Racism and Black Self-Organisation

JVL Introduction

The recent suspension of Diane Abbott from the Parliamentary Labour Party has raised a number of important political issues within the Labour Party and the left. JVL’s response was published on the website, but the debate continues.

Here Anita Patel, an anti-racist activist in South London since the early 1980s, emphasises the need for self-organisation of oppressed groups, looking in particular at the history of Black Sections in the Labour Party.

Arguing that self-organisation is an essential part of class struggle, she defends it against the charge of “identity politics”, leveled against it by some on the left whom she calls to account.

Racism and Black Self-Organisation:

Diane Abbott, the Letter, and the Failure of the Left in Britain

Anita Patel, 3rd May 2023

Diane Abbott’s brief two-paragraph letter to the Observer, retracted almost as soon as it had appeared, has provoked a swathe of condemnations. There is no doubt that the letter was confused, and clumsily worded, but it seems to me that the intensity of some of the re-actions (particularly from the socialist left) belies some deeper political issues that I’d like to explore.

The response from Starmer and from Labour’s witch-hunters has been surprisingly tame and muted, with Starmer going so far as to acknowledge the severe racism that Abbott has endured. The arch-Blairite John McTernan (something of a weathervane for the Party) has called (in the Spectator, of all rags) for us to forgive and forget. You have to ask to what are these establishment stooges responding? Is there a quiet black members’ revolt in the ranks of the party? Has the leadership decided that they need the black votes?

Momentum’s response is as treacherous as we’ve grown to expect, simply calling for her apology to be accepted, with Owen Jones jumping on his ‘faux outrage’ bandwagon, characterising the letter as “nauseating”, and saying that Abbott was “grandstanding” and “needs to understand”.

It is the socialist left’s response that I want to address here, though. Most of the socialist papers in Britain have expressed solidarity with Abbott against Starmer and his witch-hunt, and against Starmer’s racist, misogynist and authoritarian agenda. Some to their credit have highlighted Abbott’s history of fighting racism. Others, however, seem to have rediscovered their voices with a newfound confidence in condemning “identity politics”, as they round on Abbott in surprisingly moralistic, vitriolic and censorious terms. One article in the Weekly Worker takes this position to an extreme and is one of the most disgraceful pieces of writing on racism that I’ve seen in my lifetime as a black activist in the labour movement[i]. It is almost as though it had been written as some sort of left cover for “All Lives Matter” and reads like an appeal to the most reactionary elements of our class.

That there might be any appeal for such ideas in our movement is a reflection of the failure of the left, and of the changing nature of the Party’s membership, particularly in London. 40% of teenage children in Camden now attend private schools[ii]. Droves of working-class voters all over the country have peeled away from the Labour Party. It should be no surprise that this is reflected in the personnel and politics of our Party. The largest mobilisation of people in Europe into the political arena behind Corbyn’s leadership could have been turned into an organised fighting force not just against the right within the Party, but on the streets and in the community against the Tories and their policies. Instead, it was dissipated into little more than electoral machine for internal Party positions. The resultant demoralisation had set in long before the 2019 election. Meanwhile Labour Councils have become the authors of class cleansing and gentrification in London and elsewhere, covering their tracks with low-cost ‘green’ radicalism whilst making severe cuts and abandoning any notion of fighting the Tories. To ignore this shift and fail to assess its implications, and to instead scapegoat so-called “identity politics”, is plain ignorant. The concept of “identity politics” (which, interestingly, never gets clearly defined) appears to me to be used in an attempt to ride the reactionary wave of anti-‘woke’ politics.

Diane Abbott was a founding member of Black Sections in the Labour Party in the ‘80s, and its formation was a hugely significant political achievement. It was a reflection of the fightback the black community had had to organise to defend itself against racist attacks: from fascists on the streets, from the state, in the workplace, in the Party and in the unions. The Imperial Typewriters dispute, the Bradford 12, the Newham 8, the Brixton riot, Grunwick, and the New Cross fire, to name but a few. It was a reflection of the need for black activists to find a political voice. I’ve no idea whether those who simplistically advocate ‘black and white, unite and fight’ have any understanding of the racism faced by black people in the labour movement.

There are two features in this discourse I’d urge people to keep in mind:

1. Black Sections was formed on the basis that “black” is a political term, uniting people around a shared experience of racism, and their shared understanding both of their class and their need to fight for their place within the labour movement. I cannot emphasise enough the importance of that last point.
2. Black Sections demanded a constitutional arrangement within the Party which would subject Black Sections to the same democratic structures as Women’s Sections: democratic processes that create accountability to all black members within the Sections, and to the rest of the Party.

Black Sections proved to be a powerful vehicle for self-organisation that transformed the consciousness of the labour movement around racism. It gave confidence to the black community and brought their struggles into the Party. As in any movement, some of its leaders went off to look for their parliamentary seats and their careers. For all socialists in the Party, the fight for democracy and accountability is key, and this was no less true in Black Sections. Black Sections were closed down as part of Blair’s attacks on democracy within the Party as a whole and turned into the unaccountable manipulations of “BAME representation”. The decision to turn ‘black’ into ‘BAME’ was itself a divide-and-rule tactic, elevating cultural differences (between Asians, Africans, West Indians etc) above a shared experience of racism.

Do I wish that the black MPs had fought harder for Black Sections and accountability? Yes, of course I do. Just as I wish that Corbyn hadn’t caved in over mandatory re-selection of MPs. I’ve yet to see condemnations of Corbyn using the same kind of judgemental, vitriolic and censorious language that has been thrown against Abbott this last week.

It appears that there is a fundamental opposition from many on the Marxist left to self-organisation of people around their oppression, because that is in some sense seen by them to be what causes divisions in the class. There is no doubt that racism is one of the most important tools by which the capitalist and imperialist class divide workers and wage class war. They are astonishingly flexible and adept in how they use that tool. It is material that the British state is not, right now, using antisemitism to attack Jewish people (unlike in Hungary, for instance). Instead, the full weight of the state and its institutions is being brought to bear, for instance, on black youth and on Muslims. This too is material. We saw how effective and fast-moving the state can be in its deployment of racism with the whipping up of Islamophobia as a cover for the abject failure of the Iraq war. The state has powerful and sophisticated tools by which to disseminate divisive racist ideas and to influence the consciousness of the class. These divisions and oppressions are perpetuated in the service of capital across the whole of society, including in our labour movement. They are deep-rooted, and actively nurtured and reinforced by the state at every point. These divisions are not created as a result of black self-organisation!

Even the most cursory glance at history shows that it is precisely when people organise around their oppression that they are rapidly able to change the consciousness of the class of which they’re part. The fact that the leadership of these movements often turn out to be next to useless and that the ruling class and the bureaucracy try to buy them off, is not a reason to oppose self-organisation nor to tar it with the “identity politics” brush. It is the same struggle that our best militants always face, across the labour movement wherever they might be active: to fight for democracy, accountability and free speech, at the same time as working towards the end goal of changing the system.

Indeed, self-organised fightbacks against oppression are an intrinsic part of the class struggle, not some kind of self-indulgent add-on. And we should never underestimate the educational impact across our class of self-organised groups, and the insight we gain from each other about the shape of our own exploitation and the nature of the capitalist economic system.

Paper-sellers shouting instructions, keyboard warriors typing furiously, and anti-racist fronts set up as recruitment conduits to sects will never on their own change the consciousness of the class and its best leaders, nor embed the theoretical framework in militant activists that they need to fight effectively.

It is no accident that JVL, a self-organised group of Jewish socialists formed to fight the witch-hunt in the Labour Party, has put out a reflective statement in response to Abbott’s letter that is both useful and insightful. Useful, because it sought to open the door to a nuanced and genuine debate with black activists in the Party and outside. Insightful, because it allows us to address the confusion, bafflement and anger amongst black Party members and beyond as they watch the British state and the Tories, along with shameless Starmer, vilifying refugees, the Muslim community and black youth, whilst simultaneously sitting on their hypocritical high-horse about antisemitism.

Such a discussion might allow us to explore how the weaponisation of antisemitism has impacted the anti-racist movement in the UK. It could have contributed to an understanding of how Abbott’s garbled wording was perhaps a reflection of her own political contradictions. We could be having a discussion about how it was no accident that in the witch-hunt two of the first ordinary members of the Party to be burnt at the stake were black, and how the Socialist Campaign Group’s collective policy of appeasing the right and keeping their heads down might explain Abbott’s failure to publicly defend Marc Wadsworth (a co-founding member of Black Sections) and Jackie Walker. We could be looking at how, despite her history, when she had the opportunity as Shadow Home Secretary to seriously challenge the racist narratives around immigration, refugees, crime and gangs, Abbott simply called for more police officers. There are serious lessons to be drawn by black activists from the Corbyn project, and from Abbott’s role in it, but that can only happen with debate and discussion.

Instead, we have seen people giving themselves a blank cheque in virtue of their Marxism to indulge in a self-serving pile-on against Abbott, effectively reducing the political space for debate even further. This is exactly where the simplistic and context-less “black and white, unite and fight” line leads to: berating black activists for daring to raise their demands; holding them all accountable for the failures of their leadership; and accusing the most vulnerable sections of the class of causing divisions and weakening the class struggle.

[i]‘Race, prejudice and stupidity, Kevin Bean, The Weekly Worker, 27th April 2023

[ii] Disappearing schools, families forced out – and we call this progress, Aditya Chakrabortty, The Guardian, 13^th April 2023