Satnam Virdee
Biographic Data
| ID | 79428 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Satnam Virdee |
| GIVEN NAMES | Satnam |
| FAMILY NAME | Virdee |
| SIGNATURE | VIRDEE S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Glasgow |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8995-0827 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 419 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
The contemporary left, racialised capitalism and ending racism
This article considers two key questions raised by Solomos in his new book Antiracism. First, to what extent did previous modalities of antiracism make a tangible difference to the lives of racialised minorities? And second, what might the end of racism look like? Through an examination of events in 1980s Britain, I show how antiracism prised open key institutional structures of British society contributing to making black and brown lives more li…
Living in the slipstream of defeat
This essay suggests stretching Saull's structuralist account of the relationship between neoliberal globalisation and the far-right to accommodate subaltern agency and resistance. Taking this step makes transparent that the rising fortunes of the far-right is indivisible from the historic defeat that neoliberal globalisation inflicted on the global Left in the 1970s and 1980s. The victorious neoliberal elites went onto produce a refashioned diffe…
Racism and State Formation in the Age of Absolutism
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 d…
The lines of descent of the present crisis
The neoliberal settlement has been comprehensively destabilised by the 2007 financial crisis, the imposition of austerity, growing social inequalities and the emergence of populism as a social force. This article explores why institutional opposition to this settlement has principally taken a nationalist form in Britain. It does so through a history of the present by tracing the labyrinthine lines of descent and the social forces and conflicts fr…
Revolutionary lives of the Red and Black Atlantic since 1917
Revolutionary lives of the Red and Black Atlantic brings to light the life histories of a wide range of radical figures whose political activity in relation to the black liberation struggle was profoundly shaped by the global impact and legacy of the Russian Revolution of October 1917. The volume introduces new perspectives on the intellectual trajectories of well-known figures and critical activists including C. L. R. James, Paul Robeson, Walter…
The Red and the Black
This edited collection explores the inspiration of the Russian Revolution of 1917 for black radicals across the African diaspora. The volume challenges European-centred understandings of the Russian Revolution and the global left and enables new insights on the relations between Communism and various black radical traditions
Black resistance to British policing
Using a decade of activist research, this book offers a radical analysis of grassroots black resistance to policing in twenty-first-century Britain
Black Resistance to British Policing
Satnam Virdee
Race Talk
Global white nationalism
Revisiting histories of anti-racist thought and activism
This piece reconsiders histories of anti-racist thought and practice, including the linkages between anti-racisms and other traditions of liberatory thought. We argue that anti-racism should be understood as a strand in radical thought linking internationalism, institutional critique and street activism, in the process interfeeding with other social movements. The traditions of anti-racist thought discussed in this special issue exemplify these c…
Racialized capitalism
Undergirded by the perspective of historical materialism 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…
Introduction
The Introduction begins by outlining the general theme of this special issue, “Race and Crisis”. It then moves to examine populist right-wing politics from 2015. Of the various ways in which the rise of such politics could be charted in this period, here the “success” of anti-immigrant and anti-E.U. parties in national-level elections is the focus. Success is understood in terms of share of the popular vote at national level, and the appeal of th…
Racism, Crisis, Brexit
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 …
The second sight of racialised outsiders in the imperialist core
This essay focuses attention on a current of socialist internationalism within imperial Britain and the formative role played by racialised outsiders of Irish Catholic, Jewish and Indian descent in actualising anti-racism and anti-imperialism. The collective memories of colonial subjugation combined with their outsider status within Britain itself endowed them with a second sight that enabled them to see through the usual fog of blood and belongi…
Antisemitism and socialist strategy in Europe, 1880–1917
No abstract available
Socialist antisemitism and its discontents in England, 1884–98
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 structuri…
Striking back against racist violence in the East End of London, 1968-1970
This article tells the hitherto untold story of how different Pakistani organisations mobilised in response to racist violence and harassment in the east London Borough of Tower Hamlets (1968-1970). In telling this story, the authors analyse the problematic nature of official and public understandings of, and responses to, racist violence, and how it distorted the lives of racialised minorities. Drawing on original archival research carried out i…
Racism
his report is a reflection on a recent conference, 'Racism: From the Labour Movement to the Far-Right', which was held at the University of Glasgow from Friday 5th to Saturday 6th September 2014. The authors discuss the main themes that the conference sought to address, consider the key highlights of the event including a summary of the opening address by Floya Anthias, and offer some suggestions as to how the initiative may be taken forward
Opening a dialogue on race, class and national belonging
In this essay, I respond to the reviewers of my book, Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider, including Bhattacharrya, Frost, Jefferys, Meer, Roediger and van der Linden. In particular, I elaborate further on the epistemological foundations of the book, including my aim to stretch the concept of working class to accommodate both ethnic diversity, and the significance of racism and anti-racism within it. Then, I state the case for how the conce…
Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider
Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider offers an original perspective on the significance of both racism and anti-racism in the making of the English working class. While racism became a powerful structuring force within this social class from as early as the mid-Victorian period, this book also traces the episodic emergence of currents of working class anti-racism. Through an insistence that race is central to the way class works, this insigh…
Challenging the empire
This paper considers how Paul Gilroy transformed hitherto dominant understandings of the relationship between race and class by developing an innovative account that foregrounded questions of racist oppression and collective resistance amid the organic crisis of British capitalism. The returns from this rethinking were profound in that he was able to make transparent both the structuring power of racism within the working class, and the necessity…
Forward to the past
Racism, Muslims and the National Imagination
This qualitative study investigates the relationship between racism and nationalism in two multi-ethnic British neighbourhoods, focusing specifically on the construction of ‘the Muslim’ as a racialised role sign. Through in-depth interviews with 102 ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ participants in Glasgow (Scotland) and Bristol (England) we investigate the extent to which ‘the Muslim’ is being demonised as an oppositional identity in the construction of E…
Racism, Crisis, Brexit
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 …
Racialized capitalism
Undergirded by the perspective of historical materialism 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…
Race', employment and social change
This article focuses on two important questions. First, how can we explain changes in the employment position of England's racialized minority groups over the past three decades? And second, why have these changes taken place at a different pace for different minority groups? It is argued that much of the increase in Asian self-employment represents working-class accommodation to the inferior conditions of employment available under neo-liberal m…
A Marxist Critique of Black Radical Theories of Trade-union Racism
When it comes to understanding the relationship between organised labour and the racialised worker in England, the conclusions reached by black radical theorists like Sivanandan and Gilroy have gone unchallenged for many years. In this paper, it is contended that these accounts of trade-union racism are constructed on the mistaken assumption that a trade union represents the interests of all the working class. Instead, an alternative conceptual f…
Racism, Muslims and the National Imagination
This qualitative study investigates the relationship between racism and nationalism in two multi-ethnic British neighbourhoods, focusing specifically on the construction of ‘the Muslim’ as a racialised role sign. Through in-depth interviews with 102 ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ participants in Glasgow (Scotland) and Bristol (England) we investigate the extent to which ‘the Muslim’ is being demonised as an oppositional identity in the construction of E…
Racism and the sociological imagination
Our chief purpose in this article is to argue for a restoration of a strong notion of agency to sociological accounts of social relations, and particularly those concerned with group formation and conflict. We contend that much contemporary sociological writing on this topic continues to rely on the concepts of race and ethnicity as primary explanatory or descriptive devices. This has two important consequences: on the one hand it reproduces the …
Striking back against racist violence in the East End of London, 1968-1970
This article tells the hitherto untold story of how different Pakistani organisations mobilised in response to racist violence and harassment in the east London Borough of Tower Hamlets (1968-1970). In telling this story, the authors analyse the problematic nature of official and public understandings of, and responses to, racist violence, and how it distorted the lives of racialised minorities. Drawing on original archival research carried out i…
Black Self-Organization in Trade Unions
This paper considers the significance of self-organization for black and minority workers in trade unions. It embodies a review of the theoretical and empirical evidence in support of black self-organization within unions; that is, a strategy of relative autonomy rather than separatism or submersion within a race-blind union. The theoretical support is derived from arguments concerning identity, participation and power. Much of the empirical mate…
Introduction
The Introduction begins by outlining the general theme of this special issue, “Race and Crisis”. It then moves to examine populist right-wing politics from 2015. Of the various ways in which the rise of such politics could be charted in this period, here the “success” of anti-immigrant and anti-E.U. parties in national-level elections is the focus. Success is understood in terms of share of the popular vote at national level, and the appeal of th…
Migrant labour, racism and the British National Health Service
This study explores the dynamics of racism, specifically its generation and reproduction as an ideology, and its role in affecting the reception and occupational location of migrant medical labour in Britain. It is argued that the treatment of 'overseas doctors' in Britain draws on a complex interplay between racism and nationalism underpinned by the historical construction of 'welfarism' as a moral legitimator of 'Britishness'. Through an explor…
The second sight of racialised outsiders in the imperialist core
This essay focuses attention on a current of socialist internationalism within imperial Britain and the formative role played by racialised outsiders of Irish Catholic, Jewish and Indian descent in actualising anti-racism and anti-imperialism. The collective memories of colonial subjugation combined with their outsider status within Britain itself endowed them with a second sight that enabled them to see through the usual fog of blood and belongi…
Codes of Cultural Belonging
This qualitative study investigates the relationship between race and nation in an ethnically mixed neighbourhood in Glasgow, Scotland. It finds that Scottishness has a historically founded racialised referent at the level of the neighbourhood but that this referent is undermined in everyday life by syncretic codes of cultural belonging represented by signifiers such as accent, dress and mannerisms. However, these cultural signifiers that contest…
The contemporary left, racialised capitalism and ending racism
This article considers two key questions raised by Solomos in his new book Antiracism. First, to what extent did previous modalities of antiracism make a tangible difference to the lives of racialised minorities? And second, what might the end of racism look like? Through an examination of events in 1980s Britain, I show how antiracism prised open key institutional structures of British society contributing to making black and brown lives more li…
Racism and State Formation in the Age of Absolutism
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 d…
Socialist antisemitism and its discontents in England, 1884–98
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 structuri…
Challenging the empire
This paper considers how Paul Gilroy transformed hitherto dominant understandings of the relationship between race and class by developing an innovative account that foregrounded questions of racist oppression and collective resistance amid the organic crisis of British capitalism. The returns from this rethinking were profound in that he was able to make transparent both the structuring power of racism within the working class, and the necessity…
Forward to the past
The lines of descent of the present crisis
The neoliberal settlement has been comprehensively destabilised by the 2007 financial crisis, the imposition of austerity, growing social inequalities and the emergence of populism as a social force. This article explores why institutional opposition to this settlement has principally taken a nationalist form in Britain. It does so through a history of the present by tracing the labyrinthine lines of descent and the social forces and conflicts fr…
Opening a dialogue on race, class and national belonging
In this essay, I respond to the reviewers of my book, Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider, including Bhattacharrya, Frost, Jefferys, Meer, Roediger and van der Linden. In particular, I elaborate further on the epistemological foundations of the book, including my aim to stretch the concept of working class to accommodate both ethnic diversity, and the significance of racism and anti-racism within it. Then, I state the case for how the conce…
Living in the slipstream of defeat
This essay suggests stretching Saull's structuralist account of the relationship between neoliberal globalisation and the far-right to accommodate subaltern agency and resistance. Taking this step makes transparent that the rising fortunes of the far-right is indivisible from the historic defeat that neoliberal globalisation inflicted on the global Left in the 1970s and 1980s. The victorious neoliberal elites went onto produce a refashioned diffe…
Antisemitism and socialist strategy in Europe, 1880–1917
No abstract available
Black Self-Organization in Trade Unions
This paper considers the significance of self-organization for black and minority workers in trade unions. It embodies a review of the theoretical and empirical evidence in support of black self-organization within unions; that is, a strategy of relative autonomy rather than separatism or submersion within a race-blind union. The theoretical support is derived from arguments concerning identity, participation and power. Much of the empirical mate…
Racial violence and harassment
In 1994, the Home Affairs Select Committee report on racial attacks and harassment 'strongly recommend[ed] that the government improves its performance in providing statistics to judge the nature and extent of racial violence and harassment'. To that end, it repeated its recommendation, first made in its 1989 report, for the government to commission a national survey to examine the occurrence of racial attacks and harassment.1 Why does the commit…
A Marxist Critique of Black Radical Theories of Trade-union Racism
When it comes to understanding the relationship between organised labour and the racialised worker in England, the conclusions reached by black radical theorists like Sivanandan and Gilroy have gone unchallenged for many years. In this paper, it is contended that these accounts of trade-union racism are constructed on the mistaken assumption that a trade union represents the interests of all the working class. Instead, an alternative conceptual f…
Migrant labour, racism and the British National Health Service
This study explores the dynamics of racism, specifically its generation and reproduction as an ideology, and its role in affecting the reception and occupational location of migrant medical labour in Britain. It is argued that the treatment of 'overseas doctors' in Britain draws on a complex interplay between racism and nationalism underpinned by the historical construction of 'welfarism' as a moral legitimator of 'Britishness'. Through an explor…
Codes of Cultural Belonging
This qualitative study investigates the relationship between race and nation in an ethnically mixed neighbourhood in Glasgow, Scotland. It finds that Scottishness has a historically founded racialised referent at the level of the neighbourhood but that this referent is undermined in everyday life by syncretic codes of cultural belonging represented by signifiers such as accent, dress and mannerisms. However, these cultural signifiers that contest…
Race', employment and social change
This article focuses on two important questions. First, how can we explain changes in the employment position of England's racialized minority groups over the past three decades? And second, why have these changes taken place at a different pace for different minority groups? It is argued that much of the increase in Asian self-employment represents working-class accommodation to the inferior conditions of employment available under neo-liberal m…
Racism and the sociological imagination
Our chief purpose in this article is to argue for a restoration of a strong notion of agency to sociological accounts of social relations, and particularly those concerned with group formation and conflict. We contend that much contemporary sociological writing on this topic continues to rely on the concepts of race and ethnicity as primary explanatory or descriptive devices. This has two important consequences: on the one hand it reproduces the …
Racism, Muslims and the National Imagination
This qualitative study investigates the relationship between racism and nationalism in two multi-ethnic British neighbourhoods, focusing specifically on the construction of ‘the Muslim’ as a racialised role sign. Through in-depth interviews with 102 ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ participants in Glasgow (Scotland) and Bristol (England) we investigate the extent to which ‘the Muslim’ is being demonised as an oppositional identity in the construction of E…
Forward to the past
Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider
Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider offers an original perspective on the significance of both racism and anti-racism in the making of the English working class. While racism became a powerful structuring force within this social class from as early as the mid-Victorian period, this book also traces the episodic emergence of currents of working class anti-racism. Through an insistence that race is central to the way class works, this insigh…
Challenging the empire
This paper considers how Paul Gilroy transformed hitherto dominant understandings of the relationship between race and class by developing an innovative account that foregrounded questions of racist oppression and collective resistance amid the organic crisis of British capitalism. The returns from this rethinking were profound in that he was able to make transparent both the structuring power of racism within the working class, and the necessity…
Racism
his report is a reflection on a recent conference, 'Racism: From the Labour Movement to the Far-Right', which was held at the University of Glasgow from Friday 5th to Saturday 6th September 2014. The authors discuss the main themes that the conference sought to address, consider the key highlights of the event including a summary of the opening address by Floya Anthias, and offer some suggestions as to how the initiative may be taken forward
Opening a dialogue on race, class and national belonging
In this essay, I respond to the reviewers of my book, Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider, including Bhattacharrya, Frost, Jefferys, Meer, Roediger and van der Linden. In particular, I elaborate further on the epistemological foundations of the book, including my aim to stretch the concept of working class to accommodate both ethnic diversity, and the significance of racism and anti-racism within it. Then, I state the case for how the conce…
Striking back against racist violence in the East End of London, 1968-1970
This article tells the hitherto untold story of how different Pakistani organisations mobilised in response to racist violence and harassment in the east London Borough of Tower Hamlets (1968-1970). In telling this story, the authors analyse the problematic nature of official and public understandings of, and responses to, racist violence, and how it distorted the lives of racialised minorities. Drawing on original archival research carried out i…
The second sight of racialised outsiders in the imperialist core
This essay focuses attention on a current of socialist internationalism within imperial Britain and the formative role played by racialised outsiders of Irish Catholic, Jewish and Indian descent in actualising anti-racism and anti-imperialism. The collective memories of colonial subjugation combined with their outsider status within Britain itself endowed them with a second sight that enabled them to see through the usual fog of blood and belongi…
Antisemitism and socialist strategy in Europe, 1880–1917
No abstract available
Socialist antisemitism and its discontents in England, 1884–98
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 structuri…
Introduction
The Introduction begins by outlining the general theme of this special issue, “Race and Crisis”. It then moves to examine populist right-wing politics from 2015. Of the various ways in which the rise of such politics could be charted in this period, here the “success” of anti-immigrant and anti-E.U. parties in national-level elections is the focus. Success is understood in terms of share of the popular vote at national level, and the appeal of th…
Racism, Crisis, Brexit
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 …
Racialized capitalism
Undergirded by the perspective of historical materialism 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…
Satnam Virdee
Race Talk
Global white nationalism
Revisiting histories of anti-racist thought and activism
This piece reconsiders histories of anti-racist thought and practice, including the linkages between anti-racisms and other traditions of liberatory thought. We argue that anti-racism should be understood as a strand in radical thought linking internationalism, institutional critique and street activism, in the process interfeeding with other social movements. The traditions of anti-racist thought discussed in this special issue exemplify these c…
The Red and the Black
This edited collection explores the inspiration of the Russian Revolution of 1917 for black radicals across the African diaspora. The volume challenges European-centred understandings of the Russian Revolution and the global left and enables new insights on the relations between Communism and various black radical traditions
Sociology (27 works) · Political science (26 works) · Law (23 works) · Gender Studies (21 works) · Politics (19 works) · Racism (19 works) · Law (14 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · Political economy (11 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (8 works)