A struggle for the slums [1976]

The clashes over Asian immigration are said to stem from Mr. Enoch Powell’s speeches, say many worthy Establishment liberals. Strange that no heads are broken demanding free monetarism; there are no stabbings as a result of his cry for more police power; and nobody, not even in Ulster, is roused to angry demonstration in favour of his theory that Loyalism means loyalty to the Crown in Parliament! Only, on the subject of immigration, it seems, does his eloquence convince people into fury, which rather underlines the falsity of the ‘great man’ theory once again and suggests that it merely happens that his utterances happen to run parallel to prevailing opinion.

Easy to court cheap popularity among the Asian youth by protesting that all who object to immigration are ‘fascists’ and racialists. We do not need to follow the IS, IMG, old unclear Trot cobblers and all by demands to ‘ban the National Front,’ like the ‘revolutionaries’ so infatuated with the State they even expect it to make the revolution for them given sufficient resolutions backed up by chanting demonstrators.

The fact is that there is strong working class resistance to the present policy on immigration and to racial policies generally. Why be an ostrich? There is far less middle class resistance because it does not affect them in the same way. The Establishment is liberal because it lives in leafy suburbs with ample space and wide lawns and where one can’t hear one’s neighbours. They chat with the Indian doctor of philosophy on the way to the local shop and pride themselves on achieving racial harmony. Only when they are politicians on the make do they play the Numbers Game (which the liberals play exactly the opposite way). But if there were no issues there would be no votes to gain. The fascists do not invent the problem any more than revolutionaries do class issues. They are a product of it.

The importance of the fascist victory on the racial front is seen in one important issue. The whole basis of the State is to parcel off the world into partitions, and declare that it owns the whole of one territory. It purports to control the individual by right from birth unless swearing allegiance to another State. It controls and restricts his or her movements; as if it owned the earth, sea and air by natural right. Nobody could possibly justify this in this day and age, the whole idea has taken a bashing with modern transport, modern ideas, the lapse of superstition. Suddenly, in a relatively free society, a majority of the people most exploited in this way turn round not merely to defend such a system, but to advocate even greater controls by the State.  What a victory for Statism! ‘Long live our chains!’

Yet it is impossible to go along with all the zany ideas of the Establishment liberals. The African States weren’t being ‘racialist’ when they kicked out the Asians; they were simply trying to dispose of a middle-class which was notoriously exploitative. They didn’t want to take out local citizenship because it would have brought them down to the level of the Africans. 

The racial squealing of the fascists trying to exploit the ‘poor white’ mentality (‘If only I were black…’ they significantly whine) balances the welfare statism of the liberal establishment who see (and this is not cynical) a fertile field for their talents in the do-good field. Social workers, find the arrival of ready-made ‘minorities’ with their problems an ideal field of endeavour; they swarm around the ghettoes like old time missionaries.

A lot of the working class resentment is not so much against colour, it is against this middle-class liberal patronising, and also for it, because it wants to join in the something-for-nothing auction market which is the basis of social-democracy today, the Welfare State and the ‘claims’ on State compassion in which somebody must be at the end of the queue and anyone who lengthens the queue causes hardship.

Because militancy and independence (they are the same thing in the working-class though alternatives in the middle-class) have been jettisoned, there is a claims rush – a copper rush more than a gold one! – for handouts from the Welfare State, the do-gooder principle demands naturally, logically and compassionately that the harder the case the higher the position in the queue. Scales of immigration always cause some problems in society and colour causes others; but this is behind the bitterness and the tension on the white side.

This is the attitude that must be overcome and it is not overcome by telling those who hold it that they are really fascists did they but know it – or one creates the very situation one was trying to avoid.

Then too immigration flows naturally from emigration; the one causes the other. For two centuries the British people have been sold the line that all their problems are to be solved by emigration, now they are told that all their problems are caused by immigration or that immigration poses no problems.

Capitalism deliberately depopulated the land to get a reservoir of labour more or less at the bottom of industrial society. Even since 1945, when all the economic hens have come home to roost, emigration has continued at a steady pace – not to one country but into huge sub-continents and territories. 

The result, with a falling birth-rate, would be depopulation on a grand scale like that of the Highlands: it is perfectly obvious the industrialists had two choices – either to persuade the Government to stop emigration – and this would have been and still is a highly unpopular course, nor could it have been enforced without a ‘Berlin Wall’ (which is precisely why the Berlin Wall was built) – or to encourage immigration. It cannot be supposed they could have adopted the only possible alternative to wind up their industries the way the Scottish landlords wound up the economy of the country so that they could hunt pheasants on it. 

What has been the result? There has always been a steady reserve at the bottom of the rung of industrial society, a submerged section from which it is sometimes impossible to escape and one is caught by social pressures. This surrounds and entraps in turn the lower paid worker, and the higher paid worker has to fight to get out of it and incidentally come into economic conflict with differently paid workers as a result. As if with a wand, or a stroke of modern technology (and no doubt they would have planned it that way if they could) the ruling class of this country has changed the colour of their adversaries: has brought in African and Asian workers to fill up the slums (and get the blame for the slums existing), or to find their way on to the social services and urban housing (and get the blame for jumping the queue, and because of the steady rate of emigration (which was planned) coupled with the rate of immigration (which was not).

So far from this causing the capitalists embarrassment, on the contrary, the white workers are rallying round the State as never before – demanding more restrictions on liberty! They are abandoning internationalist ideas which were rocking capitalism and at any rate forming a pool for the right wing to swim in. The most bitter of all, of course, are those who are left behind in the submerged bottom of society, along with the immigrants: the poorest in society – always reckoned to be the most dangerous from the point of revolution – are transformed into the most reactionary along with the unemployed and unemployable young blacks! Too much to say that the whole thing was a planned trick of the reactionary forces; but it couldn’t have been better for them if it had been. 

It is no good pretending there is a facile answer, producing, a few liberal or socialistic slogans. 

But one may note the classic element of immigration tension is missing because of the existence of a labour movement. Say what one will about the trade union leadership, while free workers organisations exist fascism cannot triumph. The sharpest divisions that have come over the use of immigration has been the use of the pauper alien as sweated labour in order to undercut wages. The trade union movement has, by and large, prevented this. Maybe it exists to some degree among Pakistanis and Cypriots as the result of ignorance and swindling. But it is a minimal cause of the tension which exists: it is social and cultural, not economic. 

So often one must stand aside from what seem to be the major problems of the day, which are well trailed red herrings. 

That some racial tension must exist is an inevitable product of the capitalist system as it exists and endless debates on racialism and tolerance and so on are pointless while problems undoubtedly do exist. If there were such a thing as a revolutionary movement, and not the shadow of one, the immigration issue would become supremely irrelevant, which it is not at the moment. If people were thinking about seizing the means of life and taking everything, they would welcome allies. If they are thinking in terms of what benefits can be doled out by a paternal state, they object to competitors.

If someone in the back-streets of Birmingham wins the pools they make for Barbados. If there were freedom and prosperity in Barbados, why would anyone come here from there in any numbers to live in Birmingham? If there were freedom and prosperity here, who would mind? When we fight, not for freedom and prosperity, but over who should occupy the back-streets of Birmingham, who benefits?

Black Flag v4, n9 1976-07