Racism is about oppressing the working class

First, they came for the migrants. Then, they murdered Renee Good.

Bit by bit, for decades, repeated hysterias about migration have brought us here. Official politics has pushed what can acceptably done to the poor and oppressed further and further.

It has had many justifications: stopping terrorism, preventing crime, protecting jobs, putting citizens first. These days, migration is supposedly why we can’t afford housing.

For decades, both sides raced to outdo each other on persecuting migrants: Republican and Democrat, Liberal and Labor in Australia.

Donald Trump didn’t invent racism or border controls. He took the tools built by the mainstream parties of capitalism and pushed them to the extreme.

Racism is constantly used by the ruling class to lower the bar for how everyone in society is treated. Once an injustice becomes normalised against one section of society, it’s easier to extend it to others.

In Australia, Islamophobia was used to justify repressive anti-terror laws after the 11 September attacks in 2001. These laws laid the basis for draconian powers to be used against unionised construction workers.

The racist Northern Territory intervention introduced welfare quarantining debit-cards for Aboriginal communities, which was later rolled out to working-class communities in Western Sydney.

American society was told the crackdown against migrants was just about criminals who are supposedly in the country “illegally”. Then all of a sudden it wasn’t just the undocumented. “Safety” suddenly required greater surveillance powers, more restrictive laws, more weapons for the cops already killing Black people with impunity, and now armed right-wing thugs are running rampage in US cities.

Renee Good was a US citizen. She was white. But she was working class. And she stood up for those she was supposed to hate, against her own rulers and their armed thugs. To the system, that was her greatest crime.

In some way, racism has always been about fear. But it’s not about the fear we have of each other; it’s about the fear our rulers have of us.

Ordinary people have always been the spanner in the works for our rulers and their system’s rapacious and violent drive for profit.

Workers have fought and pushed back against the greed and exploitation of our bosses, winning better conditions and pay. The struggles for women’s and LGBTI rights have won things our rulers were determined to deny us. Mass movements and revolutions have ended wars and brought down brutal regimes.

Six years ago, that same solidarity Renee Good embodied became a raging storm when George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police just a few blocks away.

The city rose up. Millions of people took to the streets across the US. Solidarity demonstrations swept the world. The sheer power of the movement even forced Democratic politicians, who had spent decades building these same racist systems, to cynically take a knee so they could co-opt the movement. The authorities were forced into taking action against Derek Chauvan, Floyd’s killer, to put the genie of mass struggle back in its box.

In the last two years, the torch of global anti-racist solidarity has been taken up by the Palestine movement. Millions have defied their governments attempts to deny and excuse a genocide. The general strikes by Italian workers in solidarity with Gaza have been unprecedented, in a country run by a far-right government after decades of intense Islamophobia.

We have seen past the racist dehumanisation of Palestinians in the face of growing repression and persecution. We have taken to the streets for 2.3 million people somewhere else in the world—people we have never met, and who the media and our governments have encouraged us to ignore, hate and fear.

What’s most dangerous of all is not any individual struggle, but the fact that opposition to injustice and oppression brings us together. It shows us who the real enemy is and who our allies are. It builds our confidence.

Working-class people don’t spend our lives fixated on increasing profits by grinding other human beings into the dirt. We don’t have wealth or power in this society. We get through our days only by working together and taking care of each other. Collectivity and solidarity are part of who we are.

But the biggest reason our rulers fear us and our capacity for solidarity and the potential power it could unleash.

Black Lives Matter in 2020 gave confidence to the activists who went on to unionise in Amazon’s warehouses. Before that, the civil rights movement gave confidence to Black workers who brought their militancy to unions in the public sector and the auto industries. Standing up to racism doesn’t just improve the lives of people of colour, it builds the fighting capacity of the working class as a whole.

If together, US workers refused to work until immigration agents were driven out of their communities, the loss of profits would be unbearable for the corporations and governments who have collaborated with them. If workers everywhere shut everything down like they did in Italy, the entire global economy would be thrown into chaos. If workers took over the economy and collectively ran everything ourselves, the power of capitalism itself could be ended.

Jeff Bezos couldn’t pack every Amazon package, Gina Rinehart couldn’t haul all that iron ore by herself. They need us. We don’t need them.

That is why every racist attack on one section of the working class is an attack on the working class as a whole. Without unity, neither white nor black or brown workers can use our collective power. We need each other.

Racism is not natural; it is manufactured. It is cultivated by those with wealth and power to hold down those of us who are denied any say over the world whose wealth we work to create.

But despite the billions spent on weapons, borders and propaganda campaigns to try and get us to turn on each other, even in these darkest of times, they’ve never managed to completely stamp out our humanity.

The people of Minneapolis hurling snowballs to drive immigration agents out of their neighbourhoods, and the thousands now mobilising around the US, are the latest to take up the torch of solidarity in the face of racism.

All power to them! Their fight is crucial to pushing back against the racist brutality of Trump and rebuilding the kind of working-class power and confidence we’re going to need in the years ahead—to fight racism, war and the system built on profit that oppresses us all.