Editorial: Race prejudice is a barrier to Socialism (1963)

Editorial from the June 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Those who said that the last war was fought, among other things, for racial equality, are having to eat their words fast. Twenty years after the Warsaw Ghetto, we still see the ugly manifestations of racial intolerance and strife in many parts of the world.

Witness Birmingham, Alabama, scene of the latest battle in the struggle over desegregation, where more than nine hundred Negroes are arrested at one demonstration and Ku-Klux Klan bomb outrages wreck an agreement a few hours after it has been readied. Then go further North to Washington D.C., where the situation has produced the Black Moslem Movement, a bitterly anti-white. anti-Jewish organisation, aiming at the establishment of separate Negro States in the U.S.

Over in South Africa, racial oppression is sharpened by fresh laws giving sweeping powers of detention to the police, and to open your mouth too much in public is to invite a charge of treason and perhaps the death penalty. In another part of this unhappy continent, Nairobi based British troops riot in retaliation for the murder of one of their number.

Here at home, Chinese shops are smashed at St. Helens, Lancs, and there is the usual resentment against coloured bus workers—this time at Bristol. It is only a few months since the Colin Jordan affair and the tins of “Jew Killers.”

Racial prejudice and antagonism are with us all the time, but it is only now and then that they flare into headline news. Mostly they smoulder sullenly beneath publicity level, but ready to be sparked off. perhaps by some comparatively minor incident, into really nasty outbreaks of violence like the Notting Hill affairs a few years ago.

Then it is that ignorance and bigotry come fully into their own as hysterical fanatics hurl abuse and insults at coloured and other minorities. Scapegoats have now been found to blame for workers problems, it being conveniently forgotten that the problems existed long before the scapegoats ever appeared. Passions are inflamed and crime, one of the everyday hazards of private property society, now takes on a racial—almost political—significance.

In the welter of confusion it is not surprising that to many workers, race has become synonymous with nationality. It is a notion which the capitalist press has encouraged from time to time. During the last war, for instance, it was the policy of one paper at least to refer frequently to the “German Race” and to try and prove its essentially warlike nature. “Get back to your own country” is a remark often heard, and there was even one English father who refused his son permission to marry because the girl came from Wales, and who wanted frontiers established between the two countries.

Probably many people thought this quite ludicrous at the lime, yet it is really no more so than the whole notion of nationality which most workers support in a world made smaller almost daily by the advance of communications. It is the same notion which incidentally produced two opposing candidates in one ward in the recent municipal elections at Bradford, both standing for “Pakistani Interests.”

Socialists have always opposed racialist theories. There is no scientific evidence that one group is innately superior to another, and in fact it would be difficult to find a “pure” race in the world today, even if scientists could agree on a definition of the term. And among the capitalist class, too, there is a growing recognition that discrimination is decidedly damaging to their commercial interests. It was the “Business Community” in Birmingham, Alabama, which sought agreement with Martin Luther King.

While workers hold such ideas, there is the added danger that they will lend a ready ear to potential dictators, and that even today’s limited political democracy will suffer. But, above all, racialism is a barrier to the growth of Socialist knowledge and the recognition that the division between capitalist and worker is the only one which really matters. The interest of all workers everywhere is the same—the abolition of capitalism and its replacement by Socialism. Until they get this vital fact clear, they will stay in the mess that they are in today.