This speech was delivered by Soma Kisan at the RCG’s National Meeting and dayschool ‘How do we fight back against racism and imperialism?’ on Sunday 20 October 2024.
The figures for structural racism across the board in Britain are stark. According to the Equality and Human Rights Monitor report published in 2023:
- Bangladeshi and Pakistani workers earned 20% and 16% less than white British workers respectively.
- The poverty rate for Bangladeshi and Pakistani people was over 40%, compared to 18.6% for white British people.
- Black people in work were more likely than any other ethnic group to be in low-paid occupations, with nearly 4 in 10 Black workers in low-paid labour.
- 13% of prisoners in England and Wales identified as Black, despite Black people making up only 4% of the population.
- Black people were stopped and searched 4.9 times as often as white people.
- Black women were 3.7 times more likely to die during pregnancy or up to six weeks after giving birth compared to white women. Infant mortality rates in 2020 were highest among Black babies (5.3 per 1,000 live births) compared to 2.8 per 1,000 for white babies.
- 28.7% of Bangladeshi households and 20.7% of Pakistani and Black households experience overcrowded living conditions, compared to 2.2% of White households.
Imperialism has systematically exploited oppressed nations creating conditions which make it impossible for them to develop economically. These underdeveloped and distorted economies mean poverty, unemployment, war and often outright starvation for the oppressed. It drives workers in these countries to escape, to migrate, to seek a better quality of life or simply to save their lives. Just a handful of wealthy imperialist nations dominate and exploit the poor and oppressed nations and use every political, economic and military device possible to prevent the peoples of these nations freeing themselves from imperialism.
Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism. This means that capitalism is no longer able to develop the productive forces systematically, except by attacking the working class. Capitalism must step up exploitation for continued capital accumulation, intensifying oppression both at home and abroad. In this process, racism plays a double role. Firstly, racism is used to explain the poverty of oppressed countries – blaming them as corrupt, war-like, uncivilised, inferior, needing western intervention. This has been the case right from the beginning of colonialism to the justifications given to bombing Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Yemen right now – this racism in fact justifies national oppression – the oppression and exploitation of one country by another which is central to imperialism.
The second role of racism relates to the treatment of migrants within the oppressed country who form a super-exploited section of the working class. Racism within Britain today is a particular form of imperialist oppression. It is the form taken by national oppression within the oppressor nation.
To give an example – Britain colonised Nigeria in the late 19th century, characterising its people as child-like un-civilised races. Imperialist Britain has since systematically oppressed and profited from Nigeria, looting it of its oil and other natural resources. Meanwhile, Nigerian workers within Britain face systematic racism, lower wages, poorer housing conditions, worse health prospects. They are part of an especially oppressed section of the working class. Nigerian and all asylum seekers then endure systematic racism, facing deportation, destitution, detention, denial of benefits and of the right to work. They too form part of the especially oppressed section of the working class – the racism that has enabled Britain’s national oppression of the country of Nigeria, is internalised and reflected in the treatment of Nigerian migrants within Britain. This is the central link between racism and imperialism.
To understand this we need to look at how and why this happens, beginning with the Reserve army of labour:
In Capital, Karl Marx shows that in order for capitalist accumulation to continue, a reserve army of labour is needed. This is both to provide a new labour force as capitalism expands, but also to control the level of wages. Capitalism relies on the existence of a pool of cheap labour, an ever-ready supply of workers. This keeps wages low for the majority of the working class; if sections of the working class demand higher wages, the capitalists can just fire them and replace them with a new set of workers, who are happy to escape even worse poverty and take low paid jobs. This keeps workers in a continued state of uncertainty and instability, knowing they may be hired and fired as needed. This is also the role of benefit sanctions and attacks on welfare – to make life so difficult on benefits that people will take whatever low paid job to survive.
As capitalism expanded to imperialism, the reserve army no longer had to come only from the British labour force. The pool of cheap labour exploited by oppressor nations was increasingly drawn from the colonies and ex-colonies of Britain. After the second world war, British capitalism experienced a boom, and to fill the job vacancies it actively encouraged migrant workers from the commonwealth, former territories of the British empire. London Transport, the British Hotels and Restaurants Association and the Ministry of Health all went to the to the Caribbean to recruit workers directly.
Migrant labour doesn’t just mean extra workers, brought in to take any jobs because of a shortage of workers. Migrant labour is brought into Britain to do the very worst jobs at the lowest rates of pay. Migrant workers have been used extensively in industries and services which require shift working during unsocial hours and at a lower premium than other workers. On top of this, migrant labour has reduced the cost to capitalism of important public and social services, the NHS was founded on migrant workers, nurses, doctors. These workers were not born or educated in Britain; another country has borne the cost of raising them. Britain just gets the adult worker, ready to be put to work. This means that capitalists have been able to provide these public services to the British working class at a lower cost. Migrant workers are less costly for the capitalists, they are paid less and place fewer demands on public services.This means that migrant labour forms a distinct section of the working class, whose conditions of work and living are worse than those of most workers in Britain.
Not only do migrant workers come to Britain into a worse standard of living, as an oppressed section of the working class, there is no hope for this cycle to end as this situation needs to be reproduced over and over again as it is essential to the continuation of British capitalism.
Racist discrimination, state repression and immigration controls are key ways that migrants and their families are kept as an oppressed section of the working class. Racial profiling, the concentration of generations of migrant families in the poorest communities and jobs, disproportionate representation in prisons, racist landlords, employers, and courts – these are all examples of how this racist discrimination keeps black people in poverty and exploitation independently of their immigration status. These are all clearly represented in statistics.
Racist stop and search laws, immigration raids, racist anti-terror laws – these are all used to terrorise whole communities. Acts of resistance such as the 1981 uprisings predominantly of black youth, the riots in Bradford and other northern cities with significant Asian populations in 2001, and the explosions of anger in 2011 which followed the police killing of Mark Duggan – have all been met with the full force of the police, courts and prisons.
In addition, racism directed at specific communities is connected to ruling class interests internationally. Imperialism justifies conquest of other nations by racist supremacy. It combats the threat of unified opposition at home by encouraging racism. The invaded and occupied nations are depicted as aggressors who threaten Britain and must be disarmed, neutralised and crushed. The vilification of Muslims in Britain is intrinsically linked to Britain’s wars against the predominantly Muslim people of the Middle East and Afghanistan, in just the same way the racism against Irish people in the 1970s and 1980s was tied up with Britain’s military occupation of the north of Ireland. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and British armed forces involvement in wars grew increasingly unpopular with the population as a whole and with Muslims in particular. This meant the ruling class had to drum up racism against Muslims in order to divide opposition, using racism as a tool of control.
However one of the major ways that racist oppression is maintained is through immigration controls.
Immigration controls specifically directed against black people began to be introduced in 1962, coinciding with the end of British imperialism’s need to call on the international reserve army of labour. Major Immigration Acts were passed in 1962 by the Tories, 1968 by Labour and 1971 by the Tories. All these Acts moved towards the contract labour system in which immigrant labour can be brought in for specific jobs and deported when it is no longer needed.
Immigration controls are racist by their very nature. Now Britain has a tiered immigration policy, organised to meet the needs of capitalism:
At the top of the pecking order are skilled workers and professionals who are encouraged to settle in Britain. They are often headhunted from poorer countries, contributing to brain drain and undermining these countries ability to staff public services themselves.
Then there are the lower paid workers from states who are allowed into Britain to seek work. They do temporary and insecure jobs at a low wage, keeping British workers’ wages down and increasing profits for capitalism. These workers are often denied benefits and access to social housing. For example new EU migrants are now only entitled to jobseekers allowance for 6 months, with entitlement to housing benefit removed altogether, whereas migrants from outside the EU are now required to pay a health surcharge for healthcare, or otherwise prove their entitlement, even in an emergency!
At the bottom of the ladder are asylum seekers, who are defamed, detained and deported, and who are officially forbidden from working while their claims are processed. However, as they are either paid only the lowest level of state benefit or provided with no means at all, a sizeable number are forced to work illegally. Their labour, along with that of the undocumented immigrants whose presence here is not officially registered, also contributes to the profits of British capitalism. They are paid the lowest wages and have no access to free health care or other welfare provision.
To give human examples of what immigration controls can mean for workers, both legal and illegal workers – In August 2007, 40 terrified Bulgarian workers were not paid for 35 days, threatened with deportation if they didn’t pay £100 deposits, and forced to scavenge for food in fields. Their Cornish gangmaster was allowed to continue trading by the government’s Gangmaster Licensing Agency.
Many migrant workers are denied basic employment rights such as holiday pay, sick pay, redundancy pay and the right to claim unfair dismissal. In June 2008 The Guardian exposed a case where east Europeans, who were employed via a maze of sub-contracting agencies to work on the construction site of a government-backed PFI hospital in Nottinghamshire, were paid less than £1 per hour, with one worker taking home £8.80 for a 37-hour week, and another netting £66 for working 70 hours after deductions for accommodation and tools. The construction industry scheme, which registers the workers as technically self-employed, also deducted £76.80 from their wages each week.
As recently as 2022, migrant care workers were paid less than £5 and hour while domestic workers brought to Britain are barely paid at all. Some care workers are paid £3 an hour and on top of that still have accommodation fees deducted.
There is no way in which immigration controls can be made ‘democratic’ or ‘non-racist’, because immigration controls are concerned only with regulating flows of labour ready for super-exploitation. To call for democratic immigration controls is as impossible as calling for democratic imperialism. For this reason, in imperialist Britain, we need to oppose all immigration controls.
An ‘indigenous’ working class that opposes immigration is of great benefit to the ruling class. Firstly, it makes it easier to continue to privatise council housing, run down social services and reduce access to health care, if immigrants, rather than the government, are blamed, and secondly whenever there is a downturn in the economy and some of the reserve army is expelled, there is already a vocal body of support for the shift.
The RCG opposes all British immigration controls. It has always been our position that in an imperialist country, immigration restrictions must necessarily be racist. This applies both to claims for asylum and to the ‘management’ of ‘economic migration’.
The answer to the very real problems faced by the poorer sections of the British working class does not lie in attacking immigration but in the fight against capitalist exploitation of the whole of the working class, irrespective of nationality or race. Such a struggle is in the interests of the whole working class and the oppressed.
To understand the the Labour party’s stance on immigration, we must explain the labour aristocracy. Super-profits obtained from exploitation of oppressed nations have enabled the creation of a labour aristocracy in the imperialist nations, a better-off section of the working class whose improved living conditions are maintained by the profits from imperialism. These workers are bought off and as such have a stake in the continuation of the system. The labour aristocracy has a direct interest in the maintenance of imperialism and therefore of the oppression of nations and the resulting racist oppression of black people in Britain. This enemy within, is the most dangerous trend that we must oppose.
As Lenin said, this labour aristocracy are
‘The real agents of the bourgeoisie inside the working class movement, the labour lieutenants of the capitalist class, the real vehicles of reformism and chauvinism.’ (Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism, preface to the French and German editions)
There can be no question of there being a ‘progressive’ section of British capitalism which is prepared to end the specific exploitation of immigrant labour. British capitalism is in deep crisis and the rate of profit has undergone a massive decline. Any improvement in the condition of immigrant workers would only worsen this decline and affect all sections of British capitalism.
Capitalist democracy allows a whole section of the labour aristocracy to obtain comfortable, influential and lucrative posts as trade union officials, committee men, journalists, lawyers, MPs, academics, economists etc. These people, claiming to speak for the interests of the whole working class in fact represent only a privileged layer.
They bargain with the capitalists for their share of the profits, and they fight to persuade the mass of the working class that its interests are served by capitalism. This labour aristocracy, represented by the Labour party and its apologists, has encouraged division between British workers and other workers around the world. The working class movement should be an international movement but it is divided because British workers have been led to identify their interests with those of British imperialism against those of the oppressed, both against migrant workers and oppressed black sections of the working class within Britain, and against whole countries dominated by imperialism around the world. This is divide and rule, buying sections of the working class off with crumbs.
Hand in hand with state repression, immigration controls, discrimination and media racism has been a conscious effort to create a privileged section of black people, creating a layer of the black community which is loyal to British imperialism and who can act as spokesmen for the community and can play a role in moderating and holding in check the struggle. We saw these forces demobilizing the mass Black Lives Matter protests into charitable foundations and ‘parliamentary action’.
Throughout the last 60 years, migrant workers and black people in Britain have regularly been at the forefront of resistance, an emerging vanguard.
From migrant workers at Grunwick film processing laboratories in 1976, who held a two year strike despite racism from the trade union leaders and mass police violence on the picket line, to black youth defending their communities against police repression in Brixton, Mosside, Liverpool 8, Bradford and other cities in 1981, from Muslim youth leading militant struggles against Britain’s war drive and support for Israel, directly protesting Labour MP constituency offices and exposing their role in the genocide in Palestine to migrants in Calais storming the channel tunnel each night in 2015 – migrant workers and black youth who have no ties to the imperialist system have broken beyond the barriers of social democracy’s respectable and ineffective protest to mount real resistance. Suffering the brunt of the imperialist crisis, poverty, unemployment and racism, they are forced into direct confrontation with the imperialist state. They not only have no ties to imperialism but represent a political force which can unite the struggle of the working class in the imperialist countries with the anti-imperialist struggle for national liberation throughout the world.
Our role as communists is to support and defend this trend and argue that any movement to fight racism must be anti-imperialist. Because racism and imperialism are inseparable the fight against racism must be a fight to overthrow the basis of racism – the British imperialist state. An anti-racist movement must not only defend black and Asian people and migrant workers in this country but must also actively support all those fighting imperialism, particularly British imperialism, throughout the world. It must oppose and fight all attacks on black and Asian people and in particular must oppose all immigration controls.
A movement built on the basis of international working class interests will be capable of showing why it is in the interests of the white section of the working class to join the struggle against racism and forge real unity with migrants. The working class in Britain and oppressed people all over the world have a common interest in overthrowing the British imperialist state. There can be no question of a struggle for socialism unless a working class anti-imperialist, anti-racist movement is built. The fight against racism inevitably becomes a fight against British imperialism and its state.
