ABOUT 1.75 million black people live in Britain today. The vast majority either settled in Britain during the post-war period, or are descendants of those who did. changed the political face of Britain, and that process is continuing.
Treated as second class, citizens, people suffer oppression which is met with indifference and even condoned by the labour movement and its racist leaders.
When resisting the racists, black people have been forced to act independently of the TO SAY how a united black liberation movement can be built in this country, we must first know what sort of movement we are trying to build. It must be independent black liberation movement.
Independent independent of the state, for it is the imperialist British state which ensures that black people remain second class citizens.
Everywhere black people turn they meet from politicians, state officials, employers, trade union officials, from ordinary working class people at work and on the streets.
But racist ideology - the ideology which holds black and non-white peoples to be 'naturally inferior' to the white races — cannot simply be deteated through argument education, because it has material roots.
From its earliest days, the British capitalist class embraced racism. The early slave trade and the super-exploitation of slave labour in The American colomes provided capital for early industrial expansion in Britain.
This bloody trade in human beings was justified on the grounds that the African peoples were 'sub-human'.
ica and Asia, aires or the violent Africa and Ane British embrace of the Empire, brusn capitansmn win cheap labour and raw materials. It was justified by notions of the mother country civilsing unese chua-nke people living in the dark ages.
Divisions Today the racists use identical arguments to justify Britain's imperialist role in Zimbabwe. They claim that the people of Zimbabwe 'need" the white settler minority.
Not only did racism serve to divide white British workers from the peoples of the colonial world, it also served to create divisions in the British working class itself.
The supel-pronts achieved by exploitation of the third world enabled the most organised and skilled workers lo considerable concessions from the capitalist class.
These workers began to see their future prosperity as oeing assured by continuing dominance as an imperialist power, cherishing their privileges against the unskilled They have black an First, and violent furnished win and unorganised sections of the working class in Britain.
Britain's Since the Second World War, racism has again well served the capitalist class; this time on British soil. In the 1950s and '60s, cheap labour movement, relying only on themselves to begin their struggle for liberation.
Unlike large sections of the white working class, who have wrongly come to see their interests as lying in the continued prosperity of Britain as an imperialist nation, the black people living here strongly identify with the march of the third world against imperialism.
That is why no socialist can afford to ignore the struggles of black people decisive force for internationalism within the working class and will play a major role in expanding social services.
place, the - they are a in Britain. labour was required in the clothing metal production, and food industries, as well as the The availability of one traditional section of the reserve army of labour - women - breaking the hold of racism and national chauvinism among the white working class At its conference which has just taken Marxist Group discussed how this new situation in British politics needs to be incorporated into our strategy for socialist revolution in Britain. On the following three pages we examine the major task which the IMG is setting itself in the course of elaborating that strategy - aiding in the building of a united black liberation movement declined as white-collar employment rose and rationalised production involved shift overtime working, providing jobs for women Continued overleaf Socialist Challenge,, 21 February 1980 Page 7