World View: Is Marxism Eurocentric? (1996)

From the June 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

Mixed Media: The British Black Panther Movement (2014)

Neil Kenlock self-portrait. 1970.

The Mixed Media Column from the May 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

In October 2013 during Black History month, the Photofusion Gallery on Electric Lane in Brixton, South London, put on a photographic exhibition about the British Black Panther Movement. The exhibition was an oral history and photography project with archive photographs of protests, debates, parties, and key members by Neil Kenlock, official photographer of the British Black Panther Movement.

The British Black Panther Movement was active in the early 1970s, had several branches but Brixton in South London was the centre. Its key members were Barbara Beese, Kenrick Goppy, Darcus Howe, Farukh Dhondy, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Altheia Jones-LeCointe, Danny Da Costa, Liz Obi, Leila Howe, Olive Morris and Neil Kenlock. It had a HQ at 38 Shakespeare Road, off Railton Road, which was bought for them by art critic John Berger. The British Black Panthers were inspired by Black Power in the USA although they were different from the American Black Panthers: ‘they were a Party seeking political power, the American Constitution allows people to carry guns, so they were policing the Police’ (Kenlock).

Malcolm X’s speech at the LSE in 1965, Stokeley Carmichael’s appearance at the ‘New Left’ event Dialectics of Liberation Congress in 1967, and Black Panther Angela Davis’s visit to London inspired the movement. If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (1971) by Angela Davis was very influential along with other Black literature such as The Black Jacobins (1938) by CLR James, George Jackson’s Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters (1970) and The Souls of Black Folk (1903) by WE Du Bois. Reggae musician Linton Kwesi Johnson said: ‘Joining the Black Panthers was a life-changer for me because for the first time I discovered Black Literature.’

The exhibition includes material on the Black People’s Alliance demonstration against Racialism during the Commonwealth Premier’s Conference in January 1969, the National Conference on the Rights of Black People in Britain in May 1971, and the fire-bombing of the Unity Centre at 74 Railton Road in March 1973. There is a focus on the trial at the Old Bailey of the Mangrove 9 in October 1971. The Mangrove was a West Indian restaurant in Notting Hill that was repeatedly raided by the Metropolitan Police, and at a subsequent protest march 9 people including Jones-LeCointe, Beese and Darcus Howe were arrested.

A significant figure in the British Black Panther Movement was Olive Morris (1952-79), born in Jamaica who was a feminist, black nationalist, campaigner against private property rights and for the rights of squatters, a founding member of the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent, and co-founder of the Brixton Black Women’s Group. In 1972, 121 Railton Road was squatted by Olive Morris and Liz Obi and was later home to Black organisations, feminist and anarchist groups which were only evicted by Lambeth Council in 1999.

In 1973, the Brixton Black Women’s Group was set up at 65 Railton Road by Morris and Obi, though it later moved to Stockwell Green. The Lambeth Women’s Project was established in 1979 at 166a Stockwell Road and would be evicted by Lambeth Council in November 2012. In 1986 Lambeth Council named one of its buildings on Brixton Hill after Olive Morris. The Lambeth Council leader at the time was Labour Councillor Linda Bellos, a black radical feminist. It is with grim irony today that Lambeth ‘New Labour’ Council operates its housing department and benefits from Olive Morris House, the same Council notorious for evicting ‘squatters’ and tenants from long-life housing and those who cannot afford to pay the ‘bedroom tax.’ This is in sharp contrast to Linda Bellos who said in 2006: ‘I think class remains a key element in people’s life chances which is why I remain a socialist.’

The British Black Panther Movement was a reformist strategy in capitalism, as confirmed by the following statement: ‘I seriously believe that the methods we learnt, the ideology we imbibed and then the campaigns that we participated in gave rise to legislation which outlawed discrimination in housing and employment. We couldn’t make a Marxist-Leninist revolution but we did establish the right of blacks to become proper citizens of Britain’ (Dhondy).

Today in capitalism ‘Black youth unemployment nationally is now pushing 65 percent and rising, in some local wards this rises as high as 75-85 percent’ (Lee Jasper 8 July 2013). Today there are a disproportionate number of deaths of black men in police custody, a disproportionate number of black men in the prison population, and a disproportionate number of black people subject to stop and search by the police.

Black American novelist Alice Walker said ‘The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.’ Socialists agree with this and when the united black and white working class recognise their own immense potential power they can transform society through conscious unity by abolishing capitalism. Capitalism promotes and aggravates conflicts such as racism. Socialism will be a world free of social conflict in which human beings live and work in unity without distinction of race.

Steve Clayton

World View: Pan-Africanism or pan-humanism? (2002)

From the February 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

When slave labour was no longer profitable as a result of the invention of machines, the Trans-Atlantic slave trade was abolished. This created a severe social problem as the ex-slaves could hardly fend for themselves. They became homeless, jobless and hungry. These problems forced them to become vagabonds, outcasts, "criminals", and (owning nothing in a society dominated by money and private ownership of property) an inferior class.

This sorry state of affairs culminated in the emergence of black (ex-slave) radicals such as Marcus Garvey who organised the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Other activists against the appalling situation of the black ex-slaves included W E B. Dubois; James Brown, who sang "say it loud, I'm black and proud"; and several groups of the Black Consciousness Movement which sprang up in the middle of the 20th century.

This wind of awareness and defiance that was blowing across the Americas and Europe naturally touched the black students from mainland Africa who had gone to the USA and Europe to study. Prominent among these were Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Leopold Sedar Senghor. These radicals together with others from the Caribbean like George Padmore were after to become the precursors of the Pan-Africanist movement. It was also known among in the French-speaking world as "Négritude".

It follows from the above that (other considerations aside) Pan-Africanism is a concept that is limited to black people – those on the continent and the ones in the Diaspora. In this regard, one can liken Pan-Africanism to other (albeit better organised) groups like Zionism, Pax Romana, the Arab League, etc. They are concepts and groups dedicated only to the interest of their members.

The colour smokescreen

As explained, the roots of Pan-Africanism can be traced to the conditions, the concrete reality of the newly-"emancipated" slaves in the Americas. Let us assume for the moment (despite all) that they faced those hardships "because of their colour". The question which readily comes to mind, now, is whether we can say it is the same scenario today. Are the causes of our problems today due to our colour? Of course not.

Consider the following cases. Mobutu allowed himself to be used by the Western powers to inflict untold suffering on the people of the then Zaire. Together with these powers he stole all the wealth of the country. In fact it is said that he was richer than the state. There is also the case of Bokassa who squandered millions of dollars to crown himself emperor when at that time the ordinary people of Central African Republic could not afford one decent meal a day. In Angola, Jonas Savimbi and a few friends (UNITA) teamed up with Western businesses to visit a limitless insecurity on the poor people just to plunder the resources of the land. The story is no different in the case of Foday Sonko and fellow rebels in Sierra Leone; quite recently the chief whip of South Africa, Tony Yengeni, and a senior official of the ANC as such, was embroiled in multi-billion dollar arms deals. Yet South Africa is not at war; meanwhile millions of ANC supporters do not have drinking water and electricity in their ghettos.

Moving outside the continent, what can Pan-Africanists say about blacks in the Diaspora like the US Secretary of State Colin Powell who ordered the US delegation to walk out of the Durban Conference on Racism because he and his capitalist colleagues would lose if reparations are to be paid to the victims of the slave trade? On the other hand there are non-blacks who help in various ways many Africans. There are countless families in poor Africa whose survival depend on well-meaning and genuine Europeans and Americans.

But more importantly today, and even during the period of the "liberation" of the slaves and beyond, suffering in the form of insecurity, murders, poverty, illness, misinformation, boredom, exploitation, etc affected both blacks and non-blacks alike, from Africa, America, Asia to Europe. Therefore we cannot be justified when our suffering is blamed on our colour and their colour. Colour is used as a smokescreen to conceal the real cause of discrimination. There is a deeper factor underneath the black/white ruse.

The world economic order

It was not by accident that the Europeans came to Africa. They were looking for trade routes to the East. They were pursuing their business interests. It was also not by mistake that they started the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. They need cheap labour for their plantations. They were in business. It was again not out of humanitarian considerations that they stopped the slave trade and set the blacks free. Slave labour had become obsolete and a fetter on production. The Industrial Revolution had made it possible for machines to be used in the production process so slaves were no longer needed. Therefore the real and fundamental cause of the problems of the "freed" slaves (which led to the rise of Garvey, Dubois, etc and Pan-Africanism) was the world economic order.

Interestingly the problems that these ex-slaves faced upon their "release from bondage" are still the same problems facing us – humanity as a whole – today. These are hunger, poverty, disease, insecurity, no job satisfaction and joblessness, etc. These problems are a direct result of the system in operation in the world.

This system is based on private ownership. This means that the means of production and distribution of the wealth (factories, land, transportation, etc) are owned by a minority whilst the majority own nothing. The few owners of the means of production determine what to produce. Since their primary objective is to make profit but not to satisfy human needs, they do not hesitate to produce goods which are not needed by people. For instance armaments and weapons of mass destruction, sophisticated security systems fancy goods, cigarettes, etc are manufactured in huge quantities because they bring in huge profits. Yet food, medicines, textbooks, shoes, housing, etc which are necessities are either in short supply or beyond the reach of the masses. This type of economic system (call it the money-system, the profit-system or the capitalist system) was responsible for the slave trade, colonialism and today's problems. With the majority having nothing and constantly under economic pressure, tension is inbuilt and can at the least prompting explode into real violence such as is happening in many countries including the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in the US.

Which way forward?

One can clearly see from the above that Pan-Africanism can only be relevant if it seeks to address issues from a much wider perspective. Pan-Africanists have to transcend the narrow scope of seeing things from the point of view of colour. Today almost all countries are multi-racial. This is best articulated in the South African reggae star, Lucky Dube's song One people, different colours. Thus, to continue to harp on the "black race" is a matter of tackling the symptom and leaving the disease in fact.

Pan-Africanists must understand the profit system and learn to analyse issues from the angle of ownership to profit-making property. That is, from the angle of haves and have-nots. The world is divided into two antagonistic groups – the rich minority and the poor majority.

To be to achieve this, and even produce beneficial results, we need to acquire knowledge and live by it. This is tune with the socialist adage that "Practice without theory is blind and theory without practice is empty."

Acquiring knowledge means raising our consciousness. The highest level of consciousness is internationalism. Internationalists see every person as a person regardless of tribe or colour. And the cream of internationalists are socialists. Socialists do not consider the artificial boundaries dividing humanity as a barrier. Wherever they are is home.

However it is not enough to declare oneself socialist. It is necessary to understand the theory of socialism and how to get the peoples of the world to live by it. This involves, first, the knowledge that society, as at present constituted, is divided into two opposing camps. On the one hand there are the few privileged owners of the means of livelihood and, on the other, the majority who own nothing and so are forced to slave for the comfort of the propertied minority. The second phase entails striving for a society in which there will be common ownership and democratic control of the means of livelihood; free and equal access to the products of labour; and where, therefore, the concept and use of money (in all its forms) will cease to exist. This society is the socialist society.

• Suhuyini

Mixed Media: 'Nothing But a Man' (2014)

Film Review from the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nothing But a Man (dir. Michael Roemer)

Nothing But a Man, a 'lost' black 1960s American film was recently screened at the National Film Theatre on the South Bank in London. It won the San Giorgio Prize at the 1964 Venice Film Festival then disappeared although it was released in 16mm format and found a black audience when it was shown in churches and schools. It was re-released in the USA in 1993 when the US National Film Registry at the Library of Congress selected the film for preservation as 'culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant'.              

Nothing But a Man was made by white New York liberal Jews, the director and writer was the German Jewish Michael Roemer who had fled the Nazis, and the producer, cinematographer and co-writer Robert M Young. Roemer and Young with the help of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) travelled to the South for three months to research the script for Nothing But a Man.

Nothing But a Man was filmed in the Summer of 1963 on a budget of $230,000 around Atlantic City and Cape May in New Jersey although set in Alabama which was out of the question as a film location. This was the time of the civil rights movement, and Alabama Governor George Wallace’s support for 'segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever', and the existence of 'Jim Crow Laws' (mandated de jure racial segregation) in the South. Everyone on the film crew was paid $100 per week, the crew and cast took the day off to march on Washington DC with Martin Luther King Jr.

Nothing But a Man tells of the relationship and rather sweet courtship between Duff, a railroad worker and Josie, a schoolteacher and daughter of a preacher against a background of economic, social and institutional racism and deals with the discrimination, lack of jobs for blacks, and poverty in American society. Duff is played by Ivan Dixon later in the TV series Hogan's Heroes, and Josie by jazz singer Abbey Lincoln who sang on Max Roach's We Insist! Freedom Now Suite 1960 civil rights jazz album. The film is notable for its Motown soundtrack of Smokey Robinson, Mary Wells, Martha and the Vandellas, and Little Stevie Wonder.

Nothing But a Man is a pioneering drama about African-American life, 'one of the most sensitive films about black life ever made in this country' (Washington Post 10 July 1993), and an early portrait of black pride and anger. Duff says ‘They can reach right inside you with their white hands and turn you on and off'. The film was Malcolm X's favourite and was endorsed by the Nation of Islam newspaper Muhammad Speaks. The film is emotionally powerful with its portrait of Duff's embittered alcoholic father who was maimed at work in a sawmill, Duff's attacks on Josie's preacher father as a 'white man's nigger, you been stoopin' for so long you don't know how to stand up. You're only half a man', and the heart aches with lines like 'It's not gonna be easy but everything's gonna be alright' and 'I feel so free inside'.

Nothing But a Man has a naturalistic and neo-realist style that is in stark contrast to the Hollywood liberal middle-America films about African-Americans such as Lilies of the Field, and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? It can be compared to the cinéma vérité of Fred Hampton's Chicago Black Panther Party in Medium Cool by Haskell Wexler and the Paul Schrader film Blue Collar about Detroit car workers which starred Yaphet Kotto who was also in Nothing But a Man.

Nothing But a Man is set in the period of Bob Dylan's The Times They Are a-Changin', but how much did life change for African-Americans in American capitalist society with the Civil Rights, Voting Rights and Fair Housing Acts?

In 2010 law professor and civil rights activist Michelle Alexander wrote in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness that there are more African American men in prison than were slaves before the start of the Civil War. 846,000 black men were in prison comprising 40 percent of the total when African Americans comprise 13.6 percent of the U.S. Population. More African American men were disenfranchised due to felony convictions in 2004 than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.

The black and white working class need to realise that they create the world's wealth and that their interests are in common irrespective of race and when the united black and white working class recognise this they can solve their problems by abolishing capitalism.

Steve Clayton