Organise to fight systemic racism and capitalism with socialism
Tom Ruddell, Young Socialists Scotland, Prospect Scotland Branch Executive Committee, personal capacity.
In summer 2020 simmering anger over systemic racism and oppression boiled over following the murder of George Floyd by a white cop in the USA, reigniting the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests.
Over 10,000 people protested across Scotland to show solidarity and make clear that Scottish workers overwhelmingly denounce racism. But racism is ingrained in capitalism – we must organise in unions and build a new workers party capable of uniting the working class in all its diversity. To smash racism we must fight to smash capitalism and for the socialist transformation of society.
Capitalism’s imperialist era
Reminders of capitalism’s imperialist era are easy to find in Glasgow. Looking across Kelvingrove park is the statue of Lord Frederick Roberts, a 19th century military commander for the British Empire.
In the ‘Indian mutiny’ Roberts helped put down a mass uprising against British rule, ensuring the continued ability of the British ruling class to exploit Indian workers and land. In the Umbeyla campaign (in today’s Pakistan) he took part in the successful destruction of anti-colonialist militants and the burning of a town housing rebels.
In Afghanistan the British ruling class sought to maintain a tactical buffer state between India and Russia, also denying the Tsarist Russian empire access to a warm-water port which could enable its emergence as a rival power. In South Africa Roberts implemented the tactic of burning farms and interring citizens in concentration camps, killing over 25,000.
In this era capitalism needed to expand from national borders to create international markets and supply-chains and to subjugate more workers (mainly of colour) to reap profits for the capitalist class.
The imperialist methods employed were vicious – yet colonialists were not just the “product of their time” – their racism was a product of capitalist needs and among their working-class contemporaries there were many who rightly opposed racism and colonialism.
The year Roberts died, 1913, Lenin wrote: ‘everyone knows that the position of [people of colour] in America in general is one unworthy of a civilised country—capitalism cannot give either complete emancipation or even complete equality’.
Modern-day capitalism and its inherent racism
Capitalism today still has racism in its DNA. The capitalist class take their profits by exploiting the working-class; on an international stage they move money and work around the globe to areas where workers rights and environmental standards are low or can be eroded. Racism is therefore ingrained in the fabric of capitalism; in the words of Malcolm X, ‘you can’t have capitalism without racism’.
The short-sighted ‘covid nationalist’ tendency to vaccinate wealthy nations first has further underlined the barbarity inherent to capitalism. Lives are being traded on the crisis-ridden market system, with states fighting over supplies in the EU and an initiative to vaccinate people in lower income nations underfunded and at high risk of failure.
It’s estimated that the ‘covax’ initiative could take until 2024 to vaccinate the majority of people in poorer countries.With foreign aid dwindling, the World Bank is offering these nations loans – to be repaid in full – with which to purchase vaccines from the back of the queue.
Working-class people of all races have been at the receiving end of the coronavirus crisis. In Scotland, working-class people in the poorest areas have been dying at a rate more than double that of the more affluent.
Across the UK, double-oppressed Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) workers have been particularly affected by death rates and job losses. It was made obvious for all that underlying systemic inequalities in areas such as pay, housing quality and location were behind the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus pandemic on working-class BAME groups.
Fight racism with socialism
This is why, as socialists, we fight racism with the demand for decent pay and jobs for all, as well as good-quality housing and an end to all cuts to public services. We call for the immediate nationalisation of the major sections of the economy under democratic workers’ and trade union control, and to take the wealth off the 1%.
But we can’t just ask – only coordinated trade union action, including general strikes, can win concessions towards these demands. We must build a new workers’ party capable of organising the unions and the entire working-class in order to smash the capitalist profit system.
Only then can we carry out the socialist transformation of society, building a democratically planned economy in the interest of the entire working class, ending racism and all forms of oppression.
Join your trade union and Socialist Party Scotland today!
