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base Contents 06 21 An essay examining An edited version the theoretical of a conversation we held and historical overlaps with the Out of the Woods between fascism and collective - examining liberalism in the context the relationships between of capitalist white climate change, state supremacy violence, borders and much more 10 Remembering the Grunwick 26 strike 40 years on - featuring A collection of voices highlights from the exposing moments, exhibition including the memories & action results of a community in organising print workshop 28 14 Longtime contributor An article which tells a story Wasi Daniju recently held of growing up surrounded her first photographic by steel, industry and injury exhibition - on the SHIFTING GROUNDS in Port Talbot importance of visibility for black muslim women. We are honoured An argument is presented - that a socialist left is best 16 to publish a selection equipped to run a capitalist economy, security, policing, trade Bill Rolston details the of its contents here and welfare in the interests of all. Corbyn’s project is not alone traditions of the political here. Research from within the International Monetary Fund murals which can be found has argued that a more interventionist state may be able to across the Northern part 00 leverage solutions to a neoliberal consensus that has failed of Ireland The cover presents an on its own terms to stabilise geoeconomic relations. Despite impossible cartography, the spectacular resistance of European states against these an attempt to conceive alternatives on the continent, Corbyn went for them; initiat- of the border - an apparatus ing a rearguard pursuit of post-Keynesian economics as a that features repeatedly means of levering an end to Tory rule. This strategy, coupled in the articles bound with an ethical socialism rooted in the humanist steer of the between its pages. British left, was originally laughed off by people within his own party and everyone else in the ‘common sense’ press. Yet the Corbyn project can now claim to have accrued consider- base —This publication is funded solely by donations and is able damage to the Conservative platform and those various sustained by the voluntary efforts and enthusiasm of the base media factions - liberal and tabloid - that have held sway over collective, contributors and readers. It is printed on recycled public discourse for as long as we can remember. paper using vegetable inks by Aldgate Press. Most striking about the June 2017 election is that conspirato- rial smears mobilised in viral hate campaigns and in tabloid base #2 / print-run 1,000 copies. headlines - aimed squarely at ‘terrorist loving’ Corbyn, yet London / June 2017 importantly mediated through an Islamophobic subtext - basepublication.org failed to square a Conservative majority. This failure of capi- talist power blocs to move the election through an embed- ded history of racist and chauvinist touchstones is a cause Creative Commons License for celebration. Corbyn, on the whole, managed to substitute Unless otherwise stated, all content within this this racist-Hobbesian pact between government and elec- publication is covered by an Attribution-NonCommercial- torate for a moral egalitarianism. Much of this, including the ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License. confident presentation of a social democratic manifesto, has For further details see: creativecommons.org burnt a hole into the liberal pragmatist consensus that has mediated nearly ten years of austerity, promising, amongst other things, an end to the Work Capability Assessments that have led to thousands of deaths and suicides since their introduction by Labour in 2008. 2 / 3 Editorial Though we should also not forget the peculiar transgressions of the long trajectories of racial animus and Islamophobia of this socialist breakthrough. Most alarmingly, the ease with that are structural to British statecraft; their crystallisa- which Labour managed to bolster its law and order platform, tion in post-crash appeals to nationalism; the unviability of which helped to score political points and gazump the Gov- restarting capitalist accumulation in the old heartlands and ernment’s record on policing, especially in the wake of the reviving “golden age” industry; the relationship between attacks in Manchester and London. The argument from a capitalism and climate; the impossibility of a future under parliamentary left perspective is that concessions to the these present terms. right with regard to the expansion of militarised policing are required to garner wider support for a socialist manifesto As the left parliamentary project looks to scale, its tendency that aspires to social transformation. In the process, left- to foreclose a critical conception of the state as a compos- ist positioning becomes embroiled in celebrations of the ite of antagonistic agencies and violent machinations, is at police and of national or metropolitan togetherness. Failure risk of collapsing into economic positivism. Such a move- to reflect and scrutinise these positions - and their poten- ment presents a real threat of drawing extra-parliamentary tial to scale as stable campaign building blocks - disavows organisational formations under the rubric of the Labour the reality of identifying with the state. Put simply, claims Party. Community self-defence around instrumentalised to ensure credibility on security and policing will have to be housing provision, against immigration raids and police defended and implemented with the same determination as violence, can find no allies in the state. The autonomy of this a strong welfare provision. activity from state actors reflects the necessary distinction between these tendencies: to police and manage a new Within the dynamic of immediacy that conditions election acceleration of capital accumulation / to survive and organise campaigns, degrees of critical language and focus can there- through this instrumental objective. The interplay between fore become increasingly absent. The everyday violence of these disparate social forces will determine the long-term the border regime that sits on either side of Brexit, and the possibilities of the Corbyn project, and others like it. focus of a broader anti-migrant and anti-black continu- um, are most clearly obscured by parliamentary position- ing. Against the claim that political discourse is opened up asunder by left-electoral battlegrounds, we should neither forget how in the lead up to the ballot, there was a distinct closure of arguments and considerations over the violence of policing, detention and deportation: forcing this reality - this violence - out of focus. Against these tendencies, it is the structural continuities of a protracted capitalist crisis that we think must be restated. Included in this issue is analysis White Supremacy 4 / 5 White Supremacy “ As a simple priority, «lived multiculture» has to be defended, in thought as well as practice.” White Supremacy Alex Charnley / Michael Richmond This essay aTTempTs To offer insighT inTo The complex tity… reconnecting with who you really are for a Mexican- web of relaTions beTween capiTal, fascism, colonialism American would be about being in Mexico. For an African, it and liberalism which have conTribuTed To The would be about being in Africa.” What Spencer refers to as cenTuries-esTablished rule of european whiTe supremacy. “race realism” states in common sense tones that every- This is an abridged version of a longer essay, which can one has somewhere they belong, that tightened controls on be read in full aT biT.ly/whiTeworld immigration and increased deportations - such as the recent “Muslim ban” - are good for immigrants too because they can only truly flourish in their “natural homes”. Such logic is redolent of the 19th Century Colonization Movement in the US which saw sending slaves and free black people born in America “back to Africa” as the only solution to the problem of racial slavery in America. The naturalisation of arguments about the civilisational threat posed to the West by “Islamisation” or by immigra- tion in general, while not couched in the most explicit lexicon of white nationalism, have nevertheless gained traction in recent decades among large parts of the right but also many liberals and even leftists. Often framed in a narrative of de- “The Last Days cline and decadence, the objects of critique are the same: “multiculturalism” and “cultural relativism” have led Euro- of a White World” pean nation-states to lose their identity and the continent itself to lose its moral fibre and grounding in Enlightenment principles, while the corrosive force of immigration and “glo- In September 2000, Anthony Browne penned a sobre report balism”, particularly of confident and aggressive Muslims, for the Observer newspaper entitled “The Last Days of a White pulls it down from within. World”. Browne, latterly an advisor to Boris Johnson during his time as London mayor and now head of the British Bank- Recent essays from environmentalist Paul Kingsnorth and ers Association, informed readers that “40,000-year-old indi- former editor of Prospect magazine David Goodhart join genous white populations” of Europe were soon to become the canon of writers announcing that they’ve been mugged minorities in their own lands. The report is written with the by reality and left “the Left”, Goodhart for a “post-liberal” objective restraint of a journalist who has held senior political progressive racism and Kingsnorth for a sort of National Trust and economic briefs at the BBC, The Times, The Daily Mail and proto-fascism. Both men react against trends they ascribe The Spectator. Browne quotes liberally from Far Right nation- to liberalism or the Left (which they conflate), try to posi- alists, sitting politicians in the US and Germany, and black tion themselves as tribunes or translators of a “white work- and Asian British journalists and commentators, each with ing class revolt” and root their politics in a defence of place, different takes on the demographic changes brought about culture and tradition - a benign nationalism to shield social by South to North migration and divergent birth rates.