Mostly reading

My RSS reader is in a right state. My feeds need thinning out, but I don’t have the time to do so right now, so I am picking and choosing. It’s becoming pretty clear which are my go-to blogs that get read anyway, like Shakesville and Julia Wertz’s Fart Party.

However, there are some blogs which I save up to savour when I can appreciate them properly, and Lenin’s Tomb falls into that category. This is at-least-partly because LT rarely talks about feminism, so doesn’t fall under my “blog fodder” reading material list. Reading, say, long posts sketching out the work of James Joyce seems a tad indulgent when I can’t keep my ‘feminist’ folder under 1,000 unread posts.

Nonetheless, I have to point out lenin’s post about ‘The Cost of Labour’ - which I consumed at a leisurely pace on a long train ride today. First of all, lenin draws attention to some horrible racist language used by the Labour candidate in the recently-lost byelection.

On one election leaflet:

“Do you oppose making foreign nationals carry and ID card?”

Depressing, in the extreme.

But then s/he carries on with a dissection of the economic arguments that are sometimes thrown around in order to justify racist immigration policies (immigration policy being de facto racist and nationalist, in my view, but recognising there are shades of this).

It’s ages since I so thoroughly agreed with something written about immigration - from lenin’s thoughts on the protectionist impulses of some on the left (”the ridiculous idea that addressing domestic inequality by raising barriers to preserve global inequality is some form of social justice”), to capitalist impulses to justify immigration to a hostile, racist, nationalist, xenophobic public by saying that immigrants are simply filling jobs that no-one else will do (which “implies that the exploitation of migrant labour is okay, and actually a good thing”). The latter is an argument trotted out so often, I think that we all maybe do need reminding of the glaringly obvious.

Of course, being a socialist blog, LT stresses the economic arguments, but I feel like anti-immigration policy and rhetoric is only passingly to do with economics. I see economic pressure as more of a justification than a cause, and, backing into Nobody Passes again (seriously, everyone should read this book - it covers so much ground!) there’s more to be considered. If you view every individual on this planet as fully human, arguments about “British jobs for British workers” (I’m looking at you Gordon Brown) become nonsensical.

In Jessica Hoffman’s interview with immigration rights activists in the US, they consider a very similar issue - albiet from the other side. The US has a mass immigration rights movement, for a start; something this country sorely needs. But, anyway, these are some of the very positions and identities adopted by some in the movement in order to get the point across - which Hoffman, et al, talk through, along with the “face” of the movement being the nuclear, straight family, and the nonthreatening “humble worker”.

‘No borders’ politics is a bit unfashionable - I often hesitate to voice my views on borders and nationality, because they’re so promptly dismissed as unworkable pie-in-the-sky (as an aside: what’s smashing the patriarchy, then?! We still think that’s worth striving for!)

Over at Anji’s UK feminist bloggers’ group, we’ve been having a discussion about the use of the Union Jack in the group’s banners - of course, everyone has different views on this, but I see my views on the nation state as totally intertangled with the rest of my politics, and it’s difficult to separate that out from feminism.

Anyway, I’m on a tangent of a tangent now, so I’ll sign off.