Race & Class

This article asks whether history writing can be reparatory. Opening with a discussion of the bi-centenary of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007 and the national conversation that was created at that time, it goes on to reflect on contestations over memory and the significance of the emergence of reparations as a key term with which to think about the wrongs of the past and the possibilities of repair. It uses a discussion of the author’s individual and collaborative historical work to argue for the importance of a different understanding of Britain’s involvement in the slavery business and our responsibilities, as beneficiaries, of the gross inequalities associated with slavery and colonialism.

The reinvigoration of forms of white supremacy in the US and Europe has sharply delineated the connections between occluded racialised pasts and contemporary race politics in ways which make reparative history an urgent concern. This article argues that contemporary struggles over the politics of memorialisation telegraph more than a debate over contested histories. They are also signs of how the liberal narrative of ‘trauma’ and healing no longer suffices as a way of marginalising the history of radical black agency. Building on the research by the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project, the article focuses on the incendiary year of 1831 and on a moment of collision – between black resistance and white entitlement. It situates a hitherto overlooked aborted slave uprising in Tortola, British Virgin Islands, within its multiple radical Caribbean, Atlantic and British contexts as a way of disrupting the distance between histories confined to ‘there’ and those confined to ‘here’. The article explores how the link between slavery and capitalism can be connected concretely to the black claim made on the nature of that emancipation as a way of further developing the concept of reparative history.

Each March in Orihuela in the province of Valencia, Spain, there is a festival of mural painting in honour of local poet Miguel Hernández. For long the poet, who died in a fascist jail in 1942, had been publicly unacknowledged, but now his life, his work and his political involvement as a Republican political activist are openly displayed. How Hernández is remembered provides a powerful example of the struggles between memory and forgetting in post-Franco Spain. Faced with the contradiction of a Pact of Forgetting in 1977 and a Historical Memory Law in 2007, memory in Spain has to be carefully exhumed from under layers of fascist policies and culture.

In this article, adapted from a speech delivered at a conference on reparative history, the author challenges the dominant view of the progressive radicalism of the postwar Attlee government by exposing the brutality of its imperial adventures. Examining British involvement in Vietnam, Indonesia, Greece, Malaya, Kenya, India, Palestine, Iran and Korea, the piece paints a very different and bloody historical narrative from the dominant one. It argues that the welfare state was accompanied by the creation of the warfare state and that it was the Labour Party which cemented the ‘special relationship’ with the United States, which today the vast majority of the parliamentary Labour Party would still like to see hold sway in terms of foreign policy and questionable foreign interventions.

Transnational capitalists and global elites are confident that the world economy has recovered from the 2008 financial collapse, but there is good reason to believe that another crisis of major proportions looms on the horizon. Digitalisation and fourth industrial revolution technologies are driving a new round of global capitalist restructuring, yet they are also aggravating the underlying structural conditions that generate crisis; in particular, overaccumulation. Transnational investors have been pouring billions of dollars into the rapid digitalisation of global capitalism as the latest outlet for its surplus accumulated capital and hedging their bets on new investment opportunities in global police state. The concept of global police state allows us to identify how the economic dimensions of global capitalist transformation intersect in new ways with political, ideological and military dimensions of this transformation. There is a convergence around global capitalism’s political need for social control and repression and its economic need to perpetuate accumulation in the face of stagnation. When the next crisis hits, the Left and resistance forces from below must be in a position to seize the initiative and to push back at global police state.