By Iggy Kim
Racial categories are purely social — founded not on biological realities, but on objectively meaningless and arbitrarily selected physical traits, such as skin colour. Racial categorisation fetishises these features and artificially injects them with social value.
While the basis of racial categorisation is illusory and arbitrary, the categories themselves are very real and govern our day-to-day lives. They polarise people into separate racial groups and profoundly influence the ways these groups perceive and relate to each other.
The accumulation of profit in capitalism requires the creation of super-exploited layers within the working class. Racial categorisation provides one of the means of doing this. Division of people into racial groups socially legitimises super-exploitation of a particular section of the work force (for example, workers categorised as members of the "black" or "Asian" racial groups).
Racism — the ideology that non-white racial groups are inferior to the white racial group — is used to justify racial oppression — institutionalised inequality based on racial categorisation.
The channelling of certain racial groups into the lowest-paid jobs; unequal wages; scapegoating for unemployment and other results of the capitalist crisis; apartheid; the White Australia policy; black deaths in custody; ghettoisation; racially defined citizenship rights — all are examples of racial oppression. Such practices are not, in the final analysis, caused by racism. Rather, racism, is a product of the social practice of racial oppression.
Origins
While the European invasion of Australia was part of the global expansion of capitalism, it was exceptional in one vital respect. It was not motivated by the need for natural resources or labour: capitalist Australia began as a British penal colony.
So at first, the expropriation of land was explained by the ideology of terra nullius, based not on a racial divide, but on the distinction between "civilisation"(essentially meaning private property) and "savagery" (absence of private property). Terra nullius sufficed as long as European settlements remained tentative colonies, expropriation was small scale and arbitrary and super-cheap labour was provided by the convicts.
With the establishment of significant pastoral interests in the early 1800s, and the gold rushes and Queensland sugar plantations of the mid-1800s, however, systematic racial oppression against the indigenous population emerged, based on intensifying and systematic land expropriation.
Terra nullius was superseded by the "dying race" theory, which proclaimed that the "superior white" race would soon render the Aborigines historically obsolete. This idea legitimised the continuous removal of Aborigines from more and more land, their massacre and their confinement on reserves.
Today's descendants of early capital accumulation — the powerful pastoral agribusinesses and mining monopolies — are the social roots of continuing racism against the descendants of the original dispossessed. Aborigines are the only people in Australia who continue to suffer systematic, institutionalised discrimination based on racial categorisation.
With the vast expansion of primary industries in the 1800s, other forms of racial oppression also developed as indentured Chinese, Indian and Kanak labourers replaced the European convicts. Rural employers' associations and colonial politicians lauded the low levels of subsistence needed by "inferior" workers of colour.
Anti-Chinese racism found a new form during the gold rushes, which attracted large numbers of Chinese immigrants. Unlike their indentured predecessors, these hopeful arrivals threatened white colonists with economic competition.
This competition proved to be an obstacle to the initial capital accumulation of the growing Australian capitalist class: the net flow of gold mined by Chinese prospectors was outwards, back to China. So while the colonial ruling classes at first militarily intervened against anti-Chinese riots in the gold fields, realisation of their economic interests soon resulted in the racist Exclusion Acts of the 1850s and 1860s.
In contrast to Aborigines and Pacific Islanders, the Chinese suffered racism of an exclusionist kind — racially based immigration laws. The Chinese influx was reduced to a trickle, though many of the laws were thereafter repealed to satisfy British diplomacy.
Nationalism
An economic boom in the 1860s coincided with the end of assisted immigration from Britain, resulting in a shortage of skilled labour. As the balance of forces shifted in favour of the workers, the white labour aristocracy renewed its attacks on the remaining Chinese prospectors, who had been forced into more traditional occupations by the exclusion laws. They were aided by white small businesses and farmers who were faced with competition from Chinese cabinet makers and market gardeners.
Over the following years, the Australian Republican Association, labour federations, trades and labour councils and many individual unions adopted resolutions against the Chinese as part of their general platforms. They argued that the needs of coloured workers were more primitive, and they therefore forced down the wages and conditions of white workers. This is despite the fact that the first strike on the Darling Downs was called by Chinese "coolies".
This racism in the white labour movement was used by the big rural and urban capitalists for their own purposes. In the l880s, the ruling ideologues began to agitate for a federated nation-state as the colonial ruling classes began to merge into a single national ruling class. Racism became integral in forging Australian nationalism and cementing the white workers' identification with the ruling class. Hence, anti-Chinese racism broadened out more systematically in this period to include all people of colour.
One of the first steps taken towards nationally coordinated colonial policies was in the area of immigration. In June 1888, the six colonial premiers met in Sydney to formulate uniform legislation against immigrants of colour. It was the birth of the White Australia policy.
Even after the adoption of this legislation, racism did not subside as moves toward federation were stepped up and the colonies were struck by an unprecedented depression in 1891. One of the key platforms in the formation of both the Labor Party and the Commonwealth was commitment to the White Australia policy. In 1901, the dreams of the reactionary labour bureaucracy came true when the policy became federal law under the Immigration Restriction Act. This law also denied citizenship to people of colour already resident in Australia, regardless of their birthplace.
While the "dying race" theory of Aboriginal dispossession remained the cornerstone of colonial capitalism's economic expansion, the threat of "yellow hordes" from the north became the ideological crux of the ruling class's political aims — the establishment of the Australian nation-state and the containment of a powerful labour movement.
In the decades following federation, the ruling class's hand was further strengthened, both by consolidating its state apparatus and by binding the labour movement more directly to its interests.
In both accomplishments, the Labor Party was crucial. It was the party of the union bureaucracy that best championed the "national interest".
Thus, when Australia entered the post-World War II boom, Chifley's Labor government was used to bring in migrants from southern Europe to feed the ruling class's hunger for super-cheap labour. Just as convicts and slaves were needed to give capitalism a kick-start, Australian big capital needed migrant workers to expand its manufacturing industries in the postwar period.
This immigration program went hand in hand with a more stringent application of the White Australia policy. The minister for immigration, Arthur "two Wongs don't make a white" Calwell, argued that defence against the "yellow peril", as well as economic growth, depended on more Europeans settling the country — a task the pure British stock could not achieve alone. Australia was to "populate or perish." The consequent mass influx of migrants from non-Anglo-Celtic national backgrounds like Italy and Greece made the first dent in the racial nature of immigration policy.
The ruling class was short of skilled and professional labour. This shortage could not be met by erecting permanent racial barriers to these immigrants. So while some racism occurred at the outset, the emphasis was on assimilation — not into a racial category, but into the Australian nationality.
Systematic discrimination to channel non-British Europeans into the lowest-paid jobs was carried out on the basis of ethnic differences — their inability to speak English — rather than racial grounds. This was institutionalised by the lack of any comprehensive and accessible language instruction.
While a fetishisation of physical features still occurs against Italians and Greeks, it is not institutionalised to create and maintain succeeding generations of super-cheap labour. Native-born Australians of southern European descent, who have overcome cultural and linguistic differences, do not face systematic barriers to upward mobility.
White Australia's end
After the ALP's mass introduction of non-British migrants, the ruling class used the Menzies Liberal government to make more direct inroads into the White Australia policy. In 1956, significant reforms regarding non-Aboriginal people of colour were introduced: those already settled became eligible for citizenship, immediate relatives could obtain permanent entry, and highly qualified people could stay indefinitely on temporary permits.
In the following year, holders of temporary permits were deemed eligible for citizenship after 15 years' residency. In 1966, the Holt Liberal government reduced this to five years.
Such reforms were specifically targeted at meeting the ruling class's need for skilled and professional labour. Trade ties had by then been restored with Japan for over a decade, and the White Australia policy was not only an international embarrassment, but also economically impractical.
By the end of that decade, non-European migrants into Australia numbered 10,000 per year. Racial exclusion of Asian immigrants had come to an end.
Equally decisive were advances in the social consciousness of the working class and the rise of anti-racist social movements. In the postwar period, the Communist Party had increased its influence in the union movement and was hemming in the White Australia hardliners from the left.
Wage struggles by super-exploited Aboriginal pastoral workers, aided by Communists, made inroads into white workers' racial attitudes — the 1966 walk-off by Gurindji drovers in the Northern Territory signalled the rise of the Aboriginal land rights movement; and anti-colonialist revolutions in Asia won the support of workers, students and intellectuals.
In 1967, a referendum resulted in an overwhelmingly vote to grant Aborigines formal equality while the Labor Party's racist old guard, led by Arthur Calwell, was ousted by a new leadership under Gough Whitlam as the ruling class sought to outflank the increasingly powerful mass upsurge. When Whitlam took office in 1972, he formally ended the White Australia policy.
Non-racial immigration had formally become a bipartisan policy, as the ruling class now turned more and more to Asia for skilled and super-cheap labour. Big capital was given a boost in this by the mass influx of Indo-Chinese refugees in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this period the concept of multiculturalism was introduced by Al Grassby, Whitlam's minister for immigration.
Multiculturalism
The ethnicist ideology of multiculturalism fetishises not "race" and "racial" differences, but culture and ethnicity — different customs, dress, foods, accents and languages. Beneath the happy diversity of multiculturalism, a layer of super-exploited labour is maintained by institutionalising discrimination based on the inability to speak English.
Under-resourced and inaccessible migrant services and English tuition classes, the lack of recognition for select qualifications obtained in certain countries and the responsibility taken by migrant communities themselves for providing services to their most disadvantaged members are also legitimated.
Ethnicism has the further advantage to the ruling class of posing no obstacle to Asian business immigration — a way of further draining surplus value from Third World Asian economies — or Australian capital entering a lucrative market that it has been traditionally hostile to.
Moreover, multiculturalism's reification of culture legitimises Australian support for useful authoritarian regimes in Asia, deflecting criticism by citing "cultural differences" and different conceptions of democracy which, it proclaims, human rights activists should respect.
While the ruling class has been legitimating discrimination against migrants in terms of ethnicism, its interests are still entrenched in the continued racial oppression of Aborigines. Migrants of all racial categories have increasingly become subsumed under broader labels of "non-English speaking background", "migrants", "ethnics", and their Australian-born children are assimilated into the Australian nationality, but Aboriginal people remain Aborigines, regardless of ethnicity.
Token concessions by Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and Keating did nothing to redress the squalor, impoverishment and indignity perpetuated over centuries of dispossession of Aboriginal people. This has maintained institutional barriers by default.
Ever new incursions into indigenous lands by mining and pastoral companies are premised on singling Aborigines out as a racial group and strapping them to the welfare system, racial stereotyping, ghettoisation and overt repression through a racist police force.
This foundation of racial categorisation and racial consciousness serves to blunt class consciousness within the working class by getting white workers to identify themselves as first-and-foremost members of the white racial group, with common interests with their white bosses against all non-whites, including their non-white class brothers and sisters.
Just how pervasive this racial consciousness is can be seen by how easily many non-Aboriginal leftists fall for the ruling class argument that "we" bear some responsibility for the English ruling class's decision to invade this continent and dispossess its original inhabitants. Why? Because "we", like Captain James Cook and Governor Arthur Phillip, are members of the non-Aboriginal racial group!
That is rubbish. The fundamental needs and interests of black and white members of the working class the world over are the same — to rid the world of a social, political and economic system which sacrifices the health and well-being of the majority of white people and almost all people of colour on the altar of ever-increasing profits.
Multiculturalism does not and cannot address this need. Our goal must be a non-racial society in which racial categories do not serve as social distinctions at all and, in fact, wither away into irrelevance: with the eradication of racism will come the disappearance of the very concept of "race."