Middle class people could try harder to learn about and empathize with working class experience. Take the problem of white working class support (however truly widespread or not) for the white-nationalist, anti-immigrant Donald Trump campaign and the recent British vote (strong in poor working class districts) to leave (“Brexit”) the European Union (EU). You’ve probably heard a middle class, college-educated talking head or two acknowledge that there’s more than just ugly ant-immigrant nativism and xenophobia behind white workers’ support for Trump and Brexit: there’s also an understandable “populist” resentment of the power of the globalist corporate and financial elite.
It’s nice to see privileged folks grant validity to white working class anger at Wall Street, London, and Brussels, but what makes it any less understandable that millions of working class people fear and resent immigration while connecting the immigration issue to the problem of corporate and financial power? It doesn’t take an advanced academic degree to realize that the movement of poor and desperate workers from one to another part of the world capitalist system poses threats to the working and living standards of working people in the receiving zone. The in-flow increases the supply of the commodity labor power relative to employer’s demand for that commodity. This enhances both the marketplace bargaining power and the related workplace authority of the employer class relative to the majority of people who must rent out their labor power for wages to get by. This is Capitalism 101.
The ever-shifting supply and demand for labor power is a factor that holds no small relevance to the triumphs, trials and tribulations of the American working class past and present. As the leading left U.S. economist Richard Wolff has explained in his book “Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism” (2012), the long historical rise in real wages in the United States ended more than thirty years ago thanks to “the combination of computerization, exported jobs, women surging into the labor market, and a new wave of immigration…this time mainly from Latin America, especially Mexico and Central America….Capitalists from Main Street to Wall Street quickly realized that employers could slow or stop wage increases, given that supply now exceeded demand in the labor market…”(pp. 40-41, emphasis added).
If you don’t believe immigration is used by employers to depress living and working standards in the U.S., then take a job in any U.S. factory that has a significant number of unpleasant low-skill tasks. You will see your capitalist bosses keeping wages down and workers cowed and oppressed by (among other things) hiring immigrants whose experience of extreme poverty, violence, and other forms of misery in their lands of origin make them more than ready to work obediently and without outward complaint for $10 an hour or even less in “modern manufacturing.” That’s what I witnessed first-hand working last year at the giant Procter & Gamble plant in Iowa City, where the nation’s largest consumer packaged goods corporation contracts with a leading temporary agency (Staff Management) to fill its lower end, three-shift line-feeding and packaging jobs with a steady flow of distressed yet eager newcomers from Sudan, the Congo, and other troubled places, including Kosovo, Egypt, and Honduras. These newcomers are not union or strike material, to say the least. Sparking working class resistance among such traumatized birds of passage is a truly Herculean task.
Am I saying that good progressives should jump on board with right-wing white nationalists like Trump or France’s Marie Le Pen in calling for rich nation core states to expel and keep out brown-skinned others? Of course not. People must be granted the basic human freedom of geographic mobility. They deserve the right to escape intolerable conditions and seek new opportunities across national boundaries. The problem is capitalism and the employer class’s relentless competitive and profit-driven pressure to push down the working class in numerous ways including but hardly limited to the hiring of immigrant workers.
Still, middle class commentators seem unduly oblivious to the lived experience of working class Americans or Brits or Europeans when they voice little more than politically correct disgust at the nativism that commonly colors working class experience and consciousness in rich nations. What have middle class professionals, intellectuals, and coordinators done to counter or at least temper the savagery of the capitalist elite’s many-sided, top-down war on the working class and it ever fading unions? To help working people build organizations and win or sustain social programs to make immigration and other factors like technical displacement, union-busting, and capital flight less horrific in their impact on native working and lower classes?
Not much. In fact, the more prevalent middle and professional class tendency goes in the opposite direction. It combines pseudo-sophisticated embrace of the corporate neoliberal global order with elitist criticism of the predictable nativism of many native workers. To make matters worse, it often also embraces the U.S. imperial policies work (along with the broader neoliberal project) to expand the misery that drives masses of brown-skinned people from Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America to seek jobs, social protections, human rights in rich nations like England, France, Germany, and the United States. Hillary Clinton’s liberal supporters might want to reflect on how the U.S. and British working class nativism they abhor is fueled in part by the waves of migration sparked by Clinton and Barack Obama’s destructive foreign policies in Libya, Syria, Sudan, Rwanda, Congo, Honduras (where Mrs. Clinton deeply abetted a vicious right wing coup seven years ago), and elsewhere.
The left economist Robin Hahnel offers some wise ruminations on how the predominantly middle class Western left loses out to the racist and nativist right when it comes to immigration. Reflecting on the populist anger that is so evident across the Western working classes, Hahnel notes that two main forces fuel this discontent: “Deteriorating economic prospects for majorities, and challenges to traditional cultural hierarchies. The left,” Hahnel observes, “plays on the former while the right plays on the latter. The right has a coherent program regarding the latter with broad appeal among older ethnic majorities: Re-segregation and restoration of white skin privileges. But the right has no coherent economic program besides blaming ethnic ‘others.’”
“The left,” on the other hand, “has a coherent critique of neoliberal economics, and offers some useful alternatives: Stop catering to finance and subject it to competent regulation. Stop pointless fiscal austerity and provide needed fiscal stimulus. And stop dismantling, and rebuild the welfare state. Moreover, this program has broad appeal among the discontented.”
But: “The left has not been able to compete successfully with the right regarding the second source of discontent. If progressive groups campaign for a principled defense of multiculturalism and protecting immigrant rights, they win support from ethnic minorities and some among the young, but they alienate older, majoritarian communities in economic distress. Moreover, the dilemma for the left is even worse. Because the truth is that until a left economic program is won and firmly in place, principled multiculturalism and defense of immigrant rights does further aggravate the economic distress of disadvantaged, majoritarian populations.”
Hahnel is correct. Unless and until the middle class-left can roll back capital in its war on labor and the working class, the liberal and left middle class’s politically correct anti-racist defense of immigrant rights actually worsens the deteriorating position of the predominantly native, non-immigrant working classes of England, France, Germany, and the U.S. And that encourages the native rich nation working class to tragically hate the left.
So listen middle class liberals and progressives: fight for the left program and tone-down your shock over working class nativism. If you want to know how and why there might be something more than pure and simple reprehensible racism and mindless xenophobia behind that nativism, enter the world of lower end factory work. You won’t earn much money but you could learn a lot about how the other half lives. You might even be able to help build the sort of anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist working class movement we need to get out of this ecology-wrecking dog-eat-dog divide-and-conquer mess called the profits system.
Paul Street’s latest book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014).
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8 Comments
It seems once labour could move around and capital was stuck. Now, it seems, labour is stuck and capital moves around. Enter free trade agreements, there, there and there. Enter the forced movements of people with domestic livelihoods destroyed. Enter working class nativism confronting refugees , asylum seekers and more and more immigrants. Enter driving down wages and inflation. Enter precarity. Enter real hatred. Divide and rule again and again.
Meanwhile back at the Big Daddy White Geezer Hegemonic Power Grid ranch, while they laugh, ever increasing surpluses are divided up, as they have been since the dawn of time, but particularly since the mid seventies (see Richard Wolff), and used to build more and more gated and secure communities. Elysium!
Economic program? Shared program? Where? How? When?
Wasn’t so long ago Zizek tried to make this argument concerning the Roma and European workers and the left jumped all over him. No borders? Free movement? Sure, once capital is defeated.
Which is going to be a problem if a restored “welfare state” is our only aspiration. The ability of capital to go on strike and manufacture labor surpluses is only increasing with technological development. Don’t count on “class belonging” of workers to confront solidarity of capital.
Sorry Paul D but this is not a complex or confusing article. It doesn’t get much more simple than this one. Maybe a way to understand it might be imagining that you had the following test question: “Why does the author agree with Robin Hahnel? What does he think Hahnel is ‘correct’ about?” You need to read some 19th century and early 20th century U.S. labor history if you seriously think that native white workers resisted unionization compared to eastern and south central european immigrant workers. (Two good books to start with: David Brody, Steelworkers of America and James Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle). That is absolute historical nonsense of the highest order. And calling it “increasingly likely” that Trump will be elected is just plain bizarre.
Why is it the job of the “middle class” (frequently middle class because they have a union) to occupy some special position to “roll back capital in its war on labor and the working class”. It is all of our jobs.
Also, are you following the polls?
Paul,
I am confused about this article. Remember that is “workers of the world unite”? Whatever its origin, it is the racist nativism that has to be obliterated first, before workers can unite and organize. In the past, the WASP workers resisted unionization, so the eastern European and Italian workers organized without them anyway. Today, it is latino/a workers who are the only ones seriously organizing. And it is the workers themselves who have to be doing the uniting, and organizing.
And if (or increasingly likely, when) Trump is elected, are we supposed to be silent as immigrants are getting beaten up by their co-workers. We have already had a Mexican grocery her in Pittsburgh vandalized with “go home” graffiti spray painted on it twice in the past year – forcing the family who runs it to close and move. Am I supposed to sympathize with these thugs?
Paul D:
I’ve worked in union campaigns, union organizing and community organizing. Currently, I teach writing and experiential learning at a Twin Cities MN university.
In every case, the folks I work with have all been traditional working class and/or professional working class. Also, in every case, the groups have been multi-gender, multi-racial and multi-cultural.
And in most cases, people were able to sufficiently overcome gender/racial/cultural stereotypes while in action, organizing or learning. None of these situations resulted in hootenanny love fests; but people became collectively functional during the work of the situation.
Some people, including me, changed attitudinally and behaviorally while we worked, struggled and learned during the work.
My point is this: you cannot speak white supremacy, sexism and classism away. It takes struggle, work, love and time. And luck. Always that.
Solidarity,
Tom Johnson
Thanks for this. A review of Marxism 101 never hurts any of us, even in the days of the so-called “New Economy.”
Another consideration is the continuing power of nativism among the petite-bourgeois that have a strangle-hold on the daily lives of people in suburban and rural areas in terms of running local institutions and feeding mass cultural deprivation.
And in the U.S., the Christian right — because of its very smart use of media — especially late-night TV, cable TV and radio (all pre-internet media) — has tremendous influence; whether it is in white rural/suburban areas, or racially-mixed urban areas, continually spewing the non-ending propaganda of racism, sexism and petite-bourgeois capitalism.