Marxism 2011 part three (write up of a meeting)

Multi-culturalism is an important subject, the term multi-culturalism and what is implied by it is under attack by the right and needs to be defended, so I was at that meeting at Marxism 2011. I haven't always been a hundred percent happy with the term, don't know why exactly, might be that the liberals and some people on the right have confused the meaning, I remember once being involved in an argument with a rough looking woman in London who was attacking multi-culturalism and so I attempted a defense of it by inserting a 'new' name for what it was I thought we were talking about, I used the word 'mix' as opposed to 'multi - culturalism' thinking that she was probably just confused about the term like I was to an extent, but no, when I dropped the term multi-culturalism in our (heated) discussions, to her that was a victory and one in the eye to multi - culturalism, I think she was heavily influenced at that time by the extreme right, she had a mixed race son with her who showed signs of being mighty embarrassed. Anyway that was not a very nice experience for me and the memory has lingered and so I feel it important to strongly defend 'multi - culturalism' and was glad of a meeting on the subject at this years Marxism.

Michael Rosen was one of the speakers on the platform, he also used semantics to change the term, to make it clearer, as I had attempted to do, but his idea was to use the term ' inter - culturalism', he noted that the whole history of humanity is one of migration, and that we 'share' culture; hence 'inter culturalism'. Due to our history, it is necessary to defend people's rights to practice their culture on the land. He described how the invention of a pure 'englishness' has no foundation, even a tradition like good ol fish and chips was jointly invented by a Jewish and a Belgian cook.

There are pressures put upon us from birth ( and is big in schools ) to harbour an englishness and it is a cruel and cunning ruling class trick. There is in no sense a pure englishness or assimilation, its like begging for the holy grail; it is something that doesn't exist, we will never get there. The ruling class use this idea(l) of 'assimilation to keep us divided. They spread fear among us of one another, that one or other human being is 'the other', not to be trusted, but to be feared, derided, persecuted even, so they can go on happily ruling over us while we fight among ourselves. Its the classic: divide and rule. As human beings we have a right to be secure and we need to fight for that basic right, fight for us as beings that are essentially migratory and ' inter cultural'.

I absolutely love learning new things and new ways of putting and understanding things and so from that perspective this meeting did not disappoint, it already came into good use in a meeting I was at a week or so later, where I was defending the right of women to dress how they wish ( the context was a guy moaning about the hijab and birka, he ended up saying that anyone who comes to this country ought to ... what exactly?) we are who we are and defending peoples right to live culturally in ways that they are familiar with ( food, music, stalls, dress etc) is a matter of defending a basic human right to be secure and to be ourselves.