The struggle of the working class is the only answer to racist divisions

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A raucous campaign against migrants, much evidence of a crisis in the Labour government, and the continuing struggle of workers defending their living conditions. This whole situation is a striking manifestation of what the ICC calls the two poles at work in the world situation: on the one hand the acceleration of capitalist decomposition, expressed in the growing irrationality typified by populism and the far right, increased war mongering, and a general loss of control by the bourgeoisie; on the other hand, the struggle of the working class, a break with a long period of passivity and disorientation that prevailed from the end of the 1980s, which was signalled by workers in Britain in 2022.  Based on a long international process of subterranean maturation of consciousness, the working class in the heartlands of capitalism has shown that it is not defeated.

The racist campaign flared up in August with crowds protesting against the housing of asylum seekers and refugees, mobilised by an array of right-wing groupings. Even though physical attacks on buildings housing refugees did not occur this time, the threats and intimidation emanating from these protests was no less real, and refugee support organisations received several death threats. These activities express a spreading spirit of general hatred that “is clearly an example of the rotting of capitalist society as a whole”[1]. The protests were accompanied by the mass display of the Union Jacks and the St. George's Cross “festooning lamp-posts or being painted onto walls and roundabouts”[2] a clear message to foreigners to get lost.

This whole anti-migrant campaign reached a crescendo on Saturday 13 September, when the far right led by Tommy Robinson, former leader of the English Defence League, mobilised a crowd of 150,000 that blocked Whitehall in central London and overflowed into Trafalgar Square. The whole thing was livestreamed on X, which at its peak had 2.9 million viewers.

The demo was supported by the strong presence of several far-right European politicians. New Zealander and Christian fundamentalist Brian Tamaki called for all public expressions of non-Christian faiths to be banned. Elon Musk spoke to the crowd through a video call saying that “massive uncontrolled migration” was contributing “to the destruction of Britain” and called for protesters to get ready for a violent uprising in response.

It is clear that this nationalist campaign is not only limited to far-right organisations. The whole bourgeoisie is involved in the campaign: each of them in their own way defending the interests of the British state and the ideological attacks on the working class. Labour responded to the patriotic flag-waving by insisting that the Union Jack “belongs to all of us”, and that “British values”, touted by the far right, are actually the democratic values of tolerance and multiculturalism. Further to the left, appeals are made for a struggle against fascism, paving the way for a more militant defence of the bourgeois state and its ‘democracy’.

These events are not a particular British phenomenon; as was shown by the presence of rightwing politicians of several countries at the 13 September demo. They cannot be viewed separately from the international dynamic, where the right blames and attacks migrants for the woes in society and the left organises the defence of the migrants with an appeal to the values of democracy. In the US the raids against “illegal” workers and the protests against them are an ongoing phenomenon with ever more fatal results. In Poland and the Netherlands, in a so-called support to increased official border controls, vigilantes thronged the German border, ready to turn back any asylum seekers they came across. In Australia thousands of rightwing activists participated in anti-immigration rallies on 31 August in several cities across the country with clashes taking place as marchers were met with counter-demonstrations, waving an array of national flags. In the Netherlands, a relatively small anti-migrant protest on 20 September was attacked by a mob looking for a violent confrontation with the police and attacking buildings of established political institutions.

These events are an expression of increasingly brutal divisions within the ruling class, which it turns against the working class. The accompanying propaganda, whether coming from the right or from the left of capital, is meant to dissolve the working class, whose revolutionary project is precisely destined to transcend all divisions, above all the national, and to drag the various constituent parts into the fictitious community of the “nation”.

However these ideological attacks have not prevented the workers in the UK, despite the still embryonic recovery of its class identity, from continuing its participation in the rupture with the long years of passivity and disorientation. Since the character of the working class is eminently international this implies that an ideological attack against the workers in one country is not of decisive significance as long as other sectors of the class still develop their combativity.

This explains why workers in the UK have not been silenced in recent months. A small selection from various workers’ strikes shows this:

  • Stagecoach bus drivers in Newcastle went on strike on 18th August in protest against below-inflation pay offers to bus workers,
  • Workers on the London Underground went on strike for better pay and a reduction in working hours from 7 to 11 September
  • More than 2000 bus drivers of Bee Network began for the third time a four-day strike across Greater Manchester on Friday 19 September, after rejecting substandard pay offers.
  • More than 1500 workers at Sellafield nuclear power station went on strike on Monday 15 September, because of a disagreement with the site-specific pay entitlements
  • Staff at the University of Bradford were on strike between 22 September until Friday 3 October for a further 10 days in a row over course closures and job cuts.

Thus, the mass display of the national flags may have lured individual workers to join the xenophobic protests, but the British working class has not abandoned its struggle.

Moreover, the working-class reaction to these nationalist campaigns must not be measured solely on the basis on what happened in Britain. It is a matter for the entire working class. And this time the most impressive response came from the workers in France where, on the 18th of September, more than a million workers gathered in the street in different cities to express their dissatisfaction and willingness to defend their class interests. Workers in France have clearly shown their intention not to accept the economic attacks of the bourgeoisie without a reaction, just as the working class in Belgium did in the first months of this year in its struggle against the austerity plans of the government.

The demands of the economic crisis, of spiralling debt and the need to boost the war economy, are forcing the bourgeoisie in all countries to impose wage freezes and cut state expenditures on health and welfare benefits[3]. In France the planned attacks are particularly vicious: as they concern health, education, transport, sick leave, unemployment and pension benefits, minimum social benefits. In the UK the proposed attacks on the disabled and job-cuts in the NHS are just warning shots in what will become a major assault on the working class. The need for workers to respond on their own class terrain will become increasingly evident, in Britain and everywhere else.

And it is only by fighting on such a class basis that the working class can offer a way out from a society which is rotting on its feet, spewing out war, racism and the endless battle of each against all. Only by recognising that it is a class which owns nothing but its labour power will it understand that it is a class of immigrants and that the division between ‘native’ and ‘migrant’ workers can only benefit our exploiters. By recovering its class identity it will recognise that workers have no fatherland to defend and no national flags to wave, because they are exploited by the same enemy class in all countries, and that our true interests lie in the struggle for a world without nation states, a world community without classes and without borders.

Dennis 16/10/25

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Britain