Arizona's racist sheriff: a sexual deviant too?

When I was a young man working mostly on building sites, sewer construction or similar type jobs I remember the Tory politician Enoch Powell.  It was the late sixties and I was not politically active in any real way; had never been to a Union meeting.  I had hitchhiked to Venice in 1967 sleeping on beaches and fields along the way and meeting all sorts of people.  I slept on a beach right opposite the famous Negresco hotel in Nice.  The beach was called Le Voilier and there were 15 or 20 of us that slept there, all different nationalities.

I did the same in 1968 getting to Istanbul and Ankara this time.  I wasn't even aware there was a general strike in France that year as I was enjoying my travel along the Cote de Azure on to Milan, Venice and Thessaloniki where I could sell my fairly rare blood type on the way to Istanbul.

These experiences and the people I met, Americans and others, helped me develop a better understanding of the world.  Although I was not a "hippie" as such, I was excited by the different languages and people I was hanging out with, people from all over the world. We were British working class kids and although we liked the Yanks, we laughed at them a bit because most of the Americans we met were from the middle class, they had a little money. We used to joke that they had jeans with patches on them but no holes underneath. The sixties was an incredible decade and I am lucky to have lived through it.

I was changed for the better by this experience.  At the time, like many English workers, I came under the influence of anti-immigration ideas.  The Irish were traditionally a prime target of those that blamed immigrants for the state of the economy.  The Irish had too many children, they bred like rabbits. They were poor and many of them being rural laborers really (not the Ireland of today) were not very worldly which meant they were ignorant. They were also Catholics and the cause of that damn trouble up in the Northern Ireland, all that was left of the British colony of Ireland.

I once heard it said that when the people of color came, the people from the other former British colonies, it gave the Irish a break.  They were a different color, weren't even Christians, spoke another language (the Irish had long ago been forced to adopt English) and were an easier target.  While the Irish have different physical features than Anglo Saxon British, they are the same color and so many of us in England, myself included, are of Irish ancestry.

Enoch Powell

At around this time, the Tory politician Enoch Powell, an Englishman of Welsh descent was causing a stir by attacking immigration. Our culture, our way of life will be destroyed by the immigrant hordes was his message, although I never read it or heard it in full, he made  a controversial speech warning Christian white England of the dangers of being overrun by foreigners.  In what was called the "River of Blood" speech he warned against the perils of immigration:
As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood'. That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now."

Powell was a racist.  He was an educated man, trained in the top schools of capitalist indoctrination culminating in his stint at Cambridge. He was opposed to the Race Relations Act that was introduced in 1968 that forbade discrimination in housing finding it "offensive and immoral."  Before that Act,  I recall seeing notices on boarding houses or homes with rooms to rent announcing "No Irish, No blacks no dogs" Eric Clapton has supported Enoch Powell, and to my knowledge has never withdrawn that support.

Powell's arguments made sense to me for a brief moment.  Not that I was active in any anti-immigration stuff or racist movements, I was too busy working hard and having fun. I don't recall Powell using flagrantly bad racist terms, he was after all, an educated spokesperson of capital.  And British capitalism at that.  He was educated like many of them are in their top universities like Oxford and Cambridge.  He spoke Greek and Latin.  He was smart and cultured.  Types like Powell don't use the most crass terms like "Nigger" or "Wog".  This sort of language is reserved for the lower classes and the misinformed, or the American bourgeois and racists.  No, Powell talked in terms of culture and jobs and heritage as I recall it.

For a moment this made sense to me as it did to many workers that if there were less foreigners coming in  there would be more jobs for us.  Plus, they were from poor countries and used our social services and the great free health care system we had; they were a strain on the economy and deprived us of opportunities. After his "River of Blood" speech, 1,000 dockers marched on Westminster protesting against criticism of Powell's views by politicians and others.

Fortunately for me this period didn't last long as traveling and meeting political people helped me look at the world in a different way and I came to understand that such views were a smoke screen, an attempt to blame crises caused by capitalism on foreigners and immigrants. I was very conscious of myself as a working class person and never tried to adopt middle class ways of acting and talking. I would go so far to say that I treated middle class people unfairly as soon as I heard that accent.  I judged them and mistrusted them immediately. This was  wrong but based on certain experiences.

I am reminded of this by increasing attacks on immigrants here in the US, especially in the states that border Mexico on our southern border. There is a huge wall being built to keep the ravaging hordes out. This is a ridiculous idea in that these walls don't stop capital from emigrating. And as long as cheaper labor and more profitable ventures exist the other side of that wall, capital will emigrate and exploit workers there as it does already . We should also remind ourselves that one million Mexican subsistence farmers were driven off their land by NAFTA and that forces economic migrants to seek survival wherever they can.

Who knows the level of this man's brutality

It has come to light that Arizona's Maricopa County sheriff's office has waged a savage and brutal war against the Latino population in that county. Led by the top man, Sheriff Joe Arapaio, the deputies were encouraged to "target" Latinos as they searched for illegal immigrants. This thug with state license to kill bills  himself as "America's Toughest Sheriff".  According to the Wall Street Journal, one of the sheriffs tough measures was to  force jail inmates to wear pink underwear; some of the toughest bullies are sexual deviants. The US justice department has found that the department, under Arapaio conducted traffic stops on the basis of race, mistreated Spanish speaking inmates and discriminated against those who criticized his actions. Latino drivers in Maricopa County were "four to nine times" likely to be stopped by police the WSJ adds. Who knows how many beatings Latino men suffered and sexual favors unfortunate Latina's were forced to grant under these conditions.

The Sheriff was no doubt emboldened by the anti-immigrant legislation passed in Arizona giving the police more leeway in searching out undocumented or what they refer to as "illegal" immigrants. The US Justice Dept's offensive against Maricopa County is not to be taken as any real effort to undermine the view in society that it is immigration that is one of the main causes of the crisis so many Americans are facing.  Like I wrote about the population argument in previous blogs, this is a smoke screen, an attempt to divert attention from the real problem which is the so-called free market.  We are in a crisis of capitalism not a crisis of immigration.

With racism, the capitalist class uses both the carrot and the stick.  The civil rights movement especially forced them to come out openly against the most obvious racist abuses. During times of relative calm in the class struggle the issue is put on the back burner. But they use racism more openly when the workers move on the offensive and in doing so tend to seek class allies, overcoming these barriers to working class unity. This old divide and rule tactic is then used more forcefully, to hell with the consequences.

Many white workers and workers of all backgrounds fall prey to this argument that immigration is a major cause of our economic problems, but we must consider it in all its complexities.  We start from the main point which is that it is global capitalism that is the cause of our problems.  Men and women don't leave their children, brave bandits and for the women, the real threat of rape and murder, to come to the US because they hate their own communities.  The poverty in Central America where many of the immigrants come from has its roots in US foreign policy and US imperialism's domination and plunder in the region supporting and arming the most brutal regimes on behalf of US multinationals.

Obviously, simply calling on the opening of borders disconnected from a more general independent program for workers would not work. I posted a blog about this some time ago and wrote:

But even if these workers and peasants don't come here to the US, staying in their home countries will have basically the same effect. It will increase the supply of Labor, further driving down wages (Labor’s price) and increasing the rate at which capital invests since there would be even greater profits to be made there. Obviously this would mean further job losses here in the U.S. Thus, we cannot escape the affects of the conditions of those workers and peasants, no matter if they come here or stay in their home countries. The only real difference is that if they come here, the effects of this forced competition are more visible to us. We can bury our heads in the sand and ignore the conditions in such countries as El Salvador, Mexico, etc., but that in no way means that those conditions don't affect us just as much. Therefore, our only choice is to join with them, wherever they are, in a united struggle to improve wages and conditions, as well as democratic rights, whether they be here or there. 

It is in the interests of all workers to welcome immigrants undocumented or otherwise, in to our movement, if we do not, our main enemies, the bosses' will use them against us. They already do. It is in our interest to build unity across nation states and coordinate united efforts to raise the standard of living of workers in low wage countries which means unity with them in a struggle against US corporations and our own government. Raising their wages limits economic refugees and restricts capitals ability to seek cheaper Labor power.

Whenever we come across workers who have been overly influenced by the capitalists anti-immigration propaganda we counter this with a patient explanation of how this weakens us all, and how these ideas impede class unity and strengthens our enemies. Nationalism and racism hurts us all.

We reject the approach of the white middle class or upper middle class lefty types who lecture white workers on the need to get to grips with their "white privilege".  The individuals that adopt these methods, especially males, have indeed lived a life of privilege based on their class, their gender and their color.  They are riddled with guilt at having such privilege amid the poverty and racism that exists in society and feel the need to prove to its victims that despite their privileged backgrounds, their private schools and an upbringing that taught them from day one that they were born to lead they are not racists.  They do this by attacking the white working class who have not had the same privileges.

This approach is condescending to workers of color and is poisonous for the white workers.  White workers have more in common with workers of color than these white middle class types many of whom will find that comfortable path to security through their family and class connections when they tire of their activist adventure. Historically there are many heroic figures from the middle class who have given their lives to the workers' cause and the struggle for a democratic socialist society and this should be recognized, but they rejected their class backgrounds and fought with and for the class whose historic mission it is to change society.

Marx was not wrong when he said that workers have no countries.  We are all proud of aspects of our national culture, music, literature, dress and customs, all  sorts of things.  But our class rules nowhere.  The dominant culture of capitalist societies is bourgeois culture, the culture of Donald Trump and Warren Buffet. They are the problem, not immigrants.