Ugandan Asians arriving in Britain after being expelled by Idi Amin. The Marxist tradition has more to say about racism than just “divide and rule” of the poor and workers
Rachel Shabi is a strong supporter of the “Corbyn project” and makes many interventions defending it from right wing critics. But I found this well intentioned piece aiming to do that unnecessarily defensive, mistaken and detached from the social reality on both sides of the Atlantic.
That is of anti-Muslim racism being both most prevalent and the leading edge of other racist ideologies and practices, including anti-semitism, driven as it is primarily from the far right.
It runs with an idea, popularised on parts of the left by the Canadian critic Moishe Postone among others, that anti-semitism has a uniqueness as a form of racism in that it is directed at those (falsely) assumed to be powerful as opposed to the inferior “black” targets of other racisms.
Thus, says Shabi, the left has a blindspot to this kind of racism compared with other forms directed “downwards” at the supposedly powerless, less civilised and in wont of guidance or, possibly, racialised exclusion. The kind of racism often directed at Black or Asian immigrants.
This is an old line of argument going back decades. It has its origins in zionist ideologues claiming that anti-semitism is not only trivially unique – in the sense that all racisms (all phenomena) are literally unique – but that it is radically unique, an “ancient hatred” (Shabi) or “the longest hatred” (see titles of many books and articles over the last 50 years).
There are several problems with this.
First, it effaces the actual radical difference between the modern, racialised anti-semitism that was forged in the 19th century using the pseudo-science of race – arising out of that foundational event of modern capitalism, the transatlantic slave trade – with earlier, medieval reactionary ideas and superstition.
Of course, one drew on the other and ideas morphed in the early modern period up to the birth of industrial capitalism proper. But there was a decisive transformation into a modern racist ideology and not an “ancient” religious superstition. Modern anti-semitism required the ideological apparatus of modern racism.
And that arose from the confluence of capitalism and the enslavement of Black African people, and then the massive expansion of European colonialism, just at the point where pre-modern bans on Jewish participation in public life were being removed in western Europe.
Second, it does not pay attention to the other side of anti-semitic ideology in addition to the conspiracy about a powerful and hidden elite manipulating the modern world of finance on a global scale. And that side is simple, dehumanising, animalistic imagery that has also been (and remains) directed at racialised immigrants or poor people per se.
Michael Rosen recently drew attention on Twitter to the most notoriously anti-semitic poem in the English language – Thackery’s “The White Squall” in the early Victorian period. Hold your stomach, here’s a stanza:
“Strange company we harbored,
We’d a hundred Jews to larboard,
Unwashed, uncombed, unbarbered—
Jews black, and brown, and gray;
With terror it would seize ye,
And make your souls uneasy,
To see those Rabbis greasy,
Who did naught but scratch and pray:
Their dirty children puking—
Their dirty saucepans cooking—
Their dirty fingers hooking
Their swarming fleas away.”
These kinds of images played large in the Nazi imaginarium in the 1920s against the “Ostjuden” immigrants from the poor villages of the Pale of Settlement alongside bilge about established German, assimilated Jews being secret manipulators of the nation’s finances, its labour movement and its woes.
Third, it is not true that anti-semitism is the only form of racism or ethnic prejudice that has involved claims that the target is actually powerful, not primarily less civilised and inferior (though all racism logically entails some projection of inferiority on the victim).
The racism experienced by Chinese diaspora communities in parts of east Asia, including pogroms (a part of the counter revolutionary terror in Indonesia in 1965-66, for example), held the Chinese as both filthy parasites and as a hidden power. That was via the role of many Chinese families as long distance merchants and therefore money exchangers and the assumption that they, not economic forces, moved events.
The same was true of anti-Asian racism in Malawi, Uganda and Kenya. The South Asian minorities in those countries, where they formed a disproportionate number of traders and petty money lenders, were viciously targeted by those post-independence leaders such as Idi Amin who failed to confront the actual power of the post-colonial imperialist order so lashed out at the Asian minority instead.
They were accused of being essentially “white” and collaborators of the old colonial white master against the Black African. Many East African Asians had to flee. This was a serious racism.
Or take the Mediterranean Greek diaspora in pre-1950s Egypt and the Middle East. They had a high proportion of merchants (of course most were not) and the characteristic of being a local expression of a presumably compact and auto-loyal, “clannish” transnational, transstate “people”.
The Nasser regime in newly independent Egypt turned away from a path of truly radical economic and social transformation to a state-led, capitalist development in alliance with rich and powerful Egyptian families. So it scapegoated the Greek and Jewish minority bourgeois and communities as a whole in an effort at nationalist, sectarian cover. Greek families left Alexandria accused not of being a primitive race but of being a hidden, powerful plot against the Egyptian Arab nation.
There are other examples, such as forms of racialised prejudice and violent eruptions in parts of West Africa by a “Black” majority against a “Black” minority. There is an extensive literature looking at specific examples and, less frequently, making useful comparison.
Whether or not they reference him, many theorists owe a debt to the Belgian Jewish Marxist Abram Leon, who perished in Auschwitz at the age of 36. His The Jewish Question – a marxist interpretation remains pathbreaking in its method and introduction of universal concepts that may account for the particularities of European anti-semitism while also providing a tool for understanding the range of other racisms alluded to above.
Leon uses the concept of a “people-class” to look at how a particular ethnic or religious group might, by dint of a disproportionate role in the pores or interfaces or interstices of a society, come to be racialised through being held to be responsible for the ills of that society, particularly at moments of crisis or in periods of rapid, destabilising change.
There is a broad similarity in the position of the East Asian Chinese, the Middle Eastern Greek, the East African Asian and the European Jew – at different dates and with the anti-semitic construction of “Jews” in Europe being the paradigm, but explicable by universal concepts and the emergence of modern society, capitalism, nonetheless.
We need not take every word of Leon as scripture. There has been lots of research since – though a remarkable amount either confirms or is compatible with his basic scheme.
What is important, I’d say, is to bring these traditions of Marxism, or of serious work that engages with it (even if not acknowledged) to bear in the political and ideological debates today.
Shabi chides the left with having a blind spot over the particular character of anti-semitism. That may be true of either simplistic “divide and rule”, essentially social democratic theories of racism, or of their twin, “privilege theories” of racism. But it is not true of historical materialism or of Marxism.
Judgements of that tradition may be right or wrong and must certainly be held up to intellectual, practical and political scrutiny. But that tradition has taken these matters very seriously. And it has looked at those racisms that serve as a false worldview of the impersonal movement of economic and social forces and as racialisation of people other than the poorest sections of the working class.
For those reasons, the Marxist left can help those trying to defend the Corbyn project by providing stronger arguments, a better theory and, on that basis, being far less defensive.
Kevin Ovenden's Blog 