The Belfast pogrom is a product of rotting capitalism

Over two nights -9th and 10th June- in Belfast racist gangs waged a systematic campaign of terror against migrants. They went from home to home, kicking down doors, smashing windows, throwing petrol bombs into house in order to drive out migrant workers. Cars and even a bus were set on fire in order to terrify people. Letters were sent to health workers living around the North Belfast hospital telling to leave or be ‘burnt out’. Cars were stopped in the search for ‘foreigners’. One nurse was chased by four masked men on her way to work. International health workers had to be rescued by their fellow workers. Some workers took those driven out into their homes, at great risk to themselves. These attacks were coordinated, and included migrant workers’ addresses being distributed online so they could be targeted. Older men – perhaps linked to the Loyalist paramilitaries and drawing on a long experience of persecuting Catholics and dissident Protestants - were reported directing these gangs, that were mainly composed of disaffected youths. At least one victim reported police standing by while their homes were torched. The systematic nature of these attacks has not been seen on this scale before.

All this recalls the anti-Jewish pogroms organised by the Czarist bourgeoisie in the early 20th century. These massacres were used by the Russian ruling class, especially after the 1905 revolution, as a way of diverting workers’ militancy away from seeing the ruling class and its system as their historic enemy and blaming the Jews instead.

But today we are not just talking about the use of pogroms in one particularly rotten and anachronistic empire. Today it is the entire ‘world empire’ of capital that is rotting on its feet, and the more it rots the more it is raising the most irrational hatreds and divisions onto a new level, spreading the spirit of the pogrom across the globe. Today all minorities – religious, ethnic, national, sexual – are being scapegoated. In particular, migrants fleeing from persecution or war are being blamed for the real problems that result from the advancing decay of the capitalist system: declining health and social care, housing shortages, unemployment….

The Belfast pogrom is not simply the product of cynical manipulation by the bourgeoisie but the decomposition of capitalist society. As we said about the growing anti-Semitic attacks: “today capitalist society is far more fragmented and lacking in even any short-term solutions to its insoluble crisis. Hatred against minorities is taking ever-more numerous forms and is increasingly manipulated by governments to boost their repressive campaigns against immigrants. And as imperialist wars spread chaotically across the planet, these antagonisms are directly encouraged and exacerbated in order to justify the slaughter of whole populations. We have entered a new era of genocides”[1]  

The ruling class’s use of race, religion or any division they can use to disperse its main enemy, the working class, has a long history.

Of course, the main political parties have denounced the pogrom. They also condemned the race riot that took place the week before in Southampton, after the conviction of a Sikh man for killing a young Polish student who had been handcuffed by the police as he lay dying. Starmer made a big display of denouncing Nigel Farage’s inability to condemn the violence in Southampton and his call for “pure cold rage”. This did not stop him promising to impose even more draconian measures against immigration. One of his ministers, interviewed immediately after a Somalian woman had recounted the terror and her friends experienced, which reminded them of the war in Somalia they had escaped, made a point of boasting about the government’s success in deporting 70,000 ‘illegal’ migrants, and insisting that war-damaged migrants posed a real threat! Such crass manipulation of the tensions is not new. Both Labour and Tory governments have used migration to promote division for decades.

However, in the dynamic of a society in uncontrollable decomposition, the bourgeoisie is now playing with fire.

The main parties are now faced with the rise of populist parties such as Reform or Restore, whose central political message is the idea of overcoming the crisis through anti-migrant policies and are more and more openly calling for mass deportations. These parties thrive on their brutal displays of racism and Islamophobia. They embody and embrace the nihilistic dead-end of capitalism, by shamelessly selling the illusion that sacrificing one part of the population can benefit another part. These parties have no hesitations about stoking up violent confrontations, even if they don’t not openly call for them. The greater the instability, the more they can present themselves as the ‘saviours’ of the nation.

These parties are increasingly turning the main parties’ promotion of racial divisions against them. Reform and Restore promise to actually do something about migration, not just talk about it. This forces the main parties to adopt even more draconian policies, further exacerbating tensions.

An imperialist dimension

Labour and Tories have pointed to the role of Musk, Vance and other Far Right elements in the US who have actively been promoting these riots and the whole climate of fear around migration. They point to the links between Reform and Restore with the Trump administration. What they avoid saying is that this link is part of US imperialism’s strategy of destablisation aimed at its British and European imperialist rivals. A policy based on promoting and backing populist and Far Right parties – the ones referred to as “patriotic parties” in the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy:

“American diplomacy should continue to stand up for genuine democracy, freedom of expression, and unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual character and history. America encourages its political allies in Europe to promote this revival of spirit, and the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism. Cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”

Reform and Farage have become one of the main tools of US imperialism. Faced with Trump’s threats to Greenland, and the Iran war, Farage has tried to distance himself from Trump, because of the latter’s growing lack of popularity, even in Reform. Rupert Lowe, the leader of Restore, has been much more loyal to Trump and has now gained the backing of Musk and others around Trump. Reform is now faced with a rival on the Right, and having to adopt polices such as mass deportation which Farage once called “politically impossible”. He was always willing to place the race card, but within some constraints, because it would undermine his image as the only person able to stop the Far Right. Reform is now competing with Restore over the numbers to be deported. 

Poison for the working class

The whole political apparatus of the British state is becoming ever more unstable, trapped in the deepening contradictions of dying capitalism. The toxic ideological fumes this is giving off are a real danger to the working class.

The main danger is the ability of the main parties, and their leftwing parties in particular, to divert workers’ revulsion faced with pogroms and race riots into the defense of democracy and the state. Reform and Restore are presented as a threat of democracy, human rights and social cohesion. Workers are told you have to back one of the traditional, the same ones that have been fueling racism for decades and pushing through shameful anti-immigrant policies. We are told that we have to go and vote for these parties, which are dripping with the blood of refugees, in order to block the rise of Reform or Restore to power and oppose racism.  

A large demonstration was organised in Belfast by Unite against Racism. But this ‘unity’ means uniting behind the bourgeois state which organises exploitation and discrimination in the name of the ‘nation’, the very basis of which is racism and hatred against those who come from the other side of the border. The “unity” is above all that of the ‘people’, in order to make us forget that both ‘British’ and ‘foreign’ workers are part of the same international class.

This class unity has been demonstrated in practice in Northern Ireland, notably in the struggle of Belfast NHS workers. Health workers, who usually come from many different national and ethnic backgrounds, are an important part of the workforce and have engaged in a number of struggles to defend wages and protests against working conditions.

The only antidote to racism and the pogrom atmosphere is the united struggle of workers across ethnic, national, religious and all other divisions foisted on them by capital.

Phil, 24.6.26

 

 

---

[1]Capitalism right and left spreads hatred and division, ICC Online