WE ARE in the greatest eruption against racism and for black liberation since 1968.

In April that year smoke rose above every black ghetto in the US following the murder of the great civil rights leader Martin Luther King in the city of Memphis.

As so many black and anti-racist radicals have said for half a century in response to Establishment jibes about violence and the movements against oppression: we had a prince of non-violent mass action — you assassinated him.

Today’s movement, in its infancy and having to confront strategic dilemmas over how to surge forward, is already more extensive than in the spring of 1968.

The late 1960s had seen the struggle for equal rights against the legal architecture of apartheid in the southern US — Jim Crow — win victories and spill over into a more fundamental challenge to racism, legally codified or not.

It also came just before the end of a long period of economic expansion that was big enough to allow a rising living standard for most working people.

It was on the back of that that the conservative Republican Richard Nixon was able to appeal to a “silent majority” against the militant black liberation and other minority movements to win the presidency in November 1968.

Today is different. Four decades of neoliberalism have seen, at least until very recently, a one-sided class war against the US working class. 

The staggering increases in militarised police budgets and the security state in the last 25 years have taken place in that context — austerity notwithstanding.

A consequence, and despite Donald Trump’s efforts to emulate Nixon (and go further), is a wholly unprecedented active participation and passive sympathy for this struggle across the multiracial base of US society.

There are thousands of video clips showing both police brutality and all manner of protests across the US.

Stunning are the big city centre demonstrations. There is a video of what can only be described as a human tide flooding downtown Los Angeles. 

Some of us will remember the almost insurrection in South Central Los Angeles in 1992 following the police acquittal for the brutalisation of Rodney Glen King, a construction worker and a black man.

But there has never been such a multiracial mobilisation as today in Los Angeles in the cause of ending racism and police brutality.

It goes beyond the big metropolises. Six teenage girls in Nashville organised a protest of thousands.

In a former “sundown town” in Texas, so named for the violent exclusion of all black people by white residents, a protest took place. 

Small — but a protest in a place where black people were lynched in living memory.

In Louisville, Kentucky, white women formed a defensive line to stop police attacking a protest over the police slaying of Breonna Taylor, an emergency medical technician and a black woman shot eight times.

It’s reported that the local chapter of the National Organisation of Women organised the action. 

At a national-federal level NOW is a rather pallid liberal NGO tied to the conventional Democratic Party machine. Not, apparently, their grassroots local in Kentucky. 

That is not the only sundering that is taking place. US local and national papers report rumblings of discontent among National Guardsmen sent in to repress the mobilisations. 

They are unlike the police force. Many believe in general that they are a force whose purpose is to buttress the nation’s defence against foreign aggression and at times of natural disaster.

In city after city police forces behave as if a foreign occupying force in black and working-class neighbourhoods.

The scale of the revolt has opened cracks in the US state and government. The defence secretary has publicly breached with Trump in standing down active units of the professional army and ordering that others do not go onto the streets with live ammunition.

Wider than the minority, huge — but still a minority, who are actively involved is a shift in popular consciousness. It never moves all in one go. Surveys are partial. The process is always contested as Trump — and for that matter the British government — seeks to organise a counterattack. 

Nevertheless, a reputable poll this week found that now 57 per cent of US citizens agree that the police are more likely to use excessive force against black people.

The proportion of whites who agree is 49 per cent. Compare with opinion after the police killing of Eric Garner six years ago, which triggered the Black Lives Matter movement. Then it was just 24 per cent.

This is an earthquake. It means that the state response is going to be all the brutal and cunning. 

It is the same in Britain and Europe, where this movement has spread — again at unprecedented speed.

Two instruments at their disposal that are weaker now are these. One competing idea in the movement of the 1960s that came to dominate a decade later was that the answer to black oppression and to the class exploitation the struggle against it revealed was greater black political representation and “recognition” in official society.

Well, we’ve had that for 40 years. Black Lives Matter began under a black president who for a time was in control of all three branches of federal government in the US. 

He had behind him the enormous enthusiasm of not only black people, but of many blue-collar white workers who defied stereotype and looked to his soaring rhetoric to answer their problems that were crescendoing with the economic slump of 2008.

Nothing fundamental changed. Another defusing stratagem is the tepid tactic of “recognition.” In the 1970s it was the velvet glove around the iron fist of murdering, imprisoning and exiling the most brilliant of the black revolutionary leadership.

Symbols and official recognition for past crimes do matter. So do public memorialisation, statues, street names and the like. Any resident of Turin or Tehran will tell you that. 

There is an international airport in the US named after Mohammad Ali — “the greatest.” That is a nice thing. The airport is at Louisville. One nickname for Ali was the “Louisville Lip” — they didn’t like his sublimely eloquent demolition of racist ideology and support for the national liberation struggle in Vietnam.

Perhaps Breonna Taylor in her short life of just 26 years felt a pang of pride taking a flight from Muhammad Ali airport.

I don’t know. I do know that putting a black liberationist’s name on her local airport did not stop police murdering her in her own home and then contemptuously releasing a report that is so redacted that it might as well be a piece of blank paper, white paper.

It seems pretty clear that in Britain and other major European countries the powers that be would like to divert, distract and disorganise a movement that has seen huge mobilisations — from Berlin’s Alexanderplatz to London’s Whitehall. 

Not just that, but protests in places that some would have us believe are bastions of reaction or quaint tourist spots — Doncaster, Barnsley, Hastings, Lewes …

In a twofold manoeuvre they voice indignation at the direct action that removed a statue of slaver Edward Colston in Bristol (after decades of local authority inaction) while also wanting to make this about other monuments and a supposed cultural divide over the nation’s past.

Twofold also is the hoped for gain. First to convince working people that they have a stake in a false presentation of history in which the slave profiteers happen to be the families who pitilessly exploited working-class white people in Britain. 

Divide and rule, and reckless disregard for fuelling far-right thuggery. 

Second, perhaps sooner rather than later, to put up the odd statue of a black person, or plaque or what have you — as if that is the limit of our movement’s ambition: Breonna Taylor; Mohammad Ali airport.

What they don’t want is a reckoning — with history of the present — of the reality of racism and working-class exploitation. 

Last week some highly paid executive at the BBC took an episode of Fawlty Towers off its streaming service. No-one in the anti-racist movement asked for that. Most think it stupid. Whether stupid or more calculating, such bourgeois do-goodery is a total diversion. 

For also last week a report found that 2,000 buildings remain wrapped in the murderous cladding that incinerated 72 working-class and mainly black and brown people three years ago.

They don’t want people to connect that with police racism and all the inequalities sharpened by the pandemic.

Above all, they would like to drown out the great truth that has animated the left in this country and the labour movement at its strongest. 

It stands on the moral revulsion at racial prejudice and sense of fairness that are widely shared. 

It goes further and says to all working people — irrespective of colour — the biggest reason to overturn all racism is because it is in your interests to do so if any of us is to gain anything from the progeny today of the slavers and colonialists of then.