Abstract
This is an abridged and edited version of the speech given by the author in the panel on ‘The influence of A. Sivanandan’s ideas’ at the conference ‘New circuits of anti-racism’ at King’s College London in October 2022. It follows on from her seminal 2019 article (in Race & Class 61.2, ‘“White privilege”: shortcuts to anti-racism’) which drew on Sivanandan’s ‘RAT and the degradation of black struggle’, his critique of essentialising blackness and treating racism, a structural issue, as an interpersonal one out of which you could be ‘retrained’. She discusses ways of radical, respectful organising at a time when difference and competition of experiences can set back unity.
Keywords
Siva confirms what Walter Rodney once said (referencing Amilcar Cabral) that the analytic and practical connection of exploitation to oppression is not the property of white Marxists. This simple point strikes two complex issues simultaneously − rejecting the privileging of Euro-American history and knowledge in the leftist canons of the Global North, and rejecting the nationalist/culturalist refutation of Marxism among racialised minorities or the oppressed of the Global South. But it also, for me, makes the point that autobiographic accounts and personal experience are not necessarily better or more relevant than others. For, as Gary Younge pointed out, identity is a fine place to start as a political activist but a very bad one to end. One statement that shaped me is that after all is said and done in Siva’s key phrase, ‘what you do is who you are’.
What put me in touch with Race & Class and the first time I heard of the IRR and Sivanandan was when I met Liz [Fekete] in Amsterdam, probably in 2007, where she was doing research about the emergence of the far Right in the aftermath of the killing of Pym Fortuyn and then later the publicity around Hirshi Ali and the whole debate that emerged into a new kind of Islamophobia.
I was an organiser in a national anti-racism campaign and I was critically involved around Islamophobia and Liz was interviewing me about this as an activist, not as a scholar. I was a first-generation graduate and enrolled as a post-grad and I had a funded PhD which was amazing for me coming from an immigrant family [from Morocco] and the first one to go to uni. And yet the world was changing around me – 9/11 had just happened, the invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion and occupation of Iraq. I had been in Palestine in the first two years of the second intifada and had practically been around the corner of Amsterdam where Theo van Gogh was killed.
But so much has changed over the last fifteen years in ways that are actually not about challenging such political objective circumstances. My question is how do we organise together, how do we resist, what does it mean to operate in progressive activist spaces, when the movements are beset with political sectarianism, personal attack, cyber bullying and energy disproportionately geared towards our differences not our commonalities?
To answer – the first rule is that we argue about our interpretations and differences in the open and with the objective to advance the struggle, not to undermine each other. The second rule, and I think this is important, we don't fix what is not broken when we ourselves are very weak. We should always address tough issues, question the self-evident, push the limits, and challenge our own boundaries. But we will not get better when we question each other because we compete for resources, or reject our affinities for the sake of it. Picking over semantics like ‘allies’ instead of ‘comrades’, pitting Palestinian solidarity against black solidarity, asking whether North Africans are true Africans. Is that in the service of our communities, I ask?
We need to meet the challenges that we are experiencing because of neglect and exploitation both by the political elites and sometimes also in the movements themselves. Basic principles of respect, and acknowledging race, class, gender, ability as socially reproduced and intersectional, are values to fight for. We can't be released from the responsibility of making social analysis of racism and we can't be released from the responsibility of protecting a progressive modus operandi that relies on collective agency and a united front. The anti-capitalist politics of Claudia Jones, Sivanandan, CLR James, Stuart Hall (and of course there are all these other non-Euro-American examples that we are not exposed to) were around strategies of resistance and undoing Capital, not about identity as a subjective analysis but identity as an objective social relation. (Collective agency does not need to be in contradiction with identity. We can sit down and talk and learn about biographies after we marched and organised. By skipping or rejecting ‘political blackness’ or ‘people of colour’ as a shared class subjectivity you essentially strip it of its potential agency.)
That is why I moved on to think, write and argue about ways forward and began to discuss radical kinship. The ethical taxonomy of radical kinship is three-fold: insurgent (Jennifer Nash and Barbara Ransby provide excellent insights); compassionate, about each other (Malcolm X: ‘don’t be in a hurry to condemn’) and our causes (you don’t have to be a victim of some oppression in order to want to eliminate that oppression); reproductive, this means for and from the collective (it is not about your academic or Twitter profile), and cumulative (and so intergenerational in both directions).
Let’s take our cue from indigenous activists: don’t come to help me, but come to join your struggle to mine.
Footnotes
Miriyam Aouragh, a Dutch-Moroccan anthropologist, is a researcher at the Communications and Media Research Institute at The University of Westminster and writes on Big Tech capitalism and Middle East politics.