Richard Seymour: Corbyn was also not the dynamic factor in this referendum. Nor was any part of the Left. The racists were. The chauvinists were. And what the racists have done is successfully articulated a broad antiestablishment sentiment — originating in class injuries, regional decline, postindustrial devastation, generational anxieties, etc. — along bigoted, national chauvinist lines. The vote cannot be reduced to racism and nationalism — but that is the primary way in which it has been organised and recruited and directed, and that is the primary way in which the outcome will be experienced. That this was achieved so soon after the fascist murder of a centre-left, pro-immigrant MP, is stunning in a way. It says something about the truculence of some of the chauvinism on display. It says something about the profound sense of loss which a reasserted ‘Britishness’ is supposed to compensate for. This is what many of the left-Brexiters have simply failed to appreciate. In refusing to see that resentful, racist nationalism was indispensable to the Brexit victory, in imagining that the flag-waving and conspiracy theories about the EU are superfluous relative to the ‘class anger’ about neoliberalism and declining living standards, they have adopted an exceptionally crude model of ‘consciousness’. Implicitly, it is as if they see racism as merely a flimsy superstructure, or a temporary fug obscuring the ‘real’ antagonism. As if the questions of nationality and race have not been decisively formative of the way in which class issues are settled in the United Kingdom. More here.