Following the horrendous knife attacks on a children’s dance class in Southport, riots and arson attacks targeting Muslim living areas and places sheltering migrants have broken out. Undoubtedly they are fuelled by ‘social’ media-driven rumours and calls for ‘revenge’ from capitalism’s organised far right which, truth to tell, is not exactly a marginal element in post-industrial, post-Brexit, run-down Britain.

The insular racist propaganda which led up to Brexit has been supplemented by constant messages of Britain being inundated by people arriving by boat, while mainstream politicians like Suella Braverman (“the Islamists, the extremists and the antisemites are in charge now” – Daily Telegraph) make Enoch Powell look like a perfectly reasonable moderate. Amidst all the talk of sending asylum seekers (portrayed as ‘unwanted scroungers’) to a very well-equipped ‘processing’ camp in Rwanda, the Brexit Party resurrected itself as the Reform Party on the same anti-immigrant platform and gathered 4 million votes in the recent election, many of them in the post-industrial cities of northern England. The situation is a tinderbox which only takes a spark to set it on fire.

For decades now workers’ share of national income has been declining. Now inflation is reducing real wages. Workers face unemployment and under-employment, precarious work with no set time off, collapsing social services, homelessness which affects at least 300,000 people in the country, the NHS in a state of collapse, crumbling school buildings and a stampede of teachers away from an impossible job, etc. Utility companies — notably fuel and water — use our money to speculate on stock exchanges and money markets and rake in colossal dividends for their rich private investors whilst ignoring polluted rivers, infected water and leaking pipes, never mind people who can’t afford to turn the gas on suffering from hypothermia. All this adds up to a situation where 3.12 million people use food banks at least once a week, many of them actually in work but unable to make ends meet. The right wing of the capitalist class, like the remnants of the EDL, pretends all these things are just caused by immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers and Muslims. Identity politics is the name of their game.

This was the fuel used by ‘social media’ to stoke the flames

The capitalist class as a whole is looking to lower wages. In 2023 national statistics showed 685,000 immigrants came to the UK, more than double the number for 2016, the year of the Brexit referendum, when the figure was 311,000. This increase is despite all the rhetoric to the contrary. Cameron, for example, pledged in 2010 when net migration was 252,000, to get immigration down to the “tens of thousands, no ifs, no buts”. As yet this hasn’t happened and bosses here have continued to use migrant workers to do the lousy jobs British workers don’t want to do for rock-bottom wages and in general to keep wages down. Brexit significantly curbed European immigration, causing labour shortages for many British firms and institutions, so cheap labour is now increasingly sought from south-east Asia and elsewhere. Repatriating all immigrants would be a disaster for British capitalism causing whole sectors, not least of which the NHS, to collapse. As it is, visa applications to enter Britain by health and social care workers are now declining, part of a general fall, including a 15% drop in student numbers. However, the capitalist class also want to keep the working class divided and keeping the issue of immigration on the boil is a very simple way of doing this.

In the process it is also a cheap way of disguising the real causes of the present crisis we are all suffering from. Thus, the capitalist left, and the right, carry out a common task, that of exploiting the working class and dividing it.

Capitalism needs to be overthrown

The root of all the problems we face, from the collapsing living standards which contributed to these riots, to the present wars and the climate crisis, is the crisis of capitalism itself ... everywhere. This crisis began way back in the 1970s when the world’s working class faced mounting attacks on their wages, jobs and working conditions. There has been no let-up today, as profit-hungry bosses look to exploit the cheapest labour they can find. Migrant workers have always been used to doing the jobs others don’t want to do and unscrupulous bosses and politicians (that is, the ruling class) have played the race card when it has suited them. Today, though, we are in a dirtier, much nastier ball game, when the living and working conditions, never mind the very cohesion of workers as a class are under attack and it suits those who profit from this rotting system to have the people they exploit turn on each other.

This is not just a problem of bigoted ‘Little Englanders’. All over the world workers are being manipulated to turn on each other as capitalism’s drive for profit fuels worldwide economic crisis, environmental catastrophe and barbaric warfare and colossal inequality of wealth. All this has inevitably led to more migration which ignorant racists and ruthless politicians define as the problem. But the real problem is capitalism and the ruthless sacrifice of everything human and humane for the benefit of an increasingly rich few. There is no need for anyone on the planet to go hungry or to live without the basic necessities of life. The answer is to turn over production to directly meet human needs. Only the overthrow of the capitalist system can achieve this. And only when the working class comes together to face up to their mutual enemy.

This means the world working class has to take political control of society, socialise production on a global scale and redirect production to the needs of humanity. At present our labour produces all the real wealth of society, but it only piles up private fortunes for a handful of capitalists. They, in turn, protect themselves by turning our anger about the social issues away from themselves and their system into battles between native and immigrant workers, including those fleeing the violence of capitalism’s wars. Hence the riots. There is an alternative to the hate and racism of capitalism. This is a society in which everyone is part of a world community of producers without borders, without states, which ensures that no-one is without the basic needs of life – a world where we decide our own futures in our own recallable elected bodies.

The first step is to understand that our real enemies are our exploiters: the capitalist class who profit from the work we do for them. Only the resumption of generalised class struggle against them and their system will create the political basis for the overthrow of their rule. In the process workers need to organise their own struggles (not leaving it to the so-called ‘labour movement’) as well as act politically on their own account. That means a new political organisation: not another party to join in the capitalists’ electoral circus, but a party with a real anti-capitalist programme, the abolition of the wages and profits system in favour of a stateless community without borders where we decide what and how stuff is produced to directly meet human needs. Such a monumental goal cannot be achieved in one country alone. Capitalism is global and exploits a global working class. The CWO is part of the Internationalist Communist Tendency dedicated to building such an unprecedented world party: a party dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism before it destroys most of us. These are the indispensable steps necessary for our emancipation and it is to this that we internationalists are dedicated. If this makes sense get in touch.

Racism won’t be defeated by calls for law and order, but by working together to create a better world for our kids to grow up in. Since capitalism offers us no future we have no choice but to get together to first of all get rid of the present rotten system.

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Image: Hullian111 (CC BY-SA 4.0), en.wikipedia.org