The London bombings of 7 July brought home in the deadliest way one facet of globalisation. New anti-terrorist legislation has been brought forward; multiculturalism has come under attack; anti-Muslim racism has increased at every level of British society. Political and public debate are threaded through with the politics of fear. This wide-ranging analysis provides a framework for understanding the dynamic interconnections between the new racism thrown up by the processes of globalisation and modern empire, the increasing threat to civil liberties and the alienation felt by many young Muslims.

European powers, was desperate for labour, racialism operated on a free market basisadjusting itself to the ordinary laws of supply and demand. So that in the sphere of employment, where too many jobs were seeking too few workersas the state itself had acknowledged in the Nationality Act of 1948 -racialism did not debar black people from work per se. It operated instead to deskill them, to keep their wages down and to segregate them in the dirty, ill-paid jobs that white workers did not wantnot on the basis of an avowed racialism .but in the habit of an acceptable exploitation. In the sphere of housing, where too many people were seeking too few houses, racialism operated more directly to keep blacks out of the housing market and to herd them into bed-sitters in decaying inner city areas. And here the racialism was more overt and sanctioned by society. 'For the selection of tenants', wrote Ruth Glass scathingly, is regarded as being subject solely to the personal discretion of the landlord. It is understood that it is his privilege to bar Negroes, Sikhs, Jews, foreigners in general, cockneys, socialists, dogs or any other species which he wants to keep away. The recruitment of workers, however, in both state and private enterprises is a question of public policy -determined explicitly or implicitly by agreements between trade unions, employers' associations and government. As a landlord, Mr. Smith can practise discrimination openly; as an employer, he must at least disguise it. In the sphere of housing, tolerance is a matter of private initiative; in the sphere of employment, it is in some respects 'nationalised'.' I That same racialism operated under the twee name of colour bar in the pubs and clubs and bars and dance-halls to keep black people out. In schooling there were too few black children to cause a problem: the immigrants, predominantly male and single, had not come to settle. The message that was generally percolating through to the children of the mother country was that it was their labour that was wanted, not their presence. Racialism, it would appear, could reconcile that contradiction on its own -without state interference, laissez-faire, drawing on the traditions of Britain's slave and colonial centuries.The black response was halting at first. Both Afro-Caribbeans and Asians, each in their own way, found it difficult to come to terms with such primitive prejudice and to deal with such fine hypocrisy. The West Indians, who, by and large, came from a working-class at University of Manitoba Libraries on June 20, 2015 rac.sagepub.com Downloaded from There was another area, too, where such organisation was significant -and offered up a different unity: the area of anti-colonial struggle. There had always been overseas students' associations -African, Asian, Caribbean -but in the period before the First World War these were mostly in the nature of friendship councils, social clubs or debating unions. But after that war and with the 'race riots' of 1919 (in Liverpool, London, Cardiff, Hull and other por...

There is a class war going on within Marxism as to who -in the period of the de-construction of industrial capitalism and the re-composition of the working class -are the real agents of revolutionary change: the orthodox working class, which is orthodox no more, or the 'ideological classes' who pass for the new social force or forces. It is a war that was engendered, on the one hand, by the growing disillusion with Soviet communism and, on the other, by the receding prospect of capturing state power in late capitalist societies where such power was becoming increasingly diffuse and opaque. The solution to both, on the ground, pointed to a variant of social democracy under the rubric of Eurocommunism. The solution, for theory, pointed to a re-reading of Marx, a re-hashing of Gramsci and a return to intellectual rigour accompanied by activist mortis. The working class, as a consequence, was stripped of its richest political seams black, feminist, gay, green, etc. and left, in the name of anti-economism, a prey to economism.Conversely, the new social forces, freed from the ballast of economic determinism (and class reductionism), have been floated as the political and ideological 'classes' of the new radicalism. But that flight from class has served only to turn ideological priorities into idealistic preoccupations, and political autonomy into personalised politics and palliatives which, for all that, have passed into common left currency and found a habitation and a name in Labour local authorities. The

There is a dangerous sociology abroad -a sociology of race relations, that is -and dangerous to the black cause that it seeks to espouse. It emanates from the new set-up of the SSRC (Social Science Research Council) ethnic unit at Aston (University) under John Rex. It purports to ameliorate the condition of the black minorities, and the black young in particular, by appeals to enlightened capitalism. And, in that, it could be allowed to pass the blacks by, except that at a time of concerted and massive attack on black people by the state, to hold the centre ground against academics who abstract and distort black experience (however unwittingly) becomes vitally important.To understand the new sociology, one must understand the old and locate them both in the dialectical struggles between increasing state racism and growing black resistance.In the beginning, in the colonial period, blacks were people you studied in their native habitat -so as to inform colonial rule and authenticate an ideology of racial superiority. But as the colonies achieved 'independence' and the colonial administrators came home, the focus of interest in the former colonial subjects shifted to the dock areas of Great Britain, where the first black settlements had become established.

An introduction by A. SivanandanRacism has always been an instrument of discrimination. And discrimination has always been a tool of exploitation. Racism, in that sense, has always been rooted in the economic compulsions of the capitalist system. But it manifests itself, ®rst and foremost, as a cultural phenomenon, susceptible to cultural solutions such as multicultural education and the promotion of ethnic identities. Redressing the problem of cultural inequality, however, does not by itself redress the problem of economic inequality. Racism needs to be tackled at both levels ± the cultural and the economic ± at once, remembering that the one provides the rationale for the other. Racism, in sum, is conditioned by economic imperatives, but negotiated through cultural agency: religion, literature, art, science, the media and so on.Which of these agencies, though, holds sway in a particular epoch is itself dependent on the economic system of that epoch. Thus, in the period of primitive accumulation, when the pillage and plunder of the new world by Spanish conquistadors was laying the foundations of capitalism, it was religion in the form of the Catholic Church that gave validity to the concept that the native Indians were`sub-homines', the children of Ham, born to be slaves, and could therefore be enslaved and/or exterminated at will. In the period of merchant capital, when the monarch was no longer subordinate to the Church and the bourgeoisie was in its ascendancy, the racialist ideas of the earlier period became secularised in popular literature, political discourse and education and served to rationalise and justify the trade in black slaves.With the development of industrial capitalism and its corollary, colonialism, the racialist ideas of the previous epochs congealed into a systemic racist ideology to condemn all`coloured' peoples to racial and cultural inferiority. By the end of the nineteenth century, at the height of the imperial adventure, the ideology of racial superiority began to take on a pseudo-scienti®c validity in the Social Darwinism of Gobineau and Chamberlain ± which in turn further popularised the view of racial hierarchies.