Fundamentally, staying in or leaving the EU is not the question of ‘our generation’ or the ‘most important decision that will be taken since WW2.’ A simple test reveals the hollowness of such claims. Whatever the decision on June 23, nothing substantial will change regarding Britain and its relations with the world (exception made of an acceleration towards the already likely future of independence in Scotland.)
The EU’s Euro core is bound together and will maintain itself as a redoubt against what will be characterised as a rightist and nationalistic dis-aggregation of Europe. There is little doubt that this understanding will predominate among all classes in the eurozone. In Britain the politics and economics of globalisation will remain dominant. As you rightly state both the ‘remainers’ and the ‘exiteers’ would continue to allow the movement of labour across UK borders, because they have to and because the deals they want will force them to.
Does that mean that nothing at all changes on June 24? Not at all. And here we come to what is really in dispute on June 23. Across the western world new social and political bases are being carved out of an essentially working class constituency by a new type of ruling class leadership. While this new leadership is levering its own domestic success on populist racism and patriotism, it too will float its boat on the sea of globalisation and link itself indelibly to the super rich. In fact the telegenic racists who govern Poland and Hungary, who nearly won the Presidency in Austria, and have a good chance of success in the US, will, in all cases further break up indigenous working class benefits and rights. And in the UK, a form of this new, ultra-globalist leadership, that will sell everything including the NHS to make its ‘hard bargains’, albeit nation by nation, is already under construction under the banner of Brexit.
Next we come to the critical question of the refugee and immigrant crisis.
I think you are right to say that immigration is essential to capitalism. It is the other blade, hinged with unemployment, which makes up Capital’s scissors cutting the cost of labour. Labour is the only commodity in the ‘system of generalised commodity production’ that can be produced infinitely through self-reproduction – but not at every place at every time (although various efforts have been made recently to apply the same nostrum to Capital, with catastrophic results.)
Here we come to three main points. The first is simply an historical fact. Since capitalism won hegemony on Earth the movement of labour has been a permanent feature of the system’s existence. The movement of millions from the land to the cities; the movement of millions from Europe to the USA; the greatest single movement of population in world history, the movement of millions from rural China to its industrial areas, are all examples of this momentous, tumultuous, seething ebb and flow of labour across the globe; from continent to continent, nation to nation and inside nations.
Is this process possible to halt in one place at one time? Yes. But can the tap be permanently turned off. No. Not at least if capitalist competition is to survive. In other words, indigenous labour has always had to deal with the constantly changing numbers and character of its own working class. It has always faced the prospect of cheaper labour, whether from the next village or from the other side of the world.
A moment’s reflection on the history of the labour movement demonstrates how well organised radical left labour dealt with this problem. There was no hint of 'liberal arguments about immigration' when the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies) took on the American Knights of Labour for their ‘Boycott’ of immigrant workers. There were battles in the streets of Glasgow and Cardiff when ‘heroes’ like ‘red Clydesider’ Emmanuel Shinwell called on his fellow seaman to hunt down the ‘Lascars’ who crewed the ships in WW1. These were not liberal arguments when two were shot to death a hundred yards from the famous ‘red’ George Square. Positive results for the unity of immigrant and domestic workers have come from the minimum wage movement and the universal demand of a settled ‘price for the job’. There have been direct and organised alliances between workers as in the case of the German VW plants that struck in the 1980s for their South African counterparts over wages and conditions.
In other words it is a constant requirement of any labour movement under capitalism to respond to immigrant, foreign, agricultural, previously distant workers joining indigenous ranks. Working class leaders who have fought this by trying to exclude the new workers, as with Shinwell, or the Engineers union and its fight with women workers causing 'dilution' during WW1 etc etc, do not stand for the working class interest, they fail it.
Why is this so?
An answer brings us the second point. As a class, the working class, those who have to sell their labour power in order to exist, have as many ‘interests’ (understood as requirements, or goals that they seek) as the total number of persons in that class. If we step back from the noise of millions, we may discern large sections or groups who share certain interests, which might serve their particular condition or mitigate a specific hardship. In some cases we note that such a group’s interest appears to clash with some other group’s interest. An example might be where a set of skilled workers demand certain gains, but present that as a structural arrangement in relation to other workers eg ‘we are always to be paid 10% above the paint shop, or the cleaners, or the women workers, or the black workers, or the young or the new workers.’
And this is where a labour movement comes in. An effective labour movement in economics and in politics (viz a working class party) tries to distill and generalise working class interests as they effect the whole of that class AND as that class goes on to effect the whole of society. These shared, collective and societal interests stand above and sometimes repudiate partial interests within the working class where those interests damage another part of the same class. So comes the developing understanding that the fluctuation and downward pressure on wages and the constant mixture of the movement of labour and unemployment is an essential part of an antagonistic social system, which must be replaced as a whole.
Again this is not playing with 'liberal arguments about immigration' but rather with the endless struggle to build up a class movement that represents class interests as a whole, vis a vis itself and the society it wishes to lead.
A third significant point now emerges. The question of immigration is more acute today in western societies at any time since WW2 such that ‘open door’ immigration does appear as an anachronistic fantasy. (And, as some seem to argue, the traditional radical sectarian left apparently gets tangled up with middle class metro liberals!)
The material basis for this shift of mood is normally presented as a result of the increasing volumes of migrants that are now ‘westward bound’. More realistically and much more fundamentally, such ideas are rooted in the essential contract between labour and capital, which has shifted drastically in the recent past in the West. Since the 1980s there has been an inexorable process whereby the predominant nature of work has moved towards what has traditionally been described as provision of services. Associated with that, and the terrible defeats of the trade unions, has been a contract that attaches to the individual worker, rather than a collective bargain, and which has progressively tied the worker to an expanding responsibility for increasing aspects of what had been the ‘social wage.’ Collective organisation, based on the workplace, has been seriously damaged thereby. The new contract sets worker against worker in a competition for jobs. The ‘self employed’ Essex builder is in competition with the (cheaper) Polish builder. But if there were no Poles, the relentless march of the new economic arrangements between the classes, the new contract, would mean that the Essex builder would find himself or herself in exactly the same position when faced with competition with a cut-price builder from Bolton or Cardiff.
The defeat of large parts of collective labour in the UK has also created large-scale working class dependence in new ways on forms of welfare. Tax credits were necessary to subsidise employers who pay poorer and poorer wages. In general, as permanent austerity continues and budgets are driven down, access to welfare, to housing, to care all become more ‘competitive’, more an individual or family experience. The ‘problem’ invariably becomes ‘the cheats’, the queue jumpers, the secret racial networks that promote their own.
In essence then the argument, even if it were possible under late capitalism to apply, that limitation of certain types of immigration would be in the working class interest is false to the core. Unless the working class reorganises its interests on the basis of all who have to sell their labour power to exist, it can only fail to win society at large.
The crisis of the British working class is not addressed by any sort of immigration control in the framework of the type of society in which we live. If immigrants were not there then it would be the Scots, the old, the young, the neighbours who are to blame. Immigration controls and the associated rhetoric of the foreign ‘swamps’ verses our limited resources, is just the latest Malthusian approach to human-made scarcity.
Facing these realities, but also noting a signal rise of a new and young left political current across the west, albeit still a significant minority, requires the complete renovation not to say internal revolution of the modern working class movement. Indeed in all sorts of ways the modern working class has to recompose; to become once again a class for itself; which involves the evolution of a separate yet universal interest. The working class, since it was ushered into existence by capitalism, has gone through many experiences of defeat and restoration and advance. There is nothing, for example, that pre-determines the working class movement be centred pre-eminently on the economic principle and brought together by large units of industrial production. Of course a sense of the tremendous gap in fortunes between classes underlies all. But this is often expressed by the political principle in the first instance. There are many such examples, including the tremendous and leading role taken by South African unions in the overthrow of Apartheid. The British Chartists called together hand loom weavers from their villages, miners and their families from their quarries, shoemakers from their houses in the towns to form a national working class and a movement, which gave it its first expression.
We cannot rerun history. But we can grasp, from Latin American examples, from high points and mistakes in Greece, from the explosive growth of new and radical political formations in many countries, from the occupation of the hollowed out Labour Party in the UK by the active anti-austerity movement and the election of Corbyn over the heads of his MPs; we can learn something of how to build the alliances which will re-cement the mosaic of the modern working class. And this is argument is developed across other parts of the blog.
Returning then to the issue of remaining in or coming out of the EU; this is not what is really at stake in the coming referendum. The character of Britain’s economic life will not change substantially. Instead the vote is narrowly about who will lead the Tory Party. More widely it is about whether a new, populist and fiercer right will take the leadership in society. More widely still, the vote will help decide whether the internal crisis of the Tory Party will create the British version of a new and ferocious right wing already successful and still emerging across the west. Arguments that this new right is overestimated are specious, especially as the working class movement, including in the UK, is in its birth pangs. And the 4 million UKIP voters, substantially working class in origin, threaten to break up the nascent evolution of a new working class interest, particularly around the question of immigration and refugees.
This issue is the single most significant question in modern British politics, in that it will now decide which of the two possible directions that working class politics takes in the next period. No compromises on this issue are possible. Because of all of these factors and to aid the disruption of a new right wing, we should vote on the real issues we face regardless of the false question that has been set for us to answer – and vote to remain in the utterly un-reformable EU.
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