Euro 2020 – Racism's Coming Home

In his newsletter, Paul Mason wrote recently,

“If England win Euro 2020, the country will basically ejaculate. All of politics and social life is being framed around the possibility that a multi-ethnic team, whose main brand value is anti-racism, and with none of the narcissistic swagger of their predecessors, might actually win. It will be a massive moral victory against both the government and their elderly racist support base.”

But, of course, that was just wishful thinking in more than one sense. Southgate and his team are different to many of the teams of previous years, not just because of the multi-ethnic nature of the players, but also because of the way they have acted, in taking the knee, and taking a position on other issues, despite hostility towards them for doing so by the government, and the reactionaries that voted for it, and for Brexit. However, as I pointed out to to Paul, in an e-mail response, some days ago, John Barnes, had already described what was wrong with his wishful thinking. I wrote,

“I tend to agree with the view expressed by John Barnes. If England do well, the black players will be honorary white people for the duration, much as Andy Murray is British when he’s winning, Scottish when he’s losing. If England lose, then it will be all the fault of the Marxist/liberal non-English players. After all, millions of non-white people played an heroic role in that much more serious game played by nationalists and imperialists, that of actual war, but it didn’t change the racism they faced, including inside the military itself. And, here is the problem, because the dominant culture is always the culture of the ruling class. You do not change society by changing culture, or via cultural subversion – remember the hippies, and alternative culture from the 60’s, or the alternative middle-class culture of punk in the 1980’s? You change culture by changing society, by increasing the economic and social weight of the working-class, by building and increasing the economic and social weight of its property forms, and by increasing democratic control over socialised capital.”

It was a view quickly vindicated. Not only did we hear the same booing of the Italian national anthem, before the match began, but, inevitably, when England lost, especially as they lost on penalties, and even more so as it was three black English players who failed to score, the result was a tsunami of racist abuse unleashed against them on social media. As John Barnes has said, again, since, why one Earth would anyone think that football could act as the means of preventing racism, a racism that is deeply embedded in British, and particularly English, society. In fact, given the inevitably tribal nature of support for football teams, be they national teams, or locally based teams, it is, if anything, least well placed, as an element of culture, to perform that function.

Recently, we saw with the proposal to create the European Super League, a recognition both of the fact that the nation state was no longer a sufficiently large stage for top flight football, and of the fact that support for the top teams, in particular, is no longer simply parochial, but that the fans of, say, Manchester United, number in their tens of millions, and are spread across the globe, most never attending a match, but instead watching avidly via the Internet or Satellite TV. But, as soon as the reality manifested, it was slapped down with reactionary demands that league football be kept tightly within national bounds, and an assertion of the ridiculous claim that football fans are only those from the team's home town!

Paul's approach is idealist and subjectivist, thinking that material reality, and its reflection in society and its ideas, can be changed by first changing the ideas in people's heads. It was the approach of people like Proudhon, and dismantled long ago, by Marx, in The Poverty of Philosophy.

“The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with the material productivity, produce also principles, ideas, and categories, in conformity with their social relations.”

Perhaps the world's greatest ever boxer was Joe Louis, who fought in the 1930's, through to 1951. His rematch against Max Schmelling in 1938, was seen as part of the undermining of the Nazi ideology of racial superiority, coming on top of the victories of Jesse Owens at the 1936 Munich Olympics. Louis's unbeaten record still stands as the greatest achievement in all weight classes. He also undertook other action to combat racism, such as in golf. But, rather as with the black football players today, Louis's defeat of Schmelling saw him faced with even greater hostility from racists and Neo-Nazis, and, in golf, it only emphasised the fact that Louis was allowed to play on the basis of an exception. In WWII, Louis was drafted by the US military as a means of encouraging other black people to join the armed forces, despite the widespread racism they faced inside that military, as much as in the rest of society.

By contrast, in the 1960's, the only boxer who could challenge Joe Louis for the title of The Greatest, Muhammed Ali, refused to be drafted, and went to prison for doing so. Being compared to Louis, Ali said that he saw no reason why he should go to fight Vietnamese people who had never done him any harm, in support of a bunch of white folk in the US, who had oppressed him, and other black people from the day they were born. Ali was right in rejecting the tokenism that was being presented, particularly as, by this time, as a supporter of Malcolm X, there was a not unreasonable suspicion that, in Vietnam, he might have caught a bullet from what was supposed to be his own side. We have seen repeatedly that, for example, having black or women or gay police does not change the existence racism, sexism, or homophobia.

The real solutions to these things come from changing society itself. In the US, today, the existence of black police officers, even black police chiefs and commissioners, has not stopped the deeply racist nature of policing, and frequent murder of black people, particularly men, by racist cops. The solution to that does indeed reside, as socialists in the US have argued, not in a reform of policing, but in de-funding the police, and the use of funds instead to establish self-policing by communities, organised on a democratic basis, and the same applies to parts of Britain, and the rest of Europe too. What applies in respect of racism applies to all other aspects of life. In the 1980's, the overtly class nature of the state, and its police force was made clear by its use to break strikes, to break workers heads on picket lines, to remove the freedom of movement within the country, and to impose what amounted to martial law in pit villages, for example.

But, as I pointed out to Paul, in my e-mail, whilst all of this manifestation of racism against the black players was inevitable, if England lost, it would have been no better, and, in fact, worse had England won. As John Barnes has said, when they are part of a winning team, the black players are at best considered honorary white folk for the duration, much as with Joe Louis's Golf exemption, and the racism simply takes another form, subsumed under the sea of general xenophobia and nationalism, whipped up in the patriotic fervour. As I put it to Paul, the problem is the same as that of the Lexiters, who thought that their specific arguments in favour of Brexit would have any chance of being heard above the din of the general reactionary cacophony.

“The problem is this. It’s the same as with Lexit. The Lexiters were deluded into thinking that in all of the noise and clamor surrounding the reactionary calls for Brexit, their tiny alternative voice would be heard in distinction from it. If England win on Saturday, the alternative voice you are championing, about how it is a victory for a multicultural Britain, for a team that has warn its heart on its sleeve, taken the knee and so on, will be drowned in all of the reactionary patriotic clamour, packaged up and tied with a bow by the media, to show precisely what it wants to show, which will have nothing to do with any progressive values, and will be full on Land of Hope and Glory stuff, and all of those that voted for Brexit will, as they already have, use of as evidence of British superiority over what were called even in the 1970’s the Wops and Degos, the Frogs and Krauts. Even as the media might even have to give some credit for any win to England’s non-white players, that rampant xenophobia will simply package it as, well these honorary whites are at least better than the Europeans, simply because British superiority has washed off on them. Its that reactionary nationalism and xenophobia that will be the dominant cultural determinant here, much as during and immediately after WWII, the emphasis was on beating the Germans as Germans not particularly as Nazis – how could they given that only a couple of years before the British establishment, including Churchill had welcomed them, as anti-communist allies – any more than in WWI, it was a matter of simply beating Germany under the Kaiser.

I think you grossly underestimate the power of the media to shape public opinion and cultural values, even in this day of social media, or maybe that should be because of social media, given its reflection of dominant mores.”

As Marx set out in that comment in The Poverty of Philosophy, it is material reality that shapes ideas, not ideas that shape material reality, even though the ideas having been created then feedback into it. It is the different material reality as it confronts different groups in society that shapes their ideas, and culture. There is no homogeneity, but there is dominance and subservience. As Marx and Engels put it, in The Communist Manifesto,

“What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.”

The ideas of racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, homophobia and so on, are deeply embedded in the nature of class societies, as they have developed over millennia. They are fused with other ideas of nationalism, parochialism, and patriotism that also arose as reflections of material interests. Some of those interests do not reflect the current interests of the dominant section of the ruling class. That dominant section, the global top 0.01% that own and control the majority of fictitious capital, which also gives them control over the majority of industrial capital, have a direct interest rather in sweeping away many of those old bigotries, as they impose restrictions on the breaking down of national borders, and the free movement of capital, labour, goods and services, required for an efficient accumulation of capital. In that, they share the interests of the proletariat, as also a global class.

But, numerically, the dominant section of the ruling class is massively outvoted by the ranks of the small capitalists and petty-bourgeoisie, and those forces are the ones that have captured conservative parties in Britain, Europe and North America. It is those forces that are the spearhead of reaction that have promoted Brexit, that elected Trump, and whose ideas are reflected both within mainstream media, and across large parts of social media. It is the din from all of that, which would have drowned out any small voices about what a victory for progressive values, an England win, yesterday, would have been, just as the voices of the Lexiters were drowned out in the carnival of reaction that followed the narrow vote in favour of Brexit.

In similar conditions, in the 19th century, when the industrial capitalists needed to defeat the nationalists and protectionists of the Tory Party, by bringing about the repeal of the Corn Laws, the big industrial capitalists allied with the industrial proletariat to that end. As Marx and Engels describe, at that time, it was not just the landlords, and the sections of the merchant class, and financial oligarchy, with whom they had formed a symbiotic relation – Mercantilism – since the Middle Ages, that the industrial capitalists and proletariat confronted. The petty-bourgeoisie, comprised of the still sizeable number of independent producers, the small capitalists, both in the process of differentiation into a bourgeoisie, and, in much greater numbers, a descent into the proletariat, also took fright at these developments. The concerns of these elements were reflected in the ideas of the Sismondists.

The fact that a large number of these elements would eventually find themselves in the ranks of the proletariat, meant that socialists would have to also orientate their propaganda to them too, but that did not change the fact, that, in the given conditions, those elements were on the side of reaction, and so the opponents of progress, and socialism. They were so precisely because their material conditions meant that they could see that, on the one hand, they were being out-competed by larger scale-capital, which would itself benefit from the repeal of the corn laws, and, on the other, by organised labour, whose higher wages the larger firms could pay, but which crippled the profits of the smaller capitals. Lenin points to exactly the same conditions in relation to the development of capitalism in Russia.

In 1848, the industrial capitalists aligned with the working-class to repeal the corn laws, and across Europe, a similar alignment led to the Revolutions of 1848. But, both workers and bourgeoisie learned from that experience. The industrial bourgeoisie learned that the working-class, once drawn into that political struggle, would not now simply remain contained within its box, whose limits were defined by bourgeois-democracy, but would inevitably pursue its own interests and demands. The working-class, learned that, precisely because of that, the bourgeoisie, once it had obtained its own interests as against those of the landlord class, would seek to stop any further forward movement, including using force to prevent any further advance by workers.

It is this which creates the stalemate now faced by the progressive forces, as against the forces of reaction that have grown over the last 40 years. The progressive bourgeoisie will not engage in an open political struggle against the forces of reaction, by allying with the working-class, as they did in 1848. Instead, they rely on their control of the state to act bureaucratically to thwart the ambitions of the reaction, but that simply stokes the fires, created on the narrative of a democratic deficit that the reaction hypocritically have fuelled. But, the working-class has not stepped up to the plate to fulfil its historic mission either. The material conditions have continued to evolve, socialised capital has become ever more dominant, and its requirement to consign the nation state, and all of the ideology and bigotry that goes with it to the dustbin of history has become ever more obvious. Yet, the labour movement has failed to develop ideologically and politically in line with that development.

The working-class, rather than taking up the property question, and demanding control over its collective property, has continued to accept the right of shareholders to exercise control over property they do not own. Instead, it has continued to operate on the basis of a bourgeois, trades unionist and reformist ideology, in which the class struggle is seen just as a struggle over the price it will be paid for the sale of its labour-power. In doing so, it has frequently then seen the large socialised capitals themselves as their enemy, rather than as their own property, and basis for the creation of Socialism, much as the Luddites saw machinery as the enemy, rather than the capitalistic social relations in which the machinery existed. That means, at least passively, but, as in the case of Brexit, and other forms of “anti-capitalism”, and “anti-imperialism”, actively aligning with the reactionary elements in society that seek to hold back such development, or to turn existing development back to less mature forms, symbolised by the nation state.

That is the material condition that creates the reactionary social forces that are the vehicles by which these reactionary ideas are purveyed. And, those forces, and the reactionary ideas they represent, spreading out from the ideas of nationalism and patriotism, that inevitably lead to ideas of racism and xenophobia, cannot simply be separated out into good nationalism and bad nationalism, in the way the idealists and subjectivists would like to do. As Marx put it, in responding to that approach by Proudhon,

“The good side and the bad side, the advantages and drawbacks, taken together form for M. Proudhon the contradiction in every economic category.

The problem to be solved: to keep the good side, while eliminating the bad...

What would M. Proudhon do to save slavery? He would formulate the problem thus: preserve the good side of this economic category, eliminate the bad.”

The same applies to nationalism and patriotism. Our aim is not to save these reactionary concepts, by pretending that there is some good side that can be promoted as against a bad side; our aim is to move beyond them to internationalism, class solidarity and Socialism.