SonicG » Thu Jul 07, 2016 2:54 am wrote:Should a slender majority rule?
As I said, apparently everyone wants that it shouldn't.
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SonicG » Thu Jul 07, 2016 2:54 am wrote:Should a slender majority rule?
zangtang » Thu Jul 07, 2016 11:13 am wrote:put your side over side of the boat.........
no apologies - do not ask - you will wi8llol not get
NOW IS EVERYBODY ON THE SAME FUCKING PAGE ?
Britain is obsessed with immigration; nastily obsessed. The vote to leave the European Union was, it’s now solemnly agreed, really a vote on open borders and freedom of movement. Apocryphal tales of people voting Leave because they thought it meant that all the migrants would be made to leave; more concrete, more harrowing instances of bigotry that have nothing to do with European migration law: assaults and attacks on black Americans and British Muslims, people who weren’t covered by any of the referendum’s overt content, but who carried the physical marks that signal migration. What does it actually mean when people talk about free movement, about unrestricted mass migration, about all these foreigners coming in?
This is racism, but racism doesn’t emerge from a void; it’s generated and policed by the general discourses in a society. As everyone knows, the strongest opposition to migration comes from those places that have seen the fewest migrants. Study after study has shown that immigration doesn’t actually lead to unemployment, that it doesn’t actually drive down wages for British workers, that it doesn’t actually lead to spikes in crime, that it doesn’t actually put strains on public services, that it doesn’t actually tear apart the mythically organic communities that once existed when everyone was happily identical. Which should be obvious – who’s more likely to be ruining your life, the state and the capitalist classes, or the Romanian next door? Liberals are anxious to insist that it’s perfectly reasonable to have concerns about immigration, but it’s not at all reasonable; the demand that these concerns be heard is just a way of forbidding any discussion of what’s actually causing poverty and immiseration.
...We have found ourselves in an utterly absurd situation, where strata of signification collide. In its negotiations to exit the European Union, the British government will almost certainly try to end the free movement of people. As various European dignitaries have insisted, this idea is a non-starter; participation in the common market absolutely requires free movement, and if it can’t maintain free trade with Europe, Britain is headed for an economic disaster. But aren’t we desperate for disaster? The voters spoke very clearly, in their referendum on Europe that wasn’t really a referendum on Europe; when they said to leave the EU what they really meant was end free movement, and the public simply won’t accept any deal in which it continues. This is the problem with taking policy as a signifier – somewhere along the endless chains of reference you have to halt and actually make policy. Our policy is to end free movement: people were unhappy about the drudgery and uselessness of social life, and the ruling classes encouraged them to call that miserable situation ‘immigration’; now, to fix the situation, the same ruling class is proposing to actually end immigration. The politicians have decided that Europe means immigration, but immigration only means itself. It’d be hard to imagine a more ridiculous outcome; it’s as if someone in a restaurant was unhappy with the food, and the manager tried to fix things by tearing up the menu.
And it’s incredibly dangerous. Say we do scrap free movement – what then? When things don’t improve, when things get worse, when people get poorer and the world bleaker and the sky greyer than ever before, will the papers and the politicians throw their hands up and admit: yeah, OK, we lied, it wasn’t migration that was ruining your life, it was us, we did it? When a lie starts to have terrible consequences, the instinct is usually to double down, to keep on insisting on it out of sheer desperate doggedness. Once the borders close, that won’t be the end of it, it can only be the first stage in an constantly intensifying war against the migrants who, in their powerlessness, caused everything bad that’s ever happened. First an end to free movement, then mandatory registration and identification of all foreign-born individuals, then vast prison camps sitting squat and dismal among the fallow fields of the English countryside.
The left must defend free movement, but without illusions. The free movement of people within the European Union is not a humanitarian gesture, and it’s not dissociable from the free movement of goods and the free movement of capital; together these three form a single exploitative apparatus. It’s free only insofar as anything in capitalism is free, freedom as an abstract property possessed only by those things that are not human, a free movement of unfree people. And the space in which this free movement takes place is cloistered and barricaded, ringed with death and razor wire. There’s no free movement of people for the thousands drowning in the Mediterranean, for the people making the heroic trek from one side of Europe to the other, hounded at every point by cops and fascists, or for those detained, denied, and deported by the countries where they seek refuge. We shouldn’t defend free movement as practiced in Europe because it’s in any way a good thing, but because in the British political climate affirming free movement is the condition of possibility of any worthwhile socialist project.
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