Will H, Socialist Party Black and Asian group
Insufficient wages, prices rising. Long hours. Increasing council taxes. An increase in uni fees. Perpetually priced out of secure living conditions due to spiralling housing costs, gentrification and a depletion of our council housing stock. Only some from the long list of issues faced by the working class in Britain. And for Black workers we add racism on top.
It should be a fundamental right to have secure access to decent housing, education and food, particularly when residing within the world’s sixth biggest economy, producing a GDP of £2.9 trillion. But no, these are treated as mere commodities to be exploited by the capitalist class for their further enrichment and increased profits.
The capitalists have assaulted us with over a decade of austerity, which Starmer’s Labour government is continuing. Meanwhile, it is increasing military spending by £8.2 billion over the last two years.
Measures like cutting pensioners’ winter fuel payments and disability benefits have generated fury which capitalist politicians then cynically try to direct towards all vulnerable groups but the actual culprits – the capitalist rich elite who drain the wealth and resources out of our economy.
The wealthiest 350 people in the UK own just under £800 billion, enough to reverse every single austerity measure.
Perpetually maintained in a poverty rate that is more than double our white British counterparts, Black workers are the only major ethnic group still being paid less on average than white workers. We are also 3.7 times more likely to be ‘stopped and searched’ by police and more likely to be incarcerated. You can add to that the rekindled fear of being a victim of racist attacks from far-right mobs who seek to blame immigration for all the problems of the capitalist system.
Black workers are exploited as part of the broader working class, but that is compounded by historically rooted racial oppression – oppression rooted in Britain’s colonial past and still used as a tool today. The five largest ethnic minority populations in Britain (Indian, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Black African and Black Caribbean, mainly Nigerian and Jamaican respectively), all being major former colonies of the British Empire.
Racism was used as a tool to try to justify forced mass extraction of resources from these nations, mass impoverishment and exploitation of their peoples, and the destruction of social infrastructure and political systems. These crimes were essential for the construction of the British Empire and ultimately British capitalism and the industrial revolution. The racism and conditions Black workers face in Britain today have been baked into the capitalist system. That is the root of our degraded living conditions today and in the past. While capitalism and its rich ruling class stands, so will our exploitative treatment.
Today it is the same class, including many of the same big business owners, such as those of Lloyds and Barclays who profited from colonialism, which maintains its domineering status in our economy. Its sole priority is generating profit and the self-preservation of their systemic oppression over the working class.
A successful struggle against that system requires Black workers coming together in a common struggle with other sections of the working class. Working-class solidarity and internationalism is vital to prevent the capitalists’ attempts to divide and rule and to fight for liberation from the financial strangulation they impose on the masses worldwide for their own enrichment.
The development of a new mass party of the working class would increase the confidence of all workers to fight back, and would be a huge step forward for the fight against racism.
Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s Your Party announcement is an important step in the process of such a party being created. Its 800,000 sign ups within its opening days shows the huge enthusiasm for working-class political representation.
There are nearly a million ‘Black and minority ethnic’(BME) workers organised in the trade unions in Britain. The Socialist Party argues for the trade unions to be central to Your Party and for them to have a collective democratic voice within it. Democratic organisations with roots in Black working-class communities should have democratic representation within a new working class-led party too.
These organisations could play an important role in developing policy and programme to meet the needs of Black workers. It could include demands for policies such as free education, an increase in the quantity and quality of social housing, addressing the present disparities Black communities face in access to university education and adequate housing conditions relative to other groups.
A mass democratic workers’ party needs to be structured to allow its membership to hold its leaders to account, to be able to determine policy, direct its elected representatives and replace them if desired. We must demand that our representatives are paid no more than a workers’ wage and are subject to recall.
The working class should have a democratic say over all aspects of our lives, of how industries are run and how resources it produces are used and distributed, abolishing the private decision-making that takes place currently by politicians alienated from our class. A new party needs to have a socialist programme based on nationalising big business and the banks under democratic workers’ control and management.
We are constantly fed the false idea that the problems facing Black communities can be addressed by ‘Black faces in high places’. But what is Kemi Badenoch doing for Black workers as the first Black leader of a British establishment party? Or that somehow Black-owned businesses can compete in a system driven by exploitation without themselves taking part in any exploitation.
These ideas are used as tools by the ruling class to try to stabilise their power by assimilating members of marginalised groups into positions of superficial power and authority. It is to try to pacify our justified anger towards the exploitative capitalist system, the conditions it places us under, and obscure the need for rebellion.
It is capitalism, based on private ownership of the world’s vast wealth and resources, with its principles of ceaseless competition and ultimate target of profit accumulation, that creates a relentless search for the cheapest and most exploitable labour globally. Historically this materialised into slavery, colonialism, sweatshops rampant across the global south, and the desperate living conditions many currently face.
Combating our oppressor can only be executed through a fierce opposition to all they and their system represent. We need a united mass working-class party and for it to struggle for socialism.
