Sunday, 31 March 2019

Trying To See Through The Lies And Misinformation.

       Just a little more information on the web of US lead Western media lies and misinformation being woven around Venezuela.
         March 30, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - Venezuela is America's current target for mass destabilization in the hope of installing a puppet government.
       So were there 'security concerns? I asked Paul.
— Eva Bartlett (@EvaKBartlett) March 27, 2019
Continue Reading:

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Export Then Import The Same Stuff, And Make Lots Of Money.

      Is there any rational person on this planet that can't see the insanity of capitalism. We are always told to encourage "trade" that's the savior of the country, increase trade and we get rich. Of course the "we" doesn't include you and I. The idea seems to be we grow lots of food and then export it, so we need to import food to survive, makes perfect sense if you make you money from trading, but blasts the atmosphere with tons of CO2 and other poisonous emissions, but what the hell, it gets you a private jet and a £150 million yacht.
      For those who haven't yet quite grasped the insanity of capitalism, this article from Roar Magazine, should clarify the total greed driven insanity of this destructive economic system that destroys the planet and only benefits the few.
          The way trade works in the global economy is often absurd. Food routinely gets shipped halfway across the world to be processed, then shipped back to be sold right where it started. Mexican calves — fed imported American corn — are exported to the United States to be butchered, and then the meat is exported back to Mexico for sale. More than half of the seafood caught in Alaska gets processed in China, and much of it is sent right back to American grocery store shelves.
         Compounding the insanity of this “re-importation” is the equally head-scratching phenomenon of “redundant trade”. This is a common practice whereby countries both import and export identical quantities of identical products in a given year. For instance, in 2007, Britain imported 15,000 tons of chocolate-covered waffles, while exporting 14,000 tons. In 2017, the US both imported and exported nearly 1.5 million tons of beef and nearly half a million tons of potatoes.
        On the face of it, this kind of trade makes no economic sense. Why would it be worth the immense cost — in money as well as fuel — of sending perfectly good food abroad only to bring it right back again?
        The answer lies in the way the global economy is structured. Direct and indirect subsidies for fossil fuels, on the order of $5 trillion per year worldwide, allow the costs of shipping to be largely borne by taxpayers and the environment instead of the businesses that actually engage in it. This allows transnational corporations to take advantage of differences in labor and environmental laws between countries, not to mention tax loopholes, in service of making a bigger profit.
         The consequences of this bad behavior are already severe, and set to become worse in the coming decades. Small farmers, particularly in the Global South, have seen their livelihoods undermined by influxes of cheap food from abroad. Trade agreements have made it impossible for companies to compete in the global economy unless they base their operations in places with the weakest protections for workers and the environment. And all the while, the share of global carbon emissions produced by commercial shipping is set to rise to 17 percent by 2050, if action isn’t taken to curb our addiction to trade.  But policymakers currently have little incentive to reduce unnecessary trade: bizarrely, emissions from global trade do not appear in any nation’s carbon accounting.
        The action will therefore have to begin with peoples’ movements around the world. We must call for an end to subsidies that only benefit giant corporations, as well as an end to tax policies that encourage things like re-importation and redundant trade. Perhaps the most critical step towards sanity would be the removal of subsidies for fossil fuels. Without governments covering the cost of their emissions, transnational corporations would have to radically reconsider the way they operate.
          Making these changes will not be easy. Generating momentum for trade policies that promote community health, small farmers, and ecological stability will not happen overnight. But the first step is raising awareness of trade as an issue, and overcoming the unwillingness of most major media outlets, politicians and think-tanks to discuss it critically.
         To that end, Local Futures has released a tongue-in-cheek short film and an accompanying factsheet, highlighting the absurdity of the current global trade system and pointing to some ways out. The film and factsheet have been launched as part of #InsaneTrade Week, a social media campaign Local Futures is running from March 25 to April 1.
Author: Local Futures.
             Local Futures is an international NGO that raises awareness about the need to shift away from dependence on global monopolies, and towards decentralized, regional economies.
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Friday, 29 March 2019

Wars Make Money, But Not For The People.

      Just look around, speak your mind, then do something about it.
From Information Clearing House, The American War Machine:

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Poisoning The Wells.

        A couple of years before the "referendum", 2014, Dmitry Orlov wrote an article called The Imperial Collapse Playbook. It gives his take on the "big picture" on the various conflicts across the globe, orchestrated by the Anglo-imperialists, UK and US. It makes for interesting reading, below is just an extract from the article. When reading the piece reflect on the dates, written in 2014, and our "referendum" 2016.
Read the full article HERE: 
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Thursday, 28 March 2019

Voltairine de Cleyre.

          I have always enjoyed the poems of Voltairine de Cleyre, (November 17, 1866–June 20, 1912) and admired the woman. What some Glaswegians may not know is that she visited Glasgow and thanks to Glasgow anarchist comrades she got to see some parts of Scotland outside Glasgow, and stated she loved the highlands. Though I think it was mainly around the Loch Lomond area that she visited.
           I particularly like this poem by Voltairine;
The Road Builders

(“Who built the beautiful roads?” queried a friend of the present order, as we walked one day along the macadamized driveway of Fairmount Park.)

I saw them toiling in the blistering sun,
Their dull, dark faces leaning toward the stone,
Their knotted fingers grasping the rude tools,
Their rounded shoulders narrowing in their chest,
The sweat dro’s dripping in great painful beads.
I saw one fall, his forehead on the rock,
The helpless hand still cluthcing at the spade,
The slack mouth full of earth.
And he was dead.
His comrades getnly turned his face, until
The fierce sun glittered hard upon his eyes,
Wide open, staring at the cruel sky.
The blood yet ran upon the jagged stone;
But it was ended. He was quite, quite dead:
Driven to death beneath the burning sun,
Driven to death upon the road he built.
He was no “hero”, he; a poor, black man,
Taking “the will of God” and asking naught;
Think of him thus, when next your horse’s feet
Strike out the flint spark from the gleaming road;
Think that for this, this common thing, The Road,
A human creature died; ‘tis a blood gift,
To an o’erreaching world that does not thank.
Ignorant, mean and soulless was he? Well —
Still human; and you drive upon his corpse.
Philadelphia, 24 July 1900

Voltairine de Cleyre:
American Radical
        Born in Michigan in 1866, Voltairine de Cleyre was named after Voltaire. By the time she died forty-five years later, she had lived up to the free-thinking and trouble-making reputation of her namesake. The famous activist Emma Goldman called de Cleyre the most gifted and brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced.
De Cleyre wrote:
       Her own father was a working-class French immigrant who earned his American citizenship fighting in the Civil War. Her mother was the child of abolitionists. Her parents sent young Voltairine to a convent school, where she learned how to be a debater and an atheist. She was writing poetry at six. At nineteen, she was writing and lecturing on Free Thought, the philosophical idea that truth should be based on reason and empiricism rather than authority and dogma.
De Cleyre’s radicalism was above all “a rhetoric of self-decolonization aimed at disrupting the ideological configuration of her readers’ interior lives, freeing them to rearticulate those lives.”
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Once Upon A Time------

       Due to various pressures, Spirit of Revolt's   "Read of the Month" has missed a couple of months, but we have managed to get one in for March, just in time. It is from our John Cooper collection-T SOR 3-52-62. It is called Once Upon A Time There Was A Place Called Nothing Hill Gate----.
      It is a fascinating and informative history of the Notting Hill area and the Notting Hill Carnival. Well worth a read. Hopefully we will be back up to speed and get these little gems from our archive up on a regular monthly basis. We have thousands of documents and reports of actions and people already digitised so you can read them on line and we add to this wealth of information on a regular basis. So why not visit our archive regularly and dip into the wealth of documents and writings of historical events, people and their actions for that better world. Our main focus is the Glasgow/Clydeside area, though as you can see by our March "Read of the Month", we do travel much further afield. 

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Wednesday, 27 March 2019

Feminism, To Be Or Not To Be, That Is The Question!

         I'm sure, that within the anarchist groupings this article will annoy some, irritate more, and raise others to fury. I'm also sure that there will be others in the anarchist groupings who will agree wholeheartedly with Anna. All the more reason to share it and and see what transpires.
From 325:

Words from anarchist comrade Anna Beniamino
Anna, Women’s prison of Rebibbia
Degenerations – Between pride and gender victimhood
(An article Degenerazioni Tra orgoglio e vittimismo di genere
Published in issue 3 of the anarchist paper Vetriolo)
          Rather these should be recognized as signs of yet another operation of the deconstruction of real meaning and recuperation in act. Convinced that one is opposing them, in actual fact one is adapting to the very behavioural and normative codes conceded by dominion as ways of releasing tension.
It’s nothing new that economic and political power is tending to swallow up and redigest everything, faster and faster; consider for example the pearls of anti-sexist, antiracist or whatever it might be neo-conservatism and conformism that are being dispensed by the media every day.
          I believe that the first misunderstanding is the inability to put certain kinds of behaviour into context, within what should be a wider critique of relations and communication and interaction between individuals in the antiauthoritarian sense, reducing them to the level of questions of gender.
Gender categorization, in LGBTI (XYZ…) style, should be left to those who need to feel themselves a protected category, in pigeonholes more suited to a Linnaean categorization of individuals than free bodies and minds. Instead, we find such pigeonholes in antiauthoritarian milieus, which should already have internalized their refusal.
         By the way I’m far from believing that so-called liberated spaces really are such, in fact they often become parking lots for various forms of malaise and instead of enhancing the quality of life and relationships they risk lowering it even more. For example it’s not possible to see every inability to interact in a meeting as sexism, authoritarian imposition or gender violence: I read in a pamphlet [1] that was around last year stigmatizing the latent violence in relations between comrades ‘the oldest exercises power over the youngest, those with more experience impose themselves on those who have less, whoever is stronger on the not so strong, mirroring the relations of the existent we say we want subvert.’
      This is supposed to be a critique of authoritarian attitudes in antiauthoritarian milieus and it would be valid, were it not that it banalises and flattens everything: there is a fundamental difference between imposition of strength and the expression of experience. The inability to express oneself or to act is neither authoritarian nor antiauthoritarian, and can only be solved individually… otherwise we come to the idiocy of praising inability and inaction.
The concept of emotive violence or the violation of emotional integrity is even more ephemeral, because it promotes this analytical junk amongst antiauthoritarian individuals who should have far sharper critical weapons and practical capacity of intervention. As well as emptying of meaning the inflicted and brutal violence it is being compared to.
        How can we claim to engage in an unrelenting struggle against authority and dissertate on revolutionary and liberatory violence if we cannot even react individually to some ‘undesired comment in the street’ (by taking it for what it is, and dealing with it accordingly with the person who spat it out) or keep up an animated discussion during a meeting without having recourse to the shield of violated sensitivity? Why do we find ourselves reading the disarming and obvious idiocy that advises making love with a woman in order to avoid an unwanted abortion? [2] Why codify, even in the field of gender, only for “female gangs”, like conquest, self-defence from aggression and harassment? Isn’t this a problem common to all genders among liberated beings?
      Why should we revisit the most outworn products in the wardrobe of 1970s feminism, such as separatist meetings… maybe calling them workshops (a really ugly term that combines work and shop, borrowed from business conventions and unworthy of free discussions)?
       I read the spectre of the same reductive and banalising mechanism in another recent publication, the Italian edition of the Rote Zora claims [3], i.e. the intention to sensitize only a female audience about a group of women who carried out armed struggle in the 1980s and 90s in Germany, insisting on the choice of gender, of very great interest on some feminist topics, as a privileged discriminating factor for taking them out of oblivion… given that one doesn’t want it ‘to belong to official history. It is written by men’ [4]… What?!? Is it not that official historiography tends to not talk about them because they were angry, not angry feminists? Just as it doesn’t deal with – or distorts – the history, actions and writings of so many other angry men and women? The partial vision is not that of Rote Zora who experimented their own path of individual and collective struggle and liberation in the context of wider anti-imperialist and anti-capitalistic action, but of those who try to make a flag out of it in order to give more credibility and specific weight to their own theorizing, to then reduce themselves to looking for ‘paths of self-defence’.
      Why entrench oneself in a ‘feminist and lesbian’ discourse [5]? Why yet another protective cage, rather than develop the beauty and infinity of more advanced ideas of the critique of domination (not only gender), put forward and tested?
        ‘Sisterhood’ has always seemed to me to be a form of allusive alienation of transversal political alliances between oppressed and oppressors, between ‘inter-classist’ as it has become fashionable to say again… adverse parties. I also happened to see a booklet [6] recently containing an Italian feminist’s interviews of some female veterans of the Spanish revolution in 1936, aimed at finding a questionable ‘sisterhood’ between women anarchists engaged on the frontline (and in the background with Mujeres Libres), the POUM and Stalinist women.
       It was quite significant that almost centenarian anarchist revolutionary women were far more lucid and open in their critique about the limitations of feminism than their interviewer imbued with 1970s’ clichés was: in the extreme calm of a life lived to the full, they were able to explain simply the equal relations between male and female comrades, and how they managed to ridicule and neutralize the machismos that emerged among the most retrograde and stupid of their comrades. In short the practices and theoretical contribution of these women are far more advanced along the path of liberation of the individual and the negation of authoritarian dynamics than those of feminists who glean from their experiences, defending simulacra of struggle instead of the struggle itself. The need for auto-da-fé, the ‘deconstruction of one’s male privileges’, the search for separate places for discussions, self-awareness and self-analysis in public seem a little too much like signs of these times of over-exposition and woolly thinking, parading ‘struggles’ by category and interior struggles, to end up not struggling at all.
Women’s prison of Rebibbia
October 2018
[1] Violenza di genere in ambienti antiautoritari ed in spazi liberati [Gender violence in antiauthoritarian milieus and in liberated spaces], Italian edition translated from Spanish in 2017
[2] Critica all’aborto [Critique of abortion], Jauria – Trans-feminist publication for animal liberation, issue 1, Summer/Autumn 2015
[3] Rote Zora – guerriglia urbana femminista [Rote Zora – Feminist urban guerrilla], Autoproduzione Femminista, 2018
[4] From the introduction to the same book
[5] Which the Rote Zora women themselves didn’t think relevant. From a 1984 interview with Rote Zora: ‘Some of us have children, many others don’t. Some are lesbian, others love men’, page 51, ibidem
[6] Donne contro [Women against], Isabella Lorusso, ed. CSA editrice, 2013
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Tuesday, 26 March 2019

Let's Shoot Some Living Animals For Fun!!!!

       What a savage and insane world we live in, a world where we can breed animals, then release them into the wild, so that a deranged few can strut around the countryside shooting them. I can understand those who have to hunt to survive, but to go about shooting living creatures and call it sport, well that shifts them into the category of depraved psychopath.

        After seeing a few reports appear about game birds released from breeding farms, a map has been made public containing some of the breeding farms within the U.K.
        The shooting industry in the U.K. breeds mostly pheasants, partridges and ducks in factory farm conditions, and then they have a whole system of introduction into the wild during the summer to get the birds in place for the shooting season that starts in September.
It isn’t new to see reports of game farms being visited by the ALF with thousands of animals released, and it is no surprise. As a tactic, game farms are at its weakest point right now, when mating season is happening and they need to collect the eggs to incubate them in huge hatcheries . When breeding birds are released into the wild, there is not only a loss of “stock” but also they are unable to breed the birds they need to then distribute them in shoots. Although it is a liberation action, it carries the weight of economic sabotage and finds a solution to the burden of caring for thousands upon thousands of animals in safe homes, as game birds can be simply released into the wild. There is no doubt that many of them will die, but let’s remember that all of them plus their offspring would die during the next shooting season.
        Game farms have mostly two different layouts, either penned up in groups of 100-1000 birds, where the panels of the pen can be easily removed and birds can be herded out, or in battery cages, where a metal or wood flap can be removed allowing the birds to fly.
       Due to the map being made public, some farms might have increased their security and some keepers have warned that they are “shooting foxes every night”. Doing night reccy without any tools is heavily recommended and carrying a camera to film the conditions might be a good idea. Remember that trespassing without intent to commit any illegal activity is NOT a criminal offence. Motion detectors (being to flood light or alarm) are a thing in some farms, but as the area is quite big, it is as simple as finding a safe route. As a rule of thumb, don’t cross gates, make your own path!
        To add to the security measures, remember that no cutting tools should be used more than once and that any clothes snagged on a fence (even half a mile away from the farm) should be burnt. Maybe a visit to the charity shop is a good idea! Also remember to shoplift your shit and if you must pay, to always use cash. Empty your pockets from everything you won’t need and seriously, don’t keep receipts.
       It really is, right now, the best time for ALF cells and whoever other individuals to cripple the shooting industry as the breeding birds are the most important part of the whole business. It is for that reason that we are seeing an increase on this kind of actions right now.
If you are curious about the game farm map, here is the link:
Here there is a few reports from game farms this year:
And here there is a report from a huge action from 2018:
        Please note that the map does not list all farms, and if you have any other places that should be added you can let Stop the Cull know.
All reports can be sent to us using safe methods, those can be found here:
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Monday, 25 March 2019

Your Government Knowingly Damages Your Health.

          The following is a comment by Loam on my recent post, Co-operation Between Oppressors. It once again highlights the every increase repressive nature of the state as it continually adds to its armoury in an attempt to prop up its control over the people. On this occasion it is a technique developed in UK and employed by the Zionist apartheid state of Israel, but now finding its way into the French state's callous repressive tactics. A method that has unknown effects on the health of those exposed to these nano-particles. once again the state shows little regard for the well-being of its own citizens. Thanks Loam for the link. 

     In France, the government uses chemical markers and nanoparticles on protesters.
      Yellow vests and bystanders have become, unwittingly, guinea pigs for the world’s first experiment on human nano-particles and chemical markers whose effect on biological organisms is still poorly known.
      For the French government, these are harmless “coded chemical marking products” that permeate the skin, hair and clothing of targeted people for a period of time varying from several weeks to decades.
       Officially this fuzzy technology has never been used against human beings. However, accurate information gathered from some security professionals indicates that in Act 18 of Yellow Vests (16 March), water cannons and gases containing DNA markers and nano-particles were used. protesters without the latter having been warned beforehand.
        In addition to the chemical markers and nanoparticles, the effects on human health of which are very poorly known, the addition of new psychotropic substances to CS gases is similar to a large scale experimentation with new social control techniques similar to those the worst dystopias of science fiction movies and novels.
        These “DNA weapons” developed in Britain and widely used by Israel contain chemical and biological substances whose harmfulness to human health has been deliberately ignored, especially in Israel where Palestinian detainees claim to have contracted various types of cancer following their DNA labeling or the use of other control techniques involving nano-particles that may have damaged the genetic material of the cells of their organisms.
Read the full article HERE:
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Sunday, 24 March 2019

Solidarity Knows No Borders.

         Ah, a beautiful beach, a magnificent forest, a lovely meadow. However in this greed driven capitalist system, they are useless, they don't make any money. So let's build a sports stadium on the beautiful beach, an open cast coal mine in the magnificent forest, and an airport on the lovely meadow. That way they become useful assets to the vulture financial Mafia and the corporate juggernaut. The ethos of today's society is to turn everything into a profit making entity for that small band of multi billionaires, and to hell with the well-being of the people.
     Andalucia: Two comrades sentenced in Arraijanal (Spain)
         On February 2018, Arraijanal, one of the last parts of natural beach on the coast of Andalucia (Spanish state), was squatted to protect it from the attempt of environmental destruction in order to build a football stadium and sports town on this area. Some centenary trees were cut down and the area was fenced in, but that didn’t stop the activists from establishing a permanent protest camp.
      This protest camp have been evicted several times, but our comrades managed to reoccupy it and keep the struggle during six months, and for now the building works have been stopped.
         On May 24th, two comrades involved in this project got arrested while the police was trying to remove banners and camping material from the occupation. That resulted in a court case in which they are accused of resistance, offense against authority and bodily harm to the cops proceeding this arrest.
        What the public prosecutor was asking for were two years and a half of prison, another year on the matter of a fine, worth 12 euro per day for each one of them and an a compensation to the cops about being injured of 40 euro day if they could work and 60 if they couldn’t. Gotta add that this harm suffered by the cops consists in two between four of them declaring that they couldn’t go to work during a month for being hurt on their pinky finger.
         Today, 5th of March, they got offered an agreement on court that would consist on 720 euro of fine, the compensation mentioned before and 21 months of prison sentence on probation for three years for one of them and 490 euro of fine plus compensation, and 6 months of prison sentence on probation for two years for the other. The money of the compensation still need to be stipulated by the judge but our estimation is that would be of around 4000 euro in total.
        After a lot of pressure from the court, threatening them with a larger prison sentence with no possibility of probation for one of them, they took the agreement.
         So now on, we’re calling for solidarity for facing this case. You can help by spreading this information, or donate money to support the accused with the coming court costs and fines.

        Love and rage from the Mediterranean coast. Against environmental destruction, smash capitalism, smash the state.

soli bank account ES34 0049 6589 9123 9513 0424
Banco Santander

concept SalvarArraijanal

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Co-operation Between Oppressors.

      All states use different weapons to subdue, repress and intimidate the population. Over any act of disobedience hangs the state's tools, incarceration, fines, house arrest, probation and many more. The state continually works at refining and expanding these tools, and they learn from each other. What happens in one state will be tested in another, adding to their armoury of repression to keep the people in line.
 From Crimethinc, An Interview With Nikos Romanos:

Which one is the terrorist?
        When Nikos Romanos and several other anarchists faced trial last year, the prosecutor repeatedly emphasized: They are anarchists, so their actions are terrorist.” This sentence summarizes the message that the Greek state aims to send.
Read the full article HERE:

 Which one is the terrorist?

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Saturday, 23 March 2019

It's My Birthday, ---So What??

     I never really celebrate my birthdays, to me they are just another day in a long journey. I sometimes say that if there has to be a celebration on that particular day, it should be for my mother, after all she done all the work, I just popped into her life.
     This year was a wee bit different, my partner Stasia and my family, sort of railroaded me into having a get-together in the house, and I have to admit I had a wonderful time.
     So this old grumpy man thanks all those well-wishers who sent greetings, I'm humbled, and a special thanks to Stasia, my two grand kids and family, who made it a very memorable occasion. 

       Fortunately they didn't put the correct number of candles on the cake, as it would probably used up all the oxygen in the room. 
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Friday, 22 March 2019

Dismiss The Capitalist Economic Arguments.

       I post the following article in full, though it is filled with what should be accepted and obvious to any anarchist/libertarian-socialist. It should also be obvious to the public at large, but sadly this is far from the case. It highlights the futility of framing your arguments in the capitalist economics frame. We have to see ourselves as other than economic units profitable or otherwise.
The article written by

The Thief and the Cash Cow: Twins from a union of enemies
       As the Brexit debacle gets more surreal and confusing by the day, people in the UK are continually bombarded with information and propaganda. Whether or not the Brexit result was ‘about migration’ or, alternatively, was the outcome of a combination of various intertwined grievances, the issue of migration has played a dominant role in both right and left-wing arguments. These arguments shape ideas and create the ‘common sense’ which frames people’s thinking. And it is from these arguments that we can understand, and thereby confront, troubling underlying assumptions that are, most of the time, left unscrutinised precisely because they have already established themselves as an aspect of what their proponents consider ‘common sense’.
       One of these perspectives, which the right wing heavily relies on in its propaganda (an idea that is shared from Tommy Robinson all the way to the Conservative Party), is that the presence of migrant workers in the economy lowers wages and impoverishes working conditions. This is what I will call the ‘Thief Argument’. It forms an important pillar of their wider discourse, enabling them to say that they are not racist; they are simply stating the ‘obvious’, since ‘we have to look out for our own people first’. The left, once again in most of its denominations (from communists to the Labour Party), respond in exasperation, and in what they believe is a defence of migrant workers. They say that migrant workers are ‘good for the economy’ because they passionately work, staff the NHS and other vital services, pay taxes, and are disproportionately not recipients of state benefits. I will call this the ‘Cash Cow Argument’.
       Yet, despite their vehement proclamations of mutual enmity, these two sides are much closer than seems at first glance. In a manner not uncommon in UK political discourse (centuries of colonialism tend to leave their mark in a plethora of ways), both the left and the right tend to view migrants purely in terms of their economic costs or benefits to the host society. It is basically the same way that you view your car: if you think it’s doing a good job, you admire it; if it is underperforming, you want the problem ‘dealt with’. Yet, surprisingly for some, we have not come to these islands simply to work in your warehouses or to benefit from your patronising ‘protection’; we are more than machines. Furthermore, far from being confined to the realm of migration, these twin perspectives betray a wider conception of the human condition under capitalism as such. This article will attempt to very briefly dismantle these ideas, in the hope that we may at some point be able to forge more social movements that fight for the dignity of both locals’ and migrants’ lives.
      The ‘Thief Argument’ is probably my favourite, because of how easy it is to dismantle when you have a drunken conversation at the pub with one of its supporters. Yet it still needs to be confronted because it is strongly established in common discourses and propagated by powerful interests. In all its simplistic glory, the argument states that migrants, either in their quest for jobs and conditions better than the ones they left behind or due to the insecurity of their status, are willing to work for smaller wages and in worst conditions than the locals. This, they claim, creates a race to the bottom which impoverishes British workers. Everybody has heard it. It is propagated by the likes of Nigel Farage, UKIP, Leave Means Leave and sections of the Tory party. Recently it was given an air of credibility by the right-wing, anti-migration think tank Migration Watch UK and by a study conducted by the Bank of England which found that migration ‘impacted wages’ in the ‘semi-skilled/unskilled occupational group’. Its strength is in its simplicity; the argument seems straightforward and ‘obvious’, so much so that it has even polluted some of the Labour party’s ideas, with Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 echoing UKIP in placing the blame with international employment agencies which enable employers to ‘import cheap agency labour to undercut existing pay and conditions in the name of free market orthodoxy’.
        The weakness of this argument is that it ignores the wider social and economic conditions that create our common reality in the UK. To begin with what should be obvious, wages and employment conditions are not set by migrants but by the parliament and bosses. It is true that many migrant workers work in jobs that have low wages and worst labour conditions; yet, as I have analysed elsewhere, they are in these jobs because the UK economic system is designed by default to have them there. This is something that has been going on since the British empire; more recently, the government and employers capitalised on the expansion of the European Union in the early 2000s to provide cheap and insecure labour to many industries that were to profit greatly from it. Indeed, the principle of free movement of the EU is designed, and supported by big business in the UK, almost exclusively for that purpose. Weaker economies are artificially kept in a state of underdevelopment, which pushes migrant workers to the more ‘developed’ economies to serve as workers.
        For example, many warehouses and factories rely on agencies to provide them with temporary labour to fill their short-term needs (try to imagine the chaos in one of Amazon’s warehouses during the Christmas period). Employment legislation passed by the UK government allows insecure, short-term contracts which employment agencies use to essentially ‘rent out’ workers to the employers that require their labour. The agency usually pays the worker something around minimum wage (once again established by the UK government) while receiving a lot more from the employer than what goes in the pockets of the worker. The insecurity of the contract enables the employer to dispose of the worker once there is no need for them (while at the same time not needing to concern themselves with nuisances such as sickness or maternity pay), and the sheer volume of industries enable the agencies to consistently shuffle their workers from one location to the next, making profits all year round. On the other end of the equation, many migrant workers share some characteristics that are used by this government-business complex in order to boost profitability. These include de-skilling (the non-recognition of qualifications gained abroad), language difficulties, lack of information regarding trade unions and general labour rights, as well as an initial preference for a quick job to get settled down as fast as possible.
      As time passes and networks are solidified, occupations become linked with the people performing them, creating a cycle which reproduces itself (think of the ‘Polish plumber’ stereotype). If you have a look at ethnic community groups on Facebook, you will routinely find British employers advertising vacancies. Studies in the US have shown that the extent of employers’ preference to migrant labour is so deep that they have even drawn racialised, biological conclusions as to why certain ethnicities are better for certain jobs; for example, some believe that Mexicans are naturally suited to agricultural labour due to the design of their bodies. It is not the migrant workers that ‘take jobs’; the reality is that the whole economic system is designed to employ migrant workers in those specific conditions, purely to maintain profitability. In a study on the issue of migrant work, Anderson shows that the arguments that ‘migrant workers fill jobs that British people don’t want’ and that ‘migrant workers take jobs’ are equally invalid. Migrant workers simply accept the jobs and conditions that have already been established by the government and by employers, with existing migration controls playing a key role in creating precarious workers that are useful for profitability. The real culprits of the impoverishment of the UK’s working classes are the government and the bosses, and in these classes, migrant and British workers have a lot more in common than their differences.
While the ‘Thief Argument’ is pretty easily confronted through a basic understanding of how the UK’s economy works, the ‘Cash Cow Argument’ is harder to dispel because: 1) it usually comes, paradoxically, from an ideological source which claims to support migrant workers and 2) because it is actually true, but in its very proclamation is directly counterproductive to the purpose its proponents pretend to support. Yes, the UK economy has been designed to employ migrant workers at specific jobs, and as such it would be unrecognisable (and unimaginable) without them as it is currently structured. Yet how pitiful, weak, and dangerous is it to propose a group’s economic benefit to this society as the main argument in support of their value and humanity? While the right and the far-right hide their underlying racism behind economic arguments, the most vocal forces of the left betray, through their own proclamations, that they want migrants to stay in the UK only because of the benefits their exploitation brings to British employers. In doing so, they inadvertently support the wishes of capital more faithfully than their far-right opponents. The far-right wrongfully claims that ‘migrants are bad because they harm the economy’ and the left replies, very factually, that ‘this economy needs migrants’; in so doing, they prop up the very system they claim to be against. What is common in both of these perspectives is an infatuation with the health of the UK’s capitalist economy and a simultaneous conception of the migrant as purely an economic vessel, a thing, something with no value other than the profits it can or cannot produce.
       We need to be aiming for more than this. Anti-racism needs to be much stronger than a call to arms for capitalist exploitation of migrant workers. We need to highlight the common sources of the plight of both British and migrant workers, and foreground the objectives of solidarity, community power, and the overthrow of this economic system as such. The dominant ideological characteristic of neoliberalism is that every individual is no more than their productivity and their capacity to survive in an intensely competitive environment. This perspective has underpinned the state policies that impoverish and exploit British workers just as much as they do migrant workers. It is contradictory and damaging to argue against this system while at the same time proclaiming that migrant workers are welcome precisely because of the role they serve within it.
        It is probably true that the ‘Thief Argument’ and its variants played a significant role in galvanising support for Brexit. However, it is equally true that the European Union is a coalition of capitalist nations, warmongers and bankers. Plagued by diminishing power and resources, and not having set the correct foundations beforehand to challenge the twin assaults of both racism and neoliberalism, the wider left finds itself disjointedly and contradictorily arguing without a coherent ideological and political goal. Supporting the European Union in the name of fighting for the rights of migrant workers is incoherent; the policies of the European Union, in conjunction with the those of the UK’s governments, are directly those which keep our countries of origin in a constant state of underdevelopment and force us to seek work elsewhere. These policies stem from the same sources which both throw British workers under the wheels of austerity and which fortify migrants’ exploitation. As a brief side-note, it is equally incoherent and counter-productive to suddenly jump to support EU workers’ rights while ignoring the struggles of non-EU migrants (a fault that the ‘3  Million Campaign is particularly guilty of), who have borne the brunt of the UK’s racist migration regime for far longer and with much more painful results.
       We need to organise to develop community power from the bottom up, free from political parties and outside of the dominant institutions which exist to give an illusion of freedom amid soaring inequality. We need to fight for ‘no borders’, not ‘better borders’. We need to fight for ‘anti-capitalism’, not ‘better capitalism’. We need to show how borders are part of the same structures which create the inequality and social collapse that anti-migration Brexiteers are raging against. History has shown that solidarity is forged in collective action. Through initiatives such as Living Rent, both migrant and Scottish workers fight in unison to improve their living conditions, targeting problems which equally affect them both. Radical trade unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World and the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain bring both migrant and local precarious workers together in a variety of labour struggles, showing that solidarity is stronger than division.  In the same spirit of solidarity, locals unite with migrants against detention and immigration controls through initiatives such as the Unity Centre. All of these initiatives combine to prove that we as humans, in all of our diversity, are capable of not only resisting the assaults on our living conditions together, but that we are also able to forge new ways of existing, outside and beyond the scope of capital and profit.
      We are much more, and much stronger, than our economic roles attempt to constrain us into being. An essential step, therefore, towards organising for emancipation is to completely and permanently expel any traces of the ‘Cash Cow Argument’ from our rhetoric, while at the same time consistently dismantling and ridiculing the ‘Thief Argument’. This will set the foundations for the development of a relatively coherent (different parts of the left will always have important theoretical variations) anti-capitalist and anti-racist movement. The issue is not whether migrant workers are good for the economy; the issue is the economy itself and the plethora of oppressive mechanisms that maintain and reproduce it.
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