A Case for the Free Movement of Proletarian Globetrotters

The word ‘proletarian’ derives from the Latin word, proletarius, meaning " ( in ancient Rome ) a citizen of the sixth and lowest class, who served the state not with his property but with his offspring " - the word for offspring in Latin being proles ( Chambers Dictionary, 1998 ). ‘Originally’ therefore a proletarian was a state-designated lowest-of-the-low, property-less person who basically produced — or rather reproduced - for the Roman imperium.

While in unfashionable Marxist parlance, the term in its modern sense has a technical meaning ( referring essentially to wage-labourers who, lacking significant capital or property, are thus forced to depend for their living on remuneration in return for labour they render ), this does not cover everything the term is used to denote. The term also refers to the lowest class within any given community; the poorest class in the community; the poorest labouring class; a person who has little or no property; finally even, in botany, it denotes a plant without reserves of food: a condition tragically mirrored in the case of the asylum seeker who receives an absolute pittance to live on, which at just over 35 pounds is even less than the income of some of the most deprived and underprivileged people in this country, such as, for example, pensioners and the unemployed.

So, in broad terms, the word ‘proletarian’ refers to a person from one of the lowest, and implicitly most downtrodden, oppressed and excluded classes of history. Such a condition is uncannily descriptive of the situation these much demonised asylum seekers in Britain now find themselves in: made low, miserable, poor; excluded, oppressed, harassed, mistrusted, vilified and attacked - and this only in the purportedly ‘civilised’ country they seek refuge in!

The asylum seeker is thus inherently a kind of proletarian — yet perhaps to an extraordinary degree, both in the sense of being without capital and property-less, but also most certainly in the sense of being within the lowest class of society, or even below that - given the fact that they are not even deemed worthy of ‘serving the state with their offspring’. This offspring, moreover, is itself also reviled and rejected and is, to boot, made to feel as ‘bogus’, as burdensome and as deeply unwanted as the parents.

Even the narrower usage of the word ‘proletarian’ can help to put the asylum seeker issue in its proper perspective. If, let us imagine, asylum seekers were not ordinary wage-labourers in their country of origin, if they owned large amounts of capital, and were not vilified, targeted or in deep distress due to the conditions there prevalent, but on the contrary very wealthy, ensconced and happy, or included and pampered in the country they abandoned, what possibly could motivate these people to undergo an often extremely difficult and dangerous passage to the UK? Imagine, therefore, if you

were such a person so well made up in your own country, would you flee or be desperate to do anything to get to a ‘safe’ country far away? The word ‘safe’ is in scare quotes because this is surely an increasingly false description in the case of the UK, given the attacks on asylum seekers here, both verbal and physical, and given the sheer venom and angry hysteria vented, especially in the media, against this poor unfortunate group of outcastes ( yet asylum seekers are clearly not helpless, they are simply rendered so by the irrationality of law — for example, in regard to their lack of a right to work for at least the first six months after they arrive in the UK ). The bellicose mood music pumped out by both the media and politicians has engendered a climate of varying levels of violence towards asylum seekers which resulted most notably in the death of an asylum seeker in Glasgow during the summer, not to mention the deaths that have stemmed from tightened immigration controls making it much harder for people to get into Britain in the first place.

As for the argument that such controls prevent ‘bogus’ asylum seekers, this is absolute nonsense, for how on earth can you know who the so-called bogus asylum seekers are unless and until you have adjudicated their case, which means letting them in and judging their case, does it not? Given this very simple fact, these tight controls can be seen to be aimed at blocking ALL and ANY asylum seekers from entering the country, not just the ‘economic migrants’ with their so-called ‘weaker’ claims.

To recap, why would someone try to escape from their country, unless they were impoverished, or fleeing war or persecution, or were in some other kind of danger or deep and distressing difficulty? The so-called argument against ‘economic migration’ totally falls down on this point of psychology or motivation. The latter, however, clearly reflects or points to the grim reality of the grinding poverty, absolute despair or intolerable distress that is an everyday phenomenon for them in their own countries. The meretriciously superficial label of ‘economic migrant’ does not even begin to describe the people ( in their terrible predicaments and with their horrific backgrounds ) supposedly designated by such a bogus expression. People in such severe difficulties should be welcomed here with open arms and aided and assisted, not simply on the basis of principle, but also on economic and demographic grounds. All the hostile rhetoric about asylum seekers and economic migrants simply creates a new and oppressive climate of psychological torture, a torture perpetrated this time by the UK government and the media and which is visited upon all asylum seekers who, quite contrary to the spirit at least of the Geneva Convention on Refugees, are currently treated as guilty until proven innocent.

Looking at it from the economic angle ( at the level of social capital, for asylum seekers often have a range of different skills which would fill gaps in the British labour market ), these people have demonstrated obvious energy, inventiveness and commitment just to get as far as these shores, for there is no royal road, no straight and easy path and, furthermore, no visa for an asylum seeker to get into fortress Britain! Anyone who can get in, I think, has got to be very resourceful indeed — if not a risk-taker, and escapologist from the Continent, of genius no less! It could be argued somewhat selfishly that these are precisely the kind of people we surely need to bolster the falling demographics in this ever greying and ever shrinking population of ours. What a boon indeed — free receipt of people of great will and determination and of profound ambition to live here, not to mention the skills they may possess as an extra attraction. Such ambition is clearly more than can be said perhaps for the thousands of British people who are voting with their feet and leaving, as statistics show that — in total contradistinction to the media myth that this country is being ‘flooded’ with asylum seekers - more people emigrate from Britain each year than actually come here to live! Moreover, the strength, spirit and deep resourcefulness of these people who enter the country by all kinds of impossible and precarious routes will undoubtedly ensure that the vast majority of them are able to master life in the UK very quickly. How foolish and short-sighted it is, then, of the Government to spurn and abuse this precious resource that seems to have fallen like manna from heaven, yet has been received absurdly like a ‘swarm’ of locusts or like the plague! How demographically ridiculous and economically counter-productive, therefore, are all the financial, administrative and personnel resources - what can only be explained, given its economic irrationality and reactionary knee-jerk waste of resources, as being at the vanguard of an institutionally racist policy strategy — that are now being thrown at deflecting, blocking and preventing these not infrequently darkly skinned proletarian globe-trotters from simply following the logic of the global market-place: people generally and totally rationally move to places where it is economically and humanly viable, and move away from systems in the process of collapsing. The only way to pre-empt this, of course, is to get involved in changing the conditions ( and their causes ) which prevail in the parts of the world that are so devastated and hence which produce the most refugees. It cannot be avoided by erecting larger and tighter barriers, for these problems will only fester and breed legions of other difficulties which will in turn only further exacerbate the sense of injustice of those who get locked out from the relative benefits of living in a developed country and who have to deal with the fall-out of economic collapse often not of their own making. This will mean that in one way or another and one day or another these problems and injustices that have festered will come home to roost at the heart of the developed world: the appalling recent terror in America being perhaps a chilling forewarning of what could be on the horizon for the developed world, if we do not fundamentally re-think and re-fashion both current global power relations and also in particular the appalling and growing gap between the haves of this world and the have-nots.

This deeply serious consideration, however, brings us to note a tragic irony in all this which is so often absent, suppressed, or sidelined in the populist misrepresentations of the British mass media. And that is the matter of the poorest of the poor who have no choice often but to remain in their poor, battered and suffering country, those who for whatever reason are unable to escape the dire conditions of war, poverty, oppression, torture, famine and death that surround or consume them daily and to which fate they are often forced to succumb. In short, those most oppressed or in need are often unable to find the refuge they so desperately require, as they simply cannot reach a safer country. This is why, of course, any full discussion of issues surrounding asylum and economic migration cannot fudge the question of the constitutive role of the global political and economic system in which such migration takes place. It is a system run by the leaders, both political and economic and thus also elected and unelected, of the richest states, who choose very clearly to perpetuate, by not cancelling, the debt of the poorest nations ( and who do not even contemplate giving reparations to the poorest countries for the crimes of colonialism and imperialism all too often committed against them, both in the past and the present, by the dominant global hegemons of the West ), who choose equally evidently to continue the profiteering they make from the sale of arms ( both to their third world cronies, and to states which the West, after these states use such arms, is all too happy to condemn as rogue states — well after the Western companies that sold the weapons have pocketed their profits, thank you very much ), and, lastly, who choose to conduct war or military interventions in various parts of the globe which only end up exacerbating the tensions or problems in the area which allegedly the Great Powers, whether those of the 19^th century or of today, claim to have set out to resolve ( albeit only ever in their own favour and very often to the detriment of ordinary people within the native population ) - as, say, history in the Balkans from the Congress of Berlin of 1878 up to the recent interventions of the 1990s demonstrate. What all these acts by the Powers create is, inevitably and often at great suffering to those who have to undergo it, a greater and greater number of refugees and asylum seekers, as we now witness once again in Afghanistan. Western militarism is engendering yet another humanitarian crisis which will surely cause more economic breakdown, collapse and ruin, both for Afghanistan and for its neighbours like Pakistan — which will foster even deeper poverty and so the vicious circle will continue unabated ( including more terrorism, I fear, as counter-reaction to further global political hegemony and intervention by the US ). Without properly situating the problem in the context of this global political and economic predicament and to then arbitrarily blame or stigmatise those who suffer some of the most immediate effects of these problems - often created or at least manipulated and exploited by the rich and powerful elites of the developed world — is not only unfeeling on a human level, but it also flirts dangerously with, and can give political legitimacy to, those who would make a very specific kind of dastardly political capital out of it.

This is another example of where our state and society’s treatment of the weak and disadvantaged is a test-case of political progressiveness ( in addition to the usual ones regarding our treatment of, say, pensioners and the unemployed ). It goes even deeper than this, however. The treatment meted out to the most vulnerable, most excluded, and most discriminated-against groups in society is the litmus test par excellence of any state or society’s commitment ( or not ) to democracy, human rights, and most important of all as it is the precondition for the success of the first two, the fight against the renewed spectre of fascism in our time.

Over half a century after the end of the Second World War, it should be crystal-clear what scapegoating of vulnerable groups in society is able to lead to: nothing short of the acme of barbarism that was the Holocaust, in the form of the mass slaughter of Jews, prisoners of war, civilians, Gypsies, the mentally and physically disabled, homosexuals, political prisoners, and resistance fighters. I think it clear that both asylum seekers and ‘economic migrants’ just are potentially the equivalent of the Jews ( and the other excluded groups listed above ) of 50, 60, 70 years ago. If the reader stands in doubt about such a proposition, it needs to be remembered which group the first immigration controls were used against in 1905: it was of course against Jewish people. And against whom today are ever more extensive controls, blocks and checks being devised by New Labour, who follow hard on the heels of the Conservatives’ Shadow asylum policy? It is the new Jews, the most stark new example of the oppressed, the new globetrotting proletarians: it is precisely those whom many now chant or call ‘bogus asylum seekers’. The only true and non-discriminatory response to this is: open the gates of Europe, not just Britain, to deal with the symptoms, but even better, fight against the global causes of oppression and war which engender such problems in the first place. It may be controversial to say so, but you do not fight terrorism with an inevitably indiscriminate Superpower military violence, but rather by addressing the valid and ongoing issues and injustices that fed, and still nurture, the deep animus against the American State.