01.12.2022
Bosses want migrants
Anyone who has paid even the slightest attention to the media will know that the boss class wants to increase migration in order to keep down pay levels and increase profits. Kevin Bean says, once again, the SWP gets it wrong
When Sir Keir Starmer spoke recently to the Confederation of British Industry, he had two audiences.
The most important - the capitalist class - was sitting in front of him or would later read his craven words of loyalty to them in the Financial Times or The Economist. He promised a new partnership for prosperity with business to “drive our country forward”, because Labour is
not just a pro-business party, but a party that is proud of being pro-business; that respects the contribution profit makes to jobs, growth and our tax base… [and] understands that backing private enterprise is the only way Britain pays its way in the world.1
But Sir Keir also hoped to appeal to another audience beyond the conference hall. In a widely-flagged section of his speech he spoke directly to potential Labour voters. Playing on the alleged prejudices and hostility to foreign workers amongst the ‘red wall’ voters, Starmer identified migration as a significant issue:
Our common goal must be to help the British economy off its immigration dependency to start investing more in training workers who are already here … The days when low pay and cheap labour are part of the British way of growth must end.2
As with his earlier comments on migrant labour in the health service, the Labour leader is taking a key theme from the Blue Labour playbook and hoping that it will win back voters who had deserted the party in 2019.3 While this clearly fits in with his wider triangulation strategy to make Labour a respectable electoral option, it also poses some political problems for Starmer in winning support amongst the capitalist class. Anyone who has paid even the slightest attention to the CBI conference or the wider debates in the media knows that important sections of the ruling class in Britain want to increase migration, precisely in order to maintain the low-pay and cheap-labour model that Sir Keir decried.
You cannot open a serious newspaper without reading of appeals from businesses for a relaxation of restrictions on migrant labour. As the Financial Times put it, “immigration overshadows economic worries for CBI delegates”, whilst suggesting that business was disappointed by the “party political stance” of both the government and the opposition on the issue.4 So, while Starmer in general upholds the capitalist consensus on the broader issues of public spending, taxation, profits and wages, he still sees a political advantage in keeping in step with Rishi Sunak on migration.
It would be easy to dismiss Starmer’s attack on ‘low pay and cheap labour’ as simply a piece of electoral opportunism. However, it has a greater significance, given that this policy certainly runs counter to both the immediate interests and long-term economic strategy of the dominant sections of the British ruling class, not to mention the more ‘liberal’ sensibilities of sections of Labour’s electorate.5 Whether it be Starmer linking foreign workers to low pay and falling living standards, or Tory ministers, in particular Suella Braverman, using the chauvinist language of ‘invasion’ and the rhetoric of ‘bogus’ asylum-seekers, migration is still clearly a central issue in British politics. Thus, it is important that the working class movement develops its own analysis and policy that steers well clear of both Blue Labour protectionism or simply tailing behind the capitalist class.
Our response
One way not to do this is illustrated by Socialist Worker, which begins by arguing that by blaming low pay on migrants, Starmer lets the bosses off the hook.6 Fair enough, as far as it goes - but the idea that a large influx of desperate, unorganised and rightless workers does not impact on wages, especially at the bottom end of the working class, is absurd. Unable, unwilling, to admit this, Socialist Worker editor Charlie Kimber clutches at the politics of race. So we are told that “the bosses at the CBI could be reassured that, rather than siding with the strikes, Starmer would prefer to turn on migrant labour instead” and that “anti-migrant scapegoating doesn’t just turn attention away from pay strikes - it can, through racism, divide and weaken them”. Another argument which is valid in general, but in baldly identifying the CBI with crude racism and hostility to migrant labour, Socialist Worker really does miss the point of the current debate about migration.
Our starting point should be the nature of capitalism and the exploitation of the working class. The CBI and other important sections of the capitalist class have been agitating to relax controls on migrant labour ever since Brexit. Neither the ‘invasion’ rhetoric of Braverman and the Tory right, nor the xenophobia of Nigel Farage - prowling, as he does, the beaches of Kent and looking out for economic migrants in small boats - serve the fundamental interests of British capitalism. No, these performances are primarily part of a political strategy aimed at winning those sections of the petty bourgeoisie and working class most fearful of the impact of migrant labour on wages, health provision, local council services, housing and education.
Far from having “little to no impact on wages”, as Socialist Worker suggests, capitalists have always used migrant workers to undermine wages and conditions and weaken the power and organisation of the working class. From the 1840s onwards, both Marx and Engels noted how employers used the Irish as strike-breakers and played up the national animosities between English and Irish workers.7 For capitalism, whatever its national base, the world is its realm, whether by exporting capital or importing labour. The historical experience of capitalism and the working class internationally shows how the system operates and, more importantly, how workers can organise to fight back against it.
Instead of putting a liberal gloss on the multi-cultural benefits of migration and suggesting that it has only a limited impact on wages, the working class movement needs to develop its own political economy of migration in opposition to that of capitalism, whether in its liberal or reactionary forms. This should be grounded in how Marxists explain the impact of the competition between workers under capitalism and how the working class organises to both regulate the sale of its labour-power and limit its exploitation. It also goes hand in hand with building its economic and political organisations.8 Thus the First International was rooted in the experience and solidarity of British and French workers in countering strike-breaking and developing practical links between workers.9
From the late 1880s the Second International built on this and developed a real working class position on migration in a period when the mass movement of people from one country to another had become an established part of the world economy - and a contentious issue in the domestic politics of the main capitalist powers, such as the United States, Britain and Germany. The emigration of millions from Europe to North America, Africa and Australasia, as well as the flight of workers from poverty and oppression within Europe, made the question of migration a key one for the parties of the left.
While there was naturally a humanitarian concern about the reasons why millions sought a better life by migrating, in its politics and language the working class movement did not see migrants as helpless refugees or victims to be simply pitied. The politics of class and international solidarity went far beyond the well-meaning rhetoric of ‘Refugees welcome here’. Neither did it deny the intensification of free competition between workers that could arise as a result of migration and the impact this could have on the wages and conditions won by the workers’ movement in the richer countries.10
The resolution adopted by the 1907 Stuttgart Congress on the immigration and migration of workers still forms the basis of a Marxist position on these questions. In counterposing a series of measures and actions by the organised working class, it aimed to directly challenge the political economy and exploitation of capitalism.
It saw “immigration and emigration of workers … as inseparable from the substance of capitalism … [and] one of the means to reduce the share of the workers in the product of labour”. Describing proposed limitations on migration as “fruitless and reactionary”, it argued against “restrictions of the freedom of migration and the exclusion of foreign nations and races”. In particular it emphasised the necessity, in countries where migrants arrived, for a minimum programme of demands to regulate working conditions and wages in order to prevent undercutting, together with the granting of full political rights to migrants. It called for recruitment campaigns and the unrestricted admission of immigrant workers to trade unions in order to develop and strengthen proletarian solidarity.11
The world of the early 21st century has some striking resemblances to that of late 19th century capitalism - not least in the ways that economic crisis, along with great-power rivalry, impact on patterns of migration. We too must win native and migrant workers to limit economic competition between ourselves, to oppose attempts to foster divisions and to unite in the struggle for international socialism.
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labourlist.org/2022/11/a-new-partnership-for-prosperity-keir-starmers-speech-to-cbi-conference.↩︎
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Ibid.↩︎
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theguardian.com/politics/2022/nov/23/keir-starmer-walks-fine-line-shifting-labour-stance-immigration.↩︎
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socialistworker.co.uk/what-we-think/outrage-as-keir-starmer-blames-low-pay-on-immigration.↩︎
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K Marx and F Engels, Articles on Britain, Moscow 1975.↩︎
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J Braunthal, The History of the International 1864-1914 London 1966, pp85-105.↩︎
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M Taber (ed.), Under the socialist banner: resolutions of the Second International 1889-1912, Chicago 2021, pp41-43, 54-55 and 109-111.↩︎
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Ibid.↩︎