Racism remains one of the main features of Western capitalist society. It is institutionalised in the systematic discrimination which black people experience in jobs, housing and the education system, and the harassment they suffer at the hands of police and immigration authorities.
A striking development in European politics since the East European events of 1989 has been the resurgence of racism, expressing itself in the rise of the fascist and racist parties which have been able to make significant electoral gains, especially in France, Italy and Germany. This development has not surprised us.
Black Nationalists argue that “black liberation can be achieved only by black people organising themselves separately from white anti-racists and Socialists". Socialists, by contrast, regard racism as a product of capitalism which serves to reproduce this social system by dividing the working class. It can be abolished, therefore, only through a socialist revolution achieved by a united working class in which blacks and whites join together against their common enemy.
A major difference between socialists and black separatists is that black nationalist intellectuals tend to see Marxism as a Eurocentric political tradition, as a body of thought so deeply rooted in European culture that it is simply incapable of identifying with the plight—and expressing the aspirations of—the oppressed black masses, both in the Third World and in the advanced capitalist countries.
Black Separatists wrong
The resulting conflict between Marxism and Black Nationalism is systematically explored by Cedric Robinson, an American scholar associated with the Institute of Race Relations in London, in his book Black Marxism. Robinson’s basic thesis is that Marxism is, in the very way in which its concepts are ordered, a Eurocentric ideology.
Marxism, Robinson claims, isn’t only European in its origins, but in its “analytical presumptions, its historical perspectives, its points of view”. It consequently has failed to confront a recurring idea in western civilisation, namely racism, and in particular, the way in which racialism inevitably permeates the social structure emergent from capitalism. Socialists reject these arguments and are well aware of the links between racism—all over the world—and capitalism.
It is often claimed that racism is as old as human nature, the implication being that we can’t get rid of it. On the contrary, racism as we know it today first developed in the 17th and 18th centuries in order to justify the systematic use of African slave labour in the great plantations of the new world which were central to the original emergence of capitalism as a world system. Racism, that is, was formed as part of the process through which capitalism became the dominant social and economic system.
Thus racism today arises from the divisions that are fostered among different groups of workers whose competition on the job market is intensified by the fact they often come from different parts of the world and are drawn together within the borders of the same state by capitalism's insatiable appetite for cheaper labour power.
Racism serves to set workers against each other, and to prevent them from effectively fighting against the bosses who exploit them all, irrespective of their colour or national origin. It operates against the interest of all workers, white and black alike. A divided working class harms even those workers who are not the direct victims of racism. White workers should identify their interest with those of black people who suffer racial oppression and black separatists are wrong when they dismiss all the white working class as an irredeemable racist rabble. Racism has grown up with capitalism and helps to sustain it; its abolition therefore depends on socialist revolution and the abolition of capitalism and that will break up the material structures with which it is bound up.
Fighting Racism
Fighting racism depends on understanding its causes. This is essential if the hold of racism on white workers is to be broken. Racism appeals to white workers because it offers an imaginary solution to the real problems—poverty, unemployment, exploitation and so on.
Socialists are anti-racists not only because we despise racism for the obscenity that it is, but because a class movement which does not confront racism will not be able to change capitalism to socialism. Breaking down the social barriers which this process helps erect between different groups of workers is a necessary condition of any successful socialist revolution.
The charge that Marxism is “Eurocentric" made by Black Nationalists such as Cedric Robinson is mistaken. Marxism indeed emerged in Western Europe in response to the appearance of industrial capitalism, the capitalist mode of production in its developed form. At the centre of Marx's theory was his analysis of this unprecedented phenomenon. In the Communist Manifesto and the Grundrisse in particular he stressed capitalism's universalising role, the way in which it dragged humankind willy-nilly into the first genuinely global social system in history. But he also recognised how private property society engenders competition and exploitation at the same time. Marx was equally clear-sighted about the terrible suffering this entailed, especially for the peoples of what is called now the Third World—"the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of [America] . . . the beginning of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black skins are all things which characterise the dawn of the era of capitalist production” (Capital, Vol. I).
Marx crucially maintained that only a society of common ownership could provide the framework for the eradication of racial prejudice in its entirety. Capitalism and racism go hand-in-hand—only socialism can abolish both.
Michael Ghebre
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