The uses and abuses of class : left nationalism and the denial of working-class multiculture

This article establishes the importance of recognizing what Satnam Virdee describes as the wider racial history of ‘socialist nationalism’. Attentiveness to this formation attests to a broader attempt to resist the tendency of much contemporary analysis to attribute to today’s reconsolidated nationalism an elite, unitary and generically rightist character. It remains important to observe how racial nationalisms’ heightened contemporary appeal hinges crucially on the convergence of multiple and often contradictory ‘political rationalities’ – only some of which speak to elite machinations and/or attempts to manage the capitalist crisis. Particularly telling here is how nationalist politics ably call upon certain leftist registers: as premised on an iconography of working class plight alongside an institutional programme of welfare state entitlement as tied to exclusive visions of working class community. The second half of the article issues, in turn, an antidote to this class-coded nationalist consolidation. A renewed case for the importance of everyday multiculture, as a decidedly working class formation, is advanced. Whilst rebuking the forms of exotic romanticism and excessively upbeat vigour that characterises some multiculture research – alongside the tendency to only locate such multiculture in more fabled ‘global cities’ – the article argues here that such multiculture is a political repertoire that ably subverts the nationalist attempt to monopolize class for its own political ends

Defining and challenging the new nationalism

Sivamohan Valluvan argues that to understand how the idea of nation has recovered its lustre, we need to re-examine the core historical principles of European nationalism, and the place of race and racism within them; stop assuming the primacy of economic developments; and address the multiple ideological forms within the new nationalism

Racial entanglements and sociological confusions : repudiating the rehabilitation of integration

In line with the broader nationalist advances currently remaking the Western political landscape, the concept of integration has witnessed a marked rehabilitation. Whilst many influential critiques of the sociology of integration are already available, this article contests the concept's renewed purchase through addressing its own internal incoherence. Based on research in Stockholm, this critique concerns the relationship between ethnic identity and cultural integration. It will be argued that integration and the production of difference are intertwined, entangled dualities, and far from being a benign entanglement, this duality is premised on the force and reach of everyday civic racisms. Of pivotal and unique analytical significance here is the observation that racism should not only be considered an exogenous process that impedes integration, but as a multifaceted phenomenon folded into integration

Notes on theorizing racism and other things

In the spirit of ‘furthering debate and reflection’ in this response to Theories of Race and Ethnicity, we consider here the pertinence of the theme of resistance that occupies particular chapters within the collection and that has been central to key works within the wider race critical scholarship. Yet, when the larger field of contemporary race study is considered, we also note that other contiguous concerns – including capitalism, religion, nation, and war – are key factors in thinking through racism. Here, we further elaborate on how future theorizations of race and ethnicity must engage with these domains

Left problems, nationalism and the crisis

At a time when nationalism is being rehabilitated as the most likely custodian of political discourse, those who propagate a left alternative also seem wedded to the nation – in asserting control over migration, over defence, over security, and over how we imagine our everyday sense of community. In this paper, James and Valluvan discuss the relationship between the current crisis and xeno-racist nationalism, including an engagement with whiteness and the working class. They argue that a realisation of alternative left visions for governance must at a minimum start with the repudiation of xeno-racism’s hold on contemporary politics, and the left’s routine submission to its lustre

Diesel price hikes and farmer distress: the myth and the reality

FuelsDiesel oilPricesFarmers attitudesPumpingCostsGroundwater irrigationWellsOwnershipEconomic impactWater productivityFarm incomeMilk production

Racist apologism and the refuge of nation

This symposium commentary on Alana Lenin's Why Race Still Matters considers the terms by which apologists of racism deploy the alibi of nation and (white) identity. The increasingly efficacious claim to ‘mere' nationhood and the allegedly organic immutability of majoritarian identity both enables racism whilst impugning anti-racism. Attention will be given here to the chicanery by which racism often ceases to something to be ideologically justified or defended; but instead, the demands of anti-racism are simply deflected through asserting the seemingly superseding dictates of national righteousness. My commentary also speculates about certain connections between the white majority settings surveyed by Lentin and wider postcolonial settings where comparable politics of bordering, chauvinism and ‘racial capitalist’ stratification are pursued but without the same overarching reference to whiteness

Rejoinder : Clamour of Nationalism Symposium

The generous contributors to this symposium all reiterate a certain resignation to the suffocating ubiquity of today's nationalism as surveyed in the Clamour of Nationalism. But also implicit in their searching commentary is a wider call to continue to reckon with the contradictions that live amidst the nationalist closure and its constitutive racisms. This rejoinder tries accordingly to cleave open those elements of popular political formation that might remain unmoved by the overtures of nation. My attempt at wilfully optimistic critique also maps some potentially generative openings presented by the right's overdetermined capitulation to ‘disaster nationalism’. Finally, much of the symposium rightly cautions against an excessive extolling of multiculture's political possibilities. The rejoinder concludes herein with a duly caveated account of the everyday multiculture that might furnish us with the resources to dream against and beyond nationalism’s ability to monopolize the terrain of political community