https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/02/10/free-f10.html
Socialism and defence of the free movement of labour: Part two
By Julie Hyland
10 February 2017
This is the conclusion of a two-part series on the British pseudo-lefts’
support for immigration controls. Part one was published on February 9.
Marx on Ireland
Britain’s pseudo-left distort Karl Marx’s analysis of the “industrial
reserve army” or “relative surplus population” in order to smuggle in a
racial and nativist criterion that, in fact, belongs to the far right.
This is underscored by the fact that, in support of their position, they
frequently cite Marx on the issue of Irish migration to England in the
19th century, quoting from a letter in which he wrote, “Ireland
constantly sends her own surplus to the English labour market, and thus
forces down wages and lowers the material and moral position of the
English working class.” [Marx letter to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt,
April 9, 1870]
The divisions cultivated between Irish and English workers were
notorious and by no means confined to the 1800s. Many people today
remember only too well the “No Irish, No Blacks, No dogs” signs that
frequented rented accommodation in the UK right up to the 1960s.
Once again, the pseudo-left omit the remainder of Marx’s letter, which
excoriates the backwardness of the English worker, who “regards himself
as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of
the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus
strengthening their domination over himself.”
Marx continues: “He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices
against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as
that of the ‘poor whites’ to the Negroes in the former slave states of
the USA… The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He
sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of
the English rulers in Ireland.
“This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the
press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the
disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the
impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is
the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the
latter is quite aware of this... It is the special task of the Central
Council [of the First International] in London to make the English
workers realise that for them the national emancipation of Ireland is
not a question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment, but the
first condition of their own social emancipation.”
For Marx, prejudice amongst English workers against their Irish brothers
and sisters was the occasion for a ruthless political struggle to
establish their common class interests against the British
bourgeoisie—not, as with the pseudo-left today, an excuse for justifying
nationalist reaction.
Lenin and the fight against opportunism
Far from opposition to border controls not being a “socialist
principle,” the controversy over this issue was to take on life and
death dimensions within the Second International.
The issue of immigration restrictions arose in the run-up to the 1907
Socialist Congress in Stuttgart, the Seventh Congress of the Second
International. The US state was targeting Chinese and Japanese workers.
Congress had passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, halting the entry
of Chinese immigrants into the country. In 1908, Japanese immigration
into the US was also banned.
On behalf of the US Socialist Party leadership, Morris Hillquit and
Victor Berger proposed a resolution calling for a campaign against “the
willful importation of cheap foreign labor calculated to destroy labor
organizations, to lower the standard of living of the working class, and
to retard the ultimate realization of socialism.”
This stance was opposed by the left wing within the Socialist Party,
with Eugene Debs attacking it as “utterly unsocialistic, reactionary,
and, in truth, outrageous.”
The Stuttgart Congress rejected the resolution. Lenin, who attended the
congress as one of the Bolshevik party delegates, welcomed the defeat.
Support for immigration restrictions represented an “attempt to defend
narrow, craft interests” and was the outcome of the “spirit of
aristocratism that one finds among workers in some of the ‘civilised’
countries, who derive certain advantages from their privileged position,
and are, therefore, inclined to forget the need for international class
solidarity.” [Lenin Proletary, No. 17, October 20, 1907, The
International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart]
Lenin returned to the issue of “Capitalism and Workers’ Immigration” in
his article of that title in Za Pravdu, October 29, 1913. “Capitalism
has given rise to a special form of migration of nations,” he wrote,
forcing hundreds of thousands of workers to “wander hundreds and
thousands of versts” for employment.
“There can be no doubt that dire poverty alone compels people to abandon
their native land, and that the capitalists exploit the immigrant
workers in the most shameless manner. But only reactionaries can shut
their eyes to the progressive significance of this modern migration of
nations. Emancipation from the yoke of capital is impossible without the
further development of capitalism, and without the class struggle that
is based on it. And it is into this struggle that capitalism is drawing
the masses of the working people of the whole world, breaking down the
musty, fusty habits of local life, breaking down national barriers and
prejudices, uniting workers from all countries in huge factories and
mines in America, Germany, and so forth…”
Noting that the most backward countries of the world were thrust into
the “ranks of the advanced, international army of the proletariat,” he
wrote, “The bourgeoisie incites the workers of one nation against those
of another in the endeavour to keep them disunited. Class-conscious
workers, realising that the break-down of all the national barriers by
capitalism is inevitable and progressive, are trying to help to
enlighten and organise their fellow-workers from the backward countries.”
The anti-migrant proposal was indicative of the growth of opportunism
within the Second International, in which the trade unions were to play
a particularly significant role.
Opportunist elements also argued in favour of colonialism, on the
grounds of its “civilising role.” Most notably, several delegates raised
the demand to support working class “national defence” in times of war.
Though defeated at the 1907 Congress, these tendencies were to plunge
the working class into a fratricidal slaughter in 1914. This betrayal of
socialism by most of the leaders of the Second International, Lenin
wrote, “has been mainly caused by the actual prevalence in it of
petty-bourgeois opportunism, the bourgeois nature and danger of which
have long been indicated by the finest representatives of the
revolutionary proletariat of all countries.”
Lenin continued: “The opportunists had long been preparing to wreck the
Second International by denying the socialist revolution and
substituting bourgeois reformism in its stead, by rejecting the class
struggle with its inevitable conversion at certain moments into civil
war, and by preaching class collaboration; by preaching bourgeois
chauvinism under the guise of patriotism and the defence of the
fatherland, and ignoring or rejecting the fundamental truth of
socialism, long ago set forth in the Communist Manifesto, that the
workingmen have no country; by confining themselves, in the struggle
against militarism, to a sentimental philistine point of view, instead
of recognizing the need for a revolutionary war by the proletarians of
all countries, against the bourgeoisie of all countries; by making a
fetish of the necessary utilization of parliamentarianism and bourgeois
legality, and forgetting that illegal forms of organization and
agitation are imperative at times of crises.” [Lenin, The tasks of
revolutionary Social-Democracy in the European War, 1914]
In opposition to the capitulation of the Second International, the
Bolshevik Party, under the leadership of Lenin, came out against the war
and launched the fight for a new Third International. This was to be
built on the basis of an uncompromising struggle against the opportunist
national chauvinist tendencies that had revealed themselves as the
agencies of imperialism within the workers’ movement.
This was the critical preparation for the revolutionary eruptions that
were signified by the outbreak of imperialist war and the breakdown of
the nation state system. It was on this basis that Lenin, alongside Leon
Trotsky, was able to prepare the Bolshevik Party and the most advanced
sections of workers and youth for the seizure of power in October 1917
and the establishment of the first workers’ state in the world.
Lenin returned to the issue of border controls at the height of the war
in a November 1915 letter to the Socialist Propaganda League (SPL), a
left-wing formation within the US Socialist Party that broke with the
Socialist Party after the October Revolution to form the US Communist Party.
Lenin wrote, “In our struggle for true internationalism and against
‘jingo-socialism,’ we always quote in our press the example of the
opportunist leaders of the SP in America, who are in favour of
restrictions of the immigration of Chinese and Japanese workers
(especially after the Congress of Stuttgart, 1907, and against the
decisions of Stuttgart).
“We think that one cannot be internationalist and be at the same time in
favour of such restrictions.”
The pseudo-left: the modern day “jingo-socialists”
The global integration of capitalism has reached an unprecedented level
since Marx and Lenin’s time. In combination with the spectacular
developments in science and technique over the last 30 years, it has
made possible a rationalisation of production and facilitated the
ability of the bourgeoisie to drive down wages and conditions to an
ever-diminishing global benchmark.
However, the cause of this process is not the globalisation of
production, as the national opportunists would claim, but capitalism
itself. The tremendous achievements to be derived from the progressive
unification of the globe and its resources are perverted by private
ownership of the means of production and the division of the world into
antagonistic nation states.
In Europe, the bourgeoisie seized upon the 2008 financial crash as the
pretext to turn the clock back centuries through the imposition of
austerity. From Greece to Spain to Britain, social democracy, the trade
unions and their pseudo-left apologists have played a key political role
in this process.
As a result, thousands of workers, especially young workers, are forced
to move around looking for work. But once again, this migration is not
the cause of low wages in the UK, or anywhere else. The cause is the
subordination of the world economy to the profit interests of the
corporate and financial elite.
Even in the surveys routinely cited by the right wing, supposedly
revealing the impact of EU migration on wages in semi-unskilled
employment, the impact is minimal—calculated at between 0.5 percent and
1.0 percent. Yet wages fell by 10.4 percent in the UK between 2007 and
2015, a drop equalled only by Greece within the countries of the
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
This fall is the result of a deliberate political strategy on the part
of the bourgeoisie to pauperise the working class, one in which the
Labour Party and the trade unions play the key role.
These organisations are completely incorporated into the bourgeois and
corporate state apparatus, enforcing austerity, wage freezes and wage
cuts. Their justifications for this are the same as those they employ in
favour of border controls: Nothing can be done to alter the scarcities
created by the monopolisation of global wealth by a tiny financial
elite. Instead, the working class must make sacrifices, especially the
migrant workers who are to be told there is no place for them.
This accounts for the grotesque spectacle of Labour and the trade unions
spouting forth on the need for immigration controls so as to “protect”
labour standards, even as they collaborate with the government and
corporations to destroy these standards in order to make British capital
more competitive.
The pseudo-left are an integral part of this labour bureaucracy and
constitute the bulk of its leadership. From Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn
to the heads of numerous unions to the Syriza government in Greece, the
pseudo-left function as a special anti-working class detachment of the
bourgeoisie.
While Trump declares for “America First,” Corbyn demands import controls
against China and similar protectionist measures, while the pseudo-left
repeat the specious claim that strong national borders, economic
protectionism and tighter immigration laws will benefit the working
class. Their support for the strengthening of the nation state is wholly
reactionary. As history has proven, it leads to the intensification of
the attacks on the working class at home and support for imperialist war
abroad.
Against the national chauvinism of the pseudo-left, the absolute
principle of socialist-minded workers and youth must be to oppose the
efforts to divide native-born and migrant workers. The right of all
workers to live and work in the country they choose, with full and equal
rights, is not for sale.
Only in solidarity with its class brothers and sisters—irrespective of
colour, language, religion and nationality—can the working class
successfully struggle against globally mobile capitalist corporations
and advance its own independent solution to the world economic crisis:
the reorganization of the global economy to meet social needs, not the
drive for private profit.
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