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Horizon aims to be a space for Irish Marxists to engage in open debate, critically examine our ideas, and collectively advance the struggle for socialism.
Horizon Magazine operates under an open letter policy
“Protesters gather outside Ireland’s parliament over Yves Sakila’s ‘disturbing’ death”1
The use of single quotation marks around ‘disturbing’ in this BBC article is an interesting one. In their ethos they describe themselves as impartial, or ‘neutral’. The media source is detaching itself from the word officially, vaguely gesturing that some would describe it this way. There is a kernel of truth in that the BBC accepts this as the prevailing state of affairs. Black people are failed by the government and murdered by the henchmen of capital. But it is up to you, the reader, to decide whether that is condemnable or not. Spokespersons from Fianna Fáil and the Social Democrats have gone on to describe the events as “concerning” and “distressing”.2 They demand independent investigations into what has occurred. A far cry from addressing the racism which is built into the very functioning of these bodies.
Racism can not just be turned on and off, showing up one day and disappearing on another. It is a constant, something deeply embedded in the structure of the existing state. And there are questions as to how it can be institutionally abolished, which cannot occur without a political intervention into the way society is organised. Racism is not something that exists on a mere interpersonal level, an ideological shift cannot occur without a reorientation of structure. The case of Reconstruction in America gives us an insight into this. A brief, yet ideologically anti-racist apparatus had to be established in order to temporarily pry racism from the grasp of the white plantation owners and working class in the South. An effective attack against racism under contemporary capitalism is necessarily bound up with a fight for political power that seeks to dismantle the violent state order that enforces it.
In Ireland and across Europe the border regime itself serves as a means to uphold whiteness. A difference in citizenship rights enables the further and more intensive exploitation of an underclass. This encourages the formation of unity around race and nation, concealing class antagonisms. It is a shortcut to forms of privilege which would otherwise not be granted without the enforcement of racial disparity.
In pursuit of the protection of private property today, the state mobilises to strike out against those that threaten its interests. The murder of people of colour is enabled through the police and security apparatuses. It is deemed business as usual to punish people of colour in cruel and unusual ways, their brutalisation serving as a warning for everyone else.
There is no world in which a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie will lead the charge against racism. And there is no world in which racism is eradicated while the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie remains intact. A revolutionary mass workers’ party which is staunchly anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, and against all ideological manifestations in which the working-class is divided against itself, is the primary vehicle through which a dictatorship of the proletariat is created. This proletarian dictatorship must have the will and the means to root out and disrupt the existing structures of oppression.
The death of Yves Sakila is not an aberration to be condemned and forgotten. It is a reminder of the barbarity of the capitalist order we live under. An order we must work tirelessly to overturn.
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