RAT and the degradation of black struggle

Abstract

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

Emotions and reflexivity in feminised education action research

“…Even before it was established that the death was not due to any inflicted injuries (indeed the two boys arrested were later released without charge), the press reported all children being gathered for a special school assembly and sent home with letters for their parents; while the radio commentary noted that all the pupils were offered counselling. This moment speaks to a fateful intertextuality with the murder of Abdul Iqbal Ullah at Burnage High School in September 1986, and the controversial inquiry which pointed not only to the ways staff antagonisms became played out over resistance to a dogmatic application of multiculturalism (in line with then prevalent models of Racism Awareness Training, see Sivanandan, 1985) that thereby supported a culture of racist and gendered violence, but also claimed that the failure of the school to respond to the crisis in a way that addressed the anxieties and fears of the pupils paved the way for subsequent disorder (MacDonald et al, 1989). 4 Significantly, in proposals that (to my knowledge) have never been fully implemented, the report also called for the setting up of democratic consultation structures within the school, such as school-student representative councils.…”

Conceptualizing cultural and gendered identities in psychological therapies

“…Important as transcultural and intercultural work is, the failure to consider gender as well as racialized positions is symptomatic of a homogenization of racialized positions and identifications such that religion and culture are elided, and treated as static and unchanging experience, rather than as elaborated in relation to modern, industrialized Western cultures (Sivanandan 1985;Yuval-Davis 1992). This is particularly, but not exclusively, the case for British-born minorities, although Littlewood (1995) has recently highlighted how forms of mental distress presumed to be specific to Westernized industrialized contexts may in fact occur more generally.…”

Recognising Social Work: The Influence of the Politics of Recognition on Social Work

“…However, 'consideration' in and of itself is not enough, it also requires attempts to improve the situation. Failure to do so can lead to the situation, identified as far back as the mid-1908s by Sivanandan in relation to 'race awareness training', whereby (white) professionals gained raised awareness of other (non-white) cultures whilst continuing to allocate them the poorest resources, for example, housing them in the most deprived areas that lacked adequate infrastructure (Sivanandan 1985).…”