‘Stand up to Racism’ is a South Wales campaign group that organises events and demonstrations against racism. I’m on their mailing list and a recent message told me of a weekend event in Swansea’s Castle Gardens – ‘Love Swansea Hate Racism’. It said: ‘Bring your guitar, beats, banners, brollies, poems, words, friends, and yourself to make our streets buzz with dancing and diversity, not fascist jackboots. Let’s show that hate has no home here!’ I decided to go along and see what was happening.
It wasn’t a good day weather-wise – intermittent rain and a bit of a gale – but still what seemed to me a fairly decent turnout of 100 or so people were gathered in one area of the city centre gardens. A police van was parked nearby and some uniformed officers were hanging about, but it all seemed entirely peaceful. There were plenty of banners and placards if none of the promised poetry or live music. But there were speeches from the platform and from one of them I learned that there was a rival far-right demonstration taking place nearby, which helped to explain the police presence.
A proposal was then made from the platform to march to where the far-right, the so-called ‘Voice of Wales’, were organising their gathering, which they’d called ‘a family fun day’. The idea put forward was not to confront them, but to show them they were outnumbered. And that’s what happened – the demonstration moved out of the gardens, processed along Princes Way and then crossed over one of the city’s main arteries to the Leisure Centre garden, where the Voice of Wales supporters were gathered. The police had accompanied the procession and now made sure that the two groups of demonstrators were kept apart from each other and that the far right could address their own supporters and anyone else who was around and wave their banners. But all this didn’t last long. The Voice of Wales group, who were effectively fewer in number than their opponents and were being drowned out by them, soon decided their ‘family fun day’ was over and packed up, at which the Stand up to Racism people drifted away. And so did I.
What to make of this? Well, I couldn’t but be supportive of the anti-racism demonstrators, for I can only see it as supremely desirable to be accepting of other human beings regardless of their race (in itself a misnomer), background or place of origin. And I can only lament the fact that there are some people who oppose or resent the presence of others in their society on the basis of skin colour, culture or place of birth. As an advocate of a borderless world society, all that makes so little sense to me. However, while being unequivocally opposed to the nationalism, bigotry and manifest racism of the Voice of Wales crowd with their ‘Stop the Boats’ banners and signs, their pictures of Donald Trump displayed on placards and their speakers’ appeals to ‘British values’, I can’t not have some reservations about Stand up to Racism too.
While opposition to racism is to be applauded, unfortunately those who organise such groups tend to use them as a recruiting platform to push a Leninist agenda of the need for a vanguard – themselves – to lead the working class to a society which they may call socialist but in effect would be governed by the vanguard that has ‘led’ it there. No surprise, therefore, that the most stand-out feature of the demonstration in Castle Gardens was an SWP stall, set up in the middle selling its newspapers and other publications and displaying posters with slogans for its latest campaigns. And no surprise either that many of the banners, placards and badges on view said things like ‘Boycott Israel’, ‘Free Palestine’ and ‘Stop the Genocide’ and so were not specifically about racism at all but rather about the current conflict in the Middle East, which organisations like the SWP see as one of their ‘causes’.
But what about racism itself? Well, there’s no doubt that, even within the dog-eat-dog society that is capitalism, there has been a significant improvement in attitudes over the years. In this country, for example, the open, unabated, almost taken-for-granted racism (and sexism) that existed just a few short decades ago is dramatically less in evidence now. Who at that time could in their wildest dreams have imagined that, in the not-too-distant future the leader of one of the two biggest political parties would be a woman of colour. This is not of course to say that racist ideas have stopped having purchase over many people, but there has undeniably been what we can reasonably call progress.
Yet, given the divisive attitudes prompted by the conditions of the society we live in, the scourge of racism will always remain a possibility, a frame of mind that people whose lives feel precarious in one way or another (eg, through poverty, unemployment or job insecurity) may turn to. And indeed they may be encouraged to turn to it by leaders or parties that see it as in their interests to sow division among people who have not developed the consciousness to perceive that they have fundamentally the same interests as their fellow workers. This is currently being illustrated by developments in many parts of the ‘advanced’ world, eg, Germany, Hungary, USA.
So stand up to racism, yes, but we are unlikely to see the end of that scourge unless we stand up to capitalism and establish a socialist world of common ownership, democratic control, production for need not profit and free access to all goods and services. In such a society, racism, or any other form of prejudice or discrimination, will have no ground to take root in and no soil in which to flourish.
Howard Moss
That's the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard done and dusted.
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