Bonnett.¹⁴14. Alastair Bonnett, “How the British Working Class Became White: The Symbolic (Re)formulation of Racialised Capitalism,” Sociology Lens 11, no. 3 (September, 1998): 316–40.  Unmistakably bound up with Britain’s imperial decline, the shifting spatial scales of its territory, and the desire on the part of its ruling class to renovate the social formation in the wake of empire, this historical shift matters for three reasons. First, it allows us to see how whiteness is crystallized in post-war Britain around a nationalized and racialized class politics defined against postcolonial migrants. Second, it informs us of shifts in class formation and a racialized division of labor, as migrant workers from the former colonies took low wage, labor-intensive jobs in declining industries such as textiles, transport, and healthcare, while white workers were often employed in higher paid, capital-intensive manufacturing jobs. And third, it breaks from a linear perspective on British history which sees every next crisis as the result of Britain’s incomplete bourgeois revolution and subsequent political backwardness.

This is not to imply that Britain was shorn of issues, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. Overly dependent on the USA as the new global hegemon, and particularly vulnerable to the global bout of manufacturing overcapacity which would structure the political and industrial arena over the next few decades, successive British governments would try and fail, in the face of deindustrialisation, to stem the increasing militancy of workers.

In this respect, a critical strength of Britain in Fragments is its vital retelling of working class history during these crisis years. It neither detracts from the forms of racism reproduced by white workers, trade union leaders, or Labour politicians, nor does it scoff at the complicated ways in which proletarian internationalists sought to pry racism apart from the workers movement. The authors write of the disproportionate effect that Thatcherism had on Caribbean and Asian workers, the first to be thrown onto the dole queue, which left surplus to the requirements of capital.

But they also think through the reconstitution of the racial politics of Thatcherism and the New Right, aware of how “she and the neoliberals around her understood that the socialist anti-racist politics of the 1970s had rehumanised black and brown Britons.” Splits in the opinion of white Britons meant that “repatriation was no longer a viable political option” and so an “ideological renovation” was required in order to “distance themselves from the fascists while at the same re-inscribing racism afresh through nationalism.”¹⁵15. Virdee and McGeever, Britain in Fragments, 87. As Virdee and McGeever write:

This was reflected powerfully during the 1983 General Election, where a poster of a young man of Caribbean descent dressed in a suit was underscored by the strapline ‘Labour says he’s black, we say he’s British.’ It signalled to the wider population that black and brown Britons were here to stay, particularly if they assimilated and lived by the dominant cultural norms.¹⁶16. Ibid., 52.

Though one could question the long-term success of such a pivot by the Conservatives, it was certainly made more conducive by the defeats they were visiting upon the British working classes. The “spirit and combativity of large sections of the multi-ethnic working class” were devastated as “the technical decomposition of class” was imposed through this neoliberal counterrevolution.¹⁷17. Ibid., 90.