Gutter politics

There are many reasons why socialists want a complete change in the basis of society.  Capitalism corrupts everything it touches. In this society the cash nexus is everything.  Capitalism is a society based on class ownership, exploitation, and the profit motive. capitalism is in its biggest crisis since the Great Depression. This means that wealth is returning to its ‘rightful owners’, the capitalist class; the workers, meanwhile, must make do with austerity. To talk of ethics in such a society is nonsensical. But it’s not just that things are bad. People are also losing confidence that things will get any better: a growing majority do not think their children will end up better off than they are, for example. It is this growing majority of disaffected working-class people who are looking for answers. And unless they look very hard indeed, beyond the mainstream media, the only answers they’re hearing are coming from the rising right-wing populists with their superficial appeal that proclaims the virtues of selfishness. The conventional politicians reveal how they have no good arguments with which to counter the xenophobic nationalists; and that it is precisely the failure of their ideas that turn the workers towards hopeless fantasies. All those liberals can resort to is to whine that the populists have taken “respectable” patriotism too far, that they are extremists. It’s up to socialists to provide better answers and get them out there and show that capitalism – even when it is operating perfectly well– must necessarily produce misery and exploitation. The ill-considered rhetoric needs to be confronted, contested at any and every opportunity. Self-replicating, regurgitated mantras built on lies, fears, and hatred need overturning without hesitation.

The typical Guardian-reading liberal may genuinely abhor the racism of the right but have been unsuccessful in confronting them because to do so would mean acknowledging the shortcomings of a system which they champion and which gives rise to the politics of prejudice. When capitalism fails to deliver, when despondency and shattered hopes arise from the stench of the failed promises and expectations that litter the political landscape, is it any wonder that workers fall for the scapegoating lies of neo-fascists and the quick fix they offer?

The professional politicians do their craven best to pander to this supposed collective identity and the nefarious influence of those ideas have on the workers can be seen from the treatment of the issue of “asylum seekers” – vulnerable migrants looking for refuge and sanctuary in safer lands. They project the line that they are “firm but fair” in dealing with the asylum “crisis”, desperate to deflect charges that Britain is a “soft touch” for immigrants so they advance every policy to speed up the process of ejecting “undesirables” from the country. They talk about legitimate asylum seekers, as opposed to economic migrants – as if poverty itself were not one of the cruellest breeds of oppression. All this, despite the fact that the government's own reports demolish a great many of the myths around refugees and actively refutes that the welfare state is a pull factor and a basic motive for travelling around the world to come to another country. The majority of asylum seekers had little or no knowledge of the UK social services other than, a vague idea that they would be “looked after” because after all, that was what they had been repeatedly told – the good Samaritan character of the average Briton. The Socialist Party understands that the thing which makes workers leave behind their communities and go to a place where their language is not spoken, is the capitalist system itself. We see the harm that is done by national boundaries, that prevent workers from moving to be with whom they want to be with; prevent them from sharing their skills and their knowledge as they see fit; prevent them from seeing their common cause.

The members of the Socialist Party do not swallow the deceit that working class “foreigners” are different from working class “nationals”. That Britain is “ours”, not “theirs” when in reality it is neither. Politicians are rewarded for their management of capitalism, and the media repeatedly foments anger and vitriol amongst the working class in order to keep cashing in with their nasty anti-social “news.” The real “undeserving” are the exploitative capitalists and their devious political henchmen. If you are looking for scroungers , you should direct your spleen at the really rich – the top five percent or so of the world's population who own far, far more than the rest of us ever could. They, not asylum seekers, are the scroungers of this world and will continue to shaft us as long as we let them. Millionaires and billionaires, thanks to the exploitation of the working class, are free to fly first-class anywhere in the world are the real migrant “scroungers” who need to be kicked out.