Liberty, Liberals and the ‘I’ word: the challenge for Socialists

(Stupidly long post alert – 3,880 words. pdf version here  for ease of reading.)

 1.  An ambling preamble

When I suggested to Dave that I might write an article about the relationship between ‘modern liberty’  and immigration, his response was along the lines that this would be interesting, as it was an area he himself rarely touches, and one which he finds ‘depressing’.

Dave is not a coward, and he does not flinch from argument, from arguing the hard things, the things that he know will bring him unpopularity amongst a readership which does not share his well-grounded Marxist theoretical framework.

So if even Dave appeared momentarily to flinch, I thought this was something I had to write about, given my recently renewed commitment to facing down my longstanding desire to avoid conflict, my cowardice when faced with the hard parts.

 2. On Liberalism, and avoiding the big ‘I’

It seems, though, that I may not be alone in a tendency to avoid the big, hard ’I’ question.

As I write this, the Convention on Modern Liberty is taking place, principally in London but also in other cities around the country, though no attempt appears to have been made to cover Bickerstaffe.  

It would be easy just to rubbish the events as a bunch of wishy-washy liberals and Tories wringing their hands about the Government’s authoritarian tendencies; though I share many of the concerns that will be covered, I have no doubt that a Conservative or even a LibDem government would act in much the same way or worse.  I’ll come back to this issue in non-party terms, but - for starters - which colour government was it that the freedom of worker association otherwise known as secondary picketing?  Which colour government banned trade union membership?

But that is not the point here, and I give credit where credit is due; many of the people organising and attending the conferences do so with good, even noble intentions.  What I do want to do explore is what these liberals (some of them in the Labour party) and Conservatives might mean my ‘modern liberty’ and how far this takes us, or doesn’t.

The first interesting thing to note, in the context of the piece I’m attempting here, is that immigration doesn’t get a look in on the agenda.  There are 22 different sessions going on, but none of them touch on immigration – the right of people to come into Britain. 

The closest it gets is a session on whether the UK should have a Bill of Rights, and if so whether non-UK citizens already in the UK should be able to enjoy it, not whether anyone else might also enjoy it.

Given this, the title for the session, ‘Are human rights universal or a privilege of citizenship?’ seems almost ironic.  Further, Chuka’s pre-conference reminder that ‘The Universal Declaration recognises ‘the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family as the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world’ seems out of place for an event which is focused on ‘modern liberty’ for those lucky enough to be in the UK at the time, where they think this kind of thing really should matter.

Perhaps this is what the ‘modern’ bit means, because at first sight this temporalising statement suggests that ‘liberty’ is not in fact universal at all, and is something to be applied differentially according to the where, the who, and the where from.  Perhaps liberty as we know it is not and cannot, in the real world, be the same for everyone, is what the term seems to indicate.  As Tim from the Provisional BBC pointed out in a pithy comment on a Liberal Conspiracy article: ‘the organisers need to be careful, or we’ll be assuming the conference is about civil liberties for privileged, British-born-only elites rather than for everyone.’

Of course it can be argued that there simply isn’t space at the Convention to cover such a big topic as the liberty (or not) of people to move freely between countries. 

I’m not sure I buy that,  though;  these same apparent inconsistencies, between value-based positions on the one hand (UK-based civil liberties) and pragmatic, value-free positions (immigration) on the other, come through elsewhere.

Proper-sounding socialists like Dan Paskins have sought to explore this whole area in very recent times, not least in the context of the approaching Convention on Modern Liberty.  Dan received pretty short shrift from liberal commentators, not least Paul Kingsnorth, who had written the article  that Dan was responding to, and it’s worth a quick look at these although I am necessarily selective there isn’t the space to review the whole debate, which crossed a few blogs, including this useful contribution.

First, here’s Paul K in his original article:

‘It’s worth noting the stunning hypocrisy of Labour’s volte-face on this one. For a decade they have engineered a situation in which public discussions about immigration are taboo, by hinting darkly at the motivations of anyone who tries to hold them. Not uncoincidentally, BNP support has shot up to record levels over the same period.’

Yet when Paul and other well-minded liberals do a lot of (admirable) work pulling together a Convention to address very important issues, they too set aside the chance to discuss these really important matters which are, because they remain taboo, leading to the rise of the far right.

When Paul does engage on the matter, his views are at first sight ‘common sense’ and focus on the ecological carrying capacity of the UK, in terms of natural resources etc., which is all kind of fair enough in the ‘green’ paradigm, although he misses out the other ‘green’ option – instead of keeping people out, people could consume less.

But I think this retort to Dan is revelatory in terms of the basis of his whole approach:

‘You don’t state here – conveniently, I feel – what your position on immigration actually is. You say you are against ‘criminalisation’ and ‘repression’ of would-be immigrants (so am I; and not allowing people in does not equal either of these things).’

It is the last bracketed phrase which starts to get us to the heart of the matter, because the statement that ‘not allowing people in’ is not ‘repression’ is contestable, and should, I will argue here, be contested by socialists.

Because not letting people in who think they would benefit from coming in is, if you open yourself out beyond the confines of the nation-state, very real ‘repression of would-be immigrants’.  These would-be immigrants have made a choice that they would like to come to the UK, and to argue, as Paul might, that letting them in is not being repressive, because in the long term we’ll all suffer, can be interpreted as patronising at best, wholly authoritarian at worst. 

It is, in other words, an abuse of the power that comes with living in a relatively rich country.  As Steven Lukes has set out pretty convincingly, the NOT doing of something , in this case letting people in, can be as much an indication of the abuse of power – indeed all the more an abuse because it is hidden.  And this, it can be argued, is what is going on here.  To a large extent, it seems. Paul K adopts an out-of-sight-out of-mind attitude.

Of course, the UK does let people in. It lets in people that it thinks will benefit the economy, as long – in general terms – as they are white.  Since the overtly racist 1965 Immigration Act (the enduring consequences of which may perhaps the subject of another blogpost) white Commonwealth country nationals are allowed in without too much trouble for an initial two years, and as long as there’s employment, it’s no hassle to stay.  It is those from the poorer, blacker and more ex-Soviet countries that struggle.  Is this long-term acceptance of an immigration policy based solely on country of origin (and by proxy skin colour) an act of repression-by-inaction?  Yes, I would argue it is, that it has to be seen that way.

Ah yes, the liberals may argue though, we do have a system for political asylum which works well for those who are actively being persecuted in their own country.  We let them in, they say, and if we can make it more flexible, and definitely stop people being sent away to possible torture in other countries, then we’ll have done our job well.

But, as a socialist not a liberal, I am driven to unpick this.

3. On the challenge for socialists

What, at base, makes it acceptable to accept people seeking political asylum, and not people defined as economic migrants.  Why is there no such term as ‘economic asylum’?

Indeed, can we not argue that economic asylum seekers are in general likely to be MORE in need of or support, accorded through entry to the country, because they do not have the resources to have become involved in activities which lead to the need for political asylum in the first place – their key aim is food and accommodation for themselves and their families. 

Why is a journalist seeking asylum for himself and her/his family more ‘deserving’ than a mother seeking the rights accorded under the  UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which include, for example, the ‘right of the child to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health’ (article 24).

What we have here, in fact, is a subtle 21^st century reprisal of the 19^th century notion of the ‘undeserving poor’. By setting the political above the economic in the way I set out above, the ‘liberal’ states effectively separate humanity into two separate breeds – the deserving (often middle class) people and the rest, who simply do not merit further attention. 

In Marxian terms, what has happened is that the social and political superstructure has been successfully divorced, through long-term liberal discourse, from the economic base.  Socialism must challenge that.

Of course, I’m not saying that, at an individual level, liberals think in these terms.  But, as I’ve noted,  ignoring the  ‘hard bits’ of the immigration question sits rather oddly with much of the rhetoric of the Convention (such as Chuka’s words above), where there is a claim to what might be called a ‘value-based’ approach to (civil) liberty, and an appeal to the universal rights of people, at least in the UK, and to a range of supposedly unalterable freedoms, such as the freedom not to have all your data held by a state authority.

In all of this there is, dare I say, a quite British nationalist-sounding resonance with the opening lines of JS Mill’s ‘On Liberty’:

‘The Subject of this Essay is not the so-called Liberty of the Will, so unfortunately opposed to the misnamed doctrine of Philosophical Necessity; but Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual.’

The British way – the way of the Convention on Modern Liberty and that of many of its adherents – is to focus on the practical at the expense of the theoretical.  Paul K said as much to me in a kindly but slightly patronising comment recently, when he dismissed my use of the term ‘epistemological foundation’.

What socialists need to keep in mind though is that this focus on the practical can often be – as I claim it is with immigration – a way of avoiding the hard bits about power inequality, and indirect power abuse.  Socialists are right to embed their practice in theory, to keep going back to it to reflect, because this allows us at least partial access to the social reality that lies behind the ‘commonsense reality of liberalism’.

In actual fact JS Mill gives us a hint of that when he compares his own utilitarian approach to the question of liberty with the metaphysical musings of Joseph Priestley and his doctrine of philosophical necessity (something akin to absolute determinism and lack of ultimate free will).  While he chooses what nowadays seems an odd alternative route to the conception of ‘liberty’ (and for local polemical reasons), he does at least offer the alternative, indicating that there is another, more fundamental way of looking at what liberty is and should be. 

For socialists, I would contend, this alternative conceptions lies in the (fairly) contemporaneous work of Immanuel Kant.

In brief, the Kantian autonomy of rational will, expressed as the Categorical Imperative, leads us to an absolute moral necessity, summed up in the maxim: I ought never to act except in such a way  that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law.’

That is to say that, liberty – liberty of movement, speech, liberty to be alive – MUST be a universal aspiration at all times, and in all places – not just in a way that is appropriate to ‘modern’ times and to modern nation state confines.  The socialist’s job, where this is not happening, is to challenge the liberal ‘commonsense’, out of sight-out of mind approach.  The first way to do this is to challenge the appropriation, by the liberal mainstream, of the notion of liberty – liberty as a narrow legalistic ‘right’, divorced from debate about the power structures of modern capitalism, divorced from the underlying economic base, and thus a quality which  ultimately is only open to those with the resources sufficient to claim it. 

This claiming back of the notion of liberty must take place in the same way as socialism must seek to claim back the notion of another key term, appropriated this time by the Right.  As David Harvey points out in his ‘Freedom is just another word’ chapter of Brief History of Neoliberalism, the concept of ‘freedom’ has been hijacked by the Right to mean ‘freedom of capital to exploit’; what socialists need to do, he suggests, is re-appropriate the term to its legitimate and prior use – the freedom of people to live in society without being exploited (see also Polyani, The Great Transformation, which may become another blog post)

3.   On taking forward the socialist challenge

What, then, have all these pseudo-philosophical ramblings got to do with how socialists should ‘tackle’ the immigration question? 

Well, this is not a blogpost that’s going to propose very practical steps, because that’s the work of another post (which may come sooner, or may come later).  But there are some things to be said.

First, and as I’ve tried to set out above, as socialists we need to define terms on our own ground, and challenge the use of terms by others where these fall short of our ‘standards’.  We need to be confident that the way in which socialism is embedded in a (actually pre-Marxian) value system associated with the Enlightenment, as well as in the coherence of Marxian social theory (whether or not you buy the whole Marxian project), can stand up and take on the liberal misappropriations of our language that I have made reference to above 

We are, and as I’ve tried to set out in an earlier post, more ‘intelligent’ than liberals because we have a more fundamentally coherent value base.  In terms of the immigration debate, that means we have to challenge the whole notion that immigration restriction is in some legitimate in the first place.  It is not – it cannot be legitimate when capitalism as a whole can have mobility of labour when it wants it (as at East Lindsey), but stop it when it doesn’t need it. 

That’s not an easy debate to try and win, because people like Paul K will soon enough revert with the ecological arguments to say that, in real practical terms, a place like the UK simply cannot withstand immigration.

Here is the place to be fair to Paul K, because he does seek to offer up a longer term alternative to the ‘immigration problem’, whilst maintaining the need to keep, even to reinforce, the barriers;

‘Personally, I’d like to see a committee of ecological economists and others set to work on an unbiased study of how a genuinely sustainable, zero-carbon Britain would work – and what the optimum population should be. It would need to assume self-sufficiency in food, energy and water, at the very least. I’d then like to see us work towards it. Actually I’d like to see this in every country on Earth. A kind of contraction-and-convergence model in which rich countries get poorer and poor countries richer, eventually meeting at a sustainable point, all within an overall ‘ecological budget’ which can never be busted because it’s based on planetary limits, would work excellently. In theory’. 

I couldn’t agree more that the best way to resolve the ‘immigration problem’ is to create world society equal enough to stop people wanting to leave their homes, and often their families, and much that is dear to them, in order to make a living.  It’s an admirable sentiment, but he’s right – it’s only ‘in theory’. 

Paul K is right about what needs to happen in terms of the downsizing/upsizing.  Here’s not the place to cover this in detail, but suffice to say that – if there was the ‘political will’ – it’s not actually that out of the question.  Just as one example of the scale of the challenge – a quick review with a calculator handy of the CIA world factbook on the UK and Pakistan (chosen because it’s an immigration ‘problem’), suggests that in order to double the per capital GDP of Pakistan – enough to take a lot of people out of poverty if the actual distribution were per capita – would cost about $5,000 of the current $38,000 per capita GDP of the UK.  (I can provide the figures, if anyone wants, but I’m a bit pressed for time on this post.)

Yes, a lot, but not beyond the realms of science, surely. 

And something like it already happened in Germany from 1991 onwards.  On this occasion, popular and therefore media sentiment meant that the West DID take a very real economic hit in order to support the East through transition, and effectively thereby stopped mass migration, even within the new state.

Is this kind of thing going to happen more widely than the very specific circumstances of Germany?  Well, the green movement has now had quite a long time to convince the leaders of capitalism that it would be a good idea to do a lot of things to save the planet, and it’s not actually got very far.  Put simply, socialism has a better chance of creating the conditions he wants for long term ecological stability, and with it lack of immigration desire, than the green/liberal movement.  Economic equality is not in the interests of capitalism at the moment, so it’s not going to happen, without socialism making it happen.

That does not of course mean I advocate that the Left start a campaign tomorrow morning for ‘Open Borders Now’, because in the current media climate, where even the decent press is drawn towards a liberal notion of the need to control immigration on an ‘commonsense’ ecological basis, and where the right wing press peddles nonsense like this (confronted by Sunder), it’s a tactical non-starter, and will put us in a place even worse than before.

What we do need to do though, as I’ve set out above, is to challenge the liberal orthodoxy, which collapses the distance between what is the ethically right thing to do and what is the currently right thing to do.  We need to be explicit that our long term aspiration is, indeed, an open border policy, that only socialism can bring us that and that, with that, the ‘immigration problem’ which Paul K associates with the rise of the BNP, will simply go away.

4.  On concluding this rambling post

This is what Paul K thinks of the Left’s approach to immigration:

‘But the wider left – and you’ll excuse a few generalisations in pursuit of a deeper truth – seems equally confused in its response. For a long time now, the left’s position on immigration has been one of the reasons it has become so cut off from popular sentiment, and largely irrelevant in what were once its heartlands: the working class areas of Britain, where immigration is extremely unpopular. That position has always been pretty simple: racists don’t like immigration. Therefore, people who don’t like immigration are racists. Therefore we are against them and in favour of all immigration, at all times.’

And actually, I agree.  But for very different reasons. 

I agree because the right IS fundamentally wrong about immigration, as are their liberal colleagues, and I’m not afraid to say so.  They are wrong because they don’t have fundamental values like the Left do.  They are wrong because, despite being well-meaning enough, liberals have allowed the ‘immigration question’, either by ignoring it or by treating it without an adequate value base, to become the property of the right, and even the far right.  

To this extent the liberals, of the type that are attending the Convention on Modern Liberty, of the very decent type like Paul K, are complicit in the rise of a new set of anti-values, as espoused by the BNP, which – right here and now – threaten the values of 200 years of the Enlightenment with their Nazism-based savagery.  Explaining liberal complicity away as an understanding of ‘popular sentiment’ is actually a pretty good example of that very complicity-by-negligence.

The Left is right on immigration BECAUSE it has a set of universal values at its heart; now is the time when we need to seize back the words to describe those values .

Modernity is ours, fundamentally, because Kant (and even Mill) gave it to us. Liberty is ours, fundamentally, because we know what it means in all its universality and in all its deep individuality.