Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No. 14, 15 November/15 December 1981
The uprisings in British cities last July decisively confirmed the revolutionary vanguard role of black youth. They provided the impetus for the most significant challenge that the British state has met internally for decades. Their lead was readily followed by sections of dispossessed white youth. The youth in recognising the need to fight the forces of the British state have taken the first major step towards creating a communist movement in Britain. Their instinctive solidarity with the national liberation struggles and their own actions show that they are part of the growing worldwide movement that sees the fundamental enemy as imperialism.
There could be no greater contrast than that between the youth battling on the streets and the complacent inactivity of the British Labour and trade-union Movement in the face of the attacks being made by the Thatcher government on the working class. The British Leyland dispute says it all. The leadership of the unions, the skilled and privileged workers chose to hold on to what they had rather than fight to improve the position of the low-paid manual workers at Leyland. The privileged section of workers at Leyland and elsewhere have consistently accepted redundancies and small (for them) reductions in living standards knowing full well that this merely adds to the ranks of the unemployed. Throughout the post-war boom these privileged workers have increased their standard of living, sharing the spoils of imperialism at the expense of the oppressed both at home and abroad. Arising from their privileged position comes their loyalty to British imperialism and their contempt for the oppressed and unemployed. The British Labour Party gives political expression to the narrow, selfish, chauvinist outlook of this privileged layer.
The stark contrast between the revolutionary youth and the conservative Labour movement presents a grave problem for the middle-class socialist. They have always looked to the ‘big battalions’ of the British Labour movement to lead the struggle for socialism. Consequently they must work in or with the imperialist Labour Party to reach their political goal. However, they are faced with two inescapable facts. First, that these ‘big battalions’ and indeed the whole imperialist Labour Party tradition have been proved rotten and bankrupt, concerned only with their own narrow interests – far removed from the struggle for socialism. Second, that it is the youth on the streets, who are showing the traditions struggle, solidarity and class hatred associated with all real revolutionary movements.
This reality threatens to expose the middle-class socialists’ preposterous claims to have any revolutionary socialist credentials at all. After all they have chosen to ally with the pro-imperialist Labour Party rather than the revolutionary forces of the youth. To justify this choice, they have been forced to explicitly deny the revolutionary potential of black working class youth. Indeed they have now gone so far as to deny that the black youth are part of the working class at all!
In the most pernicious racist article yet produced by a so-called revolutionary socialist organisation, the SWP has decided that the black youth are ‘lumpen’. Not daring to openly admit that his main concern is black youth, the author Jonathan Neal coins the phrase ‘street people’.
‘… The street people are the vulnerable under-belly of the working class. The SPG cops who practise on black kids in Brixton graduate to picket lines.
‘Their economic position makes street people militant, angry, and disorganised . . . The protests can be very angry indeed — they burn down whole cities. But in the end they die away, because there is no organisation and nothing to hold onto.’ (Socialist Review 13 1981)
That this is the official view of the SWP is shown in an article by their leading academic Chris Harman in which he says:
‘In the long term, however, the energy displayed on the streets will be dissipated unless it moves to a terrain more favourable for the building of permanent organisation — to the workplaces’.
‘Attempts to organise these youth can also channel the anger from the streets into the ranks of powerful sections of the class’ (International Socialism 14 1981)
Here we see it is not a question of ‘permanent organisation’ but the political content of that organisation. The power of the ‘big battalions’ is impotent so long as it is not consciously directed against the British state and British imperialism. For as long as these ‘powerful sections of the class’ are dominated by privileged pro-imperialist layers then the power of the dockers, miners, etc. will be used to defend their own sectional interest and not those of the working class as a whole.
Once this is understood and shorn of rhetoric the SWP’s position is a call to divert the revolutionary struggle of the youth into the safer channels of the Labour movement, in order to prevent black working class youth from exercising their revolutionary influence on the working class movement as a whole.
That is why in an earlier period the SWP, fearful of black youth clashing with the NF and the police on the streets, set up the Anti-Nazi-League, an alliance with racist Labour politicians. It is no coincidence that this once-massive ANL now barely exists at a time when fascist attacks are mounting daily.
Harman and the SWP fear revolutionary struggle, particularly when it takes a violent form and is completely divorced from the more lofty concerns (Benn, the Labour Party, CND etc) of the British left. That this is the real motive rather than a supposed concern for ‘permanent organisation’ is shown by the SWP’s attitude to the revolutionary organisations created by the oppressed out of their struggle. Thus they say that the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in the USA in the 1960s relied for its cadre ‘largely on lumpen elements’ and this they say gave rise to internal and leadership problems. In fact the League of Revolutionary Black Workers was built from caucuses of revolutionary black workers in the car plants of Detroit. At its height it was largely composed of black workers and had strong influence in the car plants, hospitals and newspaper industry. One of the main factors in its destruction was the scabbing role played by the local and national trade union leaders, many of them associated, in the 1930s, with the socialist movement of that time. It was the isolation imposed by the racist Labour movement on this black revolutionary organisation which allowed black anti-communists to undermine it from within, as the state and its Labour movement allies destroyed it from without. The lessons to be drawn from this experience are the direct opposite of those drawn by the SWP. For it is into the arms of such a pro-imperialist racist Labour movement that the SWP wishes to draw black working class youth today. And if the youth refuse to be drawn then the SWP will scornfully dismiss them and their revolutionary methods as lumpen and incapable of giving rise to socialist organisation. This is said in order to turn the rest of the working class away from the revolutionary lead which the black youth are giving.
Again we can see ‘permanent organisation’ is not the issue for when the oppressed create or turn to a real revolutionary organisation to consolidate and take forward their struggle on the streets, then we find again that the SWP attacks them. If they use revolutionary force to fight imperialism they will not meet with the SWP’s approval. We only need to look at the Provisional IRA whose ranks are full of those who were the young working class street fighters of Derry and Belfast in 1969. The IRA is a ‘permanent organisation’. But the SWP consistently attacks and slanders it. Of its leaders they say:
‘… the leaders are full of their own bullshit and political gamesmanship, cut off from reality, never grasping the real initiative, their forms of organisation (road blocks, searches, military offensives) a carbon copy of the methods of the British state’.
This they say of the leadership of a revolutionary organisation confronting the armed might of the British state. It is no surprise that in order to keep their ‘respectable’ image, so necessary for work in the Labour movement, the SWP call on the IRA to give up its military struggle. Whether it be petrol bombs in the hands of the Liverpool 8 youth or the Armalite in the hands of an IRA volunteer, the SWP’s reaction is the same — Drop it!
The SWP’s racist contempt for black youth fighting on the streets and Irish revolutionaries fighting an armed struggle against British imperialism has nothing to do with communism. Indeed the SWP’s socialism has everything in common with that of the Fabian Socialists of the nineteenth century — the elitist, paternalistic, pacifist group of middle class social reformers who saw their superior British selves as leading humanity on the path of salvation.
The SWP has not learned what Lenin taught us long ago — that a fundamental split exists in the inter-national working class movement between a privileged pro-imperialist layer and the dispossessed anti-imperialist masses. The revolutionary movement has no future if it does not build on the anti-imperialist masses. That is why Lenin argued that ‘the essence of Marxist tactics … is … to go down lower and deeper to the real masses. For ‘the “lowest mass”, the real majority … are not infected by “bourgeois respectability”‘. But it is just this respectability that the SWP has chosen and which drives it to attempt to divert the anger of the black youth into the Labour movement. The communist position is quite clear. It consists:
‘in work that brings closer and merges into a single whole the elemental destructive force of the masses and the conscious destructive force of the organisation of revolutionaries.’ (Lenin)
Today that means recognising the revolutionary role played by the black youth who took part in the uprisings. Communists must work with them to prevent the future movement that they represent from being isolated and crushed by the British state and its allies. Out of this will arise a new communist movement.
