The organic crisis of British capitalism and race: the experience of the seventies

The central theme of this book is that the construction of an authoritarian state in Britain is fundamentally intertwined with the elaboration of popular racism in the 1970s.1 The aim of this introductory chapter is more modest. It offers a framework for examining the relation of ‘race’ to British decline, and attempts a periodization of state racism during the seventies. We hope to provide a more detailed morphology of these transformations in future work.2