We're Getting Antiracism DANGEROUSLY Wrong | Aaron Bastani Meets Arun Kundnani

unless we're able to say no actually the anti-racism we want right now is something that's much more about dealing with this structure that's not only um screwing people who aren't white but obviously the same structures are also screwing people who are white in different ways right and so you know we have to get to that point where we can where we can start to talk about it on those terms and that enables us to build new kinds of unity um to to take this stuff on I don't think we're gonna be able to do it through the labor party anytime soon [Music] it's 2023 and everybody is an anti-racist including all of us here at Navara media to the likes of Black Rock and Walmarts but does that mean that the term no longer really means anything and could some forms of anti-racism actually be hindering us addressing the problem of racism that's the thesis of my guest today Arun kunani is the author of the Muslims are coming he has a new book out now and he thinks that you can't have a meaningful anti-racism unless you accompany it with anti-capitalism Aaron welcome to Downstream thank you very much for our audience it is Aaron isn't it it's Arun Arun yeah Aaron and Aaron we were talking before the show actually how um you wanted it to be pronounced properly after about 25 because most people kind of couldn't they most people pronounced your name like they pronounce my name right during your childhood yeah well like when I turned up to school for the first time at age five um you know I'm saying oh hi my name's Arun and they're like Aaron I'm like no Arun Aaron and we go back and forth a little and I'm like all right whatever Aaron so when I'll you know right through school everyone call me Aaron come home my parents call me a room um and then um yeah when I was about 24 I was like you know starting to read and get into anything else involved in anti-racist politics I was like it's kind of weird that you're doing this you know there's a bit of a contradiction here so um I started I started to new people that I met had always introduced myself as a room I'd let my older friends continue to call me out which they you know some of them still do and it doesn't bother me but I do think it's an opportunity to kind of do something in in on that level when when it's new people that you meet so tell me then about your heritage your background because it's really interesting well my my dad's Cindy and Cindy's is uh part of Pakistan it's a southern part of Pakistan where Karachi is and he was one of those people who um was a partition Refugee in 1947 so he moved from what became Pakistan to uh to Bombay um with his extended family and my mum was from Holland um a Dutch Catholic um yeah so then she she was living in Holland when she met my dad he was on holiday there um in 1969 and um they felt enough and she moved to live with him in London he'd already moved to London and um and then I was born in 1970. wow and now you live in the United States I moved to New York City in 2010 and now I've been living in Syracuse which is in Upstate New York and I'm about to move to Philadelphia I feel like so just for just for our audience you are an academic you're our writer well I'm a writer I haven't you know Academia doesn't want me you've been worked in Academia yeah I've worked actually what was your Twitter bio say it says I'm a writer on on racial capitalism let's go right to this like that let's go with writing so you went to the US and and how's that worked out for you how are you finding it I mean the way I look at it is I've moved from one Empire to another you know like it's it's um but it's it's hard to buy the sort of old story of uh but I think a lot of people a lot of people from England who moved to the United States help themselves this story that you know I can be free to be who I really am and like they don't look at class and they you know they don't judge you by your accent all this sort of stuff and I don't really you know I don't think that's what America is um and um so you know I feel like moving from London to New York City is is those are probably the two cities in the world of like major world cities that are the most similar they're both work in very similar ways it didn't feel like a you know like a leap into some cultural different thing you know um there's a different there is you know all the usual things a different sense of humor and the difference you know difference for South Asians is significant because the United States um immigration policy around South Asians is is not about you know what our history was of bringing South Asians into Britain uh from a you know from a long history of colonialism then bringing them in to do jobs that other people didn't want to do originally um whereas in America it's like bringing the phds after 1965. um and so it's you know it's a different story by and large um so you don't get racialized in the same way over there that's different class story right because you've got someone like Tower hamlets which is overwhelmingly you know Bengali one of the most deprived areas of the country right uh whereas like you say South Asians in California are going to have above average income more likely to be University graduates and so on absolutely absolutely I mean and it speaks to the way that you know like race does work very differently in the states like because it is a place where white people from Europe settled and colonized and then lived there right and and so on the one hand you've got built the country right um so it's a site of genocide it's a site of enslavement now Britain's also done those things but it's done it somewhere else that we can kind of tell ourselves in Britain we can tell ourselves the story of you know well that that's not really part of our history here it is it's just that it was easier to hide it so our racism is more polite you know in in the United States it's you know it's it's like much more likely to be rude uh and carried out you know on an interpersonal level to be rude and carried out by a guy with a gun you know because the um because that that is the the they're in the the Forefront of us of a kind of set the colonial project there that was more hidden here so we are discussing today this book what is anti-racism and why it means anti-capitalism as you can see it's already well thumbed this is my proof copy you can get your own one in in bookstores sooner sat with Verso it's a brilliant book Aaron thank you I run uh it's a it's a really really brilliant book uh you've also just written an article that's up in the guardian right talks about some of the themes there but I have to say the book is really worth investing in in terms of time and and thinking because there's just so many fascinating vignettes and anecdotes and hopefully we'll be able to go over a lot of that today um to start with where does the word racism come from in the English language Where Have We inherited this word from yeah so so you know it's it's not as old as you might expect right and really it starts to get used regularly only in the 1930s and the actual origin of it in that moment is a guy called Magnus hirschfeld who's German Jewish gay uh gay rights campaigner um and a a sexologist he establishes an Institute of sexology and he's actually the person who comes up with the term transvestite and yeah that's one of the things he's researching and um he you know obviously when the Nazis come to power in 1933 he's he's out there he's driven out the country they burned down his Institute and so on um and while he's in Exile he writes a book called racismus in German and it's his attempt to make sense of like how the Nazis came to power and he racismus translates into English as racism that's where the term enters the English language as a kind of regular term of this kind of scholarly analysis and um what he's basically arguing in that book is um that there are racial prejudices that kind of been deposited in people's minds as a result of scientific racism in the 19th century um so it's about Doctrine it's about ideas beliefs and and that if you have a society where those racial prejudices are you know prevalent then it opens up an opportunity for uh extremist politicians like the Nazis to to manipulate those beliefs and come to power through hatred and then that's a threat to Liberal democracy and that's his you know he's he that's his analysis of what how Hitler comes to power puts racism at the center of it which I think not many people were doing at that time and um and and that gives us a a general understanding of what racism is from that from that book um but it's not a very good way of thinking about racism today we'll talk about that more remember so what was the conventional account then for the rise of Hitler at the time because obviously for us it seems quite obvious that a big part of this was um a form of racial superiority among white Germans that they hold over yeah other sort of non-germans according to the Third Reich so how the time did the French and the British and I mean of course you know mainstream thinking not you know yeah so so I think you know like he's he's early early into this right so that you know he's writing this book in in kind of the midnight first it's translated um in 1938 right so um you know I think ideas are still forming all across the board in terms of like how to make sense of it but I think two you know two alternative ideas that would have been floating around at the time would have been um that this is this is a an immediate result of the um the kind of uh overly cruel um effects of the you know the Versailles treaty right and so it's not it's kind of moving away from ideology to thinking about a very specific kind of recent history um or um you know thinking about it in terms of another Mussolini right and so an idea of fascism and then within that there might be all kinds of ways that people are starting to think about what fascism is um but thinking of it as as you know the Italian Paradigm would have been the one that would be the starting point for that rather than the Nazi Paradigm and so therefore you're less likely to think of racism as Central because there's a lot of Scholars and thinkers and writers and we'll talk about this later on who draw clear analogies and equivalences between the rise of fascism particularly in Germany and the British Empire um and obviously even today if you were to say that to many Brits they would get very upset and very angry uh but that's the other kind of anti-racism we'll talk about more in a moment before we do though um the word racism had also been used in France hadn't it at this point so it's not just a purely German word although that's the use of racism we've inherited really right so I think hirschfeld gets it from from coming across the word in French of racism which is starting to be used in the 1930s I think by um like anti-fascist activists in France who are seeing the rise of fascism in their country in other countries in Europe and they're using that word to capture this thing that's to do with race so we have race in the 19th century we don't really have this idea of racism until the 1930s really right everybody's talking about anti-racism right now right and you detail this in the book it's really it makes me laugh really BlackRock Walmarts um it's the topic of so many books you know Robin D'Angelo's white fragility seems to be the paradomatic one other ones too of course why is that why is absolutely everybody obsessed right now including the corporate class with with being an anti-racist well I mean I think the immediate you know the immediate cause is the summer of 2020 um when I mean in the United States you had 15 million people on the streets um as part of the black lives matter protest right so that's you know if that number's right that's the New York Times reporting then that's the largest you know that's the largest protest or movement in U.S history right um and and you know I was there at a time if you go you know I mean my impression of it was um that that number was would have been right um uh and the average age would have been something like 16 years old wow and and you know 16 year old kids running around um taking over streets using apps that I haven't even heard of to organize themselves um and it was incredibly powerful and um you know Monmouth University did a survey um that summer saying um you know what do you think about these protests what's legitimate and you know the majority of people in the United States um said that burning down of a police station in Minneapolis which is one of the things that protesters did that was where George Floyd was killed burning down that police station was justified or partially Justified right so this is you know to get that kind of opinion coming out in the United States is tells you that something very very powerful going on here right so I think then what you're talking about in terms of like you know the books that are then coming out all the initiatives from uh CEOs or corporations and all the initiatives at universities all of that is is sort of um a product of what's happening on the streets but also a distortion of it because what they're doing then is saying well we're going to pursue we're going to pursue something called anti-racism but actually what they pursue is something very different from what people on the streets are after what people on the streets are after is you know remember the slogans were things like defund the police uh abolish ice ice is the Immigration and Customs Enforcement um in the United States right so it's not saying um you need to we need to deal with you know individual officers who've gone against the kind of professional Norms that their organization has or you know kind of bad apples it's about these entire this entire infrastructure of policing and incarceration and Border controls needs to be dismantled that was the kind of center of gravity of what people were saying um but then what we see at the level of you know the kind of discussions yeah universities weren't saying um okay well we want to respond to Black lives matter how can we put our resources that we have in this you know pretty pretty well resource University in the service of this movement can we offer up rooms to have meetings in can we like get you know collaborate with people to do political education work no what they're saying is is let's hire in some professionals to do some unconscious bias training and let's um uh you know kind of do um a lot of work on um thinking about diversity and microaggressions and so on it's a very different kind of discourse right and so but it is it is tied to what's happening on the streets but it's a a perverse kind of version of it but you have this great quote again it makes me chuckle um this isn't the verbatim quote it's more or less what you write which is that this has generated a form of liberal anti-racism which is akin to a form of self-development yeah and of course I've had that in my mind for so long but just reading the examples you give of BlackRock and Walmart and very various initiatives yeah should we look at some of this stuff as but basically an extension of a self-help genre I think so I mean I think um you know this so I think the way that um a lot of this stuff operates is you know there's the podcast there's the books there's the um you know at one point there was even a an outfit that was saying you could pay like 200 and you do an anti-racist dinner party and you sit around and you know you have a room of white people and then of uh South Asian woman and a black woman at the other on the table kind of berate the white people and and this is this is meant to be productive right and so when people paid for this yeah quite a lot of money quite a lot of money for that for that so yeah Navara we should diversify that's another Revenue stream sorry yeah another meaning of diversifying yeah yeah but like the um you know so so I think I think there is a large part of it that is um about uh this idea that white people kind of have something inside them it's unconscious bias that if we just if you know use an individual to do the work that was the phrase like do the work you can bring this stuff out and make yourself a morally better person right um and um so that you know in that sense it's it's um it's got overlaps of self-out but it's got this strong moral element as well you know um and um and and to me that's that's just not that's a distraction at best um harmful in in a lot of ways as well right um we I can get into why but like um I just don't see what so if we're dealing if we're talking about structural racism right which is what everyone I mean that was the phrase that everyone used right structural racism or systemic racism you got you know Larry think CEO of BlackRock saying yeah let's take that is using that phrase systemic racism right now if it's if you're seriously talking about taking on structural racism it's not a thing that you're gonna do by addressing your own individual prejudices unconscious biases attitudes and so on right the only way you'd break down structural racism is if you can build organizations build Collective power that that can deal with what is a power relationship and and counter that right and and start to dismantle these structures and build new social structures right that's that and so the question of of like where do individuals fit into that is a question right we need to figure that out but it's not we never get to that point where we're getting individuals to reform themselves and then somehow they having done that they go on to to be part of some kind of collective power that never we never get to that point we just get trapped in these in these kind of processes and that tells me that the motivation is is not to make yourself into a better uh member of some kind of organizational Collective power it's actually about you as something narcissistic about it you know it's centering white people I mean yeah you could put it that way I mean I mean if that's if you're saying that like say you're doing the work well who's doing the work and to who and it is like if if we're gonna accept this idea that it's a it's an extension of self-development and it sort of does feel like it's so yeah I mean the way so the um you know one of the one of the really great um kind of anti-racist thinkers that I I draw on in the book is uh A7 Anda you know who was based in Britain for most of his life and um um you know what the way he looked at this was um you know yeah like obviously there's something about you know as using an individual white person's like addressing your own prejudices right and getting to the point where you've got rid of those right but he called it potty training what he meant is you've basically achieved the minimum level of an adult human being right you can you know you can kind of operate now in the you know welcome welcome to humanity now you're able to talk to other human beings in a way where you're not being patronizing or Prejudiced and you know like caught up in in their stuff right that's great but that's that's not um that's that is just kind of at one side from the actual struggle that that we have right now because that's about dealing with um like the structures can operate irrespective of whether someone has individual prejudices or not you know like if you have a um you know if you have immigration officers carrying out a deportation that immigration officer could have done a great job working on their unconscious biases and you know they really know how to use the right words to describe the poor guy that they're bundling in the plane and like possibly sending to his death right they're still doing the deportation because that deportation isn't the result of even a lot of individual prejudices it's the result of the way that the whole global system of racial capitalism requires a certain kind of division of labor around the world and uses borders to uphold that well unless we start to talk on that level we're not getting anywhere you know well we'll talk about that more in a moment I mean the classic example for me here in recent British politics is with the labor party I don't know some people get upset with me for fashion the labor party so much but I think it's particularly useful here because they claim and they aspire to uphold certain values then sometimes they don't you know they don't live up to that so you have this really funny example not funny it's tragic frankly of them blocking black socialists from standing for public office but then same time they have this we have a program and if you you know the Bernie grant program the leadership program we have unconscious bias training for all our staff at party headquarters even though we've disproportionately laid off more people of color right and we've disproportionately hired more white men right that doesn't matter because we've had the unconscious bias training and you know we've picked the right boxes and so on and it does feel like and perhaps this is why I really like the book because it feels very fitting for the present moment that after covered and after BLM it does feel like a big big section and they're very well-meaning people many of them yeah of the liberal Intelligentsia the liberal Elite the liberal establishment they look at BLM climate change the LGBT stuff and they say okay you know our society and capitalism is changing if you want to sell products if you want to start a business if you want to do audience Acquisitions Brave New World these are the things you need to claim to believe yeah and like that's a very different place to saying how do we address racism right right and and you know I think I mean that so what the labor party has done is just simply absorb the standard kind of stuff that every you know every human resources department does for every big Corporation right around the diversity stuff right and training and so on it's nothing different from that and so it tells you that they have um given up on the idea that the labor party might might be precisely that kind of collective power that might actually dismantle structural racism I mean instead it's simply about um uh the the kind of um liberal anti-racism diversity politics that is that everyone does now and doesn't change anything right and and that is you know historically um For Better or Worse for labor party was the place that a lot of people who you know South Asian people and African Caribbean people it was the place that a lot of people look to um to be their vehicle for change right but at this point uh it's hard to see that you know being a you know any hope of that at all in the labor party what did you make of Kirsten taking the knee because obviously this guy could be the next prime minister and that's a that really upset a lot of people on the right I I think it's I think it's completely redundant I think it you know this kind of style of politics of dealing with anti-racism is um is a distraction you know and we need to that's you know that's why for me the central argument is we need to distinguish between this kind of diversity politics it's liberal anti-racism and what a more radical alternative might be because um the right doesn't make that distinction obviously why would they right they want to dump it all together and and take the the bits that are obviously or or not even obviously but can be plausibly presented as somewhat ridiculous somewhat preachy somewhat elitist and say that is what anti-racism is so unless we're able to say no actually the anti-racism we want right now is something that's much more about dealing with this structure that's not only um screwing people who aren't white but obviously the same structures are also screen people who are white in different ways right and so you know we have to get to that point where we can where we can start to talk about it on those terms and that enables us to build new kinds of unity um to to take this stuff on I don't think we're going to be able to do it through the labor party anytime soon so do you think that this liberal anti-racist discourse then is actually a barrier to cross-class multiracial coalitions to it is a barrier to the extent that that is what passes for anti-racism in in general you know in the general understanding what it might mean but also is is it about because you're talking about building the kinds of coalitions where you say look there is a system here which you talked about the racialization of Global Production and and the purpose of Border serve Etc um and this disadvantages different people in different ways not all the same but it's still in many people's interests to change that and it does feel like liberal anti-racism is saying something quite different right which is yeah white Working Class People we're going to constantly tell you off right and it's very hard to bring somebody into your Coalition when they they feel like they're constantly being told off it's I mean it's hard to bring white working-class people or white people in general into a coalition anyway right that might that might look to liberation of you know of um brown and black people right that's hard to do anyway because of our history right so I don't think that's the chief barrier but it doesn't help um we um and and actually like I don't think I don't think anti-racism necessarily always requires a uh Unity with white people that's one way of doing it in certain contexts where white people are amenable to that but if they're not we'll do it other ways you know there's other ways of doing it I mean that's that's what we've got in our history we've got different options around that you know what's going on with with um the kind of liberal Elite version of anti-racism is is this idea that um the problem is white working-class people uneducated still locked in their prejudices are as more you know more liberal wealthy people have figured out to how to get beyond that with all our podcasts and everything that we've done right so we're beyond that now we've got to educate these these poorer people to get them up to our level well that's that's not the radical anti-rated tradition and also what it misses is that it's precisely those liberal Elites who are the ones who um who create the most brutal parts of of our structural racist world right like they're the ones who are upholding the border control system they're the ones who want mass incarceration actually they're the ones who who want the you know police forces to protect their neighborhoods with violence right and so um they're kind of what they're doing there is you know how convenient for them that there's there is some white working class racism for them to justify what they would want to do anyway you know that's why they constantly say uh you know we want Britain to be an open diverse welcoming place um but we've also got to take seriously the genuine concerns being expressed by you know working towards people and so we will we will need to toughen up our immigration control and so on you know that's that's a trick going on there they were they want to toughen up those border controls anyway because it's part of how the the system works right there's a it's driven by something else it's not driven by the uh you know suddenly we're taking white working-class public opinion really seriously on this one occasion because we don't want any other occasion yeah you know yeah it is fascinating isn't it like um I've had conversations in the last few months where people talk about the center you know the political Center and the political Center if you look at any polling the political Center on things like Law and Order Criminal Justice migration is to write the conservatives and then on public services wages inequality High pay it's the left of Labor yeah so if you were talking about the actual sanity of a party which incorporates both these things obviously I don't agree with a lot of that but that's just that's just an empirical observation but I say it's fascinating that you know you have a political class which is very eager to listen to uh you know the white workers we have to hear their concerns right why won't you hear their concerns about public ownership of water yeah where's that gone you have a great quote here from that Guardian article liberal anti-racists are powerless against this new structural racism they demand we use the correct racial vocabulary shaming conservative MPS or sports commentators when they use derogatory terms but abolishing a word does not abolish the social forces it expresses very lucid pithy sentence what does that mean well so much of what passes for kind of public discourse around race nowadays especially in Britain I think more even than the United States is is just let's just get us to use the correct words right and you know I'm glad that um I haven't heard anyone use for a really long time you know walking around the streets of Britain because you used to um but but where we're at now is is it's almost like that's all that anti-racism has become um and and it's the sense that if we can just get that right then everything you know all the other problems can kind of start to fall into place and the and what what's happened is that we've just we've just found ways for the for the kind of deep structural inequalities to continue even when we aren't being abused you know because they don't work through the constant need to assert racial superiority in That explicit way anymore they work through um kind of more abstract Market processes or they work through what are presented as race neutral um you know infrastructures like like policing like borders like the military uh like prisons and so on right and so with all that stuff in place they don't need to be um you know uh doing the kind of stuff that I grew up with of the abuse on the streets and stuff like that to keep the system going they don't need that anymore and there's a shift as well which you illuminate between racial distinctions have now become cultural sanctions right so and you hear this all the time you know we don't share the same culture as these people coming from Afghanistan Iran and so on and so forth to some extent is true but then you can equally say well you know an affluent Tory voter in the southeast of England doesn't really share much culturally with a working-class class region from Easter house where the average life expectancy is 60. yeah so it's it's a it's a sort of essentialism when it comes to culture which isn't isn't quite right but this idea of culture and this was again fascinating for me has changed over time much like that that word racism so you talk about how culture in the 19th century used to really be a albeit eurocentric Universal idea uh that we can all be elevated as individuals and you know really it it appeals to sort of you know the the human is comprised of the Angel and the ape and the words of Alexander Pope and culture takes us towards the angel right and and what you're saying happens in the sort of 19th early 20th Centuries with colonialism is that actually culture becomes a new vehicle for um really enveloping um what previously racial differences and we get cultural relativism as a as a result can you talk about that yeah so you know this is really um what comes out of thinkers like Franz barres and Ruth Benedict in the United States anthropologists who um kind of in the first few Decades of the 20th century are starting to question that kind of 19th century thinking that there's this kind of hierarchy of civilization you know with with white people at the top and that is also a cultural hierarchy in the sense you just described that you know at the top we have culture we you know we we and at the bottom it's kind of primitivism that kind of thing so what you get in it you know in the work of Boaz especially is this idea that well actually there's there's multiple cultures there's cultural diversity right that's where that you know really that notion of cultural diversity comes from Boaz cultural diversity and each culture is kind of self-contained right and so if you're outside that culture you're never really going to be able to understand it um and certainly what we can't do is put all these different cultures um on in any kind of hierarchy right and so that's that's you know really important move there to to take on this 19th century um sense of kind of civilizational racism right but it does mean that and and yeah Boaz is is coming out of his university to to become a public advocate for this argument by the time the Nazis are in power in Germany and he sees it as part of the work of challenging the racism that's Central to Nazi ideology right so but what what it opens up is the possibility that Burris doesn't take up but others do later of saying well okay well I would take your point there isn't this kind of racial hierarchy but instead like we can look at the world in terms of cultural differences that aren't um uh even if we don't put them in a hierarchy we can still mobilize a kind of argument about cultural difference to say each culture has the right to keep its own culture protected yeah right kind of what Enoch power does I mean that's his Innovation really is to say um uh I don't he says I'm not a racist I don't believe in biological ideas of racial hierarchy I just think that the English people have a distinctive culture right and that needs to be protected and that's why we can't have immigration right and that's why we need repatriation right so um you know the the the culture becomes uh or you know if you if you believe that culture is fixed that becomes a possibility right but culture isn't fixed you know the nature of culture is it moves around it changes um it's fluid right and culture is something we're constantly making uh and so you know that's the that's the the philosophical problem with with Powell's position and all the other you know I mean I I'm you know seeing power as the person who came out with that but kind of everyone said it you know like every every politician when they're trying to justify their immigration policy you know new labor conservative party whatever they talk about um uh you know some notion of of British values and you know we can't be overwhelmed by other cultures and so on you know that stand for every European country have you watched the um TV adaptation of handmaid's Tale uh a little a little I love it I think it's really good and there's this amazing scene which brings this home about cultural relativism where you have offred who's the handmaid of you know one of these Commanders and they're talking I think to Canadians or Americans because we've seen the Republic of Gilead now this is an American government in Exile and they're like how can you treat these handmaidens like this it's so appalling and he says this is our culture right now right right things don't overstep this is quite a woke language I mean I don't want to use that word in the way that you know the right dude but it's right right the performance of it was quite like actually it's quite Progressive you know this is our culture can you please just show a little bit of sensitivity this is how we like to organize things actually it's like yeah you know as a sex slave frankly yeah um and I I was like whoa and you know the left's obviously defended aspects of cultural relativism for a really long time because it is important to understand that you know uh the West shouldn't try and impose its culture on the rest of the planet of course but this idea again fundamentally Enoch power plays such an enormous role in this besides other stuff too but yeah you see it too with people like Douglas Murray right and right so lots of the far right today they say the death of why is Europe dying and they will say it's not just the race because I'm not I'm not a racist it's also the culture yeah and that does seem like this incredibly important field now for for anti-racists yeah and I think I think the um you know I think this is where it gets interesting in terms of connecting this to um neoliberalism right and the neoliberal kind of intellectual tradition because I think the reason the basic reason why these arguments about culture have become not just kind of central to a lot of the kind of discourse around race and immigration and so on but also actually I think they are Central to um a huge amount of policy making around um you know in all kinds of areas around Global development and around um uh you know economic policies and so on right is and the reason is is because for neoliberalism there is a there is a basic problem uh a kind of basic contradiction that called neoliberalism which is that their project is to try and create a world in which all our relationships to each other are mediated through markets right but the fact is is that most of us don't want to live like that right I mean let alone the rest but even in countries like Britain and the United States most of us don't want to live like that we want to live in societies where we have a kind of modicum of care for each other and we don't just trample over each other trying to compete with each other so it it's the neoliberals have a problem of like how can you how can you impose this Vision on societies that don't want it and you don't want to be having to coerce everyone all the time to go along with their Market Vision right so what you so what neoliberalism is about is you know the philosophical elements of neoliberalism are all about how do we create the cultural conditions for this Market order that basically we know can't just kind of um Survive by the free choice of of humanity right and so the neoliberals get into this game of like constantly looking around the world and looking at different population groups and saying um are these people um culturally adapted to be to have the right values to participate in a neoliberal society are they entrepreneurial are they Thrifty are they um willing to accept the discipline of markets when they're they don't win in markets you know um uh do they do they have ties to a broader Community or that they want you know they want to share things with or are they private property orders right which is what neoliberalism requires you to be and and of course when you do that and and when you meet resistance from um uh people who who have been colonized and are resisting the imposition of neoliberalism right through the 20th century late 20th century um the near liberals keep coming back to culture as the explanation right for why um why that resistance exists right it becomes the it becomes the the sort of trump card that you can say well of course they're resisting uh Vision because they're just culturally not adapted to it maybe we need a bit more a bit more coercion to get them to reform their culture to to enter our modern neoliberal society or maybe they're just never going to be reformable and when we need even more violence right and that is that's the kind of core argument I think around um uh you know so much of of the kind of neocolonial apparatus and then domestically as well in terms of like how different groups get racialized I mean that's the you know you can trace that in the neoliberal think tanks of how they understand what they're doing when they're doing you know when they're advocating for building prisons when they're advocating for bigger Powers uh for police forces and when they're advocating for a stronger bordering force and so on as that's the kind of philosophical underpinning of it that they draw on yeah I remember speaking to will will Davies a few years ago very smart man no longer on Twitter probably probably one of the smartest moves he made and um you know he wrote a great book about neoliberalism a very long time ago not only 10 years ago and he really sum this up for me so beautifully because of course many people say well I know what Classical liberalism is yeah it wasn't neoliberalism you're just making that term up yeah and he said the core distinction is for for Classical liberalism they believe that human nature is homoeconomicus yeah yeah utility maximizing and so on and so forth neoliberals don't believe it's natural and that it has to be imposed and that subjects have to be created exactly that's the core difference exactly and like you say when you sort of project that out into a global theater it's a really very violent project actually very violent absolutely absolutely and that's you know and and that's you know the difference is that in the in the you know when Adam Smith is around in the in the late 18th century you know you can they're they're a class on the rise and they can tell this kind of optimistic story that oh the world waiting for us to to create this new world of um free markets when you know when heyx writing he's you know he's um he's seen socialists take over his home city of Vienna you know um and he's and he's basically saying since 1870 we've been losing uh you know our class and our and The Advocates of free markets have been losing we can't take it for granted anymore we've got to come up with new ways that we that we create this world that we want right that's going to be about violence and it's going to be about um thinking about culture and how we shape it right and um and that's the difference and that's why yeah absolutely it's a it's a violin project and um uh uh you know if you read if you read any of these neoliberal thinkers carefully that violence is right there and it's it's never about just simply saying um the state needs to withdraw from the market and let the market do its thing it's about saying the state needs to constantly supervise to ensure that these rules of competition that they believe in are followed because they won't be if you just sit back people don't want to live like that so let's go back to this idea of diversity and you draw an interesting Genesis for it with the Indian Mutiny which is for the 1850s 1857 yeah yeah how does that work well so you know you've got um you've got a situation where Britain's colonized India it's extracting all this wealth that's why it's colonized India um and uh and you get the 1857 uprising which um you know is is violent on both sides um and it froze the British right it's a it's one of those moments where you get a kind of uh reflection back in I don't know what went wrong how did we you know how come this this thing happened um that we you know it's a Uprising and so the the kind of view that emerges in London is well um again it's culture right it's something about the um the culture of of India that makes them um resistant to the modernizing project that we're trying to impose on India right um this you know they would have called it civilizing Mission but essentially what they meant is um we you know our rule of India is benevolent because we're gradually bringing India up the civilizational scale to the point where they have these values of you know individual ownership of private property they're not a communal ownership uh Society right and um and then with the you know with the uprising they're like oh I guess I guess they're not they're not going to be led up this path um we're not going to be able to kind of force this transformation on on Indian society that we wanted we're gonna have to find a new way of ruling that we can continue to extract wealth but without pushing them down this path that they don't want to go so they come up with this idea of let's get um a really detailed kind of survey of the different cultural the different cultures in in the Indian population let's map them all out let's let's give each particular culture um a kind of representation in some kind of relatively superficial kind of structure of government where it's not representation but it's like uh you know there's a there's an appearance of representation there by having uh Representatives appointed by the colonial system um and and giving them the sense that you know within your particular cultural space as long as you don't challenge the overall structure and you don't challenge our project that's a about extracting this wealth you do your cultural life how you want it and um uh you so you have a little cultural space there to do your thing um and you know so then you have you know different what would called uh personal codes for different um religious groups different casts and so on so it they see it as a way of stabilizing the economic structure that they've built um and and certainly for for a period it works um and that's and that's really um you know Mahmoud mandani's written about this and you know kind of familiar with the idea of divide and what he calls it Define and Rule because what is Central to it is that the categories that are being created here aren't kind of organically there in this in the society in the form that they end up in they have to be kind of created um once you you know one if you go into an Indian village and you say in um you know 18 1860s or so when they're starting to do these these big censuses you know who's Hindu it's a kind of meaningless question right it's not how people see themselves but after a few decades the bureaucracy has created the category of a Hindu and given it a sense of well this is a certain population group in this Society that's entitled to a certain representation and so on right and so it's defined and Rule you're defining these groups and enabling your rule through that definition of them um and that's that's that's where we you know there is a line from that through to um you know because the same bureaucrats who were running that system then when you start to get um you know 1950s 1960s um people coming to Britain from South Asia the same categories are then applied and the same bureaucrats are coming home and running the local Authority with the same ideas you know right oh well we'll need some Multicultural representation here I mean even the fact that you know we call people Asians comes that's a term that's come back from British colonism in in Africa you know where the term Asians comes from so um you know and that's there's so there's a line straight up to today and how we think about diversity in Britain today because of course in the US when you say Asian it generally means East Asian yeah exactly generally I mean yeah it is our generalization yeah whereas here it means South Asia absolutely and this is where we get the dreaded quote-unquote Community leader um and and communities yeah I remember once I was saying to my dad I think I said the word Iranian community and he said some we don't have a community we all hate each other which I really liked and you know I thought it was really funny but I think this is such an oppressive word for people from minorities in this country obviously we have a white majority and I think that the fact that everybody in this country who's not white British has to be sectioned into this little cubbyhole all you're Jewish you're Iranian you know uh your West Indian et cetera Etc these are your communities in Ergo these are your community leaders well hold on I thought hold it I thought we were a democracy one person one vote I thought we believed in civil liberties and you care about the sanctity of the individual but now you're saying actually on the basis of people's color or Heritage this person represents them and it just seems so at odds with democracy and it's one of those things where someone on the right Will Mock it and they'll say well this is a left-wing idea obviously Community leaders who voted for them actually no this is an inheritance from from colonialism frankly yeah and you know I don't think we've ever had I mean we've rarely had Community leaders what we've had is people that have been appointed to pretend to represent us right I mean I think I think it'd be nice to have Community leaders which would mean um you know people who perhaps are you know local councilors people in elected office who um or even people who emerge organically through through some kind of community struggle and and become prominent um who who genuinely advocate for the rights of um people racialized into that Community right I mean that would be great but it very what you typically what the community leader is is someone who um it presents to the community what is required of them by the system yeah right and so that's a different thing you know um one of the people I write about in the book is um Jamil al-amin for me H rap Brown who was one of the leaders of the Black Power movement in late late 1960s and so on and um so he's someone who you know in the early 60s is is involved in Alabama Mississippi doing um organizing for the Voting Rights right to get um black people in those States the right to vote in order that then they can elect black people to office political office in those States and then bring about some kind of transformation in the in the lives of those people and doing that work meant you could get killed right so he was putting his life on the line for that cause by the end of the 1960s he's saying the only reason to get you know um a black person elected as mayor in in an American city which is starting to happen by then and the only point in doing that is if that mayor is willing to basically dismantle things from his office right and bring it down uh so um you know I think that's the correct analysis right it's like there's no there's nothing inherently valuable in having um you know having our people in in office being Community so-called Community leaders being Representatives nothing inherently valuable in that unless they are actually um willing to to um serve that Community by bringing down the structures that are oppressing them you mentioned prisons a moment ago um and the role they play in this kind of reforging of society after the 1970s and actually in in your word sort of quashing revolutionary sentiments we'll talk about them more in a moment um and I think most people will be aware of the tremendous increase in the prison population in the United States but one thing in particular and maybe let's start with this is the role of solitary confinement in what are called super max presence right which don't previously exist and now there's lots of them and I think today maybe you were writing this at the time sure it's more or less the same now around 80 000 people are in solitary confinement in the United States right super max star presence so where does this come from what drives the rise in particular of supermax presence yeah so you know the first thing to say is is um you know this kind of term slot tree confinement is it kind of makes it hard to see what really that feels like right so what you're talking about is isolating people um you know often for like 24 23 hours a day uh maybe they get an hour on their own in a yard um and and it's about cutting off that thing that actually is Central to being a human being is relationships with other human beings right and so um you know the sort of psychologists who've looked at this talk about how if you experience that kind of isolation for you know about three months or so it starts to become the equivalent of a kind of mental torture and it has the characteristics of you know people who experience it have the characteristics of people who survive torture right it's on that scale of of brutality but the the um yeah the thing about it is that it doesn't feel as brutal as that as what we normally think of as torture because it's all in it's all about what's going on in someone's head right and how how it's breaking down someone's personality um so if you look at the history of where this comes from um essentially it comes out of experiments that were started in the United States um in the in the early 60s where um psychologists who are working with the Federal Bureau of Prisons were looking at um people who had come back from imprisonment um in um in China or in North Korea and and were and it started to come up with who were Americans who were Americans who have been prisoners of war or whatever um and um and and starting to to imagine to I mean it wasn't an accurate portrayal of what their experience really was but they started to come up with these ideas actually what was going on there was kind of communist brainwashing right and a sort of idea that you could kind of break down someone's personality to a blank slate and then rebuild them you know with some new ideology right and so they were they were like well if if the Communists have got this we should have this capability you know um and so they start doing some experiments with um African-American prisoners who are in the Nation of Islam you know which at the time was um organizing in prisons and was seen as a threat and so the the sort of ambition of this was well this would be a very powerful tool for for controlling um at least prison populations if if we can get this working and so that's the origin of search confinement and then as you get into the kind of late 60s and early 70s um and you get um prison rebellions happening a lot more you get Attica uh you get um you know people like George Jackson um writing about how you know prison is a space of revolutionary organizing and so on um uh they they start to build more and more of these units um that began as this kind of psychological experiment to um isolate people and um you know attempt to essentially remold them through this practice uh into compliant um prisons right and so by the time you get to um you know the end of the 20th century you have I mean this thing's expanded massively in proportions of the expansion of mass incarceration itself um you know which also dramatically increases we've got super max prisons and we've got really a form of mass torture being inflicted on tens of thousands of people constantly and this is an inheritance from the Cold War absolutely right that's extraordinary right and then with the war on terror it's globalized right I mean that's that's the model but then you'd get deployed to Guantanamo Abu gray background and so on you know as well as um I mean it you know as well as a lot of other places it's it's a it's a very widespread phenomenon it's technology that's been exported around the world final question and again this was really fascinating to me was um Enoch Powell and his journey from being somebody who you know supported Imperial preference and the Empire becoming a neoliberal uh so can you explain this a little bit because it's fascinating yeah so you know so um yeah so Enoch Powell was a an Enthusiast for the British Empire and was a intelligence officer in India you know where a military intelligence officer kind of one of the bureaucrats administering the Imperial project through the 1940s and um and then you know 1947 when India liberates itself and Pakistan liberates itself he has this kind of personal crisis and he's like talked about this in interviews he's sitting on the Streets of London in the middle right through the night he won't go to sleep just like what happened like what happened you know like I can't believe this thing that I had so much uh faith in it was so much a part of my identity has been taken away from me right but it goes through the next few decades trying to figure out like what to like how to rethink really what is England's identity if it isn't the Empire you know that's that's the question for him right and um and he's also knocking about with the newly formed Institute of economic Affairs right which is the first neoliberal Think Tank um kind of formed um at the instigation of Hayek in London um and The Institute of economic Affairs have more or less recruited Powell to be their advocate in Parliament right and he's starting to think there's something in this idea that that um you know it's coming from Hayek that you could actually organize society as this big kind of um uh free market system which removes um the constant responsibility of politicians to have to think about um how are the economic resources of the society going to be distributed it doesn't become a problem anymore you just leave it to the market right the market decides right and he likes that idea because it um it seems to him to offer a new way of thinking about how to re-energize England right and he gets this idea that there's before the Empire there was a kind of spirit in England of of um kind of entrepreneurialism individual kind of get up and go you know like um kind of a kind of um National character that he thinks actually got lost in the Imperial project the Imperial project made it too easy for Britain right it didn't have to compete as hard it was it was it became kind of lazy right and so the the the process he goes through is a kind of rethinking of Empire as actually this kind of interlude in a longer history of English identity that was actually a mistake for England right because he was of that kind of effect it had culturally on on every English character so he sees the market as a way to bring back that character of you know that competitiveness is gonna is gonna bring us back to really being having to be much more agile think on our feet create new things be entrepreneurial be Thrifty be adventurous right um and so he's a neoliberal um he doesn't want the Commonwealth anymore at that point because the Commonwealth feels to him like another way to create these kind of protections for British industry shielding it from the competition he feels it needs and then um his and so then when he thinks about what would it look like to implement this political project as a conservative government because you know he's been a minister in conservative government um he understands that it's gonna he's gonna he's going against the grain of everything about British politics at that point you know where you've got trade unions you know in and out Downing Street every every week negotiating prices and wages and so on and that's the standard way of doing things unions aren't you know what they have been since the 1980s as it's kind of dangerous thing in society they're part of the way the system runs right and so we it understands it's gonna have to get rid of unions got to kind of go to war against the working class as it as or at least organized labor as it's been understood at that time um and is and his so he needs some way to be able to present this to Working Class People is in their interests right and so tries out various versions of talking about patriotism and so on to try and create this kind of sense of working class nationalism that's going to be the underpinnings of the neoliberal project the envisages um and then when he when he um starts talking about race in the story is when he becomes um he starts to see that there's a there's a way for him to use race to really do this right and so he um starts to make the argument that precisely because Britain is is bringing in workers from the Cadbury and bringing workers from South Asia who have a different culture that they're not going to be able to sign up to this um this kind of idea of englishness that he's he's developing um because for him the you know as he puts it um skin color is like a uniform it's like uh it's not you know it's very relevant to your kind of cultural identity for him right and uh so he you know he makes the argument was talking about earlier that that there's just a cultural incompatibility there but the the important thing for him about that cultural incompatibility is that it means that there's no way that if we have you know it's signifi you know what would have been at the time about a million workers with from from uh you know from these different cultures there's no way they're going to sign up to my near level project because they've got communal values I don't believe in individual private property like we need them to and if they're in the working class they're going to start influencing white workers to think like that as well and they're going to be this constant kind of limit on what we're able to achieve for neoliberalism so there's a direct relationship between him arguing for the basically ethnic cleansing of Britain and removing a million people of color from Britain and the neoliberal project that he's starting to advocate for you know and he is basically Britain's first you know neoliberal um certainly first neoliberal in Parliament in Britain so here's opposition to to brown and black people is fundamentally because they are an obstruction to the the construction of a of a market Society absolutely and it's not it's basically it's allowing race to embed the ideas of of neoliberalism so it's a the discourse around race which of course I think everybody he knows him for right very few people know the stuff on the economics yeah that was a means to an end which was to embed a certain way of doing the economy right right and so what's happening is there's a there's a you know I mean Stuart Hall talks about racism modality in which classes lived right and so I mean that that captures this right is that there's a what's really going on is a is a kind of class struggle that's operating on the terrain of race and culture right um now that doesn't mean that you can just simply say oh if only we could um you know get rid of these ideas about race we can black and white unite and fight um it because the the racial differences are material as well as as well as ideological and therefore there's going to be situations in which you can unite but there's also going to be perhaps more often situations in which you're going to need autonomous struggle by black people autonomous struggle by um Asian people in Britain because that they have a different relationship to capitalism right there's a racial division of labor that positions them differently in relation to capitalism right so there's you know so the question of where you know when do you get that Unity but when do you not or when do you when is the unity of of black workers in Britain going to be with white Works in Britain and when is that black black workers in Britain going to unite with say Liberation struggles in other parts of the world you know where do you find that Unity that's a matter of the you know the particular contingencies of where you're at that particular moment it's going to look different at different times um but you know those that is actually the key questions that you know that you start with when you're trying to build an anti-racist movement um you've got to make that kind of assessment um uh but the um but what you can't do is start from the position that Enoch power just didn't like you know there's nothing more to it except Enoch power was just a racist it was just a set of attitudes in his head and that's why he was the way he was you know no you like just read the guy listen to him it's clear that there's a lot more going on and it's tied up with a whole structure of what he thinks about what Britain should be like sent it on um the question of you know um economic markets right and the and the cultural conditions he wants to create to make those economics function in this inhuman way where we're all competing with each other right that can't just happen naturally Aaron we'll finish there thanks so much for joining us thank you very much foreign [Music]

Channel: Novara Media

Views: 47,884

Keywords: socialism, politics, Novara Media, Novara, current affairs

Id: kqSWIPFc0JQ

Length: 62min 34sec (3754 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 16 2023