The (dis)articulation of race and class in Britain, 1970s-1980s

This research examines the conceptual and political articulation of race and class in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. It traces the contributions of authors such as Stuart Hall and A. Sivanandan, alongside collective experiences of militancy and intellectual production—including black radical publications (Race Today, The Black Liberator), political organisations (Black Unity and Freedom Party, Black Liberation Front), and black feminist groups (Organisation for Women of African and Asian Descent)—to wider debates in the social sciences and Marxist theory on the relationship between racism and capitalism, and the conceptualisation of race and class. These reflections are situated within the historical processes of decolonisation and postcolonial migration, the vocality of social movements, and the economic crisis of the 1970s, which unsettled the British post-war consensus. The emergence of Thatcherism is analysed as both a response to and a decisive rupture with this conjuncture, advancing a neoliberal reorganisation of society that also relied on dismantling the theoretical-political articulation of race and class. Drawing on a wide range of published and unpublished sources, the thesis reconstructs how these authors advanced original theorisations starting from the peculiarities of black people in post-colonial Britain. The first chapter explores different conceptualisations of racism, contextualising them within the British race relations paradigm. The second examines how these understandings informed different interpretations of race and class, highlighting the tension between sociological and political accounts. The third addresses the issue of organisation through the concept of articulation and the practice of political blackness, which sought to unite heterogeneous subjects shaped by a shared—although differentiated—postcolonial experience. The final chapter analyses the disarticulation between black and class politics in the 1980s, showing how understandings of racism, of race and class, and of political organisation were reshaped within the wider hegemonic project of Thatcherism.