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From International Socialism, No.72, October 1974, p.32.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Race and Resistance: the Institute of Race Relations Story
A. Sivanandan
Race Today, (184 King’s Cross Road, London WC1) 30p.
THE INSTITUTE OF Race Relations, London, is facing closure. Starved of funds, the staff have issued a document setting out a programme and policy to meet the crisis and attract financial support. This pamphlet by the now separate organisation, Race Today, traces the fortunes of the Institute in its 22 years’ existence. The Institute’s appeal for funds does not seem strange after reading it
In the past money to finance the research programmes, library and publishing has come from the Home Office, South African mining companies, Caribbean sugar estates and foundations such as Rockefeller, Ford and Nuffleld. Firms don’t lash out money without expecting something in return even. if the pay-off is of a subtle, insidious kind which doesn’t show up in the short-run on the balance sheet. In the long-run however the paymasters got their return.
The firms who were still operating in the new political climate brought about by the end of Empire and decolonisation were eager to assess how secure their investments now were. The books published in the Institute’s early days in the 1950s were written on Central and East Africa and led to the setting up in 1962 of a group of businessmen and academics who met every two months at least until late 1967, to discuss the changing climate of investment.
This group, the Africa Private Enterprise Group, numbered amongst its members the executive director of Anglo-American Corporation of South Africa, representatives of Rio Tinto Zinc, Unilever, Barclays DCO, Standard Bank and ... Robert Carr.
Not only the businessmen had a stake in the Institute. The military and the politicians were interested in its research. Under the umbrella of the Institute of Race Relations and the Institute of Strategic Studies, a conference was held in 1962 which attracted, among others, the deputy secretary to the Cabinet military attachés from the US, Israel and France, a colonel from the War Office and group captain from the Air Ministry.
Rich and powerful interests then, were in on the formative years of the Institute – all in the pursuit of objective scholarship ... The real problems started when studies turned the spotlight nearer home. With the expansion in the economy and the migration of black workers to Britain, the research staff found themselves increasingly questioning the political consequences and content of their work.
They didn’t like the answers and began to organise to change the course of the Institute’s work and its publications, especially the monthly journal Race Today. They began to challenge the right of the governing body, the Council, to perpetuate themselves through non-contested elections. They also sought and won the right to attend staff meetings.
It was all too much for the powerful backers and their money dried up. The newly attracted supporters were ‘radicals’, black people and so, almost by definition, not rich.
This pamphlet is written by the Institute’s former librarian and tells of the changes in the Institute and the political context in which they took place. It’s a fascinating story and it should be read by readers of this journal. It will help us to understand firstly how knowledge is created and comes to form a weapon in the armoury of the ruling class, and secondly how office workers, library staff and research workers can organise to resist pressures to become accomplices in the process.
One point of comradely criticism. The author says that some office staff were members of the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs, but ‘since some members of staff were in the National Union of Journalists and could not be members of ASTMS, the staff had decided to keep their community of interests undivided and had abjured the divisive politics of unionship’. It’s an ambiguous passage, but if he means unions were never involved in the staff’s dispute, then one would reply that union activity implies a political perspective of unity and not of division.
To have begun agitation in the unions and drawn in their brothers and sisters at that time would have formed a good foundation for the appeal for funds and support from unions which the Institute is now making. And it would perhaps have given the magazine Race Today a slightly different orientation to the unions.
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