Racism – World Socialist Movement

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Racism
31st May 2020
Pamphlet
Some people claim that human beings can be divided into races on the basis of physical characteristics like skin colour, and racism is the theory that one group of people, identified in this way as a “race”, is superior to another. Racism results in hostility towards the group thought of as inferior, the practice of discrimination and persecution, and in some cases it has led to genocide.
Despite the fact that there is no evidence to support racism it
continues to cause suffering for those who are its victims. Today, as in
the past, different ideas and theories have been used to support
racism, and different groups have been singled out as the victims of
racist oppression.
This pamphlet tries to understand the origins and causes of racism
and also to demonstrate the emptiness of racists’ claims. For, without
an understanding of why, and in what circumstances, racism arises, we
will surely not be able to effectively eradicate it. Nor, without an end
to racism will we be able to establish a system of society where
divisions and hostility between people are replaced by unity and
cooperation.
Contents
01  Racism: A Historical View
02  What is Race?
03  Anti-Semitism
04  Racism in the United States
05  Racism in South Africa
06  Racism in Britain
07  The Migration of Workers
08  Why Racism?
09  The Effects of Racism
10  What Is To Be Done?
Chapter 1: Racism: A Historical View
Racism is the theory that people of one race are superior to another.
It often results in hostility towards the race thought of as inferior
and in the practice of discrimination, persecution, and, in some cases
even genocide. Racism asserts that human beings are divided into races
which are distinguished by their physical characteristics, their
cultural patterns and their modes of behaviour. These characteristics
are supposed to conform to a type and to be inherited and unchanging.
But such is the confusion of racism that the stereotypes are often
widely variable. For example when racists condemn blacks as lazy and
feckless, it is not unusual for the same people also to fear black
workers as a threat to jobs which, they argue, should “belong”to white
workers. Asian immigrants to Britain are often criticised as primitive
and anarchic but they are also seen as an alien influence on the
commerce of this country because in some areas they have taken over
shops and petrol stations, which could hardly be operated by people who
were backward and disorganised. Some of the ideas that were first used
to try to justify racism came from religion.
Religious Racism
It is only during the past 150 years or so that attempts have been
made to put racism on a scientific footing. Before that discriminatory
practices were usually justified, or condemned, on religious grounds.
The discovery of the Americas was something of a blow to believers in
the idea of the Creation; St. Augustine had written that humankind “has
sprung from one protoplasm”, so that there needed to be something of a
rethink to accommodate the people in the newly-discovered lands. One way
out was to decide that they could not be descendants of Adam and Eve,
which had the added “advantage”of excusing such atrocities as the
Spanish inflicted on the American Indians. In 1510 a Scottish professor,
John Major, applied the doctrine of “natural slavery”to the Indians,
arguing that using force against them was justified as a preliminary to
converting them to Christianity. The debate on this issue revolved
around religious theories and was exclusively concerned with the
American Indians; the negroes were not considered.
Religious theories were also used at first when negro slaves began to
arrive in the West Indies in the 17th century. Slave trading had become
big business when the demand for sugar and rum in England increased
dramatically. In the years between 1663 and 1775 English sugar
consumption rose twenty fold and this led to a pressing demand for
slaves on the sugar plantations. These two demands – for sugar and
slaves – allied to the rise of British manufacture, made the elements of
a triangular trading arrangement in which vast fortunes were amassed.
From the ports of London, Liverpool and Bristol, ships carried goods
such as textiles, cutlery, gunpowder and beer. These were exchanged on
the coasts of Africa for slaves who had been captured in the interior
and who had been force-marched to the coast, often under fearsomely
brutal guards. The slaves were packed like sardines, rank upon rank,
into the ships and taken to the West Indies where they were exchanged
for sugar, molasses, rum and tobacco for transport to England.
That part of the triangle in which the slaves were transported from
Africa to the West Indies was known as the middle passage and it soon
became notorious for the conditions in which the negroes were
transported (the stench of a slave ship was said to be detectable almost
a mile away) and for the brutality inflicted on them, although this was
to some extent held in check by the fact that the slaves were a
valuable cargo. During the 1680s the death rate of slaves in transit was
about one in four – a rate which could be matched, or even overtaken,
by that for the seamen who were also subject to the cruelty of ships’
captains and officers.
It is no exaggeration to say that this trade, and this cruelty,
provided the foundation for a significant part of the development of the
British capitalist class. In 1788 the manufacturer, Samuel Taylor,
stated that each year about £200,000 worth of goods was shipped from
Manchester to Africa, of which about £180,000 was spent on buying black
slaves. The gun industry of Birmingham and the copper industry of
Swansea were nourished on the trade and the ports of London, Liverpool
and Bristol – especially the last two – prospered mightily on it.
Between 1630 and 1807 the slave merchants of Britain made an estimated
profit of £12 million on the 2½ million slaves they bought and sold,
about half of which accrued to them during the 40 years between 1750 and
1790. The profits accumulated in the triangular trade were often
reinvested in rising industries such as coal and iron in South Wales,
iron in South Yorkshire, textiles in Lancashire, and the great rail
networks. Funds were also used to set up banks some of which have been
absorbed into today’s Big Five.
In the cities where they operated, the people who profited from the
slave trade were pillars of respectability and often staunch supporters
of the church. They became members of Parliament and were given titles:
Thomas Johnson was knighted in 1708 and Ellis Cunnliffe was made a
baronet in 1767. For 35 of the years between 1700 to 1820, Liverpool had
a Lord Mayor who was a slave merchant or was related to one. It was a
similar story in other slave ports: William Beckford was an alderman of
the City of London, sheriff (1755-6) and Lord Mayor (1762-3 and 1769-70)
apart from being MP for Shaftesbury and then London.
Beckford’s wealth was based on his huge landholding in Jamaica and
his interests as a merchant in London. This cruelty, this trade, and
these riches, were at first justified on the grounds that the slaves
were heathens, which had the disadvantage for the slave owners that a
slave could gain freedom -in theory at any rate – through conversion to
Christianity. Another approach –more satisfactory to the slave owners –
was to argue that the negroes were inferior and so quite proper subjects
for ruthless exploitation by the colonising powers.
This argument was at first extremely crude, a compound of demonology,
sexual fears and commercial interest. In the late 17th century Thomas
Herbert speculated that negro women copulated with baboons and that
negroes practised cannibalism as an expression of friendship to the
victim: “They know no surer way to express true love than in making (not
two souls) two bodies one in an inseparable union.”Later, as the theory
of the so-called Chain of Creation took root, negroes were assigned a
place between humans and animals. In 1757 a German surgeon stated that
negro blood was black and blackened bandages. Forty years later the
Manchester surgeon Charles White compared anatomical features of negroes
and whites and concluded that in terms of bodily structure the negro
was the closer to the ape. (Although White held that negroes were
generally equal to Europeans and was an opponent of slavery.)
“Scientific” Racism
The debate moved onto a different, wider plane in the 19th century
when there was a rash of publications which sought to explain not just
the slave trade but most of human history and culture on the basis of
racial difference. Robert Knox, a Scottish doctor, published his
theories in 1850: “With me, race, or hereditary descent is everything;
it stamps the man”. Knox placed the races he classified as
“Slavonian”and “Gothic”at the top, above the “Saxon”, “Celt”, “Italian”.
In 1853 the French aristocrat Count Gobineau produced his
Essay On the Inequality of the Human Races
a complex theory which linked racial superiority with class: “A society
is great and brilliant only as far as it preserves the blood of the
noble group that created it, provided that this group itself belongs to
the most illustrious branch of our species”, Gobineau was one of the
first to put forward the theory of the superiority of the “Aryan”race,
identifying the aristocracy with Aryans while the lower classes were
merely a confusion of the “Negroid and the Semite”, His ideas were
subsequently very influential in European politics, literature and
history.
Attempts to change the basis of racist thinking from religious
persecution and sexual neurosis to something more scientific were given a
new impetus by a misinterpretation of Charles Darwin’s theory of
natural selection. The appearance of
The Origin of Species
threw
a new light on the debate over race and some writers used Darwin’s
ideas in formulating a general law of social development. This law
became known as ‘Social Darwinism’ and can be most simply expressed as
an application of the principle of “survival of the fittest”. One of
these writers was Walter Bagehot, an influential figure in politics, who
argued in 1873 that “those nations which are strongest tend to prevail
over the others; and in certain marked peculiarities the strongest tend
to be the best”.
In fact Bagehot’s words expose the basic problem of Social Darwinism,
which is that the theory defines both fitness and survival in terms of
each other. Thus: those who survived must be the fittest; how do we know
they are the fittest? Because they survived. Of course Social Darwinism
was useful in justifying the expansion of European capitalism into the
colonies of Africa, India and the Far East. The fact that European
states had conquered and occupied vast areas of the earth proved that
they were the fittest and should therefore dominate the subject peoples.
And the fact that they were the fittest proved that they should survive
and continue to subjugate others.
The second half of the nineteenth century was the heyday of
pseudo-scientific racism which produced a mass of “evidence”. It led to
many different and confused ideas about the dividing line between races.
Some of this investigation was used in anthropology, by people like
Paul Broca in France, John Beddoe in England and Otto Ammon in Germany.
It was partly based on the measurement of physical characteristics,
particularly the proportions and shape of the skull and the nose. By
relating these to social features such as the numbers of each group who
tended to live in cities, it was possible to formulate a theory that
long-headed people (classified as Nordics) were superior to the
flat-headed (Alpines and Celts). Nordics, ran the theory, were the more
aggressive and enterprising people while the Alpines and the Celts  were
more anxious and submissive; Nordics were also blonde while Alpines and
Celts were dark or sallow. This was married to a concern that the
Nordics were threatened with being outbred by the fast breeding and
immigration of the others. In 1885 Beddoe warned that “the Gaelic and
Iberian races of the West, mostly dark-haired, are tending to swamp the
blond Teutons of England by a reflux migration. At the same time, the
possible effects of conjugal selection, of selection through disease,
and the relative increase of the darker types through the more rapid
multiplication of the artisan class, should be kept in view”.
In fact such anthropological investigations could be applied in any
way that suited the prejudice of the user. While Beddoe pronounced on
the approach of the Gaelic menace, Broca deduced from his findings that
the French, who were part of the broad-headed Alpines or Celts, were the
superior race. It was more than coincidence that Broca’s superior
assessment of the broad-headed came when France was in a fervour of
nationalism after defeat in the Franco-Prussian war.
At the end of the 19th century, an Englishman living in Germany,
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, repeated the claim that flaxen haired, blue
eyed Nordics were distinguished by inherent qualities of strength,
leadership and inventiveness. In his
Foundations of the Nineteenth Century
published in 1899, he stated: “The amount of Nordic blood in each
nation is a very fair measure of its strength and standing in
civilisation”. Chamberlain’s theories were very popular in Germany,
which was at that time in transition into a modern, expansionist
capitalist state. Germany came late onto the scene of imperialism, with a
need to compete in the scramble for what was left of areas like Africa.
Theories of racial superiority such as Chamberlain’s were useful
propaganda for the German ruling class. The Kaiser ordered that
Chamberlain’s book should be on display in libraries and bookshops
throughout the country and that it be distributed to all officers in the
German army.
In fact Chamberlain, who was a fanatical anti-semite, had constructed
a definition of a superior race which cunningly embraced a number of
physical types, so as to include all Germans except Jews. Extreme
nationalists seized on these ideas, which made the Jews a particular
scapegoat for the problems of the German people. A lot of what happened
later – the defeat of Germany in the 1914-18 war and the subsequent
economic and political crises – was analysed in terms of a Jewish
conspiracy to undermine the purity of the Aryan people. This prejudiced
neurosis was successfully exploited by the Nazis in their climb to power
during the late 1920s and early 1930s.
As a result, the German state under the Nazis was characterised by an
official policy of racism, backed by theories which plumbed new depths
of absurdity and horror. To begin with, like Chamberlain, the Nazis
defined an ideal racial type which included all Germans who were not
Jews. When it suited their purpose – as in the case of the expansionist
ambitions of the German ruling class towards the Saar and Czechoslovakia
– they claimed that all Germans everywhere had an essential affinity
and must therefore be united into one nation. In contrast, the Jews were
not just racially inferior; they were malignant as vermin and should be
destroyed. “Anti-semitism”, said the SS leader Heinrich Himmler in
October 1943, “is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is
not a question of ideology, it is a matter of cleanliness. In just this
same way anti-semitism for us has not been a question of ideology but a
matter of cleanliness.”
Nazi orators ranted about the bonds of German “blood”, as if it were
in some way different from the blood of people in other countries. The
Nazis’ preoccupation with such fallacies was typical of the prejudices
they disseminated. At times, the needs of the German leadership were
such that the Nazis had to modify their racism, exposing it in the
process for the bigotry that it was. So after the wartime treaty between
Italy and Germany the Italians, who by the standards of Nazi theories
were an inferior racial group, were suddenly elevated into the ranks of
the superior. A more glaring example came with the entry of Japan into
the war in 1941. This was particularly difficult for the Nazis, who
found themselves in alliance with a racial group classified by them as
inferior. They solved the problem to their satisfaction by effectively
granting the Japanese the status of “honorary”Aryans and thus exempting
them from racial discrimination and repression.
America
: The Melting Pot?
The racism which originated and developed in Europe was used in
America to justify the system of chattel slavery which existed there. In
the 17th century the southern states relied on an economy which might
be described as plantation capitalism. Money was invested with the
object of realising a profit for the investor, not only in the
plantations of tobacco and cotton but also in the human beings who were
put to work there as slaves. The American planters adopted the same
sorts of justification for their ownership of slaves as had people in
other countries, like Britain, who had also grown rich on the transport
of slaves. At first they claimed that negroes were heathens, then that
Christian teaching showed the black race to be inferior to the white and
therefore fit for enslavement (a theory also held by the Ku Klux Klan) ;
and finally that there was biological and anthropological evidence for
the blacks’ “inferiority”.
But not all whites in America were happy with the slave system. In
particular the growing industrial capitalist interests of the northern
states wanted a free labour market throughout the country to be able to
develop and expand those interests without the hindrance of slavery.
This led to the American Civil War which was not however fought
principally about the emancipation of the slaves. At the outset of the
war, Abraham Lincoln declared: “My paramount object in this struggle is
to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I
could save the Union without freeing any slaves, I would do it”. In
practice, the negroes found that “emancipation”meant that a whole
complex of discriminatory and repressive barriers – economic, social,
legal – were erected against them. In public places such as parks and
beaches they were allocated separate, inferior facilities; on public
transport and in places like restaurants they were forced to sit apart
from whites. Their children could only attend segregated schools and
colleges. In many states racism went beyond mere segregation; in the
Deep South negroes were commonly murdered, out of simple malice, and the
killers were allowed to go free, without arrest, trial or penalty.
Indeed, in some cases the culprits actually boasted of what they had
done and were that much more popular locally as a result.
This discrimination required the support of a legal system, for if
blacks were to be excluded from certain places and opportunities it was
necessary to have a definition of a negro. In theory amendments to the
Federal constitution freed the slaves. For example the 14
th
amendment said: “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall
abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United
States.”In spite of this the southern states enacted what were called
the Black Codes, which effectively forced the negroes back into
servitude.
When it became necessary to decide who was, and who was not, a negro,
then the laws were exposed in all their absurdity. In 1904 in
Louisiana, a court decided that the word “negro”did not necessarily
include persons “in whom the admixture is so slight that even a
scientific expert could not be positive of its presence”. That same
year, again in Louisiana, it was decided that an “appreciable amount”of
“Negro blood”made a person a negro within the law – without
satisfactorily defining “appreciable amount”. Most southern states
settled for “any ascertainable trace”of negro descent as a satisfactory
boundary between black and white, which meant that anyone having any
negro ancestor, no matter how remote, was classified as a negro. In fact
there were many cases in which people who were apparently white were
suddenly found to have a negro ancestry and then became ostracised as
racially inferior. This meant that someone defined as white in one state
might be classified as negro in another and could, therefore,
dramatically change their status simply by crossing a state boundary.
In the last analysis, this repression depended on the negroes being
denied the vote, which meant that they were without any political
influence. This was achieved by a multitude of tricks and deceptions. In
some cases the vote was only available to people who could satisfy the
local registrar that they understood the Constitution or were of
“good”character – and the local registrar always took care that no
blacks were so qualified. In Louisiana in 1898there was an attempt to
restrict the franchise to those who had voted in elections before 1867
and to their descendants; it was hardly likely that so soon after
official emancipation any great numbers of negroes would have been able
to vote in 1867. This meant that whereas in 1896 in Louisiana there were
130,334 registered negro voters, by 1904 this had fallen to 1,342. If
such legal moves failed, then the whites could still fall back on the
informal pressure of terror, violence and lynchings to force negroes to
“keep their place”.
It was possible for many southerners to deceive themselves about this
repression – to tell themselves that it was not happening, or that the
negroes were not capable of anything better, or that they were content
with their lot. A letter to the Guardian as recently as 14 April 1960,
from a judge in Burke County, Georgia (who described himself as “lawyer,
plantation owner, public official”and “a friend sympathetic to the
Negroes”) stated that during 30 years experience of hearing complaints
from black people he had never heard a single one about being denied the
right to vote. Such insidious complacency tended to conceal the
important fact that the whites were in a sense also disenfranchising
themselves. Political divisions within the dominant white group, and all
types of reform movements, were stifled in order to achieve the unity
needed to deny the vote to blacks.
As the party which had stood for the Union in the Civil War, the
Republicans suffered from this: for a long time the South was a Democrat
stronghold, where the policies of candidates did not matter as long as
they wore the right party label. This situation was ended in the 1950s,
when schools and other facilities were forcibly integrated and a
large-scale, determined and courageous voter registration campaign
enabled the American negroes to assert some political influence.
Nowadays it is common for the southern states to elect black people –
and Republicans – to all sorts of political offices. After the riots and
the use of the army in the 1950s there are officially no segregated
schools or colleges.
Politicians can now make successful appeals to the idea of American
national pride, but this cannot hide the racial divisions and prejudice
which still exist. For America is a country of immigrants. Besides black
slaves, America has absorbed millions of people from most parts of the
world, particularly from Europe. They were all looking for a better deal
for themselves as workers, often trying to escape from intolerable
conditions in their country of origin, like the Irish who flooded into
America after the potato famine of the 19th century. They came to a
hotbed of prejudice and the truth is there is still prejudice against
immigrants from the Caribbean such as Puerto Ricans, against Europeans
such as Poles and Germans, against Jews and many others. In each case
the rejection stems from a fear of competition – for a job, for a home,
for a place in the queue. The racial mixing of America might have been
an influence against prejudice. It might have convinced American workers
of the essential similarity of all human beings and of the essential
unity of the working class world-wide. Instead, because of the pressure
of scarcity, competition and suspicion, this has not happened.
Colonial Racism
Racism was also practised by white European people against those who
originated in Africa and Asia. During the century after 1815 almost the
whole of Asia, India, Africa and Australasia were colonised by the
capitalist powers of Europe. One particularly hectic episode was aptly
called the “scramble for Africa”. In the 1870s only about ten per cent
of the continent was colonised but by 1925 about 90 per cent of Africa
was under European rule.
This process often involved the creation of separate countries as the
imperialist powers drew arbitrary frontiers to mark off their gains.
Contact between these powers and the people they had subjugated was
rarely easy and frequently violent and bloody. For it was a matter of
the theft – more diplomatically known as annexation – of vast areas of
land, dispossessing a native population who had lived off it for
centuries. Of course they resisted – and of course they were crushed by
the armed forces of the annexing powers. As Hilaire Belloc put it:
Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun. And they have not.
This expansion was a very different matter to the development of the
plantations of America and the West Indies through the transport of
slave labour. The European powers took over Africa, Asia and the Far
East in their quest for the raw materials and markets demanded by their
expanding industrial economies. In the process they committed
atrocities, which they excused as necessary acts in the face of a native
population who were unwilling to accept the alleged benefits of
European civilisation.
Those “benefits”included such things as the settlement of farms by
Europeans on the most fertile land, the opening up of mines, the
construction of roads, bridges, railways, ports, schools, hospitals,
townships . . . It was easy to represent this as a marvellous gift of
enlightenment from a civilised people to a bunch of ungrateful savages
and to conclude that white Europeans were inherently superior to the
peoples they had forced into submission. The decimation of a tribe or
two was a small price to pay for the “benefits”.
This suppression was especially urgent and ruthless because it was
being applied by a small minority against vast numerical odds. At its
peak the British Empire contained some 372 million people of whom only
50 million were white. Such a minority could hardly have operated at any
level of efficiency or commitment had they not been bolstered by a
strong conviction of their own innate superiority. They could hardly
have condoned – or participated in – the massive cruelty of colonialism
had they not been persuaded that their mission was to uplift a lower
people.
The colonial administrator of Victorian times, with his high, stiff
collar, his pig-headed condescension and his mannered habits, is now
something of a figure of fun. But in his time he represented an
extremely powerful force. He stood for the ideology from which sprang
the racism that played so large a part in the history of Africa and
Asia. Although we may laugh at him now, he had the Maxim gun. From the
ideology he stood for came the apartheid of South Africa, racist
governments in places like Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and the political and
military repression which has attempted to hold at bay the rising tides
of African nationalism.
In most places that nationalism has won because it outgrew the
interests which stood in its way. Colonialism in most cases degenerated
into agricultural exploitation and held back industrial development in
the interests of maintaining markets for the exports of the colonial
powers. Colonies were often easy outlets for emigrant workers, who found
they could command very much higher standards of living than in their
country of origin. Inevitably these workers were among the bitterest and
most prejudiced opponents of the black nationalist movements; some of
their theories were extreme even for racists, their racial anecdotes
unlikely enough to strain the most elastic credibility. The triumph of
the nationalists was a bitter blow to white workers for they no longer
had a privileged position in the labour market.
Many of the nationalist movements called themselves socialist,
implying that they stood for revolutionary change in society which would
dispossess the owning class. What actually happened was the replacement
of the old colonial ruling class by a new one. Property society
continued, with its privileges, its inequalities and its corruption. In
the case of many new African states the transition took place on the
basis of an ideology of black nationalism. But the victory of black
nationalism in Africa has the promise, not of freedom but of the more
rapid development of industrial capitalism.
British Racism
Finally we can consider the more recent examples of racial prejudice
which have been the response of British workers to the post-war
immigration of people from the West Indies, Asia and Africa. This
immigration has been represented by some people – for example Enoch
Powell – as an act of madness which is undermining the basis of
civilised life in Britain. In fact it was a perfectly normal episode in
capitalism – the movement of a pool of unemployed workers from one area
to another. This happens all the time. For example the London area is
thickly populated with workers who came, or whose parents came, from
Wales, Ireland and Scotland. They travelled to London to escape from
unemployment in their home area, in the hope of finding work in the
capital.
When the black immigration began in the 1950s capitalism was in a
period of boom, with industries in this country generally suffering from
a shortage of labour. Firms where the work was particularly hard or
dirty or badly paid were experiencing special difficulty, as were
services like public transport and hospitals where the hours and other
conditions were unattractive. Capitalism’s classic remedy to this
problem is to call on its pool of unemployed.
But at that time there was no such pool in Britain. Between 1950 and
1960 the average percentage unemployment in the United Kingdom was under
1.7. So industry here had to look abroad for workers to do the jobs
which, in a time of relatively full employment, were difficult to fill.
Citizens of British colonies were granted United Kingdom citizenship
under the Nationality Act of 1948, which meant that workers from the
West Indies and Pakistan could come to Britain and stay for as long as
they liked. At the same time conditions in those countries were a strong
encouragement to emigrate. In the West Indies there was widespread
unemployment, unrelieved by any system of dole or social security. One
traditional outlet – the United States – had been blocked by the
McLarran-Walter Act of 1952. The Indian sub-continent had suffered
persistent impoverishment under British rule and the upheaval of the
partition into India and Pakistan deprived millions of their jobs and
their homes. These factors, together with the ever-present threat of
natural calamities such as floods and crop failures and unnatural ones
such as religious massacres, made the prospect of emigration especially
attractive.
The first immigrants – about 500, from Jamaica – came in 1948. The London
Evening Standard
(21
June) headlined the event “Welcome Home” and the new arrivals were
quickly found work. For the next few years the annual inflow was
numbered in hundreds, until 1952 when it reached about 2,000. Thereafter
it increased rapidly: 24,000 in 1954, 22,000 in 1957, until by 1958
there were some 125,000 West Indians in this country. By that time there
were also about 55,000 immigrants from India and Pakistan. Many had
been actively encouraged to come here by the concerns which were
suffering a shortage of labour. London Transport (as it then was) set up
recruiting offices in the West Indies, and West Indian nurses were
welcomed to work in National Health hospitals by none other than the
then Minister of Health, Enoch Powell. Some companies which had
recruited immigrant workers encouraged them to persuade their friends
and families back home to come and join them on the production line.
As the trickle of immigration became a flood it exerted the
predictable pressure on the limited resources in housing, schooling,
medical care and social services. Competition brought its reaction of
prejudice, and not just from openly racist organisations. In many cases
trade unions opposed the employment of black workers. In a
counter-reaction the immigrants tended to congregate in areas like
Brixton and Southall, Wolverhampton and Smethwick. As prejudice against
them hardened these were often the only places where a black skin was
not a bar to finding a home or friendship – which further accentuated
the tendency to congregate in particular areas. And, as is usually the
case, the immigrants were particularly vulnerable to landlords,
employers and others who were in a position to exploit their plight to
the limit.
This situation contained all the elements of explosive racial
prejudice. The immigrants’ skin colour made them easily identifiable.
They were concentrated in certain industries and areas, which promoted
the prejudice that they were a threat to the local worker’s chances of
finding a job and a home. They brought with them their own established
customs, language, culture and their own attitudes on sensitive issues
such as sexual relations and the family, all of which were liable to
distortion as an assault on established morals. It was not difficult to
expand these prejudices into a rampant neurosis which could effortlessly
multiply one black face in a hospital waiting area into a room full of
immigrants clamouring for immediate attention for all manner of exotic,
desperately contagious diseases.
As the 1958 riots in Nottingham and Notting Hill suggested, and the
1964 parliamentary election in Smethwick confirmed, racial prejudice had
become something of a political issue in Britain. Since then both
Labour and Tory governments have implemented racist immigration laws and
controls; the freedom of immigration of the 1948 Nationality Act has
disappeared into history. Prejudices have been inflamed and exploited by
the speeches of politicians like Duncan Sandys and Enoch Powell and by
the activities of groups like the National Front and British Movement.
These prejudices have not been supported by any scientific argument or
evidence: the racist case has usually been based on an imagined assault
on the “British way of life”. Racism continues to this day and
politicians continue to use it to distract the attention of workers away
from the real problems facing them.
Chapter 2: What is Race?
The word “race”was first used in the 17th century, as mercantilist
explorers from Europeencountered groups of people who were clearly of a
different physical appearance. Since then the word has been widely and
indiscriminately used – and abused – to the point at which any useful
meaning it ever had is in danger of being obscured. Today there are
scientists who will argue that the whole concept is incorrect, that
racial divisions do not exist in any valid sense. There are others who
argue the opposite case, and some who assert that not only do the
divisions exist but they also determine human behaviour, cultural
traditions, achievements and the like.
If we are to use the word “race”at all we must first do so as a
classification of human beings on the basis of physical characteristics.
We must be aware that we are discussing a human sub-group and that that
is the limit of the concept of race. In other words, human beings as a
whole are of one species; whatever their separate physical traits they
can all mate with each other and thereby produce offspring who are
themselves fertile. Thus humans with a black skin can mate with those
whose skin is white and their children can go on to produce offspring of
their own, and so on. This may seem too obvious to need spelling out,
except that racial prejudices can be so wild and extensive that at times
they bring this sort of demonstrable fact into question.
Suppose a race is defined, then, as a human sub-group distinguishable
from other sub-groups through some inherent physical characteristics.
If this is at all valid, a race must have physical characteristics which
are passed from one generation to the next and which are not present in
other races. At first sight this seems to fit in with the existence of
groups of people who can be classified as separate on the basis of
discernible physical features. To begin with the obvious, there are
people with black skin and people with white. Then there are others
whose skin might be described as yellow or brown. Whites tend to think
of blacks as having crinkly hair and broad, flat noses; of yellow people
as having slant eyes; of brown people as having straight, black hair
and brown eyes. On the other hand whites are thought of by the Chinese
as being hairy and having big noses. On this type of classification it
has been customary for investigators to divide human beings into five
main sub-groups – the European or Caucasian, the Asiatic or Mongoloid,
the American Indian or late Mongoloid, the African or Negroid and the
Australasian or Australoid.
But if these divisions are valid, it must be possible to draw
boundaries between races and to place all humans in one sub-group or
another. This brings us up against a number of problems. Firstly, there
are wide differences between individuals within each group; there are
many variations of skin colour and very few people who can properly be
described as “black”. There are very few, too, who can properly be
described as “white”while many who are categorised as “white”have skins
which are darker than many described as black. Then there are variations
in other characteristics, like brown people whose hair is thick and
wavy. And on the basis of physical appearance, in which race would we
place a person with a sallow skin, brown eyes, crinkly fair hair,
freckles and a snub nose?
Such questions as these make the whole concept of racial boundaries –
and therefore that of race itself – distinctly shaky. Investigators in
this field have also experienced this difficulty; such has been their
uncertainty over the whereabouts of racial boundaries that they have not
been able to agree on the number of races in existence. Their estimates
have varied from the four racial groups which were defined by Carl
Linnaeus to the 150 amassed by the American anthropologist George R.
Gliddon.
To resolve this difficulty we must take into account the fact that,
for all practical purposes, there is no such thing as a “pure”race.
Racial “purity”would depend on a group of people existing in conditions
of rigid and complete isolation, over centuries of exclusive inbreeding.
There may somewhere be such groups but the mass of humanity has not
existed in this manner. Since prehistoric times, as people began to be
able to protect themselves against natural forces, they have wandered
all over the world. The people we might classify as Celts spread out
from Western Europe to Asia Minor; the Teutons from the Black Sea area
to Spain, Italy and North Africa; the Slavs northwards to Russia and the
Balkans. The American Indians are descended from Mongoloid people who
crossed into America a long time before the first settlers arrived from
Europe. The American negro originated partly from a mixing of native
American Indians and Africans. Wherever humans have moved across the
world they have interbred, mixing their stock again and again. As human
society has developed – in particular with the shrinking of the world
through faster communications – the process of mixing has become
established and has accelerated. So the concept of a “pure”race is not
valid. If any such races exist they would be in very small, isolated
groups, absolutely untypical of the mass of the world’s people. In the
modern world, where the racists peddle their doctrines of racial
“purity”, it simply does not exist.
The science of biology has been important in the matter of race
because of the evidence that it provides to refute racist arguments. In
particular, increased understanding about the mechanisms of heredity –
the way in which physical characteristics are passed on from parents to
children through the transfer of genes that takes place at the moment of
conception –have shown the extent to which all human beings are
biologically alike. The physical characteristic of skin colour, to which
racists attach so much importance, is determined by only four genes out
of a total of about 100,000. In other words, whatever differences there
are between one racial group and another, people within anyone racial
group are genetically more different from each other than from people in
other racial groups. Humanity is  biologically one and all racial
groups have far more in common than they have differences.
The work of Charles Darwin, however much his conclusions have had to
be modified, provides a basis for an understanding of why there are
racial differences. All types of life, animal and plant, show variations
between individuals some of which may be progressive because they help
the organism to adapt and survive in its environment and others
regressive, in the sense that they hinder that adaptation or even
prevent it. So, in the case of racial differences, the dark skin of
people in Africa may have developed and dominated there through the
protection which that pigment in the skin gave against the tropical sun.
In places where the sun rarely, or never, reaches such intensity a
pale-skinned person can not only survive but actually benefit from the
fact that the sun can more easily penetrate, so providing essential
vitamins. This is not the orderly process it may seem, for human
evolution has been a lengthy and complex business, proceeding through a
random and profligate biological scattering. Each human reproduction is
markedly random for there are enormously high odds against the female
egg being fertilised by anyone of millions of male sperm and therefore
against the birth of any individual. We are all of us, in a sense, here
by a very lucky chance.
Racial Mixing
Racial mixing is part of the same biological development as that
which brought racial differences. Racists will argue that for races – or
at least certain races – to interbreed is disastrous for the quality of
the resultant offspring. Fascists warn about the debasement of human
stock, the pollution of blood, the corruption of cultural values and so
on. All of this is supported not by scientific evidence but by bigotry.
There is no evidence to prove that the child of a mixed colour parentage
is in any way inferior to one born of single colour parents.
Indeed, there are specialists in this field who argue exactly the opposite:
“Those who deliver themselves of unfavourable judgements concerning
“race crossing”are merely expressing their prejudices . . . . The truth
seems to be that far from being deleterious to the resulting off-spring
and the generations following them, interbreeding between different
ethnic groups is from the biological and every other standpoint highly
advantageous to mankind . . . Indeed, if there were any truth in the
suggestion that hybridisation results in degeneration or decadence man
should have died out long ago or else sunk to the level of a deformed
idiot, for he is one of the most highly hybridised creatures on
earth.”(Ashley Montagu,
Mans Most Dangerous Myth
).
There is abundant evidence to support this view. A prime example of
racial mixing is the United States. That country is often referred to as
one of the world’s great racial “melting pots”, with a population
overwhelmingly descended from immigrants – some voluntary, some forced –
from all over the world. In particular, the United States has seen a
fusion between black people and white with their physical differences
being slowly eroded with time. If racial mixing were detrimental to a
society, causing it to stagnate or regress, then America would be among
the most backward nations in the world. In fact, as we know, it is among
the most advanced and highly developed – probably the most powerful
state in the world. Many modern technological achievements originated
there making the USA one of the two space powers.
Militarily, economically and politically it dominates much of the
earth. This is not to argue that imperialism, backed by immense armed
forces, is a socially useful or progressive feature, but in capitalist
society it is the measure of a nation’s power and capability. The United
States could not have achieved such a position if it were true that
racial mixing undermined or hampered a state’s development. In any case,
interbreeding is an established fact of human life; to unravel it would
be an extremely difficult and prolonged business, to all intents and
purposes impossible.
Race and Culture
So far we have discussed the issue of race mainly from the biological
angle. But if we accept that there are inherent physical differences
between groups of people, it is fair to ask how far this can be taken;
does it have any useful application to human affairs? The racist
argument is that it can be taken a very long way -in some cases to
justify a policy of genocide – and that it is of vital significance to
human society. This case is based on the argument that physical features
such as colour of skin also determine behaviour, affecting a person’s
mental and physical capacities in different ways. Negroes, for example,
are often insultingly caricatured as capable of great physical strength
but of limited mental ability. From that standpoint the racist argument
is that race determines cultural standards, so that people of one skin
colour (that of the racist) are able to erect a civilisation of a higher
standard than those of another colour.
This is in fact a circular argument, with racists believing that just
as race determines culture so also does culture determine race. Race
can be identified by their cultural standards and those standards can
also be identified by reference to race. There is little scope in this
argument for reason or logic to break into the circle, except that the
facts simply deny the truth of the racist case. The earlier
civilisations – for their time of an exceptionally high standard – were
built up by groups who would now be classified by racists as inferior,
in South America, around the Mediterranean, in Africa and on the Indian
sub-continent. In the modern world there are many groups of white people
whose way of life is so depressed that, to be consistent, the racist
would need to recategorise them – the poor whites of America, for
example, or the most deprived slum dwellers of Britain.
We can now look at this issue in more detail. We have already seen
that a person’s physical features are determined by their genetic
make-up. A person’s genes can be observed, counted -even caused to
mutate. But nobody has yet discovered any genes which inherently
determine human personality or a person’s cultural preferences. Nobody
has yet unearthed any evidence that such features are passed on from
generation to generation in accordance with the laws of genetic
inheritance. Still less has anyone embarked on the task of not only
finding such genes but linking them to those which determine physical
features, so that racial characteristics could be seen to be
biologically connected to cultural ones. In fact there is no prospect of
such a connection being made, for if race is anything it is a
biological concept, confined to dividing human beings on the basis of
genetically inherited bodily features while culture is an expression of
people’s response to the material conditions in which they find
themselves. Race is a matter of biology while culture is a welter of
historical and social influences. Real material evidence denies any link
between the two. Cultural changes can, and do, happen with great speed.
A country can develop out of a primitive condition into that of a
modern state within a very short time but the study of genetics shows
that biological changes happen very much more slowly – certainly too
slowly to explain changes in cultural achievements.
One example of this is what happened to Japan in the late 19th
century. Before the 1850s Japan was an insular feudal country which
resisted any contact with the developing capitalist world outside. The
population of about 30 million had hardly varied over 150 years; no
ships were allowed to be built of more than 50 tons and anyone who left
the country faced the death penalty if they returned. At a time when in
England the Stockton and Darlington railway had been open for 28 years,
Japan had virtually no highways and few wheeled vehicles. In 1853 the
American President approached the rulers of Japan with a request to open
up the existing meagre links with a few Dutch and Chinese traders into a
contact with world commerce. At that time, observers of the Japanese
might have concluded that their backwardness was a racial, biological
feature. Their ruling class apparently had no ambition, nor capacity to
expand into the world outside and Japanese ideas, assumptions, laws and
morals – in other words culture -were fashioned by this timeless
claustrophobic existence.
Racists might have argued that this was because the Japanese were
incapable of behaving in any other way. A year later the Japanese rulers
signed a treaty of Peace and Amity with America, which signalled the
country’s transformation. Within 40 years Japan had developed into a
challenging economic and military power in the Far East. People who only
recently had been feudal peasants were schooled into fighting a
victorious modern war against China and ten years later they astounded
the world by defeating the great power of Tsarist Russia in the
Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5. Japan played a comparatively minor part in
the First World War but after 1918 became a major threat to the
economic dominance of American and European powers in the Far East. This
was emphasised by the powerful and sophisticated war machine which was
successful for so long during the second world war. Since 1945 Japan has
rebuilt its industries, and developed new industries in electronics,
motor cars, cameras and so on. It remains a powerful competitor to the
older states of world capitalism.
None of this would have been possible, had the Japanese people been
biologically retarded, as a racist might have claimed in the 1850s. Nor
can the rapid advance of capitalism in Japan be explained by a
biological adjustment among the people there, since, as we have said,
genetic changes simply cannot happen at such a pace. The social
relationships in Japan, and the country’s culture, have changed in step
with its economic development and its people have had no difficulty in
adapting to the rapid changes. There is only one way to explain this
logically – that culture is a product of society and is not linked to
people’s biological features.
Another example, which deals with what was once a rampant prejudice,
is that of the state of Israel. At a time when Jews were the most
prominent butt of racist propaganda there was a popular theory that they
were biologically averse to becoming involved in a modern military
machine. Racists asserted that Jews were shifty, insidious and cowardly –
inherent features which would enable them to avoid being recruited into
the armed forces or, if they were recruited, would angle them into
cushy, safe jobs a long way from any combat. If there were any substance
to this prejudice, the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 would
have meant a nation which was economically and militarily feeble, an
easy prey to the hostile states which surrounded it.
In fact, the opposite has been true. The country’s population –
female as well as male – are conscripted into the armed forces and, as
part of Israel’s military machine, have proved to be exceptionally
efficient and ruthless combatants. Israel has been engaged in a
succession of wars which have established it as a dominant military
power in the Eastern Mediterranean. Its soldiers have been tough and
pitiless in combat. Its leaders and militarists, like Moshe Dayan and
Menachem Begin, have proved to be single-minded in their assertion of
the interests of the Israeli ruling class. A state which was founded
with propaganda promises stressing the horrors of the Nazi holocaust has
itself perpetrated atrocities and massacres. All of this has been a
response to the needs of the Israeli capitalist class to defend their
interests from the encroachment of hostile neighbouring states and,
where necessary or possible, to expand their hold over the area. The
culture of Israel is that of a modern capitalist military power and the
workers of the country, just like those of other countries, have
accepted and absorbed it as the Israeli ruling class needed them to.
Again, this has not been a matter of biology but of social and
historical factors.
The evidence of Israel as well as Japan leads to the conclusion that
race does not determine culture. If it did it would be necessary to
argue that there had been a massive, fundamental genetic change in the
case of Israel, over the space of some 20 years, and in the case of
Japan, over some 50 years. Genetic changes simply do not happen at such a
speed; they are a very gradual process with numerous diversions and
reversals. Racists who talk of “British”or “western”or “Aryan”culture
being under threat from an “alien”influence are dealing in
unsupportable, unscientific myth.
Race and Intelligence
But in spite of all the evidence, racialism – the making of policies
and the enforcement of them on the basis of alleged racial differences –
continues to flourish. Inevitably, there has to be a continuous effort
to justify this, just as there was when slavery and colonial repression
were bolstered by theories of religion and later of craniology and
social Darwinism. In their time, these were considered to be powerful,
conclusive evidence; nowadays, of course, they are exposed as baseless.
We should remember this when we are confronted with the current attempts
to justify racism – same of them palpably malicious and to that extent
flimsy, and some rather more sophisticated and thoughtful and perhaps,
at first glance, scientifically argued.
A recent example of this, which received widespread publicity and was
the subject of heated debate, is the work of the American educational
psychologist, Arthur Jensen, in assessing the Intelligence Quotient (IQ)
of American children. In 1969, in the
Harvard Educational Review
Jensen published an article “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic
Achievement?”, which concluded that it was not unreasonable to say that
“genetic factors are strongly implicated in the average Negro-White
intelligence difference”. Jensen’s argument was that about 80 per cent
of what determines intelligence is genetic – a matter of inheritance –
and about 20 per cent environmental – fashioned by social, historical,
material factors. As he found that on average black children scored
lower in IQ tests than whites, he concluded that they must as a group be
genetically inferior in terms of intelligence. This work was seized on
by racists, who claimed that it provided objective scientific proof of
what had long been obvious to the casual observer and therefore
justified their case that social policies and decisions should be based
on this proven black inferiority.
But the racists’ excitement was distinctly premature, Jensen’s work
came under a sustained assault from other investigators in this field
who questioned his conclusions, the basis from which he began, and the
argumentative links between the two. But his ideas, in however crude a
form, are common enough in popular racial prejudice to justify a brief
examination of race, intelligence and IQ. The concept of an Intelligence
Quotient emerged in the early years of this century when Alfred Binet
and Theodore Simon invented an “intelligence scale”. At the time they
disclaimed any notion that there could be any precise measurement of
this thing called “intelligence”, aiming only to “measure the useful
effects of adaptions and the value of the difficulties overcome by
them”. The idea of a precise gauge of intelligence, which could be used
in the formation of laws and social policies, the allocation of
resources and so on, came from later investigators, Among these was
Lewis M. Terman, who in 1916 coined the term Intelligence Quotient, The
concept of ID attracted a lot of excited support and interest, This was
particularly so in America, where racists saw much wisdom in Terman’s
opinion that “the major differences in the intelligence test scores of
certain races, as Negroes and Whites, will never be fully accounted for
on the environmental hypothesis”, (Terman was not troubled by the racial
structure of his IQ test, nor was he daunted by the task of computing
IQs for dead people, producing them for Napoleon, Lincoln, Galileo and
so on.)
Whatever the confidence of people like Terman, the fact is that the
concept of an IQ really settles nothing and leaves a great many
important questions without an answer. What is intelligence? Is it a
fixed entity? Can it be measured? Is it measured by IQ tests? Does it
have any connection with hereditary factors and in particular with
racial differences? To begin with, there is no certainty about the
nature of intelligence. Is it an ability to absorb and usefully process
large amounts of knowledge so as to develop and innovate – to expand
knowledge? Or is it a highly practical memory, a capacity to store and
retrieve facts? Or do we agree with Jensen, that it is “a capacity for
abstract reasoning and problem-solving”? If the matter is so uncertain
it seems doubtful that intelligence can be a fixed entity; it is as
fraught with difficulties as the concept of race and must be treated
with a similar caution.
A problem-solving ability is not an absolute; it develops in
accordance with the problem itself. For the greater part of its life on
earth humankind has survived by means of hunting and gathering food; the
more advanced productive techniques which we now take for granted are
in fact only about 15,000 years old. What might have been regarded,
during the hunting/gathering phase, as intelligence was determined by
the problems which had to be solved then in order to survive. It would
have been very different from what is called intelligence in today’s
industrial capitalist society. A person from a primitive food gathering
economy might do poorly in a modern IQ test against an industrial worker
but the result would be different if the test were structured to the
needs of primitive society. Each person would have a different
“intelligence”but one could not be rated as superior to the other.
This throws a different light on the variations in IQ scores not just
between, but within, defined groups such as whites, blacks, Puerto
Ricans, Mexicans. To form the basis of any valid judgement or decisions
about relationships between such groups, and to be able to pronounce on
their inherited intelligence, the tests would need to be completely
separated from all historical, social and environmental influences.
There would need to be a test based on absolute equality of opportunity,
incentive, motivation, expectancy and ambition. There would need to be
an unquestioning trust in the tester by the subject and in the subject
by the tester. Of course these conditions are unattainable; it is not
surprising that IQ tests cannot come up to them. The conclusion must be
that IQ tests really tell us little more about a person than their
ability to perform in IQ tests.
This leaves us with the question of whether “intelligence”is
genetically conditioned –and therefore not susceptible to change by
environmental influences – and in particular whether it has any
connection with racial divisions. Although no genetic link has been
found between physical characteristics and intellectual performance –
and no gene which would determine the latter – the work of people like
Arthur Jensen is taken to suggest that there might be such a link:
Jensen found that on average blacks scored lower in IQ tests than whites
yet what does this really mean? The test was based on grouping by skin
colour. But since blacks are genetically mixed and in many cases include
a white ancestor this means that it would be as accurate to describe
them as genetically, or inherently, white as it would be to describe
them as black. If we argue that a person’s skin colour makes them
genetically of lower intelligence, how do we know that it is the black
skin gene which is responsible for this and not the genes for the white
skin which they may carry? If we take as our definition of a black
anyone with an identifiable black ancestor, do we also define as white
anyone with an identifiable white ancestor, which would include many
blacks? On such uncertain grounds are racial divisions based, which
deprives them of usefulness in any scientific assessment. At one time it
may suit the assessors to classify as black someone with a coloured
skin but at another they may need to modify their classification; the
results of the assessment as a whole would then be different without the
individual results changing.
We must also consider the fact that skin colour is only one of many
racial features. If the assessors based their groups on some other
feature, such as hair texture, they would have different groups,
probably of mixed skin colour. There are numerous possibilities, all of
them equally valid and each carrying its own effect on the average,
overall result. But why should it be “convenient”to make a division on
one basis and not on another? The answer is that Jensen’s
investigations, like much more work in this field, is by no means the
objective, purely scientific enterprise which racists claim it to be. It
is heavily influenced by the same historical, social and environmental
factors as affected the performance of the children whom Jensen
assessed. Jensen’s work was all about the allocation of educational
resources, about whether it was worthwhile to invest in attempting to
raise the IQ of black children if they were inherently incapable of
responding. In other words its basic assumptions were those of
capitalist society – its priorities, its frames of judgement, its
standards of success and failure.
So there is no objective biological evidence to link a person’s
genetic make up with their mental abilities. Any attempts to test those
abilities cannot be objective and are therefore not scientifically
valid. There is no case for saying that intellectual capacity is
determined by race.
What is Race?
We have seen the dangers of treating the concept of race with any
certainty. Although there are obviously differences between one group of
human beings and another, once we try to draw rigid divisions between
them we quickly realise that it is impossible to be specific or
consistent. The boundaries between races are obscure and arbitrary,
varying according to the convenience of the investigator or to which
feature is chosen as the arbiter of the race a person belongs to. The
mixing of human stock has resulted from the interbreeding caused by
migration all over the earth; the evidence is that this is leading to a
gradual smoothing out of whatever differences there might be so that,
with time, there will truly be only one “race”–the human “race”. The
racist argument, that racial mixing is harmful, is scientifically
baseless; in truth the evidence is that if anything it is beneficial to
human beings. We have also seen that whatever differences there are
between human groupings, these are vastly outnumbered by our
similarities. We come then to the conclusion that, although there may be
much profit for racists in inventing biological differences, or in
exaggerating and misinterpreting those which actually exist while
denying the essential sameness of all human beings, there is in fact no
case for basing social and political action on racial factors.
If it is anything, race is a biological concept. It is not
psychological, social, behavioural, cultural or political. It does not
explain social status, achievements, ability or human behaviour. These
things are fashioned by material conditions and the social developments
which arise from them.
Chapter 3: Anti-Semitism
Racial prejudice is a widespread feature of modern society; it is so
diverse in character that it can be applied to explain almost any
problem, deal with almost any emergency, satisfy almost any panic. It is
not simply a matter of colour, for prejudice can operate between groups
of people who have the same colour. A good example of this is
antisemitism.
Is there a Jewish Race?
Since anti-semitism is a sort of “bread-and-butter”racism – rather
like a staple diet of prejudice – it figures prominently in racist
theory. We should, then, first discuss the question of whether Jews can
properly be described as a race. In the terms of their religion they are
in fact not only a race but “the chosen people”; in scientific and
biological terms, however, they cannot be defined in this way.
Jews do not conform to any uniform recognisable physical type. They
do not all have dark hair and dark eyes; in some parts of Europe such as
Alsace and Poland there are substantial numbers who are blonde in
appearance and in other areas there are many varieties of skin, hair and
eye colour. There are Jews with black skins – for example the Falashas
of Ethiopia. And the famous Jewish nose, so beloved of anti-semitic
cartoonists, is a characteristic of only a minority. As is the case with
other groups, it is wrong to talk about “Jewish blood”for they share
the same blood groups with the rest of the world’s population.
The explanation is that the Jews – again like other human groups –
are not “pure”. They were not “pure”when they left the desert over 3,000
years ago and since then, in spite of all the efforts – voluntary as
well as compulsory – to segregate them into an exclusive body, they have
become even less so. At least three distinct strains can now be
discerned in their make up –the Ashkenazi or German; the Sephardic or
Spanish; and the Oriental. All these groups differ from one another and
each contains wide variations in physical type. If anything, their
migratory history has had the effect of making the Jews resemble the
groups among which they live. Nevertheless, over centuries they have
managed to preserve something of a separate identity for themselves.
This means that they might best be described as a socio-religious group
which, we should add, has in its struggle to survive often become as
markedly racist as its own detractors.
Jews and the Nation State
To understand the reason for anti-semitism and its catastrophic
consequences we must refer to one of the essential features of property
society – a feature which in fact existed before the emergence of
capitalism. Property society brought the concept of the nation-state.
People were encouraged – indeed often forced – to identify their own
interests with those of the state and to regard the nation as a
separate, independent entity often hostile to other states. This
baseless and inhuman idea is called patriotism – a nationalistic
prejudice which feeds on contempt for, and hostility towards, people in
other nations.
Modern capitalism raised the setting up of nation-states to a fine
art. As the first capitalist states expanded, they grew accustomed to
defining national boundaries which were based on acts of forcible
annexation, as happened when Africa was carved up between the colonising
powers of Europe during the 19th century. Capitalism is also accustomed
to redefining frontiers, setting up new states, or amalgamating or
dissolving others, usually as part of the “peace”arrangements after a
war. In this way, to give some recent examples, the state of
Czechoslovakia was established after the first world war and the
separate nations of East and West Germany after 1945. In each case the
people in the new state were pressured to regard themselves as having a
new, different, national identity, to develop a new patriotism and to
direct it against those who had recently been their compatriots.
The motive of this propaganda is the protection of the interests of
the dominant class in a nation-state. Workers who are patriotic will
readily sacrifice themselves when called upon to do so, either by
allowing themselves to be exploited more intensely at work or by
participating in a war against a group of foreign exploiters. But just
as nationalism is important to the interests of a ruling class, so are
there problems when within a nation-state there is a group which fosters
its own identity and traditions and which therefore may be perceived to
owe its loyalty – or at least a greater loyalty – to the group rather
than to the state. Historically these problems have arisen with many
groups including the Jews, who themselves have not lessened the
antagonism by defending their separateness and being conspicuous through
their religious rites and customs.
The Jews in History
From what is known of their history, the Jews were originally one of a
number of racially and culturally similar tribes who came to the
Eastern Mediterranean area from the desert region to the east. They
entered Palestine as nomadic cattle breeders – a life-style which
encouraged the retention of old-fashioned customs and rituals. At that
time – about 1400 BC – Palestine lay on an important trade route between
the empires of the Babylonians and the Assyrians to the north and the
Egyptians to the south. Although their uncomfortable position as a
buffer between other more powerful groups may have fostered feelings of
group identity in the Jews – bolstered by their distinctive religion –
their constant contact with traders and merchants would have acted
against any tendency for them to be separate and exclusive. This latter
fact would also have encouraged them to abandon the harsh, precarious
existence of nomadic herdspeople for the ranks of merchants. But as they
emigrated and settled in other countries they encountered the hostility
of the established merchants there, which they met by banding together.
The sacking of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD caused the virtually
complete dispersal of the Jews from Palestine, leaving them to survive
as separate groups wherever they could, the subject of widespread and
unrelenting hostility.
By the Middle Ages the Jews were scattered throughout the world, but
with most living in Europe. Their persecution was mainly justified on
religious grounds, the prejudices born of Christian teaching being
luridly elaborated by such bizarre fantasies as the Jews having horns
and a tail or being responsible for the Black Death. At the least they
were subject to restrictions such as a ban on employing Christians. In
many places they were disqualified from owning land and denied
membership of the Guilds which were so integral a part of the feudal
economy. One effect of this discrimination was to confine Jews to trade
and moneylending, which stimulated the accusation that they were mean,
grasping and swindling. In many countries Jews were forced to identify
themselves publicly by wearing a prominent badge {the Nazis were not,
then, the originators of this idea} and feelings against them often
boiled over into physical attacks, at times reaching the scale of
massacres. When it suited the purpose of the ruling class they would
take the Jews under their protection; many kings of England, for
example, declared them to be “servants of the king”, which gave powerful
protection to their persons and property. The price of this was to be
milked to top up the royal coffers and if they were unable to pay they
were liable to be expelled by their protector, as happened in England
under Edward I in 1290. They were not allowed back into England until
1664.
At the time of the French Revolution there was something of a respite
in the persecution of the Jews and in many European countries
restrictions against them were lifted. But by the end of the 19th
century the situation had changed, with a number of serious anti-Jewish
campaigns – or pogroms – notably in Russia and eastern Europe. These
campaigns led to a large scale exodus of Jews: between 1905 and 1908
over 200,000 a year fled and it has been estimated that some 47 million
left Europe, mostly for the United States, between 1844 and the start of
World War One.
The Jews in Britain
In Britain in 1850 the Jewish population amounted to about 35,000; by
1939 this figure had increased tenfold, most of the immigrants being
refugees from Russia and eastern Europe. They were overwhelmingly urban
settlers, concentrating in the East End of London (where about
two-thirds of them settled), in the Strangeways district of Manchester
and the Leylands in Leeds. Like many a large, concentrated, desperate
immigrant population the Jews were cruelly vulnerable to an especially
harsh exploitation, in some cases by their fellow immigrants. They were
compelled to work in the sweatshops of the ready-made clothing trade,
which had then only recently been established. In cramped, hot, dirty
workrooms, side by side with similarly desperate English workers, the
Jews laboured long and hard to the profit of their employers. They were
also employed, under similar conditions, in small workshops producing
furniture and footwear. These workshops could be set up with very little
capital, which meant that some workers could, and did, start one up
knowing that the worst that could follow failure would be to return to
the sweatshop. Here we have the origins of the Jewish stake in
entrepreneurial business and of the few Jewish businesses which later
expanded into huge tailoring combines, chain stores, property
development companies and entertainment empires.
The prejudice against Jews was, then, rooted in historical rather
than racial factors. They were seen as an alien group of sojourners,
owing no allegiance to their place of settlement and unwilling to give
any. Because workers commonly came into contact with them at the point
of retail trade, it was easy for them to have a reputation as
unproductive “middlemen”, most comfortable when they were wheeling and
dealing. Their identity as a separate, exclusive group fostered a
variety of theories of subversion which held Jews responsible for an
international conspiracy to undermine the culture and stability of
whichever country they lived in. Between the wars fascist propaganda
placed great emphasis on the alleged evil doings of something called
“international finance”, by which was meant an imaginary world-wide
Jewish plot to subvert modern civilisation.
Jewish influence was supposed to be at work in the Marconi scandal,
just before the first world war, which concerned British government
contracts to establish a chain of naval wireless stations throughout the
British Empire. At about the same time there was the Indian silver
scandal, which arose from a proposal that the India Office should
secretly buy silver through the bullion dealers Samuel Montague, instead
of through the usual method of the Bank of England operating on the
silver market. Although it was of absolutely no concern to working class
interests that one company rather than another should profit from a
government rearmament drive, or from state purchases of precious metals,
workers were angry at these underhand deals, which they saw as evidence
of Jewish clannishness and devious fixing. The South African war, which
was actually fought over which sections of the ruling class would
profit from that country’s mineral wealth, was blamed on Jewish
influence. The journalist J.A.Hobson, who was sent to South Africa in
1899 by the
Manchester Guardian
, declared: “The Jews are
par excellence
the international financiers . . . they fastened on the Rand as they are prepared to fasten upon any other part of the globe”(
Contemporary Review
, no.77, 1900).
Even the Social Democratic Federation newspaper
Justice
(which
claimed to be stating a Marxist, internationalist analysis of
capitalism) argued that “the Jew influence”was dragging Britain into the
war and that the Prime Minister, Salisbury, was unable to master “a
Jewish clique”(7 October 1899). The effect was to inflame British
workers’ paranoia and confusion. In this way they could forget their
poverty and the fact that it was their lives which were to be lost in
the war to protect the capitalists’ interests and could instead turn
their wrath onto the Jews. No theory was too outrageous if it lent
weight to the concept of Jews as sly, greedy and subversive. It was very
similar to the malicious hysteria which is vented on black workers
today. One writer, for example, in a London daily newspaper, described
Jewish immigrants in these words: filthy, rickety jetsam of humanity,
bearing on their evil faces the stigmata of every physical and moral
degeneration, men and women who have no intention of working otherwise
than in trafficking. (
Standard
, 5 January 1905).
Attacks on Jewish people and on their homes and shops were
commonplace, notably in the East End of London, and there were other
serious incidents in Ireland and Wales. Antisemitism was firmly rooted
in working class demonology. Between the wars conditions in Britain
provided a fertile breeding ground for all types of prejudice and social
scapegoating. On the one hand the capitalist class were disquieted by
the progressive erosion of their standing in the world and by the
apparently unstable attitudes of the working class who, for their part,
were bewildered and cynical at the exposure of the politicians’ promises
to build a land fit for the heroines and heroes returned from the war.
This was the type of situation in which racial prejudice could flourish.
In 1920, the publication of an English version of
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
with its apparent revelation of a Jewish plot to dominate the world,
was regarded by some people as justification for a policy of
discrimination and repression against Jews. The exposure of the work as a
forgery –which did not take long – reduced its believers to a small
lunatic fringe, among them members of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of
Fascists (BUF). Formally the BUF denied anti-semitism; Mosley always
insisted that fascists attacked Jews, not on the grounds of race or
religion, but for their actions or political opinions. But a typical
statement of his was in a telegram he sent to the notorious Nazi Jew
baiter, Julius Streicher, in May 1935: “The forces of Jewish corruption
must be conquered in all great countries before the future of Europe can
be made secure in justice and peace.”
Mosley could be provoked into even cruder expressions of his views
and so could his followers, like William Joyce, who once complained that
swimming in a public pool also used by Jews was likely to result in
being “positively anointed in Jewish grease”. When war broke out in
1939, the BUF were in a dilemma. As an organisation  expressing a
fervent patriotism they could hardly fail to play an enthusiastic part
in defending the interests of the British capitalist class (one of whom
was Oswald Mosley). But they had reservations -to put it mildly – about
fighting against Nazi Germany whose methods in dealing with political
opponents and anyone classified as racially inferior they so much
admired. They resolved the problem – at least to their own satisfaction –
by attributing the war to their old enemy, an international Jewish
conspiracy. So the BUF sent its members to war reluctantly, telling them
that they had been manoeuvred into a conflict which set one lot of
Aryans against another (which said little for the stability or the
perceptiveness of these alleged Aryan superpeople).
All this amounted, in the view of some people, to something called
“The Jewish Problem”which, had the BUF ever come to power, would
undoubtedly have been dealt with in a way having scant regard for
political freedom or for human feelings. This, of course, was the way of
the Nazis who applied to the “Problem”a “Final Solution”- the
cold-blooded, deliberately organised murder of millions of people. This
was in fact the quintessential logical expression of racism and it did
much to boost the Zionist response to it and cause the bloody conflict
in the Middle East ever since the establishment of the state of Israel.
If, since the Second World War, the Jews have largely been replaced
as the principal target of European racists, this is not to say that
anti-semitism is dead. It still exists in Britain and sometimes bursts
into violence elsewhere in Europe with bomb attacks on synagogues. It is
notably strong in Russia, where so many Jews were once forced to flee
from the last of the Tsarist pogroms. Now, under a “communist”
government, the lot of many Jews in Russia remains one of enduring
persecution – and this in a country which claims to operate on the basis
of human interests and equal standing.
For a long time the Jews have been one of capitalism’s handier
scapegoats, liable to suffer most when the system is in crisis, as it
was towards the end of the last century and during the 1930s. At such
times, when working class suffering becomes especially acute, workers
who need an explanation – any explanation – for their problems can be
vulnerable to the racist urgings to blame a scapegoat rather than
consider how capitalism works and why it imposes such problems on them.
They are liable to ignore the fact that the majority of Jews are also
members of the working class, enduring the same poverty, poor housing,
sub-standard food and clothing and so on. They go through the same
struggle for survival but Jews are no more aware of their class
interests than are any other group of workers. In their ignorance they
supported the establishment of the state of Israel and, if they live
there, they serve the interests of the ruling class in the same way as
workers everywhere – by acquiescing in their own exploitation, by
participating in their rulers’ wars, by voting for one capitalist party
or another at election time. Israel is now a powerful, militaristic
capitalist state – perhaps a nuclear power in the near future. It might
have been hoped that the Jews’ terrible history would have encouraged
them to something more hopeful.
Chapter 4: Racism in the United States
To some extent we dealt in Chapter I with the origins of racism in
the United States, seeing it develop from the institution of slavery.
One problem in considering racism in the USA is that it operates in so
many directions with so many different groups as its targets. Racial
prejudice exists not just against blacks but against people of Chinese,
Japanese and Filipino origin. Then there is the discrimination against
groups like Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. Nor is possession of a
“white”skin any protection, for racism reaches out to people whose
origins are in Europe, whose ancestors emigrated to America from such
countries as Italy, Poland and Russia. And, of course, there is
prejudice – as there is almost everywhere – against Jews. At the same
time these groups may erect barriers against each other. All of this
makes the United States – which its politicians and its patriots
describe as “God’s own country”and “Land of the Free”- the world’s
classic case of the complexity and absurdity of racism. It is a
situation to tax even the racists’ vocabulary of insults; human beings
are sneeringly labelled as “Wops”, “Yids”, “Polaks”, “Nips”. . . . But
above all other forms of discrimination there has always been that
against black people and this is the aspect we shall consider in this
chapter. The analysis we present, and the comments we make about
prejudice against blacks, can also be applied to the other groups we
have mentioned.
The Slave Economy
The first slaves were imported into America from Africa in 1619,
twelve years after the arrival of the first settlers from England. At
first only a few hundred slaves were imported, to work alongside the
native Indian population who had also been enslaved. Treatment of the
slaves was much the same as for white people who worked as indentured
servants; in most cases they could earn their freedom and were given
land of their own to cultivate. Slavery became uneconomic in the
northern states and it was quickly abolished there. This might also have
happened in the South had not the whole situation been dramatically
changed by the cultivation of tobacco. This crop needed a large,
hard-working labour force and the tobacco growers looked to the slave
trade to supply it. By the 1660s slaves were arriving in America at the
rate of about 6,000 a year. Alongside tobacco some cotton was also
cultivated but this was not very profitable, largely owing to the
laborious, inefficient and costly process of manually separating the
cotton fibres from the rest of the plant. In 1794, just as the tobacco
plantations were at a low ebb and the whole future of slavery was
consequently in question, the cotton gin was invented. This machine,
which separated the cotton seeds and fibres mechanically, had the effect
of stimulating a profitable cotton industry. As plantations turned from
the cultivation of tobacco to cotton the demand for slaves increased
enormously, reviving the trade in them and giving a new lease of life to
slavery.
The system which developed may be called “plantation capitalism”;
money was invested in cotton production, just as it might be in an
established industrial enterprise of capitalism, but the workers
involved were not the “free”wage earners characteristic of industrial
capitalism but chattel slaves. At about the same time another invention
allowed the mechanical granulation of sugar, which created a sugar
empire, also dependent on slave labour, in the south. As the demand for
slaves grew more urgent their price rose and the vastly profitable,
vastly cruel, slave trade was born again, with a body of nonsensical
theory to prove that it was all in accordance with Christian principles,
or biological fact, or was essential to American prosperity or even in
the slaves’ best interests. By the 1830s the plantation system was
entrenched in the South and so was the planters’ determination to defend
the institution of slavery.
Meanwhile, in the North things were different. That was the scene of a
developing industrial capitalism so that in one formally united country
there were two economic systems, and their respective dominant classes
competed for control over the new land. The dispute was settled in the
Civil War of 1861-65, which was fought over this issue and over the
unity of the United States. The southern aim of secession, which would
have virtually set up a separate nation with its own economic style, was
defeated and among the terms imposed by the victorious Union was the
“emancipation” of the slaves. For some years after the war, during the
time known as the Period of Reconstruction, the South was occupied by
northern troops and the freed slaves were given certain civil and
political rights. However, when the northern occupation ended in 1876,
political power was restored to the plantation owners, which set the
scene for the erosion of the “emancipation”measures, for the slaves,
although no longer legally owned by the planters, were still
economically dependent on them.
Formal Emancipation
During the 18605 and the 18705 a series of constitutional amendments
and new Acts theoretically guaranteed blacks an equal place with whites
in American society. But in 1883 the Supreme Court ruled that the Civil
Rights Act of 1875 was unconstitutional and this opened the way for a
mass of minor legislation, known as the Jim Crow laws, which undermined
the slaves’ “emancipation”. The rights and voting facilities nominally
extended to blacks became dead letters and in the South separate (and
inferior) schools, parks, transport and the like were allocated to them.
In buses, for example, blacks were confined to a very few seats at the
back; where there was a beach it was either denied to blacks or divided
into white (better) and black (worse) sections; there were separate
schools and colleges for whites and blacks. The segregation mania went
even further than that, for in the South there were very few hospitals
which would admit a black; they would – and did – see blacks die rather
than offer them treatment. Many of these measures were challenged in the
Supreme Court but were upheld on the specious grounds that the
facilities, although separate, were equal; they did not imply that
blacks were inferior and so could not be held to be discriminatory.
So it was that at the turn of the century the blacks in the south
were almost as much under subjection as they had been under slavery.
Chattel slavery had been legally abolished, from above, but it was
another matter to make emancipation work against the opposition of the
majority of people on whose cooperation its success depended. Laws do
not change social conditions and the resulting attitudes. In spite of
the “emancipation”measures the basis of the southern economy was still
the plantation, which could be worked by the most elementary form of
labour, with no need for the wages system of industrial capitalism.
Slavery was succeeded by a system in which those who worked the land
were additionally robbed, by force and fraud. And the black was deprived
of even the element of security implied by the status of slave, which
gave the owner a direct interest in the slaves being well fed and
adequately housed – often to the envy of the “poor white”farmers.
“Emancipation”in fact depressed the blacks to the lowest rungs of the
occupational ladder, where half-starved sharecroppers scratched the
meagrest of livings from the poorest of land.
The blacks were “kept in their place”by an unrelenting campaign by
the whites, carried on by both legal and illegal means. Intimidation,
beatings and lynchings became part of the southern way of life. It was
common for blacks to be arrested, convicted and punished on trumped-up
charges, particularly those alleging some sexual misdemeanour against a
white person. The law enforcement agencies – the police and courts –
which were in theory concerned with an unbiased administration of the
law, were often corrupt, enthusiastic participants in the denial of
rights to blacks. It was not unknown for the police to connive openly,
even take part in, fearful acts of terrorism and murder against blacks.
Terrorist organisations like the Ku Klux Klan were allowed to go about
their grisly business virtually unhindered. What was theoretically the
law of the land was resisted and ignored in a display of what might be
seen as white solidarity.
The situation might have been different had the blacks been able to
exercise a political influence. They were numerous enough, had they been
able to take part in elections, to have exerted significant pressure on
the politicians who stood for racial discrimination. Again, however,
they were thwarted, for the whites were able to place insurmountable
obstacles in the way of a black trying to vote. Some of these were
illegal, such as the threat, and the actual use, of violence and murder.
Others simply adjusted the law, for example the imposition of a poll
tax which no black could pay, or the use, as a voting qualification, of
the “grandfather clause”of Louisiana. For almost a century after the
Civil War the Democratic Party had a political stranglehold on the
South, where they continued to be associated in the popular mind with
the Confederacy, with slavery and the subjection of the black. From this
racist repression, and this political stranglehold, some exceedingly
ugly and menacing politicians were to emerge.
Blacks as Industrial Workers
It was the first world war, which had so lasting an effect on the
face of world capitalism, that began to change things for the American
blacks. The industrial boom of the war brought a demand for labour from
the industries in the North and the consequent migration of blacks from
the South to the northern industrial cities. At about the same time
industries such as textile processing, coal mining and steel production
opened in the South, attracting both blacks and whites from the rural
areas into the cities. At the beginning the blacks were much like any
other migratory labour force – unskilled, bewildered by the speed and
pressures of urban survival and very much at the mercy of employers,
landlords and traders who had few scruples about making the most of the
immigrants’ plight. These problems have dogged all large-scale
immigrations but in the case of the blacks coming to the North from the
South
there were also two other, particularly aggravating, factors. The
first was the excessively backward and repressive situation they had
left, which made adapting to an industrial city that much more
difficult. The second was their skin colour, which made them readily
accessible targets for other workers’ frustration, confusion and
despair. So in the case of the blacks there was an extra impetus to the
normal tendency of migratory workers to gravitate towards certain parts
of a town. It was very much a defensive move for the blacks to
concentrate in places like Harlem in New York and Watts in Los Angeles.
But escaping from the South did not release the blacks from
prejudice. The assimilation of a non-industrial people into a modern
capitalist economy always produces its own stresses, which are easily
stimulated and aggravated by the insecurity and the frustrations already
being suffered by the established, “native”workers. The blacks’ arrival
in the North met an informal, tacit segregation which effectively
confined them to inferior jobs and homes. Two styles of colour
discrimination developed. In the South it was open and explicit, a part
of the legal system – blacks simply did not have access to certain
things and there were notices and other declarations to remind them of
it. In the North and East the rules of segregation were implicit and
were silently accepted by both sides. In the northern and eastern cities
blacks did not even try to enter certain restaurants or hotels or move
into certain parts of town. The only jobs open to them were labouring or
menial. In this way was born that popular film character -the genial,
musical black servant or railway porter with a heart of gold untroubled
by ambitions to be equal. Overall, then, segregation still ruled; mixed
marriages were illegal in almost half the states and in about one third
of them blacks were officially denied access to the best schools,
restaurants, parks and similar amenities.
The absorption of blacks into industry was accelerated by the second
world war, when American factories needed workers too much to be able to
discriminate on grounds of colour. It was estimated that in July 1943
there were about 1,300,000 blacks working in war plants; in shipbuilding
the number of blacks employed in March 1944 exceeded that for all
shipyard workers in 1940. In many important ways, this situation was
incompatible with a system of racial segregation, which began to be
broken down by the demands of industrial capitalism. The American armed
forces, even though they were segregated into units by colour, were also
affected; in 1942 a southern senator suggested that black troops from
the North should be stationed only in that part of the country, but this
was peremptorily rejected as it conflicted with the military needs of
American capitalism. This decision neatly represents the reality that
the demands of Industrial capitalism cannot be endlessly denied by the
prejudices and restrictions of a pre-industrial society. That the spread
of capitalism in the South was hampered by racial discrimination, and
in particular by the segregation laws, was amply illustrated by the
experiences of the war. After 1945 the Federal authorities, in the
overall interests of the American capitalist class, acted to limit
segregation.
Desegregation
In the armed forces, segregation was abolished in 1948, which allowed
black American workers to join the same units as whites, to become
officers commanding whites and to die alongside whites in the wars of
their ruling class – as they did in Korea and Vietnam. In 1954 there was
a more significant and far-reaching decision, when Chief Justice Warren
ruled that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal”and
therefore unconstitutional and that desegregation of all schools and
colleges must proceed “with all deliberate speed”. The southern
segregationists realised the implications of this and how fatal it would
be to their position as oppressors. Their first tactic was to delay
implementation of the ruling, which was resisted by some states by a
series of ingenious constitutional arguments which in turn were defeated
by equally ingenious responses from the courts. In the end the success
of the ruling rested on two things: the existence of a black person, or
group of black people, courageous and persistent enough to claim this
new constitutional right in the face of determined resistance and
intimidation; and the willingness of the Federal authorities to enforce
the ruling, by protecting those people, above the heads of the state
politicians. In places like Little Rock, Arkansas and Oxford, Missouri,
the people came forward to take their place in the schools and colleges.
The government sent federal agents and the National Guard to ensure
that the schools were desegregated and, amid scenes of mob hysteria and
violence, the ruling was enforced. The effect has been lasting.
An important measure was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, at first
proposed by President Kennedy and then pushed through by Lyndon Johnson
with the combination of wheedling and arm-twisting in which he excelled.
The Act was aimed against private discrimination, whereas all previous
measures had been limited to discrimination in public. The Federal
Government could prosecute local governments which discriminated, and
deny them federal funds. It forbade the exclusion of blacks from
schools, restaurants, hotels, sports facilities. The Act also proved
difficult to implement against entrenched racial bigotry. But in the end
modern industrial capitalism cannot settle with slavery nor with the
prejudice which goes with it. It is a long process but the face of
colour prejudice in the United States has changed and is continuing to
change.
During the 1960s the blacks began a campaign of physically asserting
their right to use public facilities equally with whites. They sat in
the seats customarily reserved for whites in buses, they insisted on
using, and sometimes staging sit-ins at, snack-bars, restaurants and
lunch counters. They boycotted some services, as they had boycotted the
buses in Montgomery, Alabama in 1954. In 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama –
where the governor, George Wallace, was a typically populist, racist
political manipulator – they opened a wide campaign to desegregate snack
bars, jobs, stores and churches. {Southern racists had their own
special interpretation of the theory that we are all god’s children.) In
1963 there was a gigantic march on Washington DC to demand civil rights
for blacks; 200,000 people were there at the end of the demonstration.
Perhaps more significant than these activities was the voter
registration drive organised during the 1960s by the civil rights
movement. At the time blacks were still denied the vote, by intimidation
or by an obstacle course of impossible severity. In 1965 President
Lyndon Johnson (who had not always been in favour of racial equality)
listed a few of the artifices which were used: the black would be told
that it was the wrong day to register, or too late in the day, or that
the registrar was temporarily absent. Any black who was allowed to apply
would have their application refused because they had not spelled out
their second name, or had abbreviated a word. Sometimes a test would be
enforced – perhaps to recite, word perfect, the American Constitution –
with the registrar the sole judge of success or failure. No such
obstacles were put in the way of white applicants. The voter
registration drive, which began in Selina, Alabama in 1965, required a
great deal of courage and persistence in face of the fiercest hostility,
and several civil rights workers were murdered. This was a crucial
issue to white domination; in Alabama, for example, blacks made up 40
per cent of the population and were potentially a powerful voting lobby
which any hopeful politician would need to assuage.
The effect of the registration drive was quickly apparent. In the
1964 presidential election the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater,
carried only those states where less than 45 per cent of eligible blacks
were registered to vote. The other states were won by Lyndon Johnson,
who was pledged to push on with a civil rights programme. In the
elections of 1976, 46 per cent of southern blacks went to the polls,
compared to 57 per cent of southern whites. Blacks now number some 26
million in the United States – about 12 per cent of the population. Once
they had established the right to vote, blacks began to be elected to
political office; by 1978 more than 2,200 held elective office in the
South and there were black mayors even in Alabama and New Orleans. The
Democratic Party no longer dominates southern politics; Republican
candidates are often elected there.
Equality as Wage Slaves
The fact that this had been achieved in the teeth of fierce
opposition, coupled with the realisation that the loosening of
segregation did little to ease the blacks’ burden of poverty (the
unemployment rate for blacks is about twice that for whites) has
persuaded many blacks that integration is not the answer. In frustration
and disillusionment black workers set up their own, exclusive
organisations such as the Black Panthers and the Black Muslims,
signalling also their disenchantment with the tactic of non-violence.
The result has been a series of large scale riots in inner city areas,
where poverty for whites as well as blacks is especially harsh. It is in
these areas that the new flashpoints of racial tension are to be found;
industrial, urbanised capitalism has added its own bilious flavour to
racial prejudice. The black workers’ anger and frustration is
understandable but misguided. The capitalist system must condemn its
workers to repression, impoverishment and an alienated existence. This
is not confined to workers of anyone colour; moves towards racial
“equality”have eased some of the American blacks’ burdens but have left
untouched their status as workers – degraded, exploited, harassed,
oppressed.
In that way “emancipation”and the triumph of “civil rights”have
clarified a number of issues for the American black. They have shown
that workers everywhere are subject to the same problems whatever their
skin colour or “race”. In other words, all workers have a unity of
interests against the interests of the capitalist class. Although the
process has been hampered by the blacks’ historical background, a black
capitalist class is now emerging in America.
There are “black”banks and money lending firms with assets which in 1980 totalled over $2,000 million. On 17 June 1974
Time
magazine
profiled a black family living in a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama, in
which the husband was “lawyer, businessman, politician”with a Cadillac
and a Buick garaged at their ranch home. In 1980 Herman J. Russell, a
black, was president and chairman of the board of a group whose annual
sales then exceeded $32 million. One result of this is to set in motion a
reverse migratory trend, as blacks return to the South where business
prospects are more promising. Another is in its effect on black people’s
unity, which is now anything but solid on social, economic and
political issues – the same story as for white workers.
Black capitalists are ready to exploit all workers, whatever their
skin colour. Unfortunately neither black nor white workers have yet seen
the need to act in conscious unity to solve their problems by
abolishing capitalism, and only when they do so will they be truly in
touch with the possibility of their own emancipation.
Chapter 5: Racism in South Africa
In the Socialist Party’s pamphlet
The Racial Problem
, which
was published in November 1947, the section dealing with race prejudice
in South Africa closed with these words: “The logical end of the road
which the South African white worker is treading can only be bloody
violence and destruction. No group can permanently hold down another
many times more numerous than itself, and sooner or later the working
class, particularly the white section, will have to face up to the
situation and make their decision.”
We cannot claim that this statement (which could equally have been
applied to the issue of race prejudice and rising nationalism in several
other African countries) was particularly perceptive or original. Even
in those days, before the National Party came to power with the policy
of overt racism and apartheid, the future of South Africa was
frighteningly predictable to all but the most bigoted or blinkered. It
is a classic case of racism which, in the face of mounting opposition
and pressure from a developing industrial capitalism, has retreated only
slowly, putting up a stubborn rearguard action. This clash, in essence
between the needs of an industrial society and the restrictions imposed
by a pre-industrial ideology, has indeed been expressed in bloody
violence, destruction and atrocities. The working class, particularly
the whites, have had to face reality and accept concessions which go
against their bigotry. The end result is as inevitable as anything can
be; apartheid will die, South Africa will become another developing
African capitalist state (perhaps one of the more powerful and
influential) where the ruling class is predominantly black.
Apartheid: How It Works
Whites make up only 20 percent of the population of South Africa;
there are a little over four million of them. There are about one
million Asians, mainly Indians, about 2.25million Coloureds (mixed race)
and over 18 million black Africans or Bantus. Nevertheless the European
minority have for a long time controlled the economic and political
structure of the country – in contrast to many of the other examples of
racism we have considered which involve the repression of a minority by
the majority. At a time when countries like the United States were
moving towards dismantling their official racism, South Africa was
energetically putting together its system of apartheid. This also
happened in some other African states, for example Southern Rhodesia
(now Zimbabwe), but South Africa’s system of discrimination has proved
the most durable of them all. The blacks have been confined to supplying
abundant and cheap labour under the control of, and to the vast benefit
of, the whites. This system was deliberately erected and systematically
kept in being; the first laws denying Africans any legal right to land
ownership were passed in the 19th century and were followed by a series
of Acts which restricted their freedom to travel, to hold skilled jobs
and to organise in unions and political parties and denied them the
right to vote. The National Party government which was elected in 1948
rearranged these laws into one coherent code under the general name of
apartheid – or separate development – which attempted to segregate the
races with the eventual object of their living in separate, clearly
defined, parts of the country. This policy was set out in 1979 when the
National Party government laid before the parliament a national
constitution which, typically, set a divine seal on its theories:
“IN HUMBLE SUBMISSION to Almighty God, Who controls the destinies of
nations and the history of people . . . We DECLARE that whereas we ARE
CONSCIOUS of our responsibility towards God and man; BELIEVE that the
black nations of the Republic should each be given separate freedom in
the land allotted to them for the exercise of the political aspirations
of all the members of those nations.”
By “separate freedom”this preamble means the establishment of the
Bantustans, which are essential to the ultimate object of apartheid. The
Bantustans – also known, ironically, as Homelands – are intended to
confine the Africans to some 13 per cent of the land, normally the least
fertile, located in scattered units on the borders of the
industrialised areas. The rest of the land – 87 per cent – is allocated
to the whites. There is very little for the Africans to go to the
Bantustans for, so the South African government has enforced their
transfer and has also foisted on the areas the status of “independence”.
Outside the Bantustans, it is intended that blacks may live in the
“Prescribed Areas”- those allocated to the whites – only under strict
control, in other words if they are economically productive, or to put
it another way, if they are contributing to the privileged standing of
the whites. Anyone who does not come into this category is forcibly
confined to the Bantustans. This has two noticeable effects: it means
that the stable population of the Bantustans consists mainly of the old
and the sick or of mothers and their children; it also means that the
productive blacks are turned into a migrant labour force, existing in
bleak misery in places where they can most readily meet the demand for
their labour and supporting as best they can their families in the
“Homeland”.
The life-style of most whites is far superior. They hold the highest
paid jobs, many live in large houses with swimming pools, televisions,
freezers and the like. They own cars, their children go to the best
schools, they have access to all the best in services like hospitals.
They are able to employ blacks as servants. In contrast, the blacks have
suffered extremes of deprivation. In mid 1985 almost a quarter of the
black labour force was unemployed. A United Nations publication
suggested that infant mortality for black children is 25 times that for
whites. Many of the whites emigrated to South Africa to take jobs which
in their country of origin would have yielded them a life-style a lot
less luxurious; perhaps correctly, they see their privileges as
dependent on a rigid control and repression of the blacks. Such people
are, therefore, among the most ardent supporters of apartheid and will
condone all manner of inhuman excesses in that cause.
Inevitably, the policies of the South African government need to be
.enforced through restrictions on the residence and movements of black
people and essential to this are the infamous Pass Laws. These require
every African over the age of 16 to carry a pass which indicates whether
the holder is authorised to be in a prescribed white area as either a
work seeker or an employee or because they have lived in the area
continuously since birth. If a black person without this type of
authorisation is found in a “prescribed area”they are arrested (during
the most recent year – 1982 – for which records are available, some
200,000 such arrests were made) and are liable, apart from other
penalties, to be deported to their “Homeland”.
It would not be possible for all of this to exist without a powerful
security system and police force. The South African government has
dictatorial powers of arrest and detention without trial and the courts
there are not averse to handing out savage sentences. A person whose
activities are embarrassing to the government can be banned from taking
part in  political activity or even from engaging in discussion with
more than one other person at a time. The South African police are not
famous for any reticence in using these powers. They often respond to
protest demonstrations with a frenzied savagery and their interrogating
officers are notorious for torturing suspects and for the sudden death
of people under their detention through “jumping out of a window”or
expiring unexpectedly through “natural causes”.
Finally, all this horror has been kept in operation by the fact that,
in spite of their lower numbers, the whites have been able to keep
political control in their hands. The blacks have no effective voice in
national government; they can only vote for members of their
“Homeland”administrations while the Coloureds and Indians can elect
representatives to the “tri-racial”parliament. These recent concessions
are cosmetic and meaningless for at the very most they concede some say
in the affairs of only a small and insignificant segment of the country
while the whites control, and live off, the rest.
The racism of South Africa has sometimes been defended on the grounds
that it at least enables the blacks to know where they stand. Their
status and their “rights”- such as they are – are set down in laws and
they know that if they stray outside the law they risk repercussions.
There can be no argument about the fact that an attempt has been made to
compose such laws but this brings us up against the fact that a legally
defined racism must rely on a sound, consistent definition of race. In
this the South African government has been no more successful than the
others who have tried to compose such a definition and, of course,
unless they can compose it the basis of apartheid is exposed as
unscientific nonsense. The Population Registration Act of 1950 was the
original main instrument for classifying the South African population in
four main groups – Bantu, Coloured, Asiatic and White. The Act’s
definition of a white person is someone who in appearance is obviously
white or who is generally accepted as white; but it excluded any person
who, although in appearance obviously white, is generally accepted as
coloured. This obviously unsatisfactory definition, under which a person
can be white and coloured at the same time, caused a great deal of
confusion. The South African government, which had to take its own
nonsense seriously, set up a racial classification authority to decide
on a person’s race, which at least provided a lot of work for lawyers to
argue the nuances of racist madness in “borderline”cases. Sometimes
reality has had to be conveniently reshaped to fit in with the
definitions; Japanese people have been known to bleach their skin and a
child of white parents who in appearance was coloured was reclassified
as coloured which was, to put it mildly, confusing and distressing for
the family.
Apartheid: How It Developed
The background to apartheid lies in the 17th century. In 1652, the
first Europeans – the Dutch – arrived at the Cape to set up a station to
service ships of the Dutch East India Company on their voyages to and
from the Far East. At the time the place was inhabited by Hottentot
herdspeople, and bush people who lived by hunting and gathering. The
first distinctions between the settlers and the natives were based on
religious grounds, the Dutch being ardent Christians who regarded the
natives as heathens (the term Kaffir, which now has such derogatory
implications, originally meant non-believer). In 1700 slaves were
introduced from West and East Africa, Madagascar, India, Ceylon and
Malaysia. The Dutch interbred often with the Hottentots and the slaves,
which resulted in the “half-caste”group known as the Cape Coloureds.
Over the next 150 years a pattern of racial discrimination, based on
white s upremacy, began to emerge. As they developed sheep and cattle
farming the settlers moved away from the coastal areas in search of more
fertile grazing and came into conflict with Bantu tribes from the
North.
In 1806 the British came into control of the Cape and attempted to
introduce radical changes in the social structure there. Apart from
reorganising the governmental machine, the British freed the slaves and
theoretically gave the Coloureds the same status as whites (by that time
the Bush people had been almost eliminated). These measures, and the
arrival of immigrants from Britain, persuaded the Dutch – the Boers – to
move away from the Cape, in the exodus known as the Great Trek, and set
up the two inland republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal.
As they moved, the Boers met up with the Bantus, who saw the incursion
as a threat to their existence. There were many clashes, in which the
Boers were usually victorious and the Bantus became reduced to servitude
as labourers or as squatters on the land grabbed by the Boers. Both the
Transvaal and the Orange Free State were later annexed by the British
but were then given an “independent”status under British rule. In the
1860s the Indians arrived, brought in to work as indentured labourers on
the sugar plantations. Many of them, against the original intention,
stayed on after the expiry of their time to become another segment in
South Africa’s racial make-up.
The situation might have remained like that for a long time, or
changed only very slowly, had not diamonds and gold been discovered in
the Rand in 1867 and 1884. Without its gold and diamonds South Africa
might have become a sort of agrarian appendage to the rest of the
continent. The new industries changed things dramatically, for South
Africa was no longer just of strategic importance to the capitalist
powers of Europe. The Rand demanded cheap labour – which meant black
labour – and the growth of urban settlements near the mines. As the
mines fell into the hands of big capitalists like Cecil Rhodes and
Barney Barnett the small independent prospectors were rapidly reduced to
the status of employees – the “poor whites”of the gold and diamond
fields, who tried to soften the discomfort of their lowly position by
ensuring that the higher paid jobs went to them rather than to the
Africans and by refusing to be stripped to see if they were stealing
diamonds.
The blacks were confined to the low paid, unskilled jobs and this
transference of the caste system of the farmlands into industry, and
into the developing towns, brought a whole complex of problems which
have disfigured South African society ever since and which have brought
it to its present crisis. In 1890 a native miner could earn as much as
63s (£3.15) a month, which was reduced through the concerted efforts of
the mining companies to 41s 6d (£2.09) a month. At the same time a white
person, working as a junior mill hand in the mine could earn from
£20-£25 a month and it was a general pattern that white workers (who, as
we have said, were in any case usually in the more skilled or
supervisory jobs) were ten times better paid than the blacks. The
owners’ attempts to force down black miners’ wages led them to set up
compounds where the natives were compelled to live and to enforce this
by a system of “passports”which were the modern Pass Laws in embryo.
Working conditions, especially for the blacks, were dreadful and
extremely dangerous and the mining towns were ugly places of pitiless
rapacity. The big capitalists prospered through ruthless trickery.
The introduction of capitalist production had a marked effect on the
self-sufficient pastoral Boer communities. Many Boers, like the Africans
they had themselves dispossessed, became landless squatters. In the
Transvaal they mounted a stubborn resistance to the disintegration of
their way of life, which in 1899 resulted in the Boer War, a classic
imperialist conflict in which workers on both sides gave their lives to
protect their masters’ interests in the gold and diamond fields. When
hostilities ended in 1902 the Boer leaders signed the Treaty of
Vereeniging, which gave Crown Colony status to the Transvaal and the
Orange Free State. After the first world war many of the landless Boers
drifted into the towns where, unskilled and unaccustomed to the rigours
of industrial wage slavery, they would have made a poor showing in
competition for work with the Africans had not the government introduced
various measures to discriminate in their favour. One of these was an
employment colour bar, which effectively reserved the best for the
whites. Between the world wars South African governments, without
declaring a coherent long term policy on the issue, enacted a batch of
legislation which attempted to protect the pre-industrial racist
ideology of white dominance. Africans were forbidden to strike or join
trade unions; a system of residential segregation was enforced through
the Pass Laws; Africans were denied the vote. To some extent the South
African capitalists were dissatisfied at what was {from the point of
view of their profits) the wasteful and illogical practice of apartheid,
but any protests from them were muted by their hopes for change in the
future.
The election of the National Party government in 1948 marked a
radical change, for what had previously been a somewhat haphazard
collection of laws became coordinated into a powerful policy of
segregation. The new government, with its unrealistic vision of an
eternally white South Africa denuded of all blacks except those allowed
the status of temporary sojourners to serve the whites, quickly passed a
series of laws the titles of which speak for themselves – Prohibition
of Mixed Marriages Act, Native (Urban Areas) Consolidated Act,
Population Registration Act, Group Areas Act and so on. The farmers were
given substantial concessions, including tax allowances and fixed
prices for their produce and the constituency boundaries were arranged
so that a vote in a farming area was worth about 1.5 times one in a
town. Inevitably these laws met opposition, which the government
responded to with ever fiercer repression. Laws such as the Suppression
of Communism Act and the Sabotage Act were wielded to stifle opposition.
The government took powers of arbitrary detention and were not averse
to massacre in the face of mass protest, as happened at Sharpeville in
1960, Soweto in 1976 and Uitenhage in 1985.
Apartheid Under Attack
But of course the opposition has not been crushed. From outside South
Africa there have been campaigns for boycotts and sanctions. One of the
more successful has been the move to break sporting links; the denial
of international class competition in sports like rugby football,
cricket and athletics has been more than an irritant to those South
Africans who regard the sports field as a place to express an
aggressive, often male-oriented, nationalist arrogance. From outside
there has also been support for an increasingly organised and militant
guerrilla movement, which has engaged a large part of South Africa’s
military power. The strength of African protest has sometimes succeeded
in making its townships almost ungovernable. Many hundreds of people,
almost all of them black, have been killed over a short period of time
and the government has been forced to reform some aspects of apartheid.
Many of these changes are obviously cosmetic: the recruitment of
Africans into the police; the  encouragement of black small business
people who might think they have a stake in the stability of South
African society; the relaxation of strict apartheid in sport. In 1985
the laws prohibiting interracial sex and marriage were abolished. These
reforms were not gifts from the South African government; they were
prised from them and were conceded as an appeasement, designed to keep
the basis of their racist policies intact. For example the concessions
under which the different races can elect their own councils were in
reality worthless, for the councils can only administer the apartheid
system – they can do nothing to abolish or even modify it. One result of
this is that Africans who serve as councillors and in the police are
regarded as traitors and many of them have been horribly murdered.
Alongside the protests and the guerrilla warfare, pressure of a
different kind has been exerted by industrial capitalists in South
Africa. One of the most established and outspoken of these has been
Harry Oppenheimer, head of the mining combine Anglo American
Corporation. As early as May 1976, Oppenheimer set out his views clearly
to the London Stock Exchange: “those of us who believe that private
enterprise is the system best calculated to widen the areas of
individual choice – to open up new opportunities and raise the standards
of life – have to show very clearly that this private enterprise system
is not something which bears the label “for whites only”, and he went
on to say: “the migrant labour system becomes less and less appropriate
from an economic point of view as well as, of course, from a social and
moral point of view.”
When Oppenheimer spoke about “new opportunities”and “raising
standards of life”he was clearly referring to the interests of his
class. The migrant labour system adequately suits a farming economy and
to some extent even a mining industry but it cannot be applied
efficiently in a modern industrial state which needs a settled, skilled
labour force which can be hired and fired, or which will move
“freely”from one place to another, to meet the demands of commodity
production. This is recognised not only by the likes of Oppenheimer, for
there are now rising Boer capitalists who are also becoming frustrated
at the restrictions of apartheid. During the 1970s South African
industry changed from a labour intensive, low wage and low productivity
economy to a capital intensive and high productivity one. This should
also mean a higher wage economy – in other words higher wages for
African industrial workers, which is incompatible with the assumptions
of apartheid.
These combined pressures have brought the South African government up
against the reality that is developing industrial capitalism cannot
operate within the letters of a pre-industrial racism and that a
minority cannot forever repress a majority. In July 1985 the South
African government-financed Human Services Research Council reported
that “classical apartheid”was a failure, urged a “broadening of the
democratic base of the current power structure”and warned that “delays
in addressing the issue could have catastrophic consequences”. Some
reports indicate that the National Party leadership are themselves aware
that apartheid is obsolete but they also know how difficult it is to
persuade their followers of this. Various further reforms are being
considered – a federal structure which would bring the “Homelands”back
into the South African state, the abolition of the Pass Laws, the
freeing of political prisoners.
The government’s dilemma is that they must offer reforms if white
South Africa is to have any hope of survival; but the reforms themselves
must add impetus to the blacks who now feel that they are close to
wresting the political initiative from the whites. The shift in National
Party policy, away from their traditional constituency among farmers
and white mining workers towards the urban working class –relatively
well-off and more open to ideas of reform – left something of a
political vacuum. Over recent years this has been filled by a number of
parties which have split from the National Party, each adopting a more
extreme and more assertive – and uncompromising – white racism. (The
National Party was itself a creation of just such a split from the
United Party, which it defeated in the 1948 election). In 1969 there was
the Herstige (reconstituted) Nasionale Party; in 1982 the Conservative
Party which is now the second largest opposition party after the
Progressive Federal Party; in 1974 the Afrikaner Volkswag (People’s
Guard). On the fringes, but very much in evidence, is the Afrikaner
Resistance Movement, a terrorist organisation some of whose members –
including its leader, Eugene Terre Blanche – have appeared in court on
charges of possessing arms and plotting assassination.
The significance of these organisations can be seen in the extent to
which they have eaten into the National Party’s electoral standing. In
October 1985 the distribution of seats in the South Africa parliament
was:
National Party ……………………….. 127
Progressive Federal Party ………….. 27
Conservative Party …………………….18
New Republic Party …………………… 5
Herstige Nasionale Party ………… ….1
But more ominous for National Party leader Botha and his reforms was
the projection into the next election of current by-election results,
which give a total of 54 seats to the extremist opposition.
How seriously Botha took this was demonstrated in August 1985 when he
was expected to make a speech outlining some major reforms of apartheid
but in the event caved in to the pressure not to be seen to be giving
in to influence from abroad. About a month before, a State of Emergency
was declared under which it was an offence, amongst other things, to
disclose the identity of anyone arrested under the regulations before
official confirmation of the arrest; to make any statement calculated to
subvert the government; to advise or incite anyone to stay away from
work. The police powers of detention were extended and while in
detention nobody was allowed to sing or whistle or “be a nuisance”; the
only book they were allowed to read was the bible or some other “holy
book”.
Draconian measures were taken against the press, which gave the
government full powers of censorship. Television crews were prevented
from recording incidents which might reflect badly on the South African
government, such as the way the police dealt with demonstrators. The
predictable response to this was an increase, not a lessening, in the
violence of black protests, in particular against those blacks who were
considered to be collaborating with the government. The use of the
“necklace”- a tyre hung round the neck and set on fire – was the
gruesome result in many cases. Violence between blacks was frequent. At
the funeral of Nonyamezelo Mxenge, an anti-apartheid lawyer who was
murdered in August 1985 (her husband was also murdered in 1981) the
mourners clashed with members of the Zulu dominated Inkatha, who were
suspected of being in collusion with the police to attack the
demonstrators. The violence spread over onto local Indian shopkeepers
until, after four days of fighting, over 50 people were killed and some
2000 Indians had fled from their homes.
There is reason to believe that the police colluded in the activities
of the group known as the “vigilantes”- who might be called the
defenders of the “black establishment”, One of the more horrific actions
of the “vigilantes”was their clearance of the squatters camp at
Crossroads in early 1986, when 32 people were killed and over 20,000
made homeless. Opposed to the “vigilantes”were the “comrades”, in
general younger and more militant and feeling they had nothing to lose
in the struggle against apartheid. The ruthlessness of the “comrades”-
they were responsible for the use of the “necklace”against police
informers and collaborators – rivalled that of the “vigilantes”.
Outside South Africa the state of emergency and the increase in
repression resulted in a campaign for economic sanctions. This was
especially favoured by the left wing, where “Sanctions Now”became a
popular slogan. The idea was that cutting off South Africa economically
from the rest of world capitalism could persuade the government there to
change course. The history of similar campaigns against other countries
in the past does not encourage such a theory; in fact, as happened in
the case of Rhodesia, the very countries which are supposed to be
imposing the sanctions are often surreptitiously active in circumventing
them.
South Africa was also subjected to a certain amount of what might be
called diplomatic pressure. The French withdrew their ambassador and the
Americans their envoy –which at most could have made the normal
intercourse between the two countries just a little less efficient. The
advocate of sanctions claimed major victories when some big
international companies announced that they were pulling out of South
Africa. Sixty American companies took this line, the most famous being
Eastman Kodak in Britain, the loudest applause was for the announcement
that Barclays Bank, so long the target of demonstrators and boycotters
planned to withdraw. However, these were no precipitate,
morally-inspired decisions; in both cases the companies had protected
their shareholders’interests by a carefully planned withdrawal. The
chairman of Kodak said they had taken a “business decision”to pull out
for apartheid was responsible for South Africa’s economic “under
performance”. Barclays chairman said the bank’s reasons for selling up
(not closing down) were “basically commercial”.
Apartheid then has been very much on the defensive. The South African
capitalists have had to recognise black trade unions; the migrant
labour system can hardly avoid breaking down; separate development
cannot operate efficiently in an industrialised society; political
rights for all South Africans must follow all these other changes. And
what then? The people of South Africa will have passed abruptly into a
powerful capitalist economic and social order. They will have thrown off
the shackles of apartheid to become “free”wage workers. The chains they
will then have will be those of wage slaves all over the world.
Chapter 6: Racism in Britain
When we discuss racism in Britain today we almost always mean racial
prejudice based on skin colour. Other types of discrimination exist –
for example against the Irish and the Jews -but the brunt of the
racists’ disfavour is now felt by black people. It is rare now to hear
Irish immigrants blamed for unemployment or for creating slums; very
rare to hear of Jews accused of importing and spreading diseases, of
imposing an alien culture on a neighbourhood or of wangling themselves
priority in social and medical services. These types of accusation are
now levelled against black immigrants and it must first be said that
they spring from the concrete reality of people’s everyday lives. There
are slums and other inadequate housing; there is unemployment; people
are suffering from avoidable illnesses; personal and social stress
disfigure human life; for the majority there is insufficient access to
social and medical services. The experience of these problems breeds
insecurity and fear and promotes a dangerous cynicism about the future.
But this does not justify the racist case that social problems are
caused by immigrant groups, for the problems existed a long time before
the immigrants arrived, whether they are Irish or Jews or West Indian or
whatever, and they also existed in the places the immigrants came from.
This can be explained in only one way. The problems are inseparable
from the present social system and will persist as long as that system
lasts. The one thing which does change is the identity of the group
which is condemned as the supposed cause of the problem.
Over the past 150 years or so, immigrant groups coming into Britain
have included Irish, Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Cypriots, Italians,
Spaniards, Greeks, Maltese and Chinese. Those who came from the West
Indies and the Indian sub-continent during the 1950s and from the
decolonised African states in the 1960s are the latest in a long
historical line. Irish immigration peaked during the years 1850-1880
and, as a group distinguishable through their accent and cultural
habits, they were quickly confronted with a hostility which was
sharpened by the competition they represented in the employment market.
This hostility was justified by a spurious concept of the Irish which,
popular in Victorian times, has by no means died out today. They were
regarded as childish, ignorant, unstable, lazy, dirty and savage.
During the late 19th century the tendency was for the role of
principal scapegoats to be thrust on the Jews, assisted by opportunists
who hoped to make racism a political issue. In 1892 the Conservative
Party was planning to introduce controls on Jewish immigration and in
1902 the British Brothers’ League (BBL), the forerunner of many an
odious racist movement, was formed. It was BBL theory that Jewish
immigrants were overcrowding parts of the cities, forcing up rents and
rates which in turn caused further overcrowding. In fact the areas, such
as the East End of London, where the Jews tended to concentrate had
long suffered from overcrowding and general decay. The Jews were also
blamed for the high unemployment in the docks, when this was due to a
cyclical economic depression; in the tailoring trade, although this was
caused by a combination of more internal competition and the
introduction of machinery; and in the shoemaking industry which in any
case was in decline.
The reality is that large scale immigration is attracted to areas of
industrial expansion or to places where a multiplicity of small
productive units promises a lot of jobs, albeit with poor pay and
conditions. Industrial expansion aggravates the existing pressure on
housing and other resources. Most industrial towns have an area where
immigrant workers, of whatever origin, have tended to congregate and set
up communities, which then attract more immigrants. The impermanence of
these inhabitants often ensures that the areas will remain in a
condition of slumdom, and other decline comes as changes in housing
patterns put a blight on older properties. In
The Alien Invasion
(1892),
W.H.Wilkins complained that immigrants “add in a manner altogether out
of proportion to their numbers to the miseries of our poor in the
congested districts of our great towns, to which they invariably drift”.
The point is that Wilkins could not accuse the immigrants of creating
poverty, or its miseries, or urban congestion – only of aggravating
problems which already existed.
Black Immigration
In their early days, the black immigrants in Britain were met, along
with other groups, with explicit and overt discrimination.
Advertisements for flats and rooms, for example, often stated “No
coloured or Irish”and similar restrictions were placed on vacant jobs.
In 1960, to give just two of many instances, six black women were forced
out of their jobs in a West Bromwich factory because their white
workmates threatened to strike if they were allowed to continue. A
couple of months later the dustmen in Westminster objected to the
promotion of a Jamaican to driver/dustman on the grounds that such jobs
should be reserved for whites. The passing of the various Immigration
Acts, which effectively limited entry to Britain on racial grounds, was
followed by the Race Relations Acts in 1965, 1968 and 1976. These latter
laws theoretically prohibited discrimination on grounds of race against
people who were legally in this country and the Commission for Racial
Equality was set up to oversee their application.
But they were at best timid measures, sops to soften the blows of the
Immigration Acts and in any case took no account of the fact that ideas
cannot be changed just by passing legislation. One effect of the Race
Relations Act was to stimulate resentment against immigrants, who were
now seen as a favoured group protected from legitimate criticism.
Another effect was simply to drive discrimination under cover. Property
owners no longer publicly state that black tenants are not welcome but
simply do not accept them. It is the same with employment; although it
is illegal to advertise that blacks need not apply for certain jobs
there have been numerous examples of white applicants being accepted
after a black applicant has been told that the post had been filled. The
end result is that black people are still more likely to be unemployed
than white people, more likely to be in lower paid jobs and lower
standard accommodation.
Whatever the professed intentions of the Race Relations Acts, they
have not prevented organisations like the National Front and British
Movement, and others even more sinister, from stepping up their racist
campaigns. Nor have they protected black people from persistent, serious
violence. In areas where many blacks live, like the East End of London,
racist harassment and assaults are now commonplace. Some have involved
determined acts of arson causing a number of deaths. In one incident an
Asian mother and her three small children perished. Figures for racial
attacks in the Metropolitan police area increased from 1,280 in 1983 to
about 1,450 in 1984. The police tend to minimise the significance of the
figures by pointing out that they originate in the victims’ own
perception of the motive for the attacks; they do not confirm them all
as racial. On the other hand the black community in places like Tower
Hamlets, where racial harassment is rife, insist that victims are
discouraged from reporting attacks precisely because they fear the
police will not take them seriously. What cannot be doubted is that
racially motivated violence is flourishing; the Commission for Racial
Equality has received reports to this effect from Community Relations
Councils all over the country and a Home Office study has concluded
that, on the basis of incidents reported to the police. Asians are 50
times more likely than whites to be physically attacked.
Black people have reacted to this in self-defence, responding to
violence from whites with their own. Their sense of alienation and
exclusion from even the accepted norms of working class poverty has bred
a restlessness among inner city blacks which can all too easily be
stimulated into a riot. Brixton, St. Pauls, Handsworth and Tottenham are
recent examples of this and there is no reason to suppose that there
will not be more. Racists like Enoch Powell find some comfort in the
riots, claiming that they justify warnings about the tensions caused by
introducing an “alien”culture into Britain. In fact the riots are no
more than another example (and working class history is full of them) of
workers exploding, volcano-like, against the intolerable frustrations
of repression, impoverishment and insecurity.
Racist Complaints
One of the first elements in the racist case against immigration is
that it causes overcrowding in an already over-populated country. This
complaint, however, never seems to be made against white immigrants, who
for some reason are not judged guilty of increasing “overcrowding”. It
should be remembered that the first large scale black immigration, from
the West Indies, India and Pakistan, was actively encouraged to remedy a
shortage of labour in public transport, the National Health Service
(including the period when Enoch Powell was Minister of Health) and the
like. Since the early 1950s the population of this country has increased
relatively slowly, from about 50 million to about 56 million in 1985.
This has happened in spite of immigration, because in almost every year
more people leave the country than are allowed in. About 4.5 per cent of
the population of England and Wales live in homes whose “head”was born
in the New Commonwealth; if all these people were black it would amount
to a total of something like 2.5 million. This hardly represents a
threat of “overcrowding”or, in Margaret Thatcher’s words, “swamping”. If
there is a problem of absorption, it is not in the fact of black
immigration but in the prejudiced reaction of the racists.
Another point of racist attack is that black immigrants cause
unemployment among white workers through a willingness to do “white”jobs
for less pay. The National Front publication
Spearhead
of April 1970 alleged that:
“the Department of Employment has been extending special treatment to
unemployed coloured immigrants; that is, going to extra pains to secure
jobs for immigrants that would otherwise go to Britons.”
But this theory simply does not fit the facts. During the 1920s and
1930s, when the average annual rate of unemployment was almost 13 per
cent, there were virtually no black migrants to this country. Between
1948 and 1962, when the first Commonwealth Immigration Act was passed,
unemployment averaged 1.7 per cent a year. Whatever arguments were
advanced to support the 1962 Act they could not have included the smear
that immigrants caused unemployment. In fact unemployment has risen as
more stringent restrictions on immigration have been imposed; as
immigration has fallen the jobless figures have risen. In 1984, an
all-time low of 51,000 people were allowed entry to the United Kingdom
for settlement, of which nearly 25,000 were from Africa and Asia, while
unemployment reached up to the 3.5 million mark. The fact is that
unemployment rises and falls with the level of economic activity within
capitalism – in accordance with the cycle of boom and slump. This
process is endemic in capitalism and it operates all the time and all
over the world, regardless of any migratory workers. Rather than being
the cause of unemployment, migrants are usually on the move to escape
from it.
It is over housing that the prejudices of racism operate most
blatantly and fearsomely; the arson attacks we mentioned earlier were
accompanied with the daubing of slogans against rehousing black workers.
When the
National Front News
announced in October 1976 that
“thousands”of Asian immigrants were being given “immediate priority”over
homeless British families, it was echoing a prejudice which is pretty
popular. Black people are also supposed to take over entire
neighbourhoods and then, with exotic cooking, deafening music and
unhygienic habits, terrorise the remaining few whites, who always seem
to be elderly widows whose frailty is accentuated through regular
muggings. What actually happens is that immigrants in the mass usually
gravitate towards the more run-down parts of a town and, as they become
able to move out, they come into competition with other workers for
housing.
This happens with any large scale population movement, regardless of
the colour of the migrants. Even more, it has nothing to do with
immigration as such; basically it is an effect of the competition among
impoverished workers for scarce resources, which is an unavoidable part
of working class life. It is not true that a large influx of black
workers brings disturbance and decay. In the case of Southall, in West
London, the immigrants went some way to revitalising a place which
seemed doomed. Apart from their effect on the economy of the place, the
Asians established in Southall a comprehensive network of community
involvement and support. It was only racist bigots who objected to such a
rise in social morale.
It will also be useful to consider two other examples of the effect
of black settlement. In the 1960s a great many people from India and
Pakistan were encouraged to make their way to Bradford where the textile
industry, at a time of labour shortages, was looking for
low-wageworkers. At first intending to be temporary sojourners, the
immigrants had little choice but to move into areas of dilapidated
housing which were being abandoned by white workers. But whether they
wanted to or not the immigrants were prevented from returning home by
their low pay. They now make up about 50,000 of a total city population
of 450,000 and they are overwhelmingly clustered in four of Bradford’s
wards, where in some places they represent two-thirds of the population.
A prejudiced observer might see this as a premeditated take-over when
in fact it is a typically stressful stage in capitalism’s process of
worker exploitation.
Willesden, in North West London, is another area which received a
large influx of immigrants from the West Indies and the Indian
sub-continent. This part of London sprouted as a typical dormitory
suburb with the laying down of the railway in the 19th century and with
the erection of a large estate of munitions factories during the first
world war. It was, then, an area with a constant demand for labour,
attracting immigrants who placed extra pressure on resources such as
housing. The early arrivals were from Wales and Ireland – especially the
latter –and during the 1950s the black workers came. In the Borough of
Brent, which includes Willesden, nearly 54 per cent of all households
are “headed”by people born overseas, mainly Asia, East Africa, the
Caribbean and the Irish Republic. Willesden is not an attractive place
and its problems existed a long time before the first black immigrants
set foot there. It has had what is officially admitted to be a housing
problem for some 60 years; during the 1930s the local council reported
that overcrowding was a substantial, persistent concern.
Nowadays over half the rented properties in some parts of Willesden
are overcrowded or lack what the census-takers regard as basic
amenities. The economic down-turn of the 1970s has hit the nearby
industrial estates on which the area depends. Between 1971 and 1973
about 6,000 jobs in manufacturing were lost in the Borough of Brent,
most of them in Willesden; in 1985 unemployment in Brent had quadrupled
over five years to 14 per cent of the workforce. The Borough is
officially assessed as the eighth poorest in Britain and three of its
wards as among the eight most deprived in London. The depth of poverty
which typifies and disfigures Willesden cannot have been eased by the
pressures of large scale immigration but it was not caused by it. The
immigrants were enticed to the area by industries which needed to
exploit their labour, and in the hope that they would find employers to
exploit them. Similar poverty – slums, unemployment, urban decay,
emotional despair, cynicism – is experienced in many cities, such as
Glasgow and Belfast, which have hardly any black immigrants. They are
commonplace in life under capitalism.
Crime is another social malaise often laid at the door of the black
immigrants. Black people, runs the prejudice, are heavily involved in
prostitution, drug trafficking, and the style of street robbery known as
“mugging”. First of all it must be stated that there are all manner of
pitfalls for anyone trying to draw conclusions, and formulate policies,
based on criminal statistics. It is not even possible to judge the rise
and fall of the incidence of particular offences from official figures,
let alone arrive at any picture of social change from them. The reason
is that criminal statistics stem from many variable and dubious factors
such as the victims’ perceptions of what happened to them, their
response to it (masses of crime never gets reported to the police), the
current official definition of an offence, the decision of the police as
to which category an offence belongs in and whether to proceed with a
prosecution and so on. It might just be possible, after great
difficulty, to establish that there has been a genuine increase in
certain types of offences in areas which have a high proportion of black
immigrants, as the police once said was the case with street offences
in Brixton. Even so, this would not establish an essential link between
crime and skin colour. As we have seen, immigrants gravitate towards the
very places where depressed conditions breed crime. Once there, they
are subjected to a bigotry which positively discourages them from
identifying with the concept of an orderly, disciplined capitalist
society. Deviance from the compliant norm – delinquency – is inevitable,
whatever the skin colour of the deviants. Glasgow, as stated before, is
a city with few black immigrants but it has long established problems
of alcoholism, gang warfare and extreme violence. All the evidence
indicates that crime is not racially or genetically linked but is caused
by social factors, a response to repressive and hopeless conditions.
Finally, we come to the argument that black immigrants impose an
unacceptable culture on Britain. Leaving aside the fact that British
imperialist expansion of the 18th and 19th centuries was one of
history’s greatest examples of the imposition of an “alien”culture, we
must question the nature of this “culture”which is under threat and
whether it is worth defending. To begin with, is there such a thing as a
“British way of life”? Surely how people live is determined not by
their nationality but by which class they belong to? Capitalists live
comfortably on the proceeds of the surplus value contributed through the
labour of the workers. On the other side of the class line, workers
survive at varying levels of poverty and restriction. How workers live –
their “way of life”- is made up of their homes, clothes, food,
recreation, education, prospects, ambitions and all of these are
conditioned by their social relationships as members of the working
class. This also applies to workers abroad, so that any immigrants to
this country bring with them the same basic elements of “culture”as
British workers are already experiencing. Of course there may be
incidental differences in things like food, clothes and language but
these are modified and absorbed, or accepted, without any evident social
damage. Second and third generation black immigrants are growing up in
identical terms to the children of “native”British people, whose
“culture”is, in any case, itself the outcome of centuries of mingling
and cross-fertilisation. We must not forget either that British workers
have been among the world’s prime migrants. Very often they have left
this country under the illusion that once they get abroad they will not
suffer poverty and stress. But poverty and stress are common to workers
everywhere. Clearly, the need is for international working class unity
to abolish the cause of the problem.
Chapter 7: The Migration of Workers
In previous chapters we have considered some racist theories. All of
these assert that they are dealing with an urgent human problem, that
the existence of different groups of people is a threat to the group
which the racist defines as superior. But of course this threat operates
only when there is the potential of racial mixing, so that the racist
solution has to be one aimed at separation. In its most extreme form,
this solution is one of genocide, such as the Nazis attempted. In less
extreme forms it is a policy like the apartheid of South Africa, or the
repatriation advocated by British organisations like the National Front.
These less extreme policies are based on the theory that human beings
should not stray from their place of origin and that those who do stray
should be sent back as quickly as possible. The argument is that it is
perfectly efficient and desirable for people to stay forever in
closed-off communities, never mixing for fear of modifying each other’s
cultural habits, never inter-breeding because this would lead to the
devastation of racial purity.
There is absolutely no basis in reality for these ideas. There are
very few examples of groups of people being able – or being forced – to
carry on a separate, exclusive existence. Human beings have needed to be
migrants, under the pressure of whichever social system they lived in.
In primitive society, when life was precarious, humans had to move
around to find new sources of food. Slavery introduced another style of
migration, albeit one of brutally enforced transport of humans. Other
episodes of enforced migration have happened through acts of conquest or
of expulsion, as with the Jews and the Huguenots, or as attempts to
escape from persecution or famine. If human history can be seen as a
chain reaction, sparked off by changes in the mode of production, human
migration has its place as one of the energising impulses. Capitalist
society in particular provides not only the means of rapid and
world-wide migration, but also a pressure to migrate, by its very nature
as a social system. To attempt to stand apart from this is to stagnate;
indeed the consequence of separation and exclusiveness has been
backwardness. On the other hand, as we have seen, the evidence is that
social and cultural mixing is progressive and advantageous for human
beings.
The rise of capitalism, displacing the social relationships of
feudalism – a society of small agricultural communities producing for
themselves and a surplus for barons, priests and warriors – has provided
the most powerful impulse yet to migration. It would be true to say
that the capitalist industrialisation of the 19th century could not have
happened but for migration – the free movement of reserves of labour
power. Economic growth was fertilised by this labour, for it offered the
prospect of lower wages and a consequent downward influence on wages in
general, with an upward pressure on rates of profit. To begin with, the
reserves of labour power were to be found in rural areas, in the
evicted peasants and the artisans whose living had been undermined by
the new production methods. These desperate people poured into the
expanding towns to join the proletariat who were already experiencing
life under capitalist terms of employment. As the more local reserves of
labour were exhausted the employers turned their attention further
afield – to abroad. Over four centuries there was a massive movement of
peoples, concentrated especially in the century from 1830 to 1930,
consisting mainly of emigration from Europe to America. During that time
over 60 million people left Europe, 40 million of them to settle
permanently in North and South America, Australia and New Zealand.
This was not entirely a movement of people from a primitive area to
an advanced one, for up to 1860 about two-thirds of emigrants originated
in Britain, then the most industrially advanced country. Throughout the
19th century European people migrated both overseas and within Europe,
in response to the demands of capitalist industrialisation. During the
decades before the First World War hundreds of thousands from Italy,
Spain and Poland went to the Americas but large numbers also went to
Germany, France and Switzerland. In the case of Italy, nearly half the
15 million who left between 1876 and 1920 migrated to other European
countries. Of course it was not accidental that this   all happened at a
time of a rapid advance in productive techniques creating the demand
for migratory labour and the means of transport to enable that demand to
be satisfied. But however it happened and in whichever direction, it is
clear that human migration is an established fact of life. Even if it
were useful to do so, it cannot now be undone; it cannot be unravelled
so as to return everyone to their place of origin (even supposing this
could be determined).
Migrant flows
(1): by age and citizenship in thousands
British / Old Commonwealth /  New Commonwealth and Pakistan (NCWP)
Indian sub continent (2) / Other / European  Community (3) / Other foreign / All countries
___________________________________________________________________________
Into the United Kingdom
1971 92 17 18 18 13 41 200
1976 87 16 21 21 12 34 191
1981 60 11 21 14 10 36 153
1984 95 15 18 17 15 41 201
1985 110 19 17 18 20 48 232
Out of the United Kingdom
1971 171 13 6 11 14 26 240
1976 137 15 4 10 15 29 210
1981 164 13 2 14 13 26 233
1984 103 10 4 12 8 28 164
1985 108 12 3 12 10 28 174
1 Excludes the movement between United Kingdom and Irish Republic.
2 India, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
3 Excludes Denmark and Irish Republic in 1971 and Greece in 1971 and 1976.
Source: Office of Population Censuses and Surveys.
Nevertheless repatriation still finds support among people who
observe some of the effects of immigration and draw incorrect
conclusions. For example workers who depend on state benefits have been
known to vent their insecurity and frustration on black workers who are
forced to submit themselves to the same humiliating process. The same
thing can happen when workers have to wait for treatment at a hospital,
or when they go to plead their case at the Housing Department of their
local council. At such times, they have an understandable resentment
against all competition for scarce resources. When the competition can
be distinguished by some physical characteristic such as skin colour,
the resentment may lead to false ideas about the characteristics of
black workers which compel them to be indolent and demanding, to the
cost of white native workers who should have first pick of
“our”hospitals, “our”housing, “our”social security benefits. The
development of this prejudice is that we need only send the black
workers back to their country of origin for all to be well – for there
to be plenty of medical attention, housing and money for everyone. In
fact, bad housing, difficulty of access to medical treatment, lack of
money are typical – and chronic –working class problems. They are a
consequence of the essential poverty of all people who depend on being
employed in order to live. There was never a time when life was easy for
workers. Immigrants did not create the problems; they came here in the
false hope of avoiding them but found they had to share them. And if we
look at an example of large scale migration of white people, we shall
see that it produced the same kind of effects – and the same kinds of
responses – as are now attributed, on grounds of racial character, to
black workers.
Irish Migration
Britain was involved in a considerable intake of migrants during the
19th century. The reserves of labour from the rural areas were quickly
exhausted by the Industrial Revolution and the employers had to turn
their attention to Ireland, where economic conditions had created a
“surplus”of labour power. Domestic Irish industry had been damaged by
the 1800 Act of Union. In addition there was a pyramidical system of
ownership in agriculture under which less than one per cent of the total
population held 80 per cent of the cultivated land and below them the
leaseholders, the middlemen and finally the tenants. This ensured that
life for those at the base of the pyramid was precarious in the extreme.
The tenants themselves were divided into three groups; none of them
were secure and those at the bottom – the labourers -were condemned to
live in desperate squalor. To make matters worse, the repeal of the Corn
Laws, which was to the benefit of the industrial capitalists of
England, encouraged the Irish landlords to turn their estates to
grazing, which meant enclosing the land and evicting the tenants. For
some time, there had been a steady trickle of emigrants trying to escape
from those conditions – by the year 1770 about 9000 were leaving
Ireland each year for America -and the famines of 1822, 1846 and 1847
were enough to turn this into a flood. During 1846-47 one million Irish
people died of starvation. By 1851 there were 727,326 Irish in Britain,
making up almost three per cent of the population of England and Wales
and over seven per cent of the population of Scotland. The immigrants
settled in the cities – Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow – and constituted
a significant part of the labour force in the less skilled jobs in the
textile and building trades.
The fact that the staple food of the Irish was potatoes enabled them
to live more cheaply than English workers (in a normal season in Ireland
an acre of potatoes was enough to feed six children and their parents
for nine months of the year) and the resultant downward pressure on
wages caused a great deal of resentment among English workers. Many
employers were obliged to keep the two groups apart for fear of trouble
between them. There were numerous riots and some pitched battles between
the English and the Irish which could rage for several days. The lower
wages of the Irish workers condemned them to the most fetid slums, which
were worsened by poor public hygiene facilities in a cramped urban
environment.
There was no happier story for those Irish who went further afield to
America. The immigrant ships were notorious for their accommodation,
with the passengers in some cases so packed in that it was necessary for
some to die before they could all have a sleeping berth. Fever raged
and rats swarmed in the steerage accommodation, shut in from the light
and the air as it was. A medical officer at Grosse Isle, where the
immigrant vessels were held in quarantine, saw from one “a stream of
foul air issuing from the hatches as dense and as palpable as seen on a
foggy day from a dung heap”. These conditions, combined with a deficient
diet (each immigrant passenger was allowed 7lbs. of provisions a week),
were responsible for a terrible death rate; typical figures for voyages
in the late 1840s were on the
Larch
, where 108 of 440 passengers died at sea, and on the
Virginian
which lost 158 out of 476. Those who survived the crossing landed in a
desperate plight: “spectre-like wretches”, “cadaverous”, “feeble”; the
ships reached the end of their frightful journey with “not one really
healthy person on board”.
Perhaps their experiences on the voyage prepared the immigrants for
what was awaiting them on shore. Their predecessors, although not
exactly welcomed to America, had at least been in comparatively good
health and, as had happened in England, they had supplied much of the
physical muscle to cut the canals and lay down the railways and the
roads. But the famine refugees were in no state to do such work; they
had little choice but to make for the cities like Chicago, New York and
Boston. Not a very attractive prospect to the employers, they rapidly
settled into the most squalid of living conditions. To some extent their
background as impoverished peasants had hardened them to such
privations – which was to the advantage of speculative builders.
Untrammeled by any laws about space or light or drainage or water
supply, the builders covered any available ground – gardens, backyards,
alleyways –with tumble-down shacks, which at times completely encased
the original house. The houses themselves were partitioned into tiny
cubicles and untold numbers of wretched Irish people were crammed into
these spaces. Even worse were the cellars, entirely below ground and
without light, air or drainage. In Boston, many of the cellars were
flooded with every incoming tide, and others from time to time, with the
waters of Back Bay, which was no better than a scum-covered cess pit.
Yet the cellars too were crowded with immigrants; indeed one opinion was
that without the cellars Boston could not have accommodated its new
population. In 1894 a Committee of Internal Health reported on how the
Irish were living in Boston: “without comforts and mostly without common
necessaries; in many cases huddled together like brutes . . . sullen
indifference and despair, or disorder, intemperance and utter
degradation reign supreme”.
It is useful to consider the history of Irish migration for what it
tells us about the movement of workers around the world and about racial
prejudice. Living in relative backwardness, fleeing from intolerable
impoverishment, starvation and disease, they represented either an
opportunity or a threat, depending on which side of the class barrier
they were viewed from. For the landlords and the employers they were an
opportunity; desperate for employment and somewhere to live, they were
vulnerable almost to the point of being defenceless and could be
manipulated for a more intense exploitation of the “native”workers. In
that way they were a threat, for they were competitors for jobs, housing
and for scarce public resources. Inevitably their presence exerted a
retrograde influence on working class conditions and, just as
inevitably, they became feared and hated and the butt of a prejudice
flavoured with ogreish myths. We have already described some of the
features which these myths attributed to Irish people as ineradicable,
hereditary disadvantages. But the passage of time has exposed the myths;
Irish workers have been absorbed into the general process of working
class existence under capitalism. They no longer live a cess-pit
existence; they no longer dispose of their rubbish out of the windows,
or drag themselves about the streets half-naked and half-starved. There
are no longer anti-Irish riots or running battles with them, lasting for
days on end.
Shifting Prejudices
To some degree, many of the fears, myths and prejudices which were
once directed against the Irish are now turned on black immigrants with
the same justifications given – that they are an alien, primitive people
who are biologically incapable of adaptation. The history of the Irish
people shows that there is no scientific reason for these theories, that
the living conditions associated with Asian and West Indian immigrants
are not racially determined but the product of historical, social and
economic influences. In other words, these conditions have nothing to do
with skin colour. They are the inexorable product of capitalism’s
inadequacies.
It is not then unusual for migrant groups to be blamed for extreme
poverty, slum housing, rampant disease and the like, even though they
are trying to escape from those very problems. Established workers in
the “host”countries resent the immigrants as competitors, taking no
account of the fact that the things they compete for are scarce only to
workers. People who are in the capitalist – the privileged – class do
not need to be rivals for housing, or a place in the queue for social
security benefit. Working class problems did not arrive with the arrival
of immigrants; they are part and parcel of the class division of
capitalist society. The resentment against immigrants which is expressed
as racial prejudice is, then, a class matter.
Chapter 8: Why Racism?
We have been concerned with an examination of the background of
racism, its history (or parts of it) and its theoretical basis. We have
also looked at some examples of racism in operation. It is clear that no
supportable case for racism exists and that what arguments are advanced
in its favour are little more than a misguided interpretation of, or
response to, social and historical factors. Racism is not rooted in
biological fact; it is an idea which human beings impose on themselves,
at considerable cost to their own interests. This leaves us with an
important question: if racism is neither logical nor useful, why is it
so popular and widespread?
There are, of course, innumerable ideas and theories which are
popular but which have no basis in fact and are quite useless in
explaining and understanding reality. Capitalism abounds in them; as a
social system which operates in the interests of a parasite minority it
cannot justify itself in any logical way. To understand such ideas – in
this case, racism – we need to refer to the basis of capitalism, the
soil where they take root and which nurtures them.
Capitalism and Class
We use the term capitalism to describe the social system which
operates on the basis of capital or wealth invested in order to produce
goods and services for sale at a profit. This mode of production results
from the private, or class, ownership or monopoly of the means of
production and distribution. It gives wealth the particular social
character of the commodity -things which are produced for sale with a
view to profit. Some of these features existed in social systems before
capitalism, but capitalism is distinguished by the fact that such
features are dominant. Class ownership means that a minority live by
their monopoly of the means of life, leaving the rest, who are the
overwhelming majority, to live through being employed by the minority.
This is usually called “work”but it is more accurately called
“employment”, a social relationship involving the majority selling their
mental and physical abilities to the owners for a wage or a salary and
then applying those abilities in the production of commodities.
A person’s class is determined, not by the size of their income or by
their accent or by where they went to school, but by their ownership or
non-ownership of the means of production and distribution. The class
barrier marks a line of conflict, for the interest of those on one side
are opposed to those on the other. As long as capitalism lasts, this
conflict will be over the division of wealth and will be expressed in
the industrial field in strikes, working to rule, lock-outs and the
like. But the ultimate expression of class conflict is on the political
field, to dispossess the capitalist minority and establish socialism – a
society based on the common ownership and democratic control of all
that is involved in the production and distribution of wealth. Socialism
will be in glaring contrast to capitalism for it will be the most
efficient and humane society possible, making the maximum use of human
productive abilities to the benefit of the whole community. Its wealth
will be produced solely to meet human needs and the whole of society
will have free access to that wealth, each individual according to their
self-determined needs. It will be a world of one people, without
national frontiers or other artificial barriers. It will be a
democratically administered society.
The propaganda for capitalism asserts that it is the best system the
human race can design. It denies the class struggle and argues that
everyone has the same interest in making capitalism run smoothly as a
profit-based society. So what are the facts? According to the Inland
Revenue, in Britain in 1982 the top five per cent of the population
owned 41 per cent of the marketable wealth – that is things which can be
bought and sold such as housing, land, stocks and shares – while the
bottom 50 per cent owned only 4 per cent of that wealth. Put another
way, the top one per cent of the population owned more than the bottom
75 per cent put together. It is the same in other countries; the
Wall Street Journal
of
12 December 1985 quoted Federal Reserve Data which showed that in 1983
the ownership of American government and corporate bonds was confined to
four per cent of all households and that the richest two per cent of
all households owned 71 per cent of all outstanding shares. There are,
of course, countries such as Russia which claim to be socialist because
their industry is not capitalised through stocks and shares. But the
fact that in some cases it is not possible to express the class monopoly
of the means of life through such exact percentages does not prove that
monopoly does not exist. In Russia there is a privileged class who have
access to the highest standard of living and another class who have to
sell their working abilities in order to live; there is, in other words,
wage labour and capital. It makes no difference that investment,
production and distribution are carried out through the state; it only
means that such countries are more accurately described as state
capitalist.
Wealth and Poverty
Capitalism exists throughout the modern world. Its inequalities can
be seen in the contrasting life styles and expectations of the members
of each class. The British Royal Family, for example, display their
enormous wealth partly by owning four palaces, four other stately homes,
a yacht, three helicopters and three aircraft and by employing over 300
staff to wait on and work for them. One of the richest people in
Britain is the Duke of Westminster, who owns some 138.000 acres of the
world’s most expensive land, including highly valuable areas like
Belgravia, Mayfair and Westminster. One estimate puts Westminster’s
income at £3 every second – or getting on for £100 million a year. The
Cavendish family, whose head is the Duke of Devonshire, own a collection
of stately homes and estates – Chatsworth, Hardwick Hall, Bolton Abbey,
Lismore, Compton Place, Devonshire House. Landed aristocrats form only
part of the ruling class; there are others whose wealth comes more from
industry, such as the Guinnesses, the Vesteys, the Cowdrays. The
attitudes of this class were succinctly stated by Alan Clark, M.P. and
millionaire estate owner, who is noted for his open contempt for the
working class:
“I don’t need to get any richer. Once you have a certain amount of
money you are really better off living on the income –or preferably on
the income of the income. (
Guardian
1 February 1986)”
On the other side of the class divide are the wage and salary
earners. How do they live in today’s society? According to the 1983
Department of Health and Social Security
Family Expenditure Survey
some 15 million people were living “on the margins”of the official
poverty line. At the same time the Child Poverty Action Group found 3.75
million children living at that level and half a million actually
existing below it – below the level of Supplementary Benefit. A 1983
survey by Market and Opinion Research estimated that about 7.5 million
people have to do without some essential item of clothing; seven million
do not have enough for their food needs; about ten million cannot
afford any sort of holiday other than staying with relatives. For these
people – who are members of the useful, productive class in society –
there can be very little ambition or security. In contrast to
capitalists like Alan Clark their lives are a ceaseless struggle to make
ends meet interspersed with desperate crises such as being homeless. A
1986 report –
Children Today
– by the National Children’s Home,
described the lives of some members of the working class in a typical
town: Poverty in this area is relentless – there is no light at the end
of the tunnel. Families live in damp, sub-standard housing that they
can’t afford to heat properly. They survive on the basics and there is
no comfort. Sometimes the pressures overwhelm them. They haven’t the
energy to be angry about it – their energies go into surviving.”
The fact that these are examples of the lower strata of working class
existence should not obscure the fact that poverty, in some measure, is
a problem for the entire class. As we have said, workers depend for
their living on employment by the capitalists. The worst poverty is
usually suffered by those who for some reason – unemployment, old age,
sickness, single parenthood – are unable to get a job and a wage. But
this does not mean that those who have a job are secure and prosperous.
In order that surplus value – which is the source of the capitalists’
profit – may be produced, wages must be restricted by the value of the
workers’ labour power. In general terms, wages must amount to what is
required in prevailing social conditions to reproduce labour power.
Wages enable workers to buy food, clothes, housing and to have access to
education, entertainment and health care. When these have been paid for
there is very little left and the vast majority of workers die as poor
as they were born.
The irony of this situation is that the workers are condemned to this
restricted access to lower quality goods in spite of the fact that they
produce the world’s wealth, including goods of the highest quality.
They live in slums or neurotic estates of semis while they design and
build palaces. They turn out the finest food and clothes for exclusive
shops but themselves scratch around in the humiliation of mass
production chain stores and supermarkets. They are raised in the
expectation that life will be harsh and competitive and they will have
to struggle against each other for jobs, housing and essential services
such as medical care. They are conditioned to assume that this
competition is a natural fact of life; there is very little awareness
that the problem could be eradicated through a basic change in society.
Instead the tendency is to blame the need to compete on the competitors
and to argue that if they could be eliminated the problem would go away.
For these reasons male workers have resisted the employment of women or
have attempted to surround female workers with all sorts of barriers or
to confine them to the more menial, repetitive, less demanding jobs.
For the same reason the miners objected, just after the war, to the
introduction of foreign workers into the mines and, in the 1950s,
workers in several industries took action against the employment of
immigrants from Asia and the West Indies.
Nationalism and Racism
Such prejudices are by no means discouraged by the ruling class
propaganda which, in general terms, asserts that British exports (or in
America, American exports; in Japan, Japanese exports and so on) could
dominate world markets. During economic and financial crises, foreigners
are often blamed for sabotaging the prosperity of “the nation”. Just
after the second world war, for example, the Labour government told us
that they were prevented from giving us the prosperity they had promised
by something called the “dollar gap”- in other words by the domination
of world markets by American exports. A few years later the culprit had
been widened into the less specific “balance of trade”- the generally
poor competition offered by British exports against those from other
countries. After that the villains became foreign currency speculators
who were manipulating a decline in the exchange rate of sterling and who
were immortalised in the menacing shapes of the Gnomes of Zurich.
In wartime we are bombarded with remorseless racialist and
nationalist propaganda to regard the current “enemy”as inhuman savages
and the current “ally”as peaceable and humane. During 1939-45 the
Germans and Japanese were considered deserving victims of any degree of
horror; their battle casualties were gleefully reported (and often
exaggerated) and the indiscriminate slaughter of their civilian
population in air raids was justified on the grounds that it was their
just deserts. A few years after the war, when the capitalist powers had
formed themselves into different alliances, the propaganda changed to
fit in with the new “allies”in Japan and West Germany and the new
“enemies”in Russia and China. More recently, British ruling class
propaganda vilified Argentinian workers, in the most offensive and
prejudiced terms, as fit for any depths of butchery that British workers
could be misled into inflicting on them.
The Myth of Scarcity
Workers who accept this type of propaganda are allowing themselves to
be diverted from the real reasons for their problems. A lot of
nationalist paranoia is stimulated by the idea that poverty is caused
through there not being enough to go round, and therefore each nation
must compete for the wealth available. But the scarcities of capitalism
bear no relation to the productive potential of the world; they are
artificial, imposed on us by the profit priorities of capitalism. There
are huge “surpluses”of food in the world. In the EEC countries in early
1987 there were stockpiles of 1.5 million tonnes of butter, one million
tonnes of skimmed milk powder, 0.6 million tonnes of beef, and 18
million tonnes of grain. In some cases, financial subsidies are on offer
which actually persuade farmers not to produce food; in 1982 in the
USA, 82 million acres were taken out of production in this way. These
“surpluses”of land and produce do not exist because human needs are
already fully satisfied.
Each year tens of millions die from, or suffer the effects of,
malnutrition to the despair of organisations like Oxfam which aim to
eradicate hunger. In the same way the problem of  homelessness and of
unsatisfactory housing continues, keeping bodies like Shelter and CHAR
in activity, while there is a “surplus”of bricks and while skilled
building workers languish on the dole. The coal strike of 1984-85 was
fought over the issue of pit closures and after the miners’ defeat the
National Coal Board carried on apace with the programme of closures,
aiming to cease production at 26 more pits and put some 20,000 miners
out of the industry. The motive for this was not that everyone was able
to heat their homes adequately, for each winter tens of thousands of
workers -especially old age pensioners – confront the choice of a warm
house or food to eat. Many old people – the exact figure is difficult to
judge but some authorities say it runs into thousands – actually die of
cold. Of course British Coal is aware of all this; their argument for
cutting back production is not based on human need but on the need for
“economic”(i.e. profitable) pits.
Poverty represented as scarcity, combined with the pressure to
compete for those “scarce”resources, is a recipe for prejudice and
discriminatory conflict – for nationalist pride, for racism. Of course,
as we have seen in previous chapters, the advent and development of
capitalism has in many ways worked against racism and reacted against
the restrictions which racism puts on the free movement and availability
of wage labour. But the capitalist social system may also at times be a
fertile breeding ground for racism. This may seem like a contradiction
but that is how it is, for capitalism is riddled with contradictions and
inconsistencies. It cannot be a system of human harmony; division and
conflict are in its very nature. It has to try to explain away its
shortcomings. In wartime, for example, it would not be possible to admit
that workers were being urged to kill each other in the interests of
their  exploiters. It would not be possible to concede that capitalism
is anarchic, that it moves from boom to slump to boom out of all control
and that the politicians’ promises to do something about it are obvious
deceit.
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The combination of these ingredients produces a prejudice like racism
but it does not end there. As long as the working class reject the
logical analysis of capitalism which exposes how it operates they will
not only subsist intellectually on a diet of prejudice but become
dependent on it. Racism has its own momentum and can become hardened
almost into permanency, beyond the original intentions of its
instigators. In Nazi Germany a working class driven to cynical despair
by the crises of capitalism, and the impotence of the conventional
political parties to ease them, were prepared to condone and
enthusiastically support a prolonged act of genocide which in the end
was quite foreign to the needs of the capitalist system.
Racism is an issue for the working class. They must deal with it, as
an obstacle to their progress to a sane, free, humane social system.
Having no basis in biology or any other physical science, in concept and
operation it is a social matter. Like all the other ailments of
capitalism it has a political solution and will disappear with the
socialist revolution.
Chapter 9: The Effects of Racism
An easy, perhaps instinctive, reaction to capitalism is moral
indignation at what it does to people. Much of the apparent opposition
to the system has that kind of basis, as well as perhaps a feeling that
capitalism has destroyed an older and more harmonious way of life. Such
attitudes are far from correct. Capitalism could not have been avoided –
it has been an essential stage in social evolution. Its results have
included a massive expansion in productive power giving us the potential
to meet all human needs and a development in the means of
communication, which has made it possible to think of world unity in
immediate terms. Yet at the same time capitalism has divided humanity
and has been unable to satisfy people’s needs. It is a society of
conflict between classes, nations and peoples, often exacerbated by the
very technical developments which we have mentioned. While providing the
material means to unite all people, capitalism works against that
unity. Its wars, for example, are international affairs, often fought
across vast areas of the world with weapons manufactured a long way from
the battle zones or which travel immense distances to reach their
target.
Racism too is a similar painful contradiction thrown up by
capitalism. Historically it has not simply meant one group of people
being less well-treated or provided for than another. All too often it
has led to genocide, to deliberate policies of wiping out people for the
single reason that they belong to a particular group. This policy was
not born with the Nazis in Germany; it was practiced long before that,
in the name of imperialist expansion, economic advantage and
appropriation of land.
The Colonising of Australia
An important episode in the British mercantile expansion into the Pacific of the 18th and 19
th
centuries was the colonising of Australia. The centre of that country
was a place where Europeans could not easily survive but on the coasts
the colonists prospered. It was a ruthless, sordid, get-rich-quick
episode. After about 50 years the place began to conform to the European
pattern, as the native bush was ripped out to make way for
English-style farms where English crops and animals could be raised.
However, the native inhabitants –the aborigines – could not be torn out
so easily. As the tribal hunting grounds, which had been theirs to use
freely, were taken from them, they had the choice of resisting or of
declining into apathy. The theft of their land caused the collapse of
their tribal culture and they could not conform to the new European
culture which replaced it. Some aborigines were killed by imported
diseases; others by violence inflicted upon them when they tried to stop
their land being taken away. In 1788, according to one estimate, there
were 1500 aborigines in Sydney; soon after 1840 there were only a
handful of desperate beggars. Charles Darwin mournfully commented that
“wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal”.
Bad as this was, it was outdone by the pitiless massacre of the
aborigines in Tasmania. The cooler climate of that island attracted many
of the new settlers and by the 1830s they numbered (including the
transported convicts) about 13,000. All of them wanted to grab land and
they were not disposed to let the aborigines stand in their way. But the
Tasmanian natives did not succumb like those on the mainland. As their
land was taken over, they responded with attacks on the settlers and on
their homes. One settler warned: “The natives have become very
troublesome and treacherous, spearing and murdering all they find in the
least unprotected . . . .the only alternative now is, if they do not
readily become friendly, to annihilate them at once”. By “friendly”he
meant, of course, compliant to being forcibly deprived of access to the
land and accepting a completely different legal and moral code.
The meaning of “annihilation”is all too clear and that was exactly
what happened, with no attempt to disguise the fact. Martial law was
declared in 1830 and a manhunt began, with the object of eliminating the
aborigines. A line of armed beaters was formed across the island; a
surgeon on a French whaler described the aborigines being “continually
hunted and tracked down like fallow deer”. Those who survived through
being able to slip through the cordon were demoralised by the savagery
of it all. In 1835 the last of them – a couple of hundred of the
original 5,000 – were shipped out. Away from their hunting grounds they
could not sustain any sort of existence and the last of them died in
1876.
The Rape of the Congo
As that genocidal episode closed, another began. In that same year,
in Brussels, a “conference of humanitarians and travellers”met at the
initiative of the Belgian King Leopold II. As a result another
organisation, with an equally euphemistic name, was formed – the
International African Association – with the professed aim of opening up
the Congo to “civilisation”. In truth the Association was mainly an
organisation of the Belgian ruling class, with Leopold as its president.
It was not recorded how the innocent natives of the Congo regarded the
approaching promise of “civilisation”; in any case they soon found out
what this meant to them. The real object of the “civilising”mission was
to grab the Congo’s rubber and, such were the profits promised, that
years of bestial atrocities were committed. The justification for those
unspeakably horrible acts is by now terrifyingly familiar – that the
Congo natives were racially inferior, stupid and lazy, and therefore fit
subjects for repression and exploitation by the “superior”races of
Europe.
Piece by piece, through a series of dubiously negotiated treaties,
the land of the Congo was stolen by the Belgian capitalists. It was no
longer in tribal communal ownership but in the ownership of the
Association. In 1885, in another outburst of euphemisms, the Belgian
Prime Minister Beernaert declared that the newly established Congo Free
State would ensure “absolute freedom of commerce, freedom of property,
freedom of navigation”. These words foretold an unhappy future for the
natives of the Congo, who were robbed, degraded, tortured, mutilated and
murdered on a massive scale in order to extract from them the maximum
production of rubber. By any standards it was a shameful story.
The production of rubber was administered through a network of agents
who were not only under some powerful material incentives to gather as
much as possible but were allowed to do much as they liked to ensure
this happened. “I give you carte blanche”stated one circular from a
District Commissioner to the agents, “to procure 4,000 kilos of rubber a
month . . . Employ gentleness at first, and if they persist in
resisting the demands of the State, employ force of arms”. In practice,
this meant the wholesale slaughter of natives who failed to bring in
their quota and ferocious reprisals against any retaliation from them.
In one typical incident, in the village of Mummumbula, an agent was
responsible for the killing of 150 men and the crucifixion of the
village women and children. Another described being “sent into a village
to ascertain if the natives were collecting rubber, and in the contrary
case to murder all, including men, women and children”. From such
expeditions, to discourage wastage of ammunition, it was required that
for every expended cartridge a right hand would be brought back. Agents
made their way through the jungle, along the rivers, accompanied by
baskets full of severed hands. And when they shot animals they covered
the deficit in cartridges by cutting the hands off living people.
By 1909 the riverside population of the Congo had fallen from 806,000
to under 50,000. Villages such as Ikoko and Irebo lost thousands of
their inhabitants; in the
Men’s Magazine
of January 1916
E.D.Morel described the devastation: “Compared with 30 years ago, the
Congo is a desert”. There is another statistic by which the misery of
the Congo may be measured. Between 1896 and 1905 Leopold II personally
wrung some £2.8 million from the country. The horrors of the Congo
resulted in an international protest which led to some control and so to
a measure of improvement in the lives of what natives remained. But
racist genocide continues to disfigure human history.
Genocide on Biafra
When Nigeria was declared independent from British rule in October
1960 it was widely expected it would assume a position of considerable
power and influence among the emerging states of Africa. In fact the
history of the country worked against this. During the late 19th and
early 20th century it had been taken over piecemeal by the British
capitalist class which enforced the amalgamation of several antagonistic
tribal groups. The final stage in this was on 1 January 1914 when, on
grounds of “economy”, North and South Nigeria were joined in an
arrangement which gave most of the power to the tribes of the North.
After independence Nigeria quickly proved to be seriously unstable. It
was harassed by one crisis after another, was a turmoil of ethnic
friction and riots and riven by corruption. In January 1966 a military
coup took place, followed by a counter coup in July by a group of
Northern army officers. In that year there was also a series of pogroms
against the Eastern Nigerians, in which some 30,000 of them were killed
and thousands more maimed and wounded. A million Easterners became
refugees from the terror. As a climax to this crisis, in May 1967, the
leaders of Eastern Nigeria declared it a sovereign and independent state
-Biafra.
In response the North declared what proved to be a genocidal war and
gradually, over the next 2½years, the borders of Biafra were pressed
inwards until in January 1970 the state ceased to exist. Millions of
Biafrans died in the war, in combat, through being murdered or by
starvation or disease. The North’s pitiless war of attrition was
supported by arms from Russia and from Britain, which was at the time
under the Wilson Labour government. The plight of the Biafrans aroused
plenty of protests and charitable efforts aimed at tinkering with the
scale of the suffering. But the Labour government resisted all the
protests. Biafra has become another episode in capitalism’s wretched
history of human suffering.
The Nazi Holocaust
The act of genocide to which all others are compared is that of the
Nazis against the Jews -well documented if imperfectly understood. The
1939-45 war, it was said, was fought to ensure that such outrages would
never happen again but, as we have seen, this promise has not been kept.
Racist ideas were rife in Europe as the Nazi movement was born. It was a
time of economic and social chaos, of post war cynicism and of
frustrated nationalist delusions among the workers of the different
powers. Compared to other parts of Europe, Germany did not have a large
Jewish population – some 400,000 against 700,000 in Hungary, one million
in Romania and three million in Poland. But such was the chaos in
Germany that the Nazis could successfully blame it all – Germany’s
defeat, the Treaty of Versailles, the post war economic and financial
crises – on the Jews. A campaign of boycotts, discriminatory laws, fines
and levies against the property of Jews, harassment, imprisonment and
brutality came to a climax in the “Final Solution”. At first this seemed
to entail expelling all Jews to somewhere like Madagascar but after
1941 it developed into a coldly organised, large scale campaign in which
six million were put to death simply because they were Jews.
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It should not be necessary to do more than describe such episodes as
these. They condemn themselves. Mass murder and repression, which are
the logical outcome of racism, result in a massive burden of pain and
distress. They are simply indefensible and even more so when, as we said
in the opening of this chapter, they happen when society has the means
to unite humanity. For the present, what must concern us is that racism
denies the real division of capitalist society – the class division –
and the opposing interests which it sets up. It denies the urgent need
for workers everywhere to cooperate in the overthrow of capitalism.
Workers who are racist, or patriotic, are erecting artificial barriers
to human progress while they ignore those which actually exist and which
must be dismantled. Racism feeds off the problems of capitalism while
it diverts attention from the pressing need to abolish the cause of
those problems.
The solution to those problems, and the dismantling of the barriers
will mean the abolition of capitalism and the end of racism. It will
mean the establishment of a social order based on common ownership of
the means of life, in which every human being will have free access to
wealth according to self-determined needs. That society must operate on
the basis of human unity and cooperation for the common benefit. Its
values and morals will stand in direct contrast to those of capitalism.
Chapter 10: What Is To Be Done?
One explanation for racism is that it thrives when capitalism is in
phase of retrenchment. There is something to be said for this: at times
of economic boom and expansion, as we have seen, capitalist industries
call on the reserve army of unemployed. There is a demand for migrant
labour and a pressure on workers in the host area to accept the influx
of workers from another part of the country or from the abroad. In a
slump it is rather different. There is a further competition for jobs,
housing and services and a more intense insecurity bears down on
workers. Their reaction, in an absence of understanding, is defensive
and divisive. Scapegoats are there to hand, a relief for the paranoid
confusion.
One merit of this sort of theory is that it presents racism as an
idea with social roots, to be related to and explained by the economic
anarchy of capitalism. Its fault is that it is only a partial
explanation, encouraging the delusion that racism can be eliminated by
ironing out the humps and troughs of capitalism’s economic cycle,
perhaps through some skilful juggling by clever politicians and
“experts”. But the roots of racism, as this pamphlet has attempted to
show, go deeper than that. This has been an exercise in diagnosis and it
has reached certain conclusions. There is no scientific foundation for
racism, which is groundless prejudice diverting the working class from
facing the real cause of modern society’s problems; racism is a response
to social ailments but it is irrelevant to those ailments and therefore
is neither useful nor supportable; to get to the root cause of racism
we must consider the basis of capitalist society, which leads to the
conclusion that the only cure for racism is the abolition of capitalism.
The abolition of capitalism will be followed by the establishment of a
different social system. Just as capitalism is founded on the private,
or class, ownership of the means of production and distribution, so
socialism will be based on common ownership. Just as capitalism’s wealth
takes the form of commodities – things produced for sale and profit –
so socialism’s wealth will be use values, things made solely to meet
human needs. Just as capitalism is a society of class privilege, so
socialism will be one of equal rights of free access. Just as capitalism
is a coercive, repressive society so socialism will be democratic, with
full participation by its people. Just as capitalism promotes and
aggravates conflict such as racism so will socialism be organised on the
basis of human co-operation for the common benefit.
Capitalism is an inefficient and wasteful society. Although it has
the immediate potential to satisfy human needs, its social organisation
and relationships make it incapable of doing so. Production for profit
often means that production is cut back, or even stopped altogether,
because of an “overstocked”market or of legal restrictions like patent
laws. It means that all sorts of things which by any reasonable
standards ought to be done – like feeding starving people, or ensuring
that old people do not die of cold in the winter – are not done because
it is not “economically viable”. Capitalism wastes resources on an
immense scale. It wastes them in building up armed forces and huge
arsenals of weapons, whose only function is to kill and destroy. It
wastes the abilities of tens of millions of people who are in jobs which
may be necessary in a society of commodity wealth but which are
unproductive and socially useless – for example, jobs in the police and
armed forces, as accountants, salespeople and bank workers. Capitalism’s
slumps are obscenely wasteful for they make millions of workers idle
and cause masses of materials and productive forces to lie unused when
there is an obvious human need for them to be working. Land is taken out
of cultivation and food destroyed while millions are starving;
“surplus”bricks are stockpiled and building workers are on the dole
although in this country alone tens of thousands are homeless and many
more live in unfit housing. Finally, capitalism cannot be a democratic
society. It cannot allow freedom of information and a full, active
participation in decision-taking. It is a competitive society and must
be secretive, private and coercive, for only in that way can the
processes of commodity production and sale, and the privileges of the
ruling class, be protected.
The other class in society, who have no significant ownership in the
means of life and who endure all the problems of capitalism, are the
working class – the class who depend on employment for their living.
Capitalism works against working class interests but, although they are
exploited, repressed and degraded by the system, the workers give
support to capitalism and actually co-operate in their own degradation.
At election after election millions of workers vote for one or another
of the parties pledged to run capitalism; they base their electoral
“choice”on trivial differences between the parties’ plans to tinker with
some unimportant aspects of the way the system is organised and
operated. They do this because they do not think there is an alternative
to capitalism. Furthermore they see escape from the miseries of working
class life as an individual matter – winning the pools, getting
promotion, building up their own business. However this idea ignores the
fact that the working class are the vast majority under capitalism and
that it must be they who run the system, who  design, make and operate
everything in it and who even administer their own exploitation.
Socialism will come about when the working class realise such facts and
understand that they have the power to change society through
cooperative, revolutionary political action.
Socialism will be a basically simple society for it will operate
solely and completely on the basis of human needs. Everything which
socialist society makes and does will be related to those needs and will
therefore be to everyone’s benefit. Socialism will be free of
capitalism’s profit motive, which causes the demands and capacities of
the market to take precedence over human need. It will be a society in
which people can behave just as humans would were it not for the
restrictions and insecurities of capitalism. Human talents will be set
free, to design and make the best that is possible, on the single
incentive of satisfying human needs and so of benefiting the community.
Socialism will mean the greatest flowering of imagination, creativeness
and achievement in history. The nature of socialism will mean that
unavoidable natural disasters or extremes of climate will be dealt with
in the most urgent and efficient way.
Will all this be possible? Can we really have a world where abundance
and freedom are taken for granted? Capitalism has brought scientific
and technological advance to the point at which the plentiful production
of wealth is a possibility. It is only the social relationships of this
system, stemming from the class ownership of the means of production,
which prevent abundance and instead condemn millions to poverty,
malnutrition and famine. Not only socialists point out the absurdity of a
world where computers are commonplace and which can probe out to Saturn
and Mars yet also allows tens of millions to die every year of
starvation and untold millions from avoidable diseases. Capitalism’s
productive resources are actually used in such a way as to place extra
stress on people – in polluting the atmosphere, in the demands of the
production line and in the alienation of the worker. Socialism’s
production will harmonise with human interests because, free of the
anarchies and restraints of commodity production for the market, the new
society will be able to plan its work, what it makes and how it must be
distributed to meet human needs.
An essential part of that planning will be the democracy which
socialism will introduce into human society. Socialism will not happen,
and cannot work, unless the world’s people want it. They must understand
how and why it operates and must opt for it in that understanding. It
cannot be imposed on society by a minority or by a group of political
leaders. By the same token when a majority of people have established
socialism no minority will be able to take it away from them. Having set
up socialism the majority will not lose interest; they will continue to
operate society on the same basis of informed democratic decisions.
This is again something which has been facilitated by capitalism,
through the development of things like satellite communication which
enable opinions to be assessed worldwide literally in hours. Decisions
could be taken only when everyone is fully informed; socialism’s
democracy will entail the free availability of all information and
knowledge. It will be a society vibrant with debate.
All these things will contribute to socialism’s values. From one
generation to another the assumptions and the strengths of a society of
communal ownership, free access, co-operation and harmony will be handed
on. People will relate to each other as equals, as caring sisters and
brothers. Co-operation will be the norm and not an eccentricity;
security will be an everyday, established reality and not an impossible
dream.
This is all possible, virtually at once, if the working class were to
recognise their own immense power to transform society. At present they
deny themselves this power, effectively handing it over to the
capitalist class by their support for capitalism and cruel delusions
such as racism. Socialism will be the end of racism; it will be a world
free of social conflict in which human beings live and work in unity
without distinction of sex or race.
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