This is an abridged version of a talk presented at the International Green Left Conference in April by CARL BLOICE, a National Executive member of the Committees of Correspondence (USA). It was one of three talks on a panel presentation on the topic "The new racism".
Racism remains what it has always been — an ideological body of thought and practice premised on the superiority of one racial group over another. Ethnic conflict and national oppression have been around for a long time. But racism itself emerged as a justification for colonial and imperialist oppression.
It justified the oppression of another people. It became the ideology that was consciously developed in Europe to justify that oppression.
It is true that racism is not premised on skin colour. But it's also important to keep in mind that the colour line is the distinctive question in our century. Because white people in a white society can be assimilated. Skin colour doesn't rub off.
Racism can have new levels, new intensities and new forms. But I'm not sure it can be a new thing.
The intensity of racism can reflect the times and particularly the economic situation. The nature of immigration has changed. There was a period when large groups of people from one European nation or one white nation moved to another one. Today we are in a period in which for reasons having to do with global economic stratification, there is a new series of mass migrations.
While Eastern European migration takes place under particular circumstances, most of these mass migrations are from the periphery to the metropolitan areas and involve the movement of peoples of colour to areas where peoples of colour do not exist in large numbers.
At the same time, the racism against these mass migrations finds its basis in the kind of racism, for instance, which existed in the US for 400 years. For example, when I got off the plane and drove into Sydney, I noticed a guy cleaning windscreens. I was amazed because he had blue eyes and was blonde. The people who do that in New York are black. One of the principal campaign promises of the man recently elected mayor of New York, a Republican, was to get rid of these guys. As soon as he came into office he chose a new police chief who said, the first thing we are going to do to eliminate crime is drive those guys off the streets.
That's a reflection of the impact that neo-liberal policies are having in the US. For African American young people today, the unemployment rate is officially 50%, but it is probably 60% or 70%. A whole group of people are being victimised, particularly young African American and Latino people. They become the victims of political demagogy and of neo-liberal policies, the victims of chronic and growing unemployment and schemes for welfare reform. You can only have two years on welfare, and then you're out. Here we are talking about African American women.
They have a new bill now which will probably pass in Congress: if you commit three felonies, you go to jail for life. They are talking about young African American men; there's no question in anyone's minds who is being talked about and what the implications of this are.
In 1972 I stopped in a large European country. I got in touch with a young African American woman living there who introduced me to some immigrants from Africa, escaping poverty in their own countries. I listened to horrendous stories about people being swept off the streets in the middle of the night, being beaten by police, being deported without hearings. I was amazed. I went to the local Communist Party office and met with some officials there and we had a discussion. I told them what I had just heard. They didn't know anything about it, or pretended not to.
Now this question of immigration in Western Europe is being treated as "new" racism. But the premise has been there all along.
Why do I think this is important? Because there is the idea that the economic conditions give rise to racism. That is, racism arises in Germany because there are not enough jobs or because there is austerity.
Of course, it rises when that happens, but the argument that flows from that is that we can defeat racism by changing the economic situation.
That really takes us back to the First International [the International Workingmen's Association launched in 1864 in Europe], to the notion that the problem of racism will be eliminated when the problem of class relations has been eliminated, and not before. The second argument is that therefore the struggle against racism is a diversion from the central task, the overthrow of capitalism.
One of the things that distinguishes the Marxist and communist movement in the US in the early part of this century was that it broke with the Socialist Party on this question. Doing this laid the basis for the organisation of the industrial working class in the US. In the major production industries of steel, auto and coal, it would have been almost impossible to organise the industrial working class and the trade unions had there not been a struggle against racism, or at least had not some basis been found for unity of black and white workers.
So racism as a question cannot await the resolution of the class struggle, because it is a prerequisite for the successful conclusion of the class struggle.
The struggle for the rights of immigrants is really not sufficient. The struggle must also be waged against the ideology of racism. This has practical implications because the question of racism still remains a point of contention on the left.
A section of the left views the struggle against racism as something that can be carried out by promoting and aiding, under the slogan of self-determination, the movements of peoples of colour, regardless of what those movements are (nationalist, separatist etc). At the same time a struggle is not waged against the ideology of racism amongst the oppressing group, that is amongst white people in our particular case, and particularly amongst white working people. To do that is to fail the test of opportunism.
Is it really surprising that there is a rise of racism and reaction in Western Europe amongst alienated working-class youth? Sometimes you look at the newspapers and think, thank heavens for the young European anti-racist organisations. These are the young people who will confront the fascists in the streets.
At almost any conference that I go to where people of European origin predominate, a person or persons of colour at some point will stand up and criticise those in attendance for insufficient attention to the question of racism.
In progressive movements almost everywhere I go, unity is placed in jeopardy by differences over the question of how to deal with racism, by what people of colour perceive as inattention by the larger group. This happens in the Committees of Correspondence.
Does this mean every point raised by a person of colour is correct? No, but it is a matter of perceptions, which tend to flow from some semblance of reality.
I want to close with a quote from Manning Marable (an African American Marxist scholar), in an article on the Committees of Correspondence. "The struggle to define the left and build movements for racial democracy will fail ... unless progressives squarely confront the issue of race. Marx himself always recognised the importance of the race question to politics and social transformation. Historically racism has been the most decisive weapon in the arsenal of America's ruling elites to divide democratic resistance movements, turning fearful and frustrated whites against non-white people. Part of the left's problem is the rupture between theory and practice of social change. A social theory is useful only to the degree that it helps to explain reality, to the degree that it empowers those who employ it. And the day to day reality lived by millions of African Americans, Latinos and others along the jagged race-class fault line beneath American democracy is the continual upheaval of social inequality and racial prejudice. Socialists must find a way to speak directly to this reality, holistically, not as an afterthought or an appendage to their chief political concerns."
I would hold that applies to racism as we have become accustomed to it and to whatever racism we are now calling the "new" racism.