Fighting Racism and Nationalism

Student Comrade Fights for Anti-Racist Working Class Unity

SOUTH AFRICA, March 11—Colleges here went on strike a few weeks back. Recently, an ICWP comrade encountered some members of EFF (Economic Freedom Fighters) at a student meeting at his college about the strike’s outcome. Most of the Student Representative Committee (SRC) members there are EFF members. At the meeting, they were hostile to white and coloured (mixed “race”) students. Our comrade sharply exposed them for this.

Our college is mostly working class. The white students come from poor white neighbourhoods like Sydenham, Uitenhage, and Korsten. They are just like black neighbourhoods of New Brighton or Zwide.

The EFF spokesperson knows that we try to recruit people, that we look at them in a class context instead of a racial one. He had a problem with this, as if race is primary over class.

I told him, “You are racist because you are discriminating against your class brothers and sisters based on the colour of their skin. That’s a literal definition of a racist. Since you are black, you seem to think that you are immune to racism.”

This is not exclusive to him. Most black people in South Africa have this tendency, which the EFF perpetuates and exploits for its benefit.

The EFF’s leader, Malema, used to sing a song called “Shoot the White Man.” It says, “We will chase them to the sea.” Some young people listen to these racist songs daily. It makes their mentality and behaviour toward their fellow white and coloured students more hostile.

As a communist and a black person, I felt the need to speak out against this. I risked being accused of being the white man’s stooge rather than remain quiet while my class brothers and sisters were being wronged. ICWP members’ main task is to recruit the working class, regardless of their colour. Had I let that slide, it would seem to these that I agreed with those guys from the EFF.

In front of everyone I said, “Our class brothers and sisters didn’t benefit under apartheid at all. They suffered like we did and are suffering today like us. That’s why they are here with us. Their parents have to work to put food on the table. They aren’t there with trust funds. Like us, they get to school on public transportation. The only difference is the colour of their skin.”

It was important to talk about similarity and difference. The EFF emphasizes the difference in our skin colour but ignores what makes   us more similar than different. We come from the same class; that is more important.

The response from other students, black and white, was overwhelming. They embraced what I was saying. They are open and receptive to ICWP’s communist ideas. They agree with us on racism and sexism. We have many things in common. We need to be more aggressive in recruiting them and others.

These colleges and universities are recruiting grounds for the EFF and ANC (African National Congress). ICWP members need to expose them as traitors to our class, people who have sold out the masses for peanuts. Their attack shows we’re doing something right. It gives us the confidence to intensify our efforts.

We need to change the mainly black composition of our collective, to win white and coloured students so that our collective can better reflect our Party’s view— not only in words but also in practice.

It is up to us to intensify the struggle. It is not mechanical. There’s no switch button that will make them agree. It’s a process. The more we struggle around our ideas, the more these become accessible to them. Recruiting them as active members of our collective will show that we are against racism in practice.

It was the same with sexism. A few years back, we were only male comrades. We made a commitment to fight sexism not only in words but by having female comrades at the forefront for communist revolution. We have recruited female comrades. Our next step will be to recruit more white and coloured people into our Party.

The Hypocritical Flip-Flop of Kamala Harris Exposes the Treachery of Nationalism: We Need Communism

USA—Covid-19 has upended a lot of political calculations, and it’s far from certain how the US presidential election will work out. But in early March, former Vice President Joe Biden was the frontrunner. He promised that if he got the Democratic Party nomination, he’d name a woman as Vice President. Immediately Kamala Harris’ name was floated.

The 55-year-old US Senator and former Attorney General of California is of African American and Indian American ethnicity. As California’s top prosecutor she instituted a lock-em-up program similar to former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s “Stop and Frisk” campaign. She put thousands of Black, Latino and other working-class men and women in prison, filling the California prisons built under the 1994 Crime Act that Biden wrote.

Harris was an early candidate for the nomination herself. In January 2019, she attacked Biden as a friend of southern segregationists. She condemned this friendship as hurtful to her and all black people.

In March of 2020, she dropped out of the campaign and began campaigning for Biden. What happened?

Harris used bourgeois nationalism to attract African Americans and liberals who reject racism to her candidacy.  When she was defeated, she dropped the fake “hurt” and exposed herself as a lapdog of the Democratic Party establishment.

Harris and the other female Democratic Party candidates—like Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012—are promoted to tell the bosses’ story that women and people of color in “high place” will ensure that “everything will be OK now.”

Women are told that a female President or Vice President will take care of low pay, the threat of rape, the second shift of work they must attend to as mothers and caregivers, the violence of pornography, the degrading conditions they face in prison, their objectification in capitalist society and human trafficking.

Blacks and Latinos are told to trust that a President or Vice President of color will solve the problems of lousy schools, cop terror, egregious prison sentences, diseases that develop disproportionately in their communities, immigrant bashing, Muslim bans, second-tier pay at work, and the rent being too damn high as gentrification runs many out of neighborhoods they have lived in for decades into new suburban ghettoes and barrios.

The Democratic Party hopes that having a woman of color prominently on the ticket will help them lure those who know that the system does not work for them, to misguide these angry folks back into the fold. The Democrats need their votes in the Congress and for control of the White House.

But US imperialism’s two-party electoral system only ensures that those with money, the capitalists, maintain and grow their system of the theft of money, property and natural resources, or predatory finance capital, while the international proletariat and the oppressed masses are driven deeper into despair.

But the working masses are the gravediggers of capitalism. They are the ones who can bring it to an end. Not on their own, but with the communist leadership they create.

Harris and company are capitalist misleaders. The working class has among it proletarian leaders, communists, who are building a mass revolutionary party. More workers must step forward and boldly and courageously join this movement to build a party to lead the great long march to human liberation, to communism.

There is nothing that the Democratic or Republic parties have to offer. A Communist Revolution is the best option. Read Red Flag and get involved!

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