Date: Wed, 06 Feb 2002 01:13:42 +1100
Subject: Re: AUT: Putting Negri to the Test (My Response)


You asked for criticism...


On 2/6/02 12:13 AM, "Scott Hamilton" <s_h_hamilton-AT-yahoo.com> wrote:


> 
> The protests over Australian detention camps are
> obviously becoming a major issue, yet I think they are
> unlikely to mobilise large numbers of Australians and
> NZers at present. So far, they seem confined to
> prisoners themselves and to seasoned activists. The
> recent sight of both Howard and Beazley taking a hard
> electoral line on the 'refugee' issue surely signals
> that a large chunk of the Australian working class
> sits on the wrong side of the fence on this issue.


I don't know if they were working class or not, but at the last Sydney demo
there were hundreds of people I had never seen at protests before. It was a
real mums and dads crowd. Seasoned activists, in fact, seemed to have stayed
away for some weird reason.

> 
> I think it is up to the radical left to raise demands
> and sponsor tactics that make this issue more likely
> to mobilise large numbers of working class
> Australasians.

In all fairness, the best way to do that right now is to spout racist abuse.
89% of Australians support the current policy, and surely many of them do so
informedly. This sort of tactics (doing what will mobilise loads of people
easily) have worked wonders for the Liberals. It is precisely what we should
not do. 

> The prisoners obviously do not have the
> ability to do this, and liberal protesters seem to
> look to the moral persuasion of politicians rather
> than mass class-based action to achieve their ends.

What exactly is the opposition meant to be here? Class and principles?

Many people make the point that the refugees issue is actually one of
solidarity - they just don't usually phrase this in terms of the
equalization of rewards for labour across countries. (Which is a really
weird way of putting it)

> 
> It seems to me that it will be very difficult to make
> action on this issue attractive to Australasian
> workers because these workers benefit in measurable
> ways from the maintenance of the sort of border
> controls Howard and Clark uphold.

How are such benefits measurable? What is the comparison? How do you know it
is the labor controls? (This isn't a rhetorical question, by the way)

>I think that many of
> these workers correctly feel that the price their
> labour fetches and the social infrastructure they
> enjoy would be damaged a good deal by the sort of
> influx of foreign workers the abolition or even
> liberalisation of border controls would create.

Well, this is just a repeat of the unions' argument about trade
liberalisation except run with labour mobility instead of capital mobility.

In actual fact wages are pretty much independent of immigration, at least in
Australia. Since the war the relationship has in fact been the opposite of
what you suggest: the period of most intense migration also saw the most
intense wage increases.

You shouldn't take the simple supply-and-demand picture of wages as your
guide. There are all sorts of complicating factors.  There is boost to
demand of goods as well as an increase in workers taking part in the process
of manufacturing. Whether this is all harmonious is a to large extent a
matter of policy.

Historically, migrants have gotten lower pay. This has ensued all sorts of
fights, and extremely racist verbiage, specially in Australia. Note, for
instance, the nearly forgotten episode with the expulsion of the Kanakas, or
indentured Islander labourers. But is  this the only way migration can take
place? The huge numbers of English backpackers working in pubs does not seem
to wreck wages there, or at least you don't hear many people complain about
that. That is the only large-scale illegal migrant working population in
Australia, other than fruitpickers (who are screwed wherever and whomever
they are). Legal migrants cannot be paid less than their Australian
equivalents as a matter of law.



> 
> Now, I don't for a moment want to argue that this fact
> makes the demand for open borders for workers a bad
> one;

No, but it is silly mistake that unescessarily makes your argument appear
irrational - why should workers opt to ruin their own wages? Ironically, the
answer seems to be that they should make a principled moral stand...

> nor do I want to deny that the greater objective
> interests of Australasian workers lie with their
> Indonesian and Afghan cousins, rather than their
> Australasian bosses.

What if the cake was cut equitably and the Australians ended up with less
than they have now?

While I agree with you, this is a terrible argument. You are hanging
yourself on a bunch of maybes.

>What I'm suggesting is that we
> have to build into the way we campaign for open
> borders an awareness of the basis for anti-immigrant
> sentiment amongst the Australasians we are trying to
> reach. Here are some thoughts to that end:
> 
> 
> - We need to argue against the distinction between
> 'refugee' and 'economic migrant', a distinction which
> replicates the liberal distncing of politics from
> economics. All those who seek to penetrate borders are
> driven ultimately by economic forces - why should
> political persecution trump hunger as a reason for
> refuge? I understand, as well, that many governments
> are tightening the arbitrary distinction between
> refugees and economic migrants, to make it even more
> difficult for migrants to place themselves in the
> former category. 

If what you said before is true, this should make no difference to Mr and
Mrs. Working Class, who would still loose out from being nice. And that is
what you are in fact suggesting: to broaden the scope of "refugee" to
include economic refugees, and hope that the working class will make a
principled stand...

> 
> - We should draw a class line across this issue by
> pointedly not supporting the right of capitalists to
> make use of open borders. We can back this position by
> inverting the bourgeois argument that the rich should
> be allowed special travel and immigration privileges -
> to buy passports, for instance - because they are
> 'wealth creators'.

Hmm. Where does that leave well-off Iraqis and Afghans who claim asylum?

My taxi driver today was this guy who was a policeman for the Shah of Iran.
He was no friend of the working class. He loves the Shah. Still, I am glad
he is not dead. He is very interesting to talk to.

There is no moral difference between saying what you are saying, and taking
a gun to my taxi driver's head and shooting him dead.

> 
> - Opposition to border controls needs to coupled
> wherever possible with support for open access for
> Australasian workers to countries from which they are
> excluded. For instance, we can liken the right of,
> say, a Tongan worker to come to NZ and receive
> state-funded help assistance s/he needs to the
> now-vanished right of a NZ worker to get the same in
> Australia.

How is this going to win any friends? If anything this sort of privileges
enhance the racist character of our migration regimes: we end up with fifty
odd thousand sans papiers from England who are more or less ignored, while
the darkies get locked up.

There is a racism issue here you can't get around.

> 
> - We have to target 'immigrant' or 'recently-settled'
> communities before the rest of the population, when we
> seek to spread the protests. After all, the working
> class and poor members of these communities are likely
> to lack some of to the anti-immigrant interests that
> the wider working class has, or at least to have a
> strong subjective opposition to the repression of
> migrants which can act as a counter to such interests.

This is nonsese. There is fierce anti-imigrant sentiment amongst migrant
communities, at least here in Sydney. This is linked to the sentiment that
"we did it tought" and these guys should not get it easy. Many Vietnamese
boatpeople here in Western Sydney are fiercely opposed to boatpeople. It's
got something to do with the full-on right wing streak in their community.

Try convincing Australian Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants that the
solution to the racism which they experience is Communism.

> 
> 
> 
> - We should be aware that the demand for open borders
> cannot be satisfied within the bounds of capitalism in
> Australasia. Arguing for it with 'reasonable' claims
> that adapt to capitalist ideology - with the argument
> that immigrants are 'good for the economy' for
> instance - is useless as well as unprincipled. The
> liberals will not come with us on this one.
>

It is no more useless and no more unprincipled than the claim they are bad
for the economy. And it's not false.

This is totally appalling. Immigrants ARE good or at least neutral for the
economy, the 89% of Australians who think they are not are simply wrong, and
your pandering to their stupidity is precisely the same as what the Liberals
are doing.

 
> - We need to concretise the (at the moment) somewhat
> abstract open borders demand by linking it to short
> term demands like, say, those for the closure of
> facilities like Woomera (I suppose this point is
> fairly obvious)

So, on the one hand you slander anyone who suggests migrants might be good
as "unprincipled" then you turn around and ask for the absurd claim that
"Woomera be closed" - meaning, that a nicer camp be built somewhere else.
This close-Woomera stuff is rubbish. It is not the appalling conditions of
the prisoners that makes the policy of jailing people for moving around
abominable. Were they confined in the Hyatt, it would still be wrong.

Of all lame reformist suggestions lately, you had to choose the silliest.
Honestly, it's worse than the women-and-children-first, which would at least
have the tactical merit of destabilizing the system with family reunion
claims. "Close Woomera" is just the hope that the dissent will go away
somehow.

> 
> 
> Any additions, criticisms to these suggestions?
> 
> 
> Cheers
> Scott
>



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