British Black Power: The anti-imperialism of political blackness and the problem of nativist socialism

Introduction: British Black Power’s re-emergence

It’s not documented anywhere. There may be a few bits and pieces, but that’s all. ¹

Darcus Howe’s reflection in the 1980s on the history of the British Black Panther Movement (BPM) was also indicative of the wider history of British Black Power (BBP). At this historical juncture BBP ran the risk of being forgotten before it was ever truly remembered. Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s the British state’s racist approach to New Commonwealth immigration and the racial discrimination and violence endured by Britain’s ‘coloured’ immigrants had brought forth the UK’s own Black Power movement. Adapting and transforming the discourse and practice of its more famous US counterpart, BBP was at the forefront of British anti-racism. Seeking to unite African, Caribbean and Asian immigrants, BBP operated through a diverse set of activists and groups, who created a ‘Black’ political identity and formed community-based responses to racial inequality. These actions brought BBP activists to the attention of the British state, media and the wider public. ²

Four decades on, the history of BBP has garnered renewed scholarly interest (Angelo, 2009; Bunce & Field, 2013; Ford, 2016; Johnson, 2014; Waters, 2018; Wild, 2016). These historical studies explore how US conceptions of Black Power, and its ideas of ‘black is beautiful’ and ‘black self-determination’, were diffused and disseminated in the British context of the late 1960s. These studies highlight how BBP was part of the larger global reach of Black Power (Shilliam, 2015; Slate, 2012), and how empire, New Commonwealth immigration and Powellism gave Black Power over here a distinctive British accent. Thus far, in British sociology, discussion of BBP has only emerged as part of discussions and analyses of anti-racism (Shukra, 1999; Virdee, 2014).

This article aims to recover elements of BBP’s history in order to intervene in three debates about the sociology of post-colonial Britain. The first intervention focuses on the history of BBP and its embrace of political blackness. Political blackness, and its history of a collective Black identity, has become divisive (Alexander, 2018). This is not simply an academic debate, as Olaloku-Teriba (2018) outlines: the current distrust of cross-racial forms of solidarity in UK anti-racist activist circles partly centres on a historical contestation of political blackness. These positions view the era of political blackness, at best, as outdated and at worst, emblematic of ethnic erasure. This article will highlight how the history of BBP complicates the debate about political blackness. This revolves around understanding the anti-imperialism at the heart of political blackness and why elements of its sense of anti-imperial and anti-racist solidarity should be recovered in an increasingly racially divisive Britain.

Second, the article recovers BBP’s theorization of race and class in order to shed light on our neoliberal social order and its current racial convulsions. In understanding how racialization was key to understanding the dynamic of Britain’s class struggle, and elite manufactured divisions amongst Britain’s white and non-white members of the working class, BBP’s theorization of race and class prefigured that of Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, and Roberts, that ‘race is the modality in which class is lived’ and ‘the medium in which class relations are experienced’ (1976/2013, p. 394). BBP groups understood that race was not supplementary to class relations but that class itself was reproduced by capital as a racialized experience and used to underpin class domination. Or as Shilliam (2018, p. 180) pithily put its, BBP understood that ‘class is race’. This article will highlight how BBP’s theorizations of racial capitalism were specifically located at the historical juncture between the fall of British social democracy and the rise of British neoliberalism. Recovering BBP’s reflection on this shift will help us to understand, comprehend and respond to contemporary concerns about the ‘white working class’ and those ‘left behind’ in the age of neoliberal globalization and Brexit.

Finally, the article will draw out the implications of BBP’s theorization of the racialization of the British state for the contemporary return of ‘socialism’ in Britain. Socialism, in the guise of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, has found rejuvenated support in the UK. In the wake of austerity, the appetite for a radical social democracy, and its ideas of national rights to welfare, housing and employment, at the expense of neoliberal market fundamentalism, has returned to Britain. But questions surround ‘Corbynism’ on issues such as immigration controls, border policing and the dubious linking of immigration to low wages (Dale, 2017). The article seeks to not only use the history of BBP to historically contextualize some of these questions but also to recover a wider understanding of justice that challenges the fixing of socialist horizons with the nation-state and nativist (racialized) forms of welfare.

To achieve this the article is split into four constituent parts. First, I examine how an idea of political blackness underpinned BBP and differentiated it from its US counterpart. Second, I highlight how the collective Black identity of BBP enabled it to locate its anti-racist politics within a wider politics of anti-imperialism across the Third World. Third, I highlight how this in turn fed into BBP’s retheorization of class struggle in Britain and its critique of nativist social democracy. To conclude, I reflect on the history of BBP in relation to contemporary debates about political blackness, racial neoliberalism and the return of social democracy.

A note on method

The bulk of the research for this article comes from archival research at the George Padmore Institute (London), the Olive Morris Collection, Lambeth Archives (London) and the Institute for Race Relations (London). Although the analysis does draw on archived oral history, the approach taken here resembles Bloom and Martin’s approach to the US Black Panther Party’s history. This approach focuses on using primary documents rather than ‘retrospective accounts decades after the fact – with memories shaped by intervening events, interests and hearsay’ (Bloom & Martin, 2013, p. 10). Drawing on the newspapers, pamphlets and campaigning materials of BBP groups, this article aims to revisit how BBP projected its ideology outwards to its own audiences and constituencies. Moreover, it seeks to highlight how BBP narrated ideas of political blackness and political solidarity, its theorization of anti-racism and anti-imperialism and its ideas about socialism to Black communities during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This is especially true of the various newspapers of BBP groups, which were the primary mouthpieces of the movement during this period. This of course reveals a politics of the archive, whereby documents are themselves already collections of editorial decisions and possible exclusions. But it is hoped that this article and the plethora of recent historical research surrounding BBP serve as a point of future debate and historical contestation rather than historical foreclosure.

British Black Power and political blackness

I wasn’t surprised to see militant African/Caribbean youth embracing the call. These youth were second-generation and weren’t about to accept the condescension and abuse their parents had endured. No surprise there. What did surprise me was to hear Black Power resonating and to see the raised fists in the Asian communities … (Carmichael & Ekwueme, 2005, p. 576)

US Black Power pioneer Stokely Carmichael’s visit to London in July 1967 is credited as being foundational to the formation of BBP. Britain had its dawn of Black Power with Michael X’s formation of the Racial Adjustment Action Society (RASS) in the wake of his visit to Britain in 1965, and the establishment of the United Coloured People’s Association in June 1967 (UCPA). However, Carmichael’s visit created an explosion of discussion around the idea of BBP (Bunce & Field, 2010). This saw the emergence of the BPM in 1968, the Black Unity and Freedom Party (BUFP) in 1970, the Black Liberation Front (BLF) in 1971 and other Black Power groups in urban centres such as London, Manchester and Birmingham. ³ The US Black Power movement heavily influenced BBP, with groups such as the BPM taking their name from their US counterparts and the set reading for such groups being ‘Eldridge Cleaver, Angela Davis …’ and ‘Stokely Carmichael’. ⁴ However, as Carmichael’s reflections on his speech at the Dialectics of Liberation Conference highlight, BBP resonated beyond the British African/Caribbean community. This marks a distinction between BBP and its US counterpart. Although BBP groups differed on ideological prerogatives, (with some groups emerging out of one another due to ideological disagreements on issues such as cultural nationalism or the role of Marxism-Leninism in Black Power), most of the prominent BBP groups were ‘politically Black’.

Political blackness has a distinct link to anti-racism in the UK, having emerged in the late 1960s in reaction to the state racism endured by New Commonwealth communities. The British state had been confronted with the faces and lives of its former, and then still existing, empire when it had drawn on the human capital of the Commonwealth during postwar reconstruction. The postwar economy had seen the establishment of a racialized division of labour on the UK mainland. New Commonwealth citizens often occupied the bottom rung of the labour market, regardless of their previous class trajectory, as white male workers moved into higher paying skilled manual roles that informally discriminated to keep non-white labour out of such jobs. British society’s insidious racism against its non-white citizens had also resulted in informal colour bars in workplaces and unions, and racial discrimination in housing and policing (Virdee, 2014, pp. 98–119). This economic discrimination was accompanied with violence against migrant communities with flashpoints such as white-on-black rioting in Nottingham and Notting Hill in the 1950s leading to ‘nigger hunting’ and ‘Paki bashing’ in the 1960s. This spectre of racial violence would become even more concrete with the amalgamation of racist groups under the banner of the National Front in 1967 (Sivanandan, 2008, p. 107).

Perturbed by the effects of ‘coloured immigration’ on British society, with race riots and debates about cultural essentialism, and a slowdown in economic growth, the state pursued a series of racist Immigration Acts (1962, 1968, 1971) designed to limit New Commonwealth immigration. This state racism peaked with the 1971 Immigration Act and its move towards partiality, which effectively linked immigration to the ability to trace Anglo-Saxon heredity (Sivanandan, 2008, pp. 65–90). Through immigration control or racial discrimination New Commonwealth citizens were excluded from gaining access to the socio-economic and political safeguards of British social democracy. The failure of the 1965 Race Relations Act to secure protection against discrimination, or remedy the unfairness of mainland Britain’s racial division of labour, alongside the complicity of the two main political parties in legislating against coloured immigration, forced New Commonwealth communities into pursuing a more radical political response to racial oppression (Wild, 2016). ⁵ Under the signifier of a collective ‘Black’ political subject, which did not override ethnic, religious or national identities, activists attempted to create a common political identity that could facilitate cooperation between New Commonwealth communities in the pursuit of racial justice. As the legendary director of the Institute for Race Relations, Ambalavaner Sivanandan, recalled, this was a time when ‘Black was the colour of our politics not the colour of our skin’ (Owsu, 2016, p. 12).

BBP outwardly projected ‘political blackness’, with groups such as the UCPA offering early definitions of the concept. The main tenet of such political blackness was that the common experience of colonial rule and subsequent state racism in the UK united the members of the African, Caribbean and Asian migrant communities as Black peoples. The UCPA referred to its members as ‘Black Brothers and Sisters from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas’ ⁶ and argued that history was now being driven by the formation of two ‘irreconcilable camps’ between those from ‘Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas’ and ‘Western imperialist’ nations. ⁷ Political blackness was also central to the Marxist-Leninist BUFP, which emerged out of the UCPA, and the anti-vanguardist BPM. Even the more Afrocentric-focused BLF defined ‘Black people as all non-white peoples of African, Asian, Caribbean and Latin American origin who share the common enemy, and common oppressor’, in a manifesto called ‘Revolutionary Black Nationalism’. ⁸

BBP’s political blackness was thus a response to the state’s racialization of New Commonwealth communities as ‘coloured people’. ⁹ This allowed BBP groups to address the overarching racist structures of British society. This was firstly premised on arguing that the colonial constitution of Britain’s division of labour, which had helped to develop modern Britain, gave Black Britons a reparative right to stay in Britain. As the UCPA made clear in 1967:

It was the slavery of the Black man that provided the capital for the Industrial Revolution of the West. It was the Black sweat which built the White Civilization. It was the flow of Black blood which saved Britain in her World Wars just as the same Black blood is saving America in Vietnam (Shame!). It was the exploitation of Black lands which made Britain great. Black essence has for centuries been the pulse, life and blood of White people on this isle. If the accumulated wealth of Britain is shared among the Black immigrants here, Britain will still be a long way indebted to her Black benefactors. Yet, we are expected to be grateful for partaking the mere crumbs, which fall from the table of debtors. How dare they? ¹⁰

BBP groups subsequently created grassroot community campaigns and institutional initiatives against racist immigration controls, police brutality, racist discrimination in the workplace, housing and education and the threat of racial violence on behalf of all of Britain’s non-white communities. ¹¹ Although small numerically, with groups such as the BPM made up of the tens rather than hundreds, BBP groups were often able to mobilize hundreds and thousands from wider local and national communities for rallies and demonstrations. As Angelo (2018) notes, the rate of activism by groups such as the BPM was high with the staging of over a 100 protests between 1969 and 1973 and over 70 cultural events during this period.

This activism was aided through BBP groups making alliances with other anti-racist groups in New Commonwealth communities who also embraced political blackness. The Indian Workers’ Association (IWA) Birmingham Branch, under the leadership of Jagmohan Joshi, openly embraced a politically black identity in the late 1960s. Joshi regularly collaborated with BBP groups, sending IWA members, often in the thousands, to attend BBP demonstrations (Wild, 2008, p. 100). The IWA was also one of the founding members of the Black People’s Alliance (BPA), which brought together over 50 militant Afro and Asian-led groups into a unified organization that campaigned and demonstrated together (Waters, 2018, p. 74). The BPA included BBP groups such as the BPM but also the Pakistani Workers’ Association, the Pakistan Democratic Front, the West Indian Association, the Caribbean Socialist Union, the Group for Nigerian Revolution, the Afro-Asian Liberation Front and the Black Regional Action Movement. Although these groups differed on certain aspects of ideology, and certainly were not all Black Power advocates, they were united on campaigning under a politically black umbrella (Wild, 2008, pp. 133, 214).

Part of the explanation of why South Asian anti-racist groups, such as the IWA, embraced political blackness can be traced back to the British state’s homogenization of New Commonwealth citizens. South Asian Commonwealth citizens were regularly demonized as the ultimate religious and cultural other to Britain’s white, Christian population. ¹² South Asian Commonwealth citizens, and the racist views of them, were also readily mobilized in discussions about ‘Black’ immigration. The classic examples of this are the infamous general election campaign in Smethwick (Birmingham) 1964, where the Conservative candidate, Peter Griffiths, had successfully run on the most racist platform in British history. This had seen Tory campaigners stoking racial tensions between the local white population and non-white community with the slogan ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour vote Labour’ even though Griffiths and his supporters’ main focus of vitriol was the local Sikh community (Buettner, 2014).

The association of South Asians with blackness can also be found in Enoch Powell’s infamous 1968 Rivers of Blood speech, whose epithet about the black man holding the whip over the white man is largely underpinned by an association of South Asian immigration into Britain with the disorder being brought to American white society by the US Black Power movement. Shilliam (2018, p. 96) describes how South Asian Commonwealth citizens were ‘blackened’. This saw South Asians viewed through the trope of the Black slave as undeserving of the safeguards of modernity and potentially a threat to the benefits of the modern nation. South Asians thus represented a fundamental threat, not only to the resources of the modern welfare state, but to the ‘preservation of the English way of life in the post-colonial era’. Given this process, it becomes far clearer why Joshi’s IWA invited Malcolm X to visit Smethwick in 1965 and drew rhetorical parallels between racism in Birmingham, England with racism in Birmingham, Alabama.

Although the logic of BBP’s political blackness was the narration of the common experience of ‘Black’ subjects, this did not stop such groups attending to specific forms of racism suffered by certain communities. BBP groups regularly reported on the politics of the African diaspora with the BPM publishing Kwame Nkrumah’s ‘Message to the Black People in Britain’ ¹³ and groups such as the BLF promoted Pan-Africanism. BBP groups also campaigned against police brutality faced by those within the African diaspora. However, groups such as the UCPA and BPM also created links with London’s Pakistani Progressive Party (PPP) and the Pakistani Workers’ Union (PWU). This allowed them to focus on the prevalence of ‘Paki bashing’ that arose in the late 1960s (Ashe, Virdee, & Brown, 2016). The murder of the ‘Black Brother Tosir Ali’ ¹⁴ marked a tipping point, with BPM members helping to form street patrols in Asian communities in London’s East End:

It was about getting justice with the police. The police were more racist than people on the street. If you had people beat, who did you call? Paki bashing or whatever black bashing you couldn’t go to the police. … We would dress in Panther gear and go round and patrol the street … ¹⁵

BBP’s political blackness also allowed room for women to narrate the links between sexism, gender, race and class. As Bryan, Dadzie, and Scafe (2018) note, although BBP suffered from sexism, it did become a foundational moment for Black British Feminism. Groups such as the BPM, which by 1970 was headed by a woman (Althea Jones-LeCointe), and the BLF and BUFP argued against male domination. These groups also contained activists such as Gerlin Bean and Olive Morris, who would become foundational figures in future groups such as Brixton Black Women’s Group and the Organization of Women of African and Asian Decent. The BLF and BUFP also ran columns in their newspapers on the role of women in revolutionary struggle and celebrated figures such as Harriet Tubman, Angela Davis, Kathleen Cleaver, Lelia Khaled and Madame Binh. Just as BBP’s political blackness allowed its groups to draw unity, it also focused on specific issues for specific New Commonwealth communities. BBP’s form of political blackness allowed its women to draw commonality and solidarity across New Commonwealth communities. The BUFP, for example, started to map out the intersectional forms of oppression women from New Commonwealth communities faced because of British state racism. A 1971 BUFP pamphlet, created by the Black Women’s Action Committee of the BUFP, entitled ‘Black Women Speak Out’, argued that Black women suffered in three ways through being ‘poor’, ‘black’, and ‘women’. It highlighted how the class, race and gender structures of capitalist society, which often left Black women in low paying, menial jobs, subservient to white women, whilst suffering from sexism from both white and black males, combined to render Black women as the ‘oppressed of the oppressed’. The pamphlet made demands of white men and women, and Black men, to recognize the oppression of Black women and asserted that ‘equality of women is a progressive demand and all oppressed people who too want their freedom must understand this’. ¹⁶

Yet, BBP’s political blackness was not a seamless process of Afro-Asian solidarity. BBP’s conception of political blackness appears to have partly travelled from the Caribbean to the UK due to the former’s context of forming political solidarity between ex-slave (Afro-Caribbean) and ex-indentured (Indo-Caribbean) populations in Caribbean nations such as Trinidad and Guyana (Sivanandan, 2008, p. 109). Trinidad’s Black Power Movement’s opposition to the regime of Eric Williams in 1970 was partly organized around political blackness and Afro-Asian unity (see Nicholls, 1971). ¹⁷ It is no coincidence that middle class Afro-Trinidadians such as Darcus Howe and future BPM leader Althea Jones-LeCointe, whose sisters had attended the meetings of the National Union of Freedom Fighters who would play a key part in Trinidad’s Black Power Movement (Johnson, 2014; Waters, 2018, p. 41), were at the centre of advocating a politically black form of Black Power in Britain. The Asian context of the Caribbean in part explains how Asian-Caribbeans such as Roy Swah (UCPA) and Ansel Wong (BLF), who was of African and Chinese decent, were at the heart of BBP groups and why Indo-Guyanese Cheddi Jagan, the then opposition leader of Guyana, would help lead a BPA march in the late 1960s. ¹⁸

Notwithstanding BBP’s adoption of this framework for Afro-Asian solidarity, not all New Commonwealth communities embraced Black Power. BBP groups were predominately made up of Afro-Caribbean, and some Asian-Caribbean activists, and contained far fewer African and Asian activists. BBP publications were also permeated by an Afrocentric focus, leaving Asian imagery and history underrepresented (Waters, 2018, pp. 75–76). Whilst BBP groups such as the BPM contained high-ranking and upwardly mobile South Asian activists from the sub-continent, such as Farrukh Dhondy, Mala Sen, Ajoy Ghose and future Communist Party of India (Marxist) Central Committee member Suneet Chopra, the Black Panther name, and its association with US politics, put working class South Asians off joining the BPM. ¹⁹ Although able to make links with radical class-based South Asian groups such as the IWA and groups in the BPA, BBP was unable to draw in the wider South Asian communities directly to the cause of BBP. ²⁰ These first generation South Asian communities from the sub-continent were more likely to fight racial discrimination through industrial militancy, community self-defence and protests around religious freedom without fully embracing the revolutionary anti-imperialism of BBP (Wild, 2008, p. 241). Yet, by the late 1970s this would change, with the emergence of the Asian Youth Movements (AYM) in the Midlands and in Northern English cities. The second generation of British Asians of sub-continental descent, who had grown up during the struggles against the Immigration Acts, workplace discrimination and racial violence, would openly embrace elements of the US Black Panther Party and chiefly the political blackness of the BBP era. Ramamurthy (2013, pp. 65–69) traces the interlinking of anti-racism at home and anti-imperialism abroad by the AYM in the late 1970s and early 1980s through a politically black identity directly linked to BBP.

The ethnic divisions and conflicts between communities which made up the politically Black subject were sometimes acknowledged and examined in BBP publications. In 1971, the BPM newspaper contained an article called ‘The Meaning of Racism’. The article attempted to highlight to its readers the differences between structural racism and individual acts of racism. It prominently featured a section entitled ‘Is African/Asian conflict racism?’ This narrated racial conflict between African and Asian people ‘as defensive on both sides’ and between ‘subject people’. This form of conflict was distinguished from ‘white racism’, which was a geopolitically and geo-economically ‘oppressive, exploiting and dehumanising monster’. The BPM further argued that white racism, and the conflicts engendered between African and Asian people, were the result of the ‘system’ and ‘that system is CAPITALISM’. ²¹ The BPM’s narration of Afro-Asian conflict in the UK highlighted that in addition to a pragmatic politics of anti-racist solidarity at home, what underpinned the politically ‘Black’ identity of BBP was a wider politics of anti-imperialism.

Anti-imperialism: From the Third World into the belly of the beast

BBP’s embrace of political blackness was not simply a reflection of the divisions of UK race relations but was also informed by a shared history of colonial exploitation and neo-imperialism in the Third World. This centred on what W. E. B Du Bois had famously called the problem of the 20th century: ‘the colour-line’. This was the dark meridian along which Western imperialism had divided the world into blocs of light and dark races across Asia, Africa and the Americas. In the midst of decolonization, and driven by mass movements and the failures of capitalist development, the ‘darker nations’ of the Third World were drawn loosely together through a shared history of being the victims of Western imperialism and continuing targets of Western neo-imperialism. Through organizations such as the Non-Aligned Movement, G77 and UN Conference on Trade and Development, the Third World nations embarked upon a ‘Project’ to remodel geo-economic and geopolitical structures towards liberation and justice for those whose subjection had helped create the bounty of capitalist modernity (Prashad, 2007).

The idea of ‘Black Power’ in Britain was inherently hard to define, with BBP groups riffing on their US counterparts’ ideas of community control, cultural identity and self-defence against racial violence (Wild, 2016). But it was the global context of anti-imperialism which underpinned BBP’s sense of political blackness and gave an overall rationale to Black Power in Britain. Black people ‘over here’ were literality taken to be Third World people from ‘over there’ and, much like Malcolm X had done with the Afro-American struggle in the US, BBP reoriented its struggle for minority rights at home with the struggles of the global majority abroad. The ‘Black’ signifier of political blackness functioned to plug BBP activism into a global circuit of anti-imperialist activity in the Third World. This rationale can be found from the UCPA’s definition of ‘Black Power’ as the ‘Revolutionary Slogan of the Most Oppressed Peoples of the Third World’. ²² Indeed, the BPM best summed up the anti-imperialism of BBP’s political blackness through their slogan that: ‘Black oppressed people all over the world are one’. ²³

This definition of Black Power saw BBP groups narrate their own politically black unity and anti-racist struggle within and through a wider understanding of resisting neo-imperialism. The UCPA offered its own theorization of racial capitalism showing the links between imperialism, capitalist exploitation and racism:

Imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism. Capitalism as described by Marx, through retaining its salient characteristics and its essence has transformed into imperialism i.e. Monopoly capitalism. And monopoly has grown out of colonial policy and the struggle for sources of raw materials, for the export of capital for the sphere of influence i.e. for the spheres of profitable deals. Alongside this imperialist expansion was increasing pauperization of America, Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America because imperialism ravaged the material wealth of the continents. … In the process of exploiting the three continents the doctrine of white supremacy i.e. RACISM had always been the guiding light of imperialism. ²⁴

BBP groups built upon this theorization of the link between the colour-line and capitalist exploitation through theorizing neo-imperialism. By the early 1970s BBP groups were narrating and warning against the neo-imperial foundation of what we have come to call neoliberal globalization. The BUFP, for example, wrote about the oncoming outsourcing of capitalist production and expansion of super-exploitation in the Third World through the lens of capital’s declining profitability, ideological assaults against the social democratic model in the West and neo-imperial intervention against Third World governments abroad:

We see these giant exploitive capitalist monsters using the world as their oyster. They can jump off any sinking American or European ship and land firmly on the solid soil of the Third World countries, where they not only mercilessly exploit the workers of these countries, but also set up extensive networks intelligence and actively initiate espionage. Already Ford, Leyland, Volkswagen and other less well-known motor car manufacturers have entrenched themselves in Black people’s countries. ²⁵

The interlinking of the domestic anti-racist struggles in Britain and anti-imperialism permeated the various BBP groups’ publications. The newspapers and news bulletins of BBP groups reported on racism and anti-racism in the UK and juxtaposed such stories with international news on Ethiopia, Jamaica, the Black Power movements in the US and Trinidad, Dalit activism in India, apartheid South Africa, the independence struggles of Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, Guinea Bissau, Angola and Mozambique, Aboriginal rights in Australia, and the US withdrawal from Vietnam, amongst others. Part of the rationale behind these stories was educative, providing readers with a cognitive map of the anti-imperial struggles across the Third World. Via these stories, readers were introduced to revolutionary actors such as the US Black Panther Party, Amilcar Cabral, Australian Aboriginal activist Bobby Sykes, Mozambique’s FRELIMO, the Black Panthers of Israel, the Dalit Panthers of India and the PLO in Palestine.

These stories also highlighted how racial oppression in Britain was directly linked with imperial oppression in the Third World. For example, in 1973 the BUFP ran a story in its newspaper on the exploitation of Filipino immigrant sewing workers in the UK, labelling them ‘Bonded Slaves’. At the bottom of the article, readers were instructed to turn a few pages to read about how such migrant workers were engendered by Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos and US neo-imperial intervention in the Philippines. ²⁶ This interlinking of contexts also informed BBP activism, with groups such as the BPM holding solidarity demonstrations that highlighted the struggles against racism in Britain and the repression of Black Power groups in the US and Trinidad, viewing these through the prism of anti-imperial struggle. ²⁷ The BLF and the BUFP also hosted Aboriginal rights activist Bobby Sykes on her visit to Britain and drew connections between BBP, ‘Australian Black Power’ and the global fight against white supremacy. This saw BBP protests outside Australia House in London in December 1972, in response to Sykes’s call to ‘internationalize the struggle’ against Australian state racism. ²⁸

Yet, BBP’s anti-imperialism allowed its groups to transcend simple binary definitions between First (white) vs Third (Black) World forms of oppression. A BLF pamphlet outlined this position by stating that the ‘oppression in our home countries’ was not only conducted by Western imperialist nation-states and multinational corporations, but also actively aided by subservient regimes in the Third World. It argued that in places such as India, the development of a native bourgeoisie ‘allied its interests’ with imperialist powers. ²⁹ This analytically flexible anti-imperialism also allowed certain BBP groups to discern links and solidarities with ‘white’ oppressed groups. The onset of the troubles in Northern Ireland was taken by the BPM and the BUFP as an anti-imperialist struggle synonymous with their own. ³⁰ The BPM pushed this sense of common struggle further by highlighting how the ‘grievances’ and ‘discrimination’ faced by the Catholic community in Northern Ireland in areas such as employment, housing, policing and education ‘are as much a regular feature of life of black communities as they are of life in the Bogside, Falls Rd., and New Lodge’. The BPM joined anti-internment demonstrations in London in 1972, parading a banner that read ‘The Black Panther Movement Stands in Total Solidarity with the Irish Liberation Struggle’. ³¹

The anti-imperialism of BBP is best demonstrated by the Afro-Asian tensions that arose during the Kenyan and Ugandan crises of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Kenyan leader Jorno Kenyatta and Uganda’s Idi Amin targeted their middle class East African Asian populations with restrictions of action or expulsion to cement their own political power. The Afrocentric focus of these actions, favouring Black Africans over Asian Africans, presented a challenge to the politically black unity of BBP. Groups such as the BPM would reroute such potential conflict into unity. This saw the BPM campaign for the rights of all ‘Black people’ to be British citizens through opposing the 1968 Immigration Act, which sought to limit the ability of Kenyan Asians to migrate to Britain. ³² This anti-imperial unity became clearer in 1973 when Idi Amin’s expulsion of Ugandan Asians forced groups such as the BPM to issue a special statement on its stance towards Amin’s regime and its effects on Afro-Asian relations in Britain (Wild, 2008, p. 232). Groups such as the BUFP offered even more clarity, arguing that ‘Black People have the right to live in Britain’. This was premised on a class analysis of the Ugandan crisis, that viewed the ‘British’ trained Amin as an imperialist collaborator. Amin’s expulsion of the petite bourgeois Ugandan Asians left the Ugandan ‘peasant and worker’ no better off and still under the yoke of British imperialism. The BUFP also linked the British state and media’s use of the crisis to a strategy of stoking racial tension between white and black citizens to divert their attention from capitalist restructuring within Britain. ³³ The BUFP’s narration of Amin and the plight of the Ugandan Asians highlights that the politically ‘Black’ identity of BBP was underpinned by wider politics of anti-imperialism. This global reading of anti-racist struggle facilitated BBP’s retheorization of the nature of race and class in Britain.

Nativist social democracy vs global socialism

BBP’s use of a collective Black identity not only facilitated a politics of national anti-racism and international solidarity against neo-imperialism, but also conjoined these struggles to reconceptualize how class struggle should be approached in Britain. Although critical of Britain’s socialist movements, which often saw issues of race and anti-racism as diversions from class struggle (Virdee, 2014, pp. 104–106), BBP groups were anti-capitalist and firm believers in the idea of revolutionary socialism. BBP groups thus took on board Marxist ideas of class struggle and retheorized such ideas to account for the relationship between imperialism, racism and revolution. ³⁴

The UCPA’s early reflections on these issues mirror the general tenor of how BBP approached the interrelationship of race and class. Published in 1969, ‘The UCPA View of the Class Struggle in a given Historical Epoch’ outlined how racism was central to capitalism as a ‘guiding ideology of imperialism’. The pamphlet went on to outline how the class contradictions Black people in Britain faced were thus twofold. On the one hand, there was the contradiction between ‘ourselves, the oppressed and oppressors, i.e. the ruling class’. On the other hand, although Black people in ‘the main’ belonged to the ‘proletariat’, there was at this historical conjuncture, a contradiction between Black people and ‘the proletariat of imperialist countries’. In effect, the UCPA argued that the majority of white citizens had ‘joined forces with the ruling class in an unholy alliance against the interests of Black peoples’. The pamphlet concluded with the affirmation that Black people would be on the side of the proletariat when and if their counterparts abandoned their nationalism. It demanded that Black people organize themselves to guard against the ‘practice of racialism even during the period of socialist reconstruction’. ³⁵

This theoretical foundation allowed BBP groups to offer narratives on issues such as neo-imperialism, British social democracy, the mobilization of the idea of the ‘white working class’ by elites and the reframing of the idea of justice beyond the racialized idea of the British nation-state. BBP groups used this theorization of the relationship between race and class to posit a direct link between the formation of British social democracy, super-exploitation in the Third World and ideas of white nationalism in the UK. The BLF identified the surplus gains of Britain’s neo-imperial relationships with the Third World as being key to the provision of full employment and the consumer society associated with British welfare capitalism:

The super exploitation of the Third World has brought material comforts to the white working class such as consumer goods, welfare state and a standard of living beyond the country’s resources. The white workers have been incorporated in the system because they, too, get their share of the cake. ³⁶

This indictment of British social democracy was accompanied by an indictment of how race and racism had infected the British labour movement and its confusion of social democracy for socialism. BBP linked ideas of racial hierarchy and whiteness with the emergence of the idea of a ‘white working class’ that had enjoyed the material and psychological benefits of empire and now a neo-imperial form of social democracy. Britain’s (white) working class had been bound to the neo-imperial social democratic state and its outward racism and hostility to the non-white members of the British working class served as a denial of the multi-racial nature of the global working class. As the UCPA put it in 1969: ‘Communists are no longer communists. They have become Coloured and White.’ ³⁷

However, BBP groups did not castigate the racism of Britain’s social democracy without an appreciation of history. Moreover, they conceived the racism of Britain’s labour movement within the conjuncture of the end of the postwar economic boom and the disintegration of Britain’s social democratic settlement. BBP groups linked the racialization of the working class in the late 1960s to elite-driven policies that sought to mitigate the crisis of British capital in the face of Britain losing its colonial empire and encountering anti-imperial resistance in the Third World. BBP groups thus saw the dividing of the British working class along issues of race as an elite-driven ploy to bind Britain’s white population to the future of a leaner and meaner nation-state. The BPM and the BUFP consistently read the 1971 Immigration Act in unison with the 1971 Industrial Relations Act, which sought to limit union power. The diffusion of the idea of the ‘white working class’ was perceived by BBP groups to purposefully distract the working class from the reconstitution of class domination in the midst of the crisis of global capitalism in the early 1970s. ³⁸

BBP’s recognition of the problem of neo-imperialism allowed such groups to view the interrelationship between Britain’s class and anti-racist struggle through a global rather than national lens. Groups such as the UCPA and the BLF used this global context to dismiss white society’s potential to wake up and rise above the West’s racism and imperialism. For these groups, the cause of BBP was solely rooted in the cause of Third Worldism or Pan-Africanism. This was a direct response to how the white working class and its institutions were indifferent to anti-racist struggle in Britain during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Trade Union Congress (TUC), for instance, whilst fighting the Industrial Relations Bill made no link or common cause with campaigns against the 1971 Immigration Act. Those further on the left, such as the Communist Party of Great Britain, whilst understanding the plight of Britain’s Black immigrants, also saw BBP as counterproductive to class struggle (Virdee, 2014, pp. 104–106; Wild, 2008, pp. 149–150).

Yet, the BPM and BUFP did not give up on Britain’s white population. The BPM, for example, reported on the causes of white-led working class struggles such as the miners’ strike and the Upper Clyde shipbuilders’ ‘work-in’ in 1972. ³⁹ In theory groups such as the BPM and BUFP advocated for cross-racial solidarity. However, this was made on the grounds of radically altering the tenets of class struggle in Britain. The BUFP, for example, ran editorials in its newspapers that labelled the TUC and the Labour Party as ‘reactionary organizations’ or ‘state’ organizations that failed to understand the global nature of class oppression. This position framed the ‘role of Black workers’ in the UK around an idea of decolonizing Britain’s trade unions. This hinged on imploring Black workers to join unions, ‘despite the contempt we hold for these capitalist-controlled institutions’, and for Black workers to form ‘Black caucuses within trade unions’ and in partnership with ‘progressive white workers’ to seize the initiative to ‘spearhead the defense of workers’ against capitalist exploitation. Crucially, this could only be achieved through Black workers pushing workers in Britain to establish ‘strong links with the exploited workers of the Third World’. The need here was to link ‘workers’ strikes’ in the UK with a wider assault against global capitalism in the ‘Third World’ rather than the saving of neo-imperialist forms of social democracy in the West. ⁴⁰

This was an explosion of what class struggle meant in a British context. As Waters (2018, pp. 117–118) outlines, these views impacted other groups on the ‘white Left’ who were more open to changing their own theory and praxis. The Black Defence Committee (BDC), which was set up to fight racism and fascism and operated out of the office of the Trotskyite International Marxist Group, was able to bring BBP groups and anti-racist groups such as the IWA into alliance with other groups on the radical left. This alliance was not only symbolic, with the BDC creating the Black Defence and Aid Fund to funnel money from white allies to BBP groups and wider anti-racist activity (Bunce & Field, 2013, p. 121). The BDC also put forward positions that allowed the insights of BBP to expand the nature of class struggle for the wider British left:

Cuts in social welfare and tax concessions to the rich, racialist laws at home and support for white supremacy aboard, all are part of the Tories’ repressive strategy to crush the working class and divide it so that it is incapable of presenting a united front against Tory polices. The immigration Bill is an attempt to divide trade unionists on race lines and isolate a ‘scapegoat’ for the present crisis. ⁴¹

BBP thus framed class struggle not simply on the terrain of the British nation-state, but the wider coordinates of the former, and remaining, British Empire, and the global capitalist system that the British Empire had helped to engender. This moved the idea of class struggle away from the sole confines of social democratic concerns of wage labour and union power, to encompass those who were non-unionized and super-exploited, both within and beyond the UK. It also sought to erase the colour-line that underpinned such a racialized division of labour. It was this expansion of the idea of class struggle that underpinned BBP’s conjoining of anti-racist struggle around immigrant rights and racial economic equality, which sought to decolonize British social democracy, with attempts to create internationalist forms of solidarity that could thwart the neo-imperialism of the embedded liberal and forthcoming neoliberal era. BBP’s idea of socialist justice was therefore framed globally and pushed beyond nativist ideas that only saw the British state and its (white) working class as their primary agent or target of social justice. Even as the flame of BBP dissipated throughout the mid-1970s, the history of BBP holds important sociological lessons for us today. ⁴²

Conclusion: BBP then, BBP now

What, then, is the contemporary relevance of BBP? In 2013 Sivanandan outlined that British anti-racism had reached an impasse (Gordon, 2014). The onset of neoliberal globalization had thrown up new forms of racism, such as Islamophobia and xeno-racism, and political cooptation that no longer matched up with the ideology of older forms of anti-racist struggle. What was now needed was the ability to remake the anti-racist struggle for our current conjecture. There are, of course, some self-evident truths to this narrative. We can longer talk of a collective Black anti-racist subject or a Third World Project. Nor does it seem easy to envision an alternative to capitalism, even as we inch closer to economic and ecological collapse. Yet, in this conclusion I want to suggest that the history of BBP holds contemporary relevance and resources for those wishing to reimagine anti-racism in the 21st century. This centres on returning to how such a history helps to understand the idea of political blackness as a form of political solidarity and how we can apply this to new racisms; how we should approach the contemporary problem of racial neoliberalism and resurgence of populist racism; and how we should approach calls for the renewal of British social democracy.

As Wild (2016, p. 42) has suggested, perhaps the ‘most important contribution’ of BBP to British anti-racism and the global canon of Black Power was its collective ‘Black’ subject. This is ironic, as political blackness has become divisive both within and beyond the academy (Alexander, 2018). The narrative of the downfall of British anti-racism and its politically ‘Black’ subject as a tragic state-induced phenomenon is well known. This timeline sees the vibrant and independent anti-racist movement, which created an unparalleled sense of unity between Britain’s New Commonwealth communities, come apart at the seams as different ethnic groups were splintered through government-induced funding and essentialized into ethnic identities under an umbrella of multiculturalism in the 1980s (Bourne, 2016; Kundnani, 2007).

For those who critique the term, political blackness was incoherent from its inception. Modood (1994) has argued that the ‘Black’ signifier led to the invisibility of issues afflicting British Asians and the propagation of anti-white politics. This process was ossified when a regime of politically black unions, commissions and professional associations became integrated into politics at the local and national level in the 1980s. Andrews (2016) has recently revisited these criticisms and argued that the strategic essentialism of political blackness was flawed because of an apparent methodological nationalism, anti-whiteness and disavowal of an idea of blackness rooted in the African diaspora. The recommendation of both Modood and Andrews is that the politically black collective subject and its anti-racist politics be disarticulated and reconstituted around ethnic communities (e.g. Black, Asian, Muslim) and the racisms (e.g. anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, xeno-racism) they specifically suffer nationally and transnationally.

Yet, as the history of BBP reveals, to simply narrate this as a debate between the unity of anti-racist struggle at home or homogenization of all British ethnic minorities is to actually miss the political sophistication of such an evocation of political solidarity. The overriding function of BBP’s idea of political blackness was to highlight the connections of an exploitative state in the UK and an exploitative global capitalist system abroad and the racialization and racism such a system engendered in order to obscure and secure capitalist exploitation. This allowed BBP groups to avoid analysis that solely centred on the old colonial racial divisions of empire and facilitated a sophisticated analysis of the neo-imperial divisions of the post-colonial world. BBP was thus able to navigate and comprehend how race and class intersected in divisions between Black and white communities and between different Black communities (both within and beyond the UK); and how racialization and exploitation were even apparent between different ‘white’ communities. At the heart of BBP’s evocation of political blackness was an attempt to avoid a form of methodological nationalism that would only interpret racism and anti-racism within singular ethnic categories or national boundaries.

The need for recovering such a form of anti-racist political solidarity appears greater than ever. In the Brexit referendum of 2016, multiple racisms were evoked by the Leave campaign to secure Britain’s exit from the European Union. Political elites evoked a racialized nationalism of a ‘white England’ whose state and resources were threatened by white Eastern and Central Europeans and black and brown migrants who may or may not be Muslims. This set of events also saw a surge in racist hate crime against established New Commonwealth communities (Tyler, 2017; Virdee & McGeever, 2018). Such a state of affairs is not fully explainable through positions solely rooted in xeno-racism, Islamophobia or anti-blackness. Rather, what is needed is a form of analysis that can map how the politics of whiteness intersects with anti-blackness, Islamophobia and xenophobia and how this is linked to the wider coordinates of British, European and global capitalism. This ironically is the politics of political blackness that we have all too easily dismissed or forgotten.

In a post-colonial world, rising powers such as China and India further challenge the colonial colour-line of geopolitics; they are themselves linked to the spread of super-exploitative capitalist social relations, rising inequality and forms of authoritarianism within the Global South; automation and outsourcing have seen the working classes of Western nations lose elements of their privileged role in the global economy; a plethora of non-white ethnic minorities within Britain continue to find themselves at the bottom of indicators such as wages and labour exploitation and others are seen as model minorities; and flows of migration induced by either war, inequality or climate change crash against racist Western border regimes. The recovery of political blackness’s idea of joined-up and transnational thinking about racialization and solidarity against racism seems more needed than ever. Whilst we may wish to jettison the term political blackness and its ‘Black’ subject, due to the fears of ethnic homogenization or the erasure of the different forms and processes of racism suffered by different ethnic minority groups, or quite simply because it seems outdated, we would do well to recover its interlinking of domestic forms of race, class and gender domination with geo forms of exploitation and relations of power, and the formation of domestic and international forms of solidarity against such structures.

The history of BBP also speaks directly to our neoliberal social order and its current racial convulsions. BBP underlined how neoliberalism must be read through the lens of racial capitalism. Although unable to name the forthcoming regime or map it in its entirety, for BBP, the onset of what we have come to call ‘neoliberal globalization’ was to be as much of a racial moment as it was economic. ⁴³ In the first instance BBP took neoliberalism, and its practices of outsourcing of capitalist production, as a strike against Third World liberation and the reparative claims of the darker masses. In the second instance, BBP took neoliberalism to involve the evocation of whiteness by elites to mask the very destruction of the relative privileges of whiteness that social democracy had institutionalized in postwar British society. This theorization of racial neoliberalism is important because, as Kundnani (2018) has recently highlighted, modern theorizations of neoliberalism, such as those offered by Brown (2015) and Harvey (2005), seem unable to comprehend the complicity between the extensions of apparent colour-blind free markets with racism and racial inequality. The narrative of BBP thus places race, racism and whiteness back into the establishment of what we now call the neoliberal project.

This is prescient, as in the wake of austerity, the figure of the ‘left behind’ and dispossessed British ‘white working class’ has re-emerged as the emblem of neoliberalism’s destruction of the social democratic compact. This has reignited debates about national democracy and immigration. As Shilliam’s (2018, pp. 162, 176) recent genealogy makes clear, the evocation of ‘white working class’ by elites in the build-up to the Brexit referendum and the aftermath of the vote highlights how those who ‘promote geo-political realignment’ wish to ‘drive through the most intense marketization of hereto sacrosanct public goods’. BBP’s history highlights how the contemporary problem of the ‘white working class’ is not a new phenomenon, but rather linked with the racialization and destruction of class solidarity of British social democracy that can, and has been, readily conjured by elites in pursuit of furthering neoliberal prerogatives of marketization, deregulation and profit maximization. ⁴⁴ The return of ‘the white working class’ is therefore very much a return to BBP’s problematic of how to politically organize against a state structure whose history is entwined with a pernicious racialization of its labour market and social institutions.

Finally, the racialization of Britain’s labour market and social institutions brings us to the contemporary return of ‘socialism’ in Britain. Shilliam (2018, pp. 80–81) has argued that Corbynism’s language of social justice, public goods and income redistribution partly rests on deferring a confrontation with the ideas of a racialized nationalism that underpin social democracy. This is the charge that Corbynism, likely in the pursuit of electoral success, tacitly repeats the racialized and methodological nationalist idea of justice that underpinned previous forms of social democracy through a neutral focus on British class injustice. ⁴⁵ Whatever the debates about Corbynism, revisiting BBP implores us to reject a return to a racialized idea of social democracy and depart towards new ground.

This form of politics would put the target of dismantling racial capitalism at the heart of its political body. This perspective was best summed up by the then former Black Panther Olive Morris and her partner Mike McColgan’s reflections on British anti-racism in 1977. Narrating the formation of British social democracy, Morris and McColgan argued that working class struggles to gain concessions from the British ruling class had created victories that had been limited by social democracy’s racist exclusion of non-white members of the working class, both beyond and now within Britain’s borders. In the midst of the ending of such ‘concessions’ with the reformation of British social democracy, the authors conclude that Britain’s working class must now support the struggles of Black people in Britain, and their focus on justice both at home and abroad, in order to not repeat the neo-imperialism of British social democracy:

We are not arguing that the ruling class gave these concessions to the working class without a fight; we realize that they have had to struggle for every little they managed to wring from the ruling class. What we are arguing though is that these struggles have not helped to develop proletarian internationalism amongst the British working class. Today increasingly the British working class is faced with the choice of either to defend the ‘National Interest’ or throw their lot in with the oppressed people of the Third World. The most immediate way this can be done is for them to support the struggles of Third World peoples in this country. ⁴⁶

The world may very well have changed but the call to recognize the global formation of the British state and the multi-racial and international character of the oppressed remains as pertinent as when those words were first written. The new anti-racism, much like the old, should not seek to merely put brown and black faces in high places in dealing with the problem of ethnic inequality. It should rather conjoin the anti-racist struggles in Britain with the wider project of dismantling the oppressive structures of the global economy that subjugate vast swathes of the Global South. It should in turn advocate for solidarities and policy changes around issues, such as eradicating ethnic penalty in the British labour market, ending racist policing practices, abolishing immigration detention and dismantling the UK arms industry. These would not only transform Britain, but would also dismantle neo-imperial structures. Ultimately, this repository of justice and class struggle, framed globally and pushed beyond nativist limits, is what the history of BBP bequeaths its descendants.