Abstract
We are becoming accustomed to the present political juncture being narrated as a story of emancipation overstepping the boundaries of what is regarded as currently possible by those lacking a radical imagination. Moreover, this story is increasingly told alongside that of globalisation, whereby both emancipation and globalisation are depicted and decried as a singular and unstoppable force. In this way, emancipation and globalisation are naturalised. It then becomes possible for reactionaries to call for extraordinary measures to cull them. This naturalisation is a defining feature of the political domination that shaped the modern world, in which Britain and its Empire played a determining constitutive role. The persistence and viability of this domination into the post-Brexit landscape is telling of the fact that such discourses can be leading and misleading. Populist nationalism and the doctrine of free trade historically share this worldview. Hence, they find common ground in the politics of the right, while the left is faced with challenges it conveniently believes to be insurmountable. This is helped by thinking nationalism and capitalism as expressions of the popular will – behind which domination can easily hide.
Robbie Shilliam’s Race and the Undeserving Poor: From Abolition to Brexit (2018) demonstrates that ‘there was never a time when whiteness and class articulated except as an artefact of political domination’ (p. 134). Shilliam’s work should be received as a milestone in political science and cultural studies because it advances a global history of British politics that skilfully illustrates how, to this day, everything we take for granted should be traced back to its origins in the ‘initial racialization of deserving and undeserving characteristics’ (p. 7). In what follows, I argue that Shilliam’s account of the racialisation of the ‘undeserving poor’ offers a systemic critique of how whiteness excuses politics from the difficult task of anti-capitalist internationalism.
Historical researchers may have reservations about Shilliam’s use of empirical evidence. Race and the Undeserving Poor reads more like a history of ideas – specifically of influential ideas by a few notable people – than a work of historiography proper. Yet, the detail and precision with which the story of the undeserving poor is told cannot be solely due to Shilliam’s impeccable politics. Thus, one is left wondering whether this book is an abridged outcome of a historical research project involving a variety of historical sources. Although the lessons that can be drawn from this history are easily learnt from the text as it stands, my only criticism is that it would have been equally worthwhile to allow this work to overflow with a wealth and diversity of primary sources for the reader to delve into.
Chapter 1 reminds us that the Brexit referendum was interpreted as a legitimate suspension of the fact that in Britain, ‘for right or wrong, parliamentary sovereignty has always demanded representative rather than direct democracy’ (p. 1). In this sense, a decision was consciously made to treat a referendum in favour of British exit from the European Union as a more appropriate expression of popular sovereignty than parliament. Shilliam’s starting point is that this decision took place in the context of a postcolonial society that owes everything to the British Empire (p. 6). The fate of this society rests on how a line is drawn between those who are regarded as deserving of being considered and listened to as ‘the people’ and those who are not. Hence, ‘this book narrates a history of political domination told through the moralising discourses and rhetoric of the undeserving poor’ (p. 7).
In each subsequent chapter, Shilliam accessibly introduces concepts that shed light on how whiteness is made by blackening. Each of these concepts packs an intricate but straightforward story about the internationalisation of British capital. Chapter 2 reviews the ambiguous history of abolitionism in Britain. At the time, philosophers of the ‘commercial society’ advocated for the abolition of slavery because they were concerned about what the emancipation of the enslaved had to look like for the emancipated to continue being controlled as labour. Chief to this was the worry that authority would be undermined if abolition occurred on terms dictated by the enslaved. Crucially, this movement was seen by the leading thinkers of capitalism as anti-capitalist from the outset (pp. 15–19). In other words, it was regarded as morally just for people not to be enslaved in principle; but in practice, slaves had to earn and continually prove that they were deserving of freedom. These debates reflected fault lines drawn by grassroots movements in the early 1800s, as they successfully petitioned the British state to provide some welfare relief for the English poor by analogising their condition to that of slaves. Rather than express unconditional solidarity with slaves, these movements presented the English poor as the victims of elites profiting from the slave trade and the dispossession of land – the foundation stones of British capitalism (pp. 19–28). In so doing, they began to define a distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor.
Chapter 3 fast-forwards 100 years to show how this distinction widened. Abolitionism first transformed into a patriarchal movement with a ‘civilizational hierarchy’ headed by Britain (pp. 34–42). Subsequently, the idea of empire as a cosmopolitan family with a human face lost ground to concerns for the preservation of the Anglo-Saxon family. Reforms to politically enfranchise this constituency, Shilliam writes, ‘effectively transformed those who had in the past political lexicon been considered “deserving poor” into a deserving constituency of skilled and settled workers’ (p. 43). The discourse of class thus shifted more easily away from the moral character of the poor and towards the formation of an identity imagined around national belonging (p. 45). However, as Shilliam notes, the association of deserving characteristics with one’s position within an racialised division of labour could not have occurred without a eugenicist defence of the Anglo-Saxon family (pp. 46–54).
It was not until the emergence of social security and the national welfare state that the deserving/undeserving poor distinction came to be more clearly associated with ideas akin to what we now know as ‘workfare’. In Chapter 4, we find out that the enfranchisement and racialisation of the English poor gradually became recognised, institutionalised and integrated into British politics in the 20th century. The politics of the labour movement took the characteristic form of localised, orderly resistance attached to the ‘cooperative spirit of labour’ (pp. 57–59). The obviously progressive features of the early cooperative movement in Britain, argues Shilliam, were quickly shut down, as ‘patriarchy and provincialism were often identified as the core qualities that underwrote labour’s cooperative spirit, and … allowed proponents to advocate for self-organisation as a deserving characteristic of English working men’ (p. 61). Considering this, it can be argued further that the history of self-organisation in British politics has always been gendered and racialised. In other words, it is impossible to claim political independence in Britain without being complicit in its imperialist role within capitalist development.
In Chapter 5, the Labour Party’s roots in the cooperative and labour movements are directly linked with its gradual integration into the project of British imperialism. The decline of the British Empire presented the United Kingdom with two policies which were not mutually exclusive: the promotion of European integration and the multicultural Commonwealth (p. 93). When the socialist left took a position regarding these policies, internationalism’s inoculation was only partial (p. 94). This was reflected in Labour’s contradictory legislation, which restricted immigration at the same time as it criminalised racial discrimination (p. 95). Shilliam’s retelling of how Enoch Powell exploited this ambiguity is instructive. Powell instigated a veritable revolution in British conservative discourse because he linked welfare and social democracy to a ‘blackened national compact’ (p. 101). Powell, it could be argued, was concerned with restoring ‘social peace’ to a country divided by social strife. To be a follower of Powell meant believing that Britain could be turned into a virtuous community only if the white race rid itself of the moral baggage of the welfare state and of the empire that made English people duller and less industrious than their Commonwealth counterparts (pp. 97–99). Shilliam terms this ideology ‘populist nationalism’ (p. 103).
As Shilliam highlights, Powell’s political success was as much a failure of socialism as of social democracy. It is no coincidence that it took place at that height of class struggle in post-war Britain which is often fantasised about:
The shop steward exemplified the ‘self-help’ principle of labour’s cooperative spirit. The ‘closed shop’ modus operandi usually bypassed national fora – wherein the state would have to expressly intervene in confrontations between capital and labour – for a set of localised and tacit arrangements between stewards and management. In this respect, the shop steward was largely responsible for the labour/capital relationship. Such depoliticisation did not only ensure labour’s orderly independence, it was also through the depoliticised nature of this arbitration system that the informal colour bar could coalesce and racialize the postwar division of labour anew. (p. 90)
As the take-up of populist nationalism by trade union members suggests (p. 102), it was not the left’s hand in the global spread of neoliberalism under the guise of ‘identity politics’ that weakened the labour movement; rather, the rise of Thatcherism was facilitated by those white workers who expressed a ‘preference to defend their race over their class’ (p. 108). Ultimately, this resulted in an attack on white workers’ privileges which, as the racialisation of Brexit demonstrates, a contested number of them continue to refuse and resist in the most reactionary of ways. Chapter 6 is dedicated to the development of this issue in the 1980s and the 1990s. As it argues, social conservatism capitalised on Powell’s legacy and enhanced markets’ hold on people’s lives to achieve a specific politicisation of the British nation by removing from it the moral responsibility towards national welfare (pp. 113–116). This gave way to a more ambiguous racialisation of the division of labour. At the same time, the ‘white underclass’ emerged as a discourse problematising the residents of housing estates as needing forced integration within a deregulated labour market (pp. 119–120).
In this respect, New Labour and David Cameron’s ‘big society’ (pp. 128–133) picked up somewhat seamlessly from Thatcherism. As displayed in Chapter 7, New Labour’s internationalism was as ambiguous and as racist as the party’s previous governments (pp. 146–147). New Labour oversaw a decoupling of ‘national cohesion’ – achieving national security through integration, aimed especially towards Muslims – and ‘national degeneration’ – rekindling the industriousness of the British white working class through social policy (pp. 134–144, 157). This took the form of a strategic alignment with international competitiveness, which has been wonderfully summarised elsewhere by Sivanandan (1999 [1998]). On the other hand, Shilliam observes, the right saw European integration as an extension of empire in terms informed by Powell’s critique of it (p. 150). However, the emergence of UK Independence Party (UKIP) signalled a subtle shift from Powell’s ideas. The relative but not absolute decline of the privileges historically attached to whiteness in Britain proved fertile ground for a racialised politics of white, English and national self-determination (p. 156). As Shilliam astutely points out, UKIP is the logical outcome of Labour and Tory ambiguity stripped of their commitment to internationalism of the capitalist variety. In this way, UKIP was able to rid itself of the limitations imposed by internationalism and established populist nationalism as the rightful representative of whiteness regardless of its intersections with class (pp. 154–155).
Chapter 8 concludes Race and the Undeserving Poor with a puzzle and a lesson to make us think. The puzzle is that the residents of Grenfell Tower lived and died in a fire that set the entire building ablaze on 14 June 2017 even though they were, by all accounts, ‘deserving poor’ – ‘industrious, aspirational, orderly’ (p. 171). For Shilliam,
Grenfell Tower, more than any other event in recent history, revealed the plight of the ‘left behind’, which had been so comprehensively appealed to in media and parliament. Grenfell Tower singularly demonstrated the callous abandoning of Britain’s working poor by mendacious elites who have pursued marketization over redistribution, gentrification over social security, and contracting-out over public accountability. (p. 171)
There is no doubt that austerity has killed and continues to kill hundreds of thousands (Watkins et al. 2017). However, the reason why residents lived and died in Grenfell Tower is that the violence of austerity is discriminatory. Nonetheless, the fact that they were ‘associated with a council estate’ and ‘assumed to display all the characteristics of an underclass – lazy, dishonest, parentally irresponsible’ (p. 171) does not yet tell us why the victims were, with some exclusions, predominantly not White. This poses a challenge for the left, which must recognise that ‘it was never primarily the poor who created these distinctions or modified them’, but rather ‘state functionaries, politicians, power brokers, pundits and intellectuals’ who exploit classification/racialisation to achieve specific ends (p. 173). Taking this challenge seriously should make the left reconsider African enslavement, which Shilliam identifies as the most important phenomenon driving the global affirmation of capitalism and its intellectual companion – political economy (Watkins et al. 2017).
When considering the classification and racialisation of the working class over time, Shilliam does not single out the left. He argues that Brexit was predominantly driven by Conservative Euroscepticism’s desire ‘to forge an ever-closer relationship between UK and North American social conservatism’ (p. 175) and ‘a practical concern for social and economic deregulation’ (p. 177). Thus, Shilliam delivers the very project he calls for: a ‘double-critique of progressive politics’ which offers ‘criticism of marketization, deregulation and austerity’ alongside a ‘critique of the racialisation of these processes’ (p. 178). In this way, he overcomes the limits of a traditional socialist critique of austerity that has been historically doomed by its obsession with Keynesian economic management. State socialism is unintelligible without the acknowledgement that ‘Britain’s division of labour has never been national in constitution or scope’ (ibid.). Therefore, argues Shilliam, ‘the socialist left must recognise that it is in the microsites – usually coloured as ‘ethnic’ or ‘immigrant’ – that the battles for tomorrow are first won or lost’ (p. 179).
It is understandable that the socialist left in Britain would look to the state as a means of attacking imperialism and the right. 1 In absence of mass movements in the West, the capture of state power always presents an opportunity for the left to express practical solidarity, undermine its own racialisation and move away from the nativist conception of class that facilitates imperialism’s repression of class struggle worldwide. In this sense, socialist strategy would have to give analytical precedence to the right of all people to benefit from the spoils of the West (Narayan 2019). But as Shilliam points out, ‘a solidarity that matches the global reach of capital’ cannot simply be derived in a desperate attempt to universalise class politics through a critique of identity politics (p. 180). For as long as such a critique is regarded as being enough to build socialism, concludes Shilliam, its comeback will also continue to facilitate ‘the rise of the socially conservative right’ (p. 181). Hence, the prescience of his ‘double-critique’ of capitalism, which discerns how the fragility of the socialist left ‘rests upon a tactical deferral of confronting racialized nationalisms and anti-immigration sentiment in favour of a putatively neutral focus on class injustice’ (pp. 180–181).
Some socialists undoubtedly have legitimate reasons not to feel responsible for this. Nevertheless, it should not come to any of their surprise that plenty of socialists who they may struggle to call comrades have contributed to the explosive racialisation and depoliticisation of class that enabled Brexit and Grenfell:
The justice pursued by socialists is premised on a universal commitment to overcome inequality, exploitation and oppression suffered by the working class. Yet once again, tacitly or otherwise, this project is currently being pursued through and on behalf of a racialized nation whose own justice demands partiality. This partiality gains traction in the deserving/underserving distinction, even though the undeserving should just as much be considered a part of the resident working class. An internationalism adequate for our own postcolonial era therefore requires a first order analytical and ethical engagement with class as race. (p. 181)
Shilliam is acutely aware of movements that foreground race, gender and sexuality in order to refuse and abolish all systems of ‘classification’ (pp. 180–181). It is not their politics that are being questioned by Shilliam, but the conservatism of the self-styled progressive labour movement and its political representative – the Labour Party. For as long as this movement’s class politics – and therefore its politics towards race, gender and sexuality – remain ambiguous, there will be no end to uncertainty.