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This insightful text offers an original perspective on the significance of both racism and anti-racism in structuring the English working class. Through the unique concept of the racialized outsider, Virdee demonstrates the contribution of Irish Catholics, Jews, Asians and the African diaspora to the making of a more inclusive, democratic society.

Abstract
This essay explores four questions through a critical dialogue with Black Marxist, Decolonial, and Political Marxist accounts of racism. First, is it possible to speak of racism before the advent of colonisation in the Americas? Second, what were the determinants for the production of these earlier modalities of racism? Third, who were the key actors responsible for the production of such racism? And fourth, what were the linkages between these developments and racisms that would unfold with the capitalist colonisation of the Americas? I contend that the historical formation of racism as a material force lies in the formation and dissolution of absolutist states in Western Europe between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. By demonstrating how elite political cultures of Western European societies were suffused with the logic of racialisation prior to the colonisation of the Americas, the essay helps render transparent hitherto occluded connections between histories focusing on the internal racialisation of Europe and the racialisation of the European exterior. And in doing so, it establishes the constitutive part racism played in the emergence of capitalist modernity.

Undergirded by the perspective of historical materialism stretched in dialogue with black Marxism and Marxist feminism, this article constructs an account demonstrating the significance of racism to the making of modernity. The analytic returns of unthinking Eurocentric sociologies in favour of a more unified historical social scientific approach include the unmasking of the intimate relationship between capitalism, class struggles and racism, particularly how capitalist rule advanced through a process of differentiation and hierarchical re-ordering of the global proletariat. From the 17th century colonisation of Virginia to Victorian Britain and beyond, racism formed an indispensable weapon in the armoury of the state elites, used to contain the class struggles waged by subaltern populations with a view to making the system safe for capital accumulation. Additionally, situating an account of racism within the unfolding story of historical capitalism as against the postcolonial tendency to locate it within the civilizational encounter between the West and the Rest helps make transparent the plurality of racisms, including the racialization of parts of the European proletariat. This explanation of the structuring force of racism and the differentiated ways in which the proletariat has been incorporated into capitalist relations of domination has important implications for emancipatory politics. A race-blind politics risks leaving untouched the injustices produced by historic and contemporaneous racisms. Instead, an alternative approach is proposed, one that invites movements to wilfully entangle demands for economic justice with anti-racism and thereby embrace and demystify the differences inscribed into the collective body of the proletariat by capitalism.

Virdee's essay explores the relationship between English socialists and migrant Jews amid the new unionism of the late nineteenth century: a cycle of protest characterized by sustained collective action by the unskilled and labouring poor demanding economic and social justice. Reading this labour history against the grain, with a greater attentiveness to questions of race and class, helps to make more transparent both the prevalence and structuring force of socialist antisemitism, as well as English and Jewish socialist opposition to it. In particular, the essay suggests that the dominant socialist discourse was intimately bound up with questions of national belonging and this directly contributed to a racialized politics of class that could not imagine migrant Jews as an integral component of the working class. At the same time, such socialist antisemitism was also challenged by a minority current of English Marxists whose conceptions of socialism refused to be limited by the narrow boundaries of the racialized nation-state. And they were joined in this collective action by autonomous Jewish socialist organizations who understood that the liberation of the Jewish worker was indivisible from that of the emancipation of the working class in general. With the help of Eleanor Marx and others, these latter strands entangled socialist politics with questions of combatting antisemitism, and thereby stretched existing conceptions of class to encompass the Jewish worker.

A critical analysis of the historical & contemporary relationship between black labor & the UK trade union movement reveals how a decade of industrial action taken by black workers & the union members' recognition of the need for class solidarity & collective action against the movement to curb trade union activity gave black workers a solid footing within the labor movement. During the mid-1970s, the Trade Union Congress began to combat racist exclusionary practices & far Right influence. During the Grunwick dispute, thousands of white workers supported Asian women on strike, showing a willingness to overcome the ideology of racism. The creation of black self-organizations affiliated with trade unions, campaigns against racism, & training courses for trade union member actively opposing racism is ensuring the equal treatment of blacks within UK trade unions. 1 Table, 41 References. L. A. Hoffman

This article offers a conjunctural analysis of the financial and political crisis within which Brexit occurred with a specific attentiveness to race and racism. Brexit and its aftermath have been overdetermined by racism, including racist violence. We suggest that the Leave campaign secured its victory by bringing together two contradictory but inter-locking visions. The first comprises an imperial longing to restore Britain's place in the world as primus inter pares that occludes any coming to terms with the corrosive legacies of colonial conquest and racist subjugation. The second takes the form of an insular, Powellite narrative of island retreat from a "globalizing" world, one that is no longer recognizably "British". Further, the article argues that an invisible driver of the Brexit vote and its racist aftermath has been a politicization of Englishness. We conclude by outlining some resources of hope that could potentially help to negotiate the current emergency.