SWP expulsions and squabbles

[sihhi]

I still have no idea what you're on about.

Foreign workers who have overstayed their student visas, and are working to send money back to their families. I'd be surprised if there are 0 in Sheffield.

 

[J Ed]

Mexican 'thick workers' might disagree?

I know that you are being flippant but actually if you look at the history of, for example, Californian agricultural labour you will find that the mostly Hispanic agricultural labour activists campaigned very hard to limit immigration. Agricultural labour in California was only able to make any gains after labour and civil rights activists managed to curtail Mexican immigration.

http://www.ufw.org/_page.php?menu=research&inc=history/03.html may be of interest

Under neoliberalism, open borders are a boss' tool.

 

[belboid]

Under neoliberalism, open borders are a boss' tool.

Borders are a bosses tool, full stop. Protectionism does not help improve workers living standards, it helps improve bosses profits.

 

[discokermit]

That economic migration under capitalism isn't something to be uncritically celebrated. Most 'thick workers' already get this. Shame you don't.

economic migrants are workers. i doubt even they are celibrating uncritically, but nevertheless, they could be starving without it.

 

[articul8]

I'm not sure that even Kautsky would have been equivocal about border controls on migrants. In fact there weren't any in his day, at least not until 1914.

no i meant the form of the argument, "of course socialism is the ultimate goal but for now...."

 

[audiotech]

I still have no idea what you're on about.

The present immigration control system has some foaming at the mouth and others unsure of their position. Instead of focusing on immigrants, well migrants really, the concerns are to do with the failure of politics, where and how migrants are allocated. Not about the migrants themselves. Direct resources needed to help integrate people. Ensure migrants identify with that society. Feel part of it. Feel like they are wanted and needed. Have a place in its future. Not marginalisation and disaffection. Migrants, mostly from A8 European countries, have been coming here to work hard, filling gaps in the labour market, picking, packing and processing foodstuff for example. They then return home when the work is done. Furthermore, in all environments, with regards to tax, considerably more is put into an economy than is taken out in benefits. Migrants are healthier and are extremely law-abiding. Fertility rates here and in the developed countries generally are collapsing. It's forecast that the rich countries labour force will decline in the future. The questions then that need to be asked are, whose going to look after you? Whose going to pay for your pension? Whose going to provide services? Meanwhile, millions of British people continue to live and work in other countries. Sadly, when there's a crisis people can begin to blame the "other", it doesn't help when politicians join in the chorus. The crisis will surely last longer if people follow nationalism and xenophobia. The message should be migrants are good for society, are future depends on them, are jobs depend on them, we embrace them and by the way we are all migrants.

 

[SpineyNorman]

I note you have refused to actually respond, just thrown your rattle out of the pram.

Point out where my argument goes wrong if you can.

Because sometime the bourgeois state does things that favour workers because it's also in the interests of capital to do so. Just the same as the NHS and the welfare state. So those are also bourgeois and not to be supported. I wasn't throwing my rattle out of the pram. You're just too daft to understand anything more subtle than a lump hammer.

Where has anyone - even that RevSoc statement - said it should be 'uncritically celebarated'. Dont make things up, it only weakens your (already weak) argument.

Jesus. It's certainly being uncritically advocated.

Anyway, if you want to talk about this start a thread about it.

 

[Delroy Booth]

lol, so you dont support open borders in capitalism. We live in a capitalist society, so you oppose open borders. Therfore, you support bourgeois immigration controls. You cant have it both ways.

You're right, this is why the left fails, the refusal of left reformists to think their politics through.

You could throw this right back in your face. I'm not anti-immigration either. Nations and states might be bourgeois contructs, ultimately I don't consider them legitimate, but it doesn't make them any less real, and you can't just pretend they don't exist. Do you just walk straight through customs then when you go through the airport, freeman of the land style, because you're against bourgeois immigration controls?

And Spiney's right, state's immigration controls are one thing, but global capital's need for cheap, easily exploitable labour are another. Are you telling that immigration, both legal and illegal, doesn't result in rampant exploitation and misery? That it doesn't exist to serve the class interests of global capital? Immigration in and of itself is fine, of course I have no problem with immigration and open borders on principle, but the idea that the patterns of immigration we currently experiencing aren't shaped by the interests of capital first and foremost, long before the interests of the people themselves, is patent nonsense.

Of course under socialism it'd be totally different, and it might sound cheesy but it's logical, because first one of the major drivers in economic migration (ie massive global inequailty and a hegemonic global capitalist class that can play the race to the bottom between nations) would no longer exist, utterly transforming the context which immigration takes place in. And of course, under socialism, nation states would eventually wither away and end up in the dustbin of history, to be replaced by the as yet unspeficied democratic institutions of working class (which in no way would be a de facto replacement state, certainly wouldn't ever be organised on nominally national, ethnic, or linguistic lines) Just incidentally, presuming all this takes place, how long do you think it's going to take, post-revolution, for bourgeois notions of the nation-state to wither away? weeks? months? years?

You can call me a reformist too I don't mind that at all.

 

[J Ed]

The present immigration control system has some foaming at the mouth and others unsure of their position. Instead of focusing on immigrants, well migrants really, the concerns are to do with the failure of politics, where and how migrants are allocated. Not about the migrants themselves. Direct resources needed to help integrate people. Ensure migrants identify with that society. Feel part of it. Feel like they are wanted and needed. Have a place in its future. Not marginalisation and disaffection. Migrants, mostly from A8 European countries, have been coming here to work hard, filling gaps in the labour market, picking, packing and processing foodstuff for example. They then return home when the work is done. Furthermore, in all environments, with regards to tax, considerably more is put into an economy than is taken out in benefits. Migrants are healthier and are extremely law-abiding. Fertility rates here and in the developed countries generally are collapsing. It's forecast that the rich countries labour force will decline in the future. The questions then that need to be asked are, whose going to look after you? Whose going to pay for your pension? Whose going to provide services? Meanwhile, millions of British people continue to live and work in other countries. Sadly, when there's a crisis people can begin to blame the "other", it doesn't help when politicians join in the chorus. The crisis will surely last longer if people follow nationalism and xenophobia. The message should be migrants are good for society, are future depends on them, are jobs depend on them, we embrace them and by the way we are all migrants.

Don't you think that xenophobia vs completely open borders is a false dichotomy?

 

[discokermit]

now we're debating the lack of details and order of points in a founding statement of a student society?

this thread has gone proper shit.

 

[SpineyNorman]

The present immigration control system has some foaming at the mouth and others unsure of their position. Instead of focusing on immigrants, well migrants really, the concerns are to do with the failure of politics, where and how migrants are allocated. Not about the migrants themselves. Direct resources needed to help integrate people. Ensure migrants identify with that society. Feel part of it. Feel like they are wanted and needed. Have a place in its future. Not marginalisation and disaffection. Migrants, mostly from A8 European countries, have been coming here to work hard, filling gaps in the labour market, picking, packing and processing foodstuff for example. They then return home when the work is done. Furthermore, in all environments, with regards to tax, considerably more is put into an economy than is taken out in benefits. Migrants are healthier and are extremely law-abiding. Fertility rates here and in the developed countries generally are collapsing. It's forecast that the rich countries labour force will decline in the future. The questions then that need to be asked are, whose going to look after you? Whose going to pay for your pension? Whose going to provide services? Meanwhile, millions of British people continue to live and work in other countries. Sadly, when there's a crisis people can begin to blame the "other", it doesn't help when politicians join in the chorus. The crisis will surely last longer if people follow nationalism and xenophobia. The message should be migrants are good for society, are future depends on them, are jobs depend on them, we embrace them and by the way we are all migrants.

What exactly does that lengthy and unattributed cut and paste have to do with what I've been saying?

 

[audiotech]

I know that you are being flippant..

No I wasn't.

 

[SpineyNorman]

classic Kautskyite line that

Am I being accused of reformism by a labour party hack?

 

[belboid]

Because sometime the bourgeois state does things that favour workers because it's also in the interests of capital to do so. Just the same as the NHS and the welfare state. So those are also bourgeois and not to be supported. I wasn't throwing my rattle out of the pram. You're just too daft to understand anything more subtle than a lump hammer.



Jesus. It's certainly being uncritically advocated.

Anyway, if you want to talk about this start a thread about it.

christ, you are all over the shop. You equate immigration controls with the NHS!!! Wow....Do tell me which controls you support tho, you are bienhg very shy on that one.

Not surprised you want to start a new thread, you're having your arse handed to you on this one.

 

[sihhi]

I know that you are being flippant but actually if you look at the history of, for example, Californian agricultural labour you will find that the mostly Hispanic agricultural labour activists campaigned very hard to limit immigration. Agricultural labour in California was only able to make any gains after labour and civil rights activists managed to curtail Mexican immigration.

http://www.ufw.org/_page.php?menu=research&inc=history/03.html may be of interest

Under neoliberalism, open borders are a boss' tool.

No offence to you, but that's a desperately official history full of oversimplification and distortion

Here is Loren Goldner's review of a recent work:

This approach, pitting US-born workers against imported labor in California’s rural economy was, to put it mildly, not the only possibility. As Bardacke shows, there was already a long tradition of much more militant struggle in the California fields, including the IWW prior to US entry into World War I, the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) of Magonista revolutionaries who fled repression during the Mexican Revolution and who worked with the IWW on both sides of the border (the red flag briefly flew over Tijuana in 1911), as well as the great strikes of 1933, organized in part by Communist Party trade union militants. PLM influence remained alive in Los Angeles and other Mexican-American centers into the 1950s. The Filipino-based Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) around Larry Itliong (about which more below) was in favor of reaching out to the braceros as class brothers. But for the cursillo adept and Alinsky-trained Cesar Chavez in 1950s Cold War America, this classwide approach was not only an “unknown past,” as Bardacke points out, it was a past he would have viscerally rejected, and did reject when it later re-erupted in his periodic purges of “leftists” and real or imagined “Communists” from the UFW, or finally when “in 1979, the ghost of Ricardo Flores Magon”[5] made “a cameo appearance at one of the most dramatic moments in UFW history.” This antagonism between braceros and Mexican-Americans even began to crack during a rural strike wave of 1959–1962. At the Dannenburg Ranch labor camp in the Imperial Valley in February 1961, a thousand UPWA pickets striking nearby lettuce fields confronted hundreds of braceros, potential scabs, through a fence topped with barbed wire designed to keep the braceros from escaping. After calling on the braceros to join them, and confronting the local sheriffs who arrived to clear the strikers away, the militants watched as hundreds of braceros jumped out of the scab-herding growers’ trucks and more than a hundred of them climbed the fence in solidarity.

The official UFW approach 'up the loyal Hispanic-American boo the migrant Mexicans' doesn't need celebration.

 

[SpineyNorman]

economic migrants are workers. i doubt even they are celibrating uncritically, but nevertheless, they could be starving without it.

I know - I'm not anti-immigration. But seriously, can this not be discussed on another thread?

 

[audiotech]

What exactly does that lengthy and unattributed cut and paste have to do with what I've been saying?

Yeah, but I wrote and posted that there, so not as you assert. You haven't been saying much as it happens and you're not clear on your position it seems to me.

 

[SpineyNorman]

christ, you are all over the shop. You equate immigration controls with the NHS!!! Wow....Do tell me which controls you support tho, you are bienhg very shy on that one.

Not surprised you want to start a new thread, you're having your arse handed to you on this one.

No, I'm not equating the two. I'm pointing out your four legs good two legs bad idiocy for what it is.

Sorry I'm not as wadical as you belboid, it must be a real disappointment.

The kind of controls I'm in favour of are trade union controls (bourgeois unions though! ) with unions controlling who gets work - not direct border controls but it would clearly have an effect on migration.

New thread is about not derailing this one. Nothing more, nothing less.

 

[SpineyNorman]

Yeah, but I posted that, so not as you assert. You haven't been saying much as it happens and you're not clear on your position it seems to me.

It seems to me that you're not clear on anything much. None of that speaks to anything I've said on this thread. Nothing at all.

 

[audiotech]

Don't you think that xenophobia vs completely open borders is a false dichotomy?

Open borders is an aspiration. Not realistic presently.

 

[seventh bullet]

I have been working for Sainsburys for the past 5 years whilst I was at university doing my BA and my MA, the place has gone downhill rapidly over the past six months as a new manager has come in and has forced out the old team.
I went for a internal job as store trainer recently, and in the interview the hr manager was surprised to find I had two degrees
We have a new dick department manager, who thinks he's something special- been really snotty with me.
I had my performance assessment the other day, and his first words were, "i hear you have just completed a masters degree, I am not an educated man." And so I understood his hostility, he'd been with Sainsburys since leaving school and got to his position through backstabbing, scabbing and brown tonguing all he was worth, yet knew that there was no further he could go, as the company fast tracks graduate trainees into area manager positions.
He saw me as another student who looked down on manual work as somehow beneath me,.
I soon put him right, by showing him I had been a manual worker since before he was born.
And the reason I am better than him is that I am not a snivelling little right wing turd

Supermarket managers are generally cunts, not forgetting the obsequious, two-faced, backstabbing management-wannabe toads in supervisory roles. And I've got five more years' worth of experience than you!

Don't know about your spot, but it's becoming more degree-level oriented for entry into management training, whereas years ago it could be quite easy for those deemed promising and without much in the way of formal qualifications to work their way up to GM level through an internal fast-track program.

 

[sihhi]

christ, you are all over the shop. You equate immigration controls with the NHS!!! Wow....Do tell me which controls you support tho, you are bienhg very shy on that one.

Not surprised you want to start a new thread, you're having your arse handed to you on this one.

There are immigration controls bound up within the NHS. I can't find it but there was a study on Malawian medical workers in Britain something like there are more Malawi nurses with senior qualifications in Manchester (often working as agency or bank nurses) than senior nurses in Mandala, yet the niece of a Malawian nurse working for the NHS can't receive NHS renal medicine because... the ConDems and Labour have been busy saving the British working-class for neoliberalism's open borders or something.

 

[SpineyNorman]

Open borders is an aspiration. Not realistic presently.

Why, then, when this is precisely what I've been saying, did you jump in with a weird general purpose post about how great immigration is for the economy and society in general?

 

[J Ed]

No offence to you, but that's a desperately official history full of oversimplification and distortion

Here is Loren Goldner's review of a recent work:



The official UFW approach 'up the loyal Hispanic-American boo the migrant Mexicans' doesn't need celebration.

I'm not an apologist for Cesar Chavez, he pretty clearly destroyed the UFW because he had some bizarre quasi-religious ideas (reading about the role of The Game in the union is bizarre!) about what a union should be. He had some very, very strange ideas and his ostensible anti-Communism was as much about having an excuse to get rid of people who opposed his bizarre ideas about turning the union into some sort of commune/social movement.

Yes, there was a history of militant agricultural labour in California prior to the end of the bracero programme but it was distinctly unsuccessful, in fact the literature on the subject is pretty unanimous about quite how unsuccessful it was compared with elsewhere in the Western world. Agricultural workers had to wait until 1975 to benefit from legislation equivalent to those given to industrial workers in 1935.

 

[audiotech]

It seems to me that you're not clear on anything much. None of that speaks to anything I've said on this thread. Nothing at all.

I thought I was pretty clear on the issue of migrant workers. Trying to be a clever, to undermine a post I'd made smacks of desperation.

 

[sihhi]

The kind of controls I'm in favour of are trade union controls (bourgeois unions though! ) with unions controlling who gets work - not direct border controls but it would clearly have an effect on migration.

That is basically what an 'open borders' or 'non-borders' position is, provided that unions from both areas agree in the process, and it's not just the more powerful country's union deciding we'll have X temporary workers, without full citizenship rights etc as was the case in Federal Germany.

 

[audiotech]

Why, then, when this is precisely what I've been saying, did you jump in with a weird general purpose post about how great immigration is for the economy and society in general?

Do I need your permission?

 

[Nigel Irritable]

Open borders is part of the process of socialist transformation. If you don't support it you're not a socialist. If on the other hand, you think it's an appropriate demand to raise in current circumstances then you have quite a lot in common with the kind of people who think that proposing worker's militias or soviets makes sense in current circumstances.

Seriously, this is the wrong thread for this. There are many other threads where this has been discussed to death here. Please resurrect one or start a new one rather than starting an endless exchange of set piece arguments here.

 

[SpineyNorman]

That is basically what an 'open borders' or 'non-borders' position is, provided that unions from both areas agree in the process, and it's not just the more powerful country's union deciding we'll have X temporary workers, without full citizenship rights etc as was the case in Federal Germany.

And if people were calling for open borders, with the qualification that the allocation of work would be in the hands of the unions, I'd not have a problem. They're not though - it's an unqualified call for open borders. You have to be careful about this stuff when there's not enough jobs, homes, etc for everyone.

And if that's really the SWP open borders position it might be a good idea for them to tell the membership.

 

[SpineyNorman]

Seriously, this is the wrong thread for this. There are many other threads where this has been discussed to death here. Please resurrect one or start a new one rather than starting an endless exchange of set piece arguments here.

I have been trying!