Notes on policing, racism and the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK

This commentary excerpts from the research report ‘A threat to public safety: policing, racism and the Covid-19 pandemic’, carried out by the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) and published by the Institute of Race Relations in September 2021. One of the only pieces of research based on the experiences of the policed and their testimonies, the report suggests that policing during the Covid-19 pandemic undermines public health measures whilst disproportionately targeting Black and Minority Ethnic communities in the UK. The authors raise concerns about the policing of the pandemic and show that racially minoritised communities have been most harshly affected – being more likely to be stopped by the police, threatened or subject to police violence and falsely accused of rule-breaking and wrong-doing. The report argues that lockdown conditions, new police powers, and histories of institutionally racist policing have combined to pose a threat to already over-policed communities and the most marginalised and vulnerable sections of society.

Out of the cauldron: lessons from Cedric Robinson

This is an abbreviated account of the UK webinar launch in October 2021 of the biography, Cedric Robinson: the time of the Black Radical Tradition, written by Joshua Myers. Moderated by James Pope, panellists, including Myers, Colin Prescod, John Narayan, Avery Gordon and Elizabeth Robinson present their takes on Robinson in relation to the UK and especially his relationship with the Institute of Race Relations and the journal Race & Class. They discuss key aspects of Robinson’s work, including the meaning of racial capitalism, his understanding of time, and how for him historical materialism was grounded, not in the mode of production but in the primacy of social struggle and in a dialectic of power and resistance to its abuses.

Colonial legacies and racial hierarchies in the global economy: a review article

This article reviews two recent books on persistent inequalities in the global economy and the role of colonial legacies and racial hierarchies in explaining them. Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking after Empire (2019) and Franklin Obeng-Odoom’s Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa (2020) draw on the Black Radical Tradition and stratification economics respectively to challenge mainstream understandings of racial hierarchies. After first outlining the strengths and key insights of each book, the author discusses how they could be expanded in a more radical manner, along the lines of anti-colonial, decolonial and black Marxism. She argues that in order to understand how racial hierarchies are connected to the development of capitalism, further engagement with radical scholarship that sees race and class as co-constituted would be required.

The Digital Tech Deal: a socialist framework for the twenty-first century

The twenty-first century global economy is largely driven by Big Tech and, more broadly, digital capitalism. This is a global phenomenon, with US power at the centre preying on global markets through the process of digital colonialism. Mainstream antidotes to the ills of Big Tech and digital capitalism are US/Eurocentric and revolve around a collection of liberal and progressive capitalist reforms, including anti-trust, limited privacy laws, unionisation of Big Tech, algorithmic discrimination and content moderation – all of which are conceived within a capitalist framework which ignores or neglects digital colonialism and the twenty-first century ecological crisis, despite their analytical and moral centrality to contemporary political economy. This author argues that a combination of political, economic and social alternatives based on a Digital Tech Deal are needed to turn the tide against digital colonisation, entailing the socialisation of knowledge and infrastructure; passing socialist laws that support digital socialism; and new narratives about the tech ecosystem. These solutions are to be nested within an anti-colonial, eco-socialist framework that embraces degrowth to ensure environmental sustainability and socioeconomic justice.

The Twenty Years’ War

The author, expert in British colonial history, explains the inevitability of the rout of the US/British-installed regime in Afghanistan in 2021 by the Taliban, in terms of the ways in which corruption, drug trafficking, pillage of international aid, war-lordism and non-payment of police and military personnel had been allowed to flourish over the past twenty years.

Notes on exhaustionism, the latest moment of the global organic crisis

This essay seeks to build on the concept of exterminism developed by E. P. Thompson in his 1980 New Left Review essay ‘Notes on exterminism, the last state of civilization’. Thompson’s polemical focus on weapons systems in his analysis was the product of a particular moment in history; one where the most precipitous threat to human security was the Cold War. The concept of exhaustionism developed in this piece describes the governance ideologies and frameworks found within advanced capitalist state/societal complexes in response to the present ‘organic crisis’ of post-Cold War global capitalism; one accelerated by the 2008 financial crisis and Covid-19 pandemic. The exhaustionism of political leadership within the contemporary world order has contributed to widely held assumptions that the collapse of civilisation and the planet is either occurring or imminent. Moreover, it is also implied that it is too late for a novel or fundamental transformation in governing ideology, global governance and political economy to reverse the current predicament. This exhaustionism in many ways mirrors the absurdity and cynicism of the Cold War military technicians and nuclear regimes described by Thompson’s concept of exterminism, but with notable differences related to the host of actors involved, temporal horizon, and emphasis on class, imperialism and supremacism.

Sentenced for the season: Jamaican migrant farmworkers on Okanagan orchards

Despite perfunctory characterisation of Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) as a ‘triple win’, scholars and activists have long admonished its lack of government oversight, disrespect for migrant rights and indentureship of foreign workers. This article contends that the SAWP is predicated upon naturalised, deeply engrained and degrading beliefs that devalue Black lives and labour. Based on twenty months’ ethnographic fieldwork in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia, Canada, it reveals the extent to which anti-Black racism permeates, organises and frustrates workers’ lives on farms and in local communities. It situates such experiences, which workers characterise as ‘prison life’, in the context of anti-Black immigration policy and the workings of racial capitalism. This ethnography of Caribbean migrants not only adds perspective to scholarship hitherto focused on the experiences of Latino workers, but it also reinforces critical work on anti-Black racism in contemporary Canada.