Abstract
Throughout this book, I have constantly invoked Marxism as being more conducive to understanding racism and its relationship to capitalist society than Critical Race Theory; and have defended Marxism against CRT critiques of it. In order to both substantiate my defence of, and indeed, exaltation of the modern Marxist project; in order specifically to argue CRT attempts to render it passé, no longer relevant, racist and oppressive, it is incumbent on me to justify the overall strengths of Marxism as a worldview.
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Notes
- 1.
While, for all progressive people, the British Welfare State was a major achievement (indeed an economic and political consensus was forged which would last until Prime Minister James Callaghan’s 1976 Ruskin College speech, and the onset of the Thatcher government of 1979), the changes were not untainted by the legacy of British Imperialism. As the Report put it, ‘with its present rate of reproduction the British race cannot continue, means of reversing the recent course of the birth rate must be found’ (paragraph 413). Conflating racism with sexism, the Report assigned to women the role of baby-machines in the service of capitalism and British hegemony. Women were told: ‘[i]n the next thirty years housewives as Mothers have vital work to do in ensuring the adequate continuance of the British Race and British Ideals in the world’ (paragraph 117). A clear example of Beveridge’s own racism can be seen in his essay ‘Children’s allowances and the Race’. In it he stated:
Pride of race is a reality for the British as for other peoples … as in Britain today we look back with pride and gratitude to our ancestors, look back as a nation or as individuals two hundred years and more to the generations illuminated by Marlborough or Cromwell or Drake, are we not bound also to look forward, to plan society now so that there may be no lack of men or women of the quality of those early days, of the best of our breed, two hundred and three hundred years hence? (cited in Cohen 1985, pp. 88–89).
- 2.
By way of example, it is worth mentioning the special role of the monarchy in the UK. In addition to the Political/Government RSA/ISA (Cole 2008b, 2009), the monarchy continues to make a major contribution to the ideological role of the State, in that it ‘normalises’ a massively hierarchical society. As Althusser (1971: 138) has argued, above the ensemble of state apparatuses is ‘the head of State, the government and the administration’. Althusser (ibid: 154) has also pointed out that ‘the English bourgeoisie was able to ‘compromise’ with the aristocracy and ‘share’ State power and the use of the State apparatus with it for a long time’. This ‘arrangement’ continues, albeit in modified form, up to the present day. In the UK, the head of State is the Queen. The Monarchy, though not as popular as it used to be—‘Princess Di as the fairy princess’—is still thriving. The royal family continue to receive mass attention in the media, much of it favourable. Their outrageous activities are normalised and condoned. For example, the vast wealth they have; their private planes and boats; the large number of servants they employ are all generally portrayed as ‘necessary’ for such important people, who are seen as an ‘asset’ to the nation. If one of the princes spends thousands of pounds on a night out—when Prince William split up with Kate Middleton in April 2007, he racked up a £11000 bar bill in one night - this is reported neutrally by the tabloids, as ‘understandable’. The aristocracy and the monarchy are not under any imminent threat of extinction. The Queen receives £7.9 million per year from taxpayers via the Civil List, while the income due to the heir to the throne, The Prince of Wales’s Office from the Duchy of Cornwall (created in 1337 by Edward III) amounts to £14.067 million (The Duchy of Cornwall, 2006). His Royal Highness, Prince Phillip, The Duke of Edinburgh, KG (Knight of the Order of the Garter), KT (Knight of the Order of the Thistle), OM (Order of Merit), GBE (Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire), AC (Companion of the Order of Australia (Military Division)), QSO (Queen’s Service Order), PC (Member of Her Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council), well known for his racist ‘jokes’, is, at the time of writing (May, 2008) the subject of a prime-time ITV two-part series, in which black newsreader Sir Trevor McDonald asks a number of obsequious and fawning questions to the duke, whom he calls ‘sir’. ITV also put out a programme in May in which The Duchess of York dropped in to try to ‘persuade a chain smoking, overweight family of six from a Hull council estate [one of the poorest in the country], to adopt a healthier lifestyle (ITV website: http://www.itv.com/CatchUp/Video/default.html?ViewType=5&Filter=19725 )The commercial break featured a Government ‘advert’ showing a poor couple’s old car being crushed as a warning to the working class to pay their road tax. On the same night BBC1 had a programme detailing the government’s plans to get a million people off sick benefit. All the above needs to be seen in the light of Gordon Brown’s attempt to control the current crisis in capitalism by keeping public sector workers’ pay deals below 2% (boardroom pay at Britain’s top companies soared by 37% last year). After ten years of New Labour Government in Britain, the wealthiest 1% of the population owns 21% of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 50% owns 7%; health inequalities have grown in the last decade; poverty continues to blight many children’s lives; and 67% of ethnic minority communities live in the 88 most deprived wards in the country (Compass Direction for the Democratic Left, 2007).
- 3.
The ideological role of The Sun is discussed in various places in this volume. While, as noted in chapter 3 of this volume, it is the most popular working class right-wing tabloid, the Daily Mail is the most popular middle class right wing tabloid (I am using sociological rather than Marxist definitions of social class here: as I have stressed throughout this volume, the former being based on occupation and status; the latter on relationship to the mode of production).
- 4.
Marx’s views on religion are well known. As he famously put it: ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people’ (Marx, 1843–4). The editors of the Marx Internet Archives (MIA) (cited with this extract from Marx) explain that in n the 19th century, opium was widely used for medical purposes as a painkiller, and thus Marx’s dictum did not connote a delusionary state of consciousness. While Marx and Marxism have traditionally been associated with atheism, my own view is that this is not necessary. While religion, as opposed to theism (belief in a God or Gods that intervene in the world) or deism (belief in a God who does not intervene in the world) has often been and continues to be form of oppression and conservatism, there are large numbers of people who identify with a religious or spiritual belief who also identify with Marxism or socialism (millions of Roman Catholics in Venezuela for example; see later in this chapter). There are also, of course, many who are atheists or agnostics. While I am not aligned to any religion, I find no contradiction in my own belief in the existence of some power for good. Whatever our beliefs or lack of beliefs, it is my view that our energies should be devoted to the creation of equality and happiness on earth.
- 5.
Several anecdotes attest to this. One will suffice. I once got talking to two Cuban medical doctors celebrating their return to Havana from a number of months working in Africa. They were clearly very glad to be home. When I asked how they felt about working on ‘local wages’ in Africa, their joint and immediate answer was unequivocal: ‘we’re doctors, that’s what we do’.
- 6.
For a discussion of utopian socialism, see Cole (2008a, chapter 2).
- 7.
Here Marx and Engels are referring to members of communist parties. The words ‘communist’ and ‘communism’ are greatly misunderstood. ‘Communism’ was used by Marx to refer to the stage after socialism when the state would have withered away and when we would live communally. In the period after the Russian Revolution up to the demise of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries were routinely referred to as ‘communist’ in the West. The Soviet Union, following Marx, actually referred to itself as ‘socialist’. Socialists critical of the Soviet Union (e.g. Cliff 1974) have referred to the Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries as ‘state capitalist’. In this chapter, and on numerous occasions in my writing, I have distanced myself from ‘state capitalism’ or Stalinism, and have advocated democratic socialism.
- 8.
Here, we have an ironic twist: the capitalist class and their representatives who used to deride Marxists for what they saw as the metaphysic of ‘Marxist economic determinism’, for what they (wrongly) perceived was a belief in the inevitability of social revolution, are the ones who now champion the inevitability of global neoliberalism, the accompanying ‘world-wide market revolution’ and the consequent inevitability of ‘economic restructuring’ (McMurtry 2000).
- 9.
At the same time, globalization, in reality in existence since the beginnings of capitalism, is hailed as a new and unchallengeable phenomenon, and its omnipresence used ideologically to further fuel arguments about capitalism’s inevitability. In ex-UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s words, challenging globalization is tantamount to denying that autumn follows summer (Blair, The Guardian 2005).
- 10.
Chávez was elected President in 1998, and assumed office in February, 1999. He was re-elected in 2000 and in 2006. There was a failed right-wing coup against him in 2002 (for an analysis, see the video by Bartley and O’Briain 2003). It is not clear how Critical Race Theorists would view the Bolivarian Revolution. For Marxists, it needs to be contextualized historically with respect to (neoliberal) capitalism and imperialisms (see Ali 2008, pp. 53–90 for an extended discussion of US manoeuvrings in pre- Chávez Venezuela).
- 11.
Chávez quotes Fidel Castro on this fact: ‘[d]on’t say that! Every time you say that, Bush has you in his sights’ (cited in Campbell 2008, p. 58).
- 12.
As noted above, I had the privilege to teach a course at UBV for a week in 2006. The course was entitled Introduction To World Systems: Global Imperial Capitalism Or International Socialist Equality: Issues, and Implications for Education. Standards are very high—with seminar discussions and debate comparing more than favourably with universities I have taught in the UK and around the world. However, at UBV, advanced theory is very much linked to practice—that is, to improving the lives of people in the communities from where the students come. Students are almost 100% working class at UBV. While teaching there, I met a police officer who was studying for his second degree. He told me how the Chávez Government was humanising the police force. He reckoned that Chávez has the support of about 75% of the Caracas police.
- 13.
One thing that symbolises the revolution for me was the way in which, at the start of my last seminar at UBV, one of the caretakers arrived to unlock the lecture theatre, and then sat down, listened to and actively contributed to my seminar. His question was what percentage of the British working class did I think were revolutionary socialists. When I told him that the percentage was very very small indeed, he seemed somewhat bemused.
- 14.
One example will give a flavour of current Venezuelan health care. Isabel children’s hospital has been open for a year. The head surgeon has said that it is ‘more than we could have dreamed of’. He points out that children used to wait up to twelve years for surgery, but since the hospital opened, 1200 operations have been performed for congenital heart disease. Everything is free, including transport to the hospital. Mothers can stay with their children, and a small hotel is provided for visiting fathers (Campbell 2008, p. 61).
- 15.
The fallacy of ‘white Marxism’ is underlined by Marxist people of color in South America, Africa and Asia in their millions, both historically and in the present.
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Cole, M. (2017). Marxism and Twenty-First Century Socialism. In: Critical Race Theory and Education. Marxism and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95079-9_8
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