Immigration helps form the deepest
cultural division within the working class. Deeper perhaps than the
distinction between "honourable" and "dishonourable"
work (which it plays into), and unemployment and semi-employment
(which it also plays a part in reproducing), the divide created by
immigration among workers is no mere ideological dupe of the ruling
class, used simply to divide the movement from the outside. The
division is essential to capitalist processes of expansion and
development; and essential to the formation of working-class
consciousness. From the earliest days of capitalism - well before the
industrial revolution, when the crisis of feudalism, and its
attendant class struggles, drove the development of capitalist social
relations - the owners of capital have always required fresh waves of
low-paid labour to drive productive expansion and subsequently to
undermine existing forms of working-class privilege. Despite the
purely economic unity of the working class (that is, its lack of
ownership of the means of production and of the means of
circulation), the cultural and political unity of the working class
in Britain has inevitably been hampered by the movement and
subsequent incorporation of "external" populations into the
expanding centres of capital accumulation. One sees attempts
throughout the earliest phases of artisanal organisation against big
capital to control the exploitation of immigrant labour and to steady
its impact upon pre-existing skilled labour forces (with the idea of
guaranteeing basic wage-rates across industries). Though hardly
always "exclusivist" or racist, advanced workers have often
sought to consolidate their own positions by patronising the less
fortunate.
What, however, explains the acute
suspicion of immigrant labour in Britain today? Clearly the current
wave of market and institutional globalisation plays a major part in
animating prejudice. Yet the argument that, by undermining "native"
workers' rights, capital has engendered an accidental civil backlash,
is too mechanistic and also plays into the hands of right-wingers who
believe that all "aliens" must necessarily be perceived as
a threat to the "self-interest" of local populations. On
the contrary, the whole national debate about immigration in Britain
in recent years has its roots in the particular conservative culture
developed in British society as a whole since the industrial
revolution. The labour movement, for all its remarkable strengths,
has formed an essential part of this conservative culture. Yet this
fact does not explain the endurance of British national chauvinism;
it merely points to its popular, working-class element. To understand
the strength and specificity of anti-immigrant sentiment in Britain
today we must turn to the evolution of the working class's
relationship to capital and to the social system of capitalism
itself.
*
Capitalism's longue
durée in England meant that class
politics in this "most bourgeois of countries" over time
developed the most peculiar anomalies. Many commentators have pointed
to how the "Glorious Revolution" and the constitution of
1688 foreswore a bourgeois revolution on Britain. At least as
important as retrospective cultural reference to that event, however,
was the coincidence of popular counter-revolution during the
Napoleonic Wars with the onset of the Industrial Revolution. As E.P.
Thompson put it in his The Making of the English Working Class,
"As new techniques and forms of industrial organisation
advanced, so political and social rights receded." The radical
Jacobin and Dissenting Protestant traditions of the skilled artisans
- with their commitment to the "rights of the free Englishman"
were dissolved into reactionary national currents. This complex
process of class incorporation into capitalism through both war and
political reaction left democratic forces defeated. Although the
radical traditions imported from France and from native skilled
artisans were defeated, the period after 1790 also saw the
development of properly national working-class consciousness. This
consciousness was, however, marked by the prior defeat of the
radicals along with the slow growth of new trade unionism. Strangely,
the working-class insistence on a minimum of human dignity, of
protection of wages and welfare, as well as traditional morals, found
strange echoes among the Tory aristocracy. As Thompson put it,
"Whenever the traditionalist Tory passed beyond mere reflective
argument about the factory system, and attempted to give vent to his
feelings in action, he found himself in an embarrassing alliance with
trade unionists or working-class Radicals." Despite being
predominantly bourgeois in terms of social relations, the historical
accidents of British social development led its culture to be
preponderately conservative, aligned with the forces of tradition.
Any nascent alliance between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat
against reactionary aristocratic landowners was curtailed by working
class material and ideological incorporation into capitalist society.
In subsequent years, as
Tom Nairn has described in his assessment of the British Labour
Party, the trade union movement - the embodiment of the labour
movement as a whole - developed piecemeal and empirically within the
confines of British capitalist society. At no point did the union
movement attempt to combat capitalism as such. Instead, due to the
long-term incorporation of the most advanced elements of the British
proletariat into the capitalist state (under the leadership of the
Liberal Party), it sought a moral compromise with capital: in short,
a "fair share" of the productive pie for its members. This
naturally tended to favour the already-organised and well-integrated
workers - the so-called "aristocracy of labour" - against
those excluded from it. Owing to the "empirical" and purely
self-serving nature of the labour movement's analysis - and the
shortage of any radical ideas within the movement - the defence of
privileged layers within the working class became the foremost
priority of organised workers. A long history of gender and racial
prejudice within the unions attests to this privileging of the
already-organised. Without a radical democratic or egalitarian strand
in English culture to draw upon, this meant sclerosis for the
movement itself.
*
Immigration has always played a vital
part in processes of capitalist creative destruction, allowing
capitalist firms the flexibility to restructure and develop new lines
of production quickly and efficiently, discarding older labour forces
and defunct means of production in the process. Yet different labour
movements have developed varying strategies for dealing with the
introduction of new labour forces (despite or perhaps because of the
historical weakness of organised labour in the US, the Democrats
probably feel less compunction about being labelled the party of
"immigrant and ethnic minority labour" than would any
traditional European Socialist Party). Immigrants - either foreign or
internal - hardly form the only new strands introduced into national
economies. The introduction of women - a similarly discriminated
group - into the labour force has always been met with fierce and
contradictory reactions within the existing labour movement.
The organisational tensions between new
and old strands within the wider labour forces of capitalist
societies will probably not be definitively solved under a capitalist
mode of production. Still, there are strategies labour movements can
and should engage in to channel those tensions into gains for the
class as a whole, as well as promoting a general anti-capitalist
consciousness. In
Dissent magazine this year, I examined at length the
relationship between the international state system, immigration and
human trafficking. Interviewing various activists and NGO
workers, I was met with a similar line: human trafficking is a
humanitarian issue, not a political one, and should be combated
through civil pressure groups. I find quite the reverse to be true:
only political mobilisation and sustained organisation - the type
that fosters new ideas of democratic solidarity and how to enact it -
can combat a system built around the exploitation of the weakest for
the benefit of the few. Precarity and vulnerability - affecting both
older and newer; local and global industrial workforces - are nothing
new. Unions of the unemployed - operating beyond legal notions of
citizenship or corporatist industrial sectors, not to mention
employment as such - could reach outside of the traditional zones of
labour organisation to reach the world's most vulnerable and indeed
most important workers. There are already unions that seek to protect
and defend low-wage, undocumented and precariously employed workers.
Here renewed commitment to creating an anti-capitalist culture for
all must be brought.
No comments:
Post a Comment