Monday, May 19, 2008

Time To Junk Internationalism?

Superb commenter James Schipper takes on internationalism and suggests that nationalism is better for workers in this most interesting comment from the comments section of a recent post. My comments follow. I will say that I have a problem with nationalism in general and especially with the sound of the term "national socialism" for obvious reasons. Nationalism leads inevitably to racism, it seems.

But following pure internationalist logic, we are obligated to completely open borders. If you go over to leftwing and liberal pro-immigrant sites and prod them a bit, you often find that they actually do believe in Open Borders for the US.

That would mean that at some point, 1/3 of the world would be here, and 1/2 of Mexico (since 1/3 of the world and 1/2 of Mexico wants to come to the US). I argue that this would be a disaster for this country for many reasons. For one thing, we would become some kind of Calcutta West. For the environment, it would be a complete catastrophe.

At least at the start, unselected immigrants who are not interested in assimilation are only capable of recreating their own society in the new country. So Indians would recreate Calcutta in the US and Mexicans would recreate Mexico City in the US.

An excellent reason to make the immigration process highly rigorous, time-consuming, and difficult with much rejection of potential immigrants who do not make the cut is to insure that those immigrants remaining after the gauntlet-run are dedicated to assimilation.

Unscreened mass immigration, in particular illegal immigration, tends to create masses of immigrants with little interest in assimilating, plus you tend to get countless bad people mixed in with the good.

Many illegal immigrants are actually low-quality immigrants and would be rejected by any sane and rigorous US immigration program. The burden should be on the immigrant to show us precisely how and why they are going to be net positive to our country and not a negative.

Rigorously screened immigrants forced to go through a difficult and trying immigration process would be less likely to recreate Calcutta and Mexico City in the US.
Massive immigration of unskilled laborers is not only bad for ordinary workers, whose wages are driven downward, but also for taxpayers in general. There is no way that an unskilled immigrant can ever pay as much in taxes as he consumes in government services. There are two distributions going on here: upward redistribution of income among natives and transfer of income from natives to immigrants.

Your analysis above is essentially correct because it is based on the obvious premise that the real enemies of workers in high-wage countries are workers in low-wage countries. However, this is in flagrant contradiction with the Marxist idea that there is harmony of interests between all the workers of the world. That Marxist idea is totally false.

In a closed economy, workers and capitalists are like buyers and sellers. The interests of buyers and sellers are not necessarily harmonious but they are complementary and therefore in principle compatible.

Capital without labor is like a truck without a driver and labor without capital is like a transportation worker without a truck. Such a worker can't transport much. Capital without labor is useless and labor without capital is unproductive.

Under national capitalism, there can be solidarity between workers and capitalists. Under global capitalism there can't be because capital will use foreign labor as scabs, as you pointed out.

You may not realize it, but you are actually a national socialist in the literal sense of the term. The slogan of national socialism is not "Proletarians of the world, unite", but "Workers and capitalists of the nation, unite in the interest of the nation". National socialism does not preach international proletarian brotherhood but national brotherhood.

The Marxist notion of class struggle is pernicious because it makes national solidarity impossible, the only solidarity that can exist. Class struggle should not be fomented but overcome. Divisions can only be overcome by appealing to a higher common interest, and that can only be the nation.

It is only when the capitalists abandon all solidarity with their proletarian compatriots that class struggle becomes necessary, but such struggle should not be waged at a global level because the foreign workers are the allies of the capitalists. Instead of preaching class struggle, the left should appeal to the national sentiments of capitalists.

You and Patrick Buchanan are actually quite close. Your position is also quite similar to the BNP and the German NPD.

Another Marxist idea that is completely false is that workers have no country. It is often capitalists that have no country. Workers are tied to a place and that makes them patriotic. Nobody can have jobs in 20 different countries, but capitalists can easily own businesses in 20 countries.

If there are people without a country, it is global capitalists. A former CEO of the "Dutch" multinational Phillips once said that he wished that the head office of Phillips could be located in the middle of the Atlantic, which goes to show what a loyal Dutchman he was.

Over 80% of the employees of Phillips are now non-Dutch, so to call Phillips a Dutch company simply because most of its owners and top managers are Dutch is to show a capitalist bias. A company does not only consist of owners and managers but also of employees. Calling a company like Phillips Dutch is like saying that SA under apartheid was a white country because whites had most of the wealth and power.

The superiority of national socialism over Marxist socialism was proven in WWII. When Stalin had to motivate the Russians to fight, he didn't appeal to international proletarian solidarity, which would have been a complete flop, but he appealed to Russian nationalism because genuine nationalism unites while Marxist class struggle only divides.

Socialism can only work at a national level. The Swedish socialist, among the most successful in the world, created a welfare state for Swedes only. It was solidarity that ended at the national border. Now that the Swedish socialists have been infected with political correctness, they are undermining the Swedish welfare state by importing huge numbers of immigrants.

As one Dutch socialist put it, the welfare state is a strictly national arrangement.

The Left has hurt its cause immensely by its hostility to religion and to nationalism. Socialism without nationalism is impotent and nationalism without socialism is fraudulent. A person who claims to be a nationalist but who is a libertarian willing to let poorer members of the nation languish in misery and ignorance is like a man who claims to be a good family man but who never helps less fortunate family members.
Bottom line: there is absolutely nothing progressive about massive immigration of low-skilled to unskilled labor whatsoever. Citizens suffer from cutbacks in government social programs meant to help them.

There is a redistribution of income upwards in the citizenry itself, such that the lower 80% or so of society loses and the upper 20% of so of society gains. IOW, owners and possibly upper management and investors make out big and the workers (generally 80% or so of society) lose money.

In addition to losing money, they also lose services. It is quite possible that they may also see tax hikes to pay for diminishing services. Workers see their wages decline, suffer income losses, lose social services and get tax hikes.

The top 20% of society gets a tremendous amount of increased income, sees dramatic decreases in the wages it must be its workers, and in all probability sees the Gramscian culture of society change in favor of the top 20%, who now increasingly run things and dominate society in general. Why? With the dramatic income shift upwards towards the top 20%, this group will be able to buy the government more and more.

Since government is mostly made up such folks (in Congress and the Executive Branch), they will be delighted by their increased wealth and will continue to direct government policies to continue this redistribution.

The lopsided money shift will also mean that more and more of a nation's discretionary spending will be done by the top 20%. I believe already they spend at least and possibly way over 50% of all consumer spending. So advertisers direct most of their advertising to this top group, and just ignore the bottom 80%.

This is why when you turn on the TV, you see one advertisement after another directed towards the top 20% of society. This is why when you open up Time Magazine, 90% of the people they interview are in the top 20%, and most of their stories seem to be directed at this group also. It is almost as if the rest of us did not even exist.

I would also like to point out the inevitable: sitting there watching TV and seeing one ad after another directed at the top 20% and realizing that one is a million miles away from that income bracket, many folks will only get resentful and angry and determined to get into that bracket.

Since even if everyone tried to get into the top 20%, 80% would fail, most people are just never going to get there. This increases the dog eat dog mindset, societal atomization and probably even the crime rate.

Liberals and the Left support this!

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