The Destructive Fiction of "Race"
Germany and the Fiction of "Nationalism" and "Race"
The Alternative for Germany is a far-right German political party known for its xenophobia, anti-Islam beliefs, and obsession with German identity and nationalism. It is also now the country's third-largest party - and the first far-right party to enter the German Bundestag (parliament) since the end of the Second World war.
The rising xenophobia and Islamophobia in the AfD grew worse over the course of 2015, in direct response to Merkel’s so-called open-door refugee policy necessitated by the demographic need for new workers coming in where the population was in decline. By December of that year, almost 900,000 migrants, asylum seekers, and newcomers had come into Germany. The AfD capitalized on growing anxiety that the immigrants - especially Muslim immigrants - would fundamentally change German society.
Though the numbers of refugees dropped dramatically in 2016, simmering resentment on the far right in Germany at times turned violent. According to the Funke Media Group, some 3,500 far-right attacks on refugees and refugee homes were carried out in 2016, leaving hundreds injured. The AfD did particularly well in the former East Germany where there is high unemployment, low paid jobs and poor housing; an ideal ground for racist politics.
The Alternative for Germany (afD) claim German national identity is under threat, both from European integration and from the presence and accommodation of immigrants and refugees within Germany. They want the definition of being German to return to heimet (meaning blood-related) - a mystical and fictional racial belonging. The AfD claimed that children from immigrant parents might have German passports but they would never be "real" Germans because they lacked that certain German essence - blood (GUARDIAN 19 September 2019).
Of course nationalism is a fiction along with race. Workers do not have a country. They do not own and control the means of production and distribution. Workers are a subject and exploited class. Those in Germany have identical interests with immigrants coming into the country as they do with workers elsewhere in the world.
It is in this climate that in September 2017 Scientists at the University of Jena in eastern Germany called for the term "race" to no longer be used, saying there is no biological basis for the classification of humanity into races.
The scientists said:
"The primarily biological justification for defining groups of humans as races - for example based on the colour of their skin or eyes, or the shape of their skulls — has led to the persecution, enslavement and slaughter of millions of people,...However, there is no biological basis for races, and there has never been one. The concept of race is the result of racism, not its prerequisite,"
They went on to say:
"The linking of features such as skin colour with characteristics or even supposedly Genetically fixed personality traits and behaviours, as was done in the heyday of anthropological racism, has now been soundly refuted. To use such arguments today as seemingly scientific is both wrong and malicious. There is also no scientifically proven connection between intelligence and geographical origin, but there is a clear connection with social background. Here too, racism in the form of exclusion and discrimination creates supposed races.
However, racism continues to exist among people. In the 20th century, racial research, racial science and racial hygiene or eugenics, as seemingly scientific disciplines, were only some of the excesses of racist thinking and action".
The scientists continued:
"Scientific research on genetic variations of human beings shows that instead of definable boundaries, genetic gradients run between human groups.To be explicit, not only is there no single gene that underpins 'racial' differences, but there is not even a single base pair."
https://www.uni-jena.de/unijenamedia/Universit%C3%A4t/Abteilung+Hochschulkommunikation/Presse/Jenaer+Erkl%C3%A4rung/Jenaer_Erklaerung_EN.pdf
Walter Rosenthal, the President of Jena University, argues that while simply removing the word "race" from shared vocabulary will not prevent racism, "as academics we can help to ensure that racism is no longer able to invoke us as a justification."
However, to rid society of racism requires a revolutionary change. Scientific evidence can be ignored and so-called "race scientists" can just continue producing their poisoness ideas and beliefs in their well-funded journals, on the internet or at secretive conferences. Scientific work is not autonomous and neutral but takes place within a class divided society. Darwinism, for example, still has a battle with creationism and “intelligent design" in many countries like the US and Turkey, and in schools and universities political legislation can override scientific facts about the origins of human beings.
Ruling class ideas are materially grounded within the social system they are produced and disseminated in, As Marx and Engels pointed out in the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO. Capitalism, with its many social problems like poverty and unemployment, causes racism, as it does nationalism, so to remove the effects you have to remove the cause. And to remove the cause requires the working class to unite together as a "class for itself" in order to take democratic and political action as socialists to replace capitalism with socialism.
Object and Declaration of Principles
Object
The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community.
Declaration of Principles
THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN HOLDS:
1. That society as at present constituted is based upon the ownership of the means of living (ie land, factories, railways, etc.) by the capitalist or master class, and the consequent enslavement of the working class, by whose labour alone wealth is produced.
2. That in society, therefore, there is an antagonism of interests, manifesting itself as a class struggle, between those who possess but do not produce and those who produce but do not possess.
3.That this antagonism can be abolished only by the emancipation of the working class from the domination of the master class, by the conversion into common property of society of the means of production and distribution, and their democratic control by the whole people.
4. That as in the order of social evolution the working class is the last class to achieve its freedom, the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex.
5. That this emancipation must be the work of the working class itself.
6. That as the machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, exists only to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers, the working class must organise consciously and politically for the conquest of the powers of government, national and local, in order that this machinery, including these forces, may be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation and the overthrow of privilege, aristocratic and plutocratic.
7. That as all political parties are but the expression of class interests, and as the interest of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of all sections of the master class, the party seeking working class emancipation must be hostile to every other party.
8. The Socialist Party of Great Britain, therefore, enters the field of political action determined to wage war against all other political parties, whether alleged labour or avowedly capitalist, and calls upon the members of the working class of this country to muster under its banner to the end that a speedy termination may be wrought to the system which deprives them of the fruits of their labour, and that poverty may give place to comfort, privilege to equality, and slavery to freedom.