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Racists can't define race..Continued from previous page 7


The British National
 Party, in striving
for a form of respectability, tries to downplay emphasis on race (in public, at least). Its website refers to 'the indigenous
peoples of these islands', which it defines as "the people whose ancestors were the
earliest settlers here after the last great Ice Age and which have been complemented by the historic migrations from mainland Europe". This is pretty woolly language,
though we can assume that to be regarded as having a black or brown skin would disqualify a person from counting as indigenous. But how far back would a BNP government trace people's ancestry, and what would they do with those who have just one indigenous parent or grandparent? Like the Nazis and the National Party in South Africa, the BNP would be forced back on arbitrary distinctions and subjective rulings to decide who would be allowed to stay in their racial utopia.
Race, then, is not a scientific concept. Even those who see it as the linchpin of their politics cannot offer manageable definitions of it or workable guidelines as to how particular people should be categorised. The fact is that we are all human beings, with broadly similar abilities and characteristics, distinguished in various superficial ways such as eye
colour and blood group, and divided now along the destructive lines of class and nationality. In the future Socialist commonwealth, questions of race and
ancestry will be a thing of the past, like money, passports and national anthems.
PAUL BENNETT

 

 Racism (and race) is bunkum

  Socialists stand for a system of society based upon the principle of providing each individual with what they need, as a pre-condition of social activity. That is, securing for each human being the clothes, food and housing they need, as well as the cultural and social goods of life, should be the first priority of any sane society. Of course, providing each with what
they need means that different people will get different things. People are, of course, born with different needs, and people from related communities and extended families may well have a higher chance of having certain needs than others. That is, some people share genetically inherited features, such as susceptibility to particular diseases, which are passed on through human reproduction.

 Genetic features, though, can be mixed and changed by the same process - there is no essential correlation between, say, skin colour and disease. Merely, there is a chance that the genes for these two separate features
will be passed on from parent to child. Just as there is no specific correlation between skin colour and facial features, or eye colour and hair colour. That these features seem to belong together is an effect of the fact that each parent passes on half their genetic characteristics to their off-spring, and that historically people of similar appearance (and roughly common descent) have tended to breed with one another in similar climates.

The fact of the matter is that any human being from one of these groups could breed just as well with a member of the opposite sex from another group as they could with one from their own. We are all members of the same republic of genes, all related very closely to one another no matter what side of the globe we hail from. We are the surviving descendants of some less than 20,000 early humanoids. We share a common genetic trait, traceable back through the ages to just one female, many thousands of years ago.

 It's also a fact that we developed as a species to be dependent upon one another for our needs; but also able to communicate and co-operate with one another to meet those needs. Yet, today, we live in a society in which the needs of a great many people go unmet. It's clear to Socialists that the ideas surrounding race and racialism are bunkum, un-supported by the scientific facts. We can point to the history of the development of capitalism, to show how the misapprehensions surrounding race
developed along with the needs of capital to expand and control the globe, and to build loyal armies in pursuit of such conquest. Yet, they continue to do harm and deny our common humanity in the modern world.

 Socialists, as materialists, need to account for how such mistaken ideas can continue to exist in the world today, in the face of the evidence of the facts.

 On the one hand there is the continued existence of poverty fed by ignorance, which nurtures the desire for people to cling on to what little they have, instilling in them a fear of a threat from apparent strangers.

 On the other, capital's drives for efficiency, the need to cut out anything that interferes with or reduces the profit-making capacity of the industrial machine, which means that worker's whose needs cause costs (such as dealing with language and cultural differences) are squeezed out in a 'one size fits all' approach.

 What socialists propose is a different world, wherein everyone has more than enough of the things they need, so they need no longer fear to lose it; where meeting and exploring our different needs becomes a past-time and an end in itself; where without conflicts of power and dominance - because we co-operate voluntarily and democratically - there is no limitation set on, nor distortion of, our endeavour to understand what it means to be a part
of the human race. In short, socialism will allow us to be treated as unique individuals, rather than as a bureaucratically allocated race on an equal opportunities monitoring form.
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Socialist Party