Eamon Dyas

As far as I see it the issue here isn’t about how racism or anti-racism explains these incidents. The issue is how European capitalism has come to rely on immigration both to feed its labour as well as its population needs in a situation where a sense of nationality continues to be the most cohesive element around which society organises itself. 

It’s that same sense of nationality that is now being appealed to in order to save us from the Russians and the Chinese. 

European states, whether inside or outside the EU are now having to confront the outcome of their attempts to encourage immigration as a component of their free-market concept of capitalism. That encouragement of immigration initially served those European states where capitalism had been long established and it did so through the free movement of labour from the cheap and well-trained labour reserves of the post-Soviet bloc countries to those older European states. 

But it was only a matter of time before those labour-supplying states developed economically to where they were no longer providing such cheap labour but were in fact attracting their previous emigrants back home (I personally know a Polish family that moved back to Poland last year after living in the UK for decades).

At that point we saw an acceleration in immigration from further afield and that immigration, encouraged by the destabilisation of societies through western military aggression (Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya and others), introduced a new and more alien non-European element into the hearts of European states. It’s that alien element coming in such numbers that has tipped the balance between what European capitalism needs in terms of cheap and reproductive labour and what it requires by way of stable societies that it is now finding difficult to sustain. 

This is because a sense of nationality remains the only means by which a society can still display any level of stable coherence in its widest form. 

We are now witnessing the failure of a political policy for a capitalism that is based on continuing access to cheap labour to sustain it. Because that policy is compelled to operate inside societies that of necessity require stability and because that stability requires it possessing a sense of “them and us” the strains are beginning to threaten the existing EU model for capitalism. 

That policy has also been the means by which ever higher dividends could be paid to investors. This has lent itself to a situation where instead of increasing investment in equipment as a means of maintaining competitiveness European businesses have tended to be cosseted by those cheap labour policies. And they now complain about the low productivity of European labour! While that may not have had such a negative impact on the service and hospitality sectors it is proving disastrous for the manufacturing sector – a sector already hard hit by the insane policies of European politicians towards Russia. 

It’s difficult to see how this descent into chaos can be easily mitigated as there is no evidence that the political leaders of the EU have learned anything – we already see growing calls from European leaders to make it easier for more new members to be accommodated – more cheap labour. 

In the meantime, it makes no sense for the Left to continue to frame the incidents like the Nowak one or the Belfast one in terms of the racism/anti-racism framework as it reduces politics to a far too simplistic moral argument in which working class communities always end up being depicted as the “deplorables”. 

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Note by Bill McClinton

There has been a growing frustration at the lower end of the class divide for years, it has no political representation to speak of and no ideology as such, but has a feeling their problems don’t matter and they are now competing with migrants.