Racial unrest between whites and black immigrants flared this week in the southern Italian town of Rosarno. Reuters reports that the violence began when several African immigrants were assaulted by white youth wielding air rifles; these African workers responded by rioting, which led to further confrontations with white residents. The state’s reaction has been to destroy the immigrants’ hovels (some of which were nothing more than abandoned factories with no water or electricity) and to remove them to immigration centers across Italy.
Predictably, some factions of the ruling class have responded by calling for even more oppression and ostracism — “Jobs for Italians!” — while the left, naturally, is preaching some kind of feel-good unity. Both have the effect of dividing the working class and mystifying the causes of this division. The right says it’s human nature, the left says it’s ignorance. Both ignore that it’s manufactured by the bourgeoisie and the capitalist system of competition.
Only through struggle and the concurrent development of its consciousness can the proletariat discover that its unity as an exploited class is more important than all the other divisions one could invent; as Pannekoek said, the proletariat is not weak because it is divided, it is divided because it is weak.
In the course of this development, the proletariat will necessarily also discover that the bourgeoisie is merciless in its machinations.
As an example of this kind of development in consciousness, look at the case of C. P. Ellis. Ellis was an alienated working-class white who joined the Ku Klux Klan because it offered a sense of community and importance. As a Klansman, he rubbed elbows with local politicos in fighting the emerging Civil Rights movement. But before long he saw the real nature of this alliance:
One day I was walkin’ downtown and a certain city council member saw me comin’. I expected him to shake my hand because he was talking to me at night on the telephone. I had been in his home and visited with him. He crossed the street. Oh shit, I began to think, somethin’s wrong here. Most of ‘em are merchants or maybe an attorney, an insurance agent, people like that. As long as they kept low-income whites and low-income blacks fightin’, they’re gonna maintain control.
…
I’d go home at night and I’d have to wrestle with myself. I’d look at a black person walkin’ down the street, and the guy’d have ragged shoes or his clothes would be worn. That began to do somethin’ to me inside. I went through this for about six months. I felt I just had to get out of the Klan.
This was a realization cemented by some workplace struggles Ellis was later involved in, where he came to see that people were “again bein’ used. Blacks against whites. I say this without any hesitancy: management is vicious. There’s two things they want to keep: all the money and all the say-so.” (Source for C. P. Ellis quotes).
We also have to realize that relentless shuffling of humans by capital in its quest for cheap labor undermines or confronts traditional cultures in Europe. This is a legitimate concern, to an extent. But at the same time, European capital and capitalists have long undermined and destroyed cultures in the rest of the world. For that matter, European cultures are being undermined by other European cultures — just take a look at the list of endangered European languages. (One could easily argue that African immigrants are less of a threat to the dominant Italian culture than the dominant Italian culture is to the cultures of other linguistic groups living in Italy.)
Defending cultural variety does not mean endorsing racist violence and nationalist extremism. Not only are those methods and ideas abhorrent, they cannot defeat the homogenizing tendencies of capitalism (since they reinforce capitalism). The brilliant English communist William Morris wrote a splendid novel called News from Nowhere in which a Rip Van Winkle-like newcomer is guided through a future socialist society. Morris uses the protagonist’s endless questions asked of his guides to tackle a number of questions, one of which is whether national variety is obliterated in a communist society:
Said I: “How about your relations with foreign nations?”
“I will not affect not to know what you mean,” said he, “but I will tell you at once that the whole system of rival and contending nations which played so great a part in the ‘government’ of the world of civilisation has disappeared along with the inequality betwixt man and man in society.”
“Does not that make the world duller?” said I.
“Why?” said the old man.
“The obliteration of national variety,” said I.
“Nonsense,” he said, somewhat snappishly. “Cross the water and see. You will find plenty of variety: the landscape, the building, the diet, the amusements, all various. The men and women varying in looks as well as in habits of thought; the costume far more various than in the commercial period. How should it add to the variety or dispel the dulness, to coerce certain families or tribes, often heterogeneous and jarring with one another, into certain artificial and mechanical groups, and call them nations, and stimulate their patriotism—i.e., their foolish and envious prejudices?”
“Well—I don’t know how,” said I.
“That’s right,” said Hammond cheerily; “you can easily understand that now we are freed from this folly it is obvious to us that by means of this very diversity the different strains of blood in the world can be serviceable and pleasant to each other, without in the least wanting to rob each other: we are all bent on the same enterprise, making the most of our lives. And I must tell you whatever quarrels or misunderstandings arise, they very seldom take place between people of different race; and consequently since there is less unreason in them, they are the more readily appeased.”
Something to reflect on.
Edited To Add: The Internationalist Communist Tendency has put up a good article on the strife in Rosarno.
