Pathfinders: Abolish the trough (2026)

The Pathfinders Column from the September 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Summer droughts, record temperatures and infernal wildfires are fast becoming the new UK normal, as are tabloid splashes during the peak sailing season when overloaded migrant dinghies manage to make it to UK shores. Cue a shrill crescendo of right-wing rhetoric about how immigrants (they mean Muslims) are ruining the country, destroying British culture, raping children and stealing jobs. The ultimate right-wing paranoia is ‘the Great Replacement Theory’, the modern incarnation of 20th century panics about the Jews or Chinese, in which sharia law comes to dominate the West, and democracy and free speech are annihilated.

Socialists have a different frame of reference, which is the urgent need to abolish global capitalism. To us, right-wing fears are misdirected emotional responses to the pressures and stresses of living in capitalism. When the world establishes post-capitalist common ownership, with no markets or rich elites, no states or governments, these worries will evaporate. When everything in the future is free, everywhere in the world, it’s the same as everyone being rich, and then who cares who is a foreigner and who isn’t? Maybe we’ll all choose to migrate, maybe not. It won’t matter.

But when you’re impoverished today with no hope of a decent life, it’s easy to fetishise what little you do have, like your ‘culture’. British culture, as everyone knows, is the mongrel product of scores of migrations and invasions over millennia. We are built from a mongrel mix of genes and we speak a mongrel Indo-European dialect. We enjoy Indian, Japanese, Italian, Malaysian and Caribbean cooking. We like Swiss cheese, Ethiopian coffee, German beer, American fast food with French fries, Swedish saunas and nowadays, Chinese smart gadgets. Most of our classical music heroes are Russian or Polish or German. We hang out in Spanish resorts or the Austrian Alps or Thai beach bars. If anything’s ruining British culture, it’s capitalist McDonaldisation, not our boundless appetite for diversity.

Can Britain do without immigrants? With a declining home-grown population and skill set, there is an ever-increasing list of essential jobs that are in short supply. Do we not need electricians or engineers? How about plumbers, builders, bookkeepers, IT trainers or lab technicians? There’s a shortage of all these. The understaffed NHS has 27 percent of nurses and 35 percent of doctors from overseas. Does the right want a functioning NHS or not? Foreign-born dentists now outnumber native ones. Would the right prefer bad teeth?

Alright, but what about all the Asian grooming gangs and the supposed increase in migrant-related crimes and sex attacks? Certainly there have been some well-publicised cases. Migrant crimes make headlines, equivalent ‘white’ crimes don’t. Migrants are mostly young men, and young men proportionately commit more crimes. The problem is age rather than nationality. If migration causes crime, the two should rise in lockstep. Instead, when migration was rising, overall crime rates were going down. Now both rates are falling. The right can’t support their argument with reliable government data, because there isn’t any. Crimes are not recorded against immigration status, data collection is not consistent across police forces, and age demographics are not factored in. The overall picture is confused, anecdotal and ‘a bit of a bodge’, allowing some to claim that the migrant crime problem is worse than it is. Conversely, ‘if you are a victim of a violent or sexual crime in the UK, the available evidence suggests that the ethnic makeup of the country means that the perpetrator is most likely to be a white man’.

Legal migrants are statistically less likely to commit crimes, because ‘they don’t want to get kicked out of the country’, while second-generation migrants tend to assimilate, and crime rates come into line with that of the general population. According to the Office for National Statistics, (downloadable PDF), ‘MoJ data shows that proportionately fewer foreign nationals end up in prison for sexual offences than British nationals’, despite the fact that ‘Time and time again audits have found that the police in the UK falsely charge foreign nationals at a higher rate’.

What about the Great Replacement Theory? Currently Muslims constitute around 8 percent of UK and European populations. It’s true that rates are rising slightly against a backdrop of declining European birthrates. At current trends and on a reasonable estimate, Muslims would be a UK majority by 2180, in 150 years’ time.

A lot can happen in 15 years, never mind 150. Does anyone remember the hot-button social issues of 1876? Mass Polish immigration, recently a right-wing concern, reversed spectacularly when the Polish economy started outperforming the UK’s. Any number of other reversals could occur. In any case, how do speculations about future demographics help today’s poor, whom the right supposedly cares about?

People who voted for Brexit to stop immigration must be gutted that immigration then went up. They voted for ‘sovereignty’ and to ‘take our country’ back. But if England really is our country, how come we’re only allowed to walk on 8 percent of it? Why isn’t the right angry about that? The rich own all the land because they stole it from our ancestors during the Enclosures and the Highland Clearances, and then passed laws to legalise their own robbery. People complain that foreigners are stealing their jobs. Why aren’t they angry that the rich stole the entire world, forcing the rest of us into centuries of landless wage-slavery? Why does the right despise socialists, the very people who call out this crime against humanity and demand that we take our entire world back?

Could it be that prominent right-wing leaders aren’t interested in challenging the guilty rich, who cause all our working-class misery? Could it be that they hope to join the guilty rich, by whipping up popular unthinking frenzy against hapless scapegoats in order to get their own snouts in the trough? Well, socialists have a simple answer for that. Abolish the trough. Capitalism, not immigration, is humanity’s real enemy.

Paddy Shannon

The Immigration Question (1976)

From the July 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Migration is described in the Encyclopaedia Britannica as “an outstanding feature of human life”. That spells misfortune for it, for there are no features of human life that are not exploited and mangled under capitalism. In mid-1974 there were 1,673,000, or 3.2 per cent, of the population, in Britain who were “of New Commonwealth and Pakistani ethnic origin” — that is, black. The figure for 1967 was 1,016,000, or 2.1 per cent, (figures from Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, quoted in The Times, 27th May 1976). An estimate for 1954, given in The Colour Problem by Anthony H. Richmond (Pelican 1955) was 100,000.

Not all immigrants to Britain are black, of course. Approximately 4 million people left Ireland for various countries, including Britain, between 1850 and 1900. and nearly half a million again between 1951 and 1961. In 1931-38, 150,000 people entered Britain from Eire together with 350,000 from European countries. However, in contemporary usage “immigrant” means black. The freshly-coined official term “New Commonwealth” means this, and excludes immigrants from Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In that frame of mind Indians, Pakistanis and Africans are made to appear as menacing invaders.

The latest phases in this alleged problem are claims that every Asian has a tribe of probably-bogus relatives claiming entitlement to join him, and unrest which has included four apparently indiscriminate racial murders. There is now widespread agreement that something must be done to control immigration. The secretary of the Punjabee Society of the British Isles wrote to The Times on 29th May: “Enough is enough.” Bob Mellish MP, former Labour Chief Whip, in the News of the World on 30th May: “Controls must be stricter. Numbers must get fewer and fewer until we arrive at a complete stop.” And there are the National Front and Enoch Powell, neither of them funny. The former deal in fear and ignorance, as did the Nazis whom they admire; the latter has talked repeatedly of racial carnage in a manner which, to quote Bernard Levin, “is making it more likely that his predictions will come true”.

The Myths

The argument put by Mellish and others is that the number of immigrants is too great for resources inside Britain.

Is there anything that can be done to control the number of newcomers in any one year to take account of the problems of employment, housing, schools and social services?

(C. Legum and A. Raphael, The Observer, 30th May)

Mature and sober as this sounds, it is only a nicely-stated confirmation of what largely underlies racial tension: “If I blacked my face I might get a council house . . . The teacher’s too busy looking after the black kids who can’t speak English . . . They get endless Social Security, but if we went we wouldn’t . . . etc.” Either it is true that black immigrants rob the natives of jobs, houses and services, or it is not. Some recent facts are as follows.

The 1971 General Household Survey showed that 35.5 per cent, of the black population in Britain are skilled manual workers, and 30 per cent, semiskilled or unskilled; 17 per cent, have non-manual jobs, and 10.5 per cent, are “managerial and professional’.’ In The Economic Impact of Commonwealth Immigration by Jones and Smith (Cambridge 1970) the average benefits received per black head from Social Security totalled £16.30 a year, as against £28.30 for the “home” population; for Health and Welfare £18.30 as against £18.60; in Local Authority housing £0.90 as against £3.00. The General Household Survey showed also that 23 per cent. of black households were overcrowded (insufficient bedrooms) as against 6.2 per cent. white ones, and 33 per cent. lacked the use of a bath as against 12 per cent.

If it is argued that the presence of immigrants nevertheless exacerbates existing problems, that simply is not true. The housing problem has been acute throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, yet at all times sufficient houses have existed. A report in The Times on 22nd April 1976 said: : "There is a surplus of about 850,000 houses in the United Kingdom, according to the Nationwide Building Society, which yesterday published its latest survey on housing trends.” At the same time, in 1972 there were 13,000 homeless persons in London (Shelter, Paper 4) and in 1966 60-70,000 overcrowded households in London (Census). The “shortage”, as always, is because housing is beyond the reach of those who need it, not because of any absolute scarcity. What on earth has that to do with immigration or alleged differences between black and white?

The Truths

The provision and extent of welfare services and education is a matter of government policy at any given time. However, if the concern really were about population pressures on “a tiny nation of over 50 million” (Mellish) the official figures for both-ways migration should allay it. For several years the numbers entering Britain have been substantially fewer than those leaving. In 1974 the net “loss” was 85,300; from 1969 to June 1975 it was 368,100. This has practically always been the case; the sole exception was the 1931-38 period, when the world depression at the beginning caused a fall in emigration and an inward balance of 23,821. It is stated also, in the annual report On the State of the Public Health published by the DOHSS on 28th March, that in 1974 Britain had “an unprecedented low birth rate of 13 a thousand” and “The population rose by only 55,173, the smallest increase ever recorded in peacetime”.

Were immigrants to respond to declarations of the capacities and needs of “host” nations, they would be scurrying about the world everlastingly. In 1948 the Royal Commission on Population recommended a policy of “combining encouragement of emigration with with a policy of selective immigration to make good any shortage that might arise in Great Britain”. During the 1939-45 war a number of West Indians were imported to work in factories in the north of England, while the United States repealed its sixty-one-year-old policy against Chinese immigration. On 2nd June 1976 the Australian Minister for Immigration announced that workers from anywhere were wanted, mentioning "East Timor, Indochina, Chile and many other places” (The Times, 3rd June).

Since the “bread-and-butter” argument against immigration is false from beginning to end, what we are left with is racial prejudice. Moreover, it is racism of a particularly dishonest kind which knows that in the open it has not a leg to stand on, and so hides behind plausible-sounding theories of population pressure and injustice to the home population. Over twenty years ago Dr. Roger Pilkington, the geneticist and anthropologist, wrote in the British Medical Association’s magazine Family Doctor:

Leading experts had declared that available scientific knowledge provided no basis for believing that the groups of mankind differed in their innate capacity for intellectual and emotional development. “Given the same opportunities of education and environment the performance and ability of individuals does not differ appreciably from one race to another.”

(The Guardian 28th April 1955)

Profit and Prejudice

The capitalist class are too well aware of their interests to practise racism. They may have individual private sentiments, and they are pleased to see it dividing the working class. But while Enoch Powell sees immigration “foaming with much blood” (April 1968) and producing “firearms and explosives” (May 1976), the capitalist’s vision of it is a lather of surplus-value and fizzing with interest-rates and profit. The Times on 9th June carried a report on Southall, the London industrial suburb where 20-30,000 of a population of 70,000 are immigrants, mostly Indian, and where disturbances have taken place recently.

According to the report, Indians first went to Southall in the early nineteen-fifties to work in a rubber factory. It continued: “Today there is still plenty of work, mainly unskilled, available in the district. Heathrow [London airport], especially after dark, seems to be entirely serviced by Punjabis in their bright turbans and saris. There is a fair amount of light engineering and there are some food-processing plants. The engineers in the local coach-works are Indian, and many of their coaches are on hire to the town hall to take Indian children out of Southall to integrate them and to improve their English.”

Therein is the whole position. Immigrants are wage-workers, or peasants who think they will improve their condition by becoming wage-earners. Coming to Britain or any other country, they are not instituting a separate fraternity; on the contrary, they are joining one massive group in a common situation — the industrial working class. Don’t be mistaken about this. The working class are all those who own nothing but their ability to work and so have to sell that, week by week or month by month, for a price called a wage. The resultant problems of being hard-up, badly housed, uncertain of employment and generally short of the essentials for a decent life, are universal in that situation. Real or fancied differences are unimportant beside it: this is what everyone in Southall, and nine-tenths of the population of the capitalist world, has in common.

The idea of a national identity which becomes a personal one and makes the others “foreigners” is a direct product of the nation-state which is the political unit of capitalism. Thus, each nation has its own history studded with its own partisan myths, and each represents its traditions and customs as the acme of civilization. The legends about immigrants all reflect this, which is why they repeat themselves indiscriminately. Everything said about Indians and Africans now was said about Jews, Irish, Poles, Italians, Chinese etc. in the past (the contemporary story that black people eat tinned cat-food was preceded by one, in the nineteen-thirties, that Italian immigrants ate cats). Its counterparts the world over are the same: for example, in France all murder, rape and offensive conduct is attributed to Arabs. This nonsense is easily disposed of; what is more important is to see whence and why it arises.

What to Do !

“Liberal attitudes” and anti-discrimination laws are no answer. Are we really to believe that having black policemen and magistrates and enabling Indians to join golf clubs is the road to social harmony? The obvious outcome of these policies will be divisions and rancour among the immigrants themselves, and that is already happening. On 30th May The Observer reported an interview with a Mrs. Singh, who is a young BSC from Calcutta and lives in “a pretty suburban house in Hounslow”. Her opinions were that illiterate Indians should not be allowed in, and It was regrettable that “lower class, illiterate Indians collect together in places like Southall and Bradford”. Liberal legislation may be handy for Mrs. Singh and her like, but whose interests are served by trying to persuade people to live contentedly together in districts from which they would like to escape but can’t?

The solution to the problem is not “integration” or fresh restrictions, but recognition by all workers that they are in the same boat. The working class have no country: only their class identity. Those who enter Britain and those who emigrate from it — and the position is the same for other countries — are on the whole leaving adverse economic or political conditions, hoping for something better and influenced by a possibility for reaching it. Inevitably, in huge numbers they are disappointed and made the objects of the frustration of people already on the other side of the fence where the grass is not greener after all. For all of them there is a practical alternative, the establishment of a classless society without frontiers. Stop listening to the rabble-rousers and the liberalizers, and find out about Socialism.

Robert Barltrop

Sharing our rising prosperity (1962)

From the December 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

A recent issue of the West Middlesex Gazette front-paged the story of the plight of Indian immigrants in Southall, West London. Unable on arrival in this country to compete with the native-born workers for housing, the Indians are forced to spend a sardine-like existence in houses owned by their fellow countrymen.

These landlords are determined to make something out of their investment and by living themselves in one or two rooms they can let off the rest, with complete disregard for comfort or sanitation. The small exploiter is often the more ruthless, for his field of operation and expansion is so much more limited. The wretched tenants are charged sums ranging from £4 for one room with little or no furniture. In some cases 15 persons are using a kitchen or 20 using one W.C. Housing laws are disregarded, no rent books are issued and attempts to protest are met by threats, or expulsion. The tenants often unorganised and being coloured and poor have only a remote chance of obtaining accommodation elsewhere. For this reason, the newspaper concerned was careful to suppress the names and addresses of the lodgers they had interviewed.

Local officials, councillors and M.P’s. all express concern and promise to look into the matter. When immigrants flock into areas already suffering from inadequate housing for the working class, one would have thought that local dignitaries must at least have some idea about where they are going to live and under what conditions.

Industries and transport then needed certain types of labour (generally for the lower paid jobs) and politicians will seldom seriously interfere with the urgent needs of the capitalist class. After all, the working class elected them to office to run capitalism, whether they call themselves Tory or Labour.

Local councils will run into a problem if they force coloured landlords to unload their over crowded tenants. Where can they go? A strong prejudice prevents most white landlords from having them, and so does their low wage earning capacity. It would be a brave council unconcerned about the threat of not being re-elected, that placed coloured persons at the head of an ever-lengthening housing list. While such sores of human tragedies can be eased somewhat, there is a very real danger that coloured groups will remain in their plight. Capitalism pulls down and rebuilds the Gorbals and recreates at the same time a 20th century brown skinned Seven Dials in Southall and elsewhere.

Statements made by George Pargiter, Labour M.P. for Southall, reflect the mental floundering of our left wing planners. "We must deport the landlords," he says. But what if the landlords are native or have become naturalised? Property ownership has inflicted some shocking human misery on the needy, and nationality has little or nothing to do with it. Mr. Pargiter condemned the Tory government's Immigration Act; he now advocates that everyone, black or white, should be discouraged from settling in Southall. He need have no worry about keeping out one group in society; the capitalist class, irrespective of their colour, by virtue of their wealth have a strong objection to eating with a dustbin under the dining table or having their penthouse overshadowed by a gas works.

"The new towns must take more people” points out Southall’s M.P. Alas for our Labour planners, the mills of capitalism are now throwing up the evil of unemployment in such new towns as Stevenage and newcomers are not likely to be very welcome there.

People live in bad surroundings because their wages do not enable them to get anything better. Being without property, most people have to sell their energies to an employer in order to live. The wage we receive for that is basically determined by the social cost of producing our skill and knowledge. No matter how hard people may work, their wages remain low because it costs little to reproduce their labour power.

The working class as a whole are poor, especially when their incomes are compared with the amount of wealth they as a class produce. Within the wages system some sections of the working class are forced down to the point of degradation. We have the technical means to produce fine homes for everyone, but capitalist society will not readily do so unless a profit can be made from them. The higher the prospective profit the greater the incentive to production.

The threat of unemployment is always with us and with it can come more serious clashes between black and white, British and foreigners, over precious jobs. The maniacal theories of Hitler, despised and crushed only yesterday, can be revived again in certain conditions; and those conditions are always latent in capitalism. It is not yet too late for workers to start to overthrow the false conceptions that crowd into their minds.

T. Law

Editorial: Sodom and Gomorrah and the Rand. (1907)

Editorial from the January 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

Great consternation in London town. Conformity shocked. Nonconformity staggered. The national conscience stirred. The Oriental vices of compounded Asiatics have, under conditions of celibacy, broken out, and who’d have thought it, cries Conformity; and just what we expected, answers Nonconformity ; and—something shall and must be done affirms the national conscience ; and—leave it to us says the government ; we will do everything that should be done, on our honour as a government we will.

Such agitation ! Yet this grossly abhorent form of sexual excitement is bound to manifest itself where men are herded together under penal conditions and excluded from the society of their women folk. And this was quite well known both to the Conservatives who now protest that “they never did and hadn’t the slightest idea,” as well as to the Liberals who knew all the time don’t-you-know— and issued licenses for 16,000 more Chinese to be imported into the same conditions.

____________

Lust and Luxury.

Nor is the vice peculiarly Asiatic, as the distinguished gentlemen who make our laws and fill our newspapers for us would have us believe. It is not the special affliction of the heathen Chinee. It is far more widely practiced among the decadent whites of Western civilisation than our pastors and masters are prepared to admit. It is not unknown even in the most exalted circles of good old England. It is a flourishing product of that low moral caste, the accompaniment of unbridled luxury, which continually seeks the gratification of its sensual lusts and finds it only in the grossest of sensations.

The Chinese under normal conditions are a singularly moral people in a rather more ample sense than that word is usually used and their deterioration generally commences with their association with the capitalist method of more “advanced” nations. The faculties which they possess in a remarkable degree of absorbing new influences and assimilating new ideas may have resulted in those of them who have had the misfortune to be translated into the atmosphere of modern commercialism, acquiring the evil practices of their new conditions. But an argument of that sort is very much a two-edged weapon. The evils must have existed to be absorbed.

____________

Morality and Profits.

But all this apart, the consequences as we say, were well known and they were deliberately burked because Rand capitalism demanded cheap labour in order that large profits might be scooped. The Tory Party have the credit of introducing Coolie labour into South Africa. The Liberal Party got in largely by their outcry against conditions of “slavery under the British Flag.” Swearing they would never consent to the degradation of “the national honour” they consented. Swearing a new oath that they had never said the conditions under which the Chinese were being imported were conditions of slavery,—that the use of that phrase was a terminological inexactitude—they maintained a continuity of policy and were directly party to the intensification of the evil to the extent of nearly a score of thousands additional licenses. And now that by an unlucky chance the murder is out they are endeavouring to shuffle out of their responsibility by pointing the finger of contumely at the Tories and saying, I told you so.

____________

Cant and Humbug.

All of which, however, is simply part of the Party game. The central fact is that powerful capitalist interests demanded cheap Coolie labour and capitalist governments, Liberal and Tory, satisfied the demand. Now that the moral fester has broken and spurted its purification abroad it may happen that pressure of the “national conscience” deftly played upon by other capitalist influences may effect some alteration. But whether such alteration will be any less hypocritical than the grotesquely farcical steps which the Liberal Government took to relieve any “heathen Chinee” of the obligations of his contract, is a moot point to be determined by the quality and quantity of the opposition aroused by the—at present—suppressed Bucknill Report. But whatever happens one thing is sure—facilities for obtaining the necessary supply of cheap labour, white, black or yellow, for capitalist purposes, will always be given by capitalist governments, and although it may be possible to suppress some of the more repulsive manifestations of the workings of the profit monger, it will not be possible while capitalism lasts to clear out the cesspool of iniquity which is the profit monger’s inevitable accompaniment. Only by the eradication of Capitalism itself and the substitution for it of that system of Society connoted by the term Socialism will that be possible. The disease is directly traceable to the impoverishment and enslavement of the many and the riotous luxury of the few made possible by the private ownership of the means of wealth production. For Asiatic vices so-called as well as all the other unsavory products of the present system, Socialism alone is the remedy.

Emigration. (1906)

From the June 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

The March issue of the Socialist Standard contained a letter sent to one of our comrades by a friend who had gone to Canada to “escape poverty” in the Land of the West, describing the conditions he found existing there for the working class. These facts, which could have been supplemented by the communications received by others of our members, were timely in face of the long depression that has existed in the trade and commerce of this country for the last five years, and which has led to the booming of the theory of emigration as a cure for the poverty and misery existing here. Railway Companies, Shipping Companies and “Free Labour” providers like Mr. Graeme Hunter, have turned many a penny—if not honest, at least useful—by the rush of the workless, and those afraid of being workless, across the sea. Glowing accounts of the country and its prosperity are widely advertised by these interested persons, and the brilliant prospects for the “industrious” worker are dangled before the eyes of the unwary or unthinking like the bunch of carrots before the donkey. When these efforts are not sufficiently successful, then a prominent “Labour Leader” like Mr. Ben Tillett is engaged to travel this country lecturing upon the glorious conditions for the working-class existing in Australia, and it is the truth that these various agencies reach a much larger number of the people than the occasional accounts of the real situation can, under the circumstances, possibly do.

Still the seed sometimes reaches good ground and in response to an enquiry, a few remarks on the general question of emigration may be useful.

The question may be viewed from three different points. Firstly, that of analogy; secondly, the economic conditions in the countries emigrated to; and, thirdly, the reasons for emigrating.

.

Under the first heading we may say that if emigration as such were a cure, or even a palliation, to any extent worth considering of the poverty of the working class, then Ireland should be the most prosperous country on the planet. For over fifty years her sons and daughters have streamed across the oceans to the continent of the West or to the land down under the Southern Cross, until to-day the population numbers about four and a half millions, while four millions of people have left her shores in that period. With what result ? The working class of Ireland, particularly the agricultural labourers, are even worse off than the workers here ! With such an example at our very doors, we are asked by the smooth-tongued agents of the ruling class to believe that if some of our fellow-workers cross the ocean all will be well with those remaining !

“But,” it may be objected “those who went away benefited by so doing.” Let us see. The countries usually emigrated to are America, Australia and New Zealand. Although South Africa is sometimes counted, the unsettled conditions still prevailing there—to say nothing of the large number of Chinese—renders it advisable for us to leave this territory out of the present consideration. What are the general conditions prevailing in the countries named ? In essentials, similar to those we have here, that is, capitalism rules there with all its consequences as we know them here. While the standard of living—and wages—are slightly higher in America than here, they are more than counterbalanced by the speeding up and greater driving that exist there and which result in throwing the worker on the scrap heap at an earlier age than occurs here. “Too old at 35” is an intensely real cry in that go-ahead land, and this, coupled with the increasing use of machinery in all industries, thereby dispensing with men or filling their places with women and children, creates an ever increasing army of relatively redundant and, therefore, unemployed workers ; so much so, that America can shew as large a number unemployed, comparatively, as any old country; while the march of Coxey’s Army to Washington will still be fresh in the memories of many here. The emigrant thus finds that he has left one set of capitalist conditions to go into a similar set elsewhere.

Australia, as far as its industrial sections are concerned, which are the only sections the mass of the emigrants can exist in, has for years been troubled with the question of poverty and unemployment. At the very moment Mr. Ben Tillett was endeavouring to persuade the workers to go to Australia, all the large cities and towns there were discussing “what to do with the unemployed,” while the various reports, including both the “Labour” papers and emigrants who have returned, show that the struggle for existence and the prospects thereof, differ in no essential from the same struggle undergone here. “General” Booth’s wily scheme to deport some of our unemployed to the region known as “Piliga Scrub,” where, as was shown at the time, water scarcely exists and the soil is all sand, totally incapable of producing anything to support life, seems to have been dropped for the present, but may well be borne in mind when the firm of Booth and Sons move again in the matter.

Thus, Australia offers no escape from the conditions of poverty and lack of employment that the emigrant thinks to flee from, but simply alters his position geographically while leaving it economically just as it was.

In New Zealand we have a country about twice the area of Great Britain with a population of just under 800,000. Certain reforms clamoured for here by several parties are in existence there, such as State ownership of the land, Labour Colonies, etc. Yet, with all these “advantages,” they are not more successful in dealing with the problem of unemployment and poverty than those in charge of affairs at home. Tom Mann, after spending some time in the colony and travelling in various parts, came to the conclusion that New Zealand was as much in need of Socialism as the Mother Country.

No matter then, in which direction we turn, we find the arguments in favour of emigration fall to the ground when confronted with the facts of the circumstances existing in the countries where the emigrant is urged to go. And this brings us to the third heading—the cause for emigration. The answer of course is poverty or dread of unemployment.

But this is only a surface answer, and in itself asks another question—Why are the workers poor ? The answer to this latter question will contain the solution, of the problem.

It will be admitted, generally, that if a person has a right to stay on any portion of this globe, he has the right to stay in the country where he was born, and before being driven out of that country, it should, at least, be shown that the country is unable to support him—or, rather, allow him to support himself. Can this be shown of England ? Take first the raw material in the shape of land. Is it all occupied, or cultivated, or being worked ? So little so, that millions of acres are uncultivated and large areas are kept for non-productive purposes, such as game preserves, deer parks, etc. The warehouses and stores are filled with machines and tools ready to be used for the conversion of this raw material into articles for man’s use and enjoyment, while large numbers of mechanics are available, nay, anxious to be employed in producing more machines and tools if those existent are not sufficient. Are the means of transport inadequate ? According to the statements of those favouring Railway Nationalisation half the trains run empty now, and while the goods trucks are obsolete and clumsy, they could, even as they are, transport far larger quantities than they do at present.

Many miles of canals have been bought up by the Railway Companies for the purpose of stifling competition and are almost unused, while those still operating are by no means overburdened with traffic. Evidently then, the means of transport, if not ideal, are at least adequate, and here, as with the machines, we have a large supply of workers at hand ready to extend or improve these means of transport should it be decided to act in that direction.

We thus see that there is an abundance of raw material (land), of instruments of production (machines, mills, etc.), of means of transport and of workers to operate all these things, yet we have poverty and misery. Why ? Because all these means of life are owned and controlled by a comparatively small section of Society—the capitalist class.

The workers have no means of living, except by selling their abilities—or power to work, which means themselves—to such members of the ruling class as care to employ them. As the capitalists are only concerned with wringing profits out of the labour of those they employ, which again depends upon their selling the articles produced, it follows that the capitalist will only employ the workers in accordance with the demands of the markets for commodities.

To-day wealth is produced in much larger quantities with relatively fewer workers than at any previous period of the world’s history. Every increase in the speeding up of the workers, every improvement in the present or introduction of new machinery, and every further application of science to industry, results in a still smaller number of workers being required to produce the same, or even a larger, amount of wealth than before. This, of course, applies wherever capitalism exists, and the attempts to escape results by flying to similar conditions in another clime necessarily fail in every case.

The solution of the difficulty stands out clear from the answer given above. As the workers produce all the wealth and are the only useful class in modern Society, they must take the means of life, in all its branches, into their own hands, to be under their own control, for their own benefit. In other words, only by establishing a Socialist Commonwealth can they abolish the poverty, misery and unemployment which the masters’ agents to-day tell them can be avoided by emigration.

Jack Fitzgerald

Cab-ride to Capitalism: Servitude For the Majority (2010)

From the January 2010 issue of the Soci

alist Standard

It only takes a cab ride in a city to see which class has the most power and influence in capitalist society

Everyday taxicab rides may appear to be lacklustre experiences that are quickly forgotten. However, this might not always be the case. Sometimes our views of events may become clouded and we cannot see things for what they really are. However, after taking many cab-rides in an urban city, I began to see things in a different way. On one of my jaunts in a taxicab I decided to investigate what it is that made people come to developed capitalist countries from less developed parts of the world.

In speaking to a cab driver, who left Ethiopia to come to Canada, I found my answer. I asked, “do people tend to be more happy in Western societies than in Ethiopia?” He answered that, “Ethiopia was a poor country.” In his words I could see the influence capitalism now had on his life: he equated how much money one has to how happy they are in life. This is reminiscent of one of the trademark idioms of capitalism that money can buy happiness. This is now disputed even by some who are otherwise supporters of capitalism, but if it were wholly refuted then this could undermine the entire capitalist system. Unfortunately, many people do believe that money can buy happiness in the owning class and force those who do not make as much money into the service industry, which in its very nature seeks to serve the owning class.

Your life is influenced by where you are born

Your life is partly determined by where you are born. For example, if you are born in Ethiopia then your life will be determined by Ethiopian standards and culture. In the United States, Canada or the UK your life is determined by a more developed capitalist system. Someone may come from Ethiopia to experience the “freedoms” countries like these employ, but there is another factor at work here: class. It is easy to show that the system boasts of false promises: Sally wishes to go to university, but Sally’s parents cannot afford to pay for it because in the capitalist system one must pay for everything. Sally’s life path has now been influenced by what class she was born into. Therefore, what the Ethiopian will notice is that “freedoms” have a price and are largely determined by what class one is born into.

Along the same lines, immigrants often receive low paying work in the service industry once they enter the developed capitalist system and they can never afford the education to gain higher paying jobs. As a result they stay in the service industry their entire lives, being some of the most lowly-paid members of the working class of wage and salary earners. It is education and money that allows one to move up in a capitalist society but even if one is to move up the ‘social ladder’, it is only usually to a less badly paid section of the same subservient class.

Finding and maintaining a job is difficult enough for people in poor countries and therefore receiving an education is but a luxury. In fact, the cab driver I spoke to said that he was working to make sure that his daughter would be able to go to university. He has to spend his years driving a car all day long so that his daughter will not have to do the same job and will have a better future. If someone cannot improve their station in life because they have no money to begin with, they also cannot afford to improve their station through higher education. This means that they are left work for the class that owns and controls society. This is because capitalism is not really based on merit, but on how much money one has. This is irrational as merit should never have a price, it should be free and depend on nothing but itself.

The capitalist system is marketed on its promises of equality and freedoms through purchasing power. Prospective immigrants are given rhetoric about how capitalism makes anything possible – if one has money. However, nothing appears possible, let alone free and equal about the owning class being served daily by an exploited working class, who are actually the majority and whose freedom is rationed and limited by their pay packets and salary cheques.

Moreover, how successful you will be in life is largely determined by what class you are born into, and is out of your control. The cab driver from Ethiopia realised that he, or his daughter, would not be able to influence society in a poor country because all of the rich capitalist countries such as those in the G8 are the most influential and have the highest standards of living. However, even though he came to one of these developed capitalist countries, he will almost inevitably remain in the service industry for the rest of his life. This is because capitalism is not based on talent or merit like a truly equal system would be such as socialism where everyone would have an equal opportunity to pursue their true interests in life. In capitalism, your success typically still depends on how rich a family or area you are born into and what kind of a reputation it has. If you are unlucky and are born into the majority, the working class, it is likely that you will remain there to serve the upper class for the duration of your life.

Capitalism Promises Freedoms, But for Who?

It is taught in school that capitalist countries are mosaic countries, small units of various cultures existing within a larger schema or government. This view is marketed so that potential immigrants will not have to leave their customs behind and still be able to reap the so-called rewards of capitalist society. In reality, what exists is a melting pot where these cultures are eventually assimilated. The opposite of a mosaic, melting pot, a term with a negative connotation, is often used to describe societies experiencing large-scale immigration from many different countries that seem to “melt” into the existing society. For example, Muslims are being assimilated into Western culture by way of developed capitalism. Only those who assimilate into the capitalist system are able to experience the “freedoms” it promises, but at often cost to their culture. It follows that people who come to developed capitalist countries work to serve the needs of the majority, who are of a different culture, often by forgoing their own so that they might fit in the prevailing market-driven norms.

Two of the most prominent examples of the melting-pot theory are the African Americans who were enslaved by white people through trade and the Native Americans who were wiped out, enslaved or displaced during European colonization. Though these cultures, mainly the African Americans, regained somewhat of their dignity many years later, they still lost the connection to their homeland, lost their culture and were forced to “melt” into the capitalist system.

The natives of North America are an example of not only assimilation to benefit the capitalist class but of the deception of such a system. The natives did not have money or a use for money until the European settlers arrived. These initiated trade and the natives would work hard to gather furs. They would sell their furs, specifically beaver pelts, which were very expensive items in European society at the time. In return they would receive trinkets such as forks as well detrimental items like firearms and liquor. Further, the economy that was run during colonization was one that the Europeans implemented and operated themselves, i.e. capitalism. Also, when the natives finally became wary of the situation, they lost their land. Treaties for land exchange were deceitfully created in a language foreign to them so that they could not have possibly known that they were signing away their land. They were taken advantage of and most importantly, lost their autonomy and freedom. Additionally, the native clans that do remain in North America are being assimilated, or waiting to be assimilated, into society. One way where this can be seen is through the media impact on younger generations who are lured into Western society with its market-driven imperatives and away from their cultural heritage.

Servitude

It seems almost unbelievable to think that servitude exists today in a society that is supposed to be ‘meritocratic’. This is because it is unnecessary that there should even be a servant class in society at all, even if the modern form of slavery is wage slavery.

There is no doubt that if one were to ask the Ethiopian cab driver if he would drive a cab all day if he didn’t have to, he would say no. The majority of people work unsatisfying and unchallenging jobs in the service industry and this is not necessary. It is socially demeaning and it is servitude, plain and simple. Capitalism has wrought its negative influences on the African Americans and North American natives. These people were exploited and subordinate classes until they melted into the capitalist society causing social alienation and loss of cultural identity. Further, those that work in the service industry today are not far off from these fates. Their lives may be better now that they can purchase “freedom” but it is at a great cost to their dignity as they spend their lives in servitude based on the amount of money they (do not) have instead of what talents they possess. Moreover, it only takes a cab ride in a city to see which class has the most power and influence in a capitalist society and chances are it isn’t the class of the Ethiopian behind the wheel.

Jessica Fordham 

(Socialist Party of Canada)

God’s Refuge for Poor People. (1906)

From the March 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

In view of the attempts to “monkey with the thermometer” of the labour market by the transportation (for life as it is hoped) of a selected few of the unemployed and their dependents to the 160 acres of man-less land which a benevolent Canadian Government (of capitalists in need of a larger surplus of labour themselves) have set apart for each landless man who can conform to the conditions of the 10 dollar gift, the following extracts from a letter received by a comrade from a friend “in our great self-governing colony” will prove of considerable interest. Their publication may do something to counteract the work of the emigration touts (religious and secular) and the great-hearted philanthropists who are ready and even anxious to sink their hard-earned savings in a fund designed to provide for some of the deserving poor a way out of their unfortunate condition, (and out of the country) to a home beyond the sea pending translation to “the home beyond-the sky” also arranged, we understand, mainly for the reception of the deserving poor. On the evidence we incline to the belief that the latter is very little, if any, more intangible than the former.

Winnipeg.

Jan. 30th, ’06.

Dear Comrade,—I feel that I must give you my views of Canada as this country is just now receiving so much attention in England. . . . The conditions of labour are cruel. The workman is exploited if anything even worse than in England. At the present time there are hundreds of unemployed in this town. Every morning great numbers of men unable to purchase a paper, can be seen making for the “Free Press” office (outside which particulars of situations vacant are displayed) in the hope that something may be going. The cold is very intense and plenty of people are without the clothes necessary to keep them warm, while, although there are large tracts of forest, fires for them are out of the question owing to the high price of wood. Six dollars (£1 4s. 0d.) is the cost of a single case of wood, which is accounted for by the fact that there is only one way of getting it here, viz., by the Canadian Pacific Railway, who have, therefore, a complete hold of the place and charge very high rates of carriage.

The price of most other things is proportionally high—five cents for a 1½ loaf (12 ozs. to the 1b.) ; housing accommodation that would cost 6 or 7 shillings in England costs 4½ dollars (18s.); the lowest tram fare is 5 cents (2½d.); clothing is very much dearer and altogether I estimate that I have to pay a dollar for what could be bought at home for a shilling.

The winter here begins in September and has often not broken up until April, and as the majority of men are thrown out of work during that time, they have to face poverty pretty bare. Just for the few summer months there is plenty of work, but as I say it does not last long. I have met men who have been in the Colony for 20 years and are as far from that big fortune the emigration monger is always talking about as they ever were. Even men with money find the struggle against the large companies too hard and only recently four fairly large business houses went smash in less than a fortnight.

To-day I was at the station when a large number of immigrants arrived from England and it was enough to make one’s heart bleed. What chance do these poor wretches stand in a strange land when so many knowing all the ins and outs of the place cannot get anything to do? The Home Missions have been fined for over-crowding their doss-houses. They charge the out-of-works 10 cents for a bed—such as it is.

All “pubs” and hotel bars close at 8 o’clock and on Saturdays at 6 o’clock remaining shut until 10 a.m. Monday, so that the opportunities for the workers to spend their money (when they have any) in drink are not very extensive.

As a further instance of the state of the labor market, I may say that I was in conversation to-night with a contractor who is putting up a large building by the City Hall and he told me he had 75 men, some of them with the very best references, call to-day looking for work. He could give them nothing being full up. Of course the employers encourage immigration schemes. They want plenty of men in the labour market during the busy summer months so that they may not have to pay the comparatively high prices for labour which were necessary in the past when labour was scarce.

Immigration is good business for Shipping and Railway Companies and the Employers, but the poor propertyless immigrant finds himself between the devil and the deep sea. Those 160 acres may be all right for the man with capital, but when one has no money to buy implements and seed and the oxen for ploughing and the other things necessary, and when one remembers that the land (for which the Government charge 10 dollars) may be, and frequently is, located 40 or 50 miles back from a railway or even a small town where crops can be marketed, it is no great capture.

It is not surprising, therefore, that according to the figures published by the “Free Press” the other night, only 27 in every hundred homesteads taken are held long enough, to secure the patent. This patent is the title deed which the Government gives after the individual has been living on and cultivating his land for 3 years. But in order to get it he has to cultivate 10 acres at least every year or the plot is taken away from him and sold to the next comer at 20 dollars—the price advancing 10 dollars for every new-comer.

The foolishness of some of the immigrants is surprising. They expect to find a house and everything necessary awaiting them. But they soon discover their mistake and many of them beat a hasty retreat very quickly. Numbers of the men who are walking about Winnipeg without a cent in the world have returned from Homesteads up West. Many of them would gladly go back to England if they could, for however hard their lot was there it was not so hard as it is here. But as they can’t raise the money they have to stop and make the best of it. You should read some of the complimentary remarks about General Booth and his organisation which these miserable folk have written on the walls of the Salvation Army Immigration Hall. You would be amused but you would also be able to see that the writers were far from content.

I hope to be back again in England soon myself. This “Heaven for the poor” is more like Hell with the fire out !

Yours truly,

E.F.

Exploited and Spat Out (2021)

Book Review from the October 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio (Swift £12.99.)

There are eleven million ‘undocumented’ people in the US, mostly Latinx (a term that covers both men and women). The author was one, having followed her parents to New York from Ecuador aged four, though she has since received her green card, which makes her a permanent resident (her parents still aren’t). Her book gives a vivid and personalised account of the lives of undocumented workers.

The undocumented have no access to health care (other than Emergency Rooms), and an example is given of a man who died of brain cancer after being turned away by a number of hospitals. They have no retirement plans and few savings. Many come in order to send money back home for their children to get an education, but find themselves barely able to make ends meet: ‘This country takes their youth, their dreams, their labor, and spits them out with nothing to show for it.’

Several thousand undocumented workers are forced to be day-labourers, waiting on street corners for contractors to choose them for a day’s work. They are often cheated of their wages, and even left stranded in the middle of nowhere. Some worker centres have been set up to try and give them some kind of protection. Lots of undocumented immigrants were killed on 9/11, though it is impossible to say who or how many, and many helped to clear up in the aftermath, and working there has left some of them with severe medical conditions, from cancer to arthritis.

A chapter deals with Flint, Michigan, former centre of the car industry and notorious for having lead in its drinking water. Flyers on this were issued only in English, and when people went to houses to tell residents not to drink the tap water, many undocumented did not open their doors, for fear the visitors were from the immigration authorities. Distribution centres handed out bottled water, but only to those with a state ID, which the undocumented in Michigan were barred from having. A mother with lead poisoning breastfed her baby, and this resulted in the child being temporarily blind. She regained her sight, but nobody knows the possible long-term effects on her.

The main government body that creates problems for the undocumented is Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), ‘the creation of 9/11 paranoia’. Some ‘vultures’, as Cornejo Villavicencio calls them, claim (for a price) to invoke spirits that can protect against ICE. The threat of deportation is, however, real, and a few seek sanctuary in churches, which ICE do not enter.

The author agrees with the statement that Americans treat their pets better than they treat immigrants. Her book demonstrates how much US capitalism makes use of cheap labour power and how the whole system regards people at the bottom of the heap.

Paul Bennett

At the Bottom of the Heap (2006)

From the February 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The chairman of the Bench had wanted to send Chu Hua to prison, so she had been let out of the dock to speak to the duty solicitor in case he could persuade the magistrates to a less vengeful sentence. Now she sat squirming downwards and backwards into her chair, her dull eyes flickering in fear, clutching her threadbare jacket against the chill of the interview room. She did not look like a criminal who threatened to undermine what all right-thinking people – like magistrates – uphold as the basis of civilised society. It was not that she had cloned credit cards, nor dealt in controlled drugs. She had not sexually abused any children, nor deceived impoverished young women in Eastern Europe into coming here only to find that the well paid jobs they had been promised were really as enslaved prostitutes. She had not murdered anyone, nor robbed a bank at the point of a gun. “So why did you” asked the solicitor, “try to sell those counterfeit DVDs?”

It was sad story, eked out with the help of the interpreter. Chu Hua was born in a remote village in North China; the interpreter knew of the area, that it was deeply impoverished, obviously not borne up by the flood of supposed prosperity of supposed “socialist” China. Chu Hua’s parents tried to provide for their family from what little they produced in their vegetable garden. They could not afford to send the children to school so Chu Hua was scantily educated and illiterate, with no prospects of improving in that village. In 2001 she came to England as an asylum seeker, on the grounds that she was a member of the Fa Lung Kung cult. Her application was refused and now she has to report each month to the Home Office Immigration Service, and she is not allowed to take employment or apply for benefit. Sometimes she gets cash-in-hand work as a cleaner but this lasts for only a week or so because she is scared of being reported for benefit fraud. She is reduced to relying on friends and other contacts for food and somewhere to live, sleeping on floors in a roomful of other people. But bad as this is she thinks it is better than her former life in China.

Cult

On the face of it, the Fa Lung Kung seems to do little more than practise slow, hypnotic, Tai-Chi like meditation exercises – like those hardy early morning groups in many an English park. The problem in China was that it developed into a hugely popular movement with a membership large enough, and ardent enough, for the government to outlaw it as a destabilising influence. At some point it wandered beyond meditation, claiming that its followers can see through a “third eye” which protects them and can cure them of diseases. Such preoccupations, on a large scale, can be addictive enough to affect workers’ disciplined acceptance of their role as wage slaves. A ruling class will not be happy to allow too much brainwashing which does not promote their own power and influence over society. At times Fa Lung Kung has been tolerated in China (although it was banned under Mao Zedong’s regime as unhealthy and superstitious) but in recent years there has been a fierce crackdown in which the cult’s followers lost their jobs or were sent to prison where they were beaten or even killed. As might be expected, the movement spawned a considerable media industry and not a few con artists to exploit anyone vulnerable to claims about mystical powers of mental adjustment to social stress. Even so the mere fact of membership of the cult was accepted in the United States as justification for asylum; as Chu Hua soon found out, that did not apply in this country.

So she spends most of her days wandering along the local High Street and it was there, in an indoor market, that a man who must have noticed her vulnerability suggested that she could earn a little money by helping him sell some DVDs. It was not long before the police saw her – and recognised her as someone who had been arrested twice before for the same offence. Her two previous appearances in Court had resulted in her being ordered to do Community Service, which she had completed happily as it was better than the High Street and kept her occupied, scrubbing off graffiti or cleaning school playgrounds. She must have wondered why she was not allowed to do the same kind of work for a wage. But now this was her third such offence in a short period and the Court was running out of patience with her.

Pirates

The recent explosion in the production and sale of pirated DVDs has alarmed the industry, which sees it as a threat to its profits. The biggest operator in this field is HMV, which also trades in CDs and owns the Waterstones booksellers. During the last complete year, HMV recorded a pre-tax profit of ú136.2 million – up by 9.9 percent on the previous year. Not all of this, of course, came from the sale of DVDs; Waterstones is notorious for its ruthless cost cutting war against independent booksellers and makes huge profits from best-sellers like the Harry Potter books. But DVDs are extremely important to HMV’s profits; while the group’s underlying sales were down by 4 percent during the last year the sale of DVDs went up, and with it HMV’s share of the market for them, of which the group claims to have “the lion’s share”. So they are bound to take any threat to their pre-eminent position seriously – and that does not mean they worry about a few school-age computer wizards downloading and writing their own, illegal, copies of DVDs to share with their mates.

The copyright laws, with their harsh penalties, are there to aid HMV in their war against the pirates. One local authority recently decided that pirated DVDs and CDs represented so urgent a threat to their community that they formed an alliance with the local police to hunt down the pirates and close down their factories. On one gloriously successful day for the partnership the local plods and council penpushers seized £30,000 worth of illegal DVDs and CDs from one business, then a few days later went to the place again and took possession of another £20,000 worth. During the past year they have “visited” more than 90 premises, seized over 150,000 items, closed down one DVD factory and launched several prosecutions. These achievements are publicised by the council with such pride that some of their citizens may overlook the fact that they do not have an exactly successful record when it comes to their other responsibilities. Not long ago this council was assessed, in terms of the services it supplies to vulnerable people such as the homeless, the elderly or children in need, as one of the worst in London, to the extent that they were under threat of being taken over by a Whitehall hit squad.

Priorities

But of course that council was utterly correct in its priorities because the realisation of a profit through the orderly, legally controlled process of production for sale must take precedence over any human need. It is the priority of capitalism and when all is said and done it is what people like councillors and MPs are elected for – at least as things are for the present. If we had a society with a different priority wealth would be turned out to meet human needs, so that all people would have unfettered access to it, which would be enough to give any self-respecting councillor a seizure. It would be the end of the social arrangements which made it imperative for Chu Hua to come all that way across the world although when she got here it was made plain to her that she was not welcome. And now she is a threat to a mighty corporation like HMV.

In any event Chu Hua’s fears overcame her; she took her chance to leave the Court and did not come back. Huffing and puffing, the chairman was openly pleased to have his opinion of her so quickly vindicated and readily agreed to the prosecutor’s request for a warrant for her arrest. If she comes up in Court again she will have yet another charge – Failing to Surrender – against her. She is out there somewhere, scraping along somehow, vulnerable to a host of predators. We can only hope she survives.

Ivan

All that glitters . . . (2021)

Book Review from the January 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

The London Dream. Chris McMillan. Zero Books. 2020. £19.99

Subtitled ‘migration and the mythology of the city’, this is a critical look at London and the immigrants who are attracted to live and work there. McMillan writes broadly through a lens of Marxist class analysis, though also draws heavily on some of the ideas of non-Marxists such as Richard Florida, who has written extensively about the ‘creative classes’ within capitalism and the dynamic turbulence of which they are an intrinsic part. In London’s case, much of this is perceived as being centred on the so-called ‘flat white economy’ and Silicon Roundabout in Shoreditch, though it stretches much further and wider than this.

For McMillan, the ‘struggle between the hope of the London dream and the exploitation it fuels’ is the main focus of his investigation. Through analysing a variety of themes and sectors (the cleaners that service the City of London travelling in on the night buses, to jobbing actors and writers seeking their fortune but struggling to make any sort of living, through to the Uber drivers), McMillan does a good job of laying bare the exploitation that keeps the city going. He interviews a number of people who have come to London to chase their dream and is mature and reflective in analysing their success (or – largely – otherwise). In this respect he knowingly treads some similar ground to Ben Judah’s excellent This is London, which we reviewed in the Socialist Standard in June 2016.

London is now very much the ‘world city’ and whereas in 1951 as few as 5 percent of the population was born outside the UK, now the total is well over a third and growing – indeed two thirds of children born in London today have at least one parent who was born outside the UK. The Huguenots and Jewish refugees of earlier stages of capitalism have been replaced by Afro-Caribbeans, Bengalis and latterly eastern Europeans and those seeking their fortune and new experiences from the old colonies like Australia and New Zealand. But it is the low-paid, gig-economy jobs they typically fill – the waitresses, bartenders and delivery drivers. While two-thirds of registered London black cab drivers identify as ‘white British’ this only applies to 6 percent of Uber drivers, many of whom sometimes earn as little as £2 per hour net pay.

Though the book seems to be marred periodically by an unusually large number of typos and similar errors, McMillan is a good writer and brings the city and its people to life. He ends by saying: ‘London is a city of hope, a city of misery. A city where there is always something to do and no shortage of precarious workers struggling to do it. It is all part of the London dream. And still, they come. But for how much longer?’ (p.258). True enough, though what the book really lacks most is a re-imagining of the city in a way that transcends capitalism itself and the exploitation it engenders. But it is a stimulating read and a book that demonstrates that all that glitters in not all gold – and why.

DAP

Race relations (1977)

From the May 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Quoting figures from the 1971 Census (Country of Birth Tables), the Sunday Times colour supplement recently reported that there are three million people living in Britain who were born citizens of another country. The Immigration Act passed in 1971 has severely limited male immigration, although it allows the wives and children of those already here to join them if they can satisfy British Consular representatives of their relationship and obtain an entry certificate. Accompanying the report was a large double page picture displaying one representative from each of the main countries of origin; a handsome and varied collection of the human race from all parts of the globe.

There are 29 main countries of origin with the breakdown as follows:-

(Countries from whom the number of immigrants is less than 14,000 are not listed).

A study of these figures makes nonsense of wild and inflammatory statements about the United Kingdom being swamped and taken over by coloured people and alien cultures. The largest single group comes from just across the Irish Sea, and the greatest overall proportion of immigrants have a European ancestry and share a common language. These easily mingle with the indigenous population, and it is the more noticeable who suffer the hostility and resentment of the racially biased.

Not un-naturally these people generally congregate in areas with others of similar background and language which leads to the accusation of certain cities being taken over and changed. Looking at the parts of Bradford, Leeds, Birmingham and London where there are large coloured immigrant populations, one puzzles at what there is about them that could induce anyone to uproot themselves from sunnier climes and settle in such dismal depressing environs. The answer is that people who have to sell their labour-power in order to live are forced to move about in order to find a buyer. Since Capitalism started there have been migrations of workers from their birthplaces to where the means of production are situated. From the countryside to the towns, from the under-developed parts of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland to England, from the North of England to the South; and in their tens of millions workers from the whole of the British Isles have emigrated to all parts of the world to seek the means of life.

It is because these immigrants come here to seek work that they are regarded with suspicion and hostility by many members of the working class. Every new worker entering the country appears to threaten somebody’s job. There is competition for jobs — and the buyer of labour-power prefers it that way. It helps to keep the price of labour-power low, he can pick and choose his worker more freely, and the worker is more likely to toe the line when he knows he can be easily replaced by another. Employers may have private views on nationality and race, but as capitalists they are interested only in labour-power; they recruit it as and when—and from wherever — they need. Workers were recruited in this way in the 1950s from Italy, the West Indies, and Asia.

With tensions already established the indigenous worker looks around at his problems and sees in the immigrant a scapegoat. Ignoring the fact that housing problems, unemployment, and poverty were rife before any immigrant set foot on these Islands, these faults are laid at the door of the immigrant, and those who are conspicuous, i.e. the coloured population, are the focus of hostility. The immigrant, afraid and bewildered by the hostility around him, often reacts in kind. Bitter and resentful young coloureds try to outdo their white counterparts in bigotry and malice. The frustration of both sides hardens, and we have in Britain the elements of a white-black and black-white antagonism that is being inflamed by those who wish to make political capital from ideas of “racial purity” and separation.

There is a great deal of argument and disagreement amongst anthropologists about racial, ethnic and national differences; but it requires no special knowledge or study to acknowledge the paradox of the human race. Nevertheless, the likenesses far outweigh the differences. To paraphrase Will Shakespeare . . . “Have we not eyes? Have we not hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions! Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter. If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh?” . . . And yet, however similar, no two human beings are the same. Every person is unique! So there seems no rational reason to dislike someone who is different, because everyone is different.

The Socialist is free from racial prejudice. We take pleasure in the infinite variety of physical and cultural differences in our fellow humans and see no reason for those differences to continue to cause antagonism. Lines drawn on maps do not affect the way we regard our fellow men. We are deaf to calls from sectarian groups whether white, black, nationalist or feminist. There is a division in society but it is economic not social. On one side are those who own the means of production and distribution and thereby control the means by which we live — the capitalist class. On the other side are the vast majority, the working class, who have to sell their ability to work to those owners. This system is international, and like workers capitalists exist all over the world and come in all shapes, sizes and colours. Whether the owner is black or white, man or woman, speaks your language or not, the effect is the same. He is the master and you are the servant, he is the exploiter and you are the exploited.

It is in the interest of all workers whatever their colour, nationality, or sex to recognize the root of their problems lies in capitalism itself. The problems cannot be cured without its abolition. All workers must unite to bring to an end a system that sentences them to a lifetime of poverty, insecurity, conflict and hardship. Then, world-wide, all will work together, co-operating in producing everything that the human race requires to satisfy its needs. All mankind will live in harmony.

Alice Kerr

A century of progress? (2011)

From the March 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Workers are still being killed in fires in garment factories because of locked doors.

March 25th will be the centenary of the greatest workplace disaster, prior to 9/11, in America’s history – the infamous fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York. Because of a locked door, 146 people died, most of whom jumped to their deaths on the street nine storeys below, obviously preferring a quick and painless end over being burned to death.

The Triangle Company occupied the top three floors of the ten-storey Asch building at the intersection of Washington Place and Greene Street in Greenwich Village. Architect Joseph Asch had boasted his building was fire-proof, which structurally it was. This didn’t mean everything in it was.

No one knows exactly what started the fire, but the most likely explanation was a cigarette end that had not been extinguished, was thrown into a barrel of unused clothing material. Smoking was prohibited for the obvious reason that the materials were flammable. Some of the cutters constantly defied this ban, believing themselves to be a cut above the other employees (no pun intended) and as such, thought the law didn’t apply to them. Workplace snobbery being another of the many ways capitalism divides worker against worker.

The fire began around 4:45 p.m. which was quitting time for the near 500 employees. Factory manager, Sam Bernstein, the brother-in-law of one of the owners, Max Blanck, attempted to douse the flames rather than sound the alarm, an action that cost many lives.

The fire, which began on the eighth floor, sped rapidly to the ninth and tenth, cotton being very flammable. Many did escape, some in the elevators (a few even threw themselves on top of it) and some made it to the roof. Ladders were extended from a nearby building to the roof.

Among those who scaled them were the owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, (betcha couldn’t see that one coming.)

Twenty four died on the fire escape, which did not extend to the ground and was too flimsy to hold that much weight and collapsed.

Though the fire department was called and arrived quickly and extinguished the blaze in thirty minutes, their ladders could only reach as high as the sixth floor. Those who died did so because the door on the Washington Place side of the ninth floor was locked. Controversy raged between whether it was locked to prevent people leaving early or to make them leave by the Greene Street door, then enveloped in flames. The usual procedure was, when they left by the Greene Street door, they would have their handbags checked to see they were not taking home products they had made. In other words, the company had to protect their legal theft as opposed to illegal theft. Whatever the reason for the locked door it made no difference to the deceased. Their choice was death by fire, or jumping.

Most of them were young immigrant women from Italy and the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. Though no one knows what their thoughts were, it’s possible that Jewish girls, having seen in the pogroms, what fire could do to their bodies, jumped so they would be identifiable. Those who remained in the building were identified by a shoe or a lock of hair, or jewellery; six were never identified.

Nothing should have been surprising about the fire which was a tragedy waiting to happen, especially at a time where there was so little workplace safety legislation in effect in America.

In the early 20th century, approximately 40,000 people lost their lives every year to workplace injuries: in mines, foundries, factories and on railroads. What made the Triangle fire sensational is the fact that so many died so quickly, so horrifically and in America’s most populated city.

For three months officialdom did nothing about it except point fingers. State governor, John Dix, said he was “powerless”, an amazing comment, which was interpreted as, “I don’t care.” Mayor, Bill Gaynor, told his secretary to deal with it, who then referred the matter to the Fire Chief, Ted Croker. This worthy had risen to power by the patronage of his uncle, Richard Croker, once head of Tammany Hall, the most powerful political organisation in America. Croker blamed the Building Department, who blamed the Fire Department.

State Labour Commissioner, John Williams, said it didn’t come under his jurisdiction and building owner, Joseph Asch, said he had fulfilled all his obligations. Harris and Blanck said the doors were never locked during working hours. The head of the reformist Socialist Party of America, Meyer London, sneered that, whilst safety reform should be enacted, it probably wouldn’t be, and that nothing would be done about the tragedy.

The press understandably demanded that someone be held accountable. William Randolph Hearst, even created his own panel of experts in engineering, real estate and fire prevention to suggest new laws for safer workplaces for his paper, American, to advocate.

For a time, it looked like London would be proved right, but a young man, ambitious for political office, District Attorney, Charles Whitman, persevered in his attempts to prosecute the owners.

Whitman interviewed survivors and hired a detective to go to the ninth floor and find the lock of the door that opened onto the Washington Place stairs. This lock showed it had not been opened, whereupon the detective, Barry Flood, secured an indictment against Blanck and Harris, whom he arrested.

The defendants obtained the services of Manhattan’s most successful attorney, Max Steur, who had himself once been a garment worker.

Steur, knowing he couldn’t prove the door was unlocked, resorted to cheap tricks like examining the handbags of survivors to see how many garments they could possibly have smuggled out. This was done in attempt to create sympathy among the jurors and to show the reasoning for keeping it locked.

Blanck and Harris, naturally enough, said they weren’t aware of any doors being locked during working hours. Steur emphasised it would be ridiculous if they were locked, considering the constant coming and goings of delivery people, errand boys and salesmen etc. All this was ludicrous when one considers that, when a fire prevention expert inspected the premises in 1909, he noticed the door on the Washington Place side was locked during working hours. Survivors, themselves, had said Harris was constantly checking to see the door was locked.

Judge Thomas Grain, charged the jury to decide, beyond a reasonable doubt, whether or not the defendants were aware the door was locked during working hours. The jury concluded they were not aware of it, so they were acquitted.

The “innocent” partners successfully filed insurance claims that worked out to about $400.00 for every dead worker.

Civil lawsuits were brought against the owners by the relatives of the deceased, but since Steur again defended them, nobody got a penny. Instead, twenty three relatives managed to get the princely sum of $75.00 each from an insurance company.

It is of small, if any, consolation to the relatives of the victims that the fortunes of the Triangle Company gradually declined, and by 1918 had ceased to exist. By 1920, Harris and Blanck split up, neither being prosperous after.

A person who took a great deal of interest was Frances Perkins, herself an eyewitness to the fire. Fifty years later she unveiled a memorial plaque to the victims, at the sight of the tragedy. Perkins became America’s first female cabinet minister, when President Roosevelt appointed her Minister of Labor in his New Deal government. This proved women could run capitalism just as incapably as men.

During the century since the fire, laws concerning workplace safely have been passed and enforced, till by 2006, (the last year this author could get figures for), only two percent of all deaths by accidents in the US were workplace related. As necessary as such legislation is, it is nevertheless merely an improvement within capitalism. But, as long as capitalism lasts, such events will occur. The fact they occur less frequently is no reason to defend capitalism

Obviously, they will happen more in countries where safety laws either don’t exist or are not enforced. In Bangkok in 1993, nearly 200 workers died in a toy factory, where the doors had been locked by their bosses to prevent them from taking toys home. There are other examples, especially from Bangladesh (see boxes).

Despite the tremendous technological advances we’ve seen, life hasn’t changed much under capitalism. Nor, can it be argued, such events are history in capitalism’s greatest power. In 1991, in Hamlet, North Carolina, 25 people died in a fire at a poultry plant, also because of locked doors.

With the profit motive being the main determining factor in production, it would be naive and idealistic to expect capitalists and politicians, who attempt to administrate capitalism, to care. Perhaps, nobody said it better than software capitalist and investor, Kevin O’Leary, who expressed his feelings on altruism by saying, “The emotional tie that I have at the end of the month is when I count the cash.” He also told a prospective business partner, “There’s something nasty about you and I like it.”

Socialists cannot say with any degree of certainty that there will be no workplace deaths in a socialist society. The exact nature of work and the workplace will be determined by the needs of society and the technology available. What socialists can say, is that with the abolition of money and therefore the profit motive, the very death blood of capitalism, priority will be given to workplace health in general and safety in particular. Events like the Triangle Fire will never occur again.

Steve Shannon

See Also:

June 2013 Socialist Standard, Capitalism Kills: The Bangladeshi Garment Factory Disaster