Paul Bowman speaks out against racism and neoliberalism within some sections of the British trade union movement.
This is not a great article, by any means.
Re-industrialisation is not a smart strategy for dealing with the problems of post-industrial era capitalism (not to mention the climate crisis) and I'm not a fan of left-centrist outfits like the IPPR.
But buried in here is an important insight - to reduce workers' power to the laws of supply and demand in the labour market, is perhaps understandable on the part of the Tories. That's their central ideology, after all. But the same position on the part of Len McCluskey, the tankies and all their fellow-travellers, and to accept, even for a moment, that this is "left" or "socialist" in some way, is disastrous.
McCluskey & Co's immigrant-bashing is not just racist (which it is) but it is above all neoliberal. The idea that the only chance for working class people to raise their share of the social product and defeat the "iron law of wages" was by restricting their population, goes back to the early years of the 19th century, Frances Place and all that.
But apart from the longevity of this particular malignant fallacy, it's main danger is the idea of "supply side economics" in restricting labour supply being the only road to workers power is fatal.
You can't build socialism with a Tory ideology.
Just saying something is wrong isn’t an argument, creating preposterous ‘straw men’ isn’t an argument either.
ReplyDeleteWhy is it immoral to asset strip a developing country of its commodities (like gold or copper for example) but not of arguably more valuable and more needed things such as it’s professionals like nurses, doctors engineers etc?
Immigrant bashing isn’t neoliberal either, all major multinationals lobby for free movement of labour, and it isn’t because they want to pay workers more.
what preposterous straw men? Didn't quite get that.
DeleteI think Angela Nagle made that argument on this blog about the asset stripping although in this case I don't think that is the point made by McCluskey.
Immigrant bashing is despicable. Douglas Murray makes a very strong critique of immigration policy without immigrant bashing.
Anthony, I remember reading the Nagle article on here just not the specific content, my heads a soup of miscellaneous content I can no longer place where what came from!
DeleteMcCluskey might not of been making this specific argument, I just wanted to note an ethical reason for ‘immigrant bashing’, they are not repaying the societies that enabled them.
It seems we can no longer have debates such as this without the accusation of xenophobia or racism , so we better find responses that do not cede ground to the accusers. I may not have done it in this comment though.
Ps Straw manning is claiming McCluskey was immigrant bashing to avoid dealing with the substance of his point.
There has been freedom of movement since the dawn of humanity. Migrants have always, through want of opportunity or persecution in their native countries, flocked to metropole countries to work the necessary jobs that the native populatiom does not want to do. A historical reality that the framers of the UK post-Brexit immigration policy are blissfully unware of or willfully blind to.
ReplyDelete" A historical reality that the framers of the UK post-Brexit immigration policy are blissfully unware of or willfully blind to."
ReplyDeleteWell it'll come home to roost soon, as it looks like they are 'encouraging ' illegal migrants to leave..