Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 134 December 1996/January 1997
This article is a shortened version of a speech on ‘The Poisonous Roots of Racism’ given at a London RCG Forum in October 1996 by MAXINE WILLIAMS.
The day to day reality of racism is vividly documented in this year’s Newham Monitoring Project Report*. It is a catalogue of racist attacks, police harassment and inactivity by Newham Council. In one typical case an Asian man was seriously assaulted outside his house. The police first failed to respond to his 999 call and then refused to come out. When he visited the police station he was told he should lobby Parliament for more money for the police and that he should ask his attacker for his name and address. There are dozens of such examples where the police give carte blanche to all racists to do as they please knowing they will get away with it (p18).
The police also get away with their racist attacks and even murders. In late 1994 Shiji Lapite died having been kicked, punched and bitten by police, finally dying from suffocation caused by a police choke-hold. Despite an inquest verdict of unlawful killing no officer has been prosecuted.
The situation in the areas of east London covered by the Newham Report is particularly dire as a result of the deadly combination of an increasingly violent core of white working class racists being mobilised by fascist organisations and protected by the police. But the situation is exacerbated by the way in which local authorities, usually Labour, have utterly abandoned the working class, black and white, but promise sections of white people marginal privileges to keep them loyal. This has proved divisive and has encouraged the growth of racism.
Recently, local Social Services heads said that the cost of paying for asylum seekers would mean that they would be unable to finance community care for old people. The local authorities, most of them Labour, have again given the fascists the cards to play with.
The political context of racism is the stage imperialism has reached in the late 20th century. In the major capitalist countries there is a crisis with millions unemployed and savage cuts being made in welfare provision. The Thatcherite agenda, leaving the British working class with the worst welfare provision and the highest differentials in income between rich and poor, is currently being unleashed in Europe. Underlying the debate on European monetary union is the knowledge that state spending must be cut if such a union is to take place, but also the fear that without union there will be rivalries in Europe that could, as they have done twice this century, lead to war.
What is the capitalist system but a system of looting and banditry on so massive a scale that it appears normal? If you live amongst sharks no doubt shark-like behaviour appears normal. So it is accepted that at a time when the world has never been richer, the majority of people in the world — including a sizeable section of the people of the rich nations — are struggling to survive. And in the poor nations, are not surviving. At a time when world arms spending is $1.4m per minute, the spending per capita on the health of people in the poor countries is $22 dollars per year. 130 million children in poor nations have no education. Two million children have died in recent years due to the absence of immunisation but since 1945 $8,000 billion has been spent on nuclear weapons.
Are our rulers trying to tell us something? Yes — that mass slaughter to keep their system intact is necessary, health care is not. The wars that have made this century the most violent in human history (250 wars and 109,746,000 deaths) are the product of imperialism, the fight to maintain their superiority over each other through their domination over different regions of the world. Few question whether the US has the right to regularly bomb Baghdad or to fund the Taliban in Afghanistan. That’s their bit. Nobody questions the right of Germany to stealthily enlarge itself by the economic annexation of parts of Eastern Europe. That’s their bit.
We are seeing the reality of imperialism: militarism, nationalism, poverty in the rich countries and starvation in the poor. Vicious trade terms are imposed on poor nations, terms that have virtually wiped Africa off the economic map of the world and led recently to the charming debate about whether some African nations should be privatised and sold to multinationals.
But in the eyes of those who rule the world this doesn’t matter. After all, the victims are poor and black. Alongside the redivision of the world between rich nations goes not just an increasing contempt and stony-heartedness about the poor of the world, but a rise in nationalism and racism. As the capitalist countries rival each other, they whip up patriotism and its twin, racism. Throughout Europe there have been moves to restrict immigration, to deny benefits to and deport asylum seekers. Britain’s recent Asylum Act is in place and race checks by councils, hospitals, colleges and social security are now routine. Asylum seekers are forced onto the streets or onto local authority provision of the most basic kind. Often, as in Germany and in Britain, during the debate on the asylum bill, governments argue that the only way to stop the growth of fascism is to implement its racist programme for it.
And so we have a situation where the capitalists of the rich nations impoverish the poor nations and then erect barriers to keep out refugees fleeing the resulting civil wars and poverty. The level of desperation created is illustrated by the finding of a dead body recently, thought to be of someone who had stowed under an aircraft and fallen out as it landed.
These are the imperialist roots of racism. The systematic impoverishment of large areas of the world and the stigmatisation of those living there as inferior. Of course, now in a period when millions are unemployed across Europe, the new immigration controls aim to keep people out. It was a different story in the 1950s when these countries suffered from a labour shortage in low-paid jobs and encouraged immigration. But from the 1970s onwards no more immigrant labour was needed and controls multiplied until we had John Major saying in 1991: ‘We must not be wide open to all corners simply because Paris, Rome or London seem more attractive than Bombay or Algiers.’ A ‘strong perimeter fence’ must keep people out.
Immigration controls expose the roots of racism. A minority of the world lives well at the expense of billions in poverty. The post-war period, despite huge economic growth, did not alter that position. The gains in income made per person between 1964 and 1994 were 22 times higher in the rich nations. Racism is the form taken in imperialist countries by national oppression, reflecting and mirroring the oppressive relations of imperialism. And it is constantly being recreated, as the poor nations are held in their position both by economics and by force.
Of course the way in which these things are articulated has become more sophisticated in recent years. They would not today say, as for example the Labour Party programme said in 1917, ‘nobody contends that the black races are fit to govern themselves’, referring to them as the ‘non-adult races’. Now when the big boys intervene in Africa or elsewhere they are more likely to call it Operation Help Everybody. But it is still done with guns.
And this relation has had profound consequences in the rich nations for the working class. A split was created there between a richer section of the working class, bribed with the profits of imperialism and other poorer sections of the working class. The labour parties and trade unions reacted with fierce racism to immigrant labour. By the late 1960s the TUC was calling for a quota of immigrant labour in sections of industry and rejecting anti-discriminatory laws on the grounds that ‘people being protected might be put in a privileged position’.
Only the language changes. The recent Asylum Act was not opposed by the Labour Party. As Jack Straw said: ‘There is no need for this measure to be controversial. There is agreement across the floor … on the need to cut abuse and delays while meeting our international obligations. The issue is how this should be achieved, how that balance between firmness and fairness should be struck.’ Labour’s argument was that you could save £160m by shovelling out asylum seekers within three months.
That is in line with the whole of Labour history which has always placed the interests of British imperialism above all others. We do not need to wonder what a Labour government will be like — we remember they enthusiastically introduced the 1968 Immigration Act, that they used the police to suppress the Grunwick strikers, they used the police to assault anti-fascist demonstrators in Southall in 1979, when 1,000 people were injured and Blair Peach killed.
They will be like that today but worse. Look at Labour councils. They are festering cesspits of corruption, chaos and utter contempt for their working class residents. And as the poorer sections of whites feel abandoned and attacked, they will be encouraged to turn against the black people in their areas.
It is therefore vital that the socialist movement goes into those areas and takes up the issues of concern to black and white local people, actively fighting racism in the process. Anti-racism must mean not only assisting and aiding the struggle of black people against racism, it must mean fighting against the conditions which produce racism, fighting to build a socialist core in the working class — black and white.
Black people have a long tradition in Britain of organising to fight for their right to defend themselves. That struggle has its ups and downs, it has periods when it is more likely to be controlled by opportunists, Labour MPs and so on, and other periods when it is more in the hands of working class black people. It has a tradition strong enough to ensure that when black people die in police custody the community responds, often militantly. Today it is the Hillingdon strikers, mainly Asian women, taking on one of the longest struggles against the effects of privatisation in the health service.
The question for the left is not only to fight racism but also to raise the questions that have driven poor sections of the white working class into racist organisations. On housing for example, the history of local councils is shocking and they tried, in the East End, to overcome an absolute shortage of housing by a discriminatory policy of preferential housing for whites. We have to fight such divisive politics, to say that Labour has abandoned and betrayed the whole working class, that socialists are for housing for all and will fight for this. That socialists, unlike the recent Social Services statement I spoke of at the beginning, believe that both old people and asylum seekers must be protected and not forced to compete. We must fight the Labour councils who are saying this, force them to provide decent services or get out.
The roots of racism lie in the imperialist system and only by building a movement against this system, which has at its core opposition to racism and support for the interests of the working class, can we kill off those roots.
*The Newham Monitoring Project Annual
Report 1996, available from NMP, 382
Katherine Road, London E78NW
