All Together Now! The Rise of British Nationalism

Abstract

Underpinned by George Modelski’s model of World Leadership, Ornette D. Clennon will trace how war and conflict played a central role in creating ‘social unity’ within Britain as documented by C.L.R. James in his 1943 essay Greatest Empire in History Is Collapsing. Clennon will also tease out the nature of the deception of ‘social unity’ that was identified by C.L.R. James in the previous chapter by using his dialectical materialism as a conceptual framework. Clennon will also show how war and conflict drive a domestic ‘colonial administration’ of the working classes, in so doing, acting as the administrative component of James’ deceptive ‘social unity’.

The Decline of Empire

In C.L.R. James’ 1943 essay Greatest Empire in History Is Collapsing, he offers us a tantalising glimpse of a Britain in transition in terms of its international status (James 1943). With an embattled Britain on multiple fronts, both nationally and internationally, James suggests that these challenges were too numerous for the Empire to overcome, in the long run. Written during the Second World War, James maps out how the British defeats in Singapore and Burma (Myanmar) were body blows to British imperialist ambitions, as these losses to Japan later became decisive for ending British interests in the region. James also describes the mounting pressure Britain felt in India, when they sent Stafford Cripps, an opposition Labour minister who had joined the War Cabinet, on a mission to enlist the support of India in Britain’s war efforts. Cripps’ mission failed and, according to James, he left the War Cabinet as a result. James implies that this failure added to mounting pressure on Britain to leave India through the efforts of Gandhi and his Quit India movement.

James also describes the strained relationship with South Africa where although Jan Smuts, her then Prime Minister, had a very close relationship with Winston Churchill to the point of also being a member of the War Cabinet, his South African colleagues, the former Prime Minister J.B.M. Herzog, in particular, whom he had replaced, had advocated for neutrality during the war. However, James clearly recollects that a further symbol of the Empire’s demise occurred when the much-lauded (by the British Establishment) Smuts was asked to write a piece for Life Magazine that defended the Empire. James notes that in his piece, Smuts suggested not only greater autonomy for white colonial African states, a sort of early devolution arrangement, but that Britain should share its overseeing duties of these states with the US! For James, this along with everything else that was happening to the Empire seemed like an insult that was added to an injurious decline. James observes that world powers that were formally linked to the Empire for their national interests were beginning to re-align their attentions to the US, and one of the Empire’s staunchest allies in the form of Jan Smuts demonstrated this with abandon. James concludes that the underlying problem that faced the British Empire was the rise of the US as a world power and astutely noted that “[t]he natural trend of capital away from Britain toward America can be seen with singular clarity.” (James 1943).

As if to underline the changing of the world guard, James records Churchill’s overtures to Joseph Stalin as a means of countering the increasing US influence in Europe. James notes that although Stalin potentially was amenable to working in partnership with Britain and the US (and he did ultimately), Stalin had strong instincts for protecting his own national interests. Stalin’s natural distrust of Britain was not helped by the decision of Churchill and Roosevelt to apparently renege on a D-Day agreement for a Second Front in Western Europe. Stalin needed help from Churchill and Roosevelt to help fight against Germany. Churchill and Roosevelt on their side were frightened that Stalin would sign a peace-accord with Adolf Hitler, since Russia was taking heavy losses. The alliance with Russia to defeat fascism had a profound effect on encouraging the Labour Movement in the UK. James hints at the increasing powers of organisation that the British labour unions displayed, who mounted strikes over pay every year between 1941 and 1944.

We’re All in This Together. Sound Familiar?

Apart from the obvious geopolitical implications described by James in Greatest Empire, to which I will later return, I would like to explore James’ dialectical idea of a bureaucratic deception that alludes to ‘social unity’ in this wartime context. Behind the macro narrative of the apparent decline of the British Empire is a micro narrative of the mundane. A mundane narrative of the ‘everyday’ during the war that was used as a propaganda tool to engender social cohesion and unity. Hinton & Redclift (2009, p. 2) give an overview of the prevailing “‘wartime spirit’ of voluntary thrift, sufficiency and austerity”. The wartime slogans such as ‘make do and mend’, ‘dig for victory’, ‘eat greens for health’ and ‘keep calm and carry on’, on the surface, suggest a national spirit of voluntarism and community. However, scholars such as James Hinton¹ contest this view and suggest that the war actually entrenched hierarchical social values (class) even more. In his Shop Floor Citizens, Hinton (1994) explores how the voluntaristic traditions² in British industry largely stymied an intended state-planned economy that had full worker participation at its heart, where opportunities to implement productionist ideas amongst the workers were missed.³ Similarly, in his Women and Social Leadership, Hinton (2002) finds that the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS), which was set up in 1939 as a publicly valued form of citizenship, merely served to (re)produce the class inequalities of the time.

So during the war, Austerity was used as an ideological tool to engender a sense of ‘social unity’. Even though the war did indeed necessitate limited rationing and a degree of communal cooperation, it was used, even at that time, as a propaganda tool for social control. However, what interests me about this observation is how the concept of war itself became a proxy for ‘social unity’. Elsewhere (Clennon 2016d), I write at length about the importance of forming a cultural memory for a nation that is in effect an ongoing and evolving synthetic narrative where “[m]any complicated strands are reduced to a simple tale of essential and enduring national unity” (CMEB 2000, p. 16). Britain formed a living cultural memory or myth of itself around its resilience and unity under enormous wartime duress. Even though the Second World War in particular marked an imperial overreach,⁴ which is one of the indicators of imperial decline (Modelski 1987), the war could also be seen to mark the highpoint of the formation of a national psyche (cultural memory) of unity and resilience. During the war, this cultural memory took the form of unity against the ‘barbarism’ of Hitler (and the Axis Powers⁵), but up until this time, the living (ongoing) memory took the form of unity against the ‘barbarism’ of the colonies, which had to be controlled and civilised. ‘Social unity’ in this sense (as an agency-giving national psyche) could be seen as an administrative function of imperial power, as well as an internal representation of it. Following on in this vein, I would suggest that ‘social unity’ also became a government mandate or a propaganda tool for the external projection of power beyond or at its boundaries.

So, in the case of Britain, its ‘social unity’ historically had been constructed by its class system, an uneven system of wealth distribution that enabled the Empire to further its imperial economic expansion. But for the class system (the subjugation of the working classes in favour of the ruling classes) to be accepted as a natural form of ‘social unity’ by the masses, the Empire had to be seen to be projecting external control or at the very least, showing agency.⁶ Borrowing further from James’ dialectism, we can also see that there is a sense in which ‘social unity’ is a negation of the state in terms of its externality (forming and protecting its boundaries).⁷ Here, I mean that ‘social unity’⁸ enabled Britain to exert its externality in the form of imperial offensive control pre-decline but during the war it allowed it to exert defensive control in the sight of an external threat. In other words, ‘social unity’ gave Britain its offensive and defensive agency in both periods of conflict.⁹

Flint and Taylor (2011) write that every country has geopolitical codes that help identify its opportunities and threats in terms of its allies and enemies.¹⁰ Flint & Taylor also point out that every country issues internal propaganda (representation) to its population, which justifies their nation’s calculations of its geopolitical codes (its offensive and defensive agency). I would agree with this but would add that although representation of ‘social unity’ via propaganda is essential for gaining national buy-in to a nation’s geopolitical codes, the administration of ‘social unity’ is far more important and ultimately informs the propaganda. So, just taking a slight pause for reflection; we can now regard ‘social unity’ as having both an administrative and representational function in determining a nation’s cultural memory (sense of itself) and its resultant (ideological) boundaries or agency. It is perhaps through its ‘representation’ that James’ ‘bureaucratic deception’ of ‘social unity’ takes place. This means in Britain, we need to consider the inner workings of how our ‘democratic processes’ (‘social unity’¹¹) (re)produce and maintain our imperial past¹² in addition to looking at how they are represented,¹³ as both facets play such an important part in shaping our national identity.

War, Metaphor and Social Unity

People that have been in Downing Street over the years have faced issues to do with the Cold War, the Depression and the rise of fascism. Climate change is a bit of a different type of challenge but a challenge I believe is the biggest long-term threat facing our world. (Clover and Helm 2008)

The quote above is taken from Tony Blair, in 2007 when he was hosting a group of students at Number 10, Downing Street. Cohen (2009) writes at length about the ‘war’ metaphor that Blair used in his address about climate change. Cohen explores the importance of metaphor in shaping opinion and building national consensus. I would tend to look at this in terms of metaphors being used as the building blocks of state propaganda. In deliberately comparing climate change to the Cold War, the Depression and the rise of fascism, Tony Blair rather helpfully guides us through the key points in twentieth-century history, where Britain had to exercise (imperial) defensive agency in terms of protecting its borders (as well as exerting its offensive agency). However, in order to defend against these external threats, ‘social unity’ had to be encouraged/forged amongst the populous.

For me, the most revealing example that Blair mentions, of the role that ‘war’ (with its social and cultural function) plays in synthesising ‘social unity’, is the Cold War. For the UK, the flashpoint of this era occurred under the then Prime Minister Anthony Eden and his handling of the Suez crisis in 1956. Brown (2001) gives a good account of what led up to what was to become a humiliating climb down by the British. However, it was clear that British (and French) arrogance had culminated in imperial overreach when the British with the French and the Israelis thought that they could take back the Suez Canal from the Egyptians. In this sense, Britain was attempting to exercise her imperialist offensive agency but this was badly misjudged because Britain had miscalculated her geopolitical codes (Flint and Taylor 2011) in terms of assessing support from her allies. To cut to the chase, the US did not support the takeover of the canal and with the backing of the United Nations forced Britain to stand down. The US feared that such a takeover would destabilise the area and lead to the strengthening of Soviet links with liberation movements across the region. Two things of interest, for me, emerge from this episode. Firstly, Britain under Eden did not realise how geopolitically weakened it was in terms of not being able to act without the support of the US (i.e. the denial of the continuing post war decline of its Empire). And secondly; Brown (2001, para 5) characterises the exact nature of the ‘social unity’ that emboldened Britain to exercise her imperial agency, like this:

Much more potently, there was ingrained racism. When the revolutionaries in Cairo dared to suggest that they would take charge of the Suez canal, the naked prejudice of the imperial era bubbled to the surface. The Egyptians, after all, were among the original targets of the epithet, “westernised (or wily) oriental gentlemen. They were the Wogs.”

So with this unsurprising admission,¹⁴ we can begin to see that for a nation, (the threat of) ‘war’, acts as a powerful incentive or catalyst to synthesise a cultural memory that is expressed as ‘social unity’, which is an important form of social control. In the case of Britain, we can conclude from Derek Brown that at that time, her cultural memories and their expression through an underlying administrative function of ‘social unity’ were founded on race and its powers of subjugation. Of course, none of this is surprising and new but I think it is worth highlighting the importance of the insidious use of the ‘war’ metaphor, the justification it gives for shaping a nation’s cultural memory and how that is administered through the implementation of a propagandised ‘social unity’. I am not suggesting that there is a strict linear progression between these functions of state, as they are, in reality, interdependent on each other.¹⁵ However, if we see ‘social unity’, its administration and representation¹⁶ as tools of state control, then James’ observation of it being a bureaucratic ‘deception’ has a particular resonance, especially if it is founded on the ontologies of race, as is the case in the UK. I think James’ Greatest Empire in so vividly commentating on the decline of British wartime influence implicitly drives home the impact war (and conflict) has on a nation’s (imperial) psyche and how it is expressed politically and culturally. If, as James states in Dialectical Materialism, that bureaucracy is the ‘spirit’ of the state and, as discussed here, ‘war’ has the power to shape bureaucracy (as well as vice versa in Butlerian fashion¹⁷), then we have a very interesting concept of war/conflict as the birthplace of the (Western) nation or the state via the ‘spirit’ of its bureaucracy.

Domestic Colonialism

Many commentators (e.g. Robertson 2016; Browne 2015; Blauner 1969; Allen 2005) have already taken up the idea of war and conflict playing a major part in shaping a nation’s psyche. However, I am particularly interested in Thrasher’s (2015) American War Machine and Cowen and Lewis’ (2016) Anti-Blackness and Urban Geopolitical Economy because of their explicit theorisations of the BlackLivesMatter Movement as an oppositional force against a war-infused (birthed) bureaucratic democracy.

The War Machine has always had an insatiable need for bodies of color from before the birth of this nation. The genocide of Native Americans, the Atlantic Slave trade of Africans, the conquest of Mexicans, the colonization of Filipinos and Hawaiians, the mass importation of Chinese workers subsequently denied citizenship under the Chinese Exclusion Act: the War Machine created and then expanded the size of the United States using non-white bodies, waging war against them, and making them second-class citizens (when it deigned to make them citizens at all). Though the 13th Amendment ended legal slavery, it did not end the War Machine’s assault on black people, which has simply morphed from slavery, sharecropping and Jim Crow segregation, to modern day schools which are just as segregated, police violence, economic exploitation and mass incarceration. The War Machine has so effectively decimated the black community, for example, that for the few of us who do manage to get, say, an education, it is almost meaningless as a way to move up in the world.

Thrasher’s telling piece, from which the above quote comes, pitches the US as a “War Machine” that currently uses its military and cultural might to globally export an American imperialism. Now the Cold War has ostensibly passed, a new oppositional force is needed to justify a war footing (nation building). The ‘war on terror’ is a useful device because at its base it is a ‘war’ over ideology. However, unlike its predecessors, which were (are) about territory, a war about ideology that invokes a (mythical) Huntingdon clash of civilisations (Huntington 1998, 1993) is capable of being re-invented at will. This gives the ‘war on terror’ the capacity to be ongoing and crucially to be about anything it wants, such as a ‘war on anti-Western democracy’.¹⁸

Thrasher’s think piece is particularly interesting in the way in which he equates the War Machine with the formation of a ‘social unity’ that is profoundly shaped by the US treatment of its (politically) ‘black’ peoples. But Thrasher’s central point is that mechanisms that underpin the now continuous war efforts of the US are being used against sections of its own population, as he describes how the instruments of ‘war’ directly shape the (lack of) democratic freedoms of its ‘black’ peoples.¹⁹ Or, in other words, the War Machine is directly used internally to bureaucratically administer the nation’s dialectical ‘freedoms and happiness’. A ‘social unity’ built on this particular type of race-based social control can only happen if its preceding cultural memory anodises or erases specific histories that are crucial for its full self-definition. Thrasher argues that the BlackLivesMatter Movement seeks to disrupt this cultural memory by illuminating the mechanisms of the War Machine. The bureaucratic deception that James would probably recognise, here, would be how there is a form of state propaganda that justifies the brutalisation of some of its citizens by its internally applied War Machine, with the sole purpose of maintaining (enforcing) ‘freedom and happiness’ or ‘complete democracy’.

In line with this idea of the US being a War Machine, elsewhere, I write about a ‘hidden curriculum’ based on militaristic values, which appear to be implemented by Charter Schools in the US (Clennon 2014a). Reserved predominantly for children of colour,²⁰ Finley (2003) describes how in these Charter Schools, which are usually located in the poorest neighbourhoods, they teach militaristic values that promote discipline, hierarchy, centralisation of authority and obedience in the education system. In fact, DeVall, Finley & Caulfield (2002 as cited in Finley 2003, p. 2) go further to suggest that the ideology of militarism is “one that privileges power, domination, control, violence, superiority, hierarchy, standardization, ownership, and the maintenance of the status quo.” So, as Bourdieu and Passeron (2000 [1977]) remind us, education can indeed be seen as a state tool of the indoctrination that underpins the values of a nation’s ‘social unity’.²¹

To underpin the militaristic nature of US ‘social unity’, aided and abetted by its education system, Cowen and Lewis (2016) go one step further and characterise the US ghettoisation of African American communities as a form of ‘colonial administration’. In their extensive essay, they trace how the gentrification of black neighbourhoods acts as a form of colonial expansion by white communities, which as a result displaces African American communities from those areas deemed profitable for white suburbanisation. Cowen and Lewis describe, in great detail, not only the spatial domination of African Americans in their ghettoised spaces but also their financial oppression. They outline how a practice of reverse redlining,²² which entailed “high cost loans made to borrowers with impaired or limited credit histories or those who have higher ratio of debt to income” became a widespread practice by non-mainstream lenders who comprised the subprime market. Of course, this meant that in the global financial crash of 2007, started by a crisis in subprime lending, borrowers who could only get loans from the subprime market because they were the only lenders willing to take the risk, were extremely vulnerable to defaulting on their loans and as a consequence were mostly evicted from their homes. Cowen and Lewis describe how great capital wealth was drained away from the African American housing stock, as many were saddled with loans greater than the value of their properties. I think colonial administration is a great term for this because Cowen and Lewis show that wealth was extracted from these areas in remarkably similar ways to how it had been historically extracted from colonised countries. Acemoglu et al. (2001, p. 1370) give a great account of the present-day economic effects of Post-Colonial countries that were set up as “extractive states” whose “main purpose…was to transfer as much of the resources of the colony to the colonizer, with the minimum amount of investment possible.” This was in distinct opposition to “Neo Europes,” where “[t]he settlers tried to replicate European institutions, with great emphasis on private property, and checks against government power”.

So, the central argument of Cowen and Lewis’ essay is that the police brutality upon which the BlackLivesMatter Movement focuses is only part of an overall state mechanism of enforcing a particular type of colonial ‘social unity’ and that the movement is disrupting the state-led propaganda that normalises this very visible effect of brutal socio-colonial control.²³ How a nation defines its cultural memory and how it projects that internally and externally is obviously an important geopolitical code. Elsewhere (Clennon 2013), I argue just this point with the election of President Obama in terms of the establishment’s attempt at heralding a ‘post-racial’ America whose imperial dictats (i.e. ‘western style democracy is best’) were intended to gain added weight by having a black president.²⁴ However, domestically in the US, enabled by its continual ‘war on terror’, its ‘social unity’ is based on hidden militaristic values that facilitate pockets of virtual rule of martial law in internally colonised predominantly African American neighbourhoods.

However, the overwhelming point of interest for me in this section has been how war, conflict or their respective metaphors appear to define Western nations’ cultural memories or senses of self²⁵ and how this conflict shapes the ways in which nations administer and represent their ‘social unity’ (bureaucratic deceptions). Applying James’ dialectical thinking from the last chapter, he might have viewed the ‘contradiction’ between war and ‘freedom and happiness’ as a natural consequence of human history, whereby the state (the mediator of ‘freedom and happiness’²⁶) is actually negated by war (conflict)!

Since Britain has a long history of imperial domination and is well versed in colonisation, in the next section, I will discuss the ways in which the UK has maintained its (now internalised) colonial practices in the face of its negligible imperial power. I will also tentatively explore the ways in which the British state can also be considered to be ‘negated’ by war (conflict).

What’s Empire Got to Do with Brexit?

Is there a sense that ‘social unity’, out of its many potential forms (including imperialism), could manifest as an expression of nationalism? Here, I am particularly thinking of nationalism in terms of it being a replacement for imperialism²⁷ within a nation’s psyche, where it acts as an introverted expression of imperial control that is directed towards itself rather than towards others. Continuing this line of thought, I remain intrigued by Paul Gilroy’s piece that describes Britain’s “melancholic attachment to its vanished pre-eminence” (Gilroy 2005, p. 434). Even though Gilroy uses this idea to describe Britain’s attachment to its past and its seemingly revisionist obsessions,²⁸ could his use of the Freudian term ‘melancholic attachment’ give us a further clue towards conceptualising an imperialism that has introverted towards nationalism?

‘Melancholic attachment’ is a specific Freudian reference and has been discussed at length by Judith Butler in her Psychic Life of Power. Butler describes a state of unrequited love, where the ‘lover’ realises that he cannot attain love from his ‘object’, so instead of mourning the loss of his ‘object’ (and moving on) he redirects his love of his ‘object’ towards himself. However, he knows that his self-directed love (narcissism) is only a pale substitute for the true ‘object’ of his affections, so he becomes melancholic in this realisation of his loss that he refuses to mourn (or let go of). Even though he cannot attain love from his ‘object’ and has to supply it to himself, he is still attached to the idea of his unattainable ‘object’ and this attachment to this idea of this ‘object’ colours everything he sees around him, sometimes manifesting itself in extreme frustration or even hate. Butler (1997, p. 168) describes this process of self-directed love as the “lover” (ego) “turn[ing] back upon it[him]self” and says that the ‘lover’ is actually defined by this process and would not exist without his melancholic attachment, implying that he needs to manufacture this loss (or create the myth!) in order to define his true identity for himself! This has interesting connotations when this framework is applied to the psyche of a nation.

Could Britain’s loss of Empire (the true object of its affection) be expressing itself as a self-love (narcissism) that is manifesting in a form of frustrated nationalism? James offers us another clue when in Greatest Empire he writes:

Britain’s only hope is to seek shelter behind America, which means walking into the jaws of its enemy. Such is the colonial and anti-imperialist struggle of British capital. In addition, it faces the British proletariat at home, the most cohesive, powerfully organized, and most politically confident proletariat in the world. (James 1943)

Of course, as already discussed, the Empire was already shrinking under an emerging American imperialism. But perhaps it was the British proletariat that grew to define the essence of true Britishness for James because in the same piece, he later writes:

The Britain that will emerge from even a victorious war will be a Britain where the class struggle will be fought to a finish, until either a fascist Britain attaches itself as a Mussolinian satellite to some great imperialist power; or a socialist Britain which gives “Merrie England” to the masses of the British people and makes it possible for them to add their great contributions to human civilization. (James 1943)

Here, James attaches great importance to the potential of an ideological uprising of the British worker. Kumar (2003, p. 52) notes that the rise of the Labour Movement in the first half of the twentieth century actually served to bring the “parts of the United Kingdom together more comprehensively than any other party or movement”. Kumar surmises that the Labour Movement gaining its ‘spiritual’ energy from the Scottish and Welsh heartlands of steel and coal mining and not from English towns allowed it, via its geographical diversity, to unite workers from all over the country. However, I feel that there could be an argument to be made about a Labour Movement that had actually emerged as a reaction to the coloniality of ‘Englishness’, which had always been associated with the imperial ruling classes. So, the movement towards inwardness due to the gradual loss of Empire could have just exacerbated an already prevailing sense of English ‘colonial administration’ of the working classes, against which they united, resisted and formed a wider Labour Movement across the UK. I think it is clear that the British Empire had always been an ‘English’ project in which Scotland, Wales and Ireland were implicitly thought of as ‘colonies’. However, the decline of the Empire enabled the workers from these countries with their economic counterparts in England to gain renewed agency as a British proletariat that was inspired and bolstered by an international Labour Movement. Was this the beginnings of James’ ‘negation of the negation’? Kumar goes on to suggest that by the mid-twentieth century when Britain’s industrial force had begun to wane, the kingdoms within the UK started to look out more for their own interests, as nationalism in these areas began to ferment. Kumar then argues that because of the decline of Empire, ‘Englishness’ was no longer able to exist synonymously with ‘Britishness’ and was forced to stand alone as a distinct political and cultural entity.

Can we now re-frame Britain’s ‘melancholic attachment’ to its imperial past as a frustrated (and frustrating) form of British Nationalism that is desperate to hang on to its closest ‘colonies’ despite their growing resistance?²⁹ The devolution settlements agreed under the auspices of the European Convention of Human Rights and incorporated into our 1998 Human Rights Act, do, in this light, resemble an English ‘colonial administration’ that is keen to keep its territories but needs to cede some of its powers in order to do so. Perhaps we can push this further to suggest that contemporary British Nationalism is itself an expression of that melancholia.

So, in order to existentially justify the UK’s British Nationalism (melancholia) or ‘social unity’, Europe has become the site of conflict or ‘(ideological) war’ that has allowed Britain to assert its imperial defensive agency (protecting its borders).³⁰ In the recent European Referendum,³¹ which asked British voters whether they wanted to remain in or leave the European Union, we saw this melancholia very clearly. If we remember that the melancholic ‘lover’ is forced to “turn back upon [him]self” in order to compensate for his loss (in our case, of Empire) and crucially he can determine his existence only from this inversion, we can see that this type of British Nationalism needed to create a ‘war’. It needed to fabricate a conflict with the idea of the European Union in order to justify its very existence. Arguably led but definitely initiated by the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), the war metaphor was indeed forcefully used in the visual form (amongst similar verbal rhetoric) of the now infamous UKIP poster of queuing refugees (Stewart and Mason 2016). The poster echoed both Enoch Powell’s 1968 Rivers of Blood speech (Powell 2007 [1968]) and Margaret Thatcher’s fear of being “swamped by people of a different culture” (Socialist Worker 2002)³² as well as visually recalling Nazi wartime propaganda. It is outside of the scope of this chapter to provide an in-depth analysis of the Referendum campaign³³ but I will point out how it could perhaps be used to illustrate James’ vision of dialectical change in terms of creating a deceptive ‘social unity’.

Brexit and Dialectical Materialism

Since the British state is no longer an Empire, it has had to seek existential agency from somewhere else. So, now the twenty-first-century British state is negated by the ideological ‘war’ (conflict) over the European Union (indeterminate ‘being’).³⁴ The state then seeks to bring its universality of ‘complete democracy’ into existence and is thus mediated by a bourgeois bureaucracy (ruling elite, and the first negation). It is at this point that the state can be considered a ‘something’ as it gains self-awareness via its ‘spirit’ bureaucracy. The bureaucracy then creates a ‘bureaucratic deception’ of ‘social unity’ for the sole purpose of enabling it to administer the state’s universality. This bureaucratic deception is in our case, British Nationalism, which is a synthetic representation of a ‘social unity’ that used wartime imagery to engender an unpleasant form of patriotism that has been dubbed “nasty” (Tomkiw 2016) in certain sections of the media.³⁵ However, this deceptive representation of ‘social unity’ masked a ‘colonial administration’ of its people that echoed an irretrievable past imperial administration.³⁶ It is important to note that the bureaucrats behind the deception used this melancholic British Nationalism to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment in mainly the working classes (Brown 2016). At this point, James would have hoped that the British working classes would have risen up to create a ‘Socialist Britain’ to action a ‘negation of the negation’. This would have been the second negation.³⁷ However, had he been here today, James’ hopes would have been dashed by the fact that the working classes had suffered the most from Austerity (NatCen Social Research 2016; Hinton and Redclift 2009), in so doing, draining their resilience and as a result they were particularly susceptible to the bureaucratic deception of ‘social unity’ and were not able to rise up against it.³⁸ Elsewhere, (Clennon 2016b), I write how omission of a full and honest history of the UK³⁹ in its mainstream education system prevented a widespread full appreciation of its existing, national, historical and multicultural stakeholdership.⁴⁰ In effect, the working classes were victims of ‘colonial administration’ by a neoliberal education system that was designed to facilitate market separation and ‘social death’ (Graeber 2006). Karl Marx predicted this when he wrote in 1870:

The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. (Marx 1975[1870])

Although Marx describes the antagonism between the English and the Irish (representing the English colonial attitude of the British project), he perfectly sums up contemporary ‘colonial administration’ and its encouraged synthetic anti-immigrant sentiment of the masses during the Referendum. Marx continues his prescience to describe its representation:

This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this. (original italics)

As implied in the previous chapter, this sublation seems to have already taken place by the introduction of neoliberalism and its global institutional controls, as a ‘democratic’ function of our contemporary state. It could also be argued that the much awaited workers’ revolution has been co-opted by a new ruling elite – the oligarchs of the global market (i.e. the transnational corporations or “masters of the universe” (McGee 2010, p. 129)). I will explore the idea of a sublated workers’ revolution in the next chapter.

Multiculturalism and Pan Africanism, to be continued.…

I would like to finish this chapter by briefly introducing the context of ‘social unity’ for ethnic minority groups. Elsewhere (Clennon 2016b), I have discussed how the neoliberalising effects of market isolation and dislocation have thrown ethnic minorities into the same competitive market as other groups. This has meant that many Brexit voters⁴¹ from ethnic groups allied themselves to the white working classes in a mistaken belief that they shared the same market opportunities. I will discuss this in more detail in the next chapter because superficially ethnic minority groups did suffer from the same ‘colonial administration’ as that of the working classes, more generally. However, the pervasive element of racial discrimination had, in fact, made their experiences more severe because there was a disproportionate effect of Austerity on their communities (Khan 2015).

However, to discern the immediate effects of British Nationalism on ethnic minorities, Mark Hamilton, the head of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) said that in the wake of the Referendum vote there had been a marked increase in reports of race hate crimes in the UK. Rather tellingly, Mr Hamilton was careful to say, “I do not believe it suddenly emerged. Some people felt it gave licence to vent views or behaviour” (Dodd 2016). Here we can infer from Mr Hamilton’s statement an acknowledgement of pre-existing racism in Britain, or in other words a ‘social unity’ based on ‘colonial administration’ that was exacerbated by the rise of a synthetic British Nationalism.

The issue of ‘social unity’ and its deception, in BME⁴² (‘black’) communities is as contentious an issue as it is for the general population in the UK. I will now briefly set the scene by introducing two case examples for exploring these dynamic complexities on the ground before returning to a fuller discussion of the issues and the case examples in Chapter 6.

In my community activism in Manchester, I have found that there is not a natural consensus of what ‘social unity’ means beyond the shared experience of racial discrimination. But this is not a surprise. Elsewhere, (Clennon 2016d), I write at length that the UK’s long-established immigrant communities were homogenised as ‘black’ for the politically expedient purposes of integration with the white working classes. Since the inception of this state-endorsed ‘othering’, the different ethnic communities (Sub-Saharan Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, South Asians, East African Asians and the Chinese) within this grouping were never really afforded the time and space within UK society to organically acknowledge and bridge their differences. What I mean here is that they were all lumped together and targeted by structural inequalities in very similar ways. This has historically resulted in these communities being pitted against each other to compete for local authority funding and support. Some communities have definitely been more successful at the competition than others. Even though the communities clumped together under the BME banner have faced very similar ethnic discriminations, each group has responded differently to their structural challenges due to their differing levels of cultural capital and cultural resilience. So, a ‘social unity’ of ethnic minorities without a full appreciation of the market system that keeps them separated in the way Marx astutely identified between the English and the Irish, as Fanon would say, would be irrational. In Manchester, for example, with the more recent arrival of immigrants from Somalia, intercultural challenges have arisen between their communities and some of the more established ‘black’ communities because of the former’s triple whammy of Arab-ness, blackness and their Muslim faith. The complex intersection between these multiple identities⁴³ has meant that these communities have had to work very hard to understand the impact of these identities on their wider relations with other communities.⁴⁴

In Manchester, organisations such as MEaP (Making Education a Priority), an education-led social enterprise working with a consortium of black-led supplementary schools (Clennon 2016a),⁴⁵ has expanded its network of schools to work with Somali schools with the express purpose of aiding intercultural understanding and cooperation. MEaP hopes that in coming together to explore ways in which local economic opportunities can be generated through their joint provision of community education and wider stakeholder partnership building, an organic intercultural understanding will develop out of a shared community interest.

However, the Manchester-based grass-roots organisation that engenders the intellectual challenges around BME ‘social unity’ more than most is the PAC45 Foundation (PAC45 Foundation 2016b). Formed in 2015, from the members of the FONJ community forum,⁴⁶ the Foundation was named after the 5th Pan African Congress that was held in Manchester in 1945. Manchester historian, Simon Katzenellenboggen explains the significance of this meeting:

I’ve always seen it as a very important turning point, not just in Africa’s history, but in the European Empires too. It was an important step towards the end of those imperial powers in Africa, so it’s imperative for everyone, not just those of African descent, to be aware of the conference. In addition to knowing about our imperial past, we also need to face up to the consequences of what that rule meant to Africans. Most people would agree that it was an extremely significant moment, because it was the first time that people were beginning to take notice of what Africans were saying. Unlike the four earlier congresses, the fifth one involved people from the African Diaspora; not just Africans, but Afro-Caribbeans and Afro-Americans. (BBC 2014, para 2)

The PAC45 Foundation has worked hard to revive the debate around Pan Africanism and its possible meaning to grass-roots communities. In its inaugural 2015 conference, PAC45 Foundation (2016b) explored the history of the Pan African Congress, Trades Unions and Grassroots, Women in the Pan African Movement, Youth and Pan Africanism and Pan Africanism in the 21st Century. In Chapter 6, I will dialogue closely with some of the issues the conference raised, as they go to the heart of defining the ideology of what ‘social unity’ looks like in African and Caribbean diaspora communities in the UK. The Foundation’s grass-roots activities, so far, have included organising a series of events under the banner BlackLivesMatter, Manchester (Britton 2016). Like their US counterparts, BlackLivesMatter, Manchester has sought to highlight the disproportionate state brutality against BME people, particularly in police custody (Inquest 2016) but it also has sought to highlight the structural discrimination faced in other areas such as employment, health and education.

Conclusion

Although James was very interested in Pan Africanism,⁴⁷ he believed that for Pan Africanism to work, a new system had to be developed:

What Nyerere says is that African socialism must break up all the remnants of the system that we have inherited and institute something new. And then this young man goes on to say, “Valid as Marx’s description was, it bears little similarity to Kenya today.” On colonialism and so forth, they make it very clear that Marxism is something that Marx had to say about the advanced countries, it had no relation whatever to the colonial territories now that they have become independent. The only relation they had to Marxism was to call themselves Socialism. But I was able to show that Nyerere has, in discovering the necessity of breaking up this system which he has inherited from the old imperialists, has discovered the same thing that Lenin after six years was telling the Russians. (James 1973)

I think that trying to reconceptualise a Pan Africanism that has real agency outside of the present system of globalisation and domestic ‘colonial administration’ is a very challenging prospect, especially if we are to achieve a ‘social unity’ for BME communities that is not ‘deceptive’. I have a feeling that when James advocated for the black and white workers to unite, in our UK context, he would have envisaged the forging of an inclusive British Nationalism that was immune to the sort of neoliberal divisive tendencies that Marx had observed. However, for British Nationalism to become inclusive, it would first need to be dismantled and taken away from the ruling elite as a tool of bureaucratic democracy. Even if this were to be achieved, the question remains: What would (New) British Nationalism have to do with Pan Africanism?

In the next chapter, I will explore how James’ hoped-for workers’ revolution has been sublated into a UK market economy but also how a new form of ‘revolution’ is struggling to assert itself in the present UK Labour Party and Labour Movement. The leadership contest in the Labour Party, in the wake of a Brexit vote, asked important questions not just about the representative nature of our ‘social unity’ but also its mechanisms of ‘colonial administration’ and the potential opportunities for its dismantling.