“Race” Divides Us, What Unites us? here ♦ Capitalism Uses Identity Politics to Prevent Working Class Unity here ♦
“Race” Divides Us, What Unites Us?
Getting our first job is a truly educational experience! We start so full of hopeful plans. However, what begins as a passage to the world of mature responsibility quickly becomes a harsh reality check. We soon find that all the plans hinge on whether a stranger – the boss – hires us. No job means no plans. Red Flag has previously written about the important difference between jobs and work. This article will focus on another important distinction that helps us understand the world more clearly.
This brings us to the main feature of the wage system. It is a class system. At one end are wage- workers (including some “salaried professionals” like nurses and teachers).
At the other end are those who live off profits. They are the owners of factories, mines, and minerals like oil (industrialists), the owners of banks and insurance companies (financiers) and the owners of real estate empires (developers).
Not everyone belongs to these two classes. Take a truck driver, for example. He or she might be a worker, earning a union wage driving for Safeway. Or they could be small business owners operating their own truck. As such they are neither full-fledged capitalists nor wage workers.
Examples like the owner operator often mislead people into thinking there are no class divisions in the US. In fact, the US is the only Government among the major industrial countries that does not collect statistics based on class. “Class is for European democracies,” George H.W. Bush said when he was President, “It isn’t for the United States of America. We are not going to be divided by class.”
And mainstream liberal America agrees with him. Whether it’s the press and the media, the universities, or the NGOs, they all act as if race and racism is the main division in US society. By talking about poverty, health care, education, prisons, and police shootings almost only in terms of race, they hide the vital role of the class system.
We intend to show that the division between wage workers and capitalist profiteers is the main division in the US. And within that set-up, racism is the main way the wage working majority is divided and weakened.
A glance at the charts will help us make our case. They show the distribution of wealth in the US in 1976 and again in 1999.
The first graphic helps us see the unequal, class division of society. If we carry the image a little further, we can say that those sitting in chairs (not lying upon them) represent small business owners, like the truck owner-operator we talked about earlier, while those standing represent either wage workers or the unemployed.
Then, in the next graphic, as the economy grows, the gap widens. Some small business owners end up as wage workers or unemployed.
It also shows that “WE ARE THE MANY, THEY ARE THE FEW.”
Capitalism uses Identity Politics to Prevent Working-Class Unity
Under capitalism the one essential contradiction is between the workers and the bosses. It is only through a working-class communist revolution that we can resolve this.
The capitalist bosses know this. That is why they work relentlessly through their ideological agents, media, books, and education system to divide the workers by imposing different identities on us.
They differentiate and categorise the masses under the guise of inclusivity. In actual fact it is done deliberately to divide. Over time the differentiation and categorisation create prejudices between people. Differences are highlighted and compared, creating hierarchies and supremacies. This creates tribes that compete with animosity against one another.
Nationalism and xenophobia fall under these divisive capitalist tactics. These divisions prevent unity and divert workers’ and masses’ attention from the real issue. Unemployment under capitalism is falsely explained by saying that “foreigners are taking jobs.” Social disorder is explained by saying that Black or Latino or Nigerian people “are violent.”
These divisions are mostly created artificially. For an example, in South Africa there are many different “races” which only came into existence less than seventy years ago. Both the colonial and the apartheid governments did this to justify massive exploitation of native and immigrant mine workers.
These racial identities were used to prevent unity of whites and the rest of the exploited workers. Ironically, the African National Congress (ANC) government has intensified these racial identities under the guise of non-racialism and inclusivity.
The focus on identity politics is not limited to racialized identities. Even among the Black community here in South Africa, divisions based on language, geography, and tribes are also used to divert attention from the crisis of capitalism under the ANC.
For instance, in KwaZulu-Natal province (which is mainly Zulu) people are accused of coming from the Eastern Cape (mainly Xhosa) to take jobs. The only natural differences between the two tribes are differences in dialect that developed over time. The English colonial capitalists exploited these to introduce Bantustans and pave the way for the apartheid regime.
As communists, we must fight against this toxic and destructive ideology. We must do so by uniting workers of the world to fight our common enemy, the capitalist bosses.
Communists and socialists of the past, although they weren’t fighting directly for communism, showed that working class unity is achievable. Although South Africa is a hyper-racialised society, wherever there was solidarity between workers of different “races” it was the South African Communist Party that led this work.
As ICWP fighting for communism, we must do the same under our own political line. We can build from the composition of the party. It consists of workers from around the world, of different nationalities and races.
Fighting for communism means waging ideological struggle. Having been socialised by capitalist society we are not immune to its ideological poison. Dialectical materialism and collective discussions help us to offer communist responses and solutions to all divisions created by capitalists’ ideology and their agents.
—Comrade in South Africa
Read Our Pamphlet: To End Racism, Mobilize the Masses for Communism here here.
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