No to divide and rule! Our only defence is the class struggle!

 

In the Russia of the Tsars, as in western Europe in the Middle Ages, it could often start with a wild rumour: the Jews have sacrificed one of our children in their evil rituals. Sinister political groups, the “Black Hundreds”, urged the most miserable layers of the population to attack another poverty-stricken group – the Jews of the ghettoes - to rape, loot and kill. The official police usually stood by and did nothing. This was the pogrom.

Things have changed a lot since then…but not altogether. In the Britain of 2024, wild rumours about the identity of the disturbed young man who carried out a real mass murder of children in Southport are circulated online, and there are attacks by raging mobs, many of them made up of people from the most socially deprived layers of the population, on other, sometimes even more desperate, groups. This time, however, the main target is not the Jews but Muslims and asylum-seekers. Among those political forces fuelling the violence are traditional Nazi worshippers who still see the hand of World Jewry behind every social and political problem. But many of them, like the far right “Celeb” Tommy Robinson, have realised that Islamophobia pays much better dividends today, and even claim to be the best defenders of the Jews against the Islamist threat. But through all this, the spirit of the pogrom lives on. 

Above all, what lives on is the attempt to “divide and rule”: to keep all the exploited and the oppressed weak because divided, to prevent them seeing that the real cause of their misery is not a particular part of the exploited and the oppressed but the social system of their exploiters and oppressors. It is that system – world capitalism - which is responsible both for the wars and ecological destruction which is generating an unprecedented refugee problem all over the world, and for the economic crisis and austerity which is everywhere reducing living standards and access to basic necessities.

Another major difference with Russia at the end of the 19th century: these “race riots” are the product of a capitalism which has been obsolete for over a century and is which is now heading towards chaotic breakdown. The recent violence in Britain is an expression of this chaos, of a mounting loss of control by the ruling class. The more responsible factions of the ruling class don’t want this disorder on the streets. One of the main reasons the Labour Party came to power was to “restore order” on the political level after the mess created by a Tory party that had become profoundly infected by the vandal-like policies of populism[1]. Hence the very tough response by the government, threatening rioters with the “full force of the law” and planning to form a “standing army” of police trained to deal with disorder. The police today are not standing idly by faced with the looting and destruction carried out by the far right. On the contrary, they are presented as resolute defenders of mosques and hotels housing asylum-seekers, and they are arresting far right rioters en masse, while the courts convict them within days of their arrest.  

Capitalism uses its own decomposition against us

Does this mean that the Labour Party and the police are true friends of the working class now? Not at all. Capitalism may be falling apart, but the capitalist class knows that the greatest danger it faces is that the working class around the world becomes aware of itself as a class which has the capacity not only to resist capitalist exploitation but to overturn the entire system. That is why our rulers are perfectly willing to use the disintegration of their own society to obstruct the development of a real class consciousness:

- by intensifying a political campaign around the “defence of democracy against fascism” which is already a theme in the elections in the EU, France and the US, and which aims to drag workers into the dead-end of electoral politics and the idea that they should support one faction of the ruling class against the other;

 - by reinforcing the state’s apparatus of repression while “democratising” the image of the police. Today this apparatus may be directed against “far right thuggery” but tomorrow it can and will be used against the struggles of the working class. Let’s not forget how the police were employed as a “standing army” against the struggle of the miners in 1984-5. It’s the same police with the same function: protecting capitalist order.

 - by distracting attention away from the policy of austerity that the Labour government is already beginning to push through. Since its first days in power, the Labour government, which conveniently discovered a concealed “black hole” in government finances, has announced measures which indicate future attacks on working class living standards: refusal to scrap the policy that limits child benefits to two children, and getting rid of heating allowances for pensioners except for the poorest layers. 

In addition, we should not forget that it’s not only the far right or the populists who target immigrants. The “One Nation Tory” Theresa May was in charge of creating the “hostile atmosphere for illegal immigrants” under the Cameron government, while Labour’s main criticism of Tory gimmicks like the Rwanda scheme has been that it is not cost effective. In the US, despite all of Trump’s bombast against the “foreign invasion”, Democratic administrations under Obama and Biden have been no less ruthless in carrying out massive deportations. All wings of the bourgeoisie defend the national economy and national borders, which, in the brutal struggle of each against all on the world market, are more and more organised around a kind of fortress state to keep out “foreign” imports and labour.

The class struggle is our only defence

In response to the destruction unleashed in the riots, there has been a considerable amount of real indignation and outrage within the working class and the population as a whole. The attempt of the far right to use the Southport murders as a pretext for attacking ethnic minorities and migrants was greeted with the disgust it deserved by those most directly affected by the murders; and there were a number of gestures of support towards the main targets of the violence, as in Southport itself where local residents came together to repair the damage done to the mosque hit by the rioters. On 7 August, responding to the threat of further attacks on immigrant advice centres throughout the countries, thousands of people came out onto the streets in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Bristol, Brighton and elsewhere to surround these centres and prevent them being ransacked (in most cases, the threats came to nothing and the far right didn’t show up).

But we should not have any illusions. These understandable responses were immediately “embraced” by capitalism’s propaganda machine to present the image of “a real Britain” which is law-abiding, tolerant and multicultural. Following the mobilisations of August 7, this line was shared by nearly all the press from left to right. Most telling perhaps was the August 8 headline of the Daily Mail, a right-wing newspaper which has played a central role in the campaign of fear-mongering about illegal immigrants. Its front page had a photo of the demonstration in Walthamstow (perhaps the biggest in the country) and its headline was “Night anti-hate marchers faced down the thugs”.

Outside the mainstream media, the extreme left of capital, the Trotskyists in particular, have been a key factor in calling for these mobilisations and trying to create new versions of the popular front. In short, providing a left cover for the campaign to defend democracy against fascism.

The working class can only defend itself – and stand up to attacks on any of its fractions, whether “native” or “immigrant” – by fighting on its own terrain. That is, the terrain of struggle against the inevitable assault on its living standards demanded by capitalism in crisis - a struggle which has the same aims and interests in all countries and across all national divisions. The working class in Britain has many burdens of the past to throw off, above all the weight inherited from Britain’s imperial hey-day. But we should not forget that Britain was the birthplace of the first independent workers’ party, the Chartists, and - in conjunction with the French workers – of the First International. And in 2022, it was the workers of Britain who played a central role in the revival of class movements after decades of resignation. Their slogan was “enough is enough” - a slogan the far right has tried to steal. But in 2022 the slogan, which was taken up by the workers in France and elsewhere, did not mean “enough foreigners” but enough austerity, enough inflation, enough attacks on our living standards, and that remains the real situation facing the working class today, whatever the colours of the government in office.

In 1905, faced with mass strikes across the Russian Empire, the Tsarist regime responded with its usual trick: stir up the pogroms in order to break the unity of the workers or set the peasants against them. At that moment, the workers had created their own independent organisations, the soviets, and one of their functions was to organise the armed defence of Jewish quarters threatened by pogromists. Today the workers don’t have such independent organisations. But the future development of the class struggle will have to create them anew – organs of mass self-organisation which can not only defend the class from all the attacks of capital, but lead a political offensive aimed at overthrowing the whole system.

Amos, 9.8.24

 

 

 

 

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[1]  See The capitalist left can't save a dying system, ICC online