Bringing the margins into the middle: reflections on racism, class and the racialized outsider

This paper explores Virdee’s account of how racialized minorities in socialist movements ‘played an instrumental role in trying to align struggles against racism with those against class exploitation’ (p. 164). In so doing, Virdee makes an important intervention at a time when popular historians and other ideologues are colluding in the elevation of myths and – no doubt in their view – noble lies that preclude these stories. Moving through theoretical debates concerning the relationships between race and class, the nature and form of sociologies of ‘outsiders’, to political issues of mobilization, Virdee’s book successfully brings in from the margins an account the multi-ethnic character of the working class in England from the very moment of its inception.