Another group Class War didn't attract was people racialized as 'non-White'. "Class War is, and always has been, an almost exclusively white organisation ... we have tried many times to put it right but always with a lack of success" (p.5). The latter 'failure' bothers a lot of revolutionary groups, mainly because they see in the African British led urban riots of the 1980s evidence of a militant and combative section of the working class. They imagine that black communities are the front-line of revolution. Class War attempted to translate this supposed militancy into the culture, the language, of white working class males: to say to them, 'don't just kick each other in at football matches, be like the blacks, and kick the police'.
There are two mis-readings inherent in this approach, one about Britain's 'black communities', the other about 'the working class'. I'll deal with the former first. Black people in Europe and North America are burdened with expectations of radicalism: they are supposed to be heroes of resistance, perpetually taking on the forces of oppression. They are the political fantasy objects of white and black radical intellectuals par excellence. Truth to tell, however, these communities, at least in Europe, are neither incredibly politicised nor radical. Like an awful lot of communities of recent migrant origin, they mostly just want to make a decent living for themselves, to get a decent education for their kids and get ahead. The last thing most British African or British Asian people want is trouble with the police. The fact that the authorities give them trouble, and the fact that British society is a racist one, has prompted periodic bouts of fighting back. But, relative to the provocation, these bouts have been pretty tame affairs. The secret history of Britain's black communities is that they put up with an awful lot, they ignore a lot of insults, and they potter along, not particularly radical, not particularly combative.