Are the Kids United? The Communist Party of Great Britain, Rock Against Racism, and the Politics of Youth Culture

Headnote

The Communist Party of Great Britain, Rock Against Racism, and the Politics of Youth Culture

One of the themes that has arisen in the growing body of literature surrounding Rock Against Racism (RAR) and the antiracist campaigns of the late 1970s has been that RAR and its sister organization the Anti-Nazi League (ANL), both offshoots of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP), were able to attract politicized youth through the language of youth culture and identity politics, whereas the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), as the traditional home for many left -wing and antiracist activists, looked culturally conservative and apprehensive to the youth-oriented politics of RAR. Through the success of RAR and the ANL in providing widespread opposition to the far right National Front, the SWP established itself as a force on the political Left and an organization of considerable influence in the antiracist movement in Britain. On the other hand, the Communist Party, already plagued by falling membership and internal schisms over the direction of the Party, appeared to be increasingly out of touch with the antiracist movement and with black and white youth, who drifted toward the Trotskyist left or single-issue pressure groups (if politically involved at all). The relationship between the CPGB and the ANL has been examined elsewhere; what this article seeks to explore is how the CPGB's relationship with youth culture became fractured in the late 1970s as Rock Against Racism was able to engage with the emerging youth cultures of punk and reggae, and how this interaction with youth culture helped to create an antiracist consciousness informed by the politics of the SWP, rather than the CPGB. The decline of the CPGB in the political arena to the left of Labour and its increasing retreat from the forefront of antiracist politics, alongside the rise of the SWP, provides the historical backdrop to demonstrate how radical leftist politics, youth culture, and antiracism converged and diverged in the 1970s.

The Threat of the National Front

Established in the late 1960s, the National Front (NF) was a far-right organization that exploited populist fears about immigration from the British Commonwealth to promote a program that focused heavily on the forced repatriation of nonwhite Britons and violent opposition to the supposed...