Allyship presents itself as a way that people can show support for the rights of an oppressed group that they themselves are not a part of without “taking the space” of those who are oppressed. Marxists, conversely, argue that solidarity is the key way we can win reforms for, and ultimately liberate, the oppressed. Allyship and solidarity might sound like much the same thing, but there are important differences in these strategies for social change.
Allyship has at its heart the proposition that the experience of oppression tells us everything about how to fight oppression. Of course, the experience of oppression can be a powerful galvanising tool for activism. But experience is not the same as political analysis. Allyship assumes that those from oppressed groups are automatically and exclusively political authorities, and that therefore they must be deferred to on questions of political strategy. It holds that people without direct experience of a particular oppression are, at best, able to offer encouragement from the sidelines, or, at worst, are causing harm by “centring themselves” when campaigning against oppression.
Identities are forged by capitalism and oppression, but also by resistance to oppression. The “gay” identity was partly a product of struggle, and “Black” was used—in some parts of the world at least—as a political identification of anyone non-white who experienced racism. This is one reason why people can think identity is automatically radical. 
But there is an enormous diversity of class positions, opinions and political outlooks within identity groups, which creates endlessly varied experiences and responses to oppression. How are we meant to know who to listen to in this sea of contradictory ideas? How can there be an “immutable authority” of experience if two members of the same oppressed group are arguing different things?
It’s often claimed that the most marginalised or “intersectional” groups inherently represent the vanguard of struggle and should be “centred” at all times because they win the “oppression Olympics” (an unhelpful game of one-upmanship between individuals and groups based on identity to work out who’s the most oppressed). But there is no correlation between a person’s marginality and their radicalism; “intersectional” individuals now populate even the Republican and Liberal parties. 
Of course, socialists agree that in a world in which oppression makes it harder to lead, we need to encourage oppressed people in their fight. But that is not the same as arguing that being oppressed means you automatically have the most useful strategy for fighting oppression. Increasingly in activist circles, anyone who contests this political perspective is accused of “violence”. 
The other side of allyship is the way in which it assesses those who are not oppressed. They are understood to walk through the world with a set of unearned privileges and, consciously or not, hold biases towards the oppressed to maintain and justify these privileges. Allyship argues that anti-Black racism, for example, comes from white people having an in-built but unconscious desire to dominate Black people. In the words of Reni Eddo-Lodge, author of Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race: “Racism is a white problem. It is a problem in the psyche of whiteness”. 
Marxists have a radically different starting point: oppression is a structural phenomenon. It has been created and maintained by the ruling class to extend and fortify their power over the rest of us. The racist ideas in the heads of some white people originate from those at the top of society because bigoted ideas justify their oppression of the working class as a whole and specific identity groups in particular. 
“Structural” doesn’t mean that institutions are simply made up of people with a bunch of personal prejudices. It refers to the way in which those institutions function in our society to organise and defend capitalism and maintain oppression. The race of the individuals within an institution doesn’t make much of a difference to how racist that institution is. For example, every one of the five police officers charged with the murder of Tyre Nichols in Memphis last January was Black. 
Similarly, the absence of oppression is not a “privilege”. In the words of Emma Dabiri, author of What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition, “the right to secure housing, or to walk through a shop without being trailed by security, are not privileges. They are rights that belong to every human being”. 
Privilege theory fails to talk about the one group of people who are privileged: the ruling class. They’re the ones who hoard all the wealth, decide how production is organised and wield political power in our society. Their privileges are certainly unearned. But privilege theory and allyship insist that it’s working-class people who don’t belong to an oppressed minority group who benefit from oppression, despite the fact that the working class itself is an oppressed class; in fact, it’s the biggest oppressed group in society. 
The argument of “privilege theory” is contradicted by the evidence. There are many studies that show that the working class does not materially benefit from oppression and, in reality, suffers from the divisions created by the oppression of specific identity groups within it. For example, in the southern states of the US, where racism is more entrenched due to the legacy of slavery, white workers are paid less than white workers in the north. US economist Michael Reich, after conducting research into this area, concluded that “the greater the divide between black and white incomes the greater inequality within white incomes”. Only the bosses benefit. 
Racism and bigotry don’t come just from the ideas in people’s heads, but from the social conditions that are created by those at the top of society that lead some people to adopt distorted views about the oppressed. But according to privilege theorists, those holding strong anti-oppressive ideas must torture themselves until they can confront their inherent bigotry and “decolonise their minds”. 
That everyone is a racist deep down is a preposterous premise and merely speaks to the pessimism and passivity at the heart of privilege theory. Either you’re privileged and benefit from the status quo, so don’t want to fight against oppression, or you do want to fight against oppression, but you can’t because that means you’re in denial of your true nature. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t! 
True to capitalism’s ability to commodify everything, some people are making an absolute fortune hosting workshops designed to tell white workers that they are responsible for the oppression that capitalism itself creates.
Allyship insists that because non-oppressed people won’t give up their social privilege, they should at least give up their material privilege, as reflected in the hashtag #paytherent. Marxists are absolutely in favour of state and federal governments, and national and multinational institutions, paying reparations for the intergenerational destruction of Aboriginal people’s lives. Some activists on the left share this perspective. But increasingly, #paytherent is used, not to mean taking back the wealth from the capitalist class, but to mean that workers who are slightly better paid should give up some of their stuff because they are complicit in the actions of governments and institutions by default because many of them belong to the same identity category as the oppressors. 
This broader perspective can take the form of feminists calling for male workers to take wage cuts to close the gender pay gap, or demands for all white people to give money to Black people. Proponents of allyship cheer such developments as successfully securing compensation. But it lets off the hook the bosses and governments who should actually be paying reparations, and it makes fighting oppression a decidedly individual strategy. 
The capitalists know that ordinary people’s default is to stand in solidarity with each other. Capitalism could not survive if all the arbitrary divisions that it creates were smashed. That’s why the ruling class has to work so hard to maintain them. Solidarity is the act of actively working against those divisions. Marxists argue that, in the act of fighting to improve their lives through active resistance to oppression, working-class people can overcome the divisions forced on them, whatever their individual identity. Many historical examples suggest this is far from utopian.
For example, in the 1960s, militants on the south coast of NSW used their industrial powers to improve their own working lives and to improve society as a whole. When Aboriginal people were staging sit-ins to be allowed to drink in Wollongong pubs or be served in local shops, workers stood in solidarity with those activists, using their industrial power to hit those businesses economically, setting an impressive pace for desegregation in the area. The solidarity of workers meant desegregation happened in practice well before any legal changes. 
In the lead-up to the US Civil War, one in six workers in England worked in the textile industry. There was a widely held view that the South should be supported by workers because that was where the cotton was produced, even if it was by slave labour. But textile workers were won to an understanding of how the abolition of slavery was connected to their own struggles at home for better lives and greater freedom. 
This didn’t happen automatically, but through collective debate, not an attempt to “decolonise” individual minds. Karl Marx was at a mass meeting in London and excitedly reported back to his collaborator Friedrich Engels about what he was witnessing from ordinary workers in this regard. This helped inform the important theories that the socialist tradition is built on. He saw in practice the concept of solidarity of the international working class and how a struggle over one issue could breed confidence to struggle over another. The struggle to abolish slavery encouraged the English workers to take up that fight for themselves. A consequence of this act of solidarity was that the leaders of the English working-class movement broadened their own horizons.
The left-wing activists of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners recognised that they shared a common enemy with the miners striking in 1984 in Britain: the Tory government led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. They knew that a victory for the miners would weaken any further Tory attacks on their community. While the year-long strike went down to defeat, the relationships that were built based on solidarity started to change people’s ideas on both sides. 
Sections of the LGBTI community were invigorated and politicised by their involvement in the strike, which had an impact when they mobilised against Section 28 (a UK law that prohibited the “promotion of homosexuality”) a few years later. The National Union of Mineworkers called for the Trade Union Council and Labour Party conferences to actively support the gay and lesbian struggle, and demanded that it be taken seriously as a union issue. 
The lessons from all of these examples of solidarity are clear: you have to know which side you’re on; fighting gives everyone involved more confidence; the hold of bourgeois ideology can be broken; and people believe that they can win when they can feel their own power. 
Oppression will continue as long as capitalism does. But as long as there has been oppression, there has been resistance to it. The idea of working-class solidarity being seen as normal has been somewhat forgotten with the decline of class struggle in the past 30-40 years, but the recent wave of strikes in Britain and France points to what solidarity can look like and how we can win change. 
Allyship tells people who want to fight against oppression that their only option is to turn inward and look to individual choices as the solution. But just as it is now widely accepted that keep-cups won’t save the planet from climate destruction, so it must be recognised that individual allyship as a political strategy cannot advance the fight against oppression. Solidarity tells us no-one is free until we are all free, and that our freedom is inextricably linked to the freedom of all the oppressed.

Kerri Parke

Allyship or solidarity?

Mainstream discussion about Shakespeare usually depicts him and his enormous body of work as quaint and apolitical, devoid of any radical or subversive messages. But Shakespeare was living and writing during a time of violent transition and social upheaval, which is reflected in his plays. Since they were first published more than 400 years ago, every generation in every part of the world has reinterpreted Shakespeare’s plays, allowing the words to speak to them to explain their own world.
At the time that Shakespeare was writing, feudalism (an economic system based on obligation) was on the way out, and capitalism (an economic system based on competition) was on the way in. Feudalism was a fixed, hierarchical system in which everyone knew their place—serf at the bottom and lord at the top, divinely ordained. This was upended with the emergence of capitalism, in which people insisted that society could be reshaped through individual effort and ambition and that anyone with enough of either could rule. This burgeoning society was transforming economic and social life, and with that came an expansion of possibilities in other areas—expressed in the explosion of science, art and literature.
Shakespeare wrote for a new capitalist theatre; writers who previously relied on aristocratic patrons for survival could now charge admission. The theatres attracted ordinary folk who paid a penny to stand, and the gentry who paid a bit more for comfortable seats. Shakespeare had a reciprocal relationship with the theatre—his position as actor, writer and shareholder meant he had an interest in the financial success of his plays, but the relationship he created with the audience also had an impact on his writing. His plays did not just reflect his society’s context; they also shaped it. 
With capitalism came the emergence of the bourgeois individual: cutthroat and egotistical. We see this in Shakespeare’s use of soliloquy, an innovative theatrical device that demonstrated a new interest in individual psychology—exposing the mind of the characters, laying bare their secret motivations, obsessions and desires. We can see this in characters from Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. 
However, the tragedy of Shakespeare’s eponymous characters is not simply explained by their flaws but by understanding the world in which they were trying to survive. Romeo and Juliet want to choose who they marry, but they live in a society that doesn’t recognise that right. A whole tradition of academic criticism has tried to reinforce the idea that Shakespeare was the literary embodiment of the dominant ideology of the bourgeoisie, namely that of cohesion and order. They work hard to ignore and downplay the social contradictions beneath the work’s surface. 
While Shakespeare himself cannot be described as a revolutionary, his art had a radical impact on society. Shakespeare was grappling with the clash of the old and the new; he might look backward to make sense of the world around him, but his work was also looking forward, wondering what this new society would deliver. The representation of the nobility on stage brawling and fighting, constantly at each other’s throats, would make ordinary people in the audience think: “Is this who rules us, those who are supposed to be our betters? Maybe there’s nothing natural about them being at the top, if they manipulated and fought and killed to get there”. In Henry V, the king starts a war to divert attention from social problems people are facing, which may have produced doubts in the audience—is this what our rulers do too? He shows the inner workings of the royal state and reveals them to be entirely corrupt. 
Karl Marx loved Shakespeare’s work from a young age. His influence can be seen throughout Marx’s writings, from passing comment to direct analogy. Shylock, in The Merchant of Venice, provides for Marx a literary personification of the heartless drive to accumulate wealth that defined the rising capitalist class in early 19th century Europe. But in Capital, Marx uses Shylock as both the voice of the oppressor and the oppressed. The play is often considered problematic today because performances can fall into anti-Semitic stereotypes, and Shakespeare certainly wasn’t exempt from the prejudices of his times. Still, it contains an important political message: some people from oppressed minorities, like Shylock, believe that joining their oppressors on the same level will rid them of discrimination. Shylock discovers the hard way that you can’t buy your way out of oppression, and rising to the top only makes you more comfortable with the brutality of the system that oppressed you in the first place. Just as having more Black mayors, judges, governors or attorneys general has done nothing in the overall fight against racism in the United States, so Shylock was never going to escape a life of discrimination and humiliation by joining those above him. 
Marx also references Timon of Athens in Capital when reflecting on the destructive impact of money on human relations. The play is full of exchanges of money and commodities that take on a perverse and depraved role in Timon’s society—once the money has run out, Timon’s “friends” are nowhere to be seen. Timon disparagingly talks about how his despair has been brought on by money and other people’s attitudes towards it:
“What is here?
Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold? No, gods,
I am no idle votarist: roots, you clear heavens!
Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair,
Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant.”
And Marx provides his own analysis of the broader significance of Timon’s words:
“Shakespeare brings out two properties of money in particular: (1) It is the visible divinity, the transformation of all human and natural qualities into their opposites, the universal confusion and inversion of things; it brings together impossibilities. (2) It is the universal whore, the universal pimp of men and peoples.”
Marx’s analysis helps to modernise Shakespeare’s words—they can easily be applied to the bankers responsible for the 2008-9 global financial crisis or the world’s ten richest billionaires who, according to Oxfam, more than doubled their wealth during the pandemic. Marx’s observations get to the heart of capitalism’s nature: the real god of modern society is greed; the real temples are the banks and stock exchanges; the priests are the bankers and traders, and they succeed in life by demanding their pound of flesh from people when things go awry. 
When Shakespeare came to write a play about a society based on competition, he saw such a society as tragic. King Lear is set in a feudal society with a rigid hierarchy. Lear decides to shake things up, dismantling this society and creating a competitive one instead. Rather than leaving his kingdom to his firstborn, he makes his three daughters compete for it by asking them to prove who loves him the most. The infinite love that the daughters Goneril and Regan profess is immediately made worthless. The third daughter, Cordelia, says she loves him as much as a daughter should love a father, angering Lear and leading to her banishment. Lear’s fostering of a competitive drive within his daughters leads to his downfall as they are driven to accumulate more by giving him less. Without money in this new society, he is worthless; he relies on his daughters’ generosity, but the love that might have inclined them to that has been eroded by their competitive drive to gain ever more wealth. Goneril and Regan are ready to do whatever they must to accumulate more, even wage war with each other—a perfect representation of Marx’s description of capitalists as a “band of warring brothers”.
In the words of Shakespeare at the dawn of the new society that Lear has created:
“Humanity must perforce prey on itself,/ Like monsters of the deep.”
Marx expressed a similar sentiment in Capital when he wrote, “capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt”. 
Shakespeare wrote King Lear by extending an existing story in which Cordelia and Lear are reconciled at the end. His reworking reflects the tumultuous times he was living in, when the restoration of order at the end of the play was an unconvincing outcome. But the poet Nahum Tate revised Shakespeare’s play with a happy ending in which Cordelia doesn’t die, and it was this version that was performed in the late 17th century as capitalism was taking great pains to establish its dominance. A version of the play that shows how mad, brutal and war-obsessed their society was simply could not be tolerated. This version was performed for decades, until the 1830s, when society was shifting once again. The Chartists—the first independent working-class party—were launched alongside the first recorded use of the word “socialism” in the English language. Suddenly Shakespeare’s version had much more to say to a society that was starting to radically question capitalism. 
The pervasiveness of identity politics can make Shakespeare seem like the ultimate dead white male with little relevance to the left. He has recently been a target for “decolonisation” attempts in academia and schools. But that perspective misses all that his writing has to say about the human condition, with our flaws, hopes and dreams. His works show us it is possible to challenge the existing order and that humanity can transform the world and transform ourselves in the process. 
Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James called Shakespeare the “most political writer that Britain has ever seen”. James believed that there was tremendous creative power at the moment in history when existing notions of democracy and order were being pushed and expanded through political struggle, and Shakespeare’s plays could be used to represent those moments as they reappear. Artists often use the past to comment on their present; James did so when writing his seminal work, The Black Jacobins. In it, he had one eye on an amazing piece of history, the uprising that abolished slavery in San Domingo under slave leader Toussaint L’Ouverture, and one eye on the coming national liberation struggles in Africa and Asia.
The classics often feel out of reach for the ordinary person—only to be discussed in the academy or viewed by a wealthy elite. But the ideas and political undercurrents in Shakespeare’s plays are of value to everyone who dreams of a different world. As the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote in Literature and Revolution:
“It is childish to think that bourgeois belles-lettres can make a breach in class solidarity. What the worker will take from Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, or Dostoevsky, will be a more complex idea of human personality, of its passions and feelings, a deeper and profounder understanding of its psychic forces and of the role of the subconscious ... In the final analysis, the worker will be richer.”

Shakespeare and Marxism 

The Sydney Morning Herald recently <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/consent-and-coercion-in-sexual-relationships-to-be-part-of-national-curriculum-20220218-p59xmx.html">reported</a> that the topics of coercion and consent will be taught as part of the Australian high school curriculum. This is a positive development. The more awareness there is of the dynamics that fuel abusive behaviour, as opposed to the silence, ignorance and denial of such abuse that has been so common in the past, the better.
Currently, Tasmania is the only state or territory in Australia to legislate against coercive and controlling behaviours, but it is being considered for inclusion in other states’ domestic violence laws. According to the <a href="https://www.coroners.nsw.gov.au/coroners-court/resources/domestic-violence-death-review.html#Reports2">New South Wales Domestic Violence Death Review Team</a>, 99 percent of the intimate partner murders they looked at were preceded by coercive and controlling behaviours on the part of the perpetrator. So any measure that helps increase awareness about the potentially serious threat posed by this type of behaviour is to be welcomed.
Relationships Australia describes coercive control as “a pattern of behaviours used by an abuser to control their partner and create an uneven power dynamic. [It] generally involves manipulation and intimidation to make a victim scared, isolated, and dependent on the abuser”. This pattern of behaviour can be subtle and difficult to identify, especially for those subject to it. Examples include monitoring movements, restricting independence and controlling access to money. This can be an exaggerated version of behaviour that is common in “normal” relationships, and as such is often minimised or its victims dismissed as “hysterical” or “oversensitive”. And because issues that affect women are so often downplayed—in relation to health, for example—it’s not hard to see why many women might tend to rationalise such behaviour.
Since the #MeToo movement exploded in 2017 and laid bare the depths of sexual assault and harassment women are subject to, people have been talking more and more about the need for better education around consent and the myriad ways in which men—especially powerful men—abuse and manipulate women. It is important that people learn from an early age that consent can be coerced not just through physical violence or the threat of it, but also through manipulation, such as requests to demonstrate their love for their partner, by quashing their self-esteem or by telling them that no-one else will ever want them. A person cannot freely give their consent when they are afraid to say no.
But coercive control is not restricted to the “personal” sphere in capitalist society. It is a dynamic that underpins many relationships and interactions, and in most cases is not seen as a problem. Capitalism simply couldn’t function without the idea that some people should be able to exercise total control over other people on pain of financial or social consequences. Indeed, the defining features of coercive control—controlling movement, excessive surveillance, fear and financial dependency—encapsulate many modern workplaces: just think of any Amazon distribution centre. A society that normalises such dynamics in most aspects of life is ill-equipped to eradicate them from our personal lives.
Work, where we spend a significant proportion of our lives, is one example. Workers are forced to sell their labour in order to survive. If they are able get a job, they are at the mercy of a boss, who has the “right” to control workers’ labour. Workers who don’t respect this authority face the threat of the sack and financial hardship. If workers dare to step out of line, demanding better pay or conditions, the boss has ample means to punish them and enforce submission. Even in workplaces that purport to give a damn about their employees’ wellbeing, it is usually cynical and superficial, designed to better bind workers to the company rather than give them any real control. The reality is that the vast majority of workers have very little control over most aspects of their jobs—they don’t get to decide what gets produced, who runs the place or how the job should be done. As in abusive relationships, fear frequently forces them to accept this—fear of being targeted by management or sacked.
Arbitrary borders between countries are likewise enforced through intimidation. The inhuman border regimes, which characterise almost every wealthy country in the world, exist not only to punish those who cross borders without the “correct papers”, but also to deter others from exercising their right, enshrined in international law, to cross borders to seek refuge. And double standards abound: capital and the wealthy can move freely around the world, yet workers and the poor are subject to brutal controls and punishment for doing the same.
The control a tiny minority exercises over property, land and resources, which is the vital premise of capitalism, requires that others be prevented from gaining such control. This frequently means outright violence is deployed to keep people in their place, but it also works by making people feel their legitimate desires and needs are transgressions that will attract harsh punishment. 
The 1984-85 miners’ strike in Britain was an example of both. At the time, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said that she “would never negotiate with people who use coercion and violence to achieve their objective”. But it was her police that attacked and injured hundreds of picketers at the infamous Battle of Orgreave—a mass protest that ended with the police rioting and attacking anyone that moved. But as well as this open violence, Thatcher also relied on a version of coercive control, changing the law around welfare provision so that striking miners could no longer claim benefits. The intention was to coerce them back to work through the threat of starvation.
Because the modern workplace is entirely premised on the idea of coercive control, it is frequently the case that the only place that workers feel like they have any semblance of control is in their relationships. Relationships and personal life are meant to be completely cordoned off from the often brutal realities of work, migration and law enforcement that dominate “public” life. This situation inevitably leads to unhealthy interpersonal relationships, from the low-key strains and pressures of “normal” relationships to the outright abusive ones.
Work for so many of us is dehumanising. So it should not come as a great surprise that if the method of capitalism is to dominate partly through coercion and partly through consent, that this has a knock-on effect in the relationships between ordinary people, especially when those relationships are so shaped by the oppressive gender and sexual relations in capitalism. We see around us people being forced—either directly or indirectly—into doing things they don’t really want to do, so why would people think there is anything wrong with behaving the same way in their own relationships?
As a therapist, when I talk about coercive control with my clients, I often talk about gaslighting too. Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse in which a victim is manipulated into doubting their own memory and sanity. Capitalism is the biggest gaslighter of them all—most people recognise that the system is unfair and brutal, but authority figures of various sorts keep telling us how great it is, how lucky we are to have a job and how free we are. The ruling class has been so good at using the techniques of gaslighting and coercive control, it is ironic at one level that they are now finally being forced to recognise it as damaging and dangerous. But using a combination of outright control and coerced consent is the only way they can maximise profits and beat down the resistance of the oppressed and exploited. This means they want awareness campaigns to go only so far.
So, yes, it’s good that society is recognising the dangers of coercive and controlling behaviours. But the prevalence of this in relationships won’t stop while it is so rampant in the rest of society. Until the coercive control that capitalism is founded on is eliminated and replaced with a society free of oppression and exploitation in which every person is treated with the respect they deserve, coercive control in relationships will persist, with all the terrible consequences it has for people’s lives.

Capitalism and coercive control

A few weeks ago, my grandmother died in Jamaica. We weren’t at all close—I only met her a couple of times in my life—and yet, I feel sad. She had Alzheimer’s but was diagnosed with COVID-19 a couple of weeks prior to her death, along with her carers, my uncle and his wife. As a result, she deteriorated much more quickly than expected. 
My mum has made the difficult decision not to leave London to go to her mother’s funeral and be with her siblings as they grieve. She had to make this decision because UK prime minister Boris Johnson and his Tory government have shown over and over again that they don’t care about ordinary people when it comes to dealing with this pandemic. Johnson was happy to “let the bodies pile high” in order to prioritise profits. 
Opening up and letting the virus rip—so that there is now an average of 31,000 cases per day in the UK—means that my mother would have to get a COVID-19 test before she left London, quarantine when she arrived in Jamaica, get another test before she left Jamaica and test again when she arrived back in London. All of these tests reportedly cost more than £100 each. She would also be at risk of contracting the virus while in Jamaica, and she is currently only partially vaccinated. So, she decided not to travel. She was robbed of the opportunity to see her mother again before she died, and can’t even say goodbye now she has passed.
This is what reopening too soon looks like for ordinary people. Had my grandmother been in New South Wales, she would be one of the deaths that are so easily dismissed in the now defunct 11am press conferences—“an 85-year-old woman with underlying health conditions”. The humanity behind these descriptions is lost, and the condolences they send ring hollow. According to Dr David Berger writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, “one in two Australians has at least one chronic condition”, but the authorities continue to try to normalise these deaths as if they don’t matter. 
They’d be dead soon anyway, right? Their deaths are reducing the burden on the overwhelmed health service, right? But no thought is given to the family and friends of this “dead wood” who have lost their loved ones, or to the people who have died alone, scared and in pain, or to the health workers who are forced to make impossible choices about who to give precious ventilators to or whose hand to hold as they die. Our elderly people are not dead wood. They deserve to spend their retirement safely, enjoying time with grandchildren or pursuing hobbies, not dying a premature death from a disease they should never have had.
For Victorian premier Dan Andrews, the hundreds of people predicted to die in Victoria in the coming months are likewise expendable. Their lives are apparently a price worth paying to get out of lockdown and back to business. Lockdowns are hard, human beings aren’t wired to be so disconnected for so long. I’m a therapist—I know the impact of lockdowns on people’s mental health. But don’t be swayed for a moment by the government’s rhetoric on mental health—they just want to use it as an excuse to open up and further risk our health. We can see how much they really care about those with mental health issues if we look at the limited funding for services, or the closure, with a week’s notice, of a young people’s critical psychiatric care ward at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney. And it’s as if the mental health impacts of those thousands of deaths, or the mental health of the health workers who will be dealing with the trauma of working through this disaster for years to come, simply don’t exist. 
But do you know what would help people’s mental health during lockdown? Being paid to stay home, and knowing there was a job waiting for them when things reopened. And being paid to take time off to get tested, vaccinated and so on. It’s living in a system that prioritises profit over health, even in a pandemic, that gives people anxiety and depression. It really is that simple. Australia’s Mental Health Think Tank came to the same conclusion in a recently published policy <a href="https://mentalhealththinktank.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Australias-Mental-Health-Think-Tank-Policy-Paper-Aug-2021.pdf">paper</a>.
And so, as with everything under capitalism, it comes down to class—who is essential in our society? Jeff Bezos jetting off into space has shown how inessential he is. But his retirement is safe. The supermarket workers of today are the people with underlying health conditions of tomorrow. Class inequality means that it is essential workers who are likely to develop chronic health conditions and will therefore be more at risk in the health crises of the future. They are ordinary, working-class people who keep the rest of us alive and yet are some of the worst paid in our society. To us they are necessary, to the bosses they are expendable.
So yes, I’m sad that my grandmother died. I’m sad for my mum and her brothers, but I’m also angry. I’m angry that the people who run society think it is acceptable to throw their hands in the air and say there’s nothing we can do, that thousands of people are just going to die when they don’t have to. Theoretically, modern capitalism should be well-placed to deal with a pandemic—the resources available would be more than enough to combat it if there was the political will to do so. But no, Gina Reinhardt and others like her who have increased their wealth during the crisis just haven’t made quite enough money yet. According to the Guardian, “the world’s billionaires did ‘extremely well’ during the pandemic, growing their already-huge fortunes to a record high of $10.2tn”.
On the day my grandmother died, there were 511 new COVID-19 cases in Jamaica, the youngest of which was just 3 days old. The youngest COVID-19 death that day was a 19-year-old woman. These are the kinds of people that will get sick and die of the virus in New South Wales and Victoria if we reopen too soon. It doesn’t have to be this way. We need to fight for every single life. We need to aim for elimination, even as irresponsible governments make this increasingly difficult. It is not impossible. The thing missing is the political will. Now is the time for us to fight back.

Every COVID-19 death is a preventable tragedy

Twenty years ago, on Friday 20 July 2001, 23 year old anarchist Carlo Giuliani joined 50,000 others on the streets of Genoa to protest against the G8 summit taking place in the Italian city. The brilliant blue of the summer sky was obscured by thick clouds of tear gas as the Carabinieri (a branch of the Italian police) tried—with increasing violence—to contain the massed crowds of anarchists, socialists, environmental activists, trade unionists and campaigners for refugee rights. By the end of the day Giuliani would be dead—shot in the head by police—and, as news of the killing spread through the city, activists would be surrounding police stations chanting “assassini!” at the officers in the buildings and in the helicopters circling overhead.
The mobilisation against the G8 summit in Genoa—which I travelled to from Britain with a contingent of revolutionary socialists among 1,000 people organised by the activist group Globalise Resistance (GR)—was the high-water mark of the anti-capitalist movement that began less than two years earlier with the “Battle of Seattle” in November 1999.
Seattle was a major turning point. Ten years previously the Berlin Wall fell, and supporters of capitalism proclaimed “the end of history”—the supposedly permanent triumph of capitalist liberal democracy in its neoliberal form. Ruling classes everywhere abandoned state-led economic development and embraced the market. This was often done by social democratic parties and so-called “progressive” governments. Among neoliberalism’s main henchmen were Australia’s Labor Party prime ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, the US’s Democratic Party president Bill Clinton, and Britain’s “New Labour” prime minister Tony Blair.
It was a demoralising period for many socialists in Western countries like Britain. The class struggle of the 1970s and early 80s was a distant memory and social movements were on the defensive. There were pockets of resistance around the world. Important moments included the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, at the beginning of 1994, the French public sector strikes of 1995, and the 1998 mass movement in Indonesia that brought down the 31 year long Suharto dictatorship. People had been fighting neoliberalism in their own way for years, but it was only with Seattle that this resistance really emerged from beneath the tide of capitalist triumphalism.
Seattle—a protest and blockade targeting a meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO)—was a shot in the arm to all those who held on to the possibility of a different kind of world. The WTO and similar institutions such as the World Bank, the International Momentary Fund (IMF), and the World Economic Forum (WEF), had for many people become symbols of everything wrong with neoliberalism. The policies they were attempting to force on the world encouraged the destruction of the environment, the indebting of underdeveloped countries, and the undermining of wages and conditions for workers.
Seattle was the moment of “Ya Basta!” (“Enough!”), a popular slogan of the time—the moment when the slow build-up of discontent with the status-quo broke out into open rebellion in one of global capitalism’s heartlands. The world’s rich and powerful, led by the US, wanted to use the WTO meeting to plan the next steps in their quest to dominate the globe. The tens of thousands of protesters who besieged the summit had other ideas. They massed at the entrances, linked arms, and stood strong against a violent assault by police. Many WTO delegates couldn’t find a way in, and, ultimately, the summit had to be called off early.
The message was clear: if enough people are prepared to stand up and stand together against the agenda of the global elite, they can be stopped. Activists everywhere heeded the call. Over the next year and a half there was a series of major anti-capitalist mobilisations: targeting the IMF and the World Bank in Washington DC in April 2000, targeting the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/7370">WEF in Melbourne</a> and the IMF and World Bank (again) in Prague in September 2000, and targeting the European Council in Gothenberg, Sweden, in June 2001. Seattle was the spark that lit a new flame of resistance around the world. It was in Genoa that the flames reached highest.
I arrived in the city via train on the day Carlo Giuliani was killed. As my comrades and I tried to join up with the GR contingent that was attempting to break through the fence surrounding the summit, we kept getting detoured as we faced clouds of tear gas in every street we turned down. In the end we had to give up on joining the demonstration and made for our accommodation instead. We walked past a police station with a massive crowd outside shouting “assassini!” but were unaware of what had happened.
<div class="column_width_image article_inline_image"><img alt="A mural in Genoa of murdered anarchist Carlo Giuliani" class="article-body" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/murales_carlo_%20giuliani-2.jpg" /></div>
<div class="article_inline_caption">A mural in Genoa of murdered anarchist Carlo Giuliani</div>
We couldn’t find where we were staying and ended up sleeping in a park with dozens of other activists and woke the next day to find Italian comrades reading the papers and explaining what happened. The Carabinieri had deliberately driven into crowds of protesters. Some, like Carlo Giuliani, fought back, and it was then that he was shot by an officer pointing his gun through the back window of a jeep. Moments later, as Giuliani lay flat on the street—a pool of blood spreading out from around his head—the jeep reversed directly over his body. It was a cold-blooded murder.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and the other heads of state in town for the G8 summit backed the police. They hoped, no doubt, that the threat of further deadly state violence against activists would deter those planning to mobilise for the main protest the next day. It had the opposite effect. Despite understanding that the march would very likely be violently attacked and that, given what had happened to Giuliani, they were taking their lives in their hands, 300,000 people turned out. The hatred of the corrupt Berlusconi government, and of the leaders of the world’s major powers who had gathered in Genoa, ran deep and wide.
<div class="column_width_image article_inline_image"><img alt="300,000 people march through Genoa on Saturday 21 July 2001 PHOTO: Getty Images" class="article-body" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/3.jpg" /></div>
<div class="article_inline_caption">300,000 people march through Genoa on Saturday 21 July 2001 PHOTO: Getty Images</div>
In a show of defiance that I love thinking back on, the people of Genoa hung out their laundry in the days during the summit to spite an explicit directive from Berlusconi not to do so. This was their subtle way of sticking two fingers up to one of the most hated politicians in Italy who had open fascists in his government. Some of those who didn’t join the demonstration stood on their balconies raising fists in solidarity, hung supportive banners from their windows, or threw buckets of cold water on protesters to cool us down in the intense summer heat.
<div class="column_width_image article_inline_image"><img alt="PHOTO: Han Soete (Flickr)" class="article-body" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/4.jpg" /></div>
<div class="article_inline_caption">PHOTO: Han Soete (Flickr)</div>
The march was an act of mass resistance that that shook Europe and the world. On that day, in those hours, as hundreds of thousands of us marched through the streets, the usually more subtle and hidden power dynamics of capitalism were clear for all to see. On our side were workers, the poor and oppressed, standing for a better world. On the other side—behind the lines of heavily armed police and the four metre high steel barricades—was a gathering of the world’s most powerful people, intent on defending the neoliberal status quo and the immense wealth and privilege it had brought them and those they serve.
Our defiance wouldn’t go unpunished. The march was savagely attacked. Police launched themselves at demonstrators, truncheons flying. Some protesters, desperate to escape the violence, climbed trees. Those who fell to the ground were set upon by swarms of police. Many were hospitalised, but, fortunately, there were no more deaths.
<div class="column_width_image article_inline_image"><img alt="Police charge protesters during the main march PHOTO: Getty Images" class="article-body" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/6.jpg" /></div>
<div class="article_inline_caption">Police charge protesters during the main march PHOTO: Getty Images</div>
The violence, however, wasn’t over. Later that night, the police escalated again, viciously attacking the headquarters of the Genoa Social Forum (GSF), a coalition of activist groups that was using a local school as a convergence and media centre, and as accommodation for protesters. It was where my comrades and I were supposed to have stayed the night before. On Saturday night, while we were on the train back to London, a group of 200 Carabinieri stormed the school and bashed anyone they could get their hands on. Ninety-three people were arrested (including some of our comrades), with many having to be carried out of the building on stretchers.
It was a place of sheer terror. One witness—Markus, a 25 year old social worker from Germany—<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/jul/23/globalisation.johnvidal">told the Guardian</a>: “They [the police] burst into the room wearing black masks, [and] started throwing things at us ... Five of us rushed upstairs and climbed out of a window and then down a drainpipe. But the police were there. They told us to lie on the ground and then they started beating us with truncheons and kicking. Three of them beat me for two, perhaps three, minutes. I thought they were going to kill us. Two of my friends were very badly hurt in the head. There was blood everywhere.”
<div class="column_width_image article_inline_image"><img alt="A photo taken inside a school used by the Genoa Social Forum during the police raid" class="article-body" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/7.jpeg" /></div>
A photo taken inside a school used by the Genoa Social Forum during the police raid
The violence, however, couldn’t quash the spirit of solidarity and resistance that emerged from Genoa. That spirit continued into the following weeks, months, and years: in the campaign to free the activists who had been arrested in the raid on the GSF, and in the anti-war movement that was built following the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington that provided the pretext for the US and its allies to launch the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. 
The intervention of revolutionary socialists was crucial to all this. There were people in the anti-capitalist movement who—because of their politics—didn’t know what to do with themselves after 9/11.
Some thought it disrespectful to keep attacking capitalism when the US had been attacked—for them anti-capitalism became anti-Americanism. This was a reflection of a politics that didn’t understand that capitalism is a total system (in which, for example, the drive to war goes hand in hand with the kind of corporate globalisation the movement opposed) and not just an economic one. 
Many, particularly those in the movement with various brands of autonomist politics, thought globalisation meant the nation state was no longer important, and that it was multinational corporations, rather than states, that were the main enemy. These currents were disoriented by the rapid shift to a situation in which the power and violence of nation states became the central question of the day.
For revolutionaries it was clear that opposing the so-called “war on terror” was essential to building on the spirit of anti-capitalist resistance shown in the period from the “Battle of Seattle” to the Genoa G8 summit a year and a half later. The first European Social Forum (ESF)—held in Florence in November 2002—provided an opportunity to wage the argument that you can’t separate capitalism from war. This intervention was successful. The ESF concluded with a million-strong anti-war march, and made a call for an international day of protest against the threatened invasion of Iraq on 15 February 2003, which was to be the biggest global mobilisation against war in history.
So long as capitalism exists it will generate moments of inspiring resistance like we saw in Genoa. The question is: how can these moments be turned into something that can actually pose a challenge to the entire order of capitalism? How can we go from saying (as one of the main slogans of the anti-capitalist movement put it) “another world is possible”, to actually building one?
Then, as today, Marxism provided a framework for understanding the destructive dynamics of capitalism and the most effective means of opposing it. It was by grounding ourselves in this framework that we, as revolutionary socialists, could make the connection between opposing corporate globalisation and opposing war. And it also allowed us to see—in contrast to many anarchists and autonomists who were active in the anti-capitalist movement—the importance of centring the working class within those struggles, and of building revolutionary organisations that can play a role in leading them.
Faced with merely spontaneous, unorganised resistance, the ruling class may be put off balance for a moment, but—as we saw in Genoa—they have ample means for finding their feet again and forcefully restoring capitalist “law and order”. Faced with the organised resistance of revolutionary workers, it would be a very different story. The challenge for socialists today remains to involve ourselves in every manifestation of resistance to capitalism, however small, and to win as many people as possible to the project of building such a force. The fate of the world—threatened, since 2001, with multiplying and deepening crises whether economic, environmental, or social—depends on it.

Police terror and mass resistance: the Genoa G8 summit 20 years on

If you are the big tree, 
we are the small axe, 
sharpened to cut you down, 
ready to cut you down. 
– Bob Marley
Small Axe, a series of five films from Oscar-winning director Steve McQueen (whose other films include 12 Years a Slave and Hunger), is a powerful representation of the lives of Black people in Britain from the 1960s to the 1980s. It is a story both of everyday racism and police intimidation, and the institutional racism of the courts, social services and education system on one side, and on the other, the beauty, joy and solidarity of community and resistance.
2021 is the 40th anniversary of the 1981 Brixton riots—an uprising provoked by police harassment and alienation amid a deep recession—and these films show how the current period of race relations in the UK is firmly rooted in that history. From the continuity in the way Black communities are policed to the construction of Grenfell Tower in the background (albeit with some dramatic licence with the dates), the London of today is very much present in this collection.
My parents, both from Jamaica, came of age in the Britain of the ’70s and ’80s, and in many ways, this series of films depicts their lives. Both were activists around the British Black Panther Party who were schooled early in the notion that the police were always the enemy, and both fought tooth and nail to get a decent education for their kids when the system was failing them.
The films put the racist culture of Britain at the time front and centre. This is portrayed in all its multifaceted reality—from the micro scale of offhand remarks about “not being able to see you lot in the dark” to the macro of violence from the state. The racism of police, teachers, judges and schoolchildren is shown in all its horror, but the moments of beauty and joy are not skipped over either. The camera often lingers on the faces of people simply enjoying themselves in their community—displaying a sense of camaraderie and social solidarity that has been somewhat eclipsed in the decades since by the onslaught of neoliberalism.
This is on show especially in the second of the five films, Lovers Rock, which depicts one night at a blues party. It begins with setting up the house, moving furniture around, cooking the food and bringing in the sound system. We then see people pay their 50 pence entry to dance happily and sing along to the tunes being played. There is a beautiful moment when a record of Janet Kay’s “Silly Games” cuts out and the dancers packed into the living room spontaneously start singing like a makeshift a cappella choir.
Despite all the joy inside the house, the threat of racist violence is never far away. A young woman (played by Amarah-Jae St Aubyn) goes after her friend who has left the party early, but she is forced to give up the chase when she comes across a group of white boys who start making ape noises at her. Elsewhere in the film, the same young woman’s cousin arrives at the house, and we see a police car pull up outside, just watching and waiting.
The way capitalism has created the idea that Blackness equals criminality is a constant theme in these films. Just to come together, to eat, dance and protest against racism is to be seen as an agitator, a troublemaker, someone to be suspicious of, so there is rebellion inherent in the participation in and celebration of those things.
The reason why they are having parties in people’s homes becomes clear: they have been forced to by being denied entry to the mainstream clubs and bars of London due to racism and poverty. They are driven by racism to create their own space, away from the interference of white society. The film depicts these parties as a profound experience, almost like a religious event. Those attending are overcome by the music, and some dance as if they have been possessed by the Holy Spirit. They revere the DJs and the MCs as if they were gods.
The third film in the series, Red, White and Blue, tells the story of Leroy Logan, who joined London’s Metropolitan Police Force in 1983 after his father was bashed by police and hospitalised. This reflected a current of thought that emerged after the 1981 riots, which believed the only way to change institutions like the police was to join them and change them from the inside.
It is the weakest of the five films, despite a brilliant performance from John Boyega in the lead role. It goes some way to show the limits of one man’s ability to change a state institution like the police, especially when confronted by the racism of his fellow and superior officers alike, as well as the strong feelings of betrayal from his community. But McQueen’s depiction doesn’t go far enough. It doesn’t reflect the reality that over the intervening decades, the increase in representation of minorities in the police has been tiny, and their presence hasn’t changed the institutionalised racism of the police one bit. Nevertheless, it is an important inclusion in the story of the time, as this reformist kind of identity politics was, and remains, a powerful strand of thought about how racism can be challenged.
The remaining three films, Mangrove, Alex Wheatle and Education, hold the most interest for left-wing people. Mangrove tells the story of the “Mangrove Nine”—nine black people from west London, connected to the Mangrove Caribbean restaurant. The Mangrove had become a home away from home for many in the local West Indian community, and for that it was subject to constant scrutiny and regular attack from the cops. The decision to organise a protest against this harassment was made because—in the words of one of the Mangrove Nine, Black intellectual Darcus Howe (played by Malachi Kirby)—they realised the futility of “complaining to police about police, complaining to magistrates about magistrates, complaining to judges about judges”.
After the protest, the Nine were charged with incitement to riot, affray and assaulting police. According to historian Paul Field, the decision of Howe and British Black Panther leader Altheia Jones-Lecointe (played by the wonderful Letitia Wright) to represent themselves in court was an important one, because it allowed them to have a say in jury selection. Specifically, it enabled them to push for more working-class whites on the jury—which they thought could help, not because they would necessarily be anti-racists (only a few years earlier a group of east London dock workers had marched in support of Enoch Powell and his racist “Rivers of Blood” speech), but because they would be more likely to have experienced arbitrary police brutality.
Howe recognised that the outcome of the trial—the Mangrove Nine’s acquittal—was a victory for working-class unity. He declared, “Racism as a basis for the division of the British working class had taken a beating, particularly since our defence was based on the fact that the police were liars and should not be believed”.
Judge Edward Clarke’s closing comments included the first judicial acknowledgement of racism in the police in the statement “there is clearly evidence of racial hatred on both sides”. In the late 1990s, the McPherson report, which examined the police response to the murder of Black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993, further reinforced the conclusion that the Metropolitan Police was institutionally racist.
In the years since, however, the police have pushed back against this. In the wake of the massive protests in London and elsewhere in the UK as part of the global Black Lives Matter movement in mid-2020, Cressida Dick, the current commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in London, said the term “institutionally racist” was “unhelpful”. The continuing reality of racist policing in the UK today demonstrates the structural inability of an institution designed to perpetuate oppression to root it out from its own ranks.
The institutionalised racism of the education system is another topic covered. In Education, 11-year-old Kingsley (exquisitely played by Kenyah Sandy) is kicked out of his mainstream school and sent to a “special school”, as his Mum is told. In reality, it is a school for the “educationally subnormal” (ESN), and it is filled with Black and white working-class children—some with learning difficulties and other special educational needs, some with behaviour issues—all of whom had been left behind by mainstream education. 
Grenadian activist and author Bernard Coard wrote a book in 1971, How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-normal in the British School System, which demonstrated the connection between the institutional racism of the education system and the poor performance of Black children in both mainstream and ESN schools. McQueen was himself educated in a mixed comprehensive school (equivalent to an Australian co-ed government school), but even there he and his mates knew they weren’t getting a good education—both Black and white working-class kids were being ignored. “Even though we were from different backgrounds and races ... we all knew we were being fucked over”, McQueen said in a recent interview with the Guardian.
In Education, Kingsley is humiliated by teachers for not being able to read aloud in class. After this, he becomes increasingly disruptive, reflecting the fact that, as one parent puts it in an activist meeting, “If a teacher think a child stupid, he start to act stupid”. Children in ESN schools were left to rot on the scrap heap, with serious consequences for their future prospects in life. It meant being able to work only in lower paid, menial jobs, which meant being able to afford only substandard housing, and the same fate being dealt to their children, and the cycle continuing.
Encouraged to go to a supplementary school (also known as Saturday school) run by Black community activists, Kingsley discovers he’s not stupid after all—he simply hasn’t been taught in a way that suits his needs. In a powerful closing scene, Kingsley rushes down to the dinner table to read proudly from a book on the kings and queens of Africa. He has been supported, encouraged and given a topic that has relevance to his life. It is an indictment of the intrinsic racism in the British education system that thousands of families from Black and Asian backgrounds still find it necessary to fund such schools today.
Education was the most moving of the five films for me—Kingsley could have been my brother, his mum could have been my mum. In 2005 a campaign I was involved in raised money from trade unions to reprint Coard’s book in a collection of essays called Tell it Like it is: How Our Schools Fail Black Children, published by Bookmarks. The book included chapters from academics, teachers, parents and students, who explained how the education system is still failing Black and working-class children, and explored different approaches to anti-racist education. The book and campaign were so popular that a second edition was printed two years later.
Education’s celebration of the collective struggle by everyday people, guided by their reading of Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James and others, is a powerful thread running through the entire anthology. The story of Alex Wheatle also draws this out explicitly.
Abandoned by his parents, abused in the care system and humiliated by racist students and teachers at school, Alex’s rage is writ large across Sheyi Cole’s face in the title role. Alex is angry at the world, but also naive. After leaving care, he learns the hard way that the police are not “there to help you”, as he once believed. He gets picked up by the cops and is left in the middle of nowhere, as they laugh about his long walk home. I’ve recently been re-watching The Wire, in which the cops in Baltimore do the same thing—just because they can. Alex’s soft Surrey vowels turn into strong West Indian patois as he learns how to be Black in Brixton.
A major turning point, for both Alex personally and British race relations in general, was the New Cross house fire in January 1981. The early morning blaze killed 13 young people aged between 14 and 22 who were celebrating a birthday. In a turn of events that surprised no-one, the police wouldn’t seriously investigate the theory that members of the far-right National Front, who were active in the area at the time, may have fire-bombed the house.
A march of 20,000 people was held a few months later, and the police inaction was a contributing factor to the Brixton riots that broke out in April that year. There’s a beautiful interlude in the film in which Linton Kwesi Johnson reads his poem “New Crass Massakah” over images of the fire and the march. For Alex, it is a political awakening. He has an interest in music and writes the following lyrics:
<blockquote>Uprising 
There’s an Uprising 
There ain’t no work 
And we haven’t a shilling 
We can’t take no more of this suffering 
So we gonna riot inna Brixton
</blockquote>
In 1978, then Tory opposition leader Margaret Thatcher, who was in campaign mode for the 1979 general election, had said “People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture”. This kind of rhetoric had direct consequences for the Black community. It’s no coincidence that a major police operation that helped fuel the anger that sparked the Brixton riots was called “Operation Swamp”.
Alex is sent to prison for four months for his involvement in the riots, and his cell mate gives him a copy of C.L.R. James’s classic The Black Jacobins. Like Kingsley, Alex’s eyes are opened to a different representation of Black people, one centred on cultures of resistance. “Up to then”, he says, “I’d only seen Black people as victims or subservient”.
Some commentators have said that the films don’t focus on politics in a direct way. But this is to misunderstand politics as being divorced from the everyday realities of race and class. Watching as a Marxist, the politics are right there front and centre—for example, in the criminalisation of Black and working-class communities, the exclusionary nature of the education system and the lack of police action after attacks by the far right. To be Black and working-class in Britain (as in Australia) is to be political, every day of your life.
McQueen’s triumph in these films is to show how beautiful and joyful the politics of rebellion—the sharp, small axe of Black British life and struggle—really is. And, ultimately, the films call on us to re-embrace these politics to challenge racism in Britain (and by extension, the rest of the world) today.
For socialists, this means not only understanding the deeply rooted reality of racism, but also building a movement that can fight to dismantle the power structures that maintain it. It means, as a start, understanding that the ruling class use racism to divide workers, and that a culture of anti-racist solidarity is necessary to unite the working class in struggle against them. Only through such unity of action can we hope to win a society that is run in our collective interests.
Instead of continuing to try to make racists see the error of their ways with charm and reasoned argument, instead of trying to work your way to the top of society, instead of trying to tinker with the systems which we are told over and over again are institutionally racist, the anti-racist majority need to unite and fight to get rid altogether of the capitalist system that breeds racism.

Allyship or solidarity?

Shakespeare and Marxism

Capitalism and coercive control

Every COVID-19 death is a preventable tragedy

Police terror and mass resistance: the Genoa G8 summit 20 years on

Steve McQueen’s Small Axe: exposing racism, celebrating resistance

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