Challenging the Racists

Anyone who ever gets involved in arguments with racists sooner or later runs up against their assumption—sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit—that their prejudices are based on an eternal, natural law. The assumption which follows this is that racism has an existence independent from other social factors and that, unlike other ideas, it came into being regardless of whatever else was happening in the world and will, therefore, remain regardless of whatever else happens. The importance of examining this theory is not so much to assess the value of the racists’ assumption but also to look at an example of the forces which operate for changes in society and in its ideas. Contrary to what the racists think, racism as much as any other idea is a product of the prevailing economic conditions in society. Members of all ethnic groups — be they black, red, yellow, white or brown — have potentially the same intelligence. That these potentials are not realised is due to historical circumstances and environmental factors and not to biological differences. It is an unfortunate fact that many workers are colour prejudiced. Most workers are opposed to immigration on practical grounds: they mistakenly believe that it is a threat to the living standards they have achieved. Many claim that migration has caused problems in housing, education, and the health services. Herding any depressed group into a particular town or section of a city brings its own problems and tensions. This produces the classic immigration situation, of desperate people pouring into an area already run down, an area of crumbling buildings where slum landlords and other exploiters can take rich pickings.

Although the economic system is global, for political purposes the world is divided by borders into artificial national states. As socialists we don’t accept that these frontiers have any relevance. We don’t recognise them. Nor do most workers in search of security. It stands to reason if you have no property and depend for a living on working you must go, if you can, where the jobs are. Impoverished workers and peasants from the rest of the world have moved to Europe and North America.

There is no denying that bringing people of different customs and traditions together in the economic jungle of capitalism can cause inconveniences, but it is quite untrue that immigration is the cause of bad housing, cheap education and inadequate medical services. These problems existed long before the migrants came. They are problems for the working class everywhere and all the time. Immigrants are in the same position as the rest of us: propertyless, having to find an employer to live. They, too, are members of the working class. We are told that migration has caused over-crowding in our big cities with its attendant evils of taking houses which should be inhabited by the British who built them. This is nonsense. Houses, even palaces and mansions, are all built by the working class but under capitalism workers are only allowed to live in the sort of house or they can afford. This charge of taking houses from Britons might make sense if immigrants took the best. Yet immigrants have to put up with some of the worst slum housing. The best houses go, of course, to the rich who get their money from exploiting workers, black and white.

Under capitalism, how we live is decided by the size of our wages. Capitalism ensures that we don’t get much more than enough to keep us in efficient working order. This will be our lot as long as capitalism lasts. We will have to put up with what is cheap and second-rate. These are problems that affect all workers, irrespective of so-called race or colour or nationality, whether they live in America, or Britain. They are problems which can only be solved by the joint action of workers everywhere to convert the means of production from the class property of a few into the common property of the whole community.

As far as the Socialist Party is concerned, all workers the world over are brothers and sisters from the same one big family of humanity.