A Couple of Books on Rock against Racism

Looking for books on Fascism on Amazon the other day, I came across a couple of books on Rock Against Racism, the pop music campaign against the National Front when they became the fourth largest political party for a very brief time in the 1970s. I thought I’d mention them here because some of the commenters have memories about them and the Socialist Workers’ Party, with whom they have been linked and who have been blamed by some historians of British fascism for the movement’s demise.

The books are:

Never Again: Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League 1976-1982 (Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right) Paperback – 10 Dec. 2018

Dave Renton

By 1976, the National Front had become the fourth largest party in Britain. In a context of national decline, racism and fears that the country was collapsing into social unrest, the Front won 19 per cent of the vote in elections in Leicester and 100,000 votes in London.

In response, an anti-fascist campaign was born, which combined mass action to deprive the Front of public platforms with a mass cultural movement. Rock Against Racism brought punk and reggae bands together as a weapon against the right.

At Lewisham in August 1977, fighting between the far right and its opponents saw two hundred people arrested and fifty policemen injured. The press urged the state to ban two rival sets of dangerous extremists. But as the papers took sides, so did many others who determined to oppose the Front.

Through the Anti-Nazi League hundreds of thousands of people painted out racist graffiti, distributed leaflets and persuaded those around them to vote against the right. This combined movement was one of the biggest mass campaigns that Britain has ever seen.

This book tells the story of the National Front and the campaign which stopped it.’

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Never-Again-Anti-Nazi-1976-1982-Routledge/dp/1138502715

Rock Against Racism ―1976–1981 Hardcover – 29 Sept. 2022

by Syd Shelton (Author), Red Saunders (Afterword), Paul Gilroy (Contributor), Adam Phillips (Contributor), & 2 more

An outstanding photography book documenting a movement that rocked the world. 

Syd Shelton: Rock Against Racism is a body of photographs that Syd Shelton produced for and about the British Rock Against Racism movement (RAR) of 1976–1981. For Shelton, this work was a socialist act, what he calls a “graphic argument,” on behalf of marginalized lives. His practice of photographic activism began in 1973 when he was driven to document the socio cultural and political dynamics expressed on the streets of Sydney by urban Australian Aboriginal communities, the working class, and the architectural landscapes of these groups. Shelton’s first solo show in 1975, “Working Class Heroes” at the Sydney Film-makers Cooperative, established his distinct activist eye.

Shelton joined RAR in early 1977 on his return to England from Australia. He did so because he found his birthplace a more racist country than it had been when he left. This was marked by the increased political presence of the National Front, notably its gain of some 119,000 votes in the Greater London Council Elections of May 1977. Shelton, like millions of others, feared for the future of multi-cultural Britain. His contribution to RAR was to be on the London committee, to create graphic material with other RAR members such as the RAR publication “Temporary Hoarding,” posters’ badges and his photography—RAR did not have an official photographer. Shelton’s instinctive need to document RAR—its events, contributors, and supporters—has resulted in the largest collection of images on the movement. Alongside his documentation of RAR, Shelton took photographs of what he calls “the contextual images,” the lives and landscapes that were defined by others as “different,” and that often fueled racist acts of violence by simply being.

What is presented here are Shelton’s authoritative visual statements as participant-photographer on the social tempo in Britain at this time and the activist potency of RAR. As collective activism, RAR’s success was dependent on individual contributions to fuel the movement’s activities across the country. This unique national, and eventually international, charge incorporated the visual dynamic of how Black and white RAR contributors and participants styled their bodies as another antagonistic tool against racism. These were acts of style activism—the making of an activist identity through the considered composition of clothes, accessories, hairstyles, makeup, and body language. Shelton’s images prompt us to remember that the individuals at RAR carnivals, gigs, and demonstrations were the event—they were RAR.

There are many versions of what RAR was and its legacy. Syd Shelton: Rock Against Racism provides an auto/biographical telling of that historical moment. It reflects on how Shelton’s work as a photographer contributed towards social change at a critical moment of political and racial tension in Britain.’

There are also reviews of the Syd Shelton book online from some of the newspapers and magazines, if you want to look.

Private Eye on Corbyn and Trotskyite Anti-Parliamentarianism

Private Eye was running the old Blairite line yesterday that under Corbyn, Labour was being infiltrated by Trotksyites from the Socialist Worker’s Party. In the ‘Focus on Fact’ strip, which seems to be just the Blairites trying to have their revenge against the old Labour left for slights and incidents in the 1980s, they quoted the Socialist Workers’ a saying that all Momentum events were open to them. As proof of this, they further cited the SWP as saying that they’d managed to sell 127 copies of their paper at Momentum rally Newcastle, and about 20 or 30 odd in one of the southern towns.

Now I might be missing something, but this seems less than conclusive proof that they’ve infiltrated the Labour party. The fact that they are not thrown out of Momentum might show that there is some sympathy for them in Momentum, but it does not show that they have infiltrated it. Look at what was not said: the Socialist Workers did not say that they had infiltrated Momentum, only that they weren’t kicked out of Momentum’s rallies.

As for selling newspapers, at one time all Labour party or trade union events attracted people from the extreme left-wing parties. Way back in the 1980s a friend of mine went to a demonstration in Cheltenham against the banning of trade unions at GCHQ. He came back with a stack of papers being sold by people from the Communist party, including a copy of Worker’s Dreadnought, which was the paper of the ILP, still just about hanging on at that stage. And the Anarchist Ian Bone on his website talked about heckling Ed Miliband when Not So Red Ed came to speak out at an anti-austerity rally.

All this piece really showed is that there were some in Momentum, who weren’t completely hostile to the SWPs attending. But that’s quite different from infiltrating Momentum. If the story is true, of course. And given the fact that the Blairites have lied and lied again as if it’s going out of fashion, there’s no reason to believe that it is.

Elsewhere, the Eye also saw fit to mention that the SWP was against parliamentary democracy. This was to frighten us all again with the spectre of Trotskyites worming their way into Momentum to seize control of the Labour party, win power, and turn this country into Marxist dictatorship. It’s the kind of stupid, paranoid conspiracy theory that the Scum ran in the 1987 General Election, Frederick Forsythe turned into a thriller, and Maggie read and approved. It’s classic Thatcherite scaremongering. But it perversely had the effect of making me actually think higher of the SWP for a moment.

I don’t have much sympathy for the Socialist Workers’ Party. Their leader, Dave Renton, has written some excellent articles for Lobster, but the part itself is a threat and a nuisance because it does try to infiltrate and take over other left-wing protest groups and organisations. I’ve mentioned before how they broke up Rock Against Racism by infiltrating it and turning it into front organisation. There was also trouble on campus in Cheltenham in the 1990s when some of the students organised a demonstration against student fees. Unfortunately, someone also naively invited the Socialist Workers, who turned up with their megaphones haranguing the students, before being chased off by College and NUS staff.

Despite their stupid and destructive tactics, they’re right about parliamentary democracy. The corporate domination of parliament has shown it to be increasingly corrupt. 78 per cent of MPs are millionaires, holding between them 2,800 directorships in 2,400 companies, with a combined workforce of 1.2 million people and £220 billion. The laws passed by parliament reflect this corporate dominance – pro-free trade, anti-welfare, with a concern for ‘flexible labour markets’ through zero-hours and short term contracts. This bears out the Marxist idea that the state is an institution of class oppression.

As for the horrors of soviet-style government, Trotsky and Lenin were champions of the workers, soldiers’ and peasants soviets set up spontaneously by Russia’s working people during the first phase of the 1917 Revolution. Before the Bolshevik coup, these were genuinely democratic institutions. Apart from the Bolsheviks, there were other Socialist parties elected to them, including the Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries and Trudoviks, parties later dissolved and purged by the Bolsheviks. Now I think we need a genuinely democratic system of workers’ assemblies and a workers’ chamber in parliament in this country, because of the overwhelming upper class bias of existing parliamentary institutions. And it isn’t just the Trotskyites in the SWP, who want a system of worker’s soviets. I think Dennis Skinner says something positive about them in his autobiography. And I have the impression that the Tribune group within the Labour party also support this form of government. On their books website they offer a documentary history of the Council Revolution in Germany. This is interesting, because one of the major supporters of the council system, the Bavarian premier Kurt Eisner, did so not because he wanted to destroy democracy, but augment and buttress it using the workers’ and peasants’ soviets.

The Bolsheviks effectively neutered the workers’ council in Russia by taking them over and turning them into the instruments for exclusive Bolshevik government. But this doesn’t mean that they originally weren’t a good idea. And the Eye’s denunciation of the anti-parliamentary attitude of the Socialist Workers to my mind actually makes them look good when parliament is so corrupt, unrepresentative and increasingly hostile to working class representation and policies.

Anti-Immigrant and Anti-Semitic Rhetoric: The Same Today as Just After WWII

I’ve been reading Dave Renton’s article on the police and Fascist and Anti-Fascist street demonstrations in the years 1945-51 in Lobster 35. Renton’s one of the leading lights of the Socialist Workers’ Party, and has contributed a number of pieces to Lobster over the years. The article is about the way the police acted to protect the meetings of Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement from anti-Fascist protests and demonstrations when it was founded just after the Second World War.

What struck me is that while the police have done much to root out the culture of racism – I’ve got friends and family in the police, who are very definitely not racist – some of the xenophobic rhetoric from the Fascists themselves remains strikingly unchanged. For example, Renton quotes an anti-Semitic comment from the area where Mosley started campaigning again as saying that the reason there was so much infant mortality was because all the hospitals were full up with ‘alien’ refugees. It reminded me very strongly of some of the comments made about the Health Service being placed under similar pressure from immigration. The only difference is that in the early post-War years, the refugees were people displaced from their European homes by the War. Now, they’re likely to be Syrians fleeing the War there, as well as other asylum seekers from around the world.

Hope Not Hate have put up a piece listing the 1,530 extreme Right-wing candidates around the country standing for the elections on Thursday. This includes not just members of the Fascist Right, but also UKIP, who are doing their best to stoke up xenophobia and have provided a home for members of the Nazi Right, despite Farrage’s protests and policies to the contrary. Let’s make sure that they don’t win.