It has become a commonplace to assert that Marxism is incapable of explaining racism, because it supposedly reduces racial oppression to class.91 I would argue that, to the contrary, it is precisely the methodology of base and
90 van den Berghe, Race and ethnicity, pp. 89-90.
91 In fact, it is theorists who posit plural sources of power who end up reducing racial oppression to…race, or to some timeless “human nature”, the supposedly inherent hatred of black people by white, or a power-based discourse of racism.
superstructure that allows Marxism to avoid reductionism, and to explain racism as building on the structures of class oppression and reinforcing the class power of the dominant bourgeoisie. In this section, I will show how Marxists have used base and superstructure to construct a theory of racism, which I will summarise as nine theses. The rest of this thesis will address some of these propositions.
Alex Callinicos has suggested that Marx himself developed the beginnings of a Marxist theory of racism, in the following discussion of anti-Irish racism in England in the 1870s.
Every industrial and commercial centre in England possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the “poor whites” to the
“niggers” in the former slave states of the USA. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker at once the accomplice and stupid tool of the English rule in Ireland.
This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it.92
92 Quoted in Alex Callinicos, “Race and class”, International Socialism (UK), no. 55, summer 1992, pp. 18-19, emphasis in original.
Thus, in free labour capitalism, racism is structured within existing class relations. The power to impose this oppression, the control of productive resources through which to play different groups of workers off against each other, and the control of the means of ideological production—especially newspapers—are all functions of capitalism. From Marx’s brief comments, Callinicos identified four crucial points which I will identify as theses:
Thesis 1 Economic competition between workers creates the possibility for workers to be divided on “racial” lines.
Thesis 2 Racist ideology can have an appeal for white workers because, given their alienated existence within capitalism, racism offers an identity possessing the illusion of power—what WE duBois called “a public and psychological wage”.
Thesis 3 While racialised workers suffer most from racism; white workers in general do not benefit from it either; it predominantly benefits the ruling class.93
93 This assertion has been enormously controversial. It is not the task of this thesis to debate the point, but it is worth pointing out that many serious studies support this thesis. Among the vast number of historical studies which sustain this point, perhaps the most distinguished is Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s unfinished revolution, 1863-1877, Harper & Row, New York, 1988.
There are many studies which make this argument for Australia, including Constance Lever-Tracy and Michael Quinlan, A divided working class: Ethnic segmentation and industrial conflict in Australia, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London and New York, 1988; Andrew Markus, “Divided we fall: The Chinese and the Melbourne Furniture Trade Union, 1870-1900”, Labour History, no. 26, May 1974, pp. 1-10; Sarah Gregson in “‘It all started on the mines’?: The 1934 Kalgoorlie race riots revisited”, Labour History, no. 80, May 2001, pp. 21-40; Sarah Gregson, “Defending internationalism in interwar Broken Hill”, Labour History, no. 86, May 2004, pp. 115-36. Two studies which draw this conclusion based on examining relative wages are Michael Reich,
“Who benefits from racism? The distribution among whites of gains and losses from racial inequality”, Journal of Human Resources, vol. XIII, no. 4, fall 1978, pp. 524-44; and Albert Szymanski, “Racial discrimination and white gain”, American Sociological Review, vol. 41, June 1976, pp. 403-14.
Thesis 4 As a result, the ruling class makes strenuous efforts to sustain racist divisions.94
Given many of the debates about Marxism, it is important to note that Marx’s was not solely a theory of racism used to divide and rule the working class: the use of racism was only possible because it filled a need in the lives of workers, who had been turned into machines for the production of profit and because Britain was a great power. Drawing on the insights of WE Du Bois, Alex Callinicos compared the “psychological” role played by racism to that played by religion, seen by Marx as “the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions.” Thus racism gives white workers a particular identity, and one moreover which unites them with white capitalists.95
Marx also captured the colonial element in anti-Irish racism, suggesting one more fundamental proposition:
Thesis 5 Racism is not just negative “stereotyping”, but is used to strengthen and justify real oppression, including colonial or imperial
domination of other peoples.
In a remarkable study of the development of white racism in the United States, Theodore W Allen has argued that in colonial Virginia, the first ideology of whiteness was developed at precisely the moment that indentured African labourers were transformed into lifelong chattel slaves, and relations of production also transformed. He argued that Virginian capitalists were
94 Callinicos, Race and class, pp. 19-22. In fact Callinicos organises this discussion under three headings, but I have separated his discussion of his point iii, p. 22, into two separate headings (my 3 and 4), because two quite distinct issues are involved. WE duBois is quoted on p. 20.
95 Callinicos, Race and class, pp. 20-21.
desperate to divide their labourers, and that the lesser oppression (and minor privileges) associated with “whiteness” meant that poor whites could be made into a “social control layer”, to enforce the domination of Afro-American slaves in the emerging plantation system.96 Ideas about the “inferiority” of black people were later exported to Britain to justify slavery as it came under attack.97 And there is a vast literature on the use of racism to justify Europe’s colonial empires.
There are three further elements of a Marxist theory of racism which are immanent in Marx’s own writings. Firstly, there is his internationalism, most famously expressed in the injunction: “Working men of all countries, unite!”
Thus, from a range of passages within the Communist Manifesto, one can distil an argument to the effect that:
Thesis 6 The working class can only achieve lasting victories against
exploitation and oppression if it is united in struggle. By creating a world of cooperative and collective labour on a large scale, modern capitalism hence creates the possibility for working class unity, and this includes unity across “racial” and national lines.
A strategic conclusion follows:
Thesis 7 The task of communists is everywhere to “point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality” and race.98
96 Allen, Theodore W, The invention of the white race: Volume 2: The origin of racial oppression in Anglo-America, Verso, London and New York, 1997.
97 This is brilliantly discussed in Peter Fryer, Staying power: The history of black people in Britain, Pluto Press, London and Boulder (Colorado), 1984, esp. pp. 146-65
98 Marx and Engels, Manifesto, pp. 41-46, 47 (also p. 76).
Marx’s letter on the Irish movement, from which Callinicos drew, involved one further, and also fundamental strategic observation: that the oppression of the Irish by the English in both Ireland and England was in turn producing a revolutionary response from the Irish, both from the peasants at home, and the proletarianised Irish in Britain itself. Thus we might draw from Marx one final thesis, that:
Thesis 8 Racism is contradictory for capitalism: offering short term domination, profits and stability, but unleashing a potentially revolutionary dynamic, the more so as the more racialised workers are integrated into the working class of the dominant-nation.
Of course, this potential could not be realised unless the working class of the dominant national grouping rejected racism. So from around 1867 to 1871, Marx was personally involved in attempts to influence the British labour movement to support Irish independence, and to educate the German workers’ movement on the issue.99 John Newsinger argues, convincingly, that Marx’s assessment of the revolutionary potential of Irish workers in the English working class was exaggerated, but this does not undermine his general proposition. Apart from its unique ability to explain the nature and strength of racism in modern
capitalism, Marx’s proto-theory had two further strengths: it suggested a theory of working class anti-racism, and thus it offered the beginnings of a strategy for fighting racism, with the prospect of eliminating it altogether—a strategy which Marx’s most serious followers developed into a core element of their everyday politics.
99 The development of Marx’s views on Ireland and the struggle to win radical English workers to the cause of Irish independence is discussed in John Newsinger, “‘A great blow must be struck in Ireland’: Karl Marx and the Fenians”, Race and class, vol. 24, no. 2, 1982, pp. 151-67.
Of all the subsequent contributions to the Marxist tradition on the issue of racism, perhaps the most significant was that of Lenin. Lenin developed the concept of oppression within Marxist theory in What is to be done? where he argued that the revolutionary struggle of the working class was not simply a struggle against the conditions of employment and political rights of workers, but against all tyranny and all oppression, no matter who the victims were. In particular, he laid great stress on the responsibility of socialists and workers in the imperialist countries to fight for the liberation of the nationalities oppressed by their own nation state.100
The great racial issue faced by Lenin’s movement was anti-semitism. Lenin was opposed strategically to cultural separatism, but his hostility to anti-semitism was fundamental. He saw racism as a ruling-class device to contain unrest when military force was no longer sufficient.
When there was no really popular revolutionary movement, when the political struggle was not yet connected and integrated with the class struggle, simple police measures against individuals and study circles had their use… [But] Against the people’s revolution, against the class struggle the police cannot be depended on; one must have the backing of
100 This issue is extensively discussed in Tony Cliff, Lenin: Volume 1: Building the party, Pluto Press, London, 1975, pp. 44-56. See also, Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov), What is to be done?
Burning questions of our movement, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964, pp. 69-71; 78-80. Cliff, p.
53, quotes Lenin as arguing, “What you have to do is stress, in Russia, the freedom of secession for oppressed nations, and, in Poland, their freedom to unite.” This support for the rights of the oppressed to separate organisation, from socialists amongst the dominant group, alongside an argument for united action from socialists within the oppressed, represented an entirely new approach to Marxist strategies for fighting oppression. In ”Draft resolution on the place of the Bund [the Jewish socialist workers organisation] in the party”, written in 1903, Lenin argued,
“complete unity between the Jewish and non-Jewish proletariat is moreover especially necessary for a successful struggle against anti-Semitism, this despicable attempt of the government and the exploiting classes to exacerbate racial particularism and national enmity”, from Collected works, vol. 6, p. 468.
the people, too, the support of classes… One must stir up national hatred, race hatred; one must recruit “Black Hundreds” from among the politically least developed sections of the urban (and, following that, naturally, of the rural) petty bourgeoisie; one must attempt to rally to the defence of the throne all reactionary elements among the population at large; one must turn the struggle of the police against study circles into a struggle of one part of the people against the other.
That is precisely what the government is now doing when it sets Tartars against the Armenians in Baku; when it seeks to provoke new pogroms against the Jews; when it organises Black-Hundred gangs against the Zemstvo people…
Lenin suggested that racism became necessary once the working class emerged as a national class, attempting to shape and challenge national politics. Like Marx, Lenin saw the potentially revolutionary consequences of united resistance to racist violence.
Of course, by fanning racial antagonism and tribal hatred, the
government may for a time arrest the development of the class struggle, but only for a short time and at the cost of a still greater expansion of the field of the new struggle, at the cost of a more bitter feeling among the people against the autocracy. This is proved by the consequences of the Baku pogrom, which deepened tenfold the revolutionary mood of all sections against tsarism.101
These were no mere words: at the risk of their personal safety, Bolshevik activists challenged racism and national chauvinism. In the country that
invented the pogrom, the Bolshevik party included a disproportionate number of Jewish activists in its leadership. At the moment of revolution, it proposed a
101 Lenin, “Preface to the pamphlet: Memorandum of Police Department Superintendent Lopukhin”, written in Feb-March 1903 and first published in 1905, in Collected works, vol. 8, pp. 203-5.
Jewish socialist, Leon Trotsky, to head the All-Russian Soviet which seized power as the elected leadership of the workers, soldiers and peasants.
One result of this tradition of internationalism and anti-racism (and support for national self-determination) has been generations of racially oppressed people and their leaders who have identified with “communism”, including large numbers from the pre-1939 Jewish communities in Europe, a significant minority of Afro-American activists in the 1930s and the 1960s and 1970s, and millions more in the Third World. This was reflected in the production of some path-breaking Marxist histories of racism and colonialism, such as CLR James’
Black Jacobins, and Eric Williams’ Capitalism and slavery.
One of the most significant recent contributions to understanding racism has come from Kenan Malik, whose book, The meaning of race, traces the history of racist ideas and their social function. Malik argued that as capitalism developed in Europe, the ruling classes needed ideas that would naturalise economic and social inequality in an era of formal, legal equality. Racism was thus a product of ruling class needs, not a starting point for social discourse.102 In this Malik was implicitly building on Gramsci’s theory of hegemony.103 Both Malik and
102 Kenan Malik, The meaning of race: Race, history and culture in western society, Palgrave, Basingstoke (UK) and New York, 1996. In recent years, Malik has abandoned some of his own theory to become a warrior against Islamism in the name of defending the enlightenment.
103 Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed & trans Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1971, esp. pp. 12, 235;
Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from Political Writings, 1921-1926: with additional texts by other Italian Communist leaders, trans & ed Quintin Hoare, International Publishers, New York, 1978, pp 454-462; Williams, GA, “The Concept of ‘Egemonia’ in the Thought of Antonio Gramsci: Some notes on interpretation”, Journal of the History of Ideas (New York), vol. 21, no. 4, 1960, pp. 586-599.
Martin Barker have shown how cultural racism was rebuilt in the 1980s and 1990s as part of the neo-liberal offensive.104 Thus we might conclude with:
Thesis 9 Racism is an integral part of the hegemonic ideas of capitalist society, because of the role it plays in naturalising inequality in political systems in which individuals are nominally equal, but radically unequal economically and socially.
This is the broad methodology I will use in identifying the economic and class roots of the White Australia policy.
104 Malik, Meaning of race, and Martin Barker, The new racism: Conservatives and the ideology of the tribe, Aletheia Books, University Publications of America Inc, Frederick (Maryland), 1982.