Raymond Williams and Enoch Powell? Retrieving the Politics of Community with Ambalavaner Sivanandan

This article takes Paul Gilroy’s charge against Williams – that he echoed the cultural assumptions of Enoch Powell in his appeal to community – as an opportunity to reconsider Williams’s response to the structural transformation of neoliberalism. It challenges the very premise of the comparison by arguing that it rests on a misunderstanding of Powell’s project as an organic conservativism. Instead, it identifies how Powell’s thinking is informed by a nihilistic ontology of the will which implies a hollowed-out conception of the neoliberal nation. Set against this understanding of the neoliberal nation and drawing on the contemporaneous work of Ambalavaner Sivanandan, Williams’s writing of the 1980s can be seen as attempting to rethink community outside of the binary of authenticity/inauthenticity. The essay identifies significant affinities between Williams and Sivanandan in their shared concern for the capacity of community to politicise the social and so substantiate collective needs and aspirations against the domination of capital.