How to beat the racists

Leon Trotsky, writing before and after Hitler came to power, tried to warn the labour movement about the policies of the, then very strong, German Communist Party, policies which proved to be disastrous. He advocated a policy of the “united front”. His writings have a lot to tell us about the nature of fascism and how to fight it. For workers’ unity against the fascists “No matter how true it is that the Social Democracy by its whole policy prepared the blossoming of fascism, it is no less true that fascism comes forward as a deadly threat primarily to that same Social Democracy, all of whose...

The history of black and Asian people in Britain is a history of racism and of resistance to racism. The victims of racism often received white working class solidarity and had the backing of radicals and socialists. Workers’ Liberty surveys the history. Individuals and small groups of black people have been living in Britain for at least 500 years. But only after the 1650s did their numbers begin to rise significantly. When the “triangular trade” began, manufactured goods went from Bristol, Liverpool and London to the African coast, where textiles and guns were bartered for black slaves. The...

Anti-semitism, or anti-Jewish prejudice is an ancient form of racism. Unlike modern anti-black racism, the roots of which lie in the trade in slaves and the rise of capitalist colonialism, going back perhaps 400 years, anti-semitism dates back to conflicts inside the Roman Empire. In AD 313 the Emperor Constantine the Great gave Christianity supremacy inside the Empire. The Christians used their new power to persecute their Jewish rivals. The Jews were blamed for what was for Christians the worst crime in history: “The Jews killed Christ”. The Christians wanted a clear line of demarcation...

On 26 May in Oldham there was bitter fighting between Asian youth and the police. The riot followed weeks of racist provocation from fascist groups and decades of poverty — affecting both Asian and white workers — and a deep sense of alienation from mainstream politics. On 24 June rioting began in Burnley. In mid-July, Bradford erupted. In both towns the fascists had been active. In the General Election the BNP’s vote averaged 3.9 per cent over 33 constituencies. They scored over 16% in Oldham and over 11% in Burnley. Workers’ Liberty discussed the issues with Nick Lowles, joint-editor of the...

Modern anti-black racism has relatively recent roots, in the history of slavery and colonialism. Racism did not start as a divide-and-rule trick imposed by the ruling class. The racist practice of slavery and colonialism came first; racist ideas came later. When the slave trade started in the 16th century, the British capitalists took slaves and sold them like cattle, bullied them and beat them. Then, they began thinking of them as subhuman. That is the natural way of things for slave owners. When Britain conquered territories and peoples and assumed the right to rule and make decisions for...

By Dion D’Silva “I’ll be honest with you, I was terrified. I owe my life to that preacher and so do all the other white people who were there.” So spoke a policeman outside the home of Martin Luther King in Montgomery in January 1956. King’s home had just been firebombed. Yet, as he surveyed the damage, he spoke to an angry crowd that had gathered: “We must love our white brothers no matter what they do to us... what we are doing is just — and God is with us.” The birth of the modern Civil Rights Movement was the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955/56. The local preacher, Martin Luther King, threw...

Martin Thomas looks at George Breitman’s book, The Last Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary (Pathfinder, £7.95) THIS BOOK, written over the year after Malcolm X was murdered in February 1965, sets out to prove that from June 1964 until his death “Malcolm was a revolutionary — increasingly anti-capitalist and pro-socialist as well as anti-imperialist”. On one level, it is solid and convincing. Shortly before his death Malcolm said plainly that his struggle was not “a racial conflict of black against white, or... a purely American problem. Rather, we are today seeing a global...

The Nation of Islam (NoI) was founded in 1930 as a peculiar fusion of Islam and a conservative variant of black nationalism. The NoI considered whites to be devils and that the answer to American racism was the promotion of black business, racial separation and the creation of a black state. Black historian Manning Marable describes how the NoI came to be “re-founded" by Louis Farrakhan in 1981: “[In the 1970s] Most black radicals, influenced heavily by Malcolm X's public separation from and feud with the Nation in 1964-65, still viewed the organisation with a great deal of scepticism. “…...

The Black Panthers are the most representative example of revolutionary black nationalism. Dan Katz looks at two books, written by participants. Bobby Seale's Seize The Time (Vintage, 1970) and Elaine Brown's A Taste of Power (Pantheon, 1992) “Huey [Newton — the central Panther leader] said ‘I’ve got my gun. What are you going to do with yours?’… And Huey’s calling the pigs swine, dogs, sharecroppers, bastards, motherfuckers, with his M1 in his hand. And daring them, just daring them!" These are the words of Bobby Seale, Chairman of the Black Panthers. “I’ve got my gun" was a beautiful...

By Violet Martin Our basic policy is free speech. The capitalist class has a partial interest in free speech — within limits. The working class has a much more profound interest in free speech. Socialism means the defeat of entrenched power by the mobilisation of long downtrodden millions of people who at last dare to have thoughts and dreams other than those handed down by official society; thus it needs free debate. And free speech (real free speech, not the limited free speech available in a society where a wealthy minority monopolises the media, education, leisure...) is a vital part of...