THERE are many politicians hoping that the international wave of protests under the banner of Black Lives Matter will dwindle and turn out to be a moment rather than a movement.

They are not just willing the ends, but the means also.

One of them is to pay lip service to the slogan so that it becomes so ubiquitous as to be anodyne.

For sheer hypocrisy the European Union is hard to beat. It has proclaimed that “Black Lives Matter!” contrasting itself to Donald Trump’s America while returning refugees to the tender mercies of the rival Libyan militias — or ensuring they drown in the Mediterranean.

Another means of disorganising the movement is to try to isolate its most militant components, to ridicule demands that raise fundamental change but to seek accommodation over symbols.

It is to turn the desire for systemic transformation into merely a matter of culture and dealing with “hangovers from the past” not the mechanisms of today that reproduce racism and class exploitation.

In 1968 conservative Republican Richard Nixon, running for presidential office as the civil rights movement in the US grew over to more militant demands for Black Power, declared that he too “supported” that slogan — symbolically. He said: “Much of the black militant talk these days is actually far closer to the doctrines of free enterprise rather than the welfarist 1930s… [The government’s] new approach ought to be oriented towards more black ownership … black pride, black jobs, black opportunity and yes, Black Power.”

He and a small cohort of black Republicans drew on Booker T Washington’s conservative injunction half a century earlier that black people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps through entrepreneurship and establishing black business.

At the same time, Nixon was perfecting the Republicans’ “southern strategy.” That was to channel racist resentment at the formal dismantling of segregationist political structures by the civil rights movement in order to establish the party in states where the Democrats had governed for decades through that Jim Crow apparatus.

The consequences live with us today. One of them is Trump, in many ways a product of the radicalisation to the racist right of a large part of the Republican base.

Nixon’s doublespeak is beyond Trump. It is not beyond Boris Johnson, with Tory black faces in his cabinet and with precious little opposition from a Labour leader who has gone out of his way to distance himself from the radical implications of the anti-racist upsurge.

Nevertheless — and with ebbs and flows into fresh channels — this movement is continuing. As with the black civil rights struggle in the early 1960s seeding the revolt against oppression in the Catholic working class ghettos of Northern Ireland, Black Lives Matter is refracted in Europe and finding domestic forms.

In the first phase we saw enormous mobilisations in London, Paris, Berlin and other European cities. They voiced solidarity with the rising in the US and demands for change at home, often focused on the police and repressive state apparatuses.

The sickening revelation that London police officers posed for selfies by the bodies of two black women murdered in Wembley, sisters Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, might have been something for Starmer to make a national rallying point of rather than refusing even to discuss a demand emerging from the US to deal with racist policing.

The issues raised go beyond symbols of the slave trade in those countries that profited from it and wider than police brutality, central as that is.

Last weekend saw two big protests: one in Athens and one in the Neukolln borough of Berlin.

At events in Athens immigrant, refugee and migrant communities came together with forces of the organised working-class movement and left. The commonly raised slogans were: “Black Lives Matter,” “Refugee Lives Matter,” “Immigrant Lives Matter.” Participants ranged from the more established Albanians to the recently arrived Eritreans and Syrians. Health workers and other delegations joined them.

The branching out of slogans was the opposite of what you sometimes get when a small group of activists sits down and decides a list of demands divorced from the real processes of masses of people in motion.

It arose from the social reality of racism in Greece in which black lives matter is equivalent to talking about the condition of immigrants and refugees. It also came from the drawing together of various communities — in practice answering what is too often a sterile and divisive discussion: what do we mean by black? Is BAME a good or bad acronym?

And it focused general opposition to racism into precise political effect — demanding the refugee camps are closed and people integrated into the cities, an end to the Fortress Europe policy. In this it targeted the right wing government and EU enforcers of austerity. The invitation to suffering Greek workers was open and appealing — this is your issue too.

The Neukolln protests were in response to a far-right attack on a Syrian bakery — the seventh since it was opened in 2015. Neonazi SS runes were daubed on the “Damascus” shop front and a delivery vehicle torched.

The local branch of Die Linke is convinced the police know who the perpetrators are but have failed to take action for years. Centre-left political figures in the area have meanwhile played with racist myths in accusing Arab shisha bars of being a front for organised crime.

One component on the protest was a delegation organised by some young socialists from the neighbourhood of Britz and Gropiusstadt. It doesn’t have a big left presence. In fact it has had a reputation for containing serious far-right organisation.

All this might seem like extraneous and pettifogging detail. After all, it is not as arresting as the sight of a Confederate statue toppling or a gigantic, multiracial demonstration in downtown Los Angeles.

But beneath each great peak of any movement lies myriad smaller actions. And they are what provide the continuity from one peak to the next.

Last week saw a big victory for anti-racist forces in Greece with the acquittal after eight years of two Pakistani immigrant workers on false charges of assault. They were attacked by racists in 2012. It was a time when the government’s deliberate deployment of racism to divide the anti-austerity revolt spawned also the neonazis of Golden Dawn. Nazim Mahmud and Montaser Ali fought back. The police charged them.

Behind the court success lies the systematic anti-racist activity in the Petralona neighbourhood of Athens throughout that time. They went to court with a committed lawyer, but also resting on the solidarity of their neighbours — immigrant and non-immigrant.

That has been built by a ferocious effort from forces of the socialist left to take the anti-racist message into every pore of society and of working-class life, with this message: Racism is many things and there are many reasons to fight it. But the biggest reason is that it is an instrument of divide and rule, and thus it is in the interest of every working-class person ruled over to unite and to defeat it.

That and the plain reality on both sides of the Atlantic that seeking to gather in these dangerous times are forces of the fascist and racist right who burn immigrant bakeries and assault the democratic institutions working people build to try to improve their lives.
The Golden Dawn gangs who tried to murder an Egyptian fisherman in Piraeus also tried to kill a trade-union militant in the docks in that neighbourhood.

Racist reactionaries in Burnley recently flew a banner proclaiming “white lives matter.” In contrast to the international BLM slogan, which means all lives matter — but for that to happen we must fight racism, they meant black people’s lives don’t matter. Nor do they care about the lives of working-class white people. If they did, they’d be fighting over the Covid-19 crisis in care homes. They are not. Anti-racists and the labour movement are. That is why so many white people are on the Black Lives Matter protests.

It is why in response to claims that you only care about one group it is the anti-racist movement that points to the common working-class interests. The People’s Policy Project in the US has found:

“There are large class disparities in police killings…Likewise, there are large racial disparities in police killings … Whites in the poorest areas have a police killing rate of 7.9 per million, compared to 2 per million for whites in the least-poor areas. Blacks in the poorest areas have a police killing rate of 12.3 per million, compared to 6.7 per million for blacks in the least-poor areas.”

Racism divides; class experience unites. This is a moment in a movement that essentially has been going on — now hidden, now open — since the birth of capitalism dripping with blood from every pore and soiled in black slavery.

As at previous moments, the urgent issue now is whether we can widen this movement and unite the burning injustices of racism and class exploitation.

That is the great fear of all those politicians hoping this will all go away and relying to do so upon a combination of repression, calumny and cynical appropriation.