Book review essays

Race, less community, more conflict Rex, J. and Tomlinson, S., with the assistance of Hearnden, D. and Ratcliffe, P. 1979: Colonial immigrants in a British city: a class analysis. London and Boston, Ero.50.

The publication in 1967 ofRace, community and conflict by John Rex and Robert Moore was a major event in academic sociology in Britain. It revitalized urban sociology and paved the way for ‘the new urban sociology’-of which this new journal is an important emblem. Its provocative synthesis of Chicago urbanism with a conflict reading of Weber and in particular the now famous claim that there is a class struggle over the use of houses and that this class struggle is the central process of the city as a social unit, brought the study of urban sociology and race relations together and integrated both with those central concerns of what is often called bourgeois sociology-power, class and stratification. That there were ambiguities and difficulties in these new formukitions is the reason why that book promoted so much helpful debate. Any new book on race relations by John Rex especially one based on an empirical study in the same city, Birmingham, as Race, community and .confict would be eagerly awaited. And not just for what he will tell us about what is going on-the facts as it were, but because of his rare commitment to understanding; to the demystification of the modern world. All this is given even greater importance when put alongside the fact that as I write this review John Rex has taken up the most important research post in this field in Britain-the Directorship of the Social Science Research Council’s Ethnic Relations Unit at the University of Aston in Birmingham.

It must be said immediately that Colonial immigrants in a British city: a class analysis, written this time with Sally Tomlinson with the assistance of David Hearnden and Peter Ratcliffe, is at least as important as Race, community and confict. It is not just that no serious student of urban sociology and race relations can afford not to have read it but that everybody with a critical concern for British society in the post imperial age and for its sociological explanation, will have to engage with it. It is unlikely that there will be many more significant studies than this. It is, of course, a very contentious book

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and will be at least as strongly debated as Race, community and conjict-but that is how it should be and how its authors would wish it.

What then does this book achieve? Its contribution to the field of race relations is, in the untypically bland words of the authors, ‘to note the types of social relations which arise both between individuals and between groups when a society is multi-ethnic or multi-racial or the changes which occur as a result of the immigration into the society of an alien minority’ (p. I ) . In their rigorously argued Weberian position (elaborated at length by Rex in an appendix), the authors claim that objective sociological analysis by no means prevents political action; it prepares the way for it. Their objectivity is resolutely Weberian rather than structural marxist, though in their passion they teeter towards utopianism in Mannheim’s sense. The key question that is posed is, what does it mean for an outsider to gain admission to the British working class? In effect an ideal type of the British working class is constructed in order to point out that the encounter between immigrant minorities and a society such as the British is ‘by no means simply a process of absorption of immigrants into a unitary social system’ (p. I I ) . This leads the authors to suggest that the situation of the ethnic minorities and the native working class must be systematically compared with regard to employment, housing and education. A real innovation of the greatest academic and political significance is the stress placed on the relationship between ‘the relatively straightforward class structure or class struggle in a metropolitan society and that which prevails in the imperial social system as a whole’ (p. 13) . Thus, the chapter is entitled, ‘Working class, underclass and third world revolution’. Hitherto, this relationship has largely been ignored in British sociology and so this book could lead to reorientation of race relations as an academic field in Britain. However, it remains more evoked than thoroughly worked out in this book.

I t is possible only to sketch some of the authors’ approaches and findings. I On employment: They write that ‘we are concerned with any continuing link with the socio-economic system and the class status structure of their country of origin . . . the extent to which their average fate in the British labour market approximates to that of their British peers . . . whether there is any tendency at all for the formation of specifically important underclass groupings marked by a separate fate and by the emergence of incipient immigrant labour organisation . . . (is) there a tendency for immigrant worker organisation to become the core of more comprehensive political and cultural groupings’ (p. 9). They find that a substantial minority of immigrants do see their employment prospects blocked by prejudice and discrimination. There is, as yet, relatively little involvement of the young black British worker in industrial disputes-rather his problem is that of being left out of the labour force altogether. 2 On housing: They find that their predictions in Race, communip and conjict were not well founded. We are told that ‘what has happened is that many of the earliest New Commonwealth immigrants have bought inner-ring

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property and thus withdrawn themselves from the public sector, while those who have been lucky or unlucky enough to have stuck it out, without resort to house purchase, have more frequently finished up in inner city estates where they could maintain communal links with their property-owning kinsmen. Very fav have made the suburban migration’ (p. 144). 3 On education: They illustrate their stance when they write that ‘if, however, jobs and housing are two of the great means by which life chances are dispensed in a modern urban industrial society, the third means is the educational system’ (p. 24). The issue as Rex et a1. see it is whether immigrants ‘will be pressed into the lowest destiny of all in the dis- advantaged urban schools or whether they will achieve the same rights as mainstream working-class children, that is to say the right to compete for education success and social mobility in streamed comprehensive schools’ (p. 60). There is a deal of satisfaction with the education system by immigrant parents yet the segregation of their children-and the attitudes of those in authority alongside the development of new belief systems among the young point to the development in marxist terms of a class-in-itself and on the self-conscious level of class-for-itself. Their strong conclusion is that ‘of the three institutional sectors of employment, housing and education . . . education is the most important sociologically speaking, though of course, what happens in education is determined above all in the political sphere’ (p. 205). This raises expectations that what has become called ‘the local state’ would be more centrally incorporated into the analysis. We are given instead a rather traditional discussion of Birmingham’s housing and education policies. Race, communit3, and conflict moved urban studies and race relations back into academically central sociological areas. It is therefore disappoint- ing that Colonial immigrants in a British city does not, in similar fashion, move the analysis towards the currently central concerns over the nature of the capitalist, or in this case, the post-colonial state.

There is no doubt that these chapters provide some of the best information on the precise situation of ethnic minorities in Birmingham. Yet it will be quite rightly pointed out that Handsworth-ne of the race relations capitals of Britain, is not Birmingham and that Birmingham is not Britain. In one primary school, the percentage of children whose parents are immigrant, was as high as 94%. Handsworth was a reIatively satisfactory home for West Indians and even more so for Asians-yet of course, this was not so for the whites who still lived there. Handsworth is called the ‘traditionalist working- class Englishman’s Bangladesh’ (p. 2 I ) . It is particularly relevant to a review in this journal to stress how hostile Rex et al. are to viewing the problems of declining, multiracial, urban areas as basically a physical problem. Handsworth’s problems do not result from urban blight, excessive immi- gration, white prejudice nor from the inculcation of a ghetto mentality by black leaders. ‘Handsworth has not one population but three (old white residents, West Indians and Asians), and since each of these populations has different goals and would wish to put available physical and commercial

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resources to different uses, there is bound to be conflict’ (p. 94). And this conflict is likely to grow. Indeed it is likely to be magnified because of the racialist practice and racist theory in British political ideologies. Even the liberal race relations industry is seen as whistling in the dark. The source of deepest conflict is stressed towards the end of their incisive chapter on British political ideologies:

O n the one hand are the vast majority of those who settled as immigrants between 1950 and 1965 who are concerned with their own domestic and job problems, who know that discrimination exists, but have decided to make the best of it, improving their homes and staying steadily in a job . O n the other, there are the young who have been born in England or a t least partly educated here. Very few of them are in organisations but many of them complain about discrimination in employment and about relations with the police, who, they say, harass them (p. 68).

That is the cause of Rex et al.’s stark pessimism. For if such inequalities of experience and life-chance, as described in the

institutional chapters on employment, housing and education, ‘were sus- tained over a period . . . consciousness of a common identity, common exploitation and oppression, and a common conflict with the host society would emerge and find oppression in some kind of ethnic-class for itself (p. 208). Rex et aL.’s position is that the children of the immigrants, if excluded from the class system, could form an underclass to defend itself.

All this implies that the chapter ‘Race, community and conflict’ in this book has a very different message from Race, community and confict. The earlier analysis is now seen as far too optimistic., Immigrant organizations in Handsworth are far more militant than they were in Sparkbrook-indeed Rex et al. see this as the most important single difference between Handsworth in 1974 and Sparkbrook in 1964 and in Birmingham as a whole between these dates. Community organizations, so called, no longer articulate with the needs and goals and definitions of social reality to be found among the ethnic minorities. Political organizations and structures are emerging among the West Indian, Asian and the inner-city whites that differ from each other. Basically Rex et al. are no longer optimistic because of the growing racism of the white community which is matched by a growing lack of confidence in white goodwill and increasing militancy amongst immi- grants. Their concluding themes all point to increasing polarization in the relationship between West Indian and Asian minorities on the one hand and the British cultural, social and political organizations on the other. It is here that Rex et al. wish to be utopian in Mannheim’s sense of promoting change in order to counter an ideology which emphasizes not only the stability but the essential justice of the present arrangements. This is notwithstanding Rex’s claim in his appendix that he can maintain the strict division between science, ideology and utopia.

There are no happy endings in this book for in ‘the more likely event of increasing polarization . . . there will be no obvious framework within which to work . . . the time for (such) paternalism is past and increasingly the

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young black British know that it is past. The choice is really between effective political organisation on their own behalf and mindless violence and despair’

I t is necessary however to enter two final (and perhaps minor but then perhaps not) caveats. Rex et al. take what they call their ‘anti-positivistic inclinations’ just too far. There can be no excuse whatsoever for not publishing the questionnaires from which their survey data were generated. Without that we have even less access to the research process than usual. Secondly, despite volume 2 , no. 3 of this journal, this is still basically a book about men. Explicitly it is about ‘men’s relation to their houses and homes . . .’ (p. 27) etc., etc. For self-styled ‘radical sociologists’ (p. 232), this is no longer good enough.

(P* 295).

University of New South Wales, Sydney Colin Bell

I1 s’agit ici d’un expost rtsolument wtbtrien des rapports entre les immigrants antillais et asiatiques, leurs enfants et la structure des classes (ou la lutte des classes) dans la socittt hritannique. I1 se fonde sur des etudes empiriques faites B Handsworth, Birmingham. Le but de Rex et des autres Ctait ‘de voir, ?i partir de ce que nous avons pu trouver sur leur emploi, logement, dossiers scolaires, dans quelle mesure ils paraissent avoir atteint le m&me niveau que d’autres tltments d e la classe ouvrikre et, dans quelle mesure ils se sont assimiles et participent aux organisations ouvrikres’. Constituent-ils une sous-classe, ou bien prtsentent-ils, dans le cadre d e la vie politique britannique, une source de conflit plus vaste, provenant de la restructuration d’une ancienne socitti imptriale? Les auteurs prtvoient une croissance de la polarisation e t des conflits.

Hierbei handelt es sich um eine entschieden ‘Weberianische’ Abhandlung iiber die Beziehungen zwischen westindischen und asiatischen Einwanderern und deren Kindern und der Klassenstruktur (bzw. dem Klassenkampf) in der britischen Gesellschaft. Sie basiert auf empirischen Studien in Handsworth, Birmingham. Rex et al . hatten sich zum Ziel gesetzt ‘festzustellen, inwieweit sie, nach dem, was wir aus ihrem Arbeits-, Wohn- und Bildungs- hintergrund entnehmen konnten, dieselbe Stellung erreicht zu haben schienen wie andere ‘Mitglieder der Arbeiterklasse und in welchem MaRe sie sich mit Arbeiterorganisationen identifizierten oder sich an diesen beiteiligten’. Sind sie eine Unterklasse, oder stellen sie im Rahmen der britischen Politik einen breiteren Konflikt dar, der sich aus der Restrukturierung einer ehemaligen Kolonialreich-Gesellschaft ergibt? Die Verfasser sagen eine zunehmende Polarisierung und wachsende Konflikte voraus.

Esta relacibn es firmemente weberiana en su enfoque de las relaciones entre 10s inmigrantes asiiticos y d e las Indias Occidentales y sus hijos y la estructura de clases (0 lucha de clases) en la sociedad britinica. Est i basada en estudios empiricos en Handsworth, Birmingham. El objeto de Rex et al fue ‘ver hasta q u t punto parecian, segGn lo que pudimos descubrir sobre su historial de trabajo, viviendas y educacibn, haber llegado a la misma posicibn que otra gente de case obrera, y hasta quo punto participaban o se identificaban con organizaciones de la clase obrera’. ;Son una clase desvalida, o presentan, en el context0 de la politica britinica, un conflicto m i s amplio, consecuencia d e la reestructuracibn d e la antigua sociedad imperial? Los autores pronostican un aumento en la polarizacidn y el conflicto.