On September 19th 2014, the population of Scotland
voted narrowly against secession from the United Kingdom in a referendum. The
No side eked out a narrow victory in an exceptionally high turnout. Nationalism runs deep. National
identity is a much debated, and hotly contested, concept. Yet despite continued
national prejudice and xenophobia outbreaks, there are the growing bonds of a
cosmopolitan commonality.
National independence is a much exaggerated myth. Every country
is dependent and many vested interests welcome globalisation of their economy. They
have twisted their nationalist arguments to justify getting the trade unions to
help capitalists become "more competitive". National chauvinism has
divided the workers, and undermined the class struggle in the face of ever more
sweeping attacks on wages and jobs. It’s no accident then, that in a period of a
global crisis of capital, old and new nationalisms are rearing their heads—and
many of them in a most virulent and violent fashion despite that many
independence movements have been thoroughly discredited by their failures to
meet peoples’ hopes. Instead, memories are short and nasty, divisive,
increasingly ethnic nationalisms are being promoted in one part of the world
after another. In an atmosphere of anger and despair, right-wing ethnic
nationalisms, particularly of right-wing ethnic varieties, quite often seize
the political initiative.
Every day, the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems try to outdo each
other as to how they would restrict immigration further. Political leaders are
promoting myths, mistruths and lies simply to win votes. We should welcome
immigration, not try to restrict it. We definitely should not be making it more
difficult for new immigrants. The influx of eastern Europeans is nothing new to
the labour movement, particularly in Scotland. There has been an absence of a
class response, and particularly a trade union one, to foreign workers. Instead
there is an expectation that the capitalist state will protect the ‘privileges’
of the native-born worker.
At the beginning of the 20th century in Lanarkshire, there
was much vitriol against Lithuanian incomers. They were employed in the iron
works and the coal pits, and they too were accused of wage-cutting and
scabbing. Nevertheless, the Lanarkshire County Miners’ Union, in the space of
some 15 years, went from offering support to miners willing to strike against
Lithuanian workers to demanding that Lithuanian miners in Lanarkshire should
not be deported. During those 15 years, the Lithuanians had joined the union in
large numbers and were active in it. Unionisation was the key to improved
relations between the Lithuanian labour force and the LCMU.
Once the Lithuanians began to respond positively to local
strike demands, the other allegations made against them were simply not an
issue. The adoption of a more class-conscious attitude and the strength of
their newfound loyalty to the union was in part due to the fact that the union
had taken some very positive steps to encourage Lithuanian membership, such as
printing the rules in Lithuanian and offering entitlement to claim full
benefits.
We suggest fellow workers refresh their class-struggle
credentials with a read of
‘A Voice from the Aliens’ from 1895 and one of the
earliest appeals against immigration controls.
Fear-mongering and divisive politics play well in creating
more xenophobia and it has a long history, as we have shown. But those who fall
for the propaganda should know that keeping out immigrants with a ‘fortress
Britain’ (or a ‘fortress Europe’) has not and will not solve our problems and
make us better off. It is not migration which weakens the working class: it is
immigration controls. Immigration controls are weapons by which the capitalists
can discipline the working class. By deeming a group of people ‘illegal’, you
create a section of the class who risk everything if they raise their head
above the parapet and attempt to fight for a decent wage and conditions of
work. By creating a variety of ‘legal’ groups of workers, but with different,
limited rights, immigration controls create what they hope to be a more
malleable and exploitable section of migrant workers, which in turn undermines
all workers. We can only address this by fighting for equal rights for all
workers - which means no immigration controls, along with demands for secure
contracts and a living wage.
The plea that immigration controls should be imposed and
certain foreigners excluded should have no place in a workers’ movement that is
calling upon the exploited of all the world to unite for their emancipation.
Any policy for the exclusion of other suffering wage-slaves is more consistent
with the attitudes of the callous capitalist class rather than of the movement
whose proud boast it is that it stands uncompromisingly for the oppressed and
downtrodden of all the world. Immigrants have just as good a right to enter
this country as British workers have in exiting it.
The Socialist Party of Great Britain will not sacrifice
principle and jeopardise our goal for some immediate advantage. We will not
spurn fellow workers lured here by the glimmer of hope that their burdens may
be lightened by the promise of some improvement in conditions. If revolutionary
socialism does not stand unflinchingly and uncompromisingly for the working
class and for the exploited of all lands, then it stands for none and its claim
is a false pretence.
If the Socialist Party risk losing support because we refuse
to call for the border gates to be closed in the faces of our own brothers and
sisters, we will be none the weaker for spurning such tactics to acquire false
friends. All the votes gained would do us little good if our party ceases to be
a revolutionary party, yielding to public opinion to modify our principles for
the sake of popularity and membership numbers.
In the centenary year of when other supposed socialists
abandoned the workers’ internationalism and embraced national chauvinism - with
one group under HM Hyndman going as far to demonstrate their patriotic ardour
by setting up a National ‘Socialist’ Party - we in the Socialist Party are the
party of all workers, regardless of place of birth. We stand resolutely for
world socialism and if this is too encompassing for some despite them paying
lip-service to the claim - so be it. We shall leave them to their various
national ‘socialisms’.
Marx didn’t advocate open borders because at the time he
wrote border controls didn’t exist. So no-one can definitively assert what he
would have said then which is true enough (and fortunately for him nor was
there any asylum-seekers rules and restrictions for political refugees), but
Eleanor, his daughter, was particularly active in distributing the statement,
“The Voice of the Aliens’, which we recommended as a read. We will quote from it:
“To punish the alien worker for the sin of the native capitalist is like the
man who struck the boy because he was not strong enough to strike his father.”
Anyone is free to continue to see things from the point of view of market-town
parochialism. But there are consequences. You start by defending national
borders against the incoming tide of cheap labour, motivated by the purest of
socialist principles, and one day you find yourself patriotically supporting your
country’s right to defend its front line trenches in some far-off country.
We think we can definitely say what Karl Marx’s views on
immigration controls would have been. His programme was for the abolition of
nation-states and the international unity of the workers. He saw with his own
eyes the effects on the British working class of mass Irish immigration and
argued for their incorporation into the working class, not their exclusion. His
analysis of capital was that it always creates a reserve army of labour,
constantly pushing workers out of jobs and pulling workers into exploitative
labour relations. Ireland is a good example, losing a third of its population.
Living standards went down for the masses because the reserve army of labour
was maintained, so profits went up. Capital cannot serve the interests of the
working class. Successful resistance to capitalism makes it malfunction. But
the campaign for immigration controls will turn out to be a campaign to attack
benefits and restore capital to rude health. It is not enough to reform
capitalism; that only makes it malfunction. We have to replace it with the
economy of the working class: an international task.
It has been asked what Marx would have done today. We can
easily answer by describing what the First International, of which he was a
member, did. They organised!
The International announced that “the emancipation of labour
is neither a local nor a national, but a social problem, embracing all
countries” and that “Each member of the International Association, on removing
his domicile from one country to another, will receive the fraternal support of
the Associated Working Men”. Furthermore, “To counteract the intrigues of
capitalists - always ready, in cases of strikes and lockouts, to misuse the
foreign workman as a tool against the native workman - is one of the particular
functions which our society has hitherto performed with success. It is one of
the great purposes of the Association to make the workmen of different
countries not only feel but act as brethren and comrades in the army of
emancipation.”
The International consequently addressed fellow workers:
“Help us, then, in the noble enterprise, help us to bring about a common
understanding between the peoples of all countries, so that in the struggles of
labour with unprincipled capitalists they may not be able to execute the threat
which they so often indulge in, of using the working men of one country as
instruments to defeat the just demands of the workmen in another. This has been
done in the past, and seeds of discord and national antipathies have been
thereby created and perpetuated. A part of our mission is to prevent the
recurrence of such evils, and you can help us to achieve our aims.”
Marx, in the name of the International, writes: “If the
Edinburgh masters succeeded, through the import of German labour, in nullifying
the concessions they had already made, it would inevitably lead to
repercussions in England. No-one would suffer more than the German workers
themselves, who constitute in Great Britain a larger number than the workers of
all the other continental nations. And the newly imported workers, being completely
helpless in a strange land, would soon sink to the level of pariahs.
Furthermore, it is a point of honour with the German workers to prove to other
countries that they, like their brothers in France, Belgium and Switzerland,
know how to defend the common interests of their class and will not become
obedient mercenaries of capital in its struggle against labour.”
There is never an appeal to the capitalist state to impose
immigration laws, but a call to the workers to unionise.
Borders are a means by which capitalists protect their
assets, which include us. It is immigration controls that give employers
greater power over migrants, particularly new arrivals or those who are
dependent on them for their visa status, a power they do not always have over
native workers. Nationalism is a huge barrier to developing
class-consciousness. Borders cause workers in countries to care less about the
other workers in the world. Across the world, national states are imposing ever
more restrictive immigration policies. Nevertheless, people have become more
internationalised and are acquiring a cosmopolitan identity.
Making the demand, ‘No borders’, reveals the importance of
border controls to capitalist social relations - relationships dependent on the
practices of expropriation and exploitation. The rights of property consist of
the right to exclude others, while anti-nationalism is a part of a global
reshaping of societies in a way that is not compatible with capitalism or of
the state. Socialists must reject the concept of borders that are used as
control devices over labour. By opposing the idea of borders we begin to
perceive nation-states as ‘theirs’ and not part of ‘our world’.
To end with another quote from the First International: “The
poor have no country; in all lands they suffer from the same evils; and they
therefore realise that the barriers put up by the powers that be, the more
thoroughly to enslave the people, must fall.”
We in the Socialist Party seek an end to exploitation, an
end to racism, national chauvinism and anti-immigrant discrimination. When
people say we are "utopian", they mean either that it is not possible
to run society truly democratically, without the ownership of practically
everything by a few wealthy people. They are wrong because this society is
already largely run through the collective efforts of billions of people. The
whole world economy operate only on the basis of widespread cooperation between
workers. But under capitalism, the direction of all this collective work and the
distribution of its fruits are dictated by a few wealthy capitalists, many of
whom make their profits simply through gambling in those giant casinos called
stock-exchanges markets. We don't need them to run society. In fact, they are
destroying society.
The left's nationalism who cannot think outside of the myth
of national interest has given massive ideological assistance to the
conservative right wing. It shows up in their opposition to immigration, though
they have been shamed into whispering about it since the cruder message of UKIP
has come to dominate. We are taking a blunt message into this election
campaign: nationalism is racist and reactionary. Defeating the right politically
requires a war against the chronic nationalist ideological infection in the
working class. We believe that better jobs with better pay cannot be achieved
by keeping out immigrants. The problem is capitalism and we see it as our
responsibility to explain this to those sections of the working class that
blame foreigners for job losses, low wages, poor housing and cuts. We are
socialists, not social workers, and we do not aim to help workers find
individual temporary relief. We are for a collective fight on class lines. We
are for revolutionary change.
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