6. The Clash were touring in 1977 with punk bands the Jam and the
Buzzcocks, as well as with a roots-reggae sound system featuring
I-Roy and dub from the Revolutionaries. This line-up was an
expression of the polycultural character of certain segments of
punk subculture in the mid-1970s. Dub reggae was the
soundtrack for punk in those early days, with Rastafarian DJ Don
Letts spinning records at seminal punk club the Roxy. In addition,
many punk bands practiced in run-down areas of London such as
Ladbroke Grove, home to one of Britain's largest Caribbean
communities. But hybridity was not the only game in
town; neo-fascist skinheads also turned up at punk gigs regularly,
trolling for disaffected youths who might be turned on to racial
supremacist doctrine. Indeed, in case anyone in their fishnet
stocking-clad, mohawk-wearing audience didn't get the anti-racist
message, Joe Strummer announced from the stage before the band
barreled into their wailing version of Junior Murvin's lyrical
reggae classic "Police and Thieves," "Last week 119,000 people
voted National Front in London. Well, this next one's by a wog.
And if you don't like wogs, you know where the bog [toilet] is"
(Widgery 70). Strummer's terse statement attests to
the deeply racialized character of British popular culture in
general and to the menacing presence of neo-fascists at gigs in
particular, as well as to the determination of certain segments of
the punk movement to confront such racism head on.
7. The Clash's anti-racist stance was catalyzed by the evolution of
new models for political practice within Black British and Asian
communities during the 1970s. Such practices were based on an
explicit rejection of the vanguardist philosophy that underpinned
many previous Black power organizations. In an editorial published
in 1976, for example, the Race Today collective articulates the
new philosophy of self-organized activity:
Our view of the self-activity of the black working class, both
Caribbean and Asian, has caused us to break from the idea of
"organizing" them. We are not for setting up, in the fashion
of the 60's, a vanguard party or vehicle with a welfare
programme to attract people . . . . In the name of "service to
the community," there has been the growth of state-nurtured
cadres of black workers, who are devoted to dealing with the
particularities of black rebellion.
In turning against the tradition of the vanguard party, groups
such as the Race Today collective were not simply rebelling
against their immediate predecessors in the Black power tradition.
They were, rather, recuperating a tradition of autonomist theory
and practice that extends back to the work of C.L.R. James in
Britain during the 1930s.
8. By the mid-1970s, James had returned to Britain and his brilliant
writings on the tradition of radical Black self-organization had
begun to influence younger generations of activists in the Black
community there. For James and for other radicals of
his generation such as George Padmore, the impatience with
vanguardist philosophies stemmed from the failure of the Comintern
and the Soviet Union to support anti-colonial struggles during the
1930s adequately. In James's case, however, this
disillusionment with particular Communist institutions developed
through his historiographic and theoretical work into a full-blown
embrace of popular spontaneity and self-organization. From his
account of Toussaint L'Ouverture's tragic failure to communicate
with his followers during the Haitian revolution in The Black
Jacobins to his attack on the stranglehold of Stalinist
bureaucracy on the revolutionary proletariat in Notes on
Dialectics, James consistently champions the free creative
activity of the people. His theories gave activists
a way of talking about the complex conjunction of race and class
that characterized anti-imperialist struggle in the periphery and
anti-racist politics in the metropolis. Taking the
revolutionary activity of the slaves in Haiti as his paradigm,
James articulates a model of autonomous popular insurrectionary
energy that offers a perfect theoretical analysis of spontaneous
uprisings such as those that took place at the Notting Hill
carnivals of 1976-78 in London. He was, indeed, one of the few
major radicals to proclaim the inevitability and justice of the
urban uprisings throughout Britain in 1981 (Buhle 161). The impact
of James's ideas concerning the autonomy of the revolutionary
masses can be seen in the polycultural politics of coalition that
mushroomed in response to the violence of the British state during
the late 1970s.
9. Yet despite the increasing militancy of the Black community, the
grip of popular authoritarianism continued to tighten in Britain.
If people of African descent were particularly subject to
harassment and violence by the police, the Asian community in
Britain suffered especially heavily from both organized and
impromptu racist violence. In June 1976, 18-year-old Gurdip Singh
Chaggar was attacked and stabbed to death by a group of white
youths opposite the Indian Workers' Association's Dominion Cinema
in Southall (Sivanandan 142). Horrified by the lack of official
action in response to this violence committed in the symbolic
heart of one of Britain's largest Asian communities, the elders of
the community gathered to give speeches and pass resolutions
against the tide of racist violence. Asian youth in
Southall, however, were fed up with this kind of pallid response,
and with the quietist approach of their so-called leaders. They
marched to the local police station demanding action. When the
police arrested some of them for stoning a police van along the
way, the crowd of youths sat down in front of the police station
and refused to budge until their friends were freed. The following
day, the Southall Youth Movement was born. Other
Asian youth groups followed in its wake around London and in other
British cities. These groups were primarily defensive and local in
character. Unlike the class-based organizations that
traditionally dominated the Left wing in British politics, in
other words, these groups stressed the language of community over
that of class. Their struggle tended to turn on immediate goals
related to political self-management, cultural identity, and
collective consumption rather than on the more ambitious but
distant goals of the revolutionary tradition.
10. Like the spontaneous uprisings that took place during the Notting
Hill carnival, the Asian Youth Movement also led to the
development of new political formations that helped forge what
Stuart Hall afterwards termed "new ethnicities." Youth
organizations and defense committees that sprang up in one
community tended to receive help from groups in other communities,
and, in turn, to go to the aid of similar organizations when the
occasion arose. In the process, boundaries between Britain's
different ethnic communities were overcome in the name of mutual
aid. Asian groups like the Southall Youth Movement joined with
Black groups such as Peoples Unite, and, in some instances, new
pan-ethnic, polycultural groups such as Hackney Black People's
Defence Organization coalesced. In addition, Blacks
and Asians formed political groups that addressed the oppressive
conditions experienced not only by racialized subjects in Britain
but throughout the Third World at this time. Such organizations
regarded racism in the metropolis and imperialism in the
periphery, in the tradition of C.L.R. James, as related aspects of
the global capitalist system. Many of these groups hearkened back
explicitly to the Bandung conference of 1955 between African and
Asian heads of state by developing a politics of solidarity in the
face of state and popular racism in Britain. The polycultural
character and ambitions of these groups is reflected in the titles
of journals such as Samaj in'a Babylon (produced in Urdu and
English) and Black Struggle. While such coalitions always had
their internal tensions, they were sustained by their
participants' conscious reaction to the divide-and-conquer
politics that had characterized historical British imperialism and
that continued to manifest itself in the metropolis.
11. The emotional resonance of this politics of polycultural
solidarity is suggested by dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson's "It
Dread Inna Inglan." Composed as part of a campaign to free an
unjustly imprisoned community activist, LKJ's dub poem celebrates
the potent affiliations that racialized groups in Britain strove
to foster during this period:
mi se dem frame-up George Lindo
up in Bradford Toun
but di Bradford Blacks
dem a rally roun . . .
Maggi Thatcher on di go
wid a racist show,
but a she haffi go
kaw,
rite now,
African
Asian
West Indian
An' Black British
stan firm inna Inglan
inna disya time yah
for noh mattah wat dey say,
come wat may,
we are here to stay
inna Inglan,
inna disya time yah . . .
(Johnson 14).
LKJ's catalogue of different ethnic groups closes with the
unifying label "Black British," which unites the groups in common
resistance to the racism of politicians such as Margaret Thatcher.
LKJ's dub verse creates a linguistic equivalent of this imagined
community by hybridizing standard English and Jamaican patois
(Hitchcock). This was a community forged by dint of anti-racist
struggle in the metropolis. Indeed, for prominent radical
theorists of the time such as A. Sivanandan, Blackness was a
political rather than a phenotypical label. Skin
color, in other words, only became an important signifier of
social difference when it was embedded in power relations
predicated on the systematic exploitation and oppression of
certain groups of people by others. If this
understanding of the social construction of "race" derives from
the bitter experiences of colonial divide-and-conquer policies,
the politics of solidarity found within local anti-racist groups
emerge from a tradition of struggle against the racializing impact
of state immigration legislation and policing in post-war Britain.
As the popular authoritarian ideology gained greater purchase on
the British public in the economic and social crisis conditions of
the late 1970s, such forms of solidarity became increasingly
important.
12. When LKJ published "It Dread Inna Inglan," Margaret Thatcher had
just won the general election. Her agenda was, however, already
quite clear to Britain's Black and Asian communities. In 1978, she
had given an interview on Granada TV in which she linked the fears
of post-imperial Britain to prejudice against Black people:
I think people are really rather afraid that this country
might be rather swamped by people with a different culture
and, you know, the British character has done so much for
democracy and law, and has done so much throughout the world,
that if there is any fear that it might be swamped, people are
going to be really rather hostile to those coming in.
(Qtd. in
Widgery 14)
The assumptions behind Thatcher's infamous "swamping" rhetoric
are, of course, precisely the insular ones that legitimate the
increasingly exclusionary immigration legislation of the post-1945
period. Indeed, Thatcher's painfully sanctimonious
voice articulated views held by mainstream Labour and Conservative
politicians throughout the post-war period. What had changed was
the frankness with which such openly racist views could circulate
in the public sphere. Thatcher's speech delivered almost
immediately bloody results for Britain's Black and Asian
communities. The media began running reports about everyday
instances of "swamping," and notorious racist agitator Enoch
Powell was offered time on the BBC to discuss "induced
repatriation" of Black and Asian Britons (Sivanandan, "From
Resistance" 144).
13. The rising tide of racism had become inescapably evident to anyone
paying attention to mainstream British popular culture well before
Thatcher's campaign. For example, in August 1976, Eric Clapton,
the British guitarist who had made a career by appropriating music
of the Black diaspora, interrupted a concert in Birmingham to
deliver a drunken stump speech in support of Enoch Powell. Other
British musicians such as David Bowie were openly flirting with
fascist iconography and ideology at the time. Red
Saunders, a photographer and ex-Mod, responded to the endorsement
of racism by Clapton, whom he called "rock music's biggest
colonist," with a letter calling for a grassroots movement against
racism in rock music that was published in the main British
pop-music weeklies (qtd. in Widgery 40). His call provoked a
response of over 600 letters, and Rock Against Racism, a group
dedicated to amplifying the polycultural character of urban youth
culture using contemporary popular music and performance, was
formed soon after. David Widgery's editorial in the inaugural
issue of RAR's paper, Temporary Hoarding, was the group's first
manifesto: "We want Rebel music, street music. Music that breaks
down people's fear of one another. Crisis music. Now music. Music
that knows who the real enemy is. Rock against Racism. Love Music
Hate Racism" (qtd. in Renton).
14. RAR made its public debut at London's Royal College of Art in
December 1976. Headlining the bill was Dennis Bovell's dub band of
the time, Matumbi, who filled the hall with heavy bass frequencies
and caused joyous confusion among the pogo-ing punks. The show
brought together the radical Left and youth culture for the first
time. This was not an easy proposition. As Widgery states in his
memoir Beating Time, "the Left thought us too punky and the punks
thought they would be eaten alive by Communist cannibals" (59).
The traditional Left, of course, tended to see the cultural realm
as superficial, something that didn't really count in the final
analysis. Underlying the traditional Left's tactical failure was a
broader theoretical shortcoming: blinkered by an orthodox Marxist
reading of social relations, they tended to view "race" as a kind
of epiphenomenon of the class struggle. Once the basic economic
inequalities endemic to capitalist society were ameliorated
through either parliamentary reform or revolution (depending on
particular sectarian tendency), then the "race problem" itself, it
was believed, would disappear. This attitude was confirmed for
many Black radicals when the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) was formed in
1977. The very name of this organization, an outgrowth of the
Socialist Workers Party (SWP) that drew broad support from the
Labour Party and many major trade unions, suggested the insularity
of the white members of the British Left. The National Front was
regarded as a recrudescence of the Nazi party, an attitude that
ignored the emergence of the racist state in imperialist
high-Victorian Britain rather than in Weimar Germany. In addition,
the ANL seemed to assume that the NF was reanimating the putrid
corpse of a racism that was laid to rest during World War Two.
This attitude blithely ignored the discrimination and hostility
Black and Asian people had been exposed to since their arrival in
the metropolis after 1945, not to mention the enduring experiences
of imperialism and neo-colonialism of people throughout the Third
World during the post-war period. In order for the forms of
affiliation and solidarity imagined in the Clash's "White Riot" to
become anything more than rhetoric, the white Left would have to
tackle and overcome not simply the deep-seated racism that
characterized British nationalism, but also that which was
embedded in their own theoretical models.
