This is a really good article. I wish I could get everyone I know to read
it.
Miriam
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From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
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Subject: [blind-democracy] t r u t h o u t Richard D. Wolff
Maria Mendoza, 52, who was born in Mexico, arrives for work as a housekeeper
at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, July 10, 2016. US capitalists
have used Latin American immigrants as a means to exert downward pressures
on wages and working conditions, with the usual anti-immigrant results.
(Photo:
Ivan Kashinsky / The New York Times)
Maria Mendoza, 52, who was born in Mexico, arrives for work as a housekeeper
at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, July 10, 2016. US capitalists
have used Latin American immigrants as a means to exert downward pressures
on wages and working conditions, with the usual anti-immigrant results.
(Photo:
Ivan Kashinsky / The New York Times)
Capitalism has a long, ugly history of scapegoating immigrants. The pattern
has been repeated often. For example, British capitalism's drive to empire
helped force the Irish, as colonial subjects, to emigrate. Miserable
colonial conditions, including horrific famines, drove many Irish to labor
for capitalists in England at wages lower than English workers had won.
English workers raged against and clashed with the Irish immigrants more
than they struggled against the colonial system that had brought them.
British capitalists recognized a useful side effect of importing lower-wage
workers. It differentiated employees by national origin, religion and
sometimes also ethnicity. Some English workers resented downward pressures
on wages and working conditions, overcrowded housing and neighborhoods, and
overused and inadequate public services. They often overlooked capitalists'
profit-driven organization of immigration, and instead blamed immigrants
themselves. British politicians reinforced such ways of thinking as they
sought financing from those capitalists and votes from English workers.
Likewise, profit-driven media companies, the journalists they hired, and
compliant academics often promoted notions that immigrants represented net
economic costs and difficult social adjustments imposed on the existing
population. Such notions deflected workers' resentments about their economic
situations onto scapegoating immigration and immigrants. In short,
immigration made a divide-and-rule strategy of capital against labor all the
easier to pursue.
Adding insult to injury, some British leaders scolded English workers for
their "intolerance" or "prejudice" against the Irish. Such scolding lofted
them "above" the fray of mutual recriminations among competing English and
Irish workers. Portions of the upper classes enjoyed celebrating themselves
as more "tolerant" and less "biased." The British replicated their Irish
history with others among their "colonial subjects" in Asia, Africa and
South America.
The same applies to various French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, German and
Italian colonial exploits. A parallel history characterizes the US's long
experience with immigration, as well as chattel slavery, to cope with
capitalism's recurrent labor shortages.
After formal (officially recognized) colonialisms had been overthrown in the
20th century, post-colonial economic realities there changed slowly, if at
all. Profound poverty plus economic backwardness, inequality and continued
subordination to former colonial masters kept emigration on many people's
agendas.
Those who left to become immigrants found in their new homes the same old
divisions, hostilities and scapegoating.
Modern times offer more examples. The US repeatedly undermined basic living
conditions in its de facto colony, Puerto Rico, driving millions to move to
the US mainland. There, they repeatedly encountered all manner of
discriminations, abuse and scapegoating. The US economic dominance of Mexico
and Central America as informal colonies -- intensified by the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) -- produced the same result, but on a
much larger scale.
US capitalists used Latin American immigrants as means to exert downward
pressures on wages and working conditions, with the usual anti-immigrant
results.
Following the European colonial pattern, some in the corporate and governing
US elite congratulate themselves for denouncing scapegoating, intolerance,
etc. and castigating those with such attitudes as "deplorables."
Since the 1970s, the remarkable relocation of capital from its old centers
in Western Europe, North America and Japan to the new centers in China,
India, Brazil and beyond has provoked new migrations. The industrialization
of the new centers and associated political and military conflicts have
traumatically and quickly (in historical time) transformed the lives of
millions and stimulated huge labor migrations -- interregional and
international.
Emigration traumatizes most of those driven from their homes, jobs, families
and communities. Extreme conditions push emigrants to leave, especially for
foreign places they usually know little about. The uneven development of
capitalism, coupled with its drive toward colonialism, has consistently
produced the extreme conditions and extreme inequalities that sustain
successive waves of migration.
A real "cure" for the horrific processes of migration lies in a real
confrontation of capitalism's uneven development. For example, investment
could be directed not to where private profit rates are highest, but rather
to areas that need that investment most. The rationale would be that poverty
and marginalization pose a threat to peace (and thus to economic development
as well), which outweighs private capitalist profitability in terms of
social well-being. For another example, full employment -- by state
authorities wherever private employment is insufficient -- could become a
funded priority everywhere in part as a major counter to emigration.
For yet another example, taxing extreme wealth could provide significant
additional resources for investment in poorer areas. At the same time,
progressive taxation can likewise prevent the resources flowing to poorer
regions from reproducing there the gross inequalities that historically
accompanied capitalist development. To get an inkling of the magnitudes
involved, consider the
2016 Oxfam report
which showed that the combined wealth of the world's 62 richest individuals
exceeded the combined wealth of the poorer half of the world's population
(3.5 billion people). We could seriously address migration by redistributing
that wealth. If redistribution were combined with either a reorganized and
regulated capitalism -- or, finally, transition to a non-capitalist system
less beset by inequality -- still more could be accomplished.
Capitalism always entailed migrations of capital and labor.
Capitalism always entailed migrations of capital and labor. It also entailed
-- as Marx's, Piketty's and others' work have argued -- a continual tendency
toward wealth and income inequality, coupled with recurring cycles of
recession and depression. The masses of people hurt by the cycles and
inequalities have occasionally mobilized political coalitions to moderate or
even temporarily to reverse them. For example, the Great Depression of the
1930s enabled a powerful mobilization from below by a coalition of labor
unions, socialist and communist parties. That coalition forced the New Deal
policies onto President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Congress. From the
1930s to the 1970s, capitalism's tendency toward wealth and income
inequalities was temporarily reversed and cycles moderated.
President Ronald Reagan marked the re-emergence and return to dominance of
private capitalism in place of the state interventionist capitalism from the
1930s to the 1970s. This was accomplished by "deregulation and
privatization" -- the rollback of the New Deal policies. The government-led
post-World War II destruction of the Communist Party, then the socialist
parties, and then the slower destruction of the labor unions secured the
political and ideological conditions for rolling back the New Deal. Private
capitalism renewed its classic tendencies toward wealth and income
inequalities, cycles, and the resulting migrations of capital and labor.
The stale but pernicious "debate" over immigration resumes because the
underlying economic system reproduces the problem.
Contemporary struggles over immigration replay an old pattern whose horrific
consequences should long ago have spurred us to turn toward the sorts of
solutions mentioned above. Instead, we see and hear yet again about building
walls, expelling undocumented migrants, denouncing intolerant "deplorables"
and so on.
The stale but pernicious "debate" over immigration resumes because the
underlying economic system reproduces the problem.
That system's leaders and supporters hope that the latest immigrants will
eventually be absorbed by profit-driven economic growth. They likewise hope
that neither immigrants nor non-immigrants will blame the system for all
their sufferings and losses during such absorption. They have become
accustomed to expecting that this generation's immigrants, once absorbed,
will blame the next generation of immigrants. When tabulating the social
costs of capitalism, the repeated damage done by the migrations it has
provoked looms large.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
RICHARD D. WOLFF
Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is
currently a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International
Affairs of the New School University, New York City. He also teaches classes
regularly at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan. Earlier he taught economics at
Yale University (1967-1969) and at the City College of the City University
of New York (1969-1973).
In 1994, he was a visiting professor of economics at the University of Paris
(France), I (Sorbonne). His work is available at rdwolff.com and at
democracyatwork.info.
