02.09.1999

Champions of the oppressed

Minority rights and communists

Straw and his advisers seem to gorge themselves on the worst kind of saloon bar prejudice, intolerance and resentment - no matter how reactionary, philistine, irrational and ludicrous it may be - and then proceed to regurgitate the same rubbish in an effort to stoke up popular support for authoritarian measures.

The targets so far marked out for attack by Straw (and other ministers) include not only asylum-seekers and refugees, but also single mothers, social security claimants, the disabled, the unemployed, the homeless and beggars.

In each case, the government’s tactics are broadly the same: first, we are told that of course there are asylum-seekers who are genuinely fleeing persecution, there are single mothers deserving of help, disabled people who have an authentic right to immobility allowance, unemployed workers who really are looking for work, and so on.

But in the next breath we are informed that many asylum-seekers are no more than selfish, would-be economic migrants; that many single mothers (believe it or not) deliberately get pregnant in order to enjoy the boon of a tower block council flat; that a large number of benefit claimants, including disabled ones, are no more than dodgers, cheats and malingerers, trying to milk the resources provided by hard-working taxpayers. Where such vagabonds are concerned, there is naturally no room for what Straw calls “sentimentality”.

In short, a whole thesaurus of abuse and vilification is plundered in order to target vulnerable minorities, the vast majority of whom are, needless to say, disadvantaged members of the working class - not just politically, economically and socially alienated, but many of them near to despair. The consequence is that the unfortunate people in question are essentially marginalised and written off as quasi-criminal elements against whom ‘society’ (ie, the ruling class) has a perfect right to adopt the most stringent measures.

It seems to me that there are two principal ideological motives behind this methodology. In the first place, it serves to enforce the authoritarian credentials of New Labour as a government that has cast off even the vaguest pretence of adherence to social democracy, let alone anything resembling socialism.

Secondly, the hard rhetoric serves to deflect attention from the real causes of social ills. Neither the government in particular nor the capitalist system in general can be held accountable for the plight of the disadvantaged. If they suffer, and cause suffering for others in the process, then it is their own fault. And if the fault is theirs, then ‘society’ has not only the right, but the duty to deploy a small army of police spies, agents provocateurs, fraud investigators and so forth to combat the ‘threat’ which they pose to the state.

In the case of the travellers, for example, the ‘threat’ which they purportedly represent is one of uninhibited petty criminality. Many of them, we are assured, are thieves and for some unaccountable reason they also have a habit of defecating on the doorsteps of respectable citizens. Clearly, this cannot be tolerated in a civilised society. The latter charge is just too bizarre for words, but what about the former? Straw produces no statistics, and I have none to offer, but I suspect that the level of petty criminality among travellers is not markedly greater than that among the urban, so-called underclass or their counterparts among what remains of poor and bored rural youth. Of course, the real ‘crime’ of travellers is that for a variety of reasons they reject the norms of bourgeois society and choose to live only on its margins.

What of our response? Anyone who reads this paper will know that the CPGB is programmatically committed to become “champions of the oppressed” (see ‘What we fight for’, p7). At the most basic level, this means that we demand the fullest possible respect for and extension of people’s democratic rights within the existing capitalist system. To this extent, and to this extent alone, it means that we find ourselves on the same side as genuinely progressive elements among the liberal bourgeoisie.

Herein lies the source of a potentially serious misunderstanding. Some people, even some comrades, may fall into the error of believing that our position is indistinguishable from that of mere ‘bleeding heart liberals’. That we too are concerned principally with mere bourgeois right. Nothing could be further from the truth. In their touching concern for the oppressed, liberals content themselves with cries for greater ‘fairness’. The last thing they want is the sort of radical transformation of society which would inevitably challenge their own enjoyment of comfortable superiority over the mass of the people.

We take a fundamentally different view. As ‘What we fight for’ goes on to point out, “oppression is a direct result of class society and will only finally be eradicated by the ending of class society” itself. In the words of the Communist Manifesto, only a communist revolution that destroys the rule of the bourgeoisie can inaugurate human liberation by abolishing the alienation of labour that lies at the heart of all alienation and which constitutes, under present conditions, an insuperable obstacle to that true realm of human freedom “in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (K Marx and F Engels, CW Vol 6, p506).

This is the vision - not merely political, but intensely moral, which informs all our struggles on behalf of victims of oppression and intolerance, including travellers.

Michael Malkin