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Weekly Worker 567 Thursday March 10 2005
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It’s quite nice today, George
Tony Cliff once referred scathingly to socialists who prefer to chat
about the weather rather than tackle ruling class ideas head on. With
this in mind, David Isaacson notes the SWP’s silence over George
Galloway’s recent article on ‘controlled immigration’
It is already clear that immigration is a major issue in the run-up to the general election. Predictably both Labour and the Conservatives have come out with reactionary claims and promises in the hope that they will be seen as being tough rather than soft on immigration.
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| What ‘controls’ really mean |
On top of these flames the gutter press is eagerly pouring its racist petrol. Day by day they churn out filthy, reactionary lies and half-truths. Following Michael Howard’s call for migrants to be screened for diseases such as tuberculosis and HIV the Daily Mail emblazoned on its front page: “Our NHS, not the world health service!” As Alban Pryce points out, in the March edition of the Socialist Workers Party’s monthly magazine Socialist Review, “disgusting though this is, in the context of elections it should come as no surprise”.
However, if surprises are what SWP members want, then they must look closer to home. What makes this election different from any other is that SWP members will be standing for election in coalition with a prominent MP who supports the idea of ‘controlled immigration’. This MP is of course George Galloway. Yes, the same George Galloway who opposes a woman’s right to choose.
Galloway’s comments on immigration, which he made in the Morning Star, have already been covered by this paper (‘Galloway joins in the numbers game’, Weekly Worker February 24), but it is worth restating, briefly, some of the things he wrote. He thinks that “we should publish an economic-social-demographic plan for population growth based on a points system and our own needs”. Obviously that adds up to the needs of British capital. He also feels that “every country must have control of its own borders - no-one serious is advocating the scrapping of immigration controls”. These statements are a disgrace, thoroughly reactionary, and mark Galloway out as a national socialist. Galloway has made clear that his politics are based not on the concept of class, but upon that of nation.
In 1929 Wertheimer wrote of the “close affinity of the Labour Party with traditions of national culture … Separated by no class barriers from the mental and spiritual concepts of capitalism, which would otherwise have given birth to an exclusively proletarian way of life and morality, and deep-rooted in national religious tradition, the Labour Party has never been able to make a clean breakaway from capitalist culture” (E Wertheimer Portrait of the Labour Party London 1929, p91). This is no less true of Galloway since the Labour Party expelled him.
Communists, on the other hand, have no such affinity with nation. For us the fundamental division in society is that of class. As far as we are concerned workers of all countries are our brothers and sisters and our main enemy is ‘our own’ British ruling class. We are for the greatest possible unity of workers. As such we are against all immigration controls.
As our Draft programme states, “Capital moves around the world without restriction. Communists are for the free movement of people and against all measures preventing them entering or leaving countries.” Indeed we believe that “Immigration is a progressive phenomenon, which breaks down national differences and prejudices. It unites workers in Britain with the world working class” (CPGB Draft programme London 1995, p14).
The SWP is also opposed to immigration controls - in theory at least. If we look back over the years, its members have produced some very useful writing on the subject. One such piece, ‘Racism and immigration in Britain’, was the lead article in the SWP’s theoretical quarterly, International Socialism Journal in autumn 1995. The author, Ruth Brown, explains how people have always migrated and “Britain has always been composed of different peoples”. But that “large-scale movements of people in search of work are unique to modern capitalism, and immigration as we understand it today really began in the 19th century with the consolidation of unified nation-states with recognisable borders. Immigration went hand in hand with the development of the capitalist system and the capitalist state” (ISJ 2:68, p4).
With the growth of industry employers were constantly looking for fresh sources of labour. This resulted in both internal and international migration. The poor in the countryside were pulled into the towns and cities to work in the factories. People’s ways of life were changed irreversibly.
The first example of labour being moved in large numbers across borders is the slave trade. This forced migration of tens of millions of black people between 1500 and 1800, Brown says, “illustrates much more than the sheer cruelty of Britain’s capitalist class - it also represents the first organised attempt by British capitalists to meet the insatiable demand for labour which characterised early capitalism” (ISJ 2:68, p4).
Migrant workers are used by the capitalist class as worst paid labour. They are taken advantage of because of their impoverished backgrounds and forced into the most objectionable jobs with little or no legal protection or rights. Indeed their position as worst paid labour is maintained by the systematic denial of rights. It is because they do not have equal rights that they can have even more surplus value squeezed out of them - so that their employers can use them to undercut other workers.
Bridget Anderson is the author of a recent TUC report into forced labour and migration to the UK. The government tried to make sure that this report did not see the light of day - at least not until after the general election. Fortunately it failed. Anderson was interviewed in the March edition of Socialist Review and, referring to the central economic sectors of contract cleaning, agriculture, care homes and construction, explains that “the key thing is that the flexible labour markets and the way the labour market in those particular sectors works is to rely on a pool of workers who are instantly available but also instantly sackable, who are cheap and who are, in the case of care homes, available to live in”.
Anderson shows that this worst paid labour is absolutely central to the economy and is no side show engaged in by oddball employers. In the report she details how these migrant workers are exposed to forced labour through violence, intimidation, debt bondage, restriction of movement through confiscation of identity documents, and work permits that tie migrant workers to a specific employer.
As Ruth Brown explains, “The migration of labour has always reflected the combined and uneven development of capitalism on a global level. Workers follow capital to the most developed areas to meet the demand for wage labour in urban centres of expansion. In the process they attempt to escape poverty and unemployment in areas where capitalism is in decline, or where it has failed to take off altogether” (ISJ 2:68, p4).
There is therefore a link between the number of migrant workers that come to Britain and the demand for labour or availability of work. Michael Howard’s scare story of “literally millions of people in other countries who want to come and live here” is a nonsense. There may well be that many people who would like to come to Britain, but once so many had come that the demand for labour dried up, the desire amongst the rest to come here would subside - people would of course look elsewhere for work if there was no work here.
What those who attack immigration hardly ever mention is that there is a two-way flow. Thousands of people leave Britain every month in search of better-paid jobs and new lives abroad. Brown says that “by 1840 approximately 70,000 people were emigrating from Britain every year and in the mid-1850s this number doubled after the discovery of gold in California … By 1871 Britain had become a net exporter of population. With only a few exceptions, this has continued to be the case throughout each successive decade of the 20th century” (ISJ 2:68, p5).
So why then do we have immigration controls and why are the right so hysterically anti-immigrant? Immigration controls serve the capitalist system in two main ways. As stated above, they systematise the denial of rights as far as migrant workers are concerned. This allows them to become worst paid labour and suffer superexploitation. All of the abuses that Bridget Anderson details in her TUC report are made possible by this denial of rights.
The other purpose immigration controls serve is ideological. They are used to cut migrant workers off from their British brothers and sisters and turn them into scapegoats for crimes committed by the capitalist system itself. They encourage racism and national chauvinism in an attempt to divide and rule.
In Tina Becker’s otherwise excellent article covering Galloway’s reactionary musings, she makes a mistake in saying: “Immigration controls in 2005 are not racist - they discriminate against people of all colours and particularly against the poor. If anything they are ‘classist’”. She claims that this is the case because “much of the witch-hunting in the tabloid press has been directed against ‘white migrants’ from eastern Europe” (‘Galloway joins in the numbers game’ Weekly Worker February 24).
Yes, immigration controls are “classist” and, yes, they impede white as well as black migrants. ‘Stop and search’ policies effect white as well as black youths, and all ages in fact - that does not mean they are not racist. As Jack Conrad has written, “If we understand racism as a form of national chauvinism, not only a matter of skin colour, in essence not a matter of skin colour at all, we can begin to see the wood from the trees” (J Conrad Which Road? London 1991, p114). The migrant workers that come from eastern Europe are stereotyped in a racist fashion, just as the Irish were in the 19th century. Eastern Europeans have a strong claim to being today’s ‘white niggers’.
Marx, in a letter of 1870 to Meyer and Vogt, described how racism whipped up by the capitalist class affected the workers: “Every industrial and commercial centre in England possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. 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 ‘niggers’ 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 at once the tool of the English rule in Ireland.
“This antagonism is artificially 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 that class is fully aware of it” (K Marx and F Engels Selected correspondence Moscow 1965, pp236-7).
As such the 1905 Aliens Act, Britain’s first piece of legislation aimed at controlling immigration, was designed to promote the idea that immigrants were to blame for unemployment, poor housing and diseases. Of course neither this act, nor any subsequent one, stopped British capital getting its hands on worst paid migrant labour when it needed it. State-sponsored schemes, which were not affected by the legislation, were used to recruit the necessary labour. Thus through World War II more than 60,000 Irish workers were brought to Britain to fill labour shortages, while entry was denied to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany.
Immigration controls became even more overtly racist with the introduction of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1962). According to Ruth Brown, “the intended targets of the act were all black or Asian (and few ever even attempted to deny this)” (ISJ 2:68, p17).
As Wertheimer described above, the Labour Party has always been soft on the idea of nationhood. It has entered into ‘national governments’ and supported all manner of imperialist wars. Yet up until 1962 the Labour Party theoretically opposed immigration controls. Brown notes that “Labour certainly kept quiet about this position during the 1959 election, but gave no indication that its policies towards immigration had changed in any way. Even so this did not prevent the right wing of the Labour Party from making all the running over the question of immigration during the late 1950s and early 1960s” (ISJ 2:68, p19). The parallels between this and the way Respect’s right wing, in the form of George Galloway, has been given the freedom to “make all the running over the question of immigration” are obvious.
However, by the end of 1962, following the introduction of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, it was Labour Party policy to support immigration controls - and some Labour MPs even wanted to outdo the Tories. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, as unemployment rose, both parties hardened up their positions so as not to be seen as letting foreigners take ‘British jobs’.
From the 1964 election onwards the racist rhetoric has been ratcheted up at election times for fear of being seen as soft on immigration and losing votes. Labour won the 1964 election, yet lost the seat of Smethwick in Birmingham to Peter Griffith, an openly racist Tory who wrote in an election leaflet: “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour”.
The Labour Party capitulated to this racist populism and has been willing to play politics with immigration ever since for cheap electoral gain. “Ever since the Smethwick election it has been quite clear that immigration can be the greatest potential vote-loser for the Labour Party,” wrote Richard Crossman in his Diaries. He could only see disaster for the party if it was “seen to be permitting a flood of immigrants to come in and blight the central areas of our cities” (quoted in ISJ 2:68, p20). As Ruth Brown says, “The fact that the Labour Party and trade union leaders have always supported immigration controls means that racist ideas about immigration can sometimes gain a hearing among workers” (ISJ 2:68, pp3-4). The same goes for Respect’s leaders.
The ruling class have systematically attempted to use immigration controls to stoke up racism not just amongst white British workers but also amongst settled immigrant groups. The ruling class want black and Asian workers to identify with the British nation just as much as they want white workers to. This does not mean that these groups suffer any less from racism themselves. They are both used and abused. The ruling class have been modestly successful in this regard. It is significant that the Muslim Association of Britain, Respect’s largely phantom right wing which have been assiduously courted by the SWP, has fallen into this trap.
It is against this background that the coming general election is being fought out, with immigration as a key issue. It is sickening, though not surprising, that Galloway should have written what he did. He is after all a blatant populist and will do almost anything to keep a seat in the House of Commons and his MP’s overblown salary.
But what about the SWP, Galloway’s main partner in Respect - what has it got to say for itself? Well, as far as Galloway’s comments are concerned, it has said absolutely nothing.
Tony Cliff, the SWP’s late founder and leading theoretician, used to tell many stories in order to illustrate political points. There is one I remember hearing a number of times and which he also used in his autobiography. He wrote that, as a socialist intervening in a strike situation, “you can stand on a picket line and next to you is a worker who makes racist comments. You can do one of three things. You can say, ‘I’m not standing on this picket line. I’m going home because no one makes racist remarks there’. That is sectarianism, because if ‘the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class,’ you have to stand with workers on a picket line against the boss.
“The other possibility is simply avoiding the question. Someone makes a racist comment and you pretend you haven’t heard it, and you say, ‘The weather is quite nice today.’ That is opportunism.
“The third position is that you argue with this person against racism, against the prevailing ideas of the ruling class. You argue and argue. If you convince them, excellent. But if you don’t, still when the scab lorry comes you link arms to stop the scabs, because ‘the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class’. You cannot choose between activity and argument. Activity alone is blind. Argument alone is futile. Both must be combined in a dialectical unity, one with the other” (T Cliff A world to win London 2000, p89).
Considering this story, if we look at the way the SWP has reacted to Galloway’s comments on immigration, its opportunism is clear as day. It would rather chat about the weather than challenge Galloway and argue “against the prevailing ideas of the ruling class”.
As we have seen, the SWP is theoretically opposed to immigration controls. For Marxists theory and practice are inextricably linked in a dialectical unity. Yet the SWP’s practice is completely divorced from its theory. It voted down our motion supporting open borders at the Respect conference; its opposition to immigration controls is simply not mentioned in Socialist Worker articles any more; and now its silence at Galloway’s comments speaks volumes.
Cliff said that “leadership is a dialogue, and dialogue contains both agreement and disagreement” (T Cliff A world to win London 2000, p90). But John Rees has openly abandoned the idea of leadership: “We voted against things we believe in, because … of the millions out there. We are reaching out to the people locked out of politics. We voted for what they want” (Weekly Worker January 29 2004).
The SWP is slipping faster and faster to the right. Thanks to the opportunism of Rees and co, Respect is not only unable to effectively counter the anti-immigration filth put forward by Labour and the Tories; but now its right wing has been given a free hand to start stirring the shit as well.
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