One People - One Humanity

With the recent homicide of George Floyd, race prejudice has once more become a subject of media interest. The repression of the African-American community, enduring so long after for a hundred years after their “emancipation” and “liberation” ranges from murder to petty discrimination, and runs through all strata of society. It has produced a distrust and hatred that will take a very long time to overcome. Such a situation, and the fact that it could be changed, must lead to periodic eruptions of rage and anger. As long as race hatred between workers remains and is added to the normal tensions and frustrations of capitalism, such explosions will continue. The poverty factor remains constant and that is a thing reforms can do nothing about. The division in the USA is not simply racial: there are plenty of poor white wage slaves, just as there are black capitalists. Colour is neither the problem nor the solution. Class is the problem — establishing a class-free, propertyless, state-free system of society is the practical solution.

So often the victims of mob violence, much of the media depict African-Americans themselves as becoming the mob. The details are too well reported to need repeating, but many thousands of police have been needed to suppress what amounted to a rebellion. In the end, the state will win and the riots will be put down. When it is all over, needless to say the African-Americans will be the worst-hit victims. Rioting, though perhaps understandable, is not the answer. What is required is not blind rage but that the quite legitimate rage of these victims of capitalism should be accompanied by an understanding of the situation capitalism has put them in. Capitalism causes – in fact, requires – some workers to suffer above average social exclusion. The constructive thing to do is to work for a new society in which having to obtain money, by hook or by crook, to acquire what you need to live will be a thing of the past.

Is it a small wonder that racial and other antagonisms are present in a latent or active form. Again in a competitive system where workers compete for jobs and houses, the coloured person who is a worker must become a competitor too. And in a social system where ruling groups exploit race prejudice along with other prejudices to play one set of workers off against other workers, it becomes easy for the coloured person to become a scapegoat for all sorts of social evils. How much better if white and coloured workers realised they have a common class interest. That poverty, unemployment, housing shortages, are not a colour issue but a class issue, and while white and coloured workers are enchained to capitalism, neither are free. We must organise together to throw off the shackles of class-domination. We are against racism, any other form of persecution or prejudice. We want a world of human beings aware of their common shared humanity. The World Socialist Movement want the world returned to humanity, regardless of colour. What is even more important, we want humans to return to humanity.

Life is unhappy, not only for those on the bottom rungs of the social ladder, but for those who have climbed a little higher as well and are clinging desperately, after all, it is so much more painful if you fall. In America, fear of the African-American remains a direct outgrowth of the poverty inflicted by capitalism on “poor whites”. Under that pressure, with an admixture of ignorance, their conduct constantly sinks to a sickening level. The upsurge of the advocacy of #BlackLivesMatter in recent years can be understood as the backlash. Many people look around for a scapegoat to blame for all their troubles. Finding something or someone to blame is the easy answer for those who take a crude and superficial view governed by emotions rather than facts. Workers should be encouraged to think of themselves as members of a worldwide class with a common interest, not as members of different “nations” or different “ethnic” or “cultural” groups with their own different, competing interests. The WSM has never had a problem doing that. That’s because we understand that working class people of all cultures need to come together as equals to fight for issues that unite them as a class. And that’s the only way we’ll ever achieve a society where we can work together for things that unite us all as human beings, regardless of skin colour, religious beliefs, cultural or national origin, or individual difference. In the circumstances of present events across the United States however, we can do little more than to express our sympathy with the exploited.