From Race Relations came Race Agitation

The Subversion of the British Institute of Race Relations

Ambalavaner Sivanandan As He Appeared in His Later Career

By James Pew and Scott Miller, for the series The Great Illiberal Subversion: How Radical Activists Ru(i)n Western Democracies.

“Illiberal subversion, as it regards this series, refers to the “work” of radical activists and social agitators who force their will on society through a long on-going web of processes involving incremental efforts that chip away at the pillars of western democracies. Attacking and undermining public institutions as Gramsci had it - “a revolution from within” - through a drawn-out complex of affairs perhaps best viewed as death by a thousand cuts, the radical activists entrench in individual departments until they colonize an entire organization and effectively wield enough power to shape its directives. Once this happens to enough of the institutions (or pillars) of society (and it already has), the radical subverters effectively wield power over everyone, the power to shape social right and social wrong.” - The Ontology of the Great Illiberal Subversion

The subversion of the British Institute of Race Relations (IRR) is of particular historical importance because of the overwhelming influence the black radical tradition has had on the development of modern-day social justice activism. As will be shown, the legitimizing of the adversarial approach to black/white relations (indicative of the black radical tradition), which would subsequently appear in the race relations policies of all Western democracies, was a core focus and result of the IRR. 

In a previous installment, we recounted the story of how the Institute for Race Relations in Britain was created, began life as a scientific, objective, establishment affirming institute, only, in due course, to be subverted, radicalized and repurposed as a major driver of race agitation in Britain. This example represents an important case study helping to illustrate how the great illiberal subversion happened and how it continues to happen today.  

As previously established, it was under the directorship of radical interloper Sivanandan that the British Institute of Race Relations would take on a new charter in 1972, a new direction and purpose. Least it be presumed that these right-wing charges can be reduced and caricatured as simple partisan bluster, consider this portion of a tribute to the life of Sivanandan produced by the website socialistworker.co.uk: “Sivanandan talked and wrote on all aspects of racism in an anti-imperialist, Marxist framework… In 1972 Sivanandan and others led a takeover, vowing that the IRR should not just report statistics but should be an active part of anti-racist resistance. As Sivanandan came to head the organization he helped shift it towards always putting race in the context of imperialism and colonialism. The IRR remains an important think-tank to this day.”¹

For Sivanandan, Marxism had, of course, evolved from its classical mode and had transitioned into Neo-Marxism which, he says, is focused on “new social forces such as women, blacks, gays (and soon, greens) who were themselves informed and impelled by the politics of the person”; further, he states, in terms of political strategy, that while “Old Marxists infiltrate” the new identity Marxists instead “hegemonise.”² This word is borrowed from the Gramscian model of Marxist subversion which, rather than a violent revolution, calls for a “long march through the institutions,”³ that is, precisely the sort of subversion Sivanandan enacted upon the Institute for Race Relations. One commentator paraphrases Gramsci’s explanation of what “to hegemonise” is supposed to entail as follows: “To hegemonise a specific group’s political demands was to incorporate it into a wider identity, to eliminate its difference sufficiently for it to be viewed as an integral part of a larger, distinctive worldview…”⁴ In other words, the Neo-Marxist playbook of hegemonising their viewpoints entail, essentially, getting inside institutions, and, once inside, to work to make the radical (the illiberal) seem acceptable, and the established liberal order seem unacceptable. That’s “doing the work” as the radicals like to say.

One of the key functions of the Institute of Race Relations, following its subversion and Sivanandan’s installment as director, became the production of public information pamphlets sometimes intended for purchase by elementary school teachers for the purposes of “educating” the children.⁵ Although it isn’t always realized, each of three key pamphlets aimed at the general public and at school children was written by Sivanandan himself.⁶ The themes in these pamphlets predictably attempt to radicalize their readership by presenting the Western liberal experiment as an evil enterprise which distinguishes itself solely by greed and by the invention of slavery and racism (the latter hadn’t existed before capitalist greed, or so they let on).  Starting with the first, “Roots of Racism” is a twenty-eight-page pamphlet produced in 1982 and available for free download from the institute’s website:⁷ 

The early pages of the book make a claim which is common to the black radical tradition and to the doctrines of today’s social justice and woke movements (the latter are largely derivative of the former in any case): the claim, in Sivanandan’s words is that “there is in fact no such thing as different races, not scientifically speaking.” This bit of politicized pseudo-science has been advanced incessantly by radical academics and intellectuals, for example Critical Race Theorist Derrick Bell’s social construction thesis holds that race is simply a social construct. Such positions allow radicals to insinuate that not only is race not biological, but that the whole concept of “race” was cooked up by white men in the colonial era for the sole purpose of inventing a reason to be racist to people of other colors. The anti-intellectual tendencies of such positions could be illustrated many times over, to give but one example: the perception of differing races is plainly not a development of the early modern era. Before the onset of modern biology, the Europeans of the Middle Ages sought to explain racial differences using criterion germane to the times — they thought that Africa was the land of the descendants of Ham, the son of Noah, that Ham had a special association with heat, and that the people of Africa appear black because they had been burnt by the sun.⁸ 

Sivanandan’s introductory comments to “Roots of Racism” relate that he intends to provide an “anti-racist education” which entails providing a “history of black-white relations from the vantage of the black experience”; the upshot of his cynical and highly skewed treatment of history is that the general reader will come away with the following radical formula: “white race = power, exploitation and racism' and 'black race' = "oppression, powerlessness and the struggle for justice.”⁹

The third installment of Sivanandan’s series, “How Racism Came to Britain,” attracted concerted opposition from counter-radical educators and from conservative writers on account of the cartoon format of much of the pamphlet, meaning that it was obviously intended for consumption by school children. One example of opposition came from conservative pundit and journalist Ronald Butt, whose critical review of the pamphlet in The Times included a few observations about Sivanandan’s notion of history: the pamphlet included an account of the transport of African slaves in which “no mention is made of the facts that slavery was endemic in Africa; that the slaves were mostly initially enslaved by other Africans; that the Arabs enslaved both whites and Africans. No merit is given to the Europeans for abolishing this ghastly trade in human lives.”¹⁰ Another source of opposition came from Baroness Cox, one time director of Sociology at Polytechnic of North London, who published a scathing article in the Daily Mail which republished some of the illustrations from the pamphlet (with added captions): 

David Dale, a social worker and counter-radical activist, in a volume examining the dangers of radical education, describes some of the content of “How Racism Came to Britain”: “Grinning white policemen are depicted brandishing truncheons at bewildered black youths; Hitlerian educationalists consign black children to schools for the educationally subnormal, racist employers grind down black workers, and the media produce an endless outpouring of lies about mugging. No Child, including the educationally subnormal, could miss the message, but it is spelled out anyway on page 24. Next to a scrawled drawing of a leering white capitalist a caption reads 'From 1950 black people to be used as pawns in a new game devised by the British ... It was called "YOU CAN'T WIN".’

The intent and the effect of this sort of rhetoric is the same whether it is projected by the pan-Africanists, the black nationalists, the black Marxists or similar: it is to undermine the social regulation of Western democratic liberalism with its commitments to tolerance, non-identitarian individualism, law and order, to inspire black populations to separatism, segregationism and identity Marxism, to hegemonise Western institutions, to rip out liberalism and replace it with something else.

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Thanks for reading. For a complete index (with summaries) of The Great Illiberal Subversion series of essay’s, check out The Ontology of the Great Illiberal Subversion.

Bibliography:

Akbari, Suzanne. 2009. Idols In the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient 1100-1450. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. 

Butts, Ronald. “The New Breed of Racist.” The Times, July 25, 1985. 

Cox, Catherine. 1985. “Brainwashed to Hate the Police.” Daily Mail, October 8, 1985.

Dale, David. 1986. “Racial Mischief: The Case of Dr Sivanandan.” In Anti-Racism: an Assault on Education and Value, edited by Frank Palmer, 82-96. London: The Sherwood Press.

Martin, James. 2002. “The Political Logic of Discourse: a Neo-Gramscian View” History of European Ideas, 28:1-2: 21-31.

1.  https://socialistworker.co.uk/socialist-review-archive/ambalavaner-sivanandan-1923-2018/

2. https://libcom.org/article/all-melts-air-solid-sivanandan#footnote3_yb4wpgc

3. For a full-length treatment of this tactic, see Marc Sidwell, 2019, “The Long March: How the left won the culture war and what to do about it.” New Culture Forum.

4.  Martin 2012, 24.

5. These pamphlets are still sold and distributed by the institute for a couple euros each: https://irr.org.uk/product-category/publications/books-pamphlets-multimedia/page/3/

6.  Although the authorship of these pamphlets hasn’t always been clear, a sympathetic website clarifies that Sivanandan himself was the author: “Sivanandan also had a pedagogical impact through an influential series of educational booklets published by the IRR in the 1980s that attempted to address the absence of black history in schools, particularly racism and its connection to imperialism. There were four booklets in total: Roots of Racism; Patterns of Racism; How Racism Came to Britain; and The Fight Against Racism – the latter two focused on the British context, whereas the earlier books were more general in emphasis.” See: https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/us-remembering-a-sivanandan-1923-2018/

7.  https://irr.org.uk/product/roots-of-racism/

8.  Akbari 2009, 31, 40–42. As Akbari notes, in the opinion of Bartholomaeus Anglicus (1203–1273), an early encyclopedist, this heat had a negative impact of the spirits of those living in Africa.

9.  Following Dale 1986, 81.

10.  Butts 1985.