Victoria's Mumbai Cook

An excerpt from "The Culture of Xenophilia" at http://candobetter.org/node/369

In the last century and a half another bold challenge was mounted to re-order our natural affinities. Christian universalism and the rootless cosmopolitanism that was world Jewry found a rival in Marxism. In 1848 Karl Marx told the workers of the world to unite. Incredibly that call is still heard today, albeit among sometimes obscure factions. The Socialist Party of Tampa Bay declared in its 2007 platform, “working people have no country, but rather an international bond based on class.” A canvass of similar groups across Anglo-America would not necessarily reveal such blatant indifference to national interests, but nevertheless take up open immigration and refugee positions and support blanket amnesty for illegal aliens.

Socialist writer Tom Lewis explains “Socialists are internationalists. Whereas nationalists believe that the world is divided primarily into different nationalities, socialists consider class to be the primary divide. For socialists, class struggle---not national identity—is the motor of history. And capitalism creates an international working class that must fight back against an international capitalist class.”

What is critical to the understanding of the Marxist attitude to nationalism is that it takes an entirely pragmatic approach. Marx drew a distinction between good and bad nationalism. “The nationalism of the workers belonging to an oppressor nation binds them to their rulers and only does harm to themselves, while the nationalism of an oppressed nation can lead them to fight back against these rulers.” Thus Marx favoured Irish nationalism, but not English. He opposed the national movements of the Southern Slavs, but supported the Indian rebellion against the British. Lenin warned that “workers who place political unity with their ‘own’ bourgeoisie above the complete unity of the proletariat of all the nations, are acting against their own interests.” To do so, to fall victim to nationalist affections, was to evidence “false consciousness”, an inability to recognize those interests, interpreted of course by party cadres.

Australian political scientist Frank Salter had this to say about the socialist attitude to nationalism. “The Left, as it has evolved over the course of the previous century, looks down on the ordinary people with their inarticulate parochialisms as if they were members of another species…since they care nothing for the preservation of national communities. Ethnies are considered irrelevant to the welfare of people in general. It would be understandable to Martians to be so detached from particular loyalties. But it is disturbing to humans doing so, especially humans who identify with the Left.”

Such is the European Left’s identification with the Other at the expense of the resident national that, in the name of anti-racism, it was possible for left-wing novelist Umberto Eco to declare his hope that Europe would be swamped by Africans and third world emigrants just so to “demoralize” racists. And such is the identification of the AFL-CIO with 13 million illegal immigrants as potential recruits that it supports amnesty and essentially a corporate welfare program that reduces wages for the lowest of American workers. A scheme which advocates call “liberalism” but American workers call an invasion. The Canadian Labour Congress (Edgar Bergen) and its social-democratic parliamentary arm, the NDP (Charlie McCarthy), sing the same tune. Crocodile tears are shed for “undocumented” workers who allegedly make great contributions to the economy, according to their hire-a-left-wing-think-tank. But Statistics Canada’s conclusions are the same as those of Dr. Borjias are for American workers. The British Trade Union Congress tried to put one over on the public with a September 2007 report cooked up by the left-wing Institute for Public Policy Research that maintained that amnesty for illegal immigrants would net the Treasury 1 billion pounds annually. More careful analysis revealed that amnesty would cost British taxpayers up to 1.8 billion pounds a year.

This Marxist legacy of international solidarity to the disavowal of national loyalties persists to the present sometimes in unalloyed form but more often as one strand in a synthesis of muddled xenophilia with Christian and environmental thought. The latter mutation is expressed in the Canadian argument that since global warming is a global problem requiring global cooperation, to obtain this cooperation we must not send out unfriendly messages of “fear” by closing our borders, but drop them instead. Presumably a radically downward adjustment in consumption habits and greener technology will compensate for all the extra millions who would swarm in. Instead of “workers of the world unite” the Greens offer us a new rallying cry: “More and more people, consuming less and less.”

But just as Christian thought is not monolithic, neither is social democratic thought. Arguably the most famous and independent socialist intellectual of the English speaking world, George Orwell, once remarked that “in all countries, the poor are more national than the rich.” Bukharin was wrong. For the working class, national identity was just as important as class identity. And now finally, after their constituents have been battered by one of the greatest migratory waves in history, that saw the United States for example import the equivalent of three New Jerseys in the 1990s alone (25 million people), maverick social-democratic and socialist leaders in the tradition of Victor Berger, or Jack London or Canada’s J. S. Woodsworth are staking out a claim for national, as opposed to international, solidarity.

The Democratic Socialist Senator of Vermont, Bernie Sanders, has begun to make some noise about the disaster that is the illegal immigration invasion in the United States. His voting record in reducing chain migration, fighting amnesty and unnecessary visas rates B-, B- and A+ respectively from Americans for Better Immigration. Former Social Democratic Chancellor Helmut Schmidt now admits that immigration under his administration was excessive and damaging to Germany. In a book published in 1982 he confessed that “with idealistic intentions, born out of our experiences with the Third Reich, we brought in far too many foreigners.” Dutch Socialist leader Jan Marijnissen is strongly opposed to the practice of importing East European workers to undermine the position of Dutch workers. East Europeans are hired as “independent contractors” to circumvent labour law. Marijnissen wrote “It is unacceptable that employers pay foreign workers 3 euros per hour and have them live in chicken coops as if they were in competition in the 19th century of Dickens. The unfair competition and displacement of Dutch workers and small business is intolerable. Therefore we shouldn’t open the borders further, but set limits instead.”

Former Labor Premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr, also argued for the acknowledgement of limits. Along with fellow Labor MP Barry Cohen he has joined Australia’s leading environmentalists Dr. Tim Flannery and Dr. Ian Lowe in exposing the myth of Australia as being a big empty land begging to filled up with people. “Our rivers, our soils, our vegetation, won’t allow that to happen without enormous cost to us and those who follow us.” He calls for severe immigration cut-backs and a population policy.

In 1970 I signed and supported the notorious "Waffle Manifesto" which urged that the NDP---Canada's social democratic party---return to its socialist roots with a commitment to reclaim our economy and culture from the American Empire and reject further integration into the global economy. Trotskyists and right wing commentators made common cause by accusing us of "nationalism", which to their minds conjured up sordid images of death camps and wars of aggression. Leading socialist economist and expatriate American Mel Watkins --a key force behind the Manifesto--- retorted with a famous response that became our rallying cry: "The road of Canadian nationalism does not lead to Auschwitz. It only leads away from Washington." Amen.