…It’s A Black And White Issue
Posted on April 13, 2009
The strapline for the NO2EU nationalist platform in the forthcoming European Parliament elections is …it’s a black and white issue. They really are that stupid, although they are not alone. It is symptomatic of the racist dementia infecting discourse on the rapidly growing right wing of the labour movement, a slide which, unchecked, leads all the way to the Deutsche Arbeitsfront. Instead of fighting against so-called ‘social dumping’ by campaigning for equal rights, representation and fair wages and conditions for all European workers, NO2EU, a front organisation of the National Union of Rail Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), is banging the drum of economic protectionism, nationalism and the ‘sovereign’ rights of states, and supports restrictions on workers according to the passport they hold. NO2EU blames the EU for declining wages and conditions of British workers, while completely ignoring the role of the British boss class in the current capitalist crisis. NO2EU, by seeking to divert blame to the EU, is defending the interests of British capital.
This initiative follows the strike action at the Lindsey Oil Refinery in January and February, demanding ‘British Jobs for British Workers’, which diverted legitimate grievances about unemployment and access to jobs into a nationalist campaign against ‘foreign’ workers. The Socialist Party, to its great credit, intervened and the strike committee agreed to the following demands:
✩ No victimisation of workers taking solidarity action.
✩ All workers in UK to be covered by NAECI Agreement.
✩ Union controlled registering of unemployed and locally skilled union members, with nominating rights as work becomes available.
✩ Government and employer investment in proper training/apprenticeships for new generation of construction workers – fight for a future for young people.
✩ All Immigrant labour to be unionised.
✩ Trade Union assistance for immigrant workers — including interpreters — and access to Trade Union advice – to promote active integrated Trade Union Members.
✩ Build links with construction trade unions on the continent.
The Socialist Party’s intervention was ultimately unsuccessful, as the dispute was eventually settled by the adoption of a nationality-based quota system. There is however, no accounting for their participation as activists in the nationalist NO2EU campaign. Another to divide the working class along national lines is GMB official and hunt follower Andy Newman, who at the time of the Lindsey strike wrote without any apparent embarrassment
[E]nsuring that increased immigration doesn’t disadvantage the indigenous population shoudl [sic] be a socialist demand, along with demanding equality for all — migrant and indigenous.
‘Disadvantage’? His true colours are showing. The demand should be jobs and housing for all. What of people who move, for example, from Hull to Exeter? How are these ‘indigenous migrants’ qualitatively different to ‘immigrants’? Because, according to Newman’s ‘logic’ they do not ‘disadvantage’ the ‘indigenous’ population, it is only ‘immigrants’ who have this special quality. Are we really to believe that, unlike ‘immigrants’, people from Hull don’t require housing and social services? A socialist demand for equality begins with removal of all specious divisions of nationality and ethnicity.
Completing the circle of defence of nation and capital before class, Andy socialism-in-one-county Newman defended UNITE’s disgraceful betrayal of their members, when an entire shift of 850 agency workers at the Cowley Mini car plant was dismissed in February. UNITE officials admitted they had been negotiating with the bosses for weeks, but said nothing to the rank and file — in fact they assured them that they knew nothing of rumoured lay-offs right up to the moment they were sacked and ordered to leave the premises within one hour — because, they said, they feared they might lose their jobs. ‘Sorry mate, more than my job’s worth…’ Again, UNITE officials were doing the bosses’ dirty work and policing the workers. The sacked workers were furious:
We paid the union. It is a corrupt organisation. They gave us one hour’s notice that we are losing our jobs in a credit crisis. If you cannot represent us, we want the money we’ve given to you over the years and pay us back our money. We are going to speak to the media outside, and we are going to tell every newspaper, every newspaper, exactly how you’ve represented us. We asked you yesterday what was our situation, and you said you didn’t know.
Trade union consciousness is formed in the context of the dominant bourgeois, nationalist ideology. For every expression of proletarian internationalism, there are many more expressions of nationalism, sectionalism, and exhortations to put nation before class in defence of the ‘national interest’. The ‘labour aristocracy’ and vulgar Marxists fetishise trade union consciousness as the highest form of proletarian consciousness. Criticism of this nationalist, economist ideology which is thoroughly subordinated to the bourgeois nation state, is denounced by the ‘labour aristocracy’ as ‘ultra-leftist’, or, turning matters completely on their heads, ‘bourgeois’ — because, we are told, the best interests of the workers are served, and can only be served, by subordination to the dictates of the bosses and the nation state. The class collaborationist trade union leaders are not interested in overturning the relations of production that exploit the same workers whose interests the workers pay them to represent. Instead, bloated union officials act as the bosses’ tea-boys and bag-carriers.
It is in the context of the sclerotic degeneration into bourgeois nationalism, ‘ossified reformism’, and the incorporation of the trade union bureaucracies — whose class collaborationist leaders are in the pockets of the bosses, and have subordinated themselves to the interests of capital to secure the continuation of their wealth and privileges as ‘lords of labour’ — into the apparatus of the bourgeois nation state, that the need for ‘spontaneous’ action, in concert with revolutionary proletarian education, arises: to throw off the dead hands of the trade union bureacracies that are holding us down, even as the bosses are strangling us.
