Five Unexpected Walks in Italy, Germany, Slovakia and more

Ortigia, Siracusa, Sicily, Italy

Charles Darwin famously walked around his garden in order to think more intensely. With his body occupied in routine activity - the familiar garden path providing no distractions - he could devote himself entirely to his work. Perhaps this was typical Victorian dualism: with the body's coarseness occupied the mind is free to labour. But I think in many ways Darwin's extreme purposefulness is quite atypical. I suspect most people walk precisely in order not to think. Walking is at once a means of access to real novelty and at the same time a means of mental escape - both in their way a type of distraction. Walking lends the mental urge for distraction a physical excuse. The fastidious German philosopher Immanuel Kant built a short walk into his daily routine, a route he followed everyday of his adult life. Kant was a stickler for routine, reason and order, yet there is no doubt that his walks were a means to relax. Walking is generally a reason not to do any mental work, a way to shut mental things out and let everything else in.

"Only walking manages to free us from our illusions about the essential," writes the French philosopher Frederic Gors. When we choose to walk we grab something small from the world. Unlike the thoroughly utilitarian Darwin, when we walk we grab a small piece of time and make it useless. I think this is an exceptional thing. All the more so when you don't have to walk or you have no definite, cast-iron purpose for walking. So many good walks start with "Why don't we...?"

Culled from old notebooks, these are mostly walks that filled up some spare time. They are little, revelatory distractions.

Outer New Town, Dresden, Germany

Why is Germany so jolly? From the Black Forest to Berlin; from Bavaria to Saxony - walk into any shop and the same trilled "Hallo!" greets you from behind the tills. The joy of Dresden's gentrified, shop-strewn Outer New Town is the ample opportunity it provides for so many greetings. After arriving at our hotel we spend a rain-splattered February afternoon dipping in and out of its "craft-shops" and "eco-cafes" - all to a conspicuously jolly chorus.

Dresden's origins are humbler than those of some German cities: for a long time it was a backwater in the eastern marches of the Holy Roman Empire. Only from the sixteenth century does it garner familiar if delayed accolades of cultural flourishing under an obligatory "wise king", namely Frederick Augustus I the Strong. Unfortunately Augustus III the Fat, one of his successors, would be responsible for frittering away the territory not only of Saxony but of much of Poland too. Simon Winder, author of Germania, says that the catastrophes of Augustus III the Fat might be a better metaphor for Germany's twentieth century experience than the more professional and militaristic Frederick the Great. That would suggest, however, that the 25,000 civilians who died in the Allies' firebombing of Dresden in 1945 had only their avarice - and their metaphorical portliness - to blame.

"It looked a lot like Dayton, Ohio, more open spaces than Dayton has. There must be tons of human bone meal in the ground," Kurt Vonnegut, who was there in the firebombing, speculated on a return visit. This begs the question again: Why are Germans - Saxoners above all - so jolly? Is it a defence mechanism or has the Wirtschaftswunder worked its amnesiac magic so perfectly? Whatever the reason we silently congratulate each of them as we pop in and out of boutiques and funky Wurst-selling cafes. In the Outer New Town you escape some of the "fragile crispness" (in Winder's words) - the delicate, awe-inspiring beauty - of the reconstructed Old Town, which lies to our south across the Elbe. No wonder the city's alternative cultural life has migrated to this cosy, forgetful quarter, hidden from the gaze of the startling skyline just over the river: here both the amnesia and the Wirtschaft are at their liveliest.

Island of Ortigia, Siracusa, Sicily

Once a Greek city-state to rival Athens, Ortigia juts out into a wild Mediterranean sea. With its  walls making a mighty defensive effort against both storms and tides alike, this marooned button of land envelops visitors in a cosy, classically adorned refuge.

It is too late to go home and too early to go for drinks. So we walk along the sea walls as spectators to the blind fury of the waves. Watching them roar inexhaustibly in the dark is like hearing the wind howl past an upstairs window while you are safe inside. You have an irresistible feeling of nature tamed - until, that is, you get splashed. Then you retreat to some bar and smoke Gauloises and listen to the fine drumming of the rain on the window-sill.

Marjan Hill, Split, Croatia

We arrive in Split in the early morning on a ferry from the island of Korcula. On a claustrophobically hot day we walk up the side of a huge, woody hill - a great, dry rump of kindling strewn all over with "No Fire" warnings - to the city's west. This is the Marjan of Split, scooped like a sand castle out of the Adriatic, a proud, beaten chest of a peninsula towering above the city.

The Marjan is a symbol of Split resistance to fascism and of its patriotic identity. In the War partisans made its name their chorus, the star player in an anti-fascist anthem with cameos from Tito and even Joe Stalin himself. "Zivila sloboda, Hrvatskog naroda!" they sang to their fascist occupiers: "Long live the Croatian nation!" It is a point of particular pride, it seems, that the Roman emperor Diocletian built his palace in Split - though its labyrinth of alleys has been home to a gloriously ramshackle pile of markets and dwellings as long as anyone can remember. The hill remains relatively uncluttered, however; surprising in a city so choked with life it seems to spill into the sea.

Halfway up a small chapel as dry and sun-baked as the hill itself sits in a hollow, a half-decipherable dedication in Croat to one side and a baby pine spreading its thin limbs over it for meagre shade. Inside its parched old stone is coloured by a lone daub of kitsch: 1980s Jesus - the god of rock himself, surfing a lightning-bolt - hangs cheaply framed a little too high for inspecting eyes or fingers. The scraped-bare altar looks ready for a sacrifice.

My flip-flops, which were cheap and have been worn all week, feel like they're melting in the sun. My feet are caked in the hill's dust. Hardly anyone has made it up the Marjan today. Nobody - not even the guard - is in the zoo. One enraged chimp bears his teeth at us from his tiny cell. A bear lolls sadly from her pit. The pines ripple with heat. The hill's neglect may be benign but that of the animals is not. Up here - the zenith of Croat patriotism - are some angry, abandoned animals. Below tickets are being frantically sold for the next ferry.

Zdiar Village, Tatra Mountains, Slovakia

The day after accidentally climbing the highest mountain in the Tatras we decide to take it easy. It's May but it's cold and there is snow predicted for the weekend. We visit some local caves and have lunch but find we still have a few hours of light left in the evening. When we get back to Zdiar we decide to walk out of the village and through some woods around the feet of the nearby Belianske Tatry mountains.

The path follows a small, icy stream out of town and through the thin edge of a spruce wood. Half-built bridges are placed at intervals, bark-stripped log piles expectant at their sides. Squat hills roll up suddenly and fall away again. The stream meanders occasionally around them but mostly just drives straight down a long, wide clearing. Finally, as the hills funnel us into a narrow valley, we cross the stream and clamber up a stony path, half-sunk into the hillside. Tree stumps from the storm of 2007 - in which three million cubic metres of forest were wrenched up - lie everywhere, their wrecked trunks still scattered around them.

Beyond these stubbly woods we arrive at a remarkably smooth intersection of grassy slopes, a hut at the very deepest point with wires feeding out of it and back up the hills. Here and there a slumping metal tower of pulleys and wheels meets these wires, ready to send them back down. We are at an abandoned ski resort tucked into the lower slopes of the mountains. We make for the highest point, where a faux-Alpine lodge is lit up in the dusk, Mambo No.5 playing over the loudspeakers to nobody in particular. We look around for someone to sell us something but there's no one. And so we cross the road and begin the descent back into Zdiar, which snakes in a single line of hotels and penzions back to the south.

Vinohrady, Prague, Czech Republic

A studiously well-mannered neighbourhood, Vinohrady feels a lot like some scenery leftover from a Chekhov play: all sleepy bourgeois charm underlain by unspoken anxiety. You wouldn't know how near the centre of Prague you are as you flit between its tree-lined rows of apartment buildings. True to its origins as a nineteenth century village it has an innate suspicion of unruliness and a keen appreciation of its own provincial splendour.

Nevertheless, it was where we chose to live and I had a deep affection for it (one that manifested itself as much in the form of frustration as pure enjoyment). I would make sure to walk through at least some part of it everyday. So I suppose it fulfilled the same function as the aforementioned Darwinian garden: a familiar scene divested of distractions, devoted to pure routine. Except Vinohrady is no garden paradise, not really: it is perched precariously on a hilltop, bordered by grungy, ex-working class rival Zizkov to its north; the congested New Town to its west; and on its south the sprawl of smoggy Vrsovice and Nusle. Thus the villagey intimacy is often broken by an element of the strange or unexpected, the possibility of danger: call it the equivalent of Chekhov's gun, then. Every minor alteration in a frame so familiar has the power to focus the attention: a new scrawl of graffiti here; some police tape there. Some droppings of fallen plaster here; a smashed window there.

Once on our road the body of a dead taxi driver sat in his car for several days before residents finally noted the smell. A very Chekhovian detail that (I read somewhere that Chekhov liked to read newspaper headlines out-loud, their removal from context heightening their absurd potential). For a few hours a forensics team milled around in white boilersuits and closed the road to traffic. Later some flowers arrived in the spot where the car had been. We hadn't noticed the body; but we did notice those flowers. Like probably everyone else who heard about the dead taxi driver we were strangely, selfishly comforted by the fact he hadn't lived on our road. Indeed, he wasn't even Czech but foreign, possibly Ukrainian. What a relief then. Life could go back to normal.

The whole year passed like this: the pleasure of a familiar break in the trees where the sun crept through; this or that particular facade with its pastel yellow or myrtle; the woman who smoked a cigarette and talked to her neighbour at half past eleven every day; the trams just audible as they shunted up Francouzska; the weather slowly improving and the layers of coats and scarves departing; the walk from my flat - much quicker by tram - to IP Pavlova metro, via the breezy Namesti Miru and down Jugoslavska, out of Vinohrady and into the bustle of the New Town.

Two Poems About Roads in Southern England

A28 and Surrounds

When hunched in truck cabs, teamed roofers

  Belt around beltways, lace the skirts of

An ex-dissenting land, now neutered;

  Determined that, "Long hours make you worse off."

In bold font they bear the legend

  "Pride's Roofs" and strafe the roads

For a catch, cross the lines on the bend,

  Solid ways that knot antique abodes.

The old proper mining towns give way to saplings on new estates;

  Engines rumbling around the debacle

Of a premature Xmas Tree topped off with sparkles.

  "Oven-Ready Game" and a dialling code signal the brink of the A-road;

From there we bear upon hedgerows

  And car showrooms in battle-mode.

The English road is a known beast,

  Neither pretty nor wild, nor dangerous either.

Arteries of commerce, from most to least

  Pumping seaward on sodden tyres.

Best snapped as a still-life panorama,

  Its roads are its class cross-stitchings,

Catch picture-window dramas

  And at bus stops a world of vulgar etchings.

There are places where, because there are roads, nobody walks;

  Where, sans-papier, in our quarries of chalk

Turned to bungalow havens, the remainders labour

  Or wait. Where unremembered pathways

Cut away and between the motiveless brush

  Laid over by dozing chestnuts, unseen in the evening rush.

Time is on its knees

The town clambers up and on its tail brings

The wrestling waves of a disarrayed sea;

Swapping between Archer's and harder things

Heavy-scent teens wait at slot machines.

Time dusts about in tinkling arcades,

Tickling the dust-flayed men with their coats

No more, no more to sow their wild oats

With women of indiscernible age.

We leave a wardrobe of pine cones to dry

On the lime green expanse of a dish cloth;

An assemblage of autumn, piled to remind

It's change to which love's hat is doffed.

Changed to warmed age; browning pines peel their limbs

Out wide and nestle at the boiler's feet.

A young man, pizza in hand, awaits a receipt,

As we trundle past the cats at their bins.

The land is tested; all the skirmishes

Of a Catholic wind: relentless; deft at sin;

Cutting the wheat from our shivering chaff,

Heads hang wherever it's evangelizing.

Divided between meek or horny hearth,

Slick with iron sediment, the heath-shallows

Maintain in dolorous October tones

The peat bogs that will inherit the earth.

If Prague is, despite the communism,

A city of jazz, Royal Tunbridge Wells

Has never pandered to any -ism

Nor any music either very well.

We trot gamely round its spangled Pantiles

The boutiques with a grimace of fashion;

And the bespectacled of earnest dispassion

Cup cures for veins they dislike and their piles.

Half-deceased, a perished world drifts by,

Remembered not from sandy childhood

But our life's later and more cunning lie,

Deceived in Kentish depths or Sussex woods.

Erosion is for rocks the embrace of time:

We watch their heads in settling lips of fog,

Our hoarse wheels spitting on the sod,

And gathering pockmarks on bony lime.

When we get home you'll string a garland up

Made from your time-kissed pine cones and some beads

In this impermanent collection you'll

Keep in the time and see us through the freeze.

Nietzsche said, Joys all want eternities

He's right, to a degree; love wants time too,

But not from a fixed superior view:

Love would rather get it on its knees.   

Why is Jamie Oliver a media obsession? Because class is our national obsession

TV chef Jamie Oliver excites all sorts of frenzy among Britain's otherwise cautious highbrow media. Here's Will Self in the New Statesman:

If Terence Conran plummily taught the middle classes how to be a proper European bourgeoisie in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Oliver is his worthy estuarine successor, taking the permanent foodie revolution on to that portion of the former working class who bought up the public housing stock. Now they can borrow against their equity to buy bruschetta...

Will Self gets the fascination, albeit only symptomatically: Jamie Oliver obsesses liberal columnists not because of how he "speaks to" (to use a very columny phrase) our "notions of class" but because of how he represents movement between classes (that elusive and much abused phenomenon of "social mobility"). The stress in Self's above diatribe on the buying and selling of class consciousness is not on class in itself but on how class is constantly changing.

I traced the New Statesman's obsession with all things Oliver back to 2007 (I got bored after that), when they reviewed a TV show about him growing vegetables in his garden. The "millionaire television personality" himself was soon back, this time being heckled for his views on poverty. While admittedly naive, Oliver's rather pompous advice ("Cook cheaply - like the Spanish!") was hardly the most offensive twaddle to pass from an establishment figure's lips in the last few years. Worse was his anger at "young Brits" (a much-maligned, often skulkily silent constituency) who are "too wet for work" - 80-100 hours a week being his stated workload norm. Even this was voiced in the context of a ham-fisted defence of "our eastern European immigrant friends." True, Oliver's worldview borders on the myopically narrow. He wobbles, suspended above the twin tides of Victorian moral piety and a diluted Thatcherite creed of entrepreneurialism. But what else should you expect from one who so closely fits the role - admittedly a bit belatedly - of a dragged-up-by-his-own-bootstraps, Tebbitt-lite petit-bourgeois, the proverbial self-raising man? Most recently the New Statesman followed all this up with a clarion call for his defence from a voraciously exclusive middle class. Oliver, the writer contended, was a victim of snobbery directed at him and the striving, pestle-and-mortar-bashing masses. (Just to prove my case, and to widen the gene pool, even the very snobbish Economist has had the oracle in to predict the dietary frontiers of 2036 - a distinct slippage from its usual, rigorous empiricism).

What all this chef's broth boils down to is a contest over a very real set of slippages: how we understand movement within and between social classes. It's fitting that we should be so mesmerised and confused, provoked and applauding, of someone like Jamie Oliver, because he - in voice, tone and annoying colloquialism - represents all that feels affected and forced in the personality of the effective social climber. Hopping between classes is culturally a difficult thing to do. To then become outspokenly critical of the 'lower orders' - from among whose number you were flung - almost guarantees a welter of opprobrium. The need to stratify class - to pin down class identities - is betrayed by someone as energetically contrary and - let's face it - obnoxious as Jamie Oliver. The historian E.P. Thompson once described class as not "this or that part of [a larger social] machine" but as "a social and cultural formation." For Thompson class could not be defined abstractly but "only in terms of relationship with other classes... Class is not a thing, it is a happening." The thing happening in the fuss around Jamie Oliver is a symptom of anxiety: the middle class - always a little vulnerable in a society still partially in awe of aristocratic privilege and yet predominantly working class - doesn't want its waters muddied.

The urge to stratify is embodied in that common British pastime, the class survey. Last April most daily newspapers extensively covered a report that contended there were now seven classes in Britain's complex social matrix, from the "precariat" (a buzzy new gloss on semi-employment) to the more familiar elite. The research, conducted by the BBC, separated participants according to empirical data: cars, houses, jobs, savings, and so on. Yet, ask any of them if they felt like they belonged to their resultant group, and they would almost certainly balk. Probably nobody has ever felt passionately drawn to life as an "emergent service sector worker." In this the "traditional working class" survived - reduced, however, to a niggling 15% of the population. Clearly, the survey is inadequate as an expression of class feeling. Yet, how do we clearly establish what the majority of people feel about class today?

*

The social processes and experiences of capitalism tend to be class forming; yet the degree and direction of class consciousness is not determined by them. This battle takes place on the twin terrains of politics and of culture. Clearly, not all people who work will identify as working class. But because of capitalism's tendency to unite vast numbers of workers in a similar relation to itself (most don't have direct access to or ownership of the means of production; neither do they have control over a great deal of money capital) similarities not only of interest but of social behaviour, custom, outlook, culture, and politics are likely to arise. Selina Todd's recent book The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class 1910-2010 tells this story of growing class consciousness in vibrant terms. What excludes some from the privilege of membership? CEOs obviously work: some part of their professional role is given over to the creation of surplus value. Yet it's unlikely they'll identify in any immediate sense with a wider working class culture because ultimately their workplace power is necessarily greater; their proximity to the means of production closer; their ability to control large amounts of money capital infinitely greater, than the average worker. Nothing follows necessarily from these facts. I'm not going to tell you that Sir Alan Sugar isn't working class; only that you're unlikely to find him in a dole queue - or for that matter on a picket line. The much talked about "decline of the working class" since the 1970s does not refer to an exclusively economic decline; it refers to the crushing of the politically conscious minority of the working class and more broadly those who identified with its traditional culture. Capitalist social processes suggest, however, that its revival in new political and cultural forms is a constant possibility.

*

Despite the fact that so many British people continue to identify as working class, it is the middle-class that fascinates our media. The limits of this identity are contested in the unassuming form of a Jamie Oliver or of an Alan Sugar or even of a Wayne Rooney. The British middle class is, as Marx would have said, a classic "ruling class." Its ideas tend publicly to dominate others. Yet, just as capital is not static, the social composition and the worldview of its core beneficiaries is not static either. Even if capital senses no existential threat from below, particular layers within the middle class must constantly reassert their right to privilege and to elevation above "infiltrators." Through intellectual, cultural and political ritual the fluidity of the middle class as a social group can be combated.

E.P. Thompson described the development of working-class identity from 1790-1832 from two perspectives: firstly, by looking at the growing internal relations (of, say, artisans to the women's movement or to unskilled labour) of consciously identifying working class people to each other; and secondly by looking at the developing antagonisms between the working class and society's rulers. The practical lesson we can draw from the likes of both Thompson and Selina Todd is that these relations do not develop in any fixed or necessary direction (the admittedly limited attraction, described by Todd, of Oswald Mosley's fascist Blackshirts for the working class demonstrates this): class is in a constant process of change and fissure - both internally and in relation to other classes. This makes the political development of class relations peculiarly combustible and unpredictable. Still, the difference between the working class and the middle class is that only the latter must, by strict definition, attempt viciously to preserve its privileged status from others. This ontological openness of class is in fact a great reserve of strength of the working class.  

"Swamped?" - the Tory crisis over immigration and the European Union

Just a few days ago I argued on this blog that the British ruling class is deeply conflicted. The UK Conservative Party, currently in "disarray" over immigration and the European Union, is at the time of writing proving that argument right in glorious fashion.  

This conflict can be summarised as follows. On the one hand, the wider ruling class holds a sceptical faith in the power of free markets to help develop society as a whole; on the other, it maintains an ideal commitment to the "national economy" (both territorially and commercially homogeneous) as the relevant entity on which to focus developmental efforts. The tension between these two poles is now exploding around the two political flashpoints of immigration and the European Union.

Last night the Conservative Defence Minister Michael Fallon told Newsnight that parts of Britain were at risk of being "swamped", their residents "under siege" by waves of migrants. Fallon is not alone in his fears, despite the obviously enforced speed of his retraction. The UK Conservative Party has recently been committed by David Cameron to a renegotiation of the "principle of the free movement of people" within the Union as part of Britain's future continued involvement. Reports immediately seized on this as further evidence of the Tories moving further to the right under Ukip pressure.

One should be wary, however, of blaming the fiasco of the Tories' EU policies, and of their attitude to immigrants, on Ukip. The latter does not represent any clear shift to the right of the UK electorate. The Tories are not bowing to "popular pressure" as represented by the Ukip insurgency on their right flank. This tirelessly rehearsed explanation assumes that without a popular anti-EU backlash or Little Englander racism, the government would be formulating perfectly consistent and coherent policies on either. The reality of the problem runs deeper for Tories (as it does for all of Britain's historic rulers, bearing to some degree also on capitalists themselves and even the leadership of the Labour Party). The Tory Party is a composite of ideas extracted from a broad array of class roots (from a faded aristocracy to privileged layers of the working class), which rely for their coherence on a careful balancing act by Party officials. On the one hand, the interests of capital as a class must be assured. On the other, the interests of the nation as a whole. Practically, in the building of Conservative culture and in the formulation of Party policy, this is felt in the aforementioned division between developing the "national economy" and preserving the "free market."( The reality of a capitalist society is, of course, that the two are mutually interdependent and conflicting, the nature of their relationship requiring constant renegotiation ).

In short, then, the Tory Party is in a position of grave weakness over both its attitude to the EU and to immigration. On the one hand, many Tory politicians, party members, and voters recognise immigration's vital function in securing returns to capital, with fewer (though a significant minority) acknowledging the positive role played by the EU in securing regional markets (both of commodities and labour). On the other, there is widespread fear of the threat to the "national economy" posed by EU regulation and external competition from low-skilled workers. This is not a purely economic matter, however. Conservatives are by nature deeply committed to the Union of the British Isles. Through precisely its regulated free trade regime, the EU threatens UK sovereignty. The "free market" - which the EU undoubtedly supports in practice - stands less for any unchanging theory of virtue inherent in deregulation, than for what the British ruling class believes will in practice best serve British capital at a given time. The EU impinges on sacred Tory notions of sovereignty and the inner collective coherence of the UK; immigration undermines the social and territorial homogeneity of the British state. Though both the EU and immigration are, in a sense, symptomatic phenomena of free markets, the Tory Party discovers in practice that they threaten their other intellectual commitment to the national economy.

The Conservatives will struggle in the short term to reorganise their political culture so as to incorporate both immigration and the European free-market bloc (in the historical long term, they stand perhaps to gain from both anti-democratic EU tendencies and the loosening of nationally regulated labour markets). This gives the British Left a rare opening: an opportunity, for once, to fight a battle it can actually win. How? While the Tory Party struggles to reconcile itself to a world of permanently diminished stature of the British state, the Left can start organising its own counter-hegemonic bloc. The social forces it can win to its side in forthcoming battles range from the progressive, democratic wing of the middle class to migrant workers themselves. For it to do so, however, will require a reformulation of the terms of the argument in which anti-immigrant sentiment presently dominates (as previously explored, the British working class also suffers from a culture of conservatism when it comes to immigration). This reformulation of terms - made possible by current Conservative weakness - must then be used to formulate concrete proposals. In short, the Left must argue:

- the "free movement of people" doesn't threaten democratic sovereignty; the "free exploitation of labour" does

The Left could demand greater protection of workers' and democratic rights as a condition of Britain's continued EU membership. The €2.1 billion bill dumped on David Cameron by the EU this week could also be used progressively. The Left could challenge European elites to explain the use of these contributions to the electorate, as opposed to addressing themselves exclusively, and clandestinely, to the government ("Play by the rules," was the collective instruction of Barroso, Hollande and Merkel to Cameron this week). This would also form a starting point for addressing British concerns about accountability and democracy within the Union. This would take the form:

- fundamental democratic reforms, including deepening the power of the European Parliament, not withdrawal from the EU

This could be the centrepiece of a progressive Labour platform in a future EU-membership referendum.

Concretely, the Left in Britain could organise around the issue of a strictly enforced, universal living wage to protect migrants from super-exploitation and to strengthen the wider British working class. To those who argue that such a policy would cause unemployment, the Left can argue simply that it is growing consumption (fuelled by wage increases) not profit rates or returns to capital that drives productivity and economic growth in capitalist economies. Higher wages for both British and immigrant workers would help the economy as a whole.

This is a popular-democratic strategy, not a strictly "socialist" one, which draws on a long tradition of Keynesian demand management and social labour-market protection - a shared British and European heritage of the postwar era - whilst deliberately driving at a new, progressive social gain: a universal living wage. I see no reason that the current Labour Party leadership could not be pushed to make such an argument, especially if the Tories and the wider ruling bloc remain divided. The eventual goal would be a European living wage (adjusted for GDP or some other index of national wealth) to energise the renewal of a specifically European working class, to help strengthen its institutions and to create the space for its political culture.

If intellectual and working-class forces to the left of the Labour leadership fail to nudge it in the right direction on immigration by, at the earliest, the May elections or, at the latest, by the time of the proposed membership referendum, the Tories will almost certainly regain the upper-hand. I am inclined to think this outcome even more likely if the Tories are in office when Europe begins a significant economic recovery. Crucially, this could be well under way during the referendum campaign, resulting in renewed membership of an unreformed EU, a growing economy still fuelled by very cheap labour, and the further disenfranchisement of the British and European working class. The benign Tory attitude to the free market, and to European authorities as the regional guarantors of capital circulation and labour movement, will have resurfaced in more assertive form. The Left cannot afford to miss this opportunity.                         

"Dealing with the Problem": European Immigration, the British Working Class, and Ruling-Class Ideology

There is constant confusion within British culture about immigration because it touches upon some of our society's key contradictions. As confused as the masses often seem (telling Ipsos Mori they believe that immigrants make up 31% of the population; in fact it's 13%), our rulers find it no less problematic. Among them we find an intellectual zig-zag movement between celebrating the cultural, social, and economic benefits "over all" of the "free movement of people" while wondering aloud if borders need to be tightened in order to maintain "social cohesion." Thus, in the same breath that calls for "humane" government intervention to help illegal immigrants into Europe, the Economist - the intellectual home of English free traders - notes, "the logic of the free movement of people is that the more open the borders internally, the more tightly external frontiers must be managed." (Needless to say, this makes "free movement" a drastic bit less free) This is partly explained by the fact that, whatever the ideological bon mots of laissez-faire, capitalist markets must always be embedded in complex, carefully delimited social infrastructures. Bound up with this is the only half-complete conversion of the British ruling class to free trade itself. In other words, the Smithian virtues of the market have only ever been sceptically or cynically deployed by the majority of our rulers (the Tory party only coming round to Whiggish notions of free trade in the time of Margaret Thatcher). Free trade is one, partially-integrated, ideological element among others in the wider "articulation" (to use Chantall Mouffe's concept) of the British ruling class. Suspicion of immigration is connected to this wider suspicion of the perils of opening up the "national economy" (sustained historically by prising open other regions and building trade relations favourable to the British) to the convulsions of the free market.

The Economist reveals itself less in the logic of the argument than in its fluffy phrasing: "openness" for a sort of hermetic aristocracy of Schengen labour; the genteel euphemism of "management" for those outside it. On the Labour side things are no more enlightened. Simon Danczuk, Labour MP for Rochdale, recently turned immigrant sage for the Daily Mail: "Labour can no longer ignore immigration." Danczuk's message was entirely contained in the posture: he wanted to look hard in the Mail, an understandable if misguided fetish for one from a party so thoroughly harassed by them. Yet as with the Economist, in place of either fact or policy there was euphemism. This didn't stop a New Statesman editorial of the following week placing a more humane spin on essentially the same incoherent list of popular "grievances", public "perceptions" and vague threats. In all cases, immigration is not condemned per se. Indeed, it is regarded as a vital source of replenishment for labour markets and British national culture. It is seen, however, as getting "out of control" - though not as a result of market pressures themselves but rather because of the specific aspects of the European Union that erode sovereignty. "There's a sense that we can no longer get rid of criminals in our country," Danczuk says. "It would be foolish to deny that immigration from within the European Union and outside brings pressures on housing, schools, maternity units and other public services," the New Statesman says. (Why, if immigration "pressures" are universal, the need to acknowledge the EU separately?) Immigration is flawed in execution, they say, not in nature. The "free movement of people" must, it's assumed, be a good thing. It's only our capacity to "deal with" (in the Economist's vaguely seedy wording) the influx that matters.

Contradicting the established view are two related phenomena, the first objective and the second subjective. Firstly, the constant drive of capital to overcome all spatial, social, and political barriers to circulation rubs up against the institutional, social, and political infrastructures necessary to instigate its "limitless" accumulation in the first place. During intensifying phases capital must draw labour from its periphery into its core regions, generating, as Marx described, a "surplus army of labour" which is quickly and cheaply deployable in new and productive branches of industry. The creation of national - or supra-national - sovereignties is not a secondarily or merely coincidentally simultaneous process: their development in the core is a crucial stage in securing returns to capital and with them market expansion. Undergoing their own crises of "underdevelopment" peripheral regions inject their own, low-paid, hard-working labourers into newly opened production streams in the core. Then, in periods of crisis in the core, capital releases itself from production and floods the market, often in highly damaging speculative financial waves. Importantly, workers are thrown out of work and old, unproductive branches of industry are shuttered or relocated. Thus the territorial and accumulative contradictions of capital structure migration flows, as well as the social conflicts that inevitably arise from them. While capital plays a key part in the development of national cultures, it has absolutely no qualms about abandoning them to their own fates whenever it needs to and the conditions are right. Immigration is one process among others that "de-centres" national development, pushing it down new, contradictory paths. Thus, to Marx's fundamental division within the working class - that of employed and unemployed - we can add the division between privileged workers from the core and those thrust into core labour markets from the periphery. These divisions needn't necessarily take a national form (as evidenced in the case of the Economist's attitude to the EU), but, owing to the relatively few global proletarian experiences of federal or supra-national sovereign systems, they are preponderately national.

This brings us to the second way in which the prevailing view of immigration is contradicted, this time by experience: the general "native" working class opposition to immigration. In a previous article I addressed how the cultural conservatism of the British working class - and of British society generally - developed during the 19th century. There was nothing historically necessary about this: it hinged, as E.P. Thompson wrote, on the coincidence of the Industrial Revolution with the counter-revolution of the Napoleonic Wars. In Gramscian terms, the growth of class consciousness was channelled in conservative directions by this specific and contingent tipping of "the balance of class forces." This moment affected the whole history of the British working-class movement. The truisms relentlessly espoused about immigration's "ups and downs" - from the depression of wages to the mass importation of doctors; from the erosion of the "contributory" welfare principle to the cultural vibrancy of immigration - fail to impact upon popular perceptions. This is because, for all their supposed empathic power, they contradict lived experience. From the perspective of the long-term unemployed bricklayer who expects at least the minimum wage, "foreign labour" does indeed pose a direct existential threat. This simple fact is what escapes so many public figures - with all their qualifications and reservations; with all their unevenly buried xenophobia. The reality is that the Labour tradition in Britain - with its patrician commitment to the "national economy" and the "benign" imperialism that once supported it - has no convincing answer to the threat posed by free capitalist labour markets to a workforce that lives under the constant threat of further de-industrialisation. Free labour markets are a necessity for capitalist development; closed industrial and trade regimes vital for the spread of national prosperity within a limited and predetermined social framework. Immigration - as a necessary part of capitalist development - ploughs violently into this web of social contradictions, undercutting pre-established labour and national sovereignty. 

Again, E.P. Thompson's depiction of the Irish immigrant impact on the skilled English working class during the Industrial Revolution is devastating and revealing in equal measures. Thompson quotes a Blue Book report of the 1830s entitled 'Report on the State of the Irish Poor in Great Britain', which states:

The Irish emigration into Britain is an example of a less civilized population spreading themselves, as a kind of substratum, beneath a more civilized community; and, without excelling in any branch of industry, obtaining possession of all the lowest departments of manual labour.

"An Englishman could not do the work they do," one employer marvelled. Irish workers flooded the industrial economy, filling any available position. They had few of the cultural aversions of the English working class and none of their developed sense of class consciousness. According to Thompson, the Irish had "escaped the influence of Baxter and Wesley" - in other words, they were lacking in spiritual self-discipline, disregarding of moral qualms around dignity and self-abasement. They did not so much undermine wages (the key obsession of anti-immigration ideologues today) as absorb vast sectors of the economy and make them their own. The important point here is to acknowledge the specifically cultural underpinnings of this development of the Industrial Revolution: abject in Ireland, they were capable of "great feats" in England. Still, despite the obviously unintended intensification of proletarianisation wrought by Irish immigration, Thompson says, "it is not the friction but the relative ease with which the Irish were absorbed into working-class communities which is remarkable." The saving grace of the British working class - the key ingredient in its ability to stave off barbarism in the depths of extraordinary privation - was its collectivism. "By the early years of the nineteenth century it is possible to say that collectivist values are dominant in industrial communities," Thompson says. This collectivism was developed in the factory system and in the towns and villages being drawn into the "devouring jaws" (as Engels repeatedly put it) of industrialism.

In an interview with the New Left Review, the historian Eric Hobsbawm argued that the mass immigration of the Twenty-First Century was constitutively different to its Twentieth Century equivalent because - with the fluidity of postmodern identities - living in a European country no longer entailed the possibility of "assimilation" (as it had quite successfully in both the USA and France). One moved to England to work as a Polish citizen and a few years later simply transferred this new wealth of experience back home. This betrays a lack of awareness of the effect Polish communities have had on British society, and vice versa. National communities - much like capital markets - are not permanently constrained by strict cultural limits. Their evolution, not given by ethnicity, is open to peculiar permutations. If they are in part determined by the channels of culture which develop through capitalist technologies and social relations, their real limits must remain for now unknown. It is only particular interests within national states that are threatened by capitalist market expansion. The European Union may yet prove an unintended transformer of national or working class identity as opposed to their full stop. This, perhaps, is the lesson for the Left in Thompson's account of Irish immigration to England: even in such extraordinarily adverse circumstances, the industrial proletariat - still unsure of itself and of its capacities - proved capable of building real solidarity with new arrivals. This not because of its relative level of "enlightenment" along bourgeois lines, but precisely because of its own (flawed but, in its own way, highly successful) "collectivism". The future of the working class - indeed, of "humane" approaches to immigration - lies not with EU policymakers, but with new solidarities built up among the new and old elements of those whose lives and livelihoods are constantly threatened by capitalist accumulation.

Immigration as a Political Factor

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.

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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.

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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.