Anna: I just meant that I believe that lots of the racists are working class (not that they’re the only or whole working class). They might be white racist or arab racist (or sexists, or subculturists), but the result is the same – spontaneous action results in a frenzied attack at the nearest scapegoat (white, wife, arab, chinese, child, immigrant or local) rather than at the true oppressor.

That’s what I meant by saying “when the working class errupts, it is against itself”. Sections of the class bash other sections, and it sucks.

That’s fine, and it’s a point well taken, but I think there’s still an important point here, and the question isn’t purely one of wording. Part of what I want to know is how the way that the “working class” is talked about affects our idea of what “vanguardists” are and what sort of “intervention” they need to provide.

In particular, it’s not like “the working class” tout court needs a bunch of revolutionary specialists to come in and tell them what racism is. Muslim working class folks who are getting bashed know what it is, know who is truly doing the oppressing (in this particular case), and have the bruises to prove it.

And when white working class folks participate in, or enable, violent racism, it seems to me like the people most qualified to confront them on it and show them that what they are doing is wrong, are the folks who have been bashed; in this case Muslims organizing and agitating for their own safety and dignity. Do they count as “vanguardists” and does this count as “intervention” in the uprising of the working class? If so, I don’t have a problem with it, but I think long historical experience should tell us how rarely self-proclaimed vanguards of the working class operate in that way, and how very dangerous this kind of language can be, because it tends to give the picture of the working masses, on the one side and the vanguardists on the other, with the vanguardists herding the workers in the politically correct direction, rather than the picture of folks within the working class taking the initiative to confront each other and fight with each other and hopefully learn from each other and eventually work together with each other. (In point of fact, given the number of “interventions” by “vanguardists” that had nothing to do with workers and everything to do with murderous power, I wonder whether the language of the Vanguard is helpful at all.)

If you’re going to complain (rightly so) about the media’s language when it arrogates the term “locals” for violent white racists and “Muslims” for their victims, shouldn’t you also be a bit more careful than to talk about “the working class,” “the Australian working class,” et cetera as if it were composed entirely of young white men? Lots of working class folks in Australia are suffering on the business end of the bashing at the moment.