From: "Neil (practical history)" <practicalhistory-AT-hotmail.com> Subject: AUT: Working class racism/NF march Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 11:54:25 -0000 This is the first draft of a discussion article reflecting on the background to a racist demonstration in London last Saturday April 7th. It deals with some wider questions about the relationship between race and class, and white working class racism in particular, which have been touched on in discussions on this list recently (it doesn't deal with the wider critique of anti-fascist ideology, maybe I will expand it to include this). I would welcome any comments anybody may have. Incidentally the local paper is reporting that another NF march is planned in the same area this coming Saturday. 10 April 2001 Saturday's National Front march in Bermondsey, South East London followed a predictable course. No more than 30 flag waving NFers emerged from the train station, protected from around 300 anti-fascists by a police force outnumbering both. The police effort to contain the counter-demo (organised by the Anti-Nazi League and Southwark Trades Council) on the pavement was undermined by a surge onto the road, and a further surge when the NF appeared was surprizingly successful in pushing the police line back to within 10 metres of the fascists. After that there was the usual running round the back streets to little effect. This part of South London has seen it all before. In 1937 barricades were set up in Bermondsey as 15,000 took to the streets to oppose a march by the British Union of Fascists. A mile down the road in New Cross, police used riot shields for the first time in London in 1977 when an NF march was physically confronted by a black and white crowd. There were skirmishes between Anti-Fascist Action and British National Party and NF paper sellers in Bermondsey at various points during the 1990s. These historical continuities can disguise what has changed in recent years. In the 1970s the National Front was becoming a significant political force nationally, with a growing share of the vote, large demonstrations and support for its 'Keep Britain White' policies across all social classes including far right factions within the state. Today the NF and BNP demonstrations have a tiny number of participants. Their battle to 'Keep Britain White' is definitively lost and hardly anyone seriously imagines that it would be possible, let alone desirable, to expel all the black people from the country. In practical terms the far right seems to have lowered its immediate sights to defending the 'white ethnicity' of small working class areas, hence the ‘Keep Bermondsey White' theme of Saturday's march. It would easy to be complacent and imagine that they are now irrelevant - easy but mistaken. Anti-racism is now an official ideology of the state. In a modernised capitalism, crude discrimination on the basis of race or sex is a barrier to the development of a flexible labour force. Of course, racism still exists both because as an ideology it has a life of its own and because it remains embedded in immigration controls and other state practices. Among some radical anti-fascists you can almost detect a nostalgia for a time when capitalism could be simply identified with the great social evils of racism, apartheid and dictatorship (and we are not so naďve as to think it couldn't happen again). Things certainly seemed simpler than today when the police make a big deal of fighting 'hate crimes' (racist and homophobic attacks) and when the British Army sponsors Black History Month and International Women's Day. All the forces of respectable Southwark were united against the NF march on Saturday - the leader of the Council spoke to the crowd and the Liberal Democrat Home Affairs Spokesperson was present (local MP Simon Hughes). The local police were also keen that the march should not go ahead, but they did not have the power to ban it (this can only be ordered by the Home Secretary). One thing that 'socially inclusive' capitalism can't change is the generation of poverty - inequality is not a side effect of the system, it is the system. People with the reserves to be able to live as they chose would never take the low-paid, boring jobs that capitalism depends upon. If racism miraculously vanished tomorrow, we would still find black people disproportionately living in poverty. Disadvantage reproduces itself over generations - the children of poorer people are more likely grow up to be poor. Therefore communities that start off poor tend to stay that way even after institutional barriers such as overt discrimination are removed. Ultimately it is their class position in capitalism that impoverishes them rather than their skin colour. The social conditions in Peckham (with its large black population) and the neighbouring area of Bermondsey/Rotherhithe (with its majority white working class population) are actually very similar. In both more than half of children live in families living on income support. In both many people live in what is officially deemed as ‘unsuitable housing’ which is overcrowded and/or in need of major repairs (more than 2000 households in the Bermondsey and Rotherhithe area). In both health is poor – children born in this part of south London are twice as likely to die in childhood as children born in the most affluent families. According to Marxist orthodoxy, black and white people in Bermondsey should be uniting on the basis of their common class position. But no amount of chanting ‘Black and White Unite and Fight’ (the slogan of the Anti-Nazi League) can disguise the fact that this is very far from happening. This is why it would be dangerous to take any comfort in the pathetic turnout for the NF march – the march might have been poorly attended, but that doesn't mean it found no echo locally. Anybody who knows the area knows that there is a major problem with white working class racism (even if many white workers are not racist). While few local people joined the march, some of those who stood around to watch were certainly sympathetic, including the woman who called me a ‘nigger lover’, the people cheering the NF outside the Golden Lion pub, and the group with their ‘Keep the Blue White’ banner outside the Canterbury Arms on the Old Kent Road (the Blue is the local name for the main street in Bermondsey). A few hours after the march a 24-year-old Asian man was knocked to the ground in a racist attack on Rotherhithe New Road. A group of local young people has carried out a number of racist attacks in the past few months. In February a 15-year-old schoolboy, Harifur Rahman, was bottled in the face and left unconscious with a fractured skull near the route of the NF march. Contrary to what patronising liberals might think, there is nothing inherently reactionary about white working class cultures. Many of the families living in Bermondsey have been there for several generations, back to a time when there was a significant working class radical presence in the area. Surrey Docks was a centre of working class militancy in the General Strike 1926 and again in the late 1940s. The immediate post-war period also saw homeless families squatting empty buildings en masse. But the Docks are long gone along with most of the other big employers of previous generations (the remains of the Docks themselves renamed a more yuppie-friendly Surrey Quays). The destruction of working class sociability centred around these workplaces with nothing to replace it has left behind a resentment against the forces of change – to some, black people are just another threatening symptom of change, quite apart from any tendency for dispossessed white workers to gain a sense of superiority over the next rung in the social hierarchy (as seen in the South of the US, or South Africa). The rise of official anti-racism has probably only increased the allure of racism for those who official society has so little to offer. Written off as racist ‘poor white trash’ by middle class liberal leftists, some local people take a defiant pride in their outsider status. As fans of Millwall FC, the local football team, proudly declare ‘No One Likes Us, We Don’t Care’. The NF march on Saturday was prompted by Millwall playing a match sponsored by Kick Racism out of Football, a recognition that despite the acceptance of black footballers the club’s following remains a potential recruiting ground for racists. In last May’s London Mayoral elections, the British National Party scooped up 80,000 votes, the best result for the far right since the NF peaked in 1977. The issue isn’t any threat of fascists taking political power, but the much more immediate possibility of their ideas gaining ascendancy amongst sections of the inner city white working class. The result of this would be – and arguably already is - a state of terror for isolated black people and other minorities in some areas, and a powerful reactionary bulwark against the emergence of any radical working class movement. That this is even a possibility is a testament to the failure of anarchist, communist and anti-capitalist ideas/groups to connect with working class needs and priorities (the failure to connect with black working class people is equally glaring, but not the subject of this article). There is no quick solution to redressing this, but a starting point would be an honest recognition that while we all get excited about events in Mexico, Seattle, Prague and the City of London, the less glamorous reality of what is happening on our doorsteps is due some urgent consideration. _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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