Race & Class

The Material Basis of Racism

Racism is not a natural feature of human society. It did not exist in its modern form before the rise of capitalism, and it will not survive capitalism's overthrow. Racial ideology was constructed historically — assembled piece by piece to serve a specific economic function: to justify the enslavement of African peoples, to legitimate the dispossession of indigenous populations, and to divide the working class of the colonising countries against their natural allies.

The transatlantic slave trade was not driven by racial hatred — racial hatred was manufactured to justify the trade. When Portuguese merchants began purchasing enslaved Africans in the fifteenth century, the elaborate pseudo-scientific ideology of racial hierarchy did not yet exist. It was constructed retroactively, elaborated over centuries, to provide moral and intellectual cover for an economic system that required the reduction of human beings to property.

Karl Marx understood this clearly. In Capital, he demonstrated that primitive accumulation — the violent dispossession of peasants, the theft of colonial territory, and the institution of chattel slavery — formed the bloody foundation on which capitalism was built. The slave plantation and the factory were not separate systems: they were organically connected. The surplus value extracted from enslaved labour in the Americas financed the industrial revolution in Britain. The cotton picked under conditions of terror fed the mills of Manchester. Racism was the ideological cement that held this system together.

Race and Class Under Capitalism

Under capitalism, race and class are inseparable — but they are not identical. The Marxist-Leninist position is not that race "reduces to" class in a crude mechanical sense, but that racial oppression has a material, class basis and cannot be understood or combated without class analysis.

The bourgeoisie uses racial division as a deliberate instrument of class rule. By setting white workers against Black workers, native-born workers against migrants, the ruling class accomplishes several things simultaneously: it drives down wages for the entire working class by maintaining a reserve army of super-exploited labour; it prevents workers from recognising their common interests and organising against their common enemy; it channels working-class anger away from the capitalist system and toward fellow workers of other nationalities or races.

This is not merely a theoretical point — it has been demonstrated repeatedly in the history of the labour movement. In the United States, employers deliberately recruited Black workers as strikebreakers not because of racial malice but because the exclusion of Black workers from white-dominated unions created a pool of desperate labour that could be used to break strikes. The racism of the craft unions undermined their own class interests. A racially unified working class is a stronger working class.

The concept of the labour aristocracy is central here. Lenin observed that imperialist superprofits extracted from the colonies allowed the ruling class to bribe a privileged stratum of workers in the metropolitan countries with relatively higher wages and better conditions. This labour aristocracy — overwhelmingly drawn from the dominant national group — was materially invested in the continuation of imperialism. Racial hierarchy reinforces and is reinforced by this class stratification: workers in the oppressor nation receive a psychological and material "wage of whiteness" that binds them to the system even against their long-term class interests.

Against Liberal Identity Politics

Marxist-Leninists sharply distinguish their approach to racial oppression from liberal identity politics. This is not because we minimise racism or treat it as a secondary issue — on the contrary, we take it with the utmost seriousness precisely because we understand its material roots and its function in maintaining capitalist class rule. It is because identity politics, when detached from class analysis, is incapable of resolving the problem it identifies.

Liberal identity politics locates racism in the psychology of individuals — in "implicit bias," in cultural attitudes, in the representation of oppressed groups in positions of power. Its solutions are correspondingly individual and cultural: diversity training, representation in corporate boardrooms and government positions, the promotion of individual members of oppressed groups into the ruling class. This approach does not threaten the system that produces racial oppression — it merely asks that the system become more diverse in its composition.

A Black CEO of a private equity firm does not represent the interests of Black workers. A woman Prime Minister who implements austerity cuts that disproportionately devastate working-class women is not a victory for women's liberation. The ruling class has demonstrated its willingness and capacity to accommodate a degree of racial and gender diversity at the top while leaving the underlying structures of exploitation entirely intact. This is not progress toward liberation — it is the absorption of the language of liberation into the service of the existing order.

The Marxist-Leninist approach is rooted in class consciousness and material analysis. We fight racism not by promoting individual members of oppressed groups into the ruling class, but by building a working-class movement that understands racial oppression as a product of the capitalist system and fights to overthrow that system. The liberation of oppressed peoples is inseparable from the liberation of the working class as a whole.

The Soviet Achievement: National Equality in Practice

The Soviet Union provides the most advanced historical example of a state that systematically combated national and racial oppression through socialist construction. Under tsarism, Russia was described by Lenin as a "prison house of nations" — over 100 nationalities were subjected to Russification, stripped of their languages and cultures, barred from education and public life, and in several cases subjected to violent pogroms.

The Bolsheviks transformed this situation fundamentally. The Constitution of the USSR enshrined the equality of all nationalities and made chauvinist agitation a criminal offence. National minorities received the right to education in their own languages — languages that in many cases had never previously been written down were given alphabets and literary traditions for the first time. Whole peoples who had been considered backward and uncivilised by the tsarist regime were elevated to full participation in political, cultural, and economic life.

The Soviet achievements in this area were concrete and measurable. Literacy rates among previously oppressed nationalities rose from near zero to near-universal within a single generation. National republics were established for dozens of peoples across the former empire. Indigenous Siberian peoples who had lived under conditions of near-feudal subjugation were given land, schools, and political representation. The Central Asian republics were industrialised and modernised at a pace unmatched anywhere in the capitalist world.

This did not mean the elimination of all national tensions — contradictions within socialism are real and must be honestly acknowledged. But it demonstrated conclusively that a socialist state, guided by Marxist-Leninist principles, can make historically unprecedented progress in overcoming the legacy of national oppression — progress that no capitalist state has ever achieved or seriously attempted.

National Self-Determination: Lenin's Position

The Marxist-Leninist approach to the national question is grounded in Lenin's famous position on the right of nations to self-determination — including the right to secession. This position was and remains controversial, but its logic is clear and its political function is essential.

Lenin argued that the working class of the oppressor nation must unconditionally recognise the right of oppressed nations to self-determination — including separation — not because separation is always desirable, but because failure to recognise this right reproduces the chauvinism of the oppressor nation within the labour movement itself. A movement that demands unity without first recognising the right of oppressed peoples to determine their own fate is not an internationalist movement — it is a chauvinist movement dressed in internationalist language.

This was not a concession to nationalism but its opposite. Lenin distinguished sharply between the nationalism of the oppressor — which must be unconditionally opposed — and the nationalism of the oppressed, which has a progressive character insofar as it asserts the dignity and rights of subjugated peoples against colonial domination. The nationalism of Ireland against British imperialism, of India against British colonialism, of African peoples against European colonialism — these were struggles that Marxist-Leninists supported, while never abandoning the perspective that the ultimate goal is the international unity of the working class.

The national question is never abstract — it always has a concrete class content. The question is always: whose nationalism? In whose interests? The nationalism of the bourgeoisie of an oppressed nation serves to unite that nation under bourgeois leadership, ultimately serving capitalist interests. The national liberation struggle guided by the working class leads toward socialism. Marxist-Leninists support the latter and criticise the former, while always maintaining the perspective of proletarian internationalism.

Building Working-Class Unity Against Racism

The central practical task of Marxist-Leninists in relation to racial oppression is the building of genuine working-class unity — unity that is not achieved by suppressing or ignoring the specific oppression of racialised workers, but by fighting that oppression as an integral part of the class struggle.

This means that white workers in Britain must actively combat racism not merely as a moral obligation but as a class interest. Every racist division weakens the labour movement. Every migrant worker driven into irregular status becomes a tool in the hands of employers to undercut wages. Every Black worker denied union membership or access to skilled trades represents a weakening of working-class organisation. The fight against racism is the fight for a stronger, more united working class.

The united front tactic is essential here. Marxist-Leninists seek to build the broadest possible unity of working people against racism and fascism, while maintaining a clear class perspective. This means working with community organisations, trade unions, anti-racist campaigns, and progressive forces — while always fighting for the primacy of class politics and the independent organisation of the working class.

Concretely, this means:

• Full trade union membership and equal rights for migrant workers — breaking down the divisions employers use to fragment the workforce
• Fighting racist discrimination in housing, employment, and public services — as manifestations of the capitalist state's function of maintaining class and racial hierarchy
• Building solidarity between workers of the oppressor nation and workers of oppressed nationalities — not through abstract appeals to unity but through concrete joint struggle
• Opposing immigration controls — which exist to create a pool of super-exploitable labour and divide workers along national lines
• Supporting the struggles of oppressed peoples internationally — as expressions of the worldwide struggle against imperialism
• Combating chauvinism within the labour movement itself — which is the primary obstacle to working-class unity in the imperialist countries

Race and Imperialism Today

The connection between racial oppression and imperialism is not a matter of historical interest alone — it is the living reality of the contemporary world. The racial hierarchies established under colonialism persist and are reproduced through the structures of imperialism, neo-colonialism, and the capitalist state in the metropolis.

The prison-industrial complex in the United States is one of the starkest examples. The United States incarcerates a higher proportion of its population than any other country on Earth, and the incarcerated population is overwhelmingly Black and Latino. This is not an accident or an aberration — it is the continuation of the racial caste system by other means. The War on Drugs, launched by the Nixon administration, was explicitly designed — as Nixon's aide John Ehrlichman later admitted — to criminalise Black communities and the anti-war left. Mass incarceration provides a pool of near-slave labour for private prison corporations and removes large sections of the racially oppressed population from political life through disenfranchisement.

Police violence against Black communities in Britain and the United States reflects the function of the police under capitalism: not to protect the population as a whole, but to protect property and maintain the social order — which includes the racial order. The disproportionate use of stop-and-search, the deaths of Black people in custody, the systematic under-prosecution of racist attacks — these are not aberrations of an otherwise fair system. They are features of a system designed to reproduce racial hierarchy.

Immigration controls serve a dual function under imperialism. They provide a mechanism for importing cheap labour when required while maintaining a pool of undocumented workers who can be super-exploited without the protection of labour law. They also function ideologically — channelling working-class frustration away from the ruling class and toward migrants, refugees, and workers of other nationalities. The refugee crisis is a product of imperialist wars and climate breakdown driven by capitalist accumulation; immigration controls punish the victims while protecting the perpetrators.

The Marxist-Leninist on Racism: Key Principles

Summarising the Marxist-Leninist position on race and class, the following principles guide our analysis and practice:

Stalin and the National Question

Stalin's 1913 work Marxism and the National Question, written under Lenin's close supervision, remains one of the foundational Marxist-Leninist texts on the national and racial question. In it, Stalin defined a nation as a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.

This materialist definition was a weapon against both bourgeois nationalism and abstract cosmopolitanism. Against bourgeois nationalism, it insisted that nations are historical formations — not eternal, not biological, not divine — which arise under specific material conditions and which will eventually dissolve as those conditions change. Against abstract cosmopolitanism, it recognised that nations are real communities with specific cultures, languages, and histories that must be respected and supported, not dissolved into a false universalism that in practice meant the dominance of the culturally and economically stronger nation.

The policy derived from this analysis was clear: equal rights for all nations; the right of nations to self-determination; the development of national cultures as the form through which socialist content is expressed; and the fight against both great-power chauvinism and narrow nationalism as equally dangerous deviations. This policy, applied to the USSR, produced the most advanced experiment in multi-national socialist construction in human history.

Racism in Britain: A Class Analysis

In Britain, racial oppression has a specific historical character rooted in the British Empire — the largest empire in world history, which subjected hundreds of millions of people across Asia, Africa, and the Americas to colonial rule. The legacy of this empire shapes British society to this day, in ways that the British ruling class works assiduously to deny or minimise.

The Windrush generation — workers recruited from the Caribbean to rebuild post-war Britain — were subjected to systematic racism in housing, employment, and public life, and were later subjected to the Windrush scandal in which the Home Office destroyed landing cards and threatened deportation to people who had lived legally in Britain for decades. This was not a bureaucratic error — it was the logical consequence of the hostile environment policy, which was designed to make life intolerable for racially oppressed communities.

The communities formed by South Asian, African, and Caribbean immigration to Britain occupy a specific position in the British class structure. They are disproportionately represented in low-wage, insecure, and dangerous work — in the NHS, in social care, in distribution and logistics. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this translated directly into death rates two to three times higher than those of the white population — a stark demonstration of the material consequences of racial stratification within the working class.

The Marxist-Leninist response is not to demand diversity in the boardrooms of the corporations that exploit these workers, but to organise them as part of the wider working class, to fight for their full equality of rights, and to build the kind of class unity that can challenge the system responsible for their oppression. The immigrant worker and the native-born worker face the same enemy — the capitalist class that exploits both.

Further Reading

• The National Question — Lenin and Stalin's foundational analysis
• National Liberation — The Marxist-Leninist position on anti-colonial struggle
• Colonial Legacy — The historical roots of racial oppression in Britain and Europe
• Imperialism — How imperialist exploitation underpins racial hierarchy globally
• Primitive Accumulation — Slavery, dispossession, and the foundations of capitalism
• Class Consciousness — Building unity across racial and national lines
• The United Front — Tactics for broad anti-racist, anti-fascist struggle
• The Labour Aristocracy — How imperial superprofits create racial division within the working class