Sideways Sociology: UK Anti-Racism

Ambalavaner Sivanandan, Tech and Anti-Racism – by John Narayan

• The Sociological Review Foundation • Season 1 • Episode 1

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What does tech have to do with anti-racism? Why do we dismiss complex economics at our peril? And how do global struggles for justice connect to those at the local level? John Narayan  – Chair of the Council of the Institute of Race Relations, and a lecturer in European and International Studies at King’s College London – introduces us to Ambalavaner Sivandanan, or “Siva”, a giant of anti-racism who showed us how to truly understand discrimination, and how we can best confront it, together – not just at the interpersonal level or the level of language alone, but through communities of resistance, with an eye firmly focussed on capitalism, colonialism and technology. Here, John celebrates and unpacks the ideas within Siva’s 1989 essay “New Circuits of Imperialism”, which saw him address racism, capitalism and tech at a global scale, and relate this back to state racism at the national level.

Siva, John says, shows us the scope for a truly anti-racist sociology, teaching us that the struggles of “Indian farmers for land rights, those of indigenous Amazonians, and those of Grenfell Tower fire survivors” are ultimately connected – united by “a story of people harmed and marginalised by the market state; and confronting it”.

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Episode Readings


Episode Credits

  • Author: John Narayan
  • Producer: Alice Bloch
  • Sound: Emma Houlton
  • Music: Joe Gardner
  • Artwork: Kieran Cairns-Lowe


Production Note: This episode was recorded in 2024.

Alice Bloch  0:12  
Hi and welcome to Sideways Sociology, a special short series of audio essays from The Sociological Review Foundation. In each, we're looking at a key figure in the story of UK anti-racism, illuminating how they show us what that term really means, and what it takes, but also how their work and ideas speak to sociology, too, and should be better known. I'm Alice the producer, and here John Narayan – Chair of the Institute of Race Relations, and also a senior lecturer in European and International Studies at King's College London – introduces us to Ambalavaner Sivandanan, a giant of anti-racism who showed us how to truly understand discrimination, and how we can confront it together – not just at the interpersonal level or that of language, but through communities of resistance, and with an eye firmly focused on capitalism, colonialism and – as John will show us here – tech. If you've got a smartphone, have a look at it, because you'll soon see it differently. Thanks for listening.

John Narayan  1:19  
The early noughties – it's a long time ago now, isn't it? 9/11, its fallout, the war on terror and here in the UK: the New Labour project – a supposedly cool Britannia, a departure from Thatcherism – was floundering as riots unfolded in the North of the country, where South Asian communities fought far-right violence. People were asking back then: has multiculturalism failed? As mainstream thinking had it, minoritised populations – who'd in fact helped to make this country, were part of its colonial history and very much part of its present – had too much culture. They hadn't integrated, assimilated, blended into the British way of life. 

John Narayan  2:09  
Back then, I was studying sociology and these so called debates felt personal. I was from an ethnically mixed working class community in the West Midlands. My mum and dad had come to the UK from the Fiji Islands – my dad in the 1960s, the heyday of Enoch Powell and his Rivers of Blood speech against mass immigration. To give you an anecdote, Enoch Powell was my father's MP. Early on, I was given a sense that racism and class were linked. My dad, who left school at 16 to become a forklift driver, had given me this education for free. He used to tell me that we can't really talk about racism without really understanding how and why we got here, and also how and where we worked and lived. But when I listened to my peers, or the radio, or the government about the crisis of British multiculturalism, that nuance – that link between race and class – just really wasn't there. 

John Narayan  3:09  
Luckily, I took a module on race and ethnicity – a sort of backwater class back then – and found a Sri Lankan-British writer and activist: Ambalavaner Sivanandan, or Siva as he's known to those of us who work with his work. He wasn't a sociologist. He wasn't an academic really, but he showed me what anti-racism was and how to make it effective. And as I read him in the library and student bar – in works like his collected essays, Communities of Resistance, he wove a tapestry of Marxism, anti-racism and what we used to call "third world revolutionary struggle", and I began to see things differently, to place the UK's multiculturalism debates, the UK's racisms, in a bigger story, a bigger history of global inequality and imperialism. More on that soon, but first, I want to tell you more about Siva himself. Born in Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, in 1923 Siva – from the country's Tamil minority – was the son of a postal worker. He studied economics and worked in banking, before coming to the UK in the late 1950s as riots raged in Sri Lanka. Here, he retrained as a librarian. The job has associations with the quiet life, but if there was ever a revolutionary librarian, it was Siva. In 1972 as the chief librarian at the Institute of Race Relations – where today I'm now the Chair – he led a movement to wrest control of the Institute and its journal Race (later called Race and Class). His aim? To turn it away from a focus on race relations as how different groups perceive each other, and instead to put the actual needs and politics of communities suffering racism at the heart of discussion. 

John Narayan  5:01  
Staging an institutional coup sounds bold – but then, as the journalist and sociologist Gary Younge reminded readers after Siva's death in 2018, Siva knew how to draw courage when it mattered. In 1958, the year he left Sri Lanka, he saved his family from Sinhalese attackers by dressing as a policeman and waving what he knew was an empty gun. Arriving in the UK, he found something of a home from home –  unfortunately. Seeing race riots in Notting Hill, he knew at once, in his own words, that he was Black. That word might surprise those of us who today would call Siva Asian or South Asian, but back then using it was actually an act of solidarity and a statement of fact. Back then, British citizens and migrants from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean faced post-war state racism that branded them all coloured. It was through this collective identity of blackness, capturing all non-white migrant communities, that anti-racism fought back. Siva's work, like his essay From Resistance to Rebellion: Asian and Afro-Caribbean struggles in Britain, highlighted the importance of connecting up different communities of resistance. Fragmentation, he knew, could never beat the monolith of state racism. Neither could historical ignorance. We are here because you were there, he used to say, reminding us that the experience of migrants in the UK is bound up with the global history of empire. Indeed, Siva saw racism wasn't just about interpersonal relationships or name calling: it's defined by "laws, constitutional conventions, judicial precedents, institutional practices", he said, all of which have the stamp of the state. And state racism, in turn, can only be understood if we see that racism at the national level is shaped by the global nature and history of capitalism. 

John Narayan  7:16  
That's all worth remembering today, as we see riots in deprived French suburbs but little discussion of colonialism and racist policing, and as we see the value of economic 'migrants' forever debated in the UK without a discussion of imperialisms past and present. Siva reminds us to get our optics right, to readjust our lens and to set the right scale of analysis, to look back in time and across global space, because bracketing off complexity gets us nowhere. 

John Narayan  7:45  
Okay, if you already know Siva, much of what I said will be pretty standard. But what I want to do today is bring something I think is really neglected, and that's his idea of the "new circuits of imperialism" from the 1980s which, as he saw it at the time, had been made and were being perpetuated by the combination of three big factors. One, a shift in the nature of global production, that's where and how things are made. Two, a new international division of labour, that's who's doing what work and where in the global economy. And the third factor, technological change. That might sound complex, but I'm going to unpack all of that. And the thing to point out upfront is that in looking at racism, capitalism and tech at the global scale, and relating this back to state racism at the national level in the UK, Siva did something radical. 

John Narayan  8:41  
For a long time, people trying to understand western imperialism had taken for granted the classic centre-periphery trope. The idea was that the global economy had its control room, its head office in the West. This is where manufacturing happened. Meanwhile, non-western nations on the fringes – or what we used to call the periphery – was simply where the raw materials got produced and extracted, think sugar, metals, cotton, human labour. And it's true. For a long time – through enslavement, colonisation and extraction – less wealthy nations were dominated in this way by richer ones. But by 1979, when Siva wrote the essay Imperialism and disorganic development in the Silicon age, he knew things were changing. Most of us have come across the word neoliberal, and we normally take it to refer to how Thatcher and Reagan used free market ideas to privatise state assets, like railways, and attack workers rights, like curtailing union power. This normally boils down to national level stories, and those are certainly very real. But Siva anticipated and described what we've come to call neoliberal globalisation. 

John Narayan  9:52  
To Siva's eye, the centre was now supplying, within limits, the tech and the knowledge. And the periphery of the less developed nations were providing both the primary products and the manufacturing. I want you here to think of your phones. Imagine where the materials for the phone – tungsten, cobalt, lithium – come from, and then think about who produces them. Both of these processes now happen largely outside the West. Within this setup is a hierarchy of production where the advanced economies keep hold of the high-tech or rent-seeking patent rights, newly industrial ones become sites of industrial production, and undeveloped ones take on the unskilled, back-end assembly work, or the extraction of raw materials. Again, you need only reach in your pocket to find a neat example of this. On the back of my smartphone, for example, it says: designed in California, assembled in China. It can't say made in China, as the components are extracted elsewhere, made elsewhere and then shipped to China for assembly, but the patents and profits are largely returned to the US. 

John Narayan  11:03  
If you really want to simplify this, I guess you could say things got more complex, more intricate, less linear. And indeed, this globalising of production and exploitation, forged by interference by the West in Third World economies, was led by those multinational corporations and international financial institutions whose names have become bywords to complexity and being opaque. The IMF, the International Monetary Fund, the WTO, the World Trade Organisation, and so on. Those initialisms often make us switch off, make us feel ignorant, small. But one problem of recent decades, I think, is we've refused to engage in this complexity. We've seen economics as something for other people. But Siva would say, don't switch off, global economics matters for anti-racism. And anyway, there's actually a nice wildcard element that he brings in: the microchip. Yes, for Siva, the shift to neoliberal globalisation was in large part made possible by an IT revolution. The integration of microprocessor technology into industrial production, Siva said, had really deskilled and automated it now – now, highly skilled workers were needed to programme machines, while unskilled ones were needed to work them. With this change came a shift in where production actually happened, a redrawing of the international division of labour. Basically, Siva was offering an early narrative of what's been called "disarticulated Fordism". Gone was the old cartoon image of workers at the assembly line, doing distinct tasks under one roof to build a whole car, what we call Fordism. With disarticulated Fordism, multinational corporations smashed the old ways of factory production, scattering it across global assembly lines. These lines, Siva wrote, stretch from "Silicon Valley in California or Silicon Glen in Scotland, to the Export Processing Zones of Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and Sri Lanka". 

John Narayan  13:10  
Globalisation is often sold to us as a great leveller. Ads for banks and airlines present it as a shrinker of time and space that means you can fly around the world to hug your family or wire money in an instant. But Siva knew the world was not becoming one just because it was more integrated. Instead, the global assembly lines I've just described created a messier, riskier world of production – no more equal than what came before, and if anything, harder to fight with the working class now expanded and "scattered all over the non-industrialised world". Class was not dead. In fact, it was in trouble. With capital freed from the political and legal constraints it once found in the old centre, it could now dodge strikes, unions and resistance everywhere. And so the ground was set for rife exploitation, deregulation, the weakening of the labour struggle, often along racialised lines. Think of the Rana Plaza disaster – more than 10 years ago now – where garment workers in Bangladesh making clothes for the UK were crushed in a factory collapse. Think also of how child labour in the DRC has been used to mine for cobalt, which goes into our tech, and how Chinese labour is exploited putting such parts together. 

John Narayan  14:29  
Okay, so why does this matter for anti-racism today? Not only is the labour power of such workers weakened, to put it mildly, but as consumers, we also often deny their humanity. Reading Siva suggests all of this is partly due to racialisation – to how such people are constructed as other, as sub-human – and that racism therefore isn't just some interpersonal, private matter. Instead, racism is woven into the structures of the global economy. And how that economy is governed (through institutions like the WTO, yes, but also arms deals, intellectual property rights, the stuff we often wrongly dismiss as dull) is central to creating the conditions for unequal exchange and exploitation, both in what Siva called the Third World, but also in the poorer racialised populations of places like the United Kingdom. 

John Narayan  15:24  
The state too often fails to protect these people. But crucially, that's not to say the neoliberal state isn't interventionist. Siva shows us what he called the market state is actually pretty good at acting in interests of global capital and corporations. And from privatisation and deregulation, to military intervention and trade, the effects of the market state, as Siva helps us see it, are actually fundamentally racist. Just look at how richer states create fear around immigration, how they renounce multiculturalism, and look at their surveillance of minority groups (especially those surplus to labour market needs). Siva shows us that state racism is, if you will, always already part of the global economy. What's more, many of the world's powerful institutions were themselves informed by the legacy of colonialism, operating according to a kind of racist paternalism that determines who's capable or who's deserving of market freedoms, who's entitled to ask for better and who's entitled to be in charge. The IMF, for example, has always been headed by a European, the World Bank by a US citizen. This leads to constant intervention in the economies of the Global South, and poverty and inequality being seen as just the way it is for swaves of the world's population. It all makes us ask a question that suddenly sounds quite contemporary: whose lives matter? 

John Narayan  16:53  
Anti-racism has made gains recently, or at least reached a broader audience. But too often, I think it stopped at the level of the individual or language alone. Those things do matter, but Siva shows us anti-racism also has to take on those things that seem more opaque, that are harder to understand, things like our global financial institutions and their governance. Sure, those things are hardly unknown, and there was a time when protests against the 1% made big news, with Occupy in 2011. But did anti-racism crop up much in those conversations reported from London and New York back then? Perhaps not so much. In fact, I remember the Marxist historian Vijay Prashad declaring that Black Lives Matter's first iteration in 2014 was the real Occupy movement. Today, one hopes things might be different, and a connection between race, class and economic inequality, essentially, more firmly drawn. I find some inspiration for that in Siva's narration of the Pentonville Five case of the early 1970s, when five white workers were imprisoned for organising unofficial pickets in support of dockers. When the unions marched on the prison, they appealed to black groups to join them. But although British Black Power groups accepted the unions' struggle was also black people's struggle, they chose not to join the official march, citing racism as the reason. Instead, they led the different march down a different road to the same destination. What Siva's story was trying to highlight was the link between anti-racism and class politics, that our struggles may go down different roads, but that would ultimately share the same destination. If we realise this, anti-racism gains strength. 

John Narayan  18:38  
Recently, in the UK, Black Lives Matter activism, along with the effects of COVID, drew into stark clarity the institutional racism in policing but also other institutions – in things like work, education and health. So far, I'd say that BLM, and British anti-racism, today have in large part been animated by an abolitionist framework. And by abolitionism here, I'm talking about action to highlight the links between state violence, capitalist exploitation and the reproduction of racism and patriarchy, and to resist state authority and intervention. It's about abolishing prisons, borders, the police – and, in the meantime, building new institutions and new ways of living that liberate us all. Trying to abolish state prisons, borders and police forces can only achieve so much if we don't also reform – or, I would say, abolish – to think through and beyond the even bigger stuff: the IMF, the World Bank, arms agreements, intellectual property rights, arrangements that create health inequality, all those things that facilitate exploitation in the Global South. When we look closely at health, food or climate change, we find entrenched forms of institutional racism playing out. Consider the unequal distribution of COVID vaccines and HIV drugs, or the patents that make sure so many of the world's poorest are vulnerable to death and disease. 

John Narayan  20:07  
The gravity of the examples or the scale of the task might make you despair, but the world Siva described is becoming unstuck. Climate change and inflationary spikes caused by corporate profiteering, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, have made national economies far harder to globalise. It certainly made it harder to speak of globalisation as some dreamy utopia of togetherness. At the same time, the US dominance that once underpinned the neoliberal order has been challenged by the rise of China. I'm sure Siva would have been hooked by the chip wars between those countries, where China is trying to encroach on US dominance over the production of the very microprocessors that have made neoliberal globalisation possible. Meanwhile, other once-subordinate nations are embracing new deals and alliances that decentre the West. This definitely isn't all to be celebrated. States like China, India and Russia (which actively challenge the western rules-based order) suffer from their own internal authoritarianism and have geopolitical ambitions of their own. But for sure, the world is shifting once more. 

John Narayan  21:17  
Though he died in 2018, Siva's relevance lives on. He helps us not only to expand our idea of anti-racism, but to see the work needed for it to be effective. He shows us, too, the scope for anti-racist sociology, which I think must find common ground with what all too often seem like distant and unrelated struggles – what he called "communities of resistance" – like those of Indian farmers for land rights, of indigenous Amazonians and of the Grenfell Tower fire survivors fighting for justice. Such struggles are, Siva shows us, actually connected. Central to each is a story of people harmed and marginalised by the market state, and confronting it. In this age of such inequality, anti-racism must create chances for common cause and solidarity between communities here and abroad. We need to map exploitation across the world and its relation to state racism, and think through possible solutions within and beyond the state. Now is not the time for anti-racism to focus on the national context alone, or above all, even as nation states and economies unravel. Instead, it's time to think global.

Alice Bloch  22:39  
You were listening to John Narayan talking about Ambalavaner Sivanandan for Sideways Sociology. You'll find the reading list for this episode in our show notes, and via the podcast page over at thesociologicalreview.org. And please do share this essay and the others far and wide: whether with family, colleagues, friends, whoever, or – if you teach –  your students. Thank you for listening.


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