White privilege and working-class unity
By Lisa Macdonald
It is not just in Australia that racism is on the rise. A poll of 16,000 people in the 15 European Union countries in December found that 9% said they were "very racist", 24% said they were "quite racist", and another 33% said they were "a little racist".
These are frightening statistics. For all the progress made in counteracting racist ideas by the progressive movements of the 1960s, '70s and '80s, widespread racism remains not far from the surface.
The poll found that the main characteristics of those at the top of the racist scale were: "Dissatisfaction with their life circumstances, fear of unemployment, insecurity about the future and low confidence in the way public authorities and political establishment worked in their countries".
Polls in Australia in the last few years indicate that the same dissatisfactions are widespread here also.
Why do racist ideas flourish when ordinary people's living conditions and security are eroded? Logically, white people should be propelled by greater hardship to feel more, not less, unity with those who have always been relatively worse off — people of colour.
This doesn't happen because racism was created precisely to divide the working class.
The ideology of racism was created to justify the oppression of African slaves brought to the United States and the Caribbean by capitalist plantation owners. When slavery was abolished and the slaves were transformed into waged workers, the ideology of racism was refined to legitimise the segregation and super-exploitation of this new black-skinned section of the working class.
Racism was also used to justify imperialist expansion and the denial of equal rights to colonised populations. With the mass migration of people from the Third World to the rich north after World War II, governments of the imperialist countries used racism to justify discriminatory laws which rendered new immigrants super-cheap labour for capitalists.
Today, the social psychology of racism so imbues capitalist society that it is taken as self-evident that racial categories describe "natural" distinctions among people.
Yet, in nature, there is no such thing as separate races. There is only one race — the human race. There are no fixed racial categories fitting coherent sets of physical characteristics in biology, genealogy or geography. Racial categories are purely social: they are based on objectively meaningless physical traits that are fetishised and assigned different social values, dividing people into "superior" white-skinned and "inferior" non-white-skinned groups.
While today scientists generally accept that racial categorisation has no biological basis, racist ideas continue to be a powerful weapon for the ruling class to divide and weaken the resistance of working people to their common exploitation, and to justify the super-exploitation of most people of colour.
Today, as capitalists try to extract more and more from the working class, they are attacking sector by sector, playing on stratifications in the working class to enlist the support of certain sectors for their offensive.
In Australia, they are deliberately trying to activate the insecurities felt by ordinary white people after years of austerity and rising unemployment. The means are a lot of rhetoric about "privileged minorities" versus the "Aussie battler" (code for white worker), sensationalised stories about funding rorts by Aborigines, relentless jingoism about workers in Asia undercutting Australia's international competitiveness and a ratcheting up of the "immigrants take our jobs" propaganda.
Why don't more working people see through this strategy of divide and conquer? Because racism is not simply a capitalist conspiracy to dupe workers. It has a material basis. Independent of the will of white individuals, racial categorisation creates the white racial group, including all white workers, who share in some of the benefits of non-white oppression.
When people of colour are concentrated in the lowest level of political, economic and social existence, whites are proportionately spared that fate. The fact that all whites enjoy some protection from the worst excesses of capitalist exploitation is a real basis, upon which capitalism creates a cross-class "white consensus"; this causes white working people to tend to put their own short-term interests as whites ahead of the interests of the whole class.
This does not mean that white working people can never be convinced of an anti-racist position. They can, because racially based privileges are thoroughly circumscribed by the overall relations of class. Not all white people benefit equally from racism; most benefit in only a marginal and temporary way, and this becomes clearer as capitalism extends its attacks to wider and wider layers of the working class. If they are to defend themselves against the onslaught of international capitalism, working people will have to take up anti-racist struggles.
This is important because the anti-racism movement cannot win its demands without the active support of the workers' movement: those who can halt capitalist production and bring down a government which refuses to meet the movement's demands.
The reality of "white privileges" means that the workers' movement won't spontaneously support anti-racism struggles, however. The role of those people who can see beyond the petty benefits of racism to grasp that their own liberation as part of the working class is linked to the success of the anti-racist struggle is, therefore, crucial.
For socialists, this means constantly raising the issue of racism in the workplace, because it is only in the process of struggling side by side with the victims of racism that white working people will be convinced that, as Karl Marx wrote in Capital: "... Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded".
[Lisa Macdonald is a member of the national executive of the Democratic Socialist Party.]