-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Abdo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
(Quoting: Ken)
Someone PLEASE tell me that the paragraphs below are some sort of parody or
sarcasm! I cannot BELIEVE that anyone is putting them forward as a
socialist position!!
(a) In the first place, the whole difference between socialists and narrow
trade-unionists is that we are fighting for the WHOLE working class, NOT the
economic interests of some one section of it. Of course "every nation's
working class" is encouraged by capitalism to engage in a cut-throat
struggle with every other nation's working class to keep OUR wages high by
keeping THEIR wages low. We are supposed to be FIGHTING this reality, not
EMBRACING IT.
If you are going to say that it's ok for U.S. workers to fight to keep
Mexican workers out of the US because they might "depress our wages", then
you might as well argue that the Nazis and Klan are being progressive when
they try to keep Mexicans and Blacks out of some particular industry or
plant WITHIN the U.S. because they might work for less and depress the white
workers' wages.
For that matter you might as well argue that it's in the interest of the
working class of the U.S. to go and wage imperialist war against an
oil-producing nation so we can have cheap gasoline.
Or that apartheid was progressive from the point of view of socialist South
African whites. SERIOUSLY. It's the same thing. You're making Mexico into
a Bantustan.
(b) In the second place, trying to avoid the depression of U.S. workers
wages by building a fence along the Mexican border is NOT WORKING. It's a
dead-end failed strategy, because the capitalists have complete freedom to
move their capital and commodities across all the borders in any direction.
The Mexican workers are going to be employed by the capitalists one way or
the other. If they don't come to the U.S. and "depress wages", if that's
what you're afraid of, then they will work in a maquiladora plant in Mexico
and "depress wages" when the U.S. plant is closed or threatened to be
closed. It's a global economy, damn it! Within the global capitalist wage
market, U.S. workers and Mexican workers are in competition with each other
regardless of what you or God or Ross Perot want to say about it.
The capitalists are going to exploit Mexican workers either here or in
Mexico, and they don't much care which. But given the choice, most of them
would RATHER imprison them in Mexico, because that makes their whole racist
strategy of division work better.
(c) Getting back to the narrow interests of the U.S. working class for a
minute, I don't know how things are where you are, but here in Chicago there
are more Latino workers in manufacturing than EITHER Blacks or whites. Do
you want to come out here to a plant gate and try to tell the workers how La
Migra is working in their interest as U.S. workers?
(d) I can't let this reference to the "indigenous working class" pass. Are
you really arguing in the interest of the Dine and Mohawk and Cherokee
workers here?
(e) If immigrant workers are "unorganized", the thing for labor to do is to
get the hell busy and organize them. But in fact my experience is that
immigrants from Mexico have MORE class-consciousness and even MORE
experience with labor organizing than U.S.-born workers.
I know that back in 1905 or so there were some early socialists who were
writing this way, for example in California, trying to exclude Chinese
workers from the U.S. But I was hoping this national-socialist line had
gone extinct.
I know I have plunged into this argument in the middle, and maybe I'm
missing some nuance of it, but I would do the same thing if I heard two
people arguing about it on the street corner. It's just too important an
issue.
Lou Paulsen
Chicago
>Tony, As many times as you and I have had this out, I cannot believe
>that you cannot see the issue from the socialist perspective, which is
>not, I repeat, as you present it. So long as capitalism exists, that is,
>so long as labor is considered a marketable commodity, the self-interest
>of EVERY nation's working class consists of doing whatever is necessary
>to uphold a reasonable price for the commodity of labor power. Yes,
>certainly, we as socialists look beyond this to a happier day when labor
>will no longer be commodified, but will be the master of capital. IN THE
>MEAN WHILE, however, we use such tactics as collective bargaining to
>keep the price of labor above the subsistence level. When unskilled
>foreign labor, with the unconscionable goad of the employer's sword of
>Damocles (turning them in to the INS if they begin to militate for
>better wages or conditions, especially in sweatshop situations), and in
>any case being willing (perforce) to work under nonuninon conditions
>that ! UNDERMINE the historic gains of organized labor, it is
>deleterious to the interests of the indigenous working class. This is
>all a given.
>You are quite right that leftists must repect and support equal rights
>for immigrant labor and indigenous labor. This is one way of
>countervailing the "two-tier" approach of the capitalists. But it is one
>thing to support the rights of existing immigrant labor (whether "legal"
>or not), and quite another to advocate the elimination of immigration
>restrictions. These restrictions, if well enforced, serve as a prop on
>the price of human labor power for all those in the US labor market. The
>massive influx of unskilled labor, occasioned by the inevitable impact
>of your policy proposal, would lead to an immediate and irreversible
>depression of wages in the United States, and this would not bode well
>for the future of labor, and hence for socialist advance. You really
>need to rethink your position on this question. Marx said that we cannot
>entirely put a brake on the pauperization of the proletariat, but could
>put an effective brake on the process through organization of labor.!
>The importation of masses of unskilled labor would take away even that
>thin reed on which the working class is able to lean for support.
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