By Robin Sivapalan
I read Assed’s initial article [1] just over a week ago when I was invited by comrades in the SWP to join the Facebook group set up to defend him. On a quick reading I was pretty disappointed by what he had to say and also, from experience, I could predict the scale and type of enraged response this article would provoke.

I have been away in Paris the last week with a group of socialists and anarchists meeting activists involved in the recent class struggles in France. In a week I’ve come back with some very different questions that I need to test against some of the political ideas I have, some of them relevant to this debate. Yesterday, me and a comrade from the trip to Paris discussed at great length both Assed’s longer articles and some of the responses posted on the Facebook groups, in order to make some sense of the ideas being presented.

I should start by saying that my solidarity is with Assed here. I don’t agree really with what he has to say and the way he thinks about the world at the moment. However, for me, I would see in Assed a comrade in struggle against oppression, who is engaging in debate, and actually presents more left wing perspectives as he develops his argument. His opponents, from the contributions I’ve read, are mostly crude and limited, and at times bigoted and racist. They are mirror images of Assed’s piece, taken as a whole, and are either side of these apparent ‘two sides’ of what white and non-white people have done to fuck up the world. His supporters have been cautious and mealy-mouthed. I haven’t seen any socialists really bother to engage with the debate, but have offered content-less bland solidarity from their offices and student log-ins. It is not as if what Assed says, despite being peppered with socialistic phrases in his second article, should remain unchallenged by Marxists. We should of course stand by his right to say such things and defend him to a limited extent politically against right wing attack (and of course if necessary physically). But I also think his argument needs serious challenging from the left, not least because this white=evil viewpoint is a common distortion shared by many oppressed people here and around the world. Such ideas, apart from being fascistic and crazy, are an impediment to international, anti-racist, feminist working-class solidarity. I can’t say I am really surprised that the SWP comrades have remained silent, but as always, it is disappointing. In many ways, their organisation has for years in reality contributed and accommodated to these distortions of world view, I can only guess for the sake of membership drives, rather than winning people to their own ideas through arguing and discussion, by proving through working-class example.

My differences with Assed are simple really. He presents an argument in his first piece, basically saying that white people are the root of all the main evils in the world, and racism flows from this, today as always, worse than ever. It is a shame – to understate the seriousness - to see Rania Khan an elected Respect party councillor, on the SWP side of the recent split, justify this view simply because lots people share it, including white academics no less.

I’ve thought about and experienced before most of the issues and scenarios – and dozens of variations on them – that Assed presents; Black history month, Black children in education, Black people in the media, the white male colonial imperialist gaze, the ‘othering’ of Black people, Alan Johnston, the war on terror and islamophobia, slavery, elites, class exploitation. I’m no expert, as such, and nor does that really matter. I have been an activist in the anti-racist movement for a few years on campus and in the real world. But the few conclusions that I have come to, I think amount to a different perspective or framework, a different way of understanding reality, and point to seemingly different ways to change it. I’d like to add some of my perspectives to the debate.

I’m a class struggle socialist, a member of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. There are some tools for understanding history and the present political reality that shape the way I choose to struggle in solidarity with all the struggles of the oppressed and exploited in all parts of the world. As a Marxist, among other things, I think the main struggle for the future of humanity is the struggle against capitalism. But capitalism is not a ‘race’ of people, I think it is a system of social relations, wherein the majority of humanity are now dispossessed and alienated from the wealth of the world, ‘natural’ and ‘man-made’. Moreover, look at the world as a whole, and two distinct classes of people emerge, in opposing camps, with antithetical interests - wage workers and capitalists. At the same time, I think humanity taken as a whole has been drastically re-shaped as a species across the world, and collectively, has a new and more powerful transformative potential, partly through re-appropriating for profitless common use the new technologies, communications, logistics, transports, means of production and even critically the human sciences, ideas and freedoms developed under capitalist society that have been alienated from the majority of people and enclosed. Under workers’ and democratic control.

The regimes of capital dominate the world, waging war, degrading the natural basis of life and existence, enslaving masses of people in bonded wage-labour, allows for some the tedium of pacifying over-consumption, while the vast majority are condemned to severe poverty, famine, disease, miseries, insecurities, brutalities, controls, abuses, restrictions. The constant drive to extend capitalist social relations – the expropriation of more and more surplus value, that is, money, dead labour – dictates its prerogative around the world but does not explain all social evils. Capitalism is not a very old mode of production. It has grown up alongside, in battle with, competition and expedient alliance with other social institutions and ways of life, religious, feudal, tribal, monarchical, military, republican, social democratic. There are varying degrees around the world of direct global capitalist integration. In parts of the world we still see the remnants of totalitarian bureaucratic capitalistic regimes under various Communist banners, which are separated in reality from working class socialism by rivers of workers’ blood and sweat, in struggle and resistance; where workers are in many ways less free to organise than in the avowedly capitalist regimes.

In our real common dependence on the planet and on each other, the oppressed of the world must ultimately stand together to consciously enter the stage of human and world history as self-determining actors in shaping the course of their lives and the shared future of a free humanity. It is that, or face the continuing needless suffering and exploitation of the majority of the world population, that is being driven towards climate chaos and escalating war and poverty.

In the history of the modern workers’ movement around the world, Marxists have bravely fought against the logic of both Assed’s right wing and liberal opponents but also Assed’s insidious rhetoric. My parent’s generation come from Jaffna in north Sri Lanka. At one point, in a great chapter in human history I think, the Trotskyist movement had huge influence among workers across Sri Lanka and the migrant plantation workers from south India. They mobilised massive workers struggles against colonialism, against Sri Lankan capitalists, against religious and ethnic communalism. It was a struggle on many fronts in the name of class struggle socialism – and the end of the rule of profit, superstition and communalist divisions over people’s lives. Such is the embryo of a revolution, which will necessarily confront and smash the old institutions and structures and ideologues and forces of capitalist enslavement. The violent, oppressive degradation of humanity and all other life on the planet, the system of accumulation and concentration of the material and intellectual wealth - that socialists would see under the stewardship of democratic workers and community organisations – into the hands, minds and lives of the few; this system must be destroyed by a force consciously seeking to create by its own diverse potentials, social institutions of meaningful and liberating work, enjoyment, creativity and co-operation, a society that produces in a planned way to meet rational need, where the highest goal of society is the realisation and development of the individual personality and the unity of all being.

For me, such were the broadest and most visionary aims, the collective will galvanised and led by the Bolshevik party in the victorious Russian revolution, 90 years ago. This is not lessened – though the history should studied - by the fact that this revolutionary movement was quickly destroyed by the various forces of counter-revolution from which a bureaucratic and murderous clique, around Stalin, consolidated power and destroyed the institutions of workers and poor peasants’ control. Such a revolutionary party initially housed militants and working-class and peasant leaders of all the many ethnic and religious backgrounds in the Russia of the time.

Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, one third of the global population have a common and direct relation to the system of capital. The direct expropriation of the surplus-labour of the waged worker is what fuels capitalism, and it is this class of people - working directly for this generalised system of control and alienation - which constitute the strongest links in the chain of capitalist domination. The life of workers is insecure, by and large, unless they constantly organise for what limited security there can be against a prevailing predatory class of capitalists that attack every social (right of) provision the workers have fought for. Fundamentally, the capitalist of all nations, sees all of humanity as potential mass armies of labour under their control, armies of war under their control, a strange and dangerous commodity labour power that can be bought and sold like any other, but which also has the power to think, experience, resist, understand, share, educate, organise and fight. The individual worker’s labour measured in time - these hours of her life and energies given over to this exploitative relationship - is the basic unit of capitalism. While capitalism seeks to divide, atomise, alienate and exploit each individual alone, the requirements of its system give rise to the possibility of the organisation of the working class and social movements, the development of the principle of universal human solidarity among the oppressed – where an injury to one is an injury to all. Marxists work to build and develop co-operative relations of solidarity among the class of workers who collectively, globally, have the power to smash the rule of capitalist exploitation and to start to build a society of freely associating collective producers.

Assed is right in pointing out that modern day North American and European racism towards Black people has its roots in colonialism and in the period of slavery and capitalist accumulation and plunder which fuelled the industrial processes of the capitalist system. That said, I’m discovering all the time, the differences within Europe and America in terms of the ideas, strategies and work done to face up to racism, in part explained by different histories of development, imperialism and the type and extent of struggles that have left their legacy. I think Black people need to organise against racism, I think that women need to organise in their interests; no oppressed group should subordinate its struggle to some greater cause. However, the nature of such divisions and prejudices has a different reality for the working-class. These divisions are not fundamentally in the interests of the working class, however pockmarked the history of the international labour movement is with all sorts of capitulations to nationalism, communalism, religious sectarianism, racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, sexism and homophobia.

The labour movement has also provided the very best and most hopeful examples, of course, to people who are serious in resisting capitalism and all forms of oppression in the name of freedom, equality, solidarity and peace.

It was interesting to spend a week in France meeting a few activists in the RESF, the education network without borders; communities organising in defence and solidarity with migrant workers and youth, against exploitation and the criminalising and marginalising immigration and citizenship regimes. In this country similarly, the efforts to build solidarity among migrant workers and refugees and the existing labour movement on the ground have largely been supported by various anarchist, individual union activists’ black and white, smaller socialist groups, as well as religious and community organisations. Meanwhile, the biggest socialist organisation, the SWP which Assed is close to, has contributed little by way of ideological and concrete solidarity, but have rather misled hundreds of socialists and young people into a way of looking at the world, where the main enemies of humanity are Bush, Blair and Israel, where there heroes are Hamas, Hezbollah, formerly Galloway, ‘the Iraqi Resistance’ and Chavez. They can explain their own actions and perspectives.

But from where I’m standing, their actual positive alternatives – posited or worked for – have little direct bearing on the working class movement against imperialist war and capitalism. For instance, the SWP, as a result of it alliance with Galloway, has remained silent, while the International Transport Federation and other trade unionists and socialists around the world organised solidarity for the jailed and now blinded leader of Tehran’s bus workers’ union, Mansoor Ossanlou, a union of workers which has courageously organised under the most extreme repression; similarly silence for the 30 leftist students jailed a few weeks ago for their opposition to the theocratic regime, for the constantly harassed and persecuted women’s movement. At my last NUS conference a few years ago, I remember FOSIS and the SWP staging a walk-out when Houzan Mahmoud, a brave and militant Iraqi communist feminist, addressed NUS conference - on the basis that her defence of women fighting to throw off the veil, facing beheading in Iraq and her opposition to the Islamist militias, was Islamophobic! While 4,000 gay men and women have been executed in Iran in recent years, the Stop the War coalition invited apologists for the clerical fascist regime to their conferences and denounced and excluded activists who raised the banner against war and also for workers’ struggle and solidarity with women and gay people,

In this country which I know most about, there are a few gems of working-class solidarity that we should learn from. I’d like to reference the Grunwick dispute; the militant anti popular-front class struggle elements of the Lewisham riots; the working class and women’s and socialist movements that have worked in concrete international solidarity with the slave revolutions and movements for national liberation; Gate Gourmet; the schools and communities organising against deportations; the NUT’s historic attempts to combat racism in education from a class perspective; the Black fractions in unions and the committed internationalism of union activists; the NUJ which campaigned for the release of Alan Johnston and also for example organised a meeting in the House of Commons some weeks ago in solidarity with Sri Lankan journalists killed and disappeared. The most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist is unsurprisingly Iraq, an occupied war zone, but these journalists fear attacks from many directions, including the sectarian militias that are applauded in Trafalgar Square.

Currently the GMB, Unite and UNISON are putting more resources into working with migrant workers organising in super-exploited work-places. Organisations such as War on Want and No Sweat are building solidarity with Bangladeshi garment workers engaged in militant struggle who produce for Tesco’s and Primark among others; East London No Sweat sees this as cutting against the communalist politics galvanised by Respect and some mosques, with class-conscious solidarity action.

Where I am mainly active, the north of London, GMB members are organising food workers of Tamil and Gujerati origin working in hazardous conditions, holding drop-in sessions for Polish workers and have won substantial pay increases for mainly African NCP workers. Unison members in Fremantle care-homes, mainly black women, have taken strike action against worsening conditions and pay, job-cuts and closures. The bus workers section of Unite, through the initiative of a trotskyist, passed a resolution in solidarity with Mansoor Ossanlou, and indeed the Iranian bus driver who drove the bus I was on to the protest at the Iranian embassy was a member of the same union and sent his solidarity. In the student movement, ENS activists got Mansoor Ossanlou elected honorary vice-president of the NUS and invited Fremantle workers to the Feminist Fightback conference as well as raising money and sending a delegation to their strike day march and rally.

These are the kinds of workers and students’ initiatives that make me look at the world differently to when I was more involved in student activity. I went to both Cambridge and Oxford where the racism was overbearing. Being among a crop of students who are preparing themselves to be the new leaders of capital, its bankers, bosses, consultants, religious leaders, politicians, civil servants, teachers; it should be no surprise that racist ideologues and apologists and hypocrites should be found in such high number. I remember holding positions closer to Assed at that time, in part as friends and comrades at times disappointed, immersed in a student life with weak links to the workers movement, or for that matter the outside world.

Many of the injustices faced by Black people have to be addressed alongside issues of class, as connected but distinct issues. It is true I think that there are deeply embedded racist psychological processes and conceptions, drawn upon with regularity and ease by reactionary movements and ruling classes and, in the US for just one of countless examples, has led to gross betrayals by white workers in times of austerity. I think Assed is right in his painting of the way Black people here and across Africa are systematically dehumanised by the western capitalist institutions; this needs to be understood clearly. But as to solutions – I would choose to emphasise what has been achieved, what lessons can be learnt from working-class solutions and experiences, and build and develop the legacy of the best of our traditions and ideas. This for me includes, for example, a committed opposition to faith schools, as being divisive of working class children and communities to a degree such that I think the apparent religious rights of parents can be subordinated.

I think the solution is always to fight, guided by the principle of international working class solidarity. Assed clearly understands, for instance, that Condoleezza Rice and Margaret Thatcher represent nothing but a defeat for Black and women workers, but he still persists in drawing the lines of battle in terms of a white ruling elite. That the majority of the ruling capitalist elite is white and male is a historical factor, not an absolute inherent quality of being white. Of course, workers around the world have bosses and oppressors of their own ‘race’ who I think are quite experienced and autonomous in their will to procure and utilise weaponry for regional imperialist aggression and the repression of workers domestically. In north London for example, there is a long overdue fight to be had with the British wings of the RSS, the Hindu fascist militia groups associated with the BJP who have organised pogroms of Muslims in Kashmir and Gujerat. These people used to hold military drill training at the weekends at my school and have been loud supporters of the two soon to be opened Faith schools in Harrow and Barnet.

How we deal with the questions of race and racism is important; there isn't so much thoughtful discussion about it at the moment, despite the general levels of general low-level hysteria. In many ways I welcome Assed opening up a latent debate and setting down in words some positions that can serve as one springboard for debate. Whether under the ‘No Platform’ policies, that he supports for racists and fascists, he should get a hearing in the student press, is another question. I am not for giving platforms to known fascist organisers but that is as far as I would go.

I don’t think the answer to racism is simply ‘socialism’ or ‘revolution’, or ‘class’. I think the struggle among the working class – led by Black people - against racist ideas and portrayals, segregation, racist stop and search and ASBO practices, the incarceration of thousands of black people and the super exploitation of the vast majority of black workers, is among the starting points of any contemporary struggle against the divisive logic of capitalism in Britain. The fight against racism is a fight also within the socialist intellectual left who, caught up in their middle-class guilt, seem unable bring into focus a class perspective – and behind the sophistry of their theories, betray the struggles of women, gays and workers around the world, in a display of the most insidious and patronising racism.

It’s worth saying, also, that the technique of scapegoating minorities and even majorities, for an apparent social evil, is not just a weapon used by capitalists. The othering and subordinating of outsider groups of people is I think an ordering structure in both Judaic and Islamic thought and the later Catholic Church, with concepts of gentiles, infidels, heathens – and literal hell. I also think that much of the singular vilification of Israel (not by Assed here) as an unearthly abomination reeks of the same logic, and is a form of leftish anti-Semitism.

The cultural relativists, the apologists for reaction and repression if meted out by non-white people, should go … think again. And those who think that the drive for self-realisation and human freedom is a western construct obscure with their words and acts the struggles around the world for working class dignity, life and liberty.

There is much the socialist left has to do to develop the strength and initative our own working-class and social movements. I am well aware of the massive energies that have been engaged in building the stop the war movement most recently, but unless this movement is an internationalist class-based movement, with class-based strategies and slogans and actions, the further we are from the possibility of revolution and the stronger the forces of capitalism and reactionary anti-capitalism.

I hope that Black students and workers, who share common oppressions, continue to think, feel, learn and struggle together with white students and workers; the consistent struggle for the liberation of women, Black people, for sexual liberation and for open borders is central to the working class struggle for socialism.

In solidarity,

Robin Sivapalan
North London AWL