An English bus-driver has more in common with a German mechanic than with the Duke of Devonshire. A French accountant shares more experiences with a Russian wages clerk than with Giscard D’Estaing. Across the world there is a mass of people who speak hundreds of different languages and eat a great variety of foods, but who all have one common bond: they own no substantial property and so are forced to work for a living.
As you read this, millions of people are being born into families of workers. They may end up as teachers, miners, dockers, pianists. Of one thing we can be sure. They will be forced to sell their ability to work for a lifetime, simply in order to live. And then, every so often, are born exceptions to this rule—the children of the few families whose names are written over all the stocks and shares, who own the farms, mines and offices. Families of financiers, international business empires, barons of industry. From birth they will be given the best that the world’s workers can produce. They will be taught not how to go looking for jobs, but how to while away their leisure hours in self-indulgent pursuits.
There is a clear class division in present-day society. In capitalism, the world is divided into competing ‘nations’, with a state machine to defend property within each region. The British state, now run by a Tory government, uses armed force to protect private and state property from the indigenous population and from the incursions of foreign powers. Each state, including those of the Warsaw Pact, defends the interests of the small, privileged minority who have power within its boundaries. It is the essentially competitive nature of capitalism which divides the world into rival national blocs.
At the time of writing, the British government is pushing its Nationality Bill through Parliament. If passed, it will create six categories of citizen, only one of which will have the “right to live’’ in Britain. Unemployed workers demonstrating for the “right to work’’ have seen how, in the profit system, there is no such thing. Now workers who have come thousands of miles in the desperate search for employment may find that, if the government does not want them, they don’t even have a right to live. Wage and salary earners are ruthlessly monitored and moved around to where there might be a chance to profit from their work. There is no stability or security.
Workers are endlessly urged to support “the nation”. But we have no stake in Britain; it is just where we happen to sell ourselves. Parties ranging from the Communist Party to the National Front have supported import controls and “British jobs for British workers”. What they are really after is British votes for British politicians. The workers' interest is international. If “British" workers refuse to buy “Japanese" cars, then fellow workers from Japan might lose their jobs. The working class is a global class which owes no allegiance to any nation states. The capitalists themselves invest in whatever country is most profitable for them. Nowadays, one item often includes parts made in ten different countries. This is the background to the question of race and nation.
Recently there has been an increase in violent attacks motivated by racialism. Asians have been stabbed and assaulted with iron bars on housing estates in Islington, where unemployment is more than ten per cent (Guardian, 8/12/80). In 1978, Bethnal Green and Stepney Trades Council documented nearly one hundred such attacks. There has also been racialist violence across Europe, including the bombing of a Paris synagogue last October. It is no coincidence that this is happening at a time of recession and high unemployment. With austerity getting sharper, people turn to look for scapegoats and government, opposition Parties and the Press accept and even encourage this.
The main reason for the decline in National Front support over the last couple of years is the stealing of their political clothes by the Conservative Party. In 1978, Margaret Thatcher announced that Britain was in danger of being swamped by an “alien culture” and that to allay people’s fears, a Conservative government would take steps to prevent further immigration. This was just a piece of opportunist vote-catching, playing on the worst prejudices. Thatcher must have know that in 1977 only 70,000 immigrants had entered Britain, while 200,000 people had emigrated.
The Press encourage racism with headlines like “Asians jump the Housing Queue” (Daily Mail 5/4/76) and “Powell Warning of Erosion of Britain by ‘Alien Wedges’” (Times 10/4/76). The Labour Party, too, has been quick to jump on the bandwaggon. Roy Hattersley has condemned the Nationalist Bill as “racially and sexually discriminatory”. Has he forgotten his speech of 23 March 1965 in defence of the Immigration Act, when he said: “We must impose a test to analyse which immigrants are most likely to be assimilated to our national life".
Our national life? Does Hattersley mean Ascot? Eton College? Workers don’t have a national life. Despite promises to repeal the Immigration Act of the previous Conservative government, in 1965 the Labour government zealously renewed the restrictive measures. Their Home Secretary, Frank Soskice, told the House of Commons, “The government are firmly convinced that an effective control is indispensable". The number of “work vouchers" was even reduced. Bias against negroes and Asians wishing to enter this country continued, as it does to this day. In 1978 Roy Jenkins wrote of “cultural diversity in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance” (Brent Civic Review), but in 1978 he had spoken of the need for “a strict limit on the amount and rate of inward immigration for settlement" (House of Commons 5/7/76).
In 1968, Labour passed their Commonwealth Immigrants Act, an even more overtly racist legislation, which removed the right of entry to Britain from black UK passport holders. The Tories’ 1971 Immigration Act divided British subjects into “patrials”—UK passport holders born here or with parents or grandparents born here—and “non-patrials” who are not permitted to enter without vouchers, of which as few as 2,032 were issued in 1977, The Labour government’s Green Paper on Nationality in 1977 again urged even tighter control. Families from the “New Commonwealth” wishing to join a relation in Britain are brutally stopped. Bone X-rays and virginity tests have been carried out at Heathrow to check age or “marital status”.
In the 1840s, nearly three quarters of a million Irishmen were brought over to build railways and canals in England. In the 1880s refugee Jews and Ukranians supplemented the labour force. Sometimes the flow of labour is actually stimulated through recruitment, at other times it is subject to political controls. After the Second World War, destruction of human life and of machinery stimulated a boom in which the British government recruited workers from the West Indies (1951), then India (1955), and Pakistan (1957). France encouraged migrant workers to come from its ex-colonies of Algeria and Tunisia, and workers flowed into Germany from Turkey and Yugoslavia.
Successive anti-immigration legislation in Britain has aimed to move towards the more flexible and, for the workers concerned, more painful method of short-term migrant contract labour without citizenship, which has been used in France and Germany. Immigrant workers have always been given the hardest jobs and lowest pay, but recently cheap labour has increasingly been provided by European migrant workers. This “gastarbeiter” contract labour costs less in terms of housing, education and social services than a more permanent immigrant workforce, so that is the direction in which capitalism moves. But since the onset of recession in 1974, both France and Germany have introduced cash incentives to encourage the migrants to return “home”.
The racialist attacks on immigrants have no scientific basis at all. The human species has basically uniform physical features and mental potentialities. In that sense there is no race division but only one human stock of homo sapiens. There is no such thing as the British race. National frontiers are arbitrary lines set up by property society and different people within each nation may have a variety of cultural and historical backgrounds. There is no more reason for being preoccupied about whether someone is “black” than for persistently demanding to know the colour of someone’s eyes. In any case, the definition of skin colour is arbitrary. For example, in the USA people of Asian Indian origin are classified as “whites”.
In the days of the slave trade and the growth of the British Empire, racial theories were developed to try to justify the slavery and colonialism as a necessary “civilising mission” of “inferior races”. Lord Leverhulme said at a dinner in honour of the Governor of Nigeria: “The organising ability is the particular trait and characteristic of the white man”. And now blacks whose parents were actually recruited to work in England in the 1950s, and who are often the most exploited and harshly treated section of the working class, are blamed for the economic problems of the system. Workers of all colours are exploited by employers of all colours, but it is black workers who are picked on by racialists, never black (and white) employers. Albert Levy of the Anti-Racialist Movement in France has correctly said that
Fascist groups are useful to the authorities because they turn attention away from genuine struggles by accusing foreigners or Jews of being responsible for all our troubles, as in the 1930s.
but when these groups begin themselves to pose a threat to governing parties, their policies are simply taken over. As a result of major parties taking up the call for immigration control, European neo-fascist groups have found it harder to “rely on racist propaganda and agitation against immigrant workers in order to win popular support” (Guardian 6/10/80).
For the capitalist class, racial strife is seen as a danger threatening the smooth integration and exploitation of highly mobile labour. For example, H. F. Oppenheimer (who amongst other trifles owns a few South African gold mines) has actually put advertisements in newspapers proclaiming “Racial discrimination and Free Enterprise are incompatible” and complaining that he needs more trained and skilled blacks as well as whites if he is going to get the most out of the population who work for him. On the other hand, employers are always ready to use racism to divide and weaken working-class organisation. At the Dunlop strike in Germany in 1967, which involved Turkish migrant workers, a director referred to “members of an alien Mediterranean horde” in the hope of dividing the workforce. Discrimination against immigrants is used to lower wages by isolating sections of the working class.
In trying to blame black immigrants for the problems of capitalism, racialists use several myths.
Population
If this country seems overcrowded, it is because people are concentrated heavily in a few cities, so as not to get in the way of people like the Duke of Buccleuch, who owns more than 250,000 acres of England. If everyone living in Britain were spread evenly over the land, there would be more than an acre for every man, woman and child. The United Nations Food and Agriculture organisation has proved that the earth is capable of feeding and housing several times the present world population. From 1968 to 1977 over half a million more people left than entered Britain. (Office of Population Census and Surveys).
In the effort to blame blacks for social problems, two contradictory myths have been made up. On one hand, they are depicted as unemployed “scroungers” and at the same time, they are supposed to be “stealing” jobs from white workers. It is impossible to blame immigration for unemployment. The areas of highest unemployment, such as Scotland and Northern Ireland, are the areas of lowest immigration. During the mass unemployment of the 1930s, there was hardly any large scale immigration at all. Unemployment is a world-wide problem. It is produced by an international recession of capitalism. Blacks are discriminated against in jobs, housing and education. From 1974 to 1977 unemployment increased by about 130 per cent, while unemployment among black workers under 25 years old shot up by 450 per cent (Central Statistical Office).
Housing
In Britain today there are 100,000 homeless families, 600,000 unoccupied houses and no shortage of bricks, wood or labour. There is a “housing shortage” because of the artificial laws of property and profit. Immigrants suffer as a result of this fact, they do not cause it. They are made to wait longer for worse housing. For example, in 1974. 18 per cent of people in Britain did not have the exclusive use of bath, hot water and inside toilet. Among Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, the figure was 57 per cent. Seven per cent of private tenants on council waiting lists wait for three or more years. Among West Indians’ applications the figure was 19 per cent (PEP Survey).
Crime
Racists claim that black immigrants are responsible for a large proportion of violent crime. They are encouraged in this view by police officers like Commander Randall of P Division Metropolitan Police, who described young immigrants as “lazy, vicious little criminals” and David McNee, Police Commissioner for London, whose incredible message to young blacks is “Keep off the streets and you won’t get into trouble”. The figures they produce to support their racial discrimination are distorted in two ways. Firstly, they are based on arrests, not convictions. The “SUS” law has until now allowed police to indulge their prejudices by arresting the people they decide are behaving suspiciously. And even now the Bill to repeal “SUS” contains an escape clause allowing the arrest of people suspected of intending to steal cars. Secondly, immigrants are concentrated in inner city areas where the increased crowding and deprivation causes a desperate frustration which has always given rise to more violent crime.
Neo-Nazi groups like the British Movement have only a minute following, but there is a disturbing tendency now for people to react quite casually to stories of vicious racialist attacks. The only effective way of opposing the mythology of race and nation is in discussion and debate. To prevent the National Front from meeting or broadcasting their views, would be to use the same anti-democratic tactics which they use. A most ridiculous statement of this anti-democratic, tit-for-tat reaction which is so common on the Left, is in a Big Flame pamphlet on racism and fascism, which asks: “Why should we allow ‘free speech’ to those who would take it from us? ”
Of course, if Asians in London’s East End, for example, are intimidated and violently threatened by the National Front marching through the streets, they live in, we could hardly deprecate their attempts to physically defend themselves. We also realise that it is not possible to organise a public debate with the skinhead shock-troopers of the British Movement “Leader Guard”, hired to protect their leader, Michael McLaughlin. But we can constantly expose the false racist ideas which exist in the Conservative and Labour Parties as well as the British Movement and the National Front.
The “Leader Guard” is just the tip of the iceberg, representing an extreme form of the desperation, frustration and racial violence which appears throughout society. Last November, the British Movement marched through London and a group called East London Workers Against Racism attended to physically attack them. The police use this sort of response as an excuse for clamping down even harder; some of the East London Workers Against Racism ended up in prison and now they are campaigning to collect money for bail. But the British Movement remains intact and, more important, so does the social system which continues to give rise to nationalism and racism.
Clifford Slapper
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