The working people of England, in fact all over Britain, are raging. This rage is just and well-founded. But it is being misdirected; channelled by the very same people who are benefitting from the destruction of British industry and the privatisation of public services, social housing etc, into essentially meaningless displays of ‘patriotism’.
Imagine the relief in the hearts of these parasites – the billionaires and their corrupt political servants – as they see the direction this rage is taking. The only thing they fear – the righteous anger of those they exploit – is being harmlessly (and at no cost to them) manifested into displays of support for the state!
Many who are now raising the flags of England and Great Britain see themselves as rebels or even revolutionaries, but in reality they are only reinforcing the bonds of their own enslavement.
What should the working class of this country be doing instead? First, we need to acknowledge the economic reality that the British economy depends upon jobs being done which most Britons will avoid if possible. If we were to go into these hard, dirty and often dangerous jobs ourselves, the problem would be solved, but this is unlikely to happen without a serious investment in the pay and conditions for those necessary but under-rewarded tasks.
That leaves us with foreign workers as an economic inevitability. Following Brexit, white Europeans are now less likely to make up large numbers of those workers. Non-European foreign workers will often not be christian, nor white, reinforcing stereotypes about what a ‘migrant’ looks like. Those immediately identifiable as ‘foreign’ by skin colour or religious dress are easily identified as an ‘other’ – a scapegoat.
Modern workers are educated, at least to some degree. We must not allow ourselves to fall for this age-old trick of the ruling class.
Rather, the second thing we must do is, accepting the inevitability of their presence, at least under present economic conditions, and the validity of their humanity, join with the foreign workers along our common, class interests as workers.
This approach would truly be checkmate for our exploiters if it were really implemented and brought to fruition.
Given the relentless decline in our living conditions, the indignation felt by British workers is inevitable and natural, but conditions will not change unless we unite and take, we say again, take power from those whose system has brought about this crisis. Certainly, deporting eager and motivated workers will fix nothing.
We would be remiss not to address directly some of the complaints made by those who have participated in Operation: Raise the Colours, particularly in places like Epping. The question of acculturation, or assimilation, is an important one, but we need to recognise that workers from abroad don’t fail to mix because of a lack of willingness to do so but because the conditions have not been created to allow them to do so.
Free English lessons for new arrivals have been scrapped. The widespread racism in the media and political scapegoating means they are met with hostility, which inevitably leads them to cluster together – striving for some security in numbers and attempting to provide for each other the economic and physical help that wider society will not offer them when they are in need.
If an immigrant commits a crime, s/he should be held accountable to the same standards as any other worker. But we need to recognise that criminals exist in every population, and it is the imperialist ‘something for nothing’ culture combined with imperialist-induced poverty that creates conditions for the luxuriant growth of criminality, not something inherent to the culture or religion of any particular group of workers.
The biggest criminals in our society are the finance capitalist elites, who plunder the globe, engage in every kind of vice and spread degeneracy and corruption wherever they go. It is their system that is at the root cause of all the ills that working people face, and to remove that system from our backs we need unity and organisation.
Since migrant workers are often here to fill poorly-paid, unglamorous jobs, they are bound to settle disproportionately in less affluent, run-down areas. They thus find themselves in neighbourhoods that are bearing the brunt of the ruling class’s destruction of social provision: a lack of decent jobs and social housing; the devastation of health, education and community facilities; the rise of crime, prostitution, gambling, drug addiction, malnutrition and all the other diseases of poverty.
Then state-backed provocateurs are sent into these areas to back up the media narrative that the problems workers face have something to do with “uncontrolled immigration”. They point to the broken roads, the syringe-filled parks, the unsafe streets, the inaccessible GP surgeries, the hospital waiting lists, the excluded schoolchildren-turned-gangsters – real blights on the lives of all who live with them – and then they point to the migrant workers and claim a connection.
A prison in which the prisoners believed themselves to be free would surely be the most secure such institution ever devised.
In a prison of that sort, the only hope the prisoners could ever have of escape to true freedom would not come from demanding that the new inmates should be transferred to a different prison. Escape could only come from finally noticing their chains, breaking them and those of all the other inmates, and charging boldly against the dogs, shields and guns of the wardens.
