In the first part of this series, I tried to draw out some different conceptualisations of race and the process by which race is created and reproduced; racialisation. I attempted to suggest some commonalities in how racialisation operates, and also to complicate a two-dimensional understanding of the process of racialisation and racial thinking as a process of categorisation by exploring how race functions metonymically as a ‘pathologisation’ of an expanded array of different social relations and perceived social ills. In this second section I want to attempt to link racialisation more specifically to the reproduction of class society and explore its relationship to exploitation. Particularly, I want to demonstrate something of the way in which the reproduction of race functions alongside the reproduction of class relations and class-composition within class society.

Indeed, this is what is expressed in Stuart Hall’s now famous aphorism, that ‘race is the modality in which class is lived’¹. However, it is important not to take this too literally, as it remains open to an interpretation that relegates class to an a priori position, a ‘truth’ which precedes lived experience, with race simply the experiential or ideological manifestation of a ‘pure’ contradiction between capital and labour. It is of course true that class has its basis in an a priori relation; the exploitation relation and the production of surplus value ‘that goes on behind the backs of the producers’². However, it also has a second basis: the structuring of concrete labour processes and workers’ experience of production, including their capacity and efforts to resist exploitation. This process of class composition is overdetermined by race, but there are also other modalities ‘in which class is lived’. Instead I suggest that the process of proletarianisation itself – the constitution of the working class – is a parallel process to that of racialisation which, whilst never extricable from racialised dynamics, is not synonymous with them either.

In his essay ‘Class Racism’ Balibar advances the hypothesis that ‘’class’ and ‘race’ constitute two antinomic poles of a permanent dialectic, which is at the heart of modern representations of history’³. This hypothesis proposes that from the outset racist representations of history stand in relation to the class struggle, since they combine a distinctly aristocratic conception of genealogy (noble blood, fears of interbreeding and miscegenation), developed as a defence of their ‘right’ to rule in the face of emergent bourgeois power, with a contempt for the ‘dangerous classes’; the caste of labourers suited only to subjugation and incapable of developing an independent civilisation. It is only later, through the experience of European colonialism, but also subsequently through practices of immigration control and state discipline, that these hereditary notions of race were ethnicised, that is, grafted on to the nation form and employed to represent the national community.

Indeed, it is easy to forget that whatever else immigration controls are, they are primarily a state intervention in the domestic labour market. Recent proposals under the previous Tory government for a ‘points-based immigration system’ make this clearer than it often is, but it is worth noting that even outside of this specific context immigration controls act to shape the domestic labour market in the interests of capital. Even the Reform manifesto, seeking to ride a wave of anti-migrant sentiment, caveats this with a commitment to freeze only ‘non-essential’ immigration, with an ‘exception’ for ‘essential skills’. Ambalavaner Sivanandan traced how successive reforms to British immigration legislation throughout the 1960s sought to resolve British capital’s variable need for labour-power dependent on cycles of production, with the demographic problem of settlement, noting the advantages of the Common Market in providing seasonal and contractual labour on short term permits which could ‘absorb the shocks of alternating booms and depressions’⁴. He notes how the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 debarred settlement as a matter of right whilst making immigration dependent on a ‘voucher system’ for employment, with A vouchers issued to those with jobs already lined up and B vouchers for those with skills and qualifications ‘likely to be useful in this country’, thus effecting a shift from settled migration to permit work in the interest of capital. Immigration controls produce sections of the working class who are necessarily more exploitable, either because their residency is precarious or tied to specific types of employment, or because they are disbarred from forms of state support (for instance in the case of migrants with ‘No Recourse to Public Funds’). Immigration controls at the same time produce another effect which is more visible: by distinguishing between ‘alien’ and ‘citizen’ (and the many gradations in between) they produce race. That is, they reproduce categories of exclusion while also delineating the boundaries of the national community, creating distinctions which are naturalised as racial distinctions even whilst constantly changing (since they bear a determinate relation to the changing requirements of capitalist production).

Crucially, however, immigration controls do not simply ‘exclude’, they necessarily contain an integrationist function as well, formally manifested in ‘routes to citizenship’ and asylum laws which most clearly betray their ideological function. Naturally, the integrationist aspects of immigration control are secondary to their regulatory functions, since immigration controls could not fulfil their role of regulating the labour market if they did not facilitate the relative exclusion and discrimination of the majority of ‘migrants’. However, the integrationist function of immigration controls is nevertheless essential to their ideological function. Through processes like citizenship tests, borders can be represented as a product of cultural difference, whereby inclusion within the national community is dependent on the internalisation and expression of ‘British values’. Likewise, policies of asylum can stand as evidence of such ‘values’ as tolerance and democracy, even when this is belied in the experience of the asylum process itself, and when that system serves to rationalise the general exclusion of the majority of migrants.

It is therefore not a coincidence that the same language of ‘British values’ recurs in strategies of state ‘counter-extremism’ which effect ‘the dissolution between ‘foreign’ and […] ‘home-grown’ terrorism’⁵, helping to define British Muslims as a dangerous fifth column through the prism of racial and cultural difference. Counter-extremism initiatives impose a racial signifier onto social antagonisms, explaining ‘the grievances of those experiencing social, political and economic deprivation, under-employment and over-policing as not the products of structural racism but of Muslim communities living ‘parallel lives’’⁶. As the case of Shamima Begum demonstrates, counter-extremism is heavily enmeshed with practices of immigration control, whereby citizenship deprivation acts to delineate the essential cultural difference of ‘extremists’. At the same time these processes construct the national community, serving to ‘substantiate the state in the name of national security’⁷. The parallels between counter-terrorism initiatives and immigration control are glaringly apparent in the parallel state policies of the ‘Hostile Environment’ for migrants (which effects the deliberate deprivation of migrants through blocking access to state support and enforcing their exclusion from the labour market) and the Prevent counter-terrorism agenda. Both include expansive regimes of surveillance which extend beyond the official institutions of the state, imposing statutory duties on employers, landlords and healthcare staff to monitor and report on both the residency rights of individuals and ambiguous, racially coded indicators of ‘radicalisation’. That these policies form part of the statutory duties within workplaces means that they play a significant role in shaping the class experience of workers. Specifically, workers in educational settings and any services in which workers are held to have a ‘duty of care’ to pupils, students, patients or beneficiaries are subject to a ‘secondary repression’ by virtue of the statutory duties imposed on them – on pain of prosecution – to monitor and report on migrants and suspects of radicalisation. In this way, these practices of repression rationalise and justify the surveillance and repression of workers, and in turn serve to normalise extended processes of monitoring and surveillance employed in the intensification of exploitation. By categorising the duty to report on suspected radicalisation under the auspices of a ‘duty of care’, the Prevent agenda also brings the racial metaphor into relation with all of the familial connotations of ‘care’ and articulates them within the paradigm of ‘national security’.

However, it is the benefits system that reveals most starkly the parallel processes of racialisation and proletarianisation. Institutions of state welfare fundamentally structure the labour market both materially and ideologically. Materially, through reproducing the reserve army of labour as isolated individuals, who through bad ‘luck’ are dependent on state support, mitigating against collective political expression of their position through a punishing routine of sanctions and surveillance. Ideologically, through representing the abyss into which others may sink but for the grace of God, thereby also structuring the experience of competition in the labour market. In the structures and practices of repression within the benefits system we can see a remarkable parallel with the forms of repression meted out against migrants through the asylum and immigration system (minus, of course, the practices of detention and deportation). 

The requirement for regular attendance at job centre appointments mirrors the requirement to attend immigration reporting centres, with asylum seekers similarly denied their measly asylum support allowance if they fail to attend. Similarly, there are parallels between ‘work capability’ assessments and asylum screening processes, both invasive and disciplinary processes for determining ‘eligibility criteria’, including the demand for proof of sickness, evidence from claimants’ medical history etc. Recently the provision of school meal ‘vouchers’ to parents has also demonstrated a commonality with the practice of issuing food vouchers to asylum seekers. Likewise, calls in 2011 to evict the families of ‘rioters’ from social housing demonstrate the deep entanglement of the welfare state in systems of state discipline and the ideological connection of criminality as a racial ‘sin’, punishment for which can be exacted on the families of offenders. Of course, these similarities between the benefits and immigration systems are not coincidental. Practices of discipline and repression ‘trialled’ on migrant populations are subsequently applied to the ‘indigenous’ working class. In both systems the probationary architecture of repression has the effect of restricting the independence of claimants and emphasising the conditionality of state support. It is through this very conditionality that these systems produce categories of eligibility, distinguishing between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ claimants.

Thus arising out of these disciplinary processes we see similar ideological rationalisations. It is not for nothing that the benefits system has been described as a ‘hostile environment’ for the poor and disabled. Indeed, there is a clear racialised signification in the ‘stigmatisation’ of benefits claimants, who are portrayed variously as congenitally ‘work-shy’, criminal, or lacking in personal responsibility. The portrayal of families in receipt of free school meals as ‘culturally degenerate’ in late 2020 is a case in point, with Conservative MP Ben Bradley claiming that Free School Meal vouchers in the summer ‘effectively’ represented sending cash to ‘crack dens’ and ‘brothels’, while Conservative MP Danny Kruger said ‘generous, unconditional, universal benefit entitlements trap people in dependency on the state and rightly enrage people who are working hard for themselves’⁸. The concept of ‘dependency’ itself has more than a hint of racial connotations, particularly when articulated in terms of a ‘curse of intergenerational worklessness’⁹. Notions of dependency situate claimants outside of the national community, parasitically ‘scrounging’ and ‘sponging’, whilst the ‘intergenerational’ metaphor introduces the conception of a hereditary difference, a generational, in-born ‘culture’ of worklessness. Indeed, through stigmatising portrayals of benefit claimants one can constantly see reproduced an idea of the separate ‘culture’ of claimants, both in the sense of an ‘attitude’ of individual claimants and in the sense of a segregated community. Of course, in reality, the ‘segregation’ of claimants is directly enforced by precisely the disciplinary architecture of the benefits system itself, which through constant surveillance and intense workload individuates and isolates them from the rest of the working class. Perversely, cuts to benefits, which increase the disciplinary nature of the system, are justified with reference to people ‘taking advantage’ of the system, premised on the assumed moral degeneracy both of claimants, but also of migrants. Through the disciplinary ideology of the welfare system the figure of the benefit claimant is elided with the figure of the ‘benefit cheat’, which in turn is conflated with the parasitic migrant.

Whilst official state concerns over ‘children living in workless households’[14] indicate a ‘demographic’ fear which has some of the hallmarks of racial pathologisation, it must also be noted that the essentialising ‘hereditary’ aspect of this framing exists in tension with the emphasis on ‘social mobility’, and the emphasis within the benefits system of getting claimants ‘into work’. However, this does not undermine the basic observation of the racial metaphor, instead it points to a contradiction implicit within the pathology of ‘class racism’ and helps to explain its articulation alongside anti-migrant sentiment. This contradiction bears on the fact that ‘class racism’ stands in to signify the contradictory position of the working class as a constituency the boundaries of which are, by necessity, imprecise, yet which must to an extent be ‘stabilised’. Workers must be educated for their role in the production process. This must also be rationalised and ideologically legitimated at least in part through various ‘familial’ ideologies, including ideologies of national belonging and allegiance:

 On the one hand, class condition, which relates purely to the wage relation, has nothing to do with antecedents or descendants; ultimately, even the notion of ‘class belonging’ is devoid of any practical meaning; all that counts is class situation, hic et nunc. On the other hand, at least a section of the workers have to be the sons of workers, a social heredity has to be created.¹⁰

There is, therefore, an internal dialectic of ‘class racism’ which is related to its essential ‘openness’ as a pathology. We can see this, for example, in education, which has long been the British state’s magical panacea for all manner of social problems, epitomised in Tony Blair’s ‘Education, Education, Education’ speech at Labour Party Conference 1996. In this speech Blair told the audience: ‘No more bosses versus workers … We are on the same side, the same team, and Britain united will win.’ Within this nationalist disavowal of class antagonism, education was proposed as the key to addressing social ‘disadvantage’ and ‘forging a national purpose’. More recently, the closure of schools during the Covid-19 pandemic has catalysed an outpouring of disquisitions on the importance of education for addressing social inequality¹¹. ‘Equality of opportunity’ through education is proposed as the solution to inequality, allowing every individual to ‘achieve their potential’. But within class society education must necessarily segregate workers into sections of the labour market according to the requirements of capital. The doctrine of ‘social mobility’ whilst, nominally opposed to doctrines of ‘privilege’, rationalises inequality through its egalitarian gloss. In the case of those who continue to languish in ‘intergenerational poverty’, despite ‘equality of opportunity’, it becomes ‘obvious’ that the cause must be individual or cultural failure. The individual ‘potential’ of students is also rationalised through the instrumentalisation of IQ, itself a distinctly racialised notion, which finds its reflection in the managerial ideology of the executive as ‘decision-maker’. Through education the reification of intellectual capacities naturalises ‘inequality of outcomes’. Thus the reproduction of the working class as a partially ‘closed’ segment of society and the implicit rationalisation of a ‘race of workers’ is ensured not despite, but through the supposedly egalitarian dynamics of education.

Education also produces its own racial significations, as children learn to speak ‘proper English’. Whilst a ‘linguistic community’ appears more ‘open’ and egalitarian, since it nominally includes everyone with the capacity and inclination to develop their ‘linguistic capabilities’ and enter into the national community, it in fact contains a multitude of racialised distinctions and norms which greatly overlap with class differences. As Balibar observes:

[The norms of the linguistic community] confer on the act of speaking in its personal, non-universalisable traits the function of a racial or quasi-racial mark: ‘foreign’ or ‘regional’ accent, ‘popular’ style of speech, language ‘errors’ or, conversely, ostentatious ‘correctness’ immediately designating a speaker’s belonging to a particular population and spontaneously interpreted as reflecting a specific family origin or hereditary disposition. The production of ethnicity is also the racialisation of language and the verbalisation of race¹².

Further, the disciplinary functions of exclusion and suspension within schools should not be seen as simply extraneous to the project of education. Rather, these are fundamental to the pathologisation of social problems as children’s ‘behavioural issues’; establishing ‘behavioural’ norms which are not secondary to the function of ‘educating’ the young, but rather essential to the task of preparing them for the labour market. Within education the task of imparting practical ‘know-how’ is combined with both the ideological function of reproducing a national ‘culture’ (literature, art, history etc.) and the practical function of teaching children to ‘follow instructions’. More acutely, police interventions in schools to combat ‘drugs’ and ‘knife-crime’, alongside monitoring of potentially ‘radicalised’ children through the Prevent counter-terrorism initiative, or the presence of School-assigned ‘Safer Schools Officers’, tie the social-reproductive functions of the school system into the broader disciplinary architecture of policing and national security. 

Educational settings; schools and universities, often provide the vehicle for racialised moral panics, from the French Minister for Education, Frédérique Vidal, conjuring ‘Islamo-gauchiste’ tendencies which ‘corrupt society’ in French universities¹³, to the 2014 Ofsted probe into a ‘Trojan Horse’ plot to ‘Islamise’ Birmingham Schools¹⁴, to more recent Government denouncements of the malign influence of ‘Critical Race Theory’ in British universities. This too is not a coincidence, since education has always to some degree been held to have a ‘civilising’ function which betrays its entanglement with the issue of policing the population and reproducing ruling class hegemony. In the late 19^th century, as fears about the moral degeneracy of urban life emerged in the context of rapid industrialisation, the concept of youth as a discrete, age-defined social category began to symbolise a broad array of cultural concerns related to imperial decline, racial decay and class conflict. The signifier of ‘youth’ gathered together multiple meanings to define ‘a “social problem” whose solution invariably became the provision of adult-supervised leisure pursuits’ through organisations, such as the Scouts, which fulfilled the dual function of occupying the potentially volatile youths and instilling the values of Empire¹⁵. We can see a parallel to this in contemporary inner-city education programmes which map the ‘civilising’ function of education on to the social problems of urbanisation and criminality under the rubric of racial and cultural difference, especially with reference to ‘gang culture’. Importantly, however, concerns regarding youth and the urban population problem have traditionally had a close connection to concerns about the decline of the ‘white race’, a neurosis which has a contemporary parallel with the common concern for the educational attainment of ‘white working class boys’.

The many meanings of whiteness

It would be easy to dismiss this social neurosis, and other invocations of the ‘white working class’ as superficial spectres conjured by right-wing politicians and demagogues. It must be noted that there is, indeed, a certain strand of right-wing argument which invokes white identity in reaction to the ethnic categorisations of multiculturalism as a rear-guard response to the structuring logic it establishes, redolent in the idea of a ‘forgotten’ or ‘left behind’ white working class, an afterthought in the ethnic categorisation of society. It would nonetheless be wrong to relegate white racial identification to the status of a discursive trick. As Asad Haider has noted: ‘The primordial form of “race” is the “white race,” and we cannot accept it as the neutral, universal standpoint from which a theory of race as “difference” is advanced’¹⁶. Similarly, Stuart Hall observed that those who articulate racist ideology as ‘the ‘common sense’ of the white working class’ ‘succeed to the measure that they do because they are practising on real relations, working with real effects of the structure, not because they are clever at conjuring demons’¹⁷. Indeed, racial ideology does not just produce the racialised other as an object for the consumption of the racist imaginary. The signifier of race ‘racialises’ different social relations, standing in to represent antagonisms between ‘communities’. Hence it racialises communities co-constitutively, by producing a fictive relation in which communities recognise not only the ‘other’, but a representation of themselves. We therefore need to grapple with the ‘self-racialisation’ of the white working class.

This is where an understanding of ‘class racism’ provides a way to understand the organic connections established between class identification, nationalism, and racial pathologies. Since the proletariat constitute, in effect, the first necessarily international class, characterised by their exceptional geographical mobility across national borders according to the requirements of production, class racism is able to pathologise the destabilising effects of capitalist production and the internationalisation of capitalist social relations through the metaphor of the ‘dangerous classes’, who threaten the cohesion of the national community¹⁸. Class racism combines within this pathology a racialisation of labour, not simply manual labour, which – with its connotations of repetitive, exhausting, dirty tasks with no requirement of intelligence or initiative – has been perceived differently since ancient times, but distinctly industrial (and post-industrial) labour, in which workers are converted into ‘a living appendage of the machine’¹⁹. The same can be said about the supposed degenerative impact of ‘worklessness’; of the presumed atrophying impact on the intellectual and moral character of the ‘jobless’ conjured in the notion of ‘dependency’, and the representation of a subhuman constriction of social activity. In this way, class racism is able to articulate paranoia about the common themes of ‘social realism’ which circulate around the signifiers of ‘work’ and ‘worklessness’: including poverty, criminality, vice, physical and moral defects, dirtiness, sexual promiscuity, and disease as a threat to the national community. It is therefore within this paradigm that the ‘race’ of citizens and nationals is held to be constantly in peril, a theme which is consistently worked on by racist propaganda.

Within the naturalised discipline of the competition of the labour market, epithets like ‘hard working families’ achieve the resonance that they do because they simultaneously convey the experience of ‘struggling to get by’ with a racialised inclusion within the community of families which make up the national community. In this way a nationalist identification fulfils a function of disavowal, distinguishing ‘hard working families’ from the ignominy of the stigmatisation effected by class racism. A workerist valorisation of the dignity of work – with its connotations of independence and self-sufficiency – also fulfils this function, whilst the image of the ‘breadwinner’ ties it to the signifying chain of the working-class family. More generally, this function of disavowal is also produced through the distinction between skilled and unskilled work. As Michelle Barrett notes, this has long played a double-edged role in the struggle between labour and capital:

on the one hand it has provided capital with a weapon to divide and rule the working class, but on the other it has provided organized sections of the working class with a lever which has successfully been brought to bear on capital in struggles over wages and has been the instrument through which many major achievements have been won²⁰.

This ‘double-edged’ function demonstrates something of the racialised overdeterminations of class struggle. Whilst demonstration of the ‘skill’ involved in particular types of work is often a necessary ideological justification in struggles for higher wages, it also reproduces necessarily racialised distinctions even when these are not explicitly articulated through demands for exclusion of other groups. Furthermore, definitions of ‘skilled’ work often involve justifications of the indispensability of the work not only for the firm, but for national prosperity. Crucially, however, for workers themselves they fulfil a compensatory role of disavowal, through which they distinguish themselves from other workers and the contempt these others are subjected to. Relatedly, Balibar argues that workers projecting fears and resentment onto foreigners and migrants are not only fighting competition in the labour market, but much more profoundly trying to represent a disavowal of their own exploitation: ‘It is a hatred of themselves, as proletarians – in so far as they are in danger of being drawn back into the mill of proletarianisation – that they are showing’²¹.

In this regard we can see a throughline between Keir Starmer’s racist pronouncements about an ‘island of strangers’, proposed Government cuts to disability benefits, and the related Labour Party commitment to being a party, not of ‘Workers’ but of ‘Work’. ‘The clue is in the name’ said Shabana Mahmood, Secretary of State for Justice, justifying Labour’s cuts to welfare in a television interview in March 2025. To read anything profound in this latest rhetorical gimmick might seem tenuous if it were not so obviously situated in the context of a decades-long discourse on work and unemployment counterposing ‘strivers’ to ‘skivers’ and vilifying the sick, unemployed, and disabled. Indeed, far from being merely an asinine pun, the characterisation of Labour as the ‘Party of Work’ reveals something far more consistent in the logic of class racism of which it is a symptom. Through the valorisation of work, workers are invited to join the national community and reflect on their social responsibility and economic independence, thereby distinguishing themselves from all those ‘scroungers’, migrants, criminals etc. who are a ‘burden’ to society. This appeal is to participate in an implicitly bourgeois public sphere, to attain social agency through the demonstration of economic self-sufficiency and distinguish themselves from those to which that community is closed: foreigners who would take their jobs or claim benefits, and the congenitally workshy. However, inasmuch as they remain workers, subject to discipline in the workplace, constantly threatened with the precarity of unemployment, without security of housing, this invitation to join the national community relies upon the repression and disavowal of the reality of the anxieties and precarity of working-class existence, of the externalisation and personification of that precarity and anxiety, into the figure of the migrant, or the ‘scrounger’. ‘It is a hatred of themselves, as proletarians […] that they are showing.’ And insofar as this precarity and these anxieties persist, precisely this identification with the ruling ideology reproduces a reactionary radicalisation through a sense of betrayal and resentment.

There therefore exists a certain ‘self-racialisation’ of the white working class, whereby through national identification an attempt is made to disavow the experience of exploitation and the contempt to which it is subject in the terms set by the ruling ideology. This represents, of course, a degree of identification with the ruling class members of the national community. However, insofar as it functions as an expression of resentment, this ‘self-racialisation’ also demonstrates fissures in the unity of the racial constitution of the national community. The fact that ‘white working class’ identity can function as a vehicle for the expression of the ‘betrayal’ of elites, or the notion that ‘British-born families’ fall to the bottom of the housing queue, demonstrates that to some degree an alternative conception of classed whiteness is produced in these contexts. The identification with a ‘whiteness’ that is to some extent antagonistic with the ‘establishment’ (however ill-defined) encompasses sentiments such as ‘political correctness gone mad’ or a ‘two-tier justice system’ up to and including paranoid fantasies of ‘white genocide’ which populate far-right discourse. 

This tension is demonstrated in the defence of ‘our’ (white) children, particularly, for instance in relation to the racialised depiction of ‘grooming gangs’. The outcry against the fictional ‘refusal’²² of politicians and the media to associate the abuse of young girls with a racial pathology because of ‘political correctness’ demonstrates that this self-racialisation involves a wounded identification with the victimhood of imagined ‘white’ suffering at the hands of an establishment. The fact that the failure of police and Council managers to treat the abuse of young girls (both white and non-white) in Rotherham seriously was in reality motivated by misogyny and disdain for working class victims, demonstrates the means by which nativist identifications with whiteness are able to operate through the effects of ‘class racism’²³. These nativist interpretations of ‘whiteness’ include both a disavowal of the themes invoked through ‘class racism’ while simultaneously identifying with them in the form of a criticism of the contempt with which elites treat ‘ordinary people’. This nativist identification is something which mainstream nationalism constantly reproduces, through the ideological reproduction of the fictive national community and the ‘class racism’ that defines its opposite, at the same time as attempting to distance itself from it.

This represents another instance of the negotiation of ideological terms of reference which shape practices of racialisation. The production of a fictive national community which serves a unifying function in ruling class ideology constantly encounters different ‘local’ ideologies embedded in different social practices. Race is never ‘just’ race; since racialisation is the process by which a racial pathology intervenes to ‘explain’ a given set of social relations. The meanings assigned to race are therefore highly contextual, involving an endless chain of significations which relate ‘race’ to other social dynamics. The meanings ascribed to ideas such as ‘national identity’ can therefore not survive the translation process between ‘global’ ‘regional’ and ‘local’ registers of ideological articulation unchanged. There is a necessary indeterminacy in ideological themes which facilitates the unification of the ruling ideology and its ability to subsume the ‘local’ and ‘regional’ ideologies which correspond to different social practices. It is therefore not surprising that racist ideologues are able to ‘repackage’ themes of the ruling ideology in more restrictive forms, for instance converting ‘Britishness’ into ‘whiteness’ even when officially the ruling ideology goes to great lengths to emphasise the ‘openness’ of ‘British identity’. We should also see this racial restriction of the national community, however, as being inherent in the familial themes which it mobilises, making racial associations integral to the national community as an expression of kinship relations, whose shared culture inheres in hereditary lineage²⁴.

Proletarian Internationalism

In the formulation of ‘class racism’, racial heredity is the inheritance, initially, not of the subaltern, but of the dominant racial group. This is important inasmuch as it substantiates the thesis that whiteness is the ‘primordial form’ of race, and disrupts a fatalistic conception of racism as the product of innate xenophobia. Without a materialist account of race and racialisation, anti-racist politics is beset by two equally dangerous understandings of racism. On the one hand, this aforementioned fatalistic understanding, whereby racism is the inevitable xenophobic reaction to innate cultural difference; on the other, a ‘conspiratorial’ understanding of racism, whereby racism is simply a ‘tool’ of elites, a set of bigoted ideas and theories more or less consciously employed to ‘divide and rule’ a population. In the former conception, anti-racist practice inevitably tends towards elitist remedies, since racism appears simply as the product of an ignorance which can only be overcome through education and ‘tolerance’. In the latter, anti-racist practice tends towards a crude caricature of class politics, as real divisions within the working class are perceived to arise solely from the ‘agenda’ of elites. The hypothesis that racial relations represent an ‘ethnicisation’ of aristocratic heredity mediated through the nation state introduces a conception of race and racism which cuts against both the fatalistic and conspiratorial formulations. It allows us to appreciate how racism can simultaneously be antithetical to working class politics whilst at the same time being an inherent aspect of proletarian class composition within capitalist social relations. With politics around the world convulsed by volatile nativist reaction, this appreciation of the contradictory racial politics of ruling class ideology also allows us to better understand how state actors can inadvertently mobilise political and social impulses which appear to contradict the interests of neoliberal elites and the broader requirements of capital accumulation. Fundamentally, by situating race and racialisation in the shared ideological language that relates state management with the experience of exploitation and oppression, we are able to better articulate the materiality of racial relations.

In sum, therefore, the task of developing a materialist analysis of racialisation depends upon the development of a study of ideology. This is not to say that race can be addressed entirely in the realm of ideology, but it is to say that the concept of ideology provides the analytical bridge between the material conditions and practices that contribute to racialisation and the forms of consciousness which are its symptoms. The concept of ideology can not be adequately broached in Marxist theory without deriving it from the Marxist concept of the state, but this is especially true for the understanding of racialisation, which is doubly determined by practices of state management. This double determination may also be conceptualised in the sense that the state theoretically links imperialist relations with domestic racism, and links both of these with the reproduction of ruling class hegemony.

Without a sufficient materialist analysis of racism, many of the recent gains of anti-racist struggle will inevitably be co-opted by the state and capital, just as the MacPherson report and the agenda that followed represented a partial co-option of earlier decades of anti-racist struggle. Confronting this co-option therefore depends upon the development of practices of solidarity, of a recognition of the commonalities of struggles against the border regime, against police brutality, but also crucially against workplace exploitation and unemployment. Because racialisation involves the metonymic articulation of divergent and overdetermined social antagonisms as racial pathologies, ‘racism’ cannot be addressed in isolation. Equally, since nationalist and racial ideology represents and emerges from a particular experience of class composition, it is clear that confronting racism cannot be a secondary concern of class politics. Working class politics cannot be developed through an evasion of racial relations. Instead, the development of proletarian politics depends upon the confrontation and overcoming of racial antagonisms. The irrepressible (but constantly suppressed) experience of workers’ rejections of nationalism sketches an alternative to reactionary class composition. But this depends on recognising the struggle against capitalism as a revolutionary struggle, against the power of the state. It is only through this recognition that the proletariat, moving ceaselessly across borders and struggling piecemeal against exploitation all across the world, are ultimately able to arrive at a politics adequate to expressing their international class character: a politics of proletarian internationalism .

1. Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson , John Clarke, Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (Macmillan, 1978), 394 ↩︎
2. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy (Penguin Classics, 1992) ↩︎
3. Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (Verso Books, 2011) ↩︎
4. A. Sivanandan, A Different Hunger: Writings on Black Resistance, (Pluto Press, 1982) ↩︎
5. Nisha Kapoor, Deport, Deprive, Extradite:Twenty-First-Century State Extremism (Verso Books, 2018) ↩︎
6. Ibid ↩︎
7. Nisha Kapoor, “Citizenship deprivation at the nexus of race, gender and geopolitics”, rs21, February 23, 2019, https://revsoc21.uk/2019/02/23/citizenship-deprivation-at-the-nexus-of-race-gender-and-geopolitics/ ↩︎
8. Simon Murphy, “Free school meals: the Tory MPs defending refusal to support campaign”, Guardian, October 25, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/oct/25/free-school-meals-uk-marcus-rashford-conservative-mps-defend-ministers-refusal-to-u-turn ↩︎
9. Department for Work and Pensions, “Reforms will tacklepoverty and get Britain working again”, gov.uk, May 27, 2010, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/reforms-will-tacklepoverty-and-get-britain-working-again ↩︎
10. Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class,212 ↩︎
11. Alison Andrew, Sarah Cattan, Monica Costa Dias, Christine Farquharson, Lucy Kraftman, Sonya Krutikova, Angus Phimister, Almudena Sevilla, Family time use and home learning during the COVID-19 lockdown, Institute for Fiscal Studies, https://ifs.org.uk/publications/family-time-use-and-home-learning-during-covid-19-lockdown ↩︎
12. Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 103-104 ↩︎
13. Norimitsu Onishi and Constant Méheut, “Heating Up Culture Wars, France to Scour Universities for Ideas That ‘Corrupt Society’“, The New York Times, February 18, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/world/europe/france-universities-culture-wars.html ↩︎
14. Samira Shackle, “Trojan horse: the real story behind the fake ‘Islamic plot’ to take over schools“, The Guardian, September 1, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/01/trojan-horse-the-real-story-behind-the-fake-islamic-plot-to-take-over-schools ↩︎
15. John Springhall, Youth, Empire, and society : British youth movements, 1883-1940 (The Shoe String Press, 1977), 16 ↩︎
16. Asaid Haider, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump (Verso, 2018) ↩︎
17. Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, 394 ↩︎
18. I exclude the bourgeoisie from the definition of an ‘international class’ since the internationalisation of capitalist production does not imply the internationalisation of bourgeois class institutions. The bourgeoisie exist only abstractly at the level of the world economy, and operate instead through the system of states, with each national bourgeoisie pursuing divergent interests  ↩︎
19. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1, 614 ↩︎
20. Michèle Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today:
    The Marxist/Feminist Encounter (Verso Books, 1980), 167 ↩︎
21. Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 214 ↩︎
22. In reality discussion of the racial identities of perpetrators and supposed ‘cultural’ causes for abuse crowded out almost all other discussion. That the over-representation of Asian men in the night-time economy of low-wage work such as cab-driving was consistently underplayed as a factor is itself a clear case study in the process of racial pathologisation, allowing the cipher of ‘grooming gangs’ to become coded under a culturally ‘Asian’ signifier ↩︎
23. Lola Okolosie, “Rotherham’s abuse was bred in a toxic mix of class, sexual and racial bigotry”, The Guardian, August 28, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/28/rotherham-abuse-class-sex-racial-bigotry ↩︎
24. Picard 2019 ↩︎