"I look on the blacks as a set of monkeys, and I think the earlier they are exterminated the better." So said a juror during the 1838 Sydney trial of settlers accused of the Myall Creek massacre of 28 Aborigines.
While London's official policy at the time was for equal rights and even recognition of land ownership for Aborigines, the white juror's attitude, and the outcry in colonial society that white men were being tried for clearing away a few blacks, reflected the brutal racism that was a major factor in the founding of modern Australia.
All capitalist colonial-settler societies, such as the USA, Canada and Israel as well as Australia, have been founded on such attitudes towards indigenous peoples. Racist attitudes towards non-white immigrants have also been a central feature of the development of these societies.
In 1901, conservative politician Edmund Barton stated in the new Australian parliament that "we know that coloured labour and white labour cannot exist side by side... We are guarding the last part of the world in which the higher races can live and increase freely for the higher civilisation."
The ALP was at the time even more keen on fusing racism with the search for a new national identity, with the first point of its 1905 platform calling for "the cultivation of an Australian sentiment based on the maintenance of racial purity".
Racism — treating and judging people on the basis of superficial physical attributes, particularly skin colour — is endemic to capitalism. Its pervasiveness under capitalism leads many to think that it is a "natural" if unfortunate aspect of human history. However, the above examples suggest that racism is tied to particular social interests.
Prior to capitalism's rise in 16th century Europe the key differences among people that were singled out, and provided the basis for community-wide discrimination and persecution, were based on religion. However, the European colonial expansion into the Americas that was the basis for the development of capitalism posed the problem of creating a cheap labour force in the new colonies.
It is not well known that the forced labour that was essential to the commercial plantations of North and South America and the Caribbean initially consisted not just of kidnapped Africans but also of indentured white European servants. However, early class struggles such as the 1676 "Bacon's rebellion" in Virginia in which black and white labourers launched an armed insurrection convinced the colonial rulers and plantation owners they needed an ideological prop to divide the labouring poor.
From this need arose the legal and ideological infrastructure of black plantation slavery and this, along with dispossession of the indigenous people, was the basis for racism — the categorisation of people into sharply separate "races" of people, supposedly having different natures and abilities, which became scientific orthodoxy until well into the 20th century.
In early Australia, racism and a shared interest in Aboriginal dispossession blurred the class differences between the colonial elite and poorer settlers. The bureaucratic leaders of the developing labour movement also found it convenient to avoid class struggle by putting the blame for unemployment and other major social ills on Chinese immigrants and Kanak indentured labourers, thus campaigning for a "White Australia".
Unfortunately, ordinary workers are also susceptible to racism, and not only because it is an idea promoted by the ruling elite. Racist ideas are fostered not just by the conscious use of "divide and rule" by the ruling class, the paranoia of small business people under economic insecurity, and the xenophobic nationalism of reformist labour misleaders. They are also fostered by the relative advantages that have gone to all people socially categorised as "white". Indeed, that has helped racism to continue even after it has ceased to be official policy.
Racism is often more subtle today, particularly since the horrors of Nazism strict "racial" categorisation of ability and nature has gone out of fashion. Often "cultural difference" is a substitute, as in government and media vilification of Muslims — the practitioners of which, along with those who blame Indigenous people for their own conditions of extreme poverty and shocking health, rush to deny is racism.
Today, racism can be very shame-faced, as in the Tamworth council refusing the entry of black Sudanese refugees last year on the pathetic grounds of "lack of services".
However, the December 2005 Cronulla riots in which a white mob raged against "Lebs" and "wogs" demonstrated that a brutal racism can break to the surface, and that racism needs to be constantly fought against.
Aboriginal and immigrant people from the first fought for their rights and found allies, not least in the radical left. Early in the 20th century, the Industrial Workers of the World denounced the nationalism and racism of much of the rest of the labour movement. From the 1930s, the Communist Party of Australia played a pioneering role in struggles for Aboriginal rights, including landmark campaigns in the 1960s such as the Freedom Rides that helped break down segregation in country towns and the Gurindgi strike that launched the land rights
Understanding and fighting racism is a central part of the struggle for a world that can ensure social justice, freedom and dignity for all.