EUROPEAN GROUP FOR THE STUDY OF
DEVIANCE AND SOCIAL CONTROL
ESTABLISHED 1973
Coordinator: Emma Bell
Secretary: Monish Bhatia
SPRING NEWSLETTER I
Website Administrator: Kirsty Ellis
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. European Group 42nd
Conference
Call for Papers
Confirmed Speakers
Conference Fees
Booking
Accommodation Information
Assisted Places
Film sessions
II. Comment and Analysis
An interview with Stuart Hall
Celebrating The Ragged Trousered
Philanthropists 100 years on
III. European Group News
First EG Undergraduate conference
2015 annual EG conference
Recent
publications
Members
by
Group
Call for Papers (Newsletter)
British/Irish
Programme
IV. News from Europe and
around the World
Brazil
Europe
France
Germany
Greece
Portugal
Spain
Turkey
UK
USA
International
Section
Conference:
I. European Group Conference
Further information on the 42nd annual conference may be found at
http://www.europeangroup.org.
Confirmed Speakers Robert King ('Angola 3') Paul Gilroy (Kings College London) Joe Sim
(Liverpool John Moores University) Jo Phoenix (University of Leicester)
Jon Burnett (Institute of Race Relations) Carly Speed (Liverpool John Moores University)
Film Sessions (new announcement!) - A number of film sessions will be organised during
the conference with screening and discussion of
PO PO (by Ken Fero); The Stuart Hall Project (by Jon Akomfrah); Hard Time (about Robert
King- by Ron Harpelle); The Black Panther Film and photo Archives (Billy X Jennings &
Emory Douglas).
More information on separate panel discussions will be provided in the next newsletter.
Abstract Deadline 31st May 2014
Registration Deadline 30th June 2014
General Enquiries EGC2014@ljmu.ac.uk
Please submit your abstract to the relevant stream contact below:
1. Social Control in a Time of Crisis Contact: Vickie Cooper Email:
V.F.Cooper@ljmu.ac.uk
2. Processes of Othering Contact: Vicky Canning Email: V.Canning@ljmu.ac.uk
3. Sovereignty, Imperialism, Nationalism and Racism Contact: Giles Barrett Email:
G.A.Barrett@ljmu.ac.uk
4. The Harms of Neoliberalism Contact: David Scott Email: D.G.Scott@ljmu.ac.uk
5. Exclusion, Marginalisation and Criminalisation Contact: Helen Monk Email:
H.L.Monk@ljmu.ac.uk
6. Resistance and Radical Alternatives Contact: Jim Hollinshead Email:
J.M.hollinshead@ljmu.ac.uk
Fees and registration
Full delegate fee including 4 nights’ accommodation and conference
dinner
 checking in 2nd Sept, checking out 6th Sept±
Full delegate fee including 3 nights’ accommodation and conference
dinner
 checking in 3rd Sept, checking out 6th Sept±
Full delegate fee including conference dinner
Full delegate fee
Unwaged fee
£
340
€*
412
290
350
145
105
35
175
127
42
*€ prices are quoted at time of publication. These are subject to change according to
fluctuating exchange rates
±Check-in dates cannot be changed.
Accommodation details (new announcement!)
(for accommodation included in conference fee):
 Vine Court, 35 Myrtle Street, Liverpool University L7 7AJ.
 All rooms are ensuite and inclusive of a full 'English' Breakfast.
 The accommodation comes at extremely good rates and we suggest that you register
as soon as possible, to ensure accommodation: http://buyonline.ljmu.ac.uk/
 Vine Court is situated next to the main conference venue (John Foster Building,
Mount Pleasant, Liverpool) and is a 5 minute walk from Liverpool's City Centre and
cultural delights. See link for details and map of accommodation.
http://www.liv.ac.uk/accommodation/halls/on-campus-accommodation/vine-court/
Further accommodation options will be announced shortly.
Assisted Places
Please note that there will be at least one assisted place available for the conference. The
conference place is free and the European Group will help support travel and accommodation
up to €250 for the assisted place.
Depending on the nature of applications, we will bestow the assisted place on one person who
meets some / all of the below criteria:
*
Does not have a tenured position in academia or has no means of providing alternative
means of support through employment schemes.
*
An MA / PhD student / part-time member of staff who is ineligible for university
department/school/faculty funding to attend conferences.
*
Is confronted with other significant difficulties which would merit special support to
attend the conference.
*
Is currently undertaking research or activism in an area that reflects the themes and
values of the European Group
The deadline for applications for assisted places has been extended to 1st May 2014.
Those wishing to apply should write a 150-300 word statement in support of their application.
A copy of the conference paper abstract should also be included in the submission. Please
address applications to both Vicky Cooper (conference organiser) V.F.Cooper@ljmu.ac.uk
and Emma Bell europeangroupcoordinator@gmail.com
A Liverpool city guide is available to read here:
http://www.theguardian.com/travel/series/liverpool-city-guide
II. Comment and analysis
Cultures of Resistance and 'Moral Panics':
An Interview with Stuart Hall1
August, 1979, Afras Review 4: Special Issue on Racism and Class Struggle
Stuart Hall is the director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies,
University of Birmingham. Last September, AFRAS REVIEW spoke to him
about racism in Britain, South Africa and elsewhere. The interview revolved
primarily around the Centre's recent collective work Policing the Crisis :
Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (Macmillan, 1978). We'd like to thank
Stuart Hall for his co-operation.
Q. Members of the Centre recently produced a book entitled Policing the
Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. Could you tell us about
the origins of this collective project?
S.H. Yes. The book has a very practical and immediate origin. It wasn't
initiated, that is to say, as a kind of theoretical or intellectual exercise. It
arose principally because one of our graduate students has also been for eight
1
Thanks to Steve Lawler, David Scott and Emma Bell for their help turning original paper
manuscript of the interview in Afras Review, August 1979 pp 2-18 into a word version for
the April 2014 European Group Newsletter.
or nine years very active in various kinds of community work in Handsworth.
Consequently, he was quite extensively aware of the fact that in the period '71,
'72, '73 there was a very sharp worsening of relations between blacks and
the police in the area, and an increasing number of black kids in the area who
were being put into courts and getting lengthening sentences and so on.
Through the action centre that he runs and his contacts in the area, he had had
previous contact with, I think, two of the boys who were involved in the big
Handsworth case, i.e. boys who were involved in the case where a man was
mugged coming away from a pub late at night, attacked, robbed of practically
nothing, left on the ground. The kids went away, and the story is that. they
came back and beat him up some more and then got worried about the effects
of that, and either one of them or somebody else called the police. They then
went to court and got very heavy sentences - ten, twenty years apiece. And
that was right out of line with even the pattern of increasing sentences for
muggings in black areas which were being given around that time.
So the first signal to the Centre was to try to mobilize some support from the
community for these boys. And the case obviously had raised a huge storm
in Birmingham, and especially in Handsworth, where already the local
community and social workers were involved in arguments with the local
police. There was very high tension in the area and the case had mobilized
that. So that once the support committee for the three boys got off the
ground, giving their parents some help and advice in getting legal support
and so on, we thought that there ought to be something written to draw the
more general dimensions of the case to people's attention. The first thing
that was done was that a group of people got together to write a very short
pamphlet about the case and that was the first publication.
Now I had nothing to do with that. I was on sabbatical leave, working in
London. So the first group were really Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John
Clarke and others who got together on the writing of the pamphlet and I was
brought in to discuss the draft.
But that first pamphlet, called 20 years, was in fact written by them under
the Centre's auspices. We found some money to have it published, printed
and circulated. However, it was very directly related to immediate
circumstances. It was only really in the wake of that we started to put
together the pattern of increasing sentences, the panic which was growing
around the term 'mugging', the identification between mugging as a crime
and blacks. We then began to see the larger dimensions of that, and it was
only at that stage that we decided to look at the whole area more
extensively, and that turned into a piece of collective research which had a
number of other spin offs before it ever came to the point of being published
as a book.
So I think that the things to stress are, first of all, the immediate practical
take off, not as an abstract project ('Let's do a project on mugging!').
Secondly, the initiation didn't come from me or a member of staff at the
Centre, but came from the fact that the Centre is trying to encourage people
to take those sorts of initiatives themselves. Thirdly, the period of research
was a very extensive one.
Q. The book is divided into four inter-locking sections. Could you
explain its structure?
S.H. Part One is as close as we come to giving a fairly descriptive account
of the dimensions of the problem. How long have people been talking about
these kinds of crime in terms of mugging? What's the pattern of sentencing
in this area? How early do the courts and the police become sensitized to
it? At what point do the press begin to take it up? Where do they get the
term 'mugging' from? What difference does it have that one introduces the
term? etc.
Then it takes one step behind the immediate phenomenon of mugging to
what I would call the institutional location. It looks at the three main
institutions or apparatuses that intersect the problem: the courts, the police
and the media. They seem to us to be the three principal apparatuses which
construct the mugging phenomenon. So, having said that about the most
immediate issues, we see what has been ticking over in these three
institutions about this problem before mugging became such a particular
drama. What are the police doing about blacks? They decide that blacks are
into mugging. How are the courts handling these kinds of cases? How is the
media setting it up? So the first move is from the immediate phenomenon
into the apparatuses, not yet at the theoretical level but at the level of the
prehistory of the phenomenon.
Part Two takes the most dramatic case, the Handsworth case, and looks at
what it was about and how it was handled in the local press. That is an
attempt to really localize the general phenomenon of mugging in a
particular area. What is an area like Handsworth about? What is the
particular interest about this crime? Especially, what does the local press do
with it? How do the local social workers, councilors and MPs talk about this
particular problem?
In the course of researching that local area, one of the things that we came
up with was that if you are trying not to produce a theory of the press or
the media in the abstract, but trying to use the press to discover the
shifts in the currents of public opinion, in folk ideologies, then one of the
interesting areas is where the people begin to write back to the local
papers. The local papers naturally carried a lot of local letters about the
case. You can see the various interest groups that are involved coming
onto the stage, as it were, in the correspondence columns: local social
workers and community workers write in, the city council defends itself
('Handsworth is a good place! Everybody loves living here!'). You see a
lot of breaks etc. in the correspondence columns which you don't see in
the editorial coverage, which is more organized, more orchestrated.
But once we did that we got, through the mother of one of the boys,
access to letters that had been sent to her (mainly abusive letters,
swearing at her for having this half-caste kid…). And reading those letters
we had a sense we were coming much closer to what was the unformed
opinion in the area. We'd get responses to a very violent act and to very
heavy sentences and to local kids of mixed origin involved in a crime. So
we started to look at the nearest we could get to documentary evidence of
what people in the area were thinking and talking about in relation to race
and crime.
Our argument very much pivots on the letters, an examination of the
common sense ideologies about a problematic issue like race and crime.
We were not willing to accept any of the available explanations. One
might be that the working classes are racist just like everybody else,
nature-born.
Another might be that the working class, the engine of revolution, cannot
be racist, so racist ideas must have been injected from somewhere else. The
third is that the ruling class is racist, and subordinate classes live their
relation to the world entirely through the ruling class. None of them appeared
to us to be adequate.
We wanted to show that, at one and the same time, those expressions
coming from fairly lowdown the social scale in an area like Handsworth did
articulate racist views, and those racist views drew on the lexicon of
Fascism which had existed in society over a long period of time, but they did
connect with real experience (though expressed in a distorted form). They
were not just projections out of nothing. The real anxiety of old age
pensioners did come through, and people have to address themselves to the
question: What do you say to a woman that says, 'I don't have any general
feelings about race and I like the blacks and I know some good West Indians,
but I don't like the area I live in. I feel unsafe in it and one of the things that
makes it unsafe is these black kids I find at the street corner. I don't like to go
past them late at night.'? There is something real about that that is being
expressed, although the deductions that she draws from it (‘Send them back
home! All black kids are half-apes! Anyone that's been with a black man and
had a half-caste kid ought to be strung up!') contain both a real element and
an element of mystification. So we wanted to look at the basis of what we call
the lay explanations for the origins of crime, the ordinary commonsense
practical ideologies (to use a Gramscian phrase) of society, of crime and of
race.
But at the same time we wanted to see how those connected with the
discourses about race and crime generated from on top with the police being
in a very pivotal role in relation to defining crime. They put out the
statistics. They tell you what they mean. They tell you which of those
crimes they are going to attend to. We'd already pointed out that there is
a dominant set of discourses in the courts and the police and the media
about crime. And no-one is beginning to find out about how people who
have been subject to that kind of structuring and had to deal with, or
make an explanation about, their own experience at a local level, play
back some of those things in a more popular or populist set of
conversations about the problem. So really that second section begins
very locally and tries to make some rather general deductions about how
the conversation between race and crime is structured in society.
We move from that to the third section which is where we had used the
term 'moral panic' both to describe the official response to mugging and
to describe what we had heard about mugging from the letters and some
of the local responses. It's obviously a rather generalized, ill-defined term.
It comes from a very different problematic from the one in which we are
operating, so we wanted to give that notion of 'moral panic', and the linked
one of 'social control', both of which are concepts taken from radical deviant
sociology, a much more structured and historical form within the Marxist
problematic. So the chapter entitled "Crime, Law and the State" really says:
"We've pinpointed those structural, historical, dynamic features in race and
crime, but the terms we are still using to conceptualize them are
inadequate. They need giving firm structural and historical shape". So we
argued about the necessity for a move from public opinion to ideology, and
from social control to a proper theory of the state. Once- you've taken it to the
level of the state and of ideology and of the conjuncture, you have to say
what the conjuncture is and what the state is doing in relation to crime and
other issues of challenge and resistance in this period. And so you get into a
rather too long account of the mid-sixties, and through the mugging panic in
the period immediately after that, into the crisis. That's the point of the two
chapters on the sixties up to1968, then ’68 to '75, to the law and order society
and the exhaustion of consent and towards the exceptional state. In these
chapters we argue what is put theoretically in "Crime, Law and the State".
Historically we argued: "What is the intersection of crime, law and the state in
this specific period '65 to '75?". Then Part Four makes a return to the
beginning of the book. It says: "O.K., we started with some muggings and
some things in court and some accounts in the newspapers. We've seen how
inadequate that way of handling it is. Let us now go back and look at
mugging in the light of all the· concepts and things we mobilized. What is
this thing about, especially in relation to the people who are cited as being
most specifically involved, i.e. black kids". That last chapter, "The Politics
of Mugging", has a complicated structuralist argument.
Q. You are arguing against certain forms of radical sociology, e.g.
those analyses which revolve around 'social control'. You also
incorporate certain concepts from radical sociology into your own
account, e.g. the concept of 'moral panic': could you tell us what you
feel are the limitations of radical sociology (or radical sociologies),
and also what you find useful within these areas?
S.H. I'll say something about the two terms 'social control' and 'moral
panic'. The concept of social control has had a career within radical
sociology and social history. Let me take the historians. A lot would have
regarded the history of working class life etc. as very much history from
below, unlike ordinary historiography which is preoccupied with parliaments,
governments and so on. They have gradually come to see that you can't
tell the story from below any more than you can tell it from above. It's a
question of above and below in some kind of relationship. And once you
move to that position, one of the terms which has tended to be used is
social control. In sociology the first break with mainstream positivistic
criminology was towards phenomenology and a kind of extended
relativism. The deviants just defined things one way and the social
controllers defined it another way! Unfortunately the social controllers,
rather than the deviants, had the power! That early break in radical
sociology was itself criticised for lacking the whole dimension of power
and it was at that point that the concept of social control began to be
more deeply analysed and understood. One of the most important articles
was· Becker's which introduced the notion of what he calls the 'hierarchy
of credibility'. Becker was still operating on the level of definitions of a
situation but said that it was not fortuitous that some definitions prevailed
over others. So that leads us to ask the question of who has the power
to define in the situations and for whom, which introduces the question of
social control.. I think that the idea of social control has had some
theoretical pay offs. Now we would see any government policy directed at
helping in a welfare sense as almost always involving the dimension of
regulation, supervision and control. But we've always felt that the concept
doesn't take you very far. You need alternative concepts like 'hegemony'
or 'dominant ideology' which involve questions about the state and class
relationships.
Now 'moral panic' seems to come from the same stable as social control.
Why do we stay with it? One of the reasons is theoretical. My own feeling
is that Marxist theories of the state are in not too good a shape but are
coming on. Marxist theories of ideology are even further back, though
good and important things have been done on that, but at a very high
theoretical level. However, at the level of describing and defining
particular ideological configurations and mechanisms, not very much has
been done. Sometimes this has been for good anti-'empiricist trap'
reasons and sometimes for bad reasons of over-theoreticism. One of the
things in the area of ideology that we don't know very much about is, in
my opinion, signaled by the term 'moral panic'. Time and again
historically, in periods of sharpening crisis, you see an ideological
phenomenon which is suggested by this term. Let me give you some
citings:-Thompson's Whigs and Hunters, Lefebvre's The Great Fear,
Caute's book on McCarthyism…The crisis always assumes the form of
a collective projected fear of a society disintegrating or being invaded, or
about a nemesis at work unlocking it. The concept of moral panic is
obviously not an adequate explanation of what is really going on or
indeed about the kind of latent content of those ideologies, but the
retention of the term is partly because we don't yet know of a more
adequately theorized Marxist term for that historical phenomenon. The
dropping of the term social control is because we do know some terms,
like the state and hegemony, which adequately re-theorize and replace
social control.
Q. You would describe your book as Marxist, though many people
might not recognize it as Marxist. Could you tell us something
about the kinds of Marxism you were arguing against and the
kinds of Marxism upon which you drew?
S.H. We think of it as a Marxist book, but in a limited sense. The most
important limited sense is really signaled in the first section of the
chapter about the sixties and again in the last section of the chapter
about the seventies, i.e. in Poulantzas's terms, it’s a book about a
particular region – it’s not a book which is able to do very important
primary work in establishing what the structural economic
dimensions of the crisis are. In a sense you have to take a lot of that
for granted. That’s a real weakness in the book. And again, it’s
provisional, i.e. we don’t think that this is the only dimension of the
crisis to be handled, or necessarily the most important once. But we
feel that people working within a Marxist theory must begin to get
into the sub-regions of that area and try to be more specific about
that area, even though they have to leave a lot of connections
hanging. So in that sense it’s a Marxist book. If you asked, ‘It tells us
something about politics, about crime and ideology, but where are
the forces and relations of production?’, then the answer is, ‘They’re
there, but very much backgrounded’. So from that point of view it
doesn’t constitute anything like an adequate Marxist analysis of the
state.
Nevertheless, it makes a crucial connection: it links the politics of
racism and anti-racism to general structural features of the society,
so you cannot think of race any longer as a problem above society,
about which you can do something immediately without touching the
state, class relations and so on. We really tried to say, ‘There is no
race relations problem. There is no problem of racism which can be
thought of separate from the structural features of society’. So at that
point we do try to make what we think is a Marxist connection.
Q. OK, now what is it arguing against?
S.H. It’s clearly arguing against a simple kind of economic
reductionism: it doesn’t simply attempt to read off the economic
movement in the domain of politics, ideology and so on, or to make
anything like an immediate and direct correspondence between the
two.
Secondly, it is directly counterposed to what I would call a
conspirational theory of the state. The state is not presented as a
monolith, nor as if the media is in the keeping of the police, the CBI
(Confederation of British Industry) or the ruling class. It is not the
notion of the state as a committee of the ruling class.
On the other hand, as opposed to the most developed Hirstian
position (which, as I understand it, is of the autonomy of all
practices), it could be called ‘complex class reductionism’, in the
sense that it says ‘there are no necessary connections. The domains
of ideology, politics, the domains of one state apparatus and
another, have a kind of relative autonomy. They have a kind of
specificity and it’s crucial for Marxists to understand that: the
displacements, the non-correspondences, between one level and
another, between on apparatus and another. ‘But is does not go to
the point of saying that social formation is the result of autonomous
eclectic practices which happened just to fall together in Britain in the
1970s. In that sense it does hold the notion of a complex structure in
dominance, i.e. it is early Althusserian but not Hirstian.
It does not treat the social formations as an expressive totality where
a contradiction at one level is immediately expressed at all the others
in the same movement in the same form. But it doesn’t go to the
other extreme. In the spectrum of Marxist positions, I think that’s a
Gramscian position.
I think Gramsci is, at one and the same time, dealing with capitalist
social formations and complex structures. Gramsci is working on the
problematic that most interests us: relative autonomy/determination
in the last instance (what Althusser calls the two ends of the chains
of a Marxist analysis).
I think both of these things are extremely difficult concepts to work
with, but I don’t understand Marxism outside of the dialectic between
those two. That is, I think, where the Althusser of Contradiction and
Over-determination is, where Gramsci is, and where the book is. So
it is, in that early Althusserian (and in the domain of the state, early
Poulantzian) and Gramscian.
Q. How do you understand racism within this framework?
S.H. If you’re drawing on Althusser with the notion of complex
structure in dominance; Poulantzas with a regional Marxist theory of
politics and the state, the state as the complex organizing instance,
and the notion of the state apparatuses; Gramsci in the area of
hegemony and so in: if you’re drawing on that framework, none of
these things yield you a singly thought on racism unless you do
some further work. So if the book makes any contribution, it’s to
open the interface between a very Euro-Marxist centred debate and
the problems of race. It does that in two dimensions. First, in the
historical account of the ‘60s and ‘70s, it privileges Althusser,
Poulantzas and Gramsci. It says that the argument which crystallizes
here around race is also a part of a larger historical conjuncture. So
it seems to privilege Marxist analysis over isolating race as an
autonomous or relatively autonomous presence. However, having
argued about the structural and historical location of mugging in a
more general crisis of the social formation, we still have to ask, ‘what
is the specificity in this problem, since we are, after all, talking about
race, aren’t we? We are talking about black kids – not any other kids;
about crime and panic in relation to the black ghettoes, and not
elsewhere’. So that last chapter in a sense, reverses the order of the
priorities. In the earlier chapters we say that there is a crisis and you
might think of race simply as an epiphenomenon of a society in
crisis.
Blacks and Blues
If it had some blacks around, we’d talk about blacks. If it had some
blues around, we’d talk about blues. What is at issue is a society in
crisis. But in the last chapter we say that if you’re a black kind in this
society, there is something authentic to your experience that is not
just explained away by saying ‘it’s just in consciousness’, something
structurally pertinent in their situation is explained by the fact that
when the whole social formation is in crisis it operates in relation to
them, it operates in a specific way, different to the rest of the working
class. And that sets up crucial internal contradictions, stratification
and fragmentation of the working class into racially-defined groups.
The politics of blacks is bound to emerge more directly and
immediately as a black/white struggle, and puts their political
struggle at odds with struggles principally about the white working
class, white women etc.
In that last section, we don’t even begin to elaborate a theory of
racism but we do say ‘there is a specificity which is not smoothly
dealt with in the more strictly Marxist framework we’ve been dealing
with’. That last chapter is a movement backwards and forwards,
which says ‘race isn’t in people’s heads; it’s not just that they’re
black, it’s in relation to their employment, education and housing,
their insertion into society, and soon it operates in racially-defined
ways’. So that looks as if it’s giving you a very firm structural basis
for understanding what the position and experience of blacks is. But
it doesn’t deliver you the politics you would expect from the analysis,
namely ‘it’s really a class struggle coloured by race’ (to use a
metaphor). From that point of view, there are certain disturbances
which have real effects. You can’t say ‘black and whites fight
together’, and it’s just because blacks haven’t learnt the lesson yet.
When blacks actually look at their situation, they are different and the
state is operating on those differences. Those differences emerge
within industrial struggles, the black movement and any attempt to
bring black and white together in the community. So at the end the
specificity of racism is left open. It’s still an inadequately theorized
concept. We say that racism remains theoretically and politically an
unexplained irritant within the smoother structures of Marxist
analysis.
That argument about race at the end of the book applies to many of
the ways in which the notion of class itself is handled in Marxism.
You don’t need to go back and say that for these reasons the
proletariat can never be the agent of revolutionary change. So one of
the pay-offs of the book might well be to look at other forms of
internal fragmentation and stratification of class, even when race
isn’t present. It is a very important area of argument within Marxist
theory in general: that class is the complex effect of relatively
autonomous practices, of its political, economic and ideological
practice. In the conditions of the capitalist social formation, it has
been internally fragmented. It can assume a revolutionary
consciousness under very specific conditions. If those conditions
aren’t present, that same working class can emerge as racist, social
democratic, labourist, economist, etc. Those are all potential places
for the working class. So the idea that the working class is always in
place, ready for revolution, just won’t do. It doesn’t mean abandoning
the notion of class or of the potential revolutionary capacity of the
working class. It is something to be made, not to be found.
The third point was bout going back to culture. One of the other
phrases I thought you might pick out in addition to ‘social control’ and
‘moral panic’, that is not a properly Marxist phrases, is ‘culture of
resistance’, which is very important for us in a general theoretical
way. The principal dynamics and contradictions of the capitalist
social formation are class contradictions, but you have to look at
these contradictions below the level of ‘storming the barricades’.
Therefore we’ve had to look at forms of economism as legitimate,
though not revolutionarily adequate, form in which the working class
tries to deal with, and win something from, capitalism. And also
cultural resistance, the area we call negotiations. In some ways that
question is better signaled in the initial essay ‘Subcultures, Cultures
and Class’ in Resistance through Rituals where we talked about the
importance of resistance as demonstrations of the fact that – as
Poulantzas says – the class struggle never ends but it does not
always take a predictable form. Those contradictions are always at
work, and the domain of culture is one of the crucial areas in which
the resistance surfaces, particularly when you get a group like
blacks, in a numerical minority and poorly places in relation to
political struggle. Very often the resistance takes a highly developed
cultural form of expression. I think that it is also quite closely related
to my own sense of what has been going on in the Caribbean. I was
there for the whole summer two years ago and my very strong
impression there was that the majority dynamic in the society was
mass popular cultural nationalism, taking the form of Africanism,
Rastafarianism, but not just in that delimited sense. Rastafarianism’s
way of saying that Jamaican society has become black was really
very profound. My sense was that the politicians were trying to catch
up with the culture. Jamaica is a place where people talk about ‘roots
culture’ as a politicized concept. That is the language in which class
and other contradictions of society are emerging.
In Britain there are, of course, politicized black kids and then there
are those who do just want to go out in the afternoon for a game of
dominoes. And they begin to construct, in the middle of very hostile
circumstances, someplace that looks familiar where their rules mean
something. I think it’s a crucial area of cultural resistance. So the
book does say that that has happened in the history and
acknowledges the centrality of cultural struggle in general forms of
struggle.
Your fourth question is ‘O.K. You tell us hose things that have
happened and are perhaps more important than if you’d used a more
rigorous structural Marxist analysis. You take culture and
consciousness perhaps a bit more seriously than you should as an
Althusserian. Nevertheless, what is to be done about it?’ That’s
another point at which we took a very specific decision. We were not
in a position to sketch out or recommend alternative strategies,
because we were not as a group sufficiently closely integrated in the
actual struggle, and, what is more, four of us were white and could
not be engaged in that way. So, in spite of generally acclaiming the
unity of theory and practice (which in Marxism is like class, i.e. it’s an
effect). When it’s worked out you know that it’s unified. Al all other
times, the truth is it’s not unified. The theory is over there and the
practice is down there. We did not pretend that bridge could be
crossed. We did not have a strategy in general, nor did we have one
which would permit us to go to groups and say, ‘Please, now go and
do this etc.’. So we do see the book as informing the argument about
those strategies, having delimited some which are not on, some
explanations that really don’t hold, having tried to bring out some
features which must be in the argument. But that argument is not
ours; not in the sense that I don’t have any responsibility for it, but
because the book can’t do it and ought not to do it. It ought to be an
intervention. People who are engaged in day to day practices
(including in some other capacities) ought to find the book
provocative, helpful, illuminating, annoying etc. And that ought to
help crystallize what should be done next.
We do end the book as you see with a few negative indicators which
don’t help very much. We say, ‘You cannot defend blacks against
the state’. On the other hand, you cannot believe that you can
develop the class struggle by saying ‘Please, rip off everybody’.
There are those two positions as it were. The strategy has to be
something other than those two too simplistic ones. But apart from
that, it really was not possible for us to go further in the book and
say, ‘This is what should be done’.
Q. In your final section you discuss the work of two political
journals Race Today and Black Liberator. Could you tell us
what you think is positive about their analyses and where you
part company?
S.H. We couldn’t provide practical recommendations for political
strategies in that last chapter. But we did obviously want to engage
with that argument in so far as it is going on around and amongst
politically-organized black groups. That’s part of the reason why we
wanted to select some representative positions from within that
spectrum to show how what we were saying did or did not connect
with them. That’s the first thing. The second is that we got a lot of
help from, on the one had Darcus Howe of the Race Today
collective, and on the other hand Ricky Cambridge and the Black
Liberator, and we had two very long interviews with them, about the
emerging argument of the last chapter, so that’s another personal
reason. But I do think that there are certain clear oppositions both in
terms of the theoretical analyses and strategies between those two
groups which allowed us to take out the field which we wanted to
address. They seemed to us to form opposite extremes, which we
wanted to outline broadly and look at some of their strengths and
weaknesses. First, I think Race Today has provided enormous
leadership organisation for the black community. From that point of
view it’s a Gramscian party in a sense. It’s not an organized party,
but it has a formative and educative relationship to the black
community. It’s been very important to have it going and that’s not
just in terms of writing and producing the journal, but it is in terms of
the involvement of the collective in practical work especially in
Brixton and Kensington and so on. Their strength is in working from
immediate issues in the community, being deeply sensitive to the
state of consciousness and struggle wherever it is and beginning to
work with alienated kids, parents etc. They’re prepared to go in at
the level at which consciousness currently forms up and to work with
it. I think that’s not just a political strategy, it comes out of the
analysis. The analysis is, I think, very Jamesian. That’s C.L.R.
James who has been a powerful formative influence on Race Today.
People in England don’t know his work very much. They know Selma
James without knowing that she is related to C.L.R. They know her
influence on Race Today, but not that she has mediated C.L.R.
James’ interviews. By now James has had a very long political
career and development, but this position is essentially one which
affirms the autonomy of working class struggle and resistance
wherever it appears and in whatever form. That’s because his
position is very anti-bureaucratic, anti-organizational, anti-Leninist,
anti-the Party in relation to the class. It says the Party always sells
out the class, the class is always further into the struggle (though
perhaps not in a well thought out way), the Party always has a
restrictive ‘social control’ relation to the struggle. So the position
always goes to the affirmation of the struggle wherever it appears.
And it has a very autonomous notion of the different segments of the
class. I think that’s probably the relationship of race to James’
analysis of class. So he does not wait until blacks and whites and
women and children all drop together: if the women are struggling,
support the women; if black kids are struggling, strongly support
them. It’s the autonomy of class resistance and its necessary
separateness just now. And that is really a case which Selma James
has argued in relation to the women’s movement. I think that Race
Today’s strategy in relation to blacks and black kids and the black
community is very much informed by that. Where it breaks today is
where you need to be. If the kids decide to take on the police in
Brockwell Park, that is where you need to be, on a line with them,
affirming what they’re doing. And in terms of political struggle I don’t
know any other place to start. On the other hand that does lead them
into some very serious mis-analyses and cul-de-sacs. It leads them
to take on a kind of sectarianism, in relation to both currents in the
black struggle and in relation to the white working class. I’m not
suggesting that unity can be brought out of that, but I don’t see, long
term, how the situation of blacks in society can be systematically
improved without the bringing together of black and white around
certain issues of the struggles. And although Race Today may not
refuse that theoretically (they say, ‘Yes, we can see that such a time
may come’), that is not the politics they’re into, because their
analysis ends them off in a different direction.
It’s not quite a simple inversion, but Black Liberator begins
somewhere else. Black Liberator is, in my view, nearly the most
sophisticated Althusserian journal in Britain. I think that’s because
the two people mainly involved with it – Ricky Cambridge and Cecil
Gutzmore – are very sophisticated Marxists indeed. And that has led
them to what I would see as structurally a more adequate analysis of
the position of blacks in this society. I think they use the notion of
‘reserve army of labour’, to show it is one of the mechanisms of
capitalism in crisis which is itself structured and re-punctuated by
race, in a very fruitful way. They do illuminate some of the
constraints that have been operating on the black struggle that
prevented it from developing and going further. They take a much
more sober and realistic position than Race Today does in terms of
their analysis. You can’t simply say that politically they do not go out
and defend because Cecil Gutzmore is a life-long black militant.
That’s not the difference. They’re on the line as much as the others,
but their analysis doesn’t give them a political language which
connects in that immediate way with people who are involved in day
to day struggle.
Having staked out the two positions and having identified some
strengths and weaknesses, I’m left with the dilemma which the book
does not really solve, between analysis which is adequate but
doesn’t produce the right political strategy and political strategy
which is absolutely necessary which is founded on incorrect
analysis. Very rough stuff!
Q. How would your analysis relate to the South African
situation?
S.H. In some ways the situation is different. In the simplest sense, it’s
different numerically. But it’s not just that there are substantial
differences in the racial composition of the working class in the two
places. And that must have pertinent effects on the nature of the
struggle that can be waged. That’s something.
Secondly, my own view is that though there are some similarities, the
relationship of the white working class to the black factions of the
working class in Britain is different from that in South Africa. I think
that there have been quite specific ways, including the intervention of
given specific state strategies in South Africa, which have quite
consciously and more structurally raised the white working class into
a position of control over the exploitation of the blacks. In Britain I do
see that differentiation, too, and I do see how you can work politically
and ideologically on white sections of the working class and say ‘you
can only do better at the expense of your black brothers’. But it’s not
systematic in the way it is in South Africa. Broadly speaking I do tend
towards some of the more recent analyses of Wolpe and others
about the particular contradictory role that the white working class
plays in relation to capital and to blacks. The state has
institutionalised those separations, has consciously gone out to draw
sections of the white working class and the new petty bourgeoisie
into the operation of the state which is exploiting blacks. So the
relation of the class to capital and to the black sections makes very
important differences in the ways in which the struggle can develop.
That’s also true in relation to what one might call the ‘reserve army of
labour’.
The reserve army of labour in Britain operates in periods of economic
recession, in relation to blacks and whites and the Irish and women
together, which can then be worked up in terms of black versus
whites. It’s perfectly clear that he reserve army of labour in South
Africa is institutionally on the reserve! There is a legal, formal state
policy of separation which makes the dimensions of the struggle in
South Africa different. I don’t mean to say that because the white
working class stands in that relation to the blacks and to capital that
the problems in the area in which unities of struggle can be fought is
not pertinent. I don’t think that the unity of that class can be
assumed, but it must be the purpose of Marxist strategies to
increase wherever possible the chances for unified struggle. That’s
because I think that the situation in South Africa is fundamentally a
class situation, a class-race situation. It’s not simply a race situation.
And consequently, where the white working class turns up in that
struggle is of crucial importance. But on the other hand I would
certainly agree with everyone who says that the notion of unified
struggle at this stage is almost certainly not on the cars, and
therefore the development of further stages in an autonomous black
struggle is of the utmost importance. And I suppose that there have
been moments when both the South African CP and the ANC have
acted as restraint on that struggle, as well as facilitating it. There
have been times when the dominant South African Communist
Marxist analysis of the situation has presented a far too simple
picture of the position of blacks and whites.
Q. Nevertheless, accepting your broad distinctions between the
British and South African situations, do you think that there are
experiences and analyses of groups in Britain from which
South African groups can learn?
S.H. I’m not sure. I think it’s the other way around! I rather think that
the black struggle in Britain has a lot to learn from some of the things
that are happening in South Africa. I think that both the very broad
and increasing involvement of black women and the advanced
position that young blacks are taking (much more politicized than in
Britain) really have important things to tell us. There are similarities
in the sense that young blacks, often unemployed, or even school
kids, are in the vanguard of the struggle. But my feeling is that the
political consciousness is higher in South Africa amongst that group
than in Britain, once you move out of the simple question of blacks
and whites and discrimination and the system against them because
they’re black.
That’s really the basis of one of my arguments against Race Today
which sometimes flatter the consciousness at the level it’s already at.
It’s message is: ‘You are resisting. Go on resisting!’ And I don’t think
that a political organization can only have that relationship to the
class, because of the analysis I gave you before: a class only
becomes an effective instrument in struggle because it changes and
develops. For example, the consciousness of kids confronting the
police: it’s not that that level of resistance needs to be lowered. But
they do need to see that if you do defeat the police in Brixton
tomorrow, the mechanisms which assign blacks a certain place in
the economic structure do not change on Monday morning. They
stay right where they are. And I think that Race Today have been
very good at working with but not working on. Any political
organization must have sometimes disciplining (as I said in relation
to the ANC), sometimes constraining, but always formative
relationship to the class. There is, I think that, though the level of
immediate struggle and resistance has been very high in the last
year and a half, that there are beginning to develop among certain
sections in South Africa a really penetrating analysis of what the
structures are about and awareness of the length and complexity of
the struggle ahead. The struggle in South Africa has reached a more
sophisticated level and the blacks know too little about it in detail.
They know, broadly speaking, ‘Support Soweto’, but they don’t really
know what has happened to kids in their own age group who are in
the forefront of struggle.
Q. Would you say that the major difference between blacks in
Britain and South Africa is that in South Africa the practical
possibilities of making it are nil and that therefore it is
impossible for blacks to have ‘liberal illusions’?
S.H. Yes. That’s really what I meant by saying that because many of
the black/white divisions as they operate inside the fragmentation of
the working class and are operated on, are what I would call
informal. So you could live with the illusion that if you could get a
little bit of capital together you could break through it, etc. Once
they’ve been institutionalized by the state and policed by the state,
that has an effect. The barriers are perfectly clear, the lines are
much more sharply demarked and that has a different effect on the
struggle. It’s bound to.
Q. Could you talk a little about the links between racism and
imperialism, since this is crucial for understanding the situation
of blacks in both Britain and South Africa.
S.H. Almost everybody who was involved in Policing the Crisis has a
long term project moved on to from that, and an attempt to do
something about racism in a Marxist framework. It’s the thing I’ve
been trying to work on every now and again, when I get some time.
But it’s very tricky and complicated. Historically, it seems to me that
there is absolutely no question that most of what is would be useful
to talk about in terms of racism has something directly to do with the
phase of conquest and of mercantilist and then capitalism expansion
and then imperialism in is higher phases. Nevertheless, those aren’t
the only forms of racism that one can find, if one uses a fairly
descriptive definition. So I don’t know whether there we are into an
argument which is rather similar to the argument about gender.
Namely, that patriarchy does not begin with capitalism, that it can be
found in other social formations, but that it is always over-determined
by class relations. So I don’t know whether it’s most useful to think
about racism as a structure which has arisen as one available form
of ideological and economic and political domination wherever there
has been, for instance, a conquest situation. Think of Latin America.
The conquest situations have always generated what I can only call
quasi-racist ideologies, ideologies about the peasant or the Indian or
whatever it is. So it seems to be along structure, each time
periodized principally by the class relations. That makes if not
theoretically and analytically, then historically, the connection
between colonialism and imperialism and racism a very close one.
The second stage of that, thinking about the situation in Britain,
would be to say that that cannot but have a very profound effect on
the British social formation internationally. The fact that Britain’s
whole capitalist social formation has been constructed in relation to
conquest, colonialism, imperialism, must have had something to do
with the way in which that has been ideologically understood and
explained, etc. So I think that legacy is there in the society.
Having said that, I suppose theoretically, as well as in other ways,
I’m rather dubious of what might then emerge from that as a notion
of continuing racism, an essential racism that’s always there in every
social formation, always the same. At that point I do want to
periodize and look at differences. I want to look at the racism of
slave societies and look at the difference between that and what I
would call the racism of popular imperialism of the 1880s, 1890s,
1900s in Britain and what I would call indigenous racism that has
certainly taken root inside rather than been articulated in terms of the
relationship between Britain and somewhere else in the 1950s and
1960s. I want to look therefore at the similarities, but also at some of
the differences, between them because I think the differences there
are very important. I think it’s important in this area to work against
the notion of a universal theory of racism, located in human nature or
in social psychology, as a matter of prejudice, etc. I think there are
all kinds of simple social psychological mechanisms which we
distinguish with between our friends and the people we don’t know
etc. which are not pertinent. What is pertinent are the historical
conditions in which those become the active distinctions which
people begin to structure the really profound social relationships
around. That’s what matters. We could have class defined by the
difference between red hair and black, but we don’t. We mark the
difference and might even say that we like people with red hair, or
whatever it might be, but the social formation isn’t structured around
that. So even if there is that propensity in human nature to separate
the different traces and the different colours, that’s unimportant.
Historically racism has to do with when the economy and politics
deliver that distinction as the pivotal alone. So I want to mark the
difference and continuities in those different periods in the
development of English racism, and to try to see whether, without
reducing it, one can relate that to some of the structural economic
circumstances. It’s the difference to be accounted for partly in
relation to the fact that you have a slave mode of production in the
Caribbean and the Southern States inside a mercantilist and
capitalist phase, whereas in the imperialist period you have direct
colonization, the drive for new kinds of resources and a sharpening
competitive atmosphere in Europe, whereas in the last period you do
have the whole problem of internalizing the external proletariat. What
do those things tell us about the different configurations in which
economic, political and ideological practice assume a specifically
racist character?
Q. You have spoken about the problem of the periodization of
British racisms. What are your ideas about the differences and
similarities between British racisms and those of other
metropolitan powers? For example, Portugal?
S.H. A Marxist analysis which would not be an analysis of the
relations between racism and capitalism in general, but which would
be able to take that analysis to the level of very specific periods or
very specific social formations, must recognize that part to do with
what the nature of that metropolitan power is, and its own historical
tradition and so on. Differences have been marked, for example, in
relation to Portuguese, Spanish, British, Dutch slavery in the
Caribbean and in the American area; sometimes those differences
have been theorized in a very inadequate way, but they do remain,
and alter the configuration, dynamics and specific features of those
racisms. I can think about the one I know best, the Southern States
and the Caribbean, which were formed in the same moment, in the
same movement, etc. Nevertheless, the dynamic of American
relations is not the same as those in the Caribbean. Even if you want
to end up saying there are two racisms and the main dynamic issued
by the same structure, these specificities are quite important. This
relates to what we said a moment ago about South Africa. The point
where the distinction is made legally OK and enforced has an effect.
I’m not persuaded by Althusser’s argument that because law is a
wise super-structural phenomenon it doesn’t have effects. It does
matter whether the law chooses consciously to define and act on
that, because it does affect immediate social relations, it does affect
movement, who can go out with whom. So I think those specificities
are bound to be brought into the analysis at a certain state. And at
the moment I’m trying to think through those problems of racism in
relation to capitalism and imperialism.
Q. Could we conclude by a consideration of present-day
imperialism and its connections with racism?
S.H. In that area there are some contradictory things going on that I
don’t quite understand. I think the principal economic institutional
basis of contemporary imperialism is undoubtedly the multinational.
If you were to look at the economic policies of multinationals and you
were to deduce its corresponding ideology, then in terms of capitalist
rationality they ought not to be racist. What the hell do they care?
Portuguese, anybody, can put together any component anywhere.
And so the thrust of that ideology ought not to be racist. But that is
affected the moment you look at the continuing national bases of the
multinationals. It’s all very well to talk about the multinational as an
economic institution, but they are located in various national sites.
The Shell deal in relations to Rhodesia precisely tells us that. Overall
Shell may have nothing to gain from the preservation of a certain
situation in Rhodesia, but the bit of Shell which is in South Africa is
subject to South African influences, to South African legal
regulations, to South African politics and inflect what one might think
of as the ideal rationality of a big multinational. That is a real
theoretical problem in a Marxist analysis of contemporary
imperialism: to try to look at the independence of international and
national elements in the particular policies of multinationals. That’s
one area of complexity.
The other area of complexity is this; that if you want to relate to the
British situation internally, my own feeling is that if one wanted to
relate the emergence of indigenous racism and an organized fascist
group, if one wanted to locate that in class and economic terms, it
would have much more to do with small and medium capital, itself
being squeezed by the multinationals, and much more to do with
those sections of the class that are organized in those labour
processes than with the multinational ones. Though that is countermanded by some evidence. For example, some of the most pertinent
black struggles have precisely emerged in relation to big
corporations, sometimes with a multinational base rather than a
small one. So I’m tentative about that argument at this state: I think
that’s more because of what I understand as the relationship
between Conservative policies and race and the National Front. I
think there’s a very close intricate political relation, not of a
conspirational kind, between those two. They’re operating on the
same terrain and bidding for the same terrain. As I understand the
Conservative economic policy, it is an economic policy which doesn’t
exist in relation to big capital and multinational capital, which is one
reason and the only reason why I think Labour might win next time.
Multinational capital and big capital in Britain hate Labour, but require
a social-democratic party. So the one thing I do not see is a Thatcher
strategy for monopoly capital. I think there’s a Thatcher strategy for
petty-bourgeois, medium national capital. I think that’s where the
thrust is in economic terms. And I think that that is where the
Conservatives have been operating ideologically:
national/international, tight little island versus the EEC and the rest of
the world, private individuals versus the big bureaucracies of state
capitalism. I think it’s operating on that line. And I think organised
fascism is operating on that line too. That’s where I would being to
try to tease out the connections in Britain between the emergence of
a distinctive organised fascist movement in the ‘70s and what has
been happening in terms of economic and political strategies, but it’s
just a guess.
100 th Anniversary of the publication of The
Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
Tressell, R. (1914/2012) The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists Wordsworth Editions Ltd.;
Wordsworth Classics edition ISBN-10: 184022682X / ISBN-13: 978-1840226829 [with
introduction by Tony Benn, March, 2012]
Almost 100 years ago (April 23rd 1914) the classic socialist novel The Ragged Trousered
Philanthropists was published in England. The author referred to himself as “Robert
Tressell”, but his real name was Robert Noonan. Robert Noonan had been a house painter
by trade and adopted the name “Tressell” - which derived from the “trestle table” and at that
time regularly used by painters and decorators – to maintain his anonymity. Robert Noonan
failed initially to find a publisher and the book was published posthumously after he died of
tuberculosis in 1910. His daughter Katherine insisted that the publishers use his pseudonym
‘Tressell’. Yet the convoluted and controversial story of the book’s publication does not end
here, for the initial transcript was subjected to heavy editing. Large sections of Noonan’s
manuscript were cut out of the 1914 edition, and this was especially notable in those sections
dedicated to the teachings of socialism. It was not until some years later that the original
manuscript was published in full. Set in ‘Mugsborough’ (Hastings, England) the book draws
upon the authors own experiences and fears of poverty. The central character of the book,
“Frank Owen”, is a socialist who tries to spread word about the inherent contradictions of
capitalism and the need for workers to come together in collective struggle. The book is
perhaps most famous for its discussion of the “great money trick” and this section provides
one of the most impressive and understandable critiques of capitalism ever written. In effect
the character Frank Owen explains to his fellow workers how money in the capitalist system
creates poverty rather than wealth. George Orwell (1946, in the Manchester Evening News)
believed that The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was "a book that everyone should read
[and one which leaves you] with the feeling that a considerable novelist was lost in this young
working-man whom society could not bother to keep alive.” In the 2012 Wordsworth edition
there is an introduction by the late Tony Benn, who sadly died earlier this month. He wrote in
his introduction (Benn, 2012:8)
I have given this book to many, many people in the course of my life and all
the recipients have been inspired by it as I have been. Every generation has
to fight the same battles again and again, and every time it is the confidence
of the campaigners that determines the speed of their success.
Reading the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists can give us clarity, understanding and hope
and could be used to help build renewed confidence in the fight against global capitalist
exploitation and the challenges of the current ‘age of austerity’ that members of the European
Group face in countries all around the world today.
Further Reading
F.C.Ball,(1973/ 2005) One of the Damned: The Life and Times of Robert Tressell London:
Lawrence and Wishart ISBN-10: 1905007124
Harker, D. (2003) 'TRESSELL: The real story of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists'
London: Zed Books, June 2003. Paperback: £12.99/$25.00; ISBN 1 84277 385 2
For overview of the book please see also discussion by Dave Harker:
http://www.unionhistory.info/ragged/ragged.php
David Scott, Liverpool John Moores University
IV. European Group News
First European Group Undergraduate Conference
The 1st European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control undergraduate
conference will be held at Liverpool John Moores University on Monday 7th April 2014.
The conference has been organised by students and staff at Liverpool John Moores University
and will provide an opportunity for undergraduates studying ‘crime’, deviance and social
control at a number of universities in the North West of England to present papers based upon
research undertaken for their dissertations. The student papers will broadly reflect the key
principles and priorities of the European Group and alongside undergraduates there will also
be presentations from MA/MRes and PhD students talking about their research and the
transition to postgraduate study.
There will be more than ten presentations and two panels at the conference. Titles of papers
include:



“An Anarchist Approach to State Crime: Does The State inevitably give rise to and
normalise atrocities through the construction and dehumanisation of The Other?”
“Status and weapon dogs: a study of the harms and media reporting of problematic
dog ownership”
“Silent punishment: personal reflections on doing a PhD on deaf prisoners”
If European Group members would like further information regarding the conference, please
contact Anne Hayes, Will Jackson or David Scott: a.hayes@ljmu.ac.uk.
Venue: John Foster Building Room 121, 98 Mount Pleasant, Liverpool, L3 5UZ
Time: 9.30 – 14.00
Future Conference
We are delighted to announce that Anna Markina, our Estonian national representative, will
be organising our 2015 conference at the University of Tartu in Tallinn, Estonia, during the
week of August 24th to 30th August (exact dates will be confirmed shortly).
Recent publications by European Group members
An interview with Rowland Atkinson, author of Fifty Shades of Deviance, to be released this
month, is available to read here:
http://www.routledge.com/criminology/articles/author_interview_with_rowland_atkinson/
Scott, D. (2014) “Prison Research: Critical or Appreciative Inquiry” in Criminal Justice
Matters, March 2014
Scott, D. & Flynn, N. (2014) Prisons and Punishment: The Essentials London: Sage
The Group would like to encourage members to send references for their new publications to
the Group coordinator. These will be published in the newsletter and then will appear on the
website. The aim is to build up a directory of members’ work over the coming years. Please
send in your references in Harvard format by the 25th of each month to
europeangroupcoordinator@gmail.com if you wish to see them appear in the following
month’s newsletter.
Call for papers
We’d like to encourage academics, activists and those targetted by mechanisms of state
control (people in prison, migrants, people who have come into conflict with the police etc.)
to contribute short pieces of approximately 1,500 words to our monthly newsletter
‘comment and analysis’ section. Contributions from across the globe are welcome. Please
contact Emma Bell at europeangroupcoordinator@gmail.com
British/Irish Conference
‘Penal Law, Abolitionism and Anarchism’, a conference hosted by the British/Irish section
of the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control and the Hulsman
Foundation will take place from Saturday 26th – Sunday 27th April 2014 at Shire Hall,
Nottingham. Can we imagine law without the state? Could what we now call ‘crime’ be dealt
with by means other than criminal law and punishment? This conference seeks to explore
interrelationships and tensions that exist between the philosophies and practices associated
with penal law, abolitionism and anarchism. It aims to provide a space for the
interdisciplinary exploration of complex critiques of state law and legality, criminalization
and other forms of state and corporate power in neoliberal contexts. The rich and complex
European tradition of abolition recently explored in great detail by Vincenzo Ruggiero, to
which Louk Hulsman made such a creative contribution, provides important intellectual
resources to challenge neoliberal penal and social [well/war –fare] politics and policies and to
expose their harms and underlying power-dynamics. Joe Sim underlined the continued
importance of Angela Davis’ concept of ‘abolitionist alternatives’ as well as of forms of a
renewed penal activism. These and other abolitionist or minimalist approaches to criminal
justice challenge existing hegemonic belief systems that continue to legitimate the generation
of harms via the operations of law, psychology, criminology, the media and frequently shape
public opinion. For some critical criminologists such reflections might imply promoting an
Anarchist Criminology, while for others this might involve the use of courts to challenge
decisions made by ministers. The direct action taken by the Occupy movement and similar
movements (e.g. UK Uncut) can of course also be linked to a diversity of philosophies and
principles of anarchism as well as to contemporary media movements and digital activism
that are of crucial relevance in the current context.
For further details please contact Andrea Beckmann [abeckmann@lincoln.ac.uk] or Tony
Ward [A.Ward@hull.ac.uk]
The programme can be downloaded here:
https://www.facebook.com/download/222298307967715/Preliminary%20programme%20Brit
%20Irish%20section%20conference%202014.docx
V. News from Europe and the World
Brazil
Call for Papers/Conference
On 8 and 9 May 2014, at the La Salle University (Unilasalle), in the city of Canoas, Rio
Grande do Sul, southern Brazil, takes place the workshop “Critical Criminology in Brazil:
current senses and meanings".
The meeting aims to discuss the reception and development of critical criminology in the
country, and will focus on the text "Radical Criminology" (1981), from Juarez Cirino dos
Santos. The choice of this text is due to the fact that, along with "Dialectic Criminology"
(1972), from Roberto Lyra Filho, is considered a central work in Brazil, as it helped to set the
agenda of the national criminological critique of the following decades.
Please submit abstracts by 14th April.
More information: crimcrit2014@gmail.com
Europe
A new Statewatch analysis looks at the large number of documents hidden from public view
by the European Council.
Tony Bunyan, Statewatch Director, comments:
“The Council have constructed a two-tier system of secrecy to keep from public view
thousands and thousands of documents. This has been compounded by the failure of the
European Commission to put forward proposals to implement the provision in the Lisbon
Treaty to make all documents concerning the legislative procedure public.
In place of the need to deepen democratic openness and accountability in EU the Council has
entrenched a system of secrecy based on its discretion to decide whether and when to make
documents public.
The result is that the European legislature – the Council of the European Union and the
European Parliament – meet in secret trilogues to decide over 80% of new laws going
through the EU.”
See: http://www.statewatch.org/analyses/no-240-restricted-documents.pdf
Germany
Conferences
Tagung des Norddeutschen Kriminologischen Gesprächskreises 09.-11.05.2014 in Bielefeld:
http://www.nordkrim.de/
Tagung: "Auf dem Weg zu einer sicheren Gesellschaft?Sicherheitskulturen - Kriminalpolitik Kriminologie"- Bielefeld, 27.-29. März 2014 - http://www1.uni-hamburg.de/giwk/
Greece
A battle is lost for sure only when is not given. It is with great pleasure that I announce that
EG member Stratos Georgoulas whose promotion had been turned down by the University of
the Aegean on account of his leftist political convictions (his case was discussed in the EG’s
August Newsletter) won his legal battle. According to the court, his selection committee
based its decision on political bias and not on academic criteria as it should have done and
thus it is forced to decide again but this time based on purely academic criteria. During this
very difficult time for him, the EG has been by Stratos’ side and many of its members
expressed overwhelming support by writing to the Rector of the university urging him to do
what Greek justice has finally done, by signing a text in support of Stratos, by passing the
information about the problems Greek academia is facing to the international academic
community and by offering their much needed friendship. I am not exaggerating when I say
that it was the EG's support that gave him the courage and strength to launch and finally win
this battle. The committee will convene again during this calendar year. Any new
developments on the issue and regarding Stratos’ decisions to pursue further legal actions will
be shared with the EG.
Aimilia Voulvouli
Leonidas Cheliotis discusses prison conditions in Greece on France 24:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_BtWVrAlPU&list=UUQfwfsi5VrQ8yKZ-UWmAEFg
Ireland
The Centre for Criminal Justice and Human Rights (CCJHR) at University College Cork is
pleased to announce its 8th Annual Graduate Conference which will take place on the 5th
and 6th June, 2014 and is putting out a call for papers.
The conference is specifically aimed at those who are undertaking doctoral research in the
areas of criminal law, criminal justice and human rights.
The theme for this year’s event is “Justice and Dignity under Challenge.” The aim is to reflect
upon how intransigent law making can negatively impact upon human rights protection and
criminal law. The theme will encourage debate on the challenging questions which arise when
interpreting the law in rapidly changing and unstable times.
See: http://www.ucc.ie/en/ccjhr/news/fullstory-426331-en.html
Portugal
Third GERN Doctoral Summer School on “Criminology, Security and Justice:
methodological and epidemiological issues”
School of Criminology, Faculty of Law, University of Porto, Portugal
To be held at the Faculty of Law, University of Porto, Portugal
4-6 September 2014
Venue and Date
The third GERN Summer School for doctoral students will take place at the Faculty of Law
(School of Criminology), University of Porto (Portugal) from Thursday 4 September to
Saturday 6 September 2014.
Aim of the GERN Summer School
The GERN Summer School is directed at Doctoral students (preferably in their second or
third year) undertaking doctoral research in a Groupement Européen de Recherche sur les
Normativités (GERN) member institution.
The Summer School is an opportunity to present your research and debate it with European
leading researchers.
The Summer School includes:
-Presentations and discussion of PhD research work by doctoral students;
- Discussion sessions with senior researchers;
-Plenary lectures with relevant topics for PhD work development;
-An opportunity to submit your revised paper for publication.
In addition it is an opportunity to meet senior researchers and other doctoral students
undertaking criminology and criminal justice research from Europe.
Application and deadlines
To make an application to the 3rd GERN Summer School students will need to send by 28
April 2014:
- a detailed abstract of their paper (two pages that includes the theoretical and conceptual
framework, methodologies and results/expected results);
-a letter of support from the PhD supervisor, agreeing to help them.
These elements should be sent to palmeida@direito.up.pt and ccardoso@direito.up.pt.
Initial acceptance will be made known by 16 May 2014.
Those students who have been initially accepted will need to send their paper to be discussed
at the Summer School, of some 6,000 words, in English or French, by 25 July and final
acceptance will be on receipt of the paper.
Important dates to remember:
Abstract submission and letter of
support from PhD supervisor
Acceptance confirmation
Paper submission
Deadline
28 April2014
16 May 2014
25 July 2014
Costs
Students will bear the cost of their travel, accommodation and subsistence at Porto.
The cost of the conference will be 45 Euros to include course material, lunch, coffee-breaks
and one informal dinner on the 5th September.
Spain
Conference
The political economy of punishment today: Visions, debates and challenges, International
two-day conference, 18-19 September 2014, Law School, University of A Coruna, A Coruna,
Spain
Over the last decade, several key texts have sought to examine the recent transformations of
penality, most prominently among them mass imprisonment, through Political Economy
conceptual tools. Hence, this literature, which is fairly heterogeneous both in perspectives and
conclusions, contributed to updating the theoretical framework of Political Economy of
Punishment, which was crucial to reframing critical thought on punishment in the 1970s and
1980s. Moreover, those recent works have coincided with the unfolding of a theoretical line
aimed at explaining the rise of punitiveness of the last decades from the standpoint of the rise
of neoliberalism, understood both as a political project and as an economic doxa. By contrast,
another prominent body of literature has tended to emphasise the cultural and/or political
components of the evolution of penality – and hence its variability - to some extent side-lining
the political economic analysis.
Taking account of this theoretical context, it appears to be particularly timely to reflect
on the current condition of the analytical field of the Political Economy of Punishment from
the plural perspectives that arose from these new contributions on the subject.
First, the Conference aims to debate whether those recent texts are shaping new
theoretical tools for the political economic analysis of punishment. Second, the Conference
seeks to analyse whether and how the recent Political Economy of Punishment literature may
be related to the texts on neoliberalism and punishment and to those which are focused on the
cultural and political elements of the contemporary penal trends. Last, but not least, the
Conference is aimed at examining to what extent the Political Economy of Punishment
literature may contribute to critically analyse the evolution of penality since the onset of the
so-called Great Recession.
Therefore, we will consider contributions on a wide range of issues that encompass the
broad theme of The political economy of punishment today: Visions, debates and challenges,
particularly on the themes of:
 Variants of capitalism and punishment: versions and relations
 Contemporary transformations of capitalism and penality: postfordism, neoliberalism,
etc.
 Great Recession and penal policies
 Economy, culture, politics and punishment: theoretical tools, dialogues and conflicts
Keynote speakers:
Leonidas Cheliotis (University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK)
Alessandro De Giorgi (San Jose State University, USA)
Dario Melossi (University of Bologna, Italy)
Máximo Sozzo (National University of the Litoral, Argentina)
Richard Sparks (University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK)
Organization: ECRIM, University of A Coruna, Spain (www.ecrim.es)
Academic chairs: José Ángel Brandariz (University of A Coruna, Spain), Máximo Sozzo
(National University of the Litoral, Argentina) and Dario Melossi (University of Bologna,
Italy)
Organizing committee chair: Patricia Faraldo (University of A Coruna, Spain)
Abstract guidelines: Proposals should be titled and should not exceed 250 words. Please
include the proposer’s name and contact details along with their university affiliation.
Please submit abstracts via email to: dcastrolinares@gmail.com
The papers presented at the workshop may be eventually published in a book containing the
workshop proceedings.
Closing date: 15 June 2014
Decisions about the acceptance of the papers will be made by the end of June 2014.
News
Mobilisation of 29th March. Great mobilization of disobedience against laws that curtail
rights and freedoms: reduction of the social state, the rights of workers, the reform of the
Penal Code and the Public Safety Act clearly aimed at suppressing dissent and outward signs
of discomfort, the Private Security Law and the reform of the abortion law, among others, and
support to victims of repression and judicial proceedings against social protests.
See the Manifesto at:
http://desobediencia2014.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/desob14english.pdf
New book
State Crimes, Crimes of the Markets and Social Harm: Debates in Critical Criminology and
Sociology of the Criminal Law (Iñaki Rivera coord) Barcelona: Anthropos-Siglo XXI Ed.
Studentship
Applications now open for the Master in Criminology, Criminal Policy and Sociology of the
Criminal Law 2014-16 (Barcelona University)
http://www.ub.edu/web/ub/es/estudis/oferta_formativa/master_universitari/fitxa/C/MD60F/in
dex.html (Spanish)
Turkey
EUROPEAN WEEKEND SCHOOL 2014: “Minority Rights Protection in the EU”, 15-17
May 2014, Center for European Studies, “Jean Monnet Center of Excellence”, Boğaziçi
University, Istanbul, Turkey. See http://acmof.wordpress.com/2014/02/28/european-weekendschool-2014call-for-application/
United Kingdom
Activism
On Thursday 13 March staff and student volunteers with the University of Bristol based
Innocence Network UK (INUK) attended the Supreme Court hearing of Nunn v Suffolk
Constabulary and Others.
INUK was granted leave to intervene in the matter because of the experience of its member
innocence projects in assisting alleged victims of wrongful convictions to make applications
to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC). The CCRC is the body that reviews
alleged miscarriages of justice and refers cases back to the appeal courts if it is felt that there
is a real possibility that the conviction or sentence will not be upheld.
For more information, see: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/law/news/2014/425.html
Call for Papers
Aimilia Voulvouli and Dr Raul Gerardo Acosta Garcia, a Mexican fellow anthropologist
currently working at ITESO, are organizing a panel for the upcoming Royal
Anthropological Institute Conference on Anthropology and Photography to be held in
London from 29th – 31st May at the British Museum. You are more than welcome to
apply to our panel entitled “Visibility of dissent: meanings and repercussions of urban
activism
through
digital
photography
and
video”
(http://www.nomadit.co.uk/rai/events/rai2014/panels.php5?PanelID=2827) or any of
the other panels of the conference.
Jörg Wiegratz is looking for submissions re a conference panel on 'The political economy of
economic fraud in neoliberal Africa', for the ASAUK Biennial Conference 2014, University
of Sussex, 9-11 September. The paper abstract submission deadline is the 25th of April 2014
(http://www.asauk.net/conferences/asauk14.shtml).
A number of contemporary African economies are characterised by a significant and
apparently rising level of economic trickery, fraud and crime in many business sectors - and
related to this we often find associated corruption, intimidation and violence. Notably as well,
after two decades of light-touch regulation of the economy and the expansion of business
power during the rise and height of neoliberalism, a few African states have recently started to
undertake a number of explicit countermeasures (i.e. ‘crackdowns’ and regulatory initiatives)
in the name of reducing fraudulent activities including ‘malpractice’ in their respective
economies, i.e. officially regulating or constraining aspects of business power. Despite its
empirical significance, the phenomenon of fraud and anti-fraud measures has remained
largely understudied in African studies. This state of affairs is markedly different from the
study of corruption on the continent. Against this background, this panel seeks to give more
analytical attention to economic fraud and crime. It welcomes contributions that shed light on
the political-economic drivers, characteristics and repercussions of fraud and/or anti-fraud in
particular country cases. Contributors might also want to examine the sociocultural aspects of
the theme. A central (but by no means the only) theme of the panel is to examine the
structures and relationships of power that brought about the fraud and the anti-fraud including
the ‘post-crackdown’ settlement between the state and the business sector. With regard to for
instance anti-fraud measures against both relatively wealthy/elite and poor/non-elite actors,
contributors might wish to highlight issues concerning particular political-economic
pressures, dilemmas, tensions, and conflicts (including intra-state organisational infighting),
as well as class dynamics and power struggles related to these state measures. Or, analyse the
respective episodes of violence, intimidation, corruption, injustice, impoverishment and social
harm that seem to characterise some of these state measures. More generally, the panel aims
to contribute to study of economic fraud and crime in the Global South.
Panel organizer: Jörg Wiegratz, University of Leeds, j.wiegratz@leeds.ac.uk
Conferences/lectures/workshops
Edge Hill University, Department of Law and Criminology (Legal Research Group) present
Guy Standing - The Precariat Charter, Guest lecture and book launch
Wednesday 2nd April 2014, Hub 1, 3.30pm - 6.00pm. See
http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/law/news/
The University of Sussex will be hosting a conference entitled ’Understanding Hate Crime:
Research,
Policy
and
Practice’
from
8th-9th
May
2014.
See
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/law/newsandevents/hate
Reclaim Justice Network event, Liverpool: "What will it take to have a shrinking criminal
justice system?", Date: Thursday 15th May
Venue: Black-E, The Gallery, 1 Great George Street, Liverpool L1 5EW
Time: 6.30-8.00pm. See: http://downsizingcriminaljustice.wordpress.com/
The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies and the University of Liverpool will behosting a
conference entitled ’How violent is Britain?’ on Friday 16th May. For more details, see
http://www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=35
Public lecture by Tony Bunyan, Statewatch, as part of the Jean Monnet Summer School on
the European Union's Area of Freedom, Security & Justice, School of Humanities, University
of
Dundee,
Saturday,
14
June
2014
from
18:00
to
19:30.
See
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/public-lecture-by-tony-bunyan-statewatch-tickets10854132001
Human rights in prisons in the UK and Europe: what would the highest standards look like?
On 27 June 2014 the Reclaim Justice Network will be holding an event at HMP Grendon to
consider how to improve conditions and human rights in prison. The day will be divided into
three parts, aimed at practitioners, prisoners, their friends and families, and prison
administration staff. Register here.
The University of Sheffiled will be hosting the 5th Annual Conference 'Theorising Normalcy
and the Mundane - more questions of the human' from 7th-8th July 2014. See
http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/whatson/conferences
British Society of Criminology Conference, Hosted by the Department of Sociology, Social
Policy and Criminology, School of Law and Social Justice, The University of Liverpool. 1012 July (preceded by a postgraduate conference on 9th July). For further details see:
http://www.liv.ac.uk/law-and-social-justice/conferences/bsc/ New deadline for papers: 30th
April.
BISA IPEG annual workshop 2014: IPE and the New Normal - Open Conflict After the Crash
5th-6th September 2014. See: http://www.polis.leeds.ac.uk/about/events/ipe-and-the-newnormal-open-conflict-after-the-crash.php
Job Opportunities
Lecturer in Criminology or Social Policy, Faculty of Social Sciences, Open University,
Milton Keynes. Closing date: 17th April. See: http://www3.open.ac.uk/employment/jobdetails.asp?id=7645
Reports
The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies has just launched its latest justice policy review by
Richard Garside, Arianna Silvestri and Helen Mills. See:
http://www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/sites/crimeandjustice.org.uk/files/UK%20Justice%20Polic
y%20Review%203_0.pdf
The UK government has published an independent review into the Stephen Lawrence
inquiry. See https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/stephen-lawrence-independentreview
A Home Office report proving the ‘negligible’ impact of migration on UK native
employment
is
available
to
read
here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/287086/occ109
.pdf
The Reclaim Justice Network has produced a briefing paper on the changes to the Incentives
and earned privileges scheme that came into effect in November 2013.
The briefing highlights concerns about:
 Potential increases in rates of suicide and self-harm under the current changes;
 Increased problems of disorder and, as a result, staff and prisoner safety;
 Prison sentences that continue to inflict more damage than they repair;
 The proliferation of violent criminal justice policies.
It can be downloaded here: http://downsizingcriminaljustice.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/rjniep-feb-2014.pdf
USA
Activism
This is a message from the Prison Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition:
We need your help. The California prison system's Security Threat Group/Step Down
Program (STG/SDP) is getting close to being implemented. These regulations govern
placement into and release from the SHU (Secure Housing Units), California’s long-term
solitary confinement cells. The STG/SDP policies will perpetuate California’s over use of
torturous isolation.
We are soliciting your help to weigh in and speak out against these regulations. Please
submit a comment and ask your friends, family, neighbors, pastor, school class, place of
worship, and organizations to write also.
The public comment period is open now; it closes April 3, 2014 at 5 PM.
In many respects the STG/SDP is worse than the current practice. The STG/ SDP program is
based on the U.S. Bureau of Prisons model, subject of great criticism in 2012 by the U.S.
Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights & Human
Rights. California uses solitary confinement far and away more than any other government
entity on the planet - the most absolute numbers and the highest percentage of prisoners in
solitary. On any given day California, conservatively, has 11,000 adult prisoners in some
form of isolation.
Conference
6th Annual International Crime, Media and Popular Culture Studies Conference at Indiana
State University. Abstracts are due by May 5, 2014. Presenter Registration payments are due
by May 19, 2014. Non-Presenter registration is Due August 12, 2014. Conference Dates are :
September 22-24th, 2014. See: http://www.indstate.edu/ccj/popcultureconference/index.htm
International
Reports
A UN report by the special rapporteur Ben Emmerson into the promotion and protection of
fundamental freedoms whilst countering terrorism has devoted a special chapter to the use of
drones. A copy may be read here: http://justsecurity.org/wpcontent/uploads/2014/02/Special-Rapporteur-Rapporteur-Emmerson-Drones-2014.pdf
Amnesty International’s annual report on the death penalty reports a rise in executions in
2013. The full report is available to download here:
http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/ACT50/001/2014/en/652ac5b3-3979-43e2-b1a16c4919e7a518/act500012014en.pdf
A BIG THANKS to all the European Group members for making this
newsletter successful.. Please feel free to contribute to this newsletter by
sending any information that you think might be of interest to the Group
to Emma/Monish at : europeangroupcoordinator@gmail.com
Please try to send it in before the 25th of each month if you wish to have it
included in the following month’s newsletter. Please provide a web link
(wherever possible).