04.03.1999
Tailing Macpherson
Around the left
Organisations guided by dogmatic ideology are doomed to eventual irrelevance. Regrettably, the left is saturated with dogma. For the last 40 years those like Peter Taaffe have been predicting the imminent collapse of capitalism - and the red 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s ... A decade ago they were telling us that the reactionary collapse of the bureaucratic socialist states heralded a new Trotskyite or some such dawn. Now the same comrades are insisting semi-hysterically that the police are not “reformable” and that British society remains permeated by some mysterious - though ever shifting - force called “institutionalised racism” - the more you say it, the more the recruits are supposed to flock in.
Bluntly, the left cannot get to grips at all with a post-Macpherson Report Britain, based on a thoroughly safe anti-racism. The new ideology is embraced - eagerly and genuinely - by virtually all sections of the establishment. Nowadays, the very definition of respectability is to be anti-racist - not to mention anti-sexist, anti-homophobic, etc. Racism among the ‘chattering classes’ is the ultimate abhorrence - and to be perceived as not being zealous enough in your anti-racism is a social faux pas.
Clearly, anti-racism is now part and parcel of bourgeois ideology.
But the left, frozen by fossilised dogma, cannot see what is staring it in the face. Or rather, it does not want to see. This is for the relatively simple reason that the rapidly developing - and evolving - ideology of anti-racism contradicts one of the key tenets of left dogma. That is, the non-materialist decree that capitalism - and hence the bourgeois state - is inherently racist. That is the absolute truth which cannot change. All bourgeois politicians who say they are anti-racist must by definition be liars and hypocrites. Amen.
Socialist Worker (February 27) provides us with a marvellous case study in anti-racist denial. Its front page thunders, “Condon out! - Police are racist to the core.” Inside, there are references to the “scum” who murdered Stephen Lawrence. And so on. But language like this could just as easily be lifted from the Daily Mail. Indeed, on occasions it is not always easy to distinguish the front page of Socialist Worker - or most of the other soft Trotskyist/Labourite/economistic left papers - from the Daily Mail’s. (After all, if anything, the Daily Mail has been more militant than the Socialist Worker in its anti-racism vis-à-vis the ‘Lawrence Five’.)
In fact, Socialist Worker’s entire coverage of the Stephen Lawrence affair amounts to little more than warmed over left liberalism. Its editorial, with the wonderfully self-parodic title, ‘Not time for half measures’, quotes a WPC as saying about her fellow officers: “There’s a hard core of about 20% who are racist.” This of course begs the obvious question of how the police force can be “racist to the core” if 80% are not racist. Anyway, the editorial states: “These 20% of open racists set the tone for the rest. Paul Wilson of the Black Police Association [no doubt racist to the core] says ... ‘The culture takes hold. The last thing you do is put your head above the parapet’.” The editorial solemnly concludes: “This is what is meant by ‘pernicious and institutionalised racism’.”
It is instructive that Socialist Worker - as do almost all the left -adopt and parrot the anti-racist language and terminology of the bourgeoisie. It also appears that it wants the bourgeoisie to make the police acceptable:
“There will be many calls for reform of the police over the next few weeks. They will fight any challenge to the way they operate tooth and nail. Now is no time for half measures. Just to begin getting rid of racism in the police would require purging the openly racist elements from the ranks. Are 20% of police to be booted out?”
Well, SWP comrades, despite the rhetorical nature of the question, it is entirely possible for the state to launch a campaign to purge the police of racists. Whatever the proportion “booted out”, you can be sure that if, for example, William Hague was asked in the Commons tomorrow whether he thinks the ‘20% hard core racists’ should be dismissed, his response would almost certainly be, ‘Yes - kick the lot out now’. Or does the SWP think that Hague is a secret racist?
Frankly, to describe the SWP’s own approach to the police as a “half measure” would be too generous. Nowhere in Socialist Worker does it make the propaganda call for the police to be opposed and replaced with workers’ militias. The real nature of the police force - which is to preserve, maintain and defend bourgeois society on behalf of the ruling class - is not alluded to. There is absolutely no reason why the police cannot perform this invaluable function in a solidly anti-racist, though undoubtedly anti-working class manner.
This heresy is banished from the pages of Socialist Worker. The best we get is a limp, vague plea that “the pressure on the police needs to be stepped up now. No one should be fobbed off by cosmetic changes.”
The irony is that the SWP is lagging behind The Guardian. Last week, Jonathan Freedland mooted the idea that the Metropolitan police force should be disbanded on the grounds that it was irredeemably racist. Why bother with Socialist Worker when you have The Guardian?
Predictably, the SWP’s response to the Macpherson Report is just to trot out the same old economistic recipes. No high politics. For example on Radio 4’s ‘Any questions?’ programme, the SWP member, comedian Mark Steel, recommended to listeners that if they heard workmates spouting racism they should tell them to stop talking crap. Quite right. But what about political demands? How do we challenge the state? Nothing but a very significant silence.
We have long commented, and will continue to do so, on how the left confuses national chauvinism - or even just general xenophobia - with racism. However, we are now seeing a further degeneration in the left’s analysis. It - and the bourgeoisie of course - are busily redefining racism so it is starting to mean just some sort of prejudice - any prejudice. We see this abject confusion in Alex Callinicos’s article, ‘No defence to blame all’.
Naturally, it quickly gets in an enthusiastic plug for the Macpherson Report and its definition of racism. Callinicos comments:
“Britain is indeed a racist society, but this is not because most people here are racist. It is because the fundamental structures of this society systematically discriminate against black people in jobs, education, housing and other areas of life. The Macpherson Report has just confirmed what every black person knows - that racism is institutionalised in the Metropolitan Police.”
On the previous Scarman definition this is patently false. Sir Paul Condon was not called the “PC pc” for nothing. And what about John Grieve, assistant deputy commissioner and head of the Met’s violent and racial crimes unit? He has a passion for the works of Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Bob Dylan, and is a man on a mission to “nick a few racists” - almost the sort of man you would be proud to be seen selling Socialist Worker with. These two men are ‘impeccably’ anti-racist. The policies and guidelines they are attempting to implement- often of course against the resentment of some in the lower ranks -are those of bona-fide anti-racism.
Callinicos, naturally, does not deal with this. Rather he gives very curious examples of so-called racism:
“Some workers see themselves as belonging, with the bosses, to the dominant ‘race’ or ‘nation’, while others are excluded as inferiors and outsiders. A classic example is the sectarian division between protestant and catholic workers, the latter of Irish origin, which developed in many British industrial cities during the 19th century. This gave the Tories a hold on working class constituencies in Liverpool that was only eradicated in the 1960s.”
Callinicos’s analysis is predicated on a massive leap in logic. Like many on the left, he presents us with a description of national chauvinism - or prejudice, communal-religious bigotry, labour aristocratic arrogance, etc - and then casually proceeds to label it racism - which is presumably based on some hocus-pocus biological classification of humanity into four or five ‘races’. How on earth can antagonism between catholic and protestant workers be described as ‘racism’? That would make the 1642 English Revolution a ‘race’ war between puritans and high churchers. Both groups of workers share the same language and the same nationality. Indeed, both belong to the same ‘race’, if you want to use the unscientific and backward terminology of both racism and official anti-racism.
This all demonstrates the irrationality which is gripping official society over racism and the ‘race issue’. Therefore, as the left is tied by a thousand invisible reformist-opportunist-economist strings to bourgeois society, it too reproduces the garbage about racism. Dismally, the SWP is reduced to playing anti-racist footsie with the bourgeoisie.
But if you thought Socialist Worker’s coverage was bad, the Socialist Party’s is a hundred times worse. The SP is craven in its superstitious deference to official anti-racism and is full of eminently respectable plans to reform the police force and civil society in general. On the front page we read: “A mass campaign is needed to force Condon to quit and bring the police to account. But there also needs to be more far-reaching change than the current, completely inadequate measures. Increasing race relations training for police and toughening laws against racist crime is not an adequate solution, especially when even existing laws like the Race Relations Act of 1976 are not properly enforced.” Elsewhere, comrade Mark Wainwright argues: “We support the rooting out of individual racists, support real anti-racist training and extending the anti-discrimination laws” (February 26).
So, the SP’s response to the Stephen Lawrence inquiry and the Macpherson Report is to call for the bourgeois state to accrue more draconian powers - perhaps making anti-racist language illegal even in private and abolishing double jeopardy. The fact of the matter is that the Race Relations Act paved the way for subsequent bureaucratic anti-racist measures, the main purpose of which is to divide the masses along the grounds of ‘race’ and reduce the workers to mere ethnic supplicants to the bourgeois state.
Not that we should be surprised by the SP’s anti-racist authoritarianism. The SP vision is of a ‘socialism’ handed down to the workers by benevolent state functionaries - for which the workers are meant to be suitably grateful.
The establishment accepts only too well that an injustice has been done - and is frantically looking for a redress, even if means fundamentally changing English law - in an authoritarian direction. We should be clear. In its determination to nobble the ‘Lawrence Five’ the state is quite prepared to remove our democratic rights.
Just like the SWP, the SP ends up appealing to reformism and abstract socialism. Speaking on our behalf yet again, it declares:
“Socialists will always fight for a thorough reform and increased accountability of the police. We are also in favour of measures which undermine racist attitudes and prejudice. But such measures will have a limited effect unless linked to a socialist transformation of society; the one recommendation the Macpherson inquiry was never likely to give.”
But in the meantime, while we are waiting for the new socialist millennium when nobody will be prejudiced, we should be fighting “for the kind of ‘policing’ people feel is needed, locally and nationally” ... and, no, the comrade is not talking about armed workers’ militias but “local, community-based forces, controlled through local, community-based, elected committees”, which of course must be “accountable”. Both the SWP and the SP are prepared to live with the police force - they just want it to be anti-racist when it oppresses us. They will not be disappointed. The anti-racism offensive of the bourgeoisie is only just beginning.
The left may have lost the plot - we have not. Our anti-racism is internationalist - the bourgeoisie’s anti-racism is based on a defence of the nation state and the promotion of an incorporative national chauvinism. You cannot be an internationalist without being an anti-racist. But you certainly can be an anti-racist without being an internationalist. Tony Blair, William Hague, Sir Paul Condon and the Bob Dylan-loving John Grieve amply prove that.
Don Preston