Race & Class

This commentary by the organisers of the ongoing People’s Tribunal on Police Killings (PTPK), which held its first hearings in London on 5–6 April 2025, describes key features of the background to and hearings of the PTPK. Despite an estimated 3,000 police violence related deaths in the UK, no criminal conviction of officers has ever followed an inquest, and the judicial system has acted to contain the struggles of the families of those killed by police. The PTPK provided a space for families to tell their narratives in an unfiltered way, and verbatim testimonies are included here. The authors are aware that these testimonies might well not accord with evidence presented at inquests and rulings by inquests and the Crown Prosecution Service. But the shared patterns of systemic treatment by the state as well as collective resistance needed to be documented. These testimonies were interventions of what Fero and Hutnyk term obstinate memory – which functions simultaneously as qualitative data, research method and political praxis. Families testified to decades of betrayal by coroners, prosecutors, complaints bodies and lawyers who maintain a fiction of accountability. The very language of deaths in custody is, it is argued, a deliberate state strategy of erasure. Instead, the PTPK proposes the term police killings; to name them as such is to challenge power. The collection of testimonies, expert witness evidence and panel judgments underpin a series of class actions that the PTPK is undertaking. Further tribunals are planned on state killings in prison, secure medical units and during immigration control.

Has decolonisation, as an analytical concept and political horizon, reached a dead-end? Some argue the term has been so overused – and misused – that it has lost meaning and should be confined to the era of formal empire. Yet, abandoning it obscures the endurance of imperialist, colonial and settler-colonial structures and forfeits a theoretical apparatus vital for confronting them. This article argues that decolonisation remains analytically and normatively indispensable, provided its meanings and political horizons are clarified. The authors map how scholars and movements have variously understood the concept, identifying different modalities of decolonisation that, by privileging certain elements over others, blunt its radical potential and even cover for reactionary agendas. Against this backdrop, the article recovers a militant and revolutionary modality: mid-twentieth-century Marxist-inspired projects that transcended the limits of juridical and economistic decolonisation, grappled critically with epistemic decolonisation, and reimagined anti-colonial political communities and futures. The authors term this revolutionary approach worldly Marxism and suggest it can revitalise contemporary theories and practices of decolonisation.

In the face of burgeoning authoritarianism in the United States, this article turns to South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement for lessons in contesting this regime. The authors highlight two tensions in the 1970s and 1980s that are relevant for organisers today. First, South African activists worked to construct a mass coalition with popular support. But they did so at the expense of core demands, abandoning anti-capitalism in the name of democracy. This first tension then is between organisational form and political content. Second, Black Consciousness activists in the movement articulated an expansive conception of Blackness that worked to unify a broad sector of the oppressed. But they had to be careful not to let this identity broaden into an amorphous abstraction detached from lived experience and demands for dignity. This second tension then is between abstract and concrete articulations of racial identities. The authors conclude by drawing lessons from these tensions that can help us effectively fight a racist and capitalist authoritarianism in the United States.

This article examines migrant agricultural labour in southern Italy as a concentrated site of contemporary extractive capitalism. Focusing on the 2011 strike of migrant workers in Nardò (Apulia) and the subsequent Sabr trial, it argues that labour exploitation in European agriculture is not a marginal deviation or the result of criminal excess, but a structurally organised regime sustained through migration control, labour flexibilisation and territorial governance. Situating the case within the framework of racial capitalism and state-mediated extraction, the article conceptualises Europe as a space of internal frontiers, where incorporation into production is systematically coupled with precarious legal and political membership. The Nardò strike exposed the racialised foundations of agricultural production, while the Sabr trial translated structural exploitation into individualised criminal responsibility. Together, they illuminate the dialectic between conflict and legality through which extractive labour regimes are both challenged and stabilised. By foregrounding the legal and institutional production of vulnerability, the article contributes to a critical understanding of how democratic legality coexists with, and mediates, extractive accumulation in contemporary Europe.

The author takes issue with the switch within the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) from a framework of equality (based on its founding principle of universality) to that of equity (based on a supposed responsiveness to specific needs). It is precisely because people’s lives are structured by unequal exposure to risk, exploitation and harm that universal provision is necessary. Equality, properly understood, does not deny difference; it protects against hierarchy. He argues that the move to equity, far from being progressive in recognising difference, is actually based in neoliberalism’s domination of a market in which scarcity has to be managed, hence hierarchies established. Equity justifies differential access by framing it as fairness, instead of questioning why there is less to distribute. Racial equity metrics capture relative change rather than absolute improvement, allowing disparities between groups to narrow even as overall conditions deteriorate. Proportionality, on which equity is based, means sorting ‘populations’, and race, even if not intentioned, becomes an explanatory factor rather than a social marker. The task is not, argues the author, to refine inequality more humanely, but to reclaim equality as a universal social right and to confront the conditions that have deepened social injustices, which clearly affect health.