It is necessary to criticise Jeremy Corbyn’s recent comments on immigration, which are not only a problem in themselves but indicative of a general direction of the project, particularly, but not only, when it comes to immigration, which needs to be resisted. What is wrong with Corbyn’s remarks is a quite deliberate bad faith where a technical point about the Posted Workers’ Directive is allowed to slide into implying a more general position whereby migrant workers are held to undermine working conditions. The point then is that Corbyn’s clumsy phrasing was not an accident, not a failure of expression but entirely intentional. It is not to excuse Corbyn to say that the remarks were clumsy, anything but. The clumsy expression is an attempt to resolve a contradiction around electoral appeal that cannot be resolved honestly, at least on this terrain.

The necessary criticism of these remarks is not abstract; it not made in abstraction from the situation. Moreover, writing as a strong, if not uncritical, supporter of the Labour leadership, it is necessary to both address and to claim responsibility for the project. This criticism is the necessary, but by itself insufficient, means of opening up the situation in terms of its contradictions and the forces involved so that ways can be found to work on and through these contradictions to exert useful pressure for better positions and oppose a wider slide towards a conformism, timidity and lack of thought that will, in the long-run, prove disastrous for the project.

To summarise the situation, a politician who has been one the very, very few consistent defenders of the rights of migrants (and this is not to exculpate, it is both necessary to be clear about this to grasp the situation and to be clear that Corbyn more than almost anyone should know better) is now, as Labour leader, taking up a position that, at the very least, reproduces beliefs about migrants that are a) false, b) reactionary, mystifying and potentially dangerous. This positioning, moreover, is not an isolated incident, it is a development and worsening of positions that were latent before. Corbyn’s statement, moreover, does nothing to challenge the attitudes which produce the increasing number of violent racist attacks, and, if anything, actively impedes the development of solidarity between migrant and non-migrant workers which is the only real basis for struggle against exploitation, including, but not only, the forms of exploitation which Corbyn’s words at least admit the interpretation that he feels migrant workers could be to blame for.

Corbyn’s remarks, however, are not Powellism, though Labour has plenty of that, notably from Rachel Reeves and Andy Burnham, neither are they on the shores of fascism, as with Stephen Kinnock’s, probably deployment of a Vichy slogan. They are, however, wrong and the integration of “left” arguments into an anti-migrant position is potentially dangerous in its mystification and its tying of arguments against the free movement of capital to arguments against the free movement of people at exactly the point when these must be disarticulated. How then have we got to this situation? Is there anything to be done to reverse this direction of travel?

Compromises (and worse) with the Old Labour Right

A significant part of Corbyn’s acceptance of these positions is due to compromise with the Old Labour Right, this is notable in the manifesto, not only on immigration, but also on policing as well as on foreign and defence policy. The statement, “when the UK leaves the EU, freedom of movement will end”, has something of the bad faith of the recent comments comments. However, these compromises are only part of understanding Corbynism’s slippages on immigration. These slippages also come from certain of Corbynism’s own, at first latent, now increasingly clear, tendencies, and, indeed, it is these tendencies that have made compromise with the restricted class politics of the Old Labour Right possible, and even attractive, to some on the left.

Notably, these are not compromises with the Blairite, modernising right, who have, now, begrudgingly, come to accept Freedom of Movement as the price for Free Market membership. Indeed, one factor behind the ease of Corbynism’s compromises with the Old Labour Right’s restricted and mystified class politics arguments against immigration, is a shared opposition to Blairism and a shared anti-liberalism. There is a correct dismissiveness of the begrudging acceptance of FoM to secure the interests of capital. This is both in terms of the market free market membership gives access to and in terms of locking the UK economy into neoliberal discipline and of the limited middle class cosmopolitanism both by geography (to Europe, perhaps only Western Europe) and scope (largely to a personal identity based on consumption preferences, which further limits the Western Europe that is the object, and only the object of this cosmopolitanism) that goes hand in hand with the assertion of these interests. Furthermore, there is a recoil from the way in which arguments and Parliamentary tactics in support of FoM have been deployed against the Labour leadership. Finally, most significantly, EU FoM is limited, not only for EU citizens, with EU nationals who are rough sleeping regularly deported, but, even more importantly, it is, of course, limited to EU nationals. When the Mediterranean is a graveyard for thousands of Africans, an unequivocal defence of EU FoM is a bad joke. However, none of this should have weakened the left’s resolve to defend EU FoM, not uncritically- that is not without grasping what and who it excludes- and not as a means to secure capitalist integration, but because our internationalism, an internationalism of all people not capital, unconditionally requires resistance, at the absolute least, to any new border restrictions. Moreover, whilst free market membership requires FoM (and depends on negotiations with the EU), the reverse is not true, Corbyn and Labour’s position could (and should) be to maintain FoM, irrespective of EU negotiations over the single market.

This limited cosmopolitanism is a significant continuation of the shallow, modernising cosmopolitanism of the Blair years, where no contradiction is experienced between freedom of movement for capital and EU citizens, on the one hand, and Yarl’s Wood, and Islamophobia at both home and abroad, on the other, what Sivandanan describes as “the combined ‘war’ on asylum and on terror”. ¹. Notably too, for the analysis of the shallow cosmopolitanism of Blair and Blairism, part of Sivandanan’s important formulation of xeno-racism involves it being “a racism of global capital”. ²

The politics, and particularly the restricted class politics, of the Old Labour Right, or of right-wing labourism, or of the usually dominant tendencies in social democratic reformism in an imperial core state like the UK, have tended towards strict controls on immigration since the 1960s. These policies on immigration are grounded in the limited class politics of this, often dominant, section of Labour, and overlap with earlier positions on imperialism, expressed most clearly and usefully by George Padmore,

While genuine Socialists within the Labour Party may look upon it as the instrument for bringing about a fundamental transformation of the existing social order, the Trade Union leaders certainly have no such illusions. They have never really been converted to the Socialist objective, even though they have given lip-service to it. Their outlook is purely economic, and they have used their positions in the Labour Party to impose their aims. These aims have been to wring concessions from the ruling class, and they have come progressively to the point of view that if the capitalist class is to be in a position to accede their economic demands, that class must have their support whenever its position is threatened. The result has been that whenever British Capitalist-Imperialism is faced with a crisis, the Trade Union bosses have not utilised that crisis to forward the supposed Socialist aims of the Party, but rather they have joined forces with the capitalist class to resolve the crisis.

The central question to whether better can be expected and struggled for over, in this case, immigration, is whether this tendency encompasses the whole labour movement, or if there are counter-tendencies and contradictions to work on. For Padmore, there do exist genuine socialist and anti-imperialist forces within the Party, who, along with those outside could be rallied, “round a programme of action that will inspire the masses and imbue them with confidence in themselves”. As a version of this debate continued into the late 1950s and 1960s, the question around the limits of who was encompassed by the labour movement and the relation between this limit and the limit of its political and social power, even in his influential and optimistic formulation that the labour movement is a remarkable creative achievement, Raymond Williams noted it was complicated “by the fact that England’s position as an imperial power has tended to limit the sense of community to national (and, in this context, imperialist) lines” ³. Perry Anderson, broadly rejected the optimism of this formulation describing the labour movement as having an “inmovable corporate class consciousness”, which, he goes on to define by contrast with a hegemonic class.

If a hegemonic class can be defined as one which imposes its own ends and its own vision on society as a whole, a corporate class is conversely one which pursues its own ends within a social totality whose global determination lies outside it. A hegemonic class seeks to transform society in its own image, inventing afresh its economic system, its political institutions, its cultural values, its whole ‘mode of insertion’ into the world. A corporate class seeks to defend and improve its own position within a social order accepted as given.”.

Beginning under Wilson, these issues came to bear specifically on questions of immigration through forms of state racism both drawing upon and implicating the Trade Union leadership. As Sivandanan argues, by the time of the Callaghan government, state racism, embodied in immigration acts,

Had atomised the working class and created hierarchies within it based on race and nationality to make conflicting sectional interests assume greater significance than the interest of the class as a whole. It had combined with the trade union aristocracy to reduce the political struggle of the labour movement to its bare economic essentials – degraded the struggle to overthrow the system to the struggle to be well off within it - and in the process had weaned the trade unions from the concerns of the labour movement to the concerns of government.⁴

Following both Anderson and Padmore, this weaning of the trade unions from the concerns of the labour movement was only possible on the basis of certain tendencies already present in the labour movement, which already predisposed it to subordination to the state. The legacy of these arguments whereby an acceptance of a subordinate position, an inability to further general working class interest, is linked to a racist (and often sexist) sectionalism that advances (or, in conditions like today’s, attempts to defend) the narrowly defined interests of a section of the working class, which is held to be the whole, is seen today in the carping that the left are out of touch with traditional working class supporters, that Corbynism has, wrongly, partially endorsed. Racism, then, is a key part of the integration of (parts of - but parts which are held to stand for the whole) the working class into the British state and capital. This is not only, as Padmore argues, in terms of imperialism, but also in immigration legislation- the two, indeed, are intimately, linked, with Sivandanan consistentely arguing both in theory and oppositional struggle for the links between racism and imperialism and between racial oppression and class exploitation.⁵

Corbynism’s Counter-tendencies?

In a fairly clear way, Len McCluskey’s politics represent the left edge of this politics, and in a less clear way, Paul Mason’s seemingly idiosyncratic fusion of left economics with military adventurism, politicisation (that is the accepting the dominant form of politicisation) of security and opposition to FoM should be seen as part of the form of politics that is at the leftward edge of a traditional, corporatist class politics. Despite Corbynite figures like Mason and McCluskey being firmly situated within a tradition that could be described as the left wing of the Old Labour Right or left labourism, parts of the tradition Corbyn inherits is external to these limits. It is the tradition E. P. Thompson deploys in “The Peculiarities of the English”, to argue that the English left is not as closed off, unimaginative and tied to imperialism and racism as Nairn and Anderson imagine. This is a tradition where the boundaries of ethical concern, solidarity and legitimate political action go beyond Britain’s borders and beyond the labour aristocracy. It is the tradition of the radical, anti-imperialist liberalism of J. A. Hobson (this is not, however, to say Hobson is beyond criticism, he certainly is not, but that a certain stubborn radical liberalism is at least as much part of Corbyn’s formation as a labourism contently trapped within national boundaries), and of socialist peace campaigns. The latter tradition, which Thompson points out both against Anderson and against the Labour Right who would identify all internationalism with middle-class politics, with working class roots- with

the temporary triumph of CND at Labour’s Annual Conference in 1960…not (as Nairn has it) as a “miracle” but as the authentic expression of a tradition, deeply rooted, not only in an intelligentsia but in the trade unions and constituency parties.

Labourism and the limited trade union consciousness critiqued by Padmore, does not exhaust the labour movement. This tradition, however, has often been marginal, and often mostly, but not only, able to operate on the level of moral persuasion. It is a tradition which has consistently accepted its subordination (it is a subordinate tendency within a subordinate form of politics), and whose major achievements have been, as Ralph Miliband argues, “to prevent the Labour leadership from giving way completely to its inclinations; and, given the nature of these inclinations, this is something of great consequence”. A further aspect of this when it comes to immigration has been Labour’s tendency to adopt draconian immigration policies coupled with conscience appeasing but often deeply limited anti-racist laws ⁶. Indeed, even as far back as 1944, Padmore noted this tendency with there being genuine socialists in Labour “who wish to see the worst features of Colonial role abolished or ameliorated, and, as a sop to this orientation on the problem of Empire, the Executive from time to time issues pious resolutions, statements and manifestoes”. In many ways despite the left occupying the leadership, these reflexes have not fully been overcome. The Labour left tendency to compromise has continued, as Panitch describes, “in the face of a crisis…It is the [left] that always backs off, because it has a greater concern for solidarity — more easily guilted, always”, this includes, because of the shared presumptions, in the last instance, with the Right, a failure to defend the rights of migrants for the sake of unity.

The position of immigration then is to a significant extent a result of compromise, but it is not a compromise with an absolutely distinct political force and set of values. The compromise has happened because of shared foundations, most immediately a limited moral and political imagination. But this is deeply rooted in sedimented political instincts and material interests which may not operate purely or at all on the level of migration and wages but which involve the wider upholding of an imperial logic which is productive of forms of racism and hierarchies and exclusions, often of a racist character, within the working class in the UK. Secondly, the double subordination of the labourist left (firstly, with labourism a subordinate politics, and then with left labourism subordinate within that) produces the lack of ability to articulate and empower new purposes and organise new forces. The reduction, as Sivandanan notes, of the struggles of the labour movement to the narrow economic interests of a small, labour aristocracy section of the working class, standing in for the whole, both in terms of this part standing in for the whole, and narrow economic interests standing in for the whole of working class political, social, cultural and economic struggles.

The point then is not to break with the class forces of labourism, which would, ultimately, be a break into isolation from political effectiveness. These class forces remain genuine, rooted, to an extent, and with organisational strength. These connections through the Party is part of what gives Corbynism at least a chance to exert considerable power. As Maya Goodfellow argues,

While the window of possibility may seem tiny to many, there is a potential for Labour to be radical on immigration – both rhetorically and in terms of policy. They should connect up with antiracist groups and mobilise local activists to advocate for a better migration system for all. The aim should be to unite people regardless of where they were born in fighting for better pay, rights and conditions.

However, whilst a break with the class forces of labourism is undesirable, to say the least, they must be lead, the current Labour leadership have considerable moral authority to attempt this leadership, and to break the left from its subordinate position.

Permanent (Election) Campaign Footing, or Corbynism’s Ming Vase Period

In 1996, Roy Jenkins compared Tony Blair’s attitude to election victory to an elderly butler carrying a precious Ming vase across a highly polished floor.

Labour’s much heralded permanent (election) campaign footing has further intensified tendencies towards compromise, working within the limits imposed by dominant social forces- an implicit cross-class politics constituted by containing class contradiction within the nation- and a generalised timidity. The bad faith of Corbyn’s positioning amounts to a large extent to attempting to reconcile until Labour win office a contradiction which cannot be permanently resolved. Mason’s form of triangulation, as described by Chris Green, involves seeing “hegemonic struggle as essentially a task of triangulation, of making gradual left-wing economic reform palatable to the kinds of people who want more police on our streets, more nuclear weapons, and so on.” (A further part of this would be making left-wing economic reforms palatable to the kinds of people who want fewer immigrants). This reduces hegemony to the yoking together of disparate, essentially disunited forces within an electoral bloc, the identities of these forces are reified, Mason’s rather limited and limiting political sociology, presenting the Labour electorate as a mix of liberal minded urban professionals and struggling, anti-immigration working class voters in small towns as if these two groups have entirely static consciousness and no shared interests underpins this triangulation.

To grasp the tendencies here it is necessary to acknowledge the very great pressures towards this sort of timid electoralism. Firstly, there are, at least in the short-term, very obvious political benefits to Corbyn’s bad faith position. Secondly, Labour being elected on the 2017 programme or something very similar is now plausible and (provided Labour was able to implement this programme) would mean a desperately needed process of reforms being enacted. Moreover, winning power under a left leadership genuinely feels like a once in a lifetime opportunity therefore it is understandable, if not justifiable, with this prize seemingly tantalisingly close, that a significant amount of timidity and morally questionable realpolitik has crept in. These tendencies are further supported by the slight, and undoubtedly temporary, easing off of attacks on Corbyn from the press and the PLP. This has created the dangerous impression that it may not be necessary to take on the forces of reaction, and that some compromise may be found with them, which won’t significantly impact on our room for maneouvre. This has further led to the positions on immigration seeming palatable; which is a serious moral misjudgement, and a dangerous political judgement, at least in the medium and long-term, that these forces do not need to be challenged head-on. Politically the position on immigration may be sharp in the short-term; it is not beyond that, however. Nothing has so corrupted Corbynism so much as the notion we are swimming with the tide of history.

There is, of course, for the left at least, a significant difference between gaining office and exercising power. As Anderson argues,

When a Conservative government is in power, [Parliament] is an integral part of a continuous landscape which extends in a smooth, unbroken space around it. When a Labour government is in power, it is an isolated, spot-lit enclave, surrounded on almost every side by hostile territory, unceasingly shelled by industry, press and orchestrated ‘public opinion’. Each time it has in the end been over-run.

Blairism’s Ming Vase timidity, its refusal to risk challenging these forces, did not have negative political consequences as its politics were always predicated on, at the least, accommodation with, at the most, actually advancing these forces. Indeed, never taking on these powers provided a useful alibi for its operating only within a narrowly circumscribed idea of the possible. Corbynism, by contrast, to be effective, needs to explode these limits of the possible, and not only on immigration.

Implications of The Prematurity of Corbynism

It is not an iron law of politics that “what Powell says today, the Tories say tomorrow, and Labour legislates on the day after”,⁷ or to put in today’s terms, what Farage said yesterday, the Tories legislate on today, and Labour says tomorrow. However, whilst it is not an iron law, it is the general tendency, and one that will not necessarily be interrupted by being led by figures with a strong record on defending migrants and migration. To interrupt the direction of this process requires serious, sustained organised challenge both within and outside the Party, and this challenge must include the moral backbone not to be deflected by barely ameliorative, technocratic bones thrown to the left’s conscience. The question, therefore, is if Corbyn’s slide on immigration is a symptom of this lack of pressure, how can this pressure be built.

The lack of pressure on the Labour leadership, ironically, is also a symptom of circumstances which helped Corbyn become leader. The irony is that one might have expected the left taking the Labour leadership to have been the result of widescale socialist mobilisation particularly within Trade Unions and social movements. However, the conditions of Corbyn’s victory were quite the opposite, stemming from a moral crisis within Labour, constituted to a large extent by the weakness of the left (a stronger left would have pressured the centrist candidates into marginally less unappealing positions). Corbyn’s victory, in some ways, then, was a purely negative and moral response to an intolerable situation within Labour, the positive moment is now, slowly being built but this remains a process. In the absence of the full unfolding of the positive, creative side of the project, the weakness of a negative, moral critique means the project is vulnerable to the organised, machine politics of the Labour Right. The incompletion of the creative, positive development of the project has also meant the predominance, even within the left, of traditional Labour Left tendencies rather than the more interesting, radical left tendencies that have been a part of Labour. Moreover, the negative side of the project, coupled with the keen sense of urgency to take state power, have led to a vulnerability to a particular sort of realpolitik.

For Georg Lukács, whose work exerted a significant and often under-remarked influence on the debates around Labour within British Maxism, “petty realpolitik” ⁸ (and what are Corbyn’s remarks but “petty realpolitik”?) within left organisations is always rooted in a vulgar, limited and essentially subordinate class consciousness. It involves a shift from a proletarian perspective to the consciousness of the bourgeoisie, and here Lukács parallels Padmore on the labour aristocracy’s acceptance of a subordinate role, as a Junior Partner in Imperialism Ltd, as a “bourgeois proletariat”. In “Tactics and Ethics” the point is made even more emphatically with realpolitik described as presenting a particularly “baleful and ominous threat” to socialism, and stemming from a limited assertion of sectional interests that can never build the necessary politics. ⁹ As Lukács argues, “the bourgeoisie fighting on its own ground will prove superior to the proletariat both ideologically and economically.” Theory and practice, consciousness and action are sundered, a useless passivity is accepted with the apparently pragmatic compromise which accepts the values and forms of consciousness of existing society, including its racism, rather than articulating and empowering new socialist values and forms of consciousness.

Two other themes in Lukács are significant here. Firstly, his distinction between genuine class consciousness and the current “psychological state of consciousness of proletarians”, with opportunism and realpolitik stemming from the confusion of the two ¹⁰. What this gap between the actually existing psychological state and authentic class consciousness demands is forms of politics, cultural work and organisation that close the gap, in the direction of genuine class consciousness, not the direct assertion of the truth of the inchoate “psychological state”. This remains lacking in Labour. The second, related point, also bearing on political construction, is Lukács’s argument that anti-capitalist consciousness (there would be a further parallel here with the anti-austerity, anti-labour establishment consciousness of Corbynism, a necessary stage, certainly, but not, by itself, the goal) is not yet a genuine class consciousness, not yet the assertion of the working class as the subject of history but a stage to be preserved and overcome. Beyond calling for the need for political construction, these two arguments show that even if working class people believed that immigration was a major problem and that this was experienced as an anti-capitalist argument, to go down the “legitimate concerns” path would be catastrophic. Corbyn’s bad faith realpolitik around immigration is rooted in passivity, incorporation into bourgeois modes and, whilst it may be useful in the short-term, will, ultimately be damaging in the longer-term.

Migrants’ Rights are Workers’ Rights

The electoral footing and an acquiescence to a labourist drift, coupled with the lack of socialist, pro-migrant consciousness and pressures institutionalised in social movements, and indeed of organised pressure from migrants themselves, has led to the leadership taking up positions on migration that are bad. Ultimately, the nub of these issues is the implicit denial that migrant workers are workers. The building of a serious challenge to this position, resisting the integration of arguments about capital driving down wages into an anti-immigration frame, requires steady, unglamorous practical activity as well as theoretical criticism to assert that migrant workers’ rights are workers’ rights. One example of the development of these practical forms, as discussed by Mark Seddon in New Socialist is Sheffield Needs a Pay Rise. Seddon writes, “the group has also sought to combat xenophobia by emphasising the shared interests of British-born workers and migrant workers. Florin Luca, a Romanian worker living in Sheffield spoke about the need for solidarity among all low-paid workers at a campaign demonstration in December.

The boss loves to divide the Polish worker from the Romanian worker, the Pakistani worker from the English worker’, he explained, ‘it is only when poor workers stand up together and fight to improve our lives that things will change.’.

Through these forms the struggles of migrant workers can be brought inside Labour, challenging the limited forms of solidarity which have often been what passes for class politics. It also requires a more general development of left forces, arguments and institutions both inside and outside Labour.

Whilst Corbyn has slipped into positions that deserve to be criticised, Diane Abbott has maintained a correct position, consistently arguing the rights of migrant workers are unambiguously workers’ rights. Significantly, Abbott has argued, “it is important to remember that freedom of movement is a workers’ right.” The point here- that the freedom of workers to move and leave employers enhances bargaining power, forcing up wages- is one that workers and radical sections of the workers movement have consistently grasped throughout history, from proletarian suspicions of owning their own home documented by Engels, for whom home ownership functioned as ruse, “to chain the workers by this property to the factory in which they work”, to Early Modern struggles against villeinage, as Robin Blackburn argues,

Those [in the 18th century] who vaunted the social rights enjoyed by the “Freeborn Englishman” held they had no parallel in Continental Europe and the boast had some substance. The abolition of the last vestiges of English villeinage in the seventeenth century meant meant that all men, and not a few women, were free to move to where the wages and conditions were best — if necessary to emigrate to the New World. ¹¹

Along with apartheid, the poor laws- that is efforts to curtail this freedom to move won by workers in the early modern period- are mentioned by Abbott, meaning, workers “had to accept whatever jobs, and at whatever wages and terms that the employers in their locality chose. This is one of the key, overlooked issues in the current widespread assault on freedom of movement.” It is important to note too that capital tends to get its way, the abolition of FoM is not likely to lead to labour shortages, which would strengthen the bargaining position of British workers (even if this abandoning of EU workers was desirable), instead, as with the ridiculed but revealing floated idea of a “barista visa”, it is more likely that rights to employment and even residence in the UK will be tied to migrant workers doing specific jobs, massively reducing their freedom to leave and their bargaining power. In the background of ostensibly “left” criticisms of freedom of movement is the notion that Tory racism is somehow anti-capitalist and that the Tories value this apparently anti-capitalist racism more than the interests of capital. This is as bizarre as it is reprehensible. For Sivandanan, by contrast, “capital requires racism, not for racism’s sake but for the sake of capital. Racism changes in order that capital might survive.” ¹²

There are a number of reasons for Corbyn’s moral, and, in the long-term, political failings on immigration. To attempt to grasp these reasons is not to excuse Corbyn, instead it is, linked to the criticism that has to be the starting point, part of finding ways to address the situation and work on the contradictions of a Labour Left project, which we are part of, and therefore, in some ways responsible for, to make more possible not only better positions on immigration but to resist a slide into timidity, conformism and, ultimately, defeat.