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 19 February 2025

“A WEEK IS LONG TIME IN POLITICS,” said Labour prime minister Harold Wilson, back in the 1960s. He meant that a lot could happen in a week, much of it unpredictable. By the same token, US president Donald Trump’s first month back in office could equate to a year’s worth of politics, except that many of his actions were entirely predictable – albeit the speed of them might not have been.

Trump signed over 300 executive orders in his first few days. The intensity and range were reminiscent of the US ‘shock and awe’ blitzkrieg on Iraq in 2003. This was a demonstration of overall political supremacy that was intended to stun opponents into submission.

Within the US, the measures will boost the interests of Big Oil and Big Tech, while further marginalising the poor and stoking racism. Internationally, the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement means a further acceleration of global warming; while exit from the World Health Organisation, and cutting funds for foreign family planning organisations if they provide or promote abortions, will threaten access to healthcare for many poor people in the Global South.

After Trump’s demands on Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal; his plan to turn Gaza into a US-owned holiday resort; and his announced tariffs on imports of aluminium, steel, motors, pharmaceuticals and semiconductors; what has most stunned governments in Britain, the EU and Ukraine has been the speed with which he has moved to normalise US relations with Russia and to talk about ending the war in Ukraine, plus his demand for half of Ukraine’s mineral resources.

As Peter Franssen writes in this edition of CR, Trump “embodies the arrogance characteristic of American imperialism.” He has ridden to office on a tide of discontent, but his international policies are a measure of desperation, faced with the rise of the Global South, and in particular China. Hence his attempts to control all areas which might be used by Chinese shipping. Peter’s article was written before the latest developments over Ukraine, but we can see these as an attempt by Trump to disengage from Europe in order to focus militarily on China, and to drive a wedge between China and Russia.

The fight for peace, in Europe, the Middle East and globally, thus remains a vital necessity. But here in Britain and in Europe, we also face severe threats to our democracy. Those are not the alleged threats that JD Vance spoke about at the Munich Security Conference, where he basically talked up the policies of far-right anti-immigration parties like Germany’s Allianz für Deutschland.

The threat to our democracy is partly from the racism of those far-right parties – including Reform UK, whose MP Rupert Lowe recently called for repeal of the 1965 Race Relations Act. It comes too from the fascist fringe, who instigated riots in our cities last summer. But it is also from our own ruling class: in the restrictions on the right to protest, seen most recently in the arrests over the Palestine march on 18 January; in the heavy jail sentences imposed on climate activists; and in sharply reduced tolerance for dissenting voices in the Labour Party itself.

As the Morning Star editorial said on 8 February: 

“It is vital to march in defence of our rights …. Palestine is where we fight back. It is an anti-racist movement, both because it opposes a modern-day apartheid state and because those attacking it use Islamophobic propaganda to do so …. And because it is a popular movement. … It should be the crucible of a resurgent left.”

But the anti-racism needs to go much deeper. In our lead article here Luke Daniels details the reality and consequences of transatlantic slavery, and argues that the fight for reparations is a fight for racial and economic justice. The descendants of African slaves suffer poorer health than whites and also massive psychological trauma. There has to be a full formal apology, but the racist ideology that classes Black people as inferior also has to be challenged. “Building a mass movement in the fight for reparations will help raise awareness about the true nature of Africans,” he says, and “mobilising the working class in the fight for reparations presents an opportunity to go on the offensive against racism.”

We follow Luke with Part 2 of Joe and John Pateman’s ‘The Marxist Interpretation of the Public Library’, which looks at the relationship of the public library to democracy, freedom and equality, and the public librarian as a historical phenomenon. Then, in Part 3 of his series on ‘Economic Development’, Jerry Jones presents “a vision of what a more equitable economic system, not appropriating surplus labour, might look like,” focusing mainly on common ownership through cooperatives, and economic planning using markets. In the following short article Martin Graham revisits his analysis of Fictitious Capital from CR107, correcting the algebra by including the rate of exploitation.

We have three book reviews in this edition. First, John Foster tackles Patrick Theuret’s L’esprit de la revolution; then Jonathan White reviews John’s own book, Languages of

Class Struggle; and finally Nick Wright looks at the late Domenico Losurdo’s Western Marxism.

Samuel Mercer takes on the political education column this time, to argue that such education “should be an exercise in theoretical and political preparation of party cadres to listen to what the workers do not know, and what the workers know but the cadre does not,” in order to intervene better against the relations of production. Discussion welcome!

As ever, we include a Soul Food poetry column. This will be Fran Lock’s swan song, as she is moving on to other things, and she has produced a real cracker: commentary and two poems with real class content, one by the incoming columnist Nick Moss, and the other by the late lamented Fred Voss.

We’ll miss you, Fran!

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The fight for reparations for transatlantic chattel slavery is a fight for racial and economic justice. 

The first Pan-African Congress on Reparations was held more than three decades ago in Abuja, Nigeria, in April 1993. Following that, on 10 May, Tottenham MP Bernie Grant tabled a motion in the House of Commons in support of the Abuja Proclamation. The motion was supported by 63 Labour MPs, including Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Benn. Tony Gifford KC, who had delivered a crucial paper at the Abuja conference, entitled ‘The Legal Basis of the Claim for Reparations’, was the first to raise the issue in the House of Lords, on 14 March 1996. At the time of writing, the 38^th African Union summit in February 2025 is due to focus on Reparatory Justice and Racial Healing under the theme ‘Justice for Africans and People of African Decent through Reparations’.

Africans and African descendants are working closer together to achieve reparatory justice. The United Nations has declared a Second International Decade for People of African Descent, starting 1 January 2025. This will add pressure on Britain’s Labour government to come to the table, as Barbados prime minister Mia Mottley, chair of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) said in her recent New Year Statement:

“Yet, my friends, so much remains to be done in this area. We must continue to press the international community for a mature, face-to-face conversation at all levels, so that we may see them repair the damage from the exploitation through the immoral institutions of slavery and colonialism which our people suffer from”1

For the first UN conference against racism, held in Durban, South Africa 2001, the Tony Blair Labour Government sent a Black woman, Valerie Amos, to try to scupper any discussion on reparations. This was a racist act by the party, putting a Black person in such an embarrassing situation with her Black peers. We see history repeating itself, with PM Keir Starmer using his Black foreign secretary, David Lammy, to carry out the unenviable task of trying to stymie the reparations movement. On his November 2024 trip to Nigeria, when questioned about reparations, he told the BBC: 

“It’s not about the transfer of cash, particularly at a time of a cost-of-living crisis around much of the globe, and certainly in the UK.”2  

An amazing shift from what he said in 2018, from the back benches: 

“I’m afraid as Caribbean people we are not going to forget our history − we don’t just want to hear an apology, we want reparation.”3

The call for reparatory justice is not new, as some would have us believe. In 1861 Jamaican peasants sent a petition to Queen Victoria, demanding land for collective cultivation. They were ignored. Matilda, the last survivor of the transatlantic slave trade, aged in her 70s in 1931, walked 15 miles to make her legal claim for reparations, after she heard a rumour that compensation was being paid. The judge dismissed her case. Matilda was aged two when she was kidnapped, along with her family in the West African interior. She arrived in America on the Clotilda − infamous as the last ship known to have carried slaves across the Atlantic to North America. It was an illegal trip, and although the owners burnt and scuttled the vessel to get rid of the evidence, its remains were found in the Mobile River in 2019.4 American civil rights leader and black nationalist Queen Mother Moore handed in a petition of one million signatures to President Kennedy in 1963 demanding reparations. She was simply ignored. 

Likewise, successive Labour and Conservative governments have ignored CARICOM calls for a discussion on reparations. At the last Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Samoa, 2024, Keir Starmer tried to have the issue of reparations excluded from the agenda. He failed in his attempt and the meeting ended with a communique saying that:

“Heads, noting calls for discussions on reparatory justice with regard to the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and chattel enslavement … agreed the time has come for a meaningful, truthful and respectful conversation towards forging a common future based on equity.”5

European governments and major British institutions including universities, banks and the Church of England have apologised and made some form of reparations. Historically, the British taxpayer paid reparations to some 40,000 slave owners for loss of property. The £20m (£17 bn in today’s money) was borrowed from Rothschilds bank, over a 180-year payment plan that was finally paid off in 2015. The enslaved received not a penny, despite protests from local anti-slavery campaigners at the time. 

Dr Eric Williams, in his thesis Capitalism and Slavery,6 argued that the billions made from the enslavement of Africans kick-started the British industrial revolution and capitalism itself. No one has been able to disprove his thesis, and researchers are uncovering even more evidence supporting his argument. Academics at the Wilberforce Institute, University of Hull, contracted by Lloyds Register, showed how the maritime and industrial group recorded information about vessels’ sea worthiness: 

“[I]t then sold that information on to subscribers, many of whom were actively involved in the slave economy … notably at least six committee members of the society of the Registry for shipping from 1764 were identified as enslavers, while another six were involved in the trafficking of enslaved Africans.” 

The Lloyds group admitted: 

“[W]e played an important role supporting a maritime system that enabled the slave economy. … We are deeply sorry for this part of our history.”7

In the USA, Brown Brothers Harriman, Wall Street’s oldest private investment bank, has come under scrutiny. The bank was founded in the early 19^th century by Irish merchant Alexander Brown, who migrated to Baltimore and moved into banking after making a fortune in the cotton trade; former partners included Prescott Bush, patriarch of the Bush political dynasty. One of the researchers, Lawerence Westgaph, said: 

“Brown Brothers Harriman is a really important bank; their story is modern capitalism as we know it and the rise of America as a superpower…The Brown family used money they made buying and selling slave-produced cotton to establish themselves in banking − and they started to lend money to others producing cotton.”8

The CARICOM 10-Point Plan

In April 2014, in Chaguaramas, Trinidad and Tobago, the CARICOM governments agreed a 10 Point Plan for Reparatory Justice.9 We shall look at a some of its points.

Point 5. Public Health Crisis: 

“The African descendant population in the Caribbean has the highest incidence in the world of chronic diseases in the forms of hypertension and type two diabetes. This pandemic is the direct result of the nutritional experience, physical and emotional brutality, and overall stress profiles associated with slavery, genocide and apartheid …. The chronic health condition of Caribbean blacks now constitutes the greatest financial risk to sustainability in the region. Arresting this pandemic requires the injection of science, technology, and capital beyond the capacity of the region.”

It is not only in the Caribbean that health is an issue for Black people. In England, a study by University of Oxford researchers, reported in The Guardian,10 found that menopausal women of Chinese and Black African backgrounds are about 80% less likely to receive hormone replacement therapy (HRT) than white women. The academics examined HRT prescriptions issued to 1,978,348 women aged 40 to 60 over a 10-year period between 2013 and 2023, and found that “almost six times as many white women were prescribed HRT than black women, and more than twice as many women in affluent areas were offered HRT than those living in socially deprived areas.” Nina Kuypers, the founder of Black Women in Menopause, was quoted as saying: 

“Many Black women tell us that when they go to their GP, they feel dismissed or unheard, with their symptoms often being misinterpreted or overlooked. Instead of being recognised as part of menopause, their experiences are sometimes attributed to unrelated conditions, such as diabetes or high blood pressure, which are prevalent in the Black community.”

Point 8. Psychological Rehabilitation 

“For over 400 years Africans and their descendants were classified as non-human, chattel property and real estate. They were denied recognition as members of the human family by laws derived from the parliaments and palaces of Europe. This history has inflicted massive psychological trauma upon African descendant populations. This much is evident daily in the Caribbean.”

Those who are uncomfortable with the reality of enslavement like to tell us we should just ‘move on’, as though it was that simple.  But, as bell hooks asserts:

“The suffering many Black people experience today is linked to the suffering of the past, to ‘historical memory.’ … To look back, not just to describe slavery but to try and reconstruct a psycho-social history of its impact has only recently been fully understood as a necessary stage in the process of collective Black-self recovery.”11

I myself grew up with the legacy of slavery. I have seen women and children beaten in the streets and heard their cries in the home. I know children who have had their hands burnt with naked flame or with hot oil, for stealing food. I have grown up with a level of unacceptable violence which affected my behaviour on several levels. Many of our great, great grandparents were suffering from what is now recognised as ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’. They were in no shape to be ‘good’ parents as many of the hurts they endured during enslavement were simply passed on to their children. 

The legacy of slavery and colonialism is that Black men perpetrate higher than average levels of violence, with Africa and the Americas topping the regional lists for violence. Caribbean and Latin America countries account for nearly half of the world’s intentional homicide victims, despite representing just 8% of the global population. According to UN data, Central America stands out as the most violent sub-region, with Central America and the Caribbean experiencing annual increases in homicide rates of about 4%, in the last two decades − twice as high as for sub-Saharan Africa.12 

Facing up to the reality of chattel slavery is not easy, and European governments and individuals who benefited from enslavement would rather it be forgotten. The descendants of the enslaved would rather not dwell on it because of the shame, painful feelings, and anger that it invokes. But Black people have nothing to be ashamed of. If anyone should feel shame it is those who were enriched by the enslavement of our African ancestors. This is not a call to victimhood or guilt generation, as neither serves any useful purpose, as bell hooks argued: 

“Internalisation of victimisation renders Black folks powerless, unable to assert agency on our behalf. When we embrace victimisation, we surrender our rage.”13

Black people need to recognise and accept that the brutal mistreatment of our ancestors has left legacies of violence, mistrust, internalised racism, and identity issues for most of us. Living in ‘denial’ is not helpful, and to achieve true liberation we must face the reality of what enslavement meant for our great, great, grandparents.

The propaganda at the time generated by the enslavers tried to paint a picture of the happy-to-be-enslaved lazy African, sitting in a watermelon patch feasting on watermelons. Richard Hart, in his book Occupation and Control, provides us with the brutal reality of enslavement from the evidence recorded in one parish of Jamaica:

• 1776: Jack, for being a runaway: “to be hanged by the neck until he is dead, and his head to be cut off in the most public place on the sd. Estate”.
• Coach: “for uttering many rebellious expressions” against his overseer “to be hanged and his head to be afterwards separated and exposed”.
• Adam: for running away: “to have a halter put about his neck, and one of his ears nailed to a post, and that the executioner do cause the said ear to be cut off close to his head”.
• Plato: “for having fresh veal found upon him belonging to Roselle plantation. “to have both his ears cut off close to his head, to be worked in chains for twelve months, and the first Monday in every month to receive 39 lashes with a cat-o-nine tails on his bare back each time”.
• 19 April 1783: Priscilla, for running away, “both her ears cut off close to her head immediately, to receive 39 lashes the first Monday in every month for one year and to be worked in irons during that time”.
• 5 July 1780: Jackson, for running away: “to have his right ear cut off close to his head, his nose slit, and to be branded on each cheek with the plantation mark”.
• 1767: Quaco, for being found armed with a military offensive weapon called a cutlass and using it in a rebellious manner against one of Charlie Blair Esquire’s negroes who endeavoured to catch him for being a runaway for some months: “to have both his ears cut off close to his head and also the great tendon, commonly known by the name of Tendon Achilles, of his left leg to be separated or cut asunder in such manner as it may not reunite”.14

Black women faced double oppression under enslavement, as revealed by Martin Hoyle in his book, The Axe Laid to the Root: The Story of Robert Wedderburn: 

“My father ranged through the whole of his household for his own lewd purposes; for they being his personal property, cost nothing extra: and if any one proved with child − why it was an acquisition which might one day fetch something in the market, like a horse or a pig in Smithfield. In short amongst his own slaves my father was a perfect parish bull: and his pleasure was the greater, because at the same time he increased his profits.”15 

The systemic rape of enslaved black women led to other issues for Black people, as bell hooks in her book Salvation- Black People and Love informs:

“White supremacist practices of breeding through rape of Black women by white masters produced mixed-race offspring whose skin colour and facial features were often radically different from the Black norm. This led to the formation of a colour caste aesthetic. While white racists had never deemed Black people beautiful before, they had a higher aesthetic regard for racially mixed Black folks. When that regard took the form of granting privileges and rewards on the basis of skin colour, Black people began to internalise similar aesthetic values. To understand the colour caste system and its impact on Black life, we have to acknowledge the link between patriarchal abuse of Black women’s bodies and the overvaluation of fair skin.”16 

We see this ‘overvaluation’ being acted out all over the world; and in Africa and the Caribbean, skin-lightening cream is a massive industry. Internalised racism is the product of enslavement and colonialism that needs to be addressed through education and counselling.

Eurocentric values of beauty were imposed during colonisation. Black people had to conform to these values if they wanted to get ahead in white-dominated institutions or colonial establishments. For generations, Black women in European countries have faced discrimination because of their hair. But the fight for Black hair to be legalised is intensifying, with Labour MP Paulette Hamilton and the singer Mel B among leading Black Britons urging parliamentarians to make the UK the first Western country to introduce a law to end afro hair discrimination. Mel B recounted her experience of discrimination: 

“The very first video shoot I did as a Spice Girl for Wannabe, the stylist took one look at my hair and told me it had to be straightened. My big hair didn’t fit the pop star mould. But I stood my ground-backed by my girls − and I sang and danced as me, with my big hair, my brown skin and I was totally proud of who I was.”17

Point 1. Full Formal Apology

“The healing process for victims and the descendants of the enslaved and enslavers requires as a precondition the offer of a sincere formal apology by the governments of Europe. Some governments in refusing to offer an apology have issued in place Statements of Regrets. Such statements do not acknowledge that crimes have been committed and represent a refusal to take responsibility for such crimes. Statements of regrets represents, furthermore, a reprehensible response to the call for apology in that they suggest that victims and their descendants are not worthy of an apology. Only an explicit formal apology will suffice within the context of the CARICOM Reparatory Justice Programme (CRJP).”

An apology for slavery is a crucial part of the demand for reparations − not because of the claims for cash which should follow an apology, but because of its significance in the fight to end racism. Acknowledging and owning up to the lies propagated about Africans will help both Black and white to overcome the negative effects of the misinformation. Education is key to defeating racism. No one is born a racist, and it is the lies about Africans over the centuries that has led many people to believe in the superiority of white people. Black people have also been affected by the misinformation with many ‘internalising’ the negative stereotypes and lies about Black people. 

Learning about African history is a crucial part of recovery for Black people. Our African ancestors had no problem with self-esteem before conquest, enslavement, and colonisation. Before the ideology of racism was developed and spread, white men had high regard for Africans, as observed by one of the early missionaries, Fr Cavazzi: 

“These Congolese nations think themselves, with nauseating presumption, the foremost men in the world and nothing would persuade them to the contrary …. They think their country is the largest, happiest, most enjoyable and most beautiful there is …. Similar opinions are held by the king himself, but in a manner more remarkable. For he is persuaded that there is no other monarch in the world who is his equal or exceeds him in power or the abundance of wealth ….”18 

These Africans were not fantasists, as demonstrated by the historical fact of Malian King Mansa Musa, crashing the world economy with the gold he gave away on his pilgrimage to Mecca.19

Challenging racist ideology

The task now faced is building the biggest anti-racist movement to defeat the far right. We are in a good position to win this historic battle. The groundwork has been laid by the anti-fascist, anti-racist movement. The racists have been confronted on every occasion they have taken to the streets to spout their message of hate. It is crucial that we continue to show that physical opposition to their vile ideology. 

But the fight is also at a theoretical level, with a new wave of racist ideology being spread by the followers of the late Professor Richard Lynn, who began his comparative national IQ work in 1967, arguing that Western civilisation was under threat by genetically inferior ethnic groups. Lynn’s database of more than 100 papers, first published in 2002, has been characterised as “a cornerstone of scientific racism ideology that … is being used in online propaganda by a new generation of well-funded ‘race science’ activists,” whose activities were uncovered in an investigation by The Guardian and Hope Not Hate.20

Angela Saini, in her 2019 book Superior, dismantled the pseudoscience of Lynn. For her efforts she has largely been forced off social media because of “attacks from the far right and white supremacists.”21 Professor Rebecca Sear, an evolutionary behavioural scientist at Brunel University London, and the president of the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association, is among those who have demanded the retraction of Lynn’s work because of its “ludicrously bad science” which has “nevertheless become thoroughly embedded in the academic literature.”20

Lynn’s work has been criticised for its methodology, as samples “were unrepresentative or too small to be meaningful.” According to Sear, his figure for Angola’s National IQ was “based on 19 people from a malaria study”, while the Eritrean IQ “was derived from tests of children in orphanages.”  The National Human Genome Research Institute at the US National Institute of Health says that 

“Scientific racism is an ideology that appropriates the methods and legitimacy of science to argue for the superiority of white Europeans and the inferiority of non-white people whose social and economic status have been historically marginalised.”22

Racism has negatively impacted the lives of most people, and understanding its root cause is crucial in defeating it. Racist ideology – a pack of lies about Africans − was developed and propagated to justify the enslavement of Africans for profit. Opposition to the trade in humans meant the enslavers had to convince the European masses that Black people were not fully human. Lies were invented and spread widely, for centuries, affecting most of the world. They said Africans lived in trees, had smaller brains, ate each other and so on. Later, IQ testing was invented to try and prove these lies. They said Africans were less intelligent and had no art (after stealing most of it). Everywhere Black people go they experience racism because of false information spread about Africa and Africans. 

Black and white people have been affected, albeit in different ways. White people generally have internalised the notion of white superiority and often act this out on Black people, in ways that are recognised as prejudice and discrimination. The lies have left many Black people with a negative view of themselves. When these negative stereotypes created about Black people are acted out on themselves and other Black people, that is ‘internalised racism’ − responsible for much of the self-hatred and Black-on-Black violence perpetrated in Black communities today. 

Building a mass movement

Building a mass movement in the fight for reparations will help raise awareness about the true nature of Africans. Learning about the great historical African civilisations and their culture is a crucial part of recovery, and will help end Black-on-Black violence. The colonised were denied their African history and had the history and values of the European coloniser instilled. Reclaiming a sense of pride in Africa and things African will help restore self-confidence and contribute to ending the conditions that have created the widespread use of violence.

So far, the fight against racism has been mainly a defensive one. But mobilising the working class in the fight for reparations presents an opportunity to go on the offensive against racism. The challenge is to get more Black people engaged. This is not a criticism of the movement, as many Black progressive activists have not engaged fully with the anti-fascist movement, for reasons that are understandable. Some rightly saw racism as a problem for white people to resolve and were happy to sit back and let them get on with it. Many were too busy trying to provide for their families. Some feared they would be vulnerable to attack from the racists. Many Black people fought back in Notting Hill, Brixton, Birmingham and many other instances of uprisings up and down the country.

With the threat of fascism once more stalking Europe and with a paralysed neoliberal system bereft of a clue on how to fight the racists, it is for the left to present an alternative view of the world. Communists are ideally positioned to take up the challenge. Armed with a superior and humane ideology for human liberation, Communists must be bold in challenging the system at every level. 

At the root of the current upsurge in fascism is blatant inequality and the withholding of resources to provide the most basic needs in housing, health, heating and education. Greed has overtaken the owning classes; and as they grow exponentially richer the masses grow that much poorer. Capitalism’s drive for continual growth on a finite planet puts our lives and existence in a precarious position. 

Capitalism has run its course and is no longer capable of providing a decent living standard for the masses. The owning classes cannot help themselves; and, as the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire argues in Pedagogy of the Oppressed,23 it is only the oppressed who can save the oppressors − they have not the strength to help themselves. He believes it is the vocation of the working class to bring the owning class back to their humanity. Simply put, we must stop them from destroying themselves and this beautiful planet.

Some might argue that the enslavement of Africans has damaged the moral fibre of British society. The British ruling classes committed a crime against humanity when they trafficked up to 20m Africans across the Atlantic to work in plantations in the Americas for their enrichment. The fight for reparatory justice can awaken a sense of pride in being British and bring substance and substantive numbers to the anti-racist struggle. It was the anti-slavery movement along with the numerous slave rebellions in the Americas that eventually led to the enslaved being freed.

The fight for reparations is ideally placed to bring the owning class back to their humanity. Some individuals whose ancestors benefited from the enslavement of Africans have rightly joined the movement for reparations and some have apologised and paid some reparations. This helps to heap more pressure on the government to accept responsibility, apologise and pay reparations for their role in enslavement of Africans. 

In a white-dominated society, the lives of Black people are adversely affected in key areas, such as in housing, education, health the law, immigration etc. Research has shown most of these institutions to be institutionally racist.  But racism also affects Black people in multiple ways, for example:

Racism at work

• As the Fawcett Society and the Runnymede Trust have reported,24 three quarters of women from ethnic minority backgrounds have experienced racism at work. The survey of nearly 2,000 women of colour with a comparison group of 1,182 white women found that 61% percent of ethnic minority women, compared with 44% of white women, had changed aspects of themselves, such as their names, to fit in.

Equal pay

• An analysis by the Trades Union Congress has shown that “structural racism in the jobs market is holding BME women back”, trapping them in low-paid jobs with few rights at work.25  One in three of the 155,000 BME women on zero-hours contracts work in health and social work, particularly in residential care, and are suffering a staffing crisis partly due to its median hourly pay of £12.01.26  TUC general secretary Paul Nowak said: 

“The significant and disproportionate concentration of BME workers on zero-hours contracts points firmly to structural racism in our jobs market. … It’s time to tackle the discrimination that holds BME workers back once and for all-and ensure that everyone has access to a decent secure job.”26 

• The police and prison service

In the UK Black men are stopped by the police seven times more than whites. More prison time, more overmedication for mental health, and Black inmates face disproportionate force at Wormwood Scrubs. A report by the Independent Monitoring Board found that Black prisoners “were on the receiving end of 47% of incidents at which staff used force, despite only accounting for 29% of inmates. By contrast, the number of incidents in which force was deployed against white prisoners almost exactly matched their representation in the prison.”27 

Victimhood does not serve our liberation; we need join with others to fight racism and internalised racism. By taking part in activities to end racism Black people assert their agency. As the capitalist system goes into decline the chaos caused will make the world a dangerous place for Black people. We have no choice but to unite and fight racism, if we are to survive the next wave of fascism sweeping the Western world.

We must recapture the spirit of the thousands of cotton mill workers who refused to handle slave labour-produced cotton, from the American South, in 1862. Although they paid a heavy price, as some 60% of the Lancashire mills shut down because of the strike action, they are not forgotten. Trade unions Unite and Unison combined to commemorate the workers’ boycott in a ceremony in January 2025. One of the organisers, Chris Neville said: “The cotton workers’ action is one of the best possible examples of workers’ international solidarity.”28 

Black and white, unite and fight!

Notes and References

1 https://caricom.org/new-year-statement-by-new-chair-of-the-caribbean-community-caricom-honourable-mia-amor-mottley-s-c-m-p-prime-minister-of-barbados/.

2 Morning Star, 05.11.2024, ‘Lammy tells Africa there will be “no cash for slavery reparations”’; online at https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/lammy-tells-africa-there-will-be-no-cash-for-slavery-reparations.

3 See, for example, LBC, 14.10.2024, at https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/keir-starmer-slavery-reparations-commonwealth-summit-david-lammy/.

4 GC Darley, ‘Remembering Matilda, the last survivor of the transatlantic slave trade’, Aljazeera 12/1/ 2025, 12.01.2025, at https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/1/12/remembering-matilda-the-last-survivor-of-the-transatlantic-slave-trade.

5 T Davison, ‘Which countries have paid reparations for their role in the slave trade? Commonwealth leaders discuss issue’, in Evening Standard, 24.10. 2024; online at https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/reparations-meaning-define-slave-trade-commonwealth-keir-starmer-countries-b1189847.html.

6 EE Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, University of North Carolina Press, first published 1944.

7 https://www.lr.org/en/about-us/who-we-are/our-history/lloyds-register-and-the-transatlantic-trafficking-of-enslaved-african-people/.

8 https://businesstelegraph.co.uk/brown-brothers-harrimans-slavery-links-exposed-by-liverpool-campaign/.

9 https://caricom.org/caricom-ten-point-plan-for-reparatory-justice/.

10 A Bawden, ‘White women most likely to get HRT prescriptions in England, study finds’, in The Guardian 21/10/24, at https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/oct/21/white-women-hrt-prescriptions-study-england.

11 b hooks and C West, Breaking Bread, South End Press, Boston, MA, 1991, p 14.

12 https://www.kaieteurnewsonline.com/2023/12/19/latin-america-can-boost-economic-growth-by-reducing-crime-imf/.

13 b hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism, H Holt & Co, New York, 1995, and Penguin Books, 1996.

14 R Hart, Occupation and Control: The British in Jamaica,1660-1962, Arawak Publications, Kingston, Jamaica, 2013, pp 69-70.

15 M Hoyles, The Axe Laid to the Root. The Story of Robert Wedderburn, Hansib Publication, London, 2004, p 28.

16 b hooks, Salvation, Black People and Love, The Women’s Press, London, 2001

17 A Mohdin, in The Guardian, 10.09.2024, at https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/sep/10/mel-b-britons-world-afro-day-hair-discrimination-parliament-equality.

18 B Davidson, The African Past, An Atlantic Monthly Press Book, Little, Brown and Co, Boston/Toronto, 1964, p 33.

19 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Musa.

20 H Devlin and D Pegg, ‘Publisher reviews national IQ research by British “race scientist” Richard Lynn’ in The Guardian, 10.12.2024; online at https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/dec/10/elsevier-reviews-national-iq-research-by-british-race-scientist-richard-lynn.

21 S Tripathi, ‘Women and Online Harassment’, in Feminist Dissent, No 6, 2022, Special Issue; online at https://journals.warwick.ac.uk/index.php/feministdissent/article/view/1265.

22 https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Eugenics-and-Scientific-Racism.

23 P Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Penguin, 2017.

24 Fawcett Society, Broken Ladders, downloadable at https://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/broken-ladders.

25 https://www.tuc.org.uk/blogs/bme-women-far-more-likely-be-zero-hours-contracts.

26 B Torre, ‘Tories “failing black women” as many face insecure work’, in Morning Star, 04-05.11.2023; online at https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/tories-failing-black-women-more-forced-inhumane-zero-hours-contracts.

27 M Bentham, ‘Black inmates face disproportionate force’, in Evening Standard, 07.03.2023; online at https://iframe.standard.co.uk/news/london/black-inmates-disproportionate-force-wormwood-scrubs-ministry-of-justice-b1065317.html.

28 Morning Star, ‘Trade unionists gather to commemorate cotton workers boycott of slavery’, 20.01.2025, online at https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/trade-unionists-gather-commemorate-cotton-workers-boycott-slavery. 

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