Thinking About Racism as a Communist here ♦ Comrades Discuss Questions About Racism here ♦
Thinking about Racism and May Day as a Communist
Red Salute! One of the biggest days I celebrate back in India is Labour Day (May Day), working class struggle day, a day for the working class, as we all celebrate being a worker in this world.
After reaching the US, I thought about how I can contribute on this May Day. Two campus groups led a solidarity march with the workers in our small university town. I left class and went to the march for a little while to give my solidarity to the working class in one way or another.
After class, walking around, I saw a janitor who’s a good friend of mine; we have regular conversations. She’s a Black American lady who is pretty experienced, older, and has good knowledge about world society. As she was cleaning, she found a flyer in the hallway about the protest march. She was about to throw it away. I greeted her and we talked about racism and how she sees it.
She talked about how the Black Panther movement gave the struggle structure on the policy level. This was interesting. She talked about the Black Panther movement, revolution, civil society, and lots of things. I told her “Happy Labour Day!” She kind of knew that May 1st is known as Labour Day, the workers’ day.
She called two other co-workers over and we had a conversation about May Day and the reasons we celebrate it. Then I distributed our Red Flag to them. I asked my friend to read and go through it and let me know what she thinks about it, or if she wants to do a story later, we can do that.
It was interesting for me as a Dalit person who came all the way from an unknown place, to see myself in this world. Here I am trying to build up a community, a movement. Being from a particular caste, how I’m seeing caste and race as one thing—how I’m not approaching this as an identity thing or one country thing, but as a concept of one world, as communist revolution does. It’s a great conversation.
My contribution can be very small, but it has impacted me in a very interesting way to think in a communist perspective.
—A Comrade
Comrades Discuss Questions about Racism
Racism is the ideology that a group of people think another group is “inferior” or should be judged based on their skin color. Clear divisions into various “races” definitely came from capitalism. Capitalists defined “races” and then had to establish laws to enforce their racist divisions as this did not come “naturally.” Capitalists pushed racist eugenics propaganda (that they called science) to rationalize the poor treatment and super-exploitation of “inferior races.”
Discrimination is the liberal legal term used by capitalists to supposedly “outlaw” racism. Capitalists provide lip service for the goal of eliminating racism and outlawing discrimination because people would otherwise see capitalism for what it is, an exploitative profit-driven system not worth keeping.
Racism, sexism, and other biases are learned behaviors and not something a child is born with. For capitalism it is essential to keep the masses divided in as many ways as possible, such as sexism, ageism, ableism, and racism. A system that thrives because of these divisions will not eliminate them.
While capitalism is still intact, we cannot hope to achieve 0% racism. So, what do we do to address racism within our party under capitalism?
Some things: Translating Red Flag into different languages based on our abilities. Focusing on the international level, not just workers within the USA. Leadership by all is encouraged. All, regardless of race, are provided access to the party, party meetings, party literature, and party resources. Our main concentrations in Los Angeles are in MTA, where there are many Black workers, and garment, where there are many immigrant workers from Central America. And we frequently ask ourselves how we can do more to be more inclusive.
There are more questions to ask and problems to be resolved. Capitalism has ingrained so much division between us in so many ways. It will take time to help people get rid of the racist ideology that capitalism has implanted. How will we structure a communist society differently to eliminate racism? How will we handle the transition from capitalism to communism when it comes to all the “isms”?
We look forward to the new ICWP anti-racism pamphlet. We hope it will further lay out how we fight racism within and outside the party and our plans for a racism-free society in the communist future.
—Two comrades in California (USA)
Read the ICWP Pamphlet:
To End Racism: Mobilize the Masses for Communism
Front page of this issue
