Say It Loud!

Marxism and the Fight Against Racism

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• Publisher: Bookmarks E Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781909026384
• eBook ISBN: 9781909026452
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Kommunismus, Postkommunismus & Sozialismus

The current period has seen the rise of Islamophobia, a resurgence of fascism in Europe and constant attempts to scapegoat immigrants. This book seeks to challenge the idea that racism is inevitable by taking a critical look at the origins and history of racism in Britain and abroad. The eight authors' shared Marxist approach and activist history ensure a smooth narrative and a clear argument for the struggle for liberation today.

CHAPTER 1

The roots of racism

Ken Olende

BRITAIN is a racist society. Black and Asian people face discrimination in education, jobs, housing, and at the hands of the police and the criminal justice system. Many people believe this is because racism is part of human nature and will always be with us. Others think racism is just an irrational hangover from the past that has been in retreat in the 250 years since the Enlightenment and can be put behind us as we arrive in a post-racist society. Some, mostly in the media and among the rich, try and blame the victims—saying that people suffer from racism because they segregate themselves from the rest of society.

Marxism offers another explanation and a practical solution. The development of racism is intimately entwined with that of capitalism. Racism is in the material interest of the people who run our society and to get rid of it we have to challenge that system.

What is racism?

Scientifically, race is a meaningless concept. Thankfully, serious attempts to classify people by race stopped being acceptable after the Nazi horrors of the Second World War. Before then it was common for people to be defined by racial types and specific traits that supposedly went along with their types. For example, it seems bizarre now that Raymond Arthur Dart, an important scientist who discovered the human ancestor Australopithecus, believed races could be clearly and precisely divided into types, and that it was possible to tell how much of which type made up the bloodline of a population. He calculated the racial type of South Africa’s black population to be “51.2 percent Negroid, 25 percent Bush, 22.3 percent Caucasoid and 1.5 percent Mongoloid” in 1937.¹ These races were assigned moral values. Some were apparently “industrious”; others, like the African Bush, “merry, dancing, carefree”.²

Even at their peak of popularity, some could see that such classifications were racist nonsense. The great black US anti-racist W E B Du Bois was able to point out as early as 1915:

In fact it is generally recognised today that no scientific definition of race is possible. Differences, and striking differences there are between men and groups of men, but they fade into each other…³

Regrettably, such ideas of innate difference still occasionally resurface, as when Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray attempted to rehabilitate ideas of scientific racism in their 1994 book The Bell Curve. So to this day mainstream organisations such as the American Anthropological Association have to state that there is no scientific substance to such beliefs. In 1998 it issued a statement saying:

Evidence from the analysis of genetics (eg, DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic “racial” groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes.

Racial myths bear no relationship to the reality of human capabilities or behaviour. Scientists today find that reliance on such folk beliefs about human differences in research has led to countless errors.⁴

This is true, but the argument needs to be taken further. In fact racism, along with the concept of “race”, is a relatively new development that came with capitalism. Its emergence goes along with the rise of a new class and a new way of ordering the world.

The great black Marxist C L R James argued that racism came out of the Atlantic slave trade, which was:

so shocking, so opposed to all the conceptions of society which religion and philosophers and others had (despite St Paul and his “Slaves, obey your masters”), that the only justification by which humanity could face it was to divide people into races and decide that Africans were an inferior race.⁵

Only a Marxist argument can explain how racism emerged when it did and how it can be challenged. In order to show this however we have to define certain things. First, what exactly do we mean by “racism”? Second, if it emerged with capitalism what do we say about previous prejudices? And why does racism remain influential long after the demise of the Atlantic slave trade?

In his book Racism, Resistance and Revolution Peter Alexander defined racism as “discrimination against a group on the grounds of some imputed inherited characteristic, such as colour”.⁶ As a core position that still stands, though we need to consider prejudices that are supposedly cultural, such as modern Islamophobia or the Turkish government’s objection to Kurds, both of which are supposed to disappear if the oppressed change their cultural identity. We will return to this issue later.

Racism links to other forms of prejudice. In itself it is neither logical nor consistent. Again and again, however, the idea that a certain group of people are inherently different lessens and then returns. It has appeared in the past with the Irish, Jewish people and most recently with Muslims in Britain. But centrally, racial discrimination emerged alongside the Atlantic slave trade, which accompanied the rise of Britain as a capitalist state and a world power. As it has developed it has become a powerful way to divide people who might threaten capitalist rule.

The development of racism as it exists today can be roughly divided into three phases. First there was the horror of the Atlantic slave trade. Second was the period when the globalising of capitalist empires made racism a worldwide phenomenon. Finally we have the development of racism related to immigration.

1 Slavery, capitalism and the birth of racism

Slavery was central to early capitalism and racism became its justification. Racism evolved entwined with capitalism over three centuries. Both have changed, but they are still intimately connected and we will not see the back of racism while capitalism survives. Capitalism emerged in northern Europe—particularly in Britain and Holland—as a new economic system based around sale for the market. For it to replace the previous feudal system a wholesale shift in ideas and social organisation was required.

One of the key developments was the triangular slave trade, where manufactured goods from Britain were taken to the west coast of Africa and traded for slaves. The slaves were transported to the Americas on the second side of the triangle, where they were sold to work on plantations. Finally the products of those plantations—sugar, cotton and tobacco—were brought back to Britain on the third leg. These were sold and the process began again. The profits were astronomical.

Capitalists pushed the idea of universal trade and the “free market”. As Chris Harman put it, “Market relations rest on the assumption that, however unequal people’s social standing, they have an equal right to accept or reject a particular transaction”.⁷ Such ideas were expressed in the slogans of the bourgeois revolutions: “All men are created equal” in the US, and “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” (Liberty, equality, brotherhood) in France.

Earlier societies had certainly not considered these to be self-evident truths, and therefore their rulers had felt no need to justify straying from them. But the massively profitable Atlantic slave trade—based on brutally forcing some people into inequality of the most extreme kind—dominated the capitalist’s income. How could the capitalist resolve this contradiction? In 1911 the black US Marxist Hubert Harrison argued that:

to the credit of our common human nature, it was found necessary to reconcile the public mind to the system of slavery. This was effected by building up the belief that the slaves were not really human: that they belonged to a different order of beings… One broad, general implication of this belief seems to be the denial of social, political and economic justice to all people not white.⁸

The ideas of racism developed first among the planters in the West Indies and the Americas and it was here that they took their most extreme form.

When Europeans had first arrived in the Americas they had forced Native Americans to work for them, but a combination of overwork and European diseases led to a catastrophic population decline. The British then imported indentured labour from England and Ireland. Indentured labourers were bound to work for an employer for a fixed period of time, to pay off a debt—sometimes a conviction or just the cost of travelling to the Americas. They were not paid wages and could be bought and sold by employers. For much of the 17th century there were more indentured labourers than slaves on the plantations. Though there was a time limit on indentured work, the labourers often died before their working life ended. The planters found that imported African slaves could do the work, and if they died there was a plentiful further supply available. Historian Eric Williams observed:

Here then is the origin of Negro slavery. The reason was economic, not racial; it had to do not with the colour of the labourer, but the cheapness of the labour. As compared with Indian and white labour, Negro slavery was eminently superior… This was not a theory, it was a practical conclusion deduced from the personal experience of the planter. He would have gone to the moon, if necessary, for labour. Africa was nearer than the moon.⁹

The slavers tried a series of justifications, including Noah’s curse on Ham from the Bible. They argued that black people were descended from Ham and as such were born to serve. In the end they preferred a more forward-looking myth, one that fitted with the developing new scientific taxonomies. Black people were a different, and inferior, species.

An early opponent of these developments spotted the class relations that caused the bigotry in a book called The Negro’s and Indian’s Advocate published in 1680. As a Christian the author, Morgan Godwyn, was outraged that planters told him that to convert black people to Christianity would lead to “the overthrow of their estates, and the ruin of their lives, threatening even the utter subversion of the island”.¹⁰ Godwyn reports that the slave owners were not confident in their ideas of black inferiority and spread them in whispers. He decided that the planters believed what they did out of “avarice”.

Nevertheless, the ideas took root. A century later the same slave owners’ descendants proudly displayed their prejudice in books such as Edward Long’s History of Jamaica, published in 1774, which aimed to show that black people can be observed to be subhuman. While his book claimed to be a scientific treatise it contains passages like the following about black people:

When we reflect on the nature of these men and their dissimilarity to the rest of mankind, must we not conclude that they are a different species of the same genus?… That the oran-outang and some races of black men are very nearly allied, is, I think, more than probable…nor, for what hitherto appears, do they seem at all inferior in the intellectual faculties to many of the Negro race… The amorous intercourse between them may be frequent… An oran-outang… has in form a much nearer resemblance to the Negro race, than the latter bear to white men.¹¹

Though most people in Britain had never seen a black person the ideas of the slavers gained currency, particularly at the top of society. So the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume wrote in 1753 that he was:

apt to suspect that negroes, and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilised nation of any complexion other than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufacture among them, no arts, no sciences.¹²

But even as these ideas caught on, examples emerged to di...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A note on terminology
• Introduction: Say it loud: Brian Richardson
• 1 The roots of racism: Ken Olende
• 2 From confrontation to compromise: Black British politics in the 1970s and 1980s: Gary McFarlane
• 3 A defining struggle: The Stephen Lawrence campaign: Hassan Mahamdallie
• 4 A promise betrayed: Racism after Macpherson: Brian Richardson
• 5 The rise of Islamophobia: Talat Ahmed
• 6 Beating back the fascist threat: Weyman Bennett
• 7 Lessons from America: Civil rights to Black Power: Yuri Prasad
• 8 How do we fight racism today?: Esme Choonara
• Further reading
• About the authors
• Notes
• Index