My grandfather always dreamed of going to America. Due to life and its weird oddities, he somehow ended up in a Spanish concentration camp instead. My father, too, always dreamed of going to America, aspiring to join a Big Band when the age of Big Bands was already long over. Instead, he somehow ended up as a classical musician in a European orchestra. What we hope for politically is not always what he hope for personally. Consider, for instance, how many bitter and despairing people believe that only more terrorism could make people finally wake up, while simultaneously hoping that they and their loved ones will remain spared from the onslaught of racist white people or radical Muslims. Likewise, whether political notions are true (or false) is independent from how they relate to our personal lives. My parents came as refugees to the Western world shortly after the floodgates of immigration were opened at the request of a number of big businessmen such as Francis Bouygues in France, under Konrad Adenauer in Germany and due to laws introduced by Sen. Ted Kennedy in the United States.
Capital either goes to misery (“outsourcing”) or imports misery (“Refugees welcome!”) in order to take advantage of docile and cheap labor, to drive down wages and to drive up rents. Lower wages, higher rents: this is the simple materialist reason why Capital wants free trade and open borders; this is why it has long used immigration to move different ethnic groups throughout the world like pawns on a chessboard. Indians were sent to Fiji to cut sugar canes while Chinese people were sent to Canada, to South Africa and the US to work on railways. The Wirtschaftswunder of 1950s Germany, i.e. the era of economic growth after World War II, was first “tackled” by importing Turkish workers, and the US Immigration Act of 1965 not only laid the foundation for the ethnic replacement of European Americans but, ironically, also to the destruction of the African-American working class. (African-Americans had been developing a relatively stable working class for some years and a delicate middle class with some economic success as small business owners when the foundation for their destruction was laid during the Civil Rights Era.) Clearly, “No Nations! No Borders!” is just as much a corporate slogan as it is the slogan of a spoiled and pampered, highly financed ANTIFA youth, rioting to emphasize their demands for less “racism”, more immigration and transsexual characters in video games.
However, Marx and Engels, during their day and age, understood why the English ruling class of the 19th century was so eager to imports hundreds of thousands of Irish workers. Friedrich Engels, writing on Irish immigration in 1845, first quoted historian Thomas Carlyle to explain: “The Irishman is there to undertake all work that can be done by mere strength of hand and back — for wages that will purchase him potatoes. He needs only salt for condiment, he lodges to his mind in any pig-hutch or dog-hutch (…). The Saxon-man, if he cannot work on these terms, finds no work.” Engels agreed and continued himself, “These Irishmen who migrate for fourpence to England, on the deck of a steamship on which they are often packed like cattle, insinuate themselves everywhere. The worst dwellings are good enough for them; their clothing causes them little trouble, so long as it holds together by a single thread; shoes they know not; their food consists of potatoes and potatoes only; whatever they earn beyond these needs they spend upon drink. What does such a race want with high wages? (…) The majority of the families who live in cellars are almost everywhere of Irish origin. In short, the Irish have discovered the minimum of the necessities of life, and are now making the English workers acquainted with it. (…) With such a competitor the English working-man has to struggle, with a competitor upon the lowest plane possible in a civilised country, who for this very reason requires less wages than any other. Nothing else is therefore possible than that, as Carlyle says, the wages of English working-man should be forced down further and further in every branch in which the Irish compete with him.” http://archive.is/0lgQy Today, it is Mexican or Syrian workers who make white workers “acquainted with the minimum of the necessities of life.” This, not some nonsense about “conscious capitalism” is the reason why big business is so eager to fight for “diversity”, “inclusion” and immigration.
One of the saddest “red pills” to swallow is that the ruling class is not a race or an occult group, trying to achieve a metaphysical or ideological goal of some sorts (like a world without “pure” races), but is simply opposed to the nation state and borders because they want cheap labor. They want mass immigration in order to drive down wages, drive up rents and make strikes impossible. Conservative Ann Coulter realized it, “Nouvelle Droite” philosopher Alain de Benoist realized it (“Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up. Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.”), self-described National-Socialist Kerry Bolton realized it, and even “democratic Socialist” Bernie Sanders(!) realized it before he cucked out: “Open borders? That’s a Koch brothers proposal. That’s a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States. It would make everybody in America poorer —you’re doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs. You know what youth unemployment is in the United States of America today? If you’re a white high school graduate, it’s 33 percent, Hispanic 36 percent, African American 51 percent. You think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids?” http://archive.is/1XQlI
Unsurprisingly, even the 19th century knew both a misguided religious as well as a racial opposition to the immigration of Irish people (who were neither considered to be white nor, given that they were traditionally Catholic, Christians). Even back then many Christians used the Bible as a crystal ball and gobbled up booklets and pamphlets full of several self-assured, populist explanations of how the Irish were agents of the Romish antichrist, their immigration fulfilling the details of obscure biblical prophecies. Likewise, fascism and racism today have actually become more acceptable in Christian circles than thorough anti-Capitalism; you can rather talk about how the evil Jews want to kill the Aryan man as a revenge for the Reformation than using terms such as “ruling class”, “capital” and “low-wage workers.” Same with anti-Americanism: describing the USA as a new Babylon and Satanic is more acceptable and widespread than simply noticing the process of the monopolization of capital and US “monoimperialism.”
But obscure Christian prophecies and racism are only two of the features the misguided opposition of today and the misguided opposition of the past have in common. A further similarity is their hostility towards technology: the Luddites, for instance, were a group of English textile workers in the 19th century who destroyed weaving machinery as a form of protest. Of course, the ruling class of 19th century England (the same ruling class who imported these Irishmen to make things even worse for workers) defended machinery and crushed the Luddites most brutally; just like the ruling class of today destroys you most brutally if you speak out against open borders. If alt-right et al. had realized that racism and anti-technological sentiment weren’t the proper responses for 19th century Luddites, and aren’t the proper responses today, they might not have been so disappointed by their “God Emperor” Trump, and might not go down the path of lunatic torch marches and esoteric antisemitism today.
Furthermore, while people are less equal than they say, they are still more equal than they think. It is perfectly reasonable wanting to avoid “a scenario where I’m electorally outnumbered by or have to interact with significant numbers of people from groups which disproportionately display hostility toward my group“, but even the most racist white person has to admit that Asians, Indians and Mexicans are obviously at least smart enough to produce, say, the cars that were once produced in the US and hence created a strong and prosper working and middle class. After all, a single genius here and there does not yet make a prosperous country – look at the middle and the working class, not just on the number of Nobel prize laureates! Additionally, Indian engineers on H-1B visas (easy to get rid off) who work for lower wages and less security are just as useful as low-wages workers; not only economically but also politically. Remember how Hillary Clinton won the Democrat’s nomination as presidential candidate due to the almost religious support of American “people of color”, specifically black people, who fervently supported the most hawkish and imperialist of all, and loudly applauded when she rhetorically asked them if racism were to end if she would break up the big banks. (Who cares about imperialism and war as long as these “intersectional feminists of color” don’t have to bear the sight of a white guy with dreadlocks, amirite!)
With the alt-right not realizing that there is neither Jew nor Gentile when it comes to Capital, but that they are all one in the Dollar, and leftists -due to the carrot and stick policies of the ruling class- having degenerated into a bunch of thugs, rats, state employees and crypto-liberals, dark and difficult times lie ahead of us.
“No Nations! No Borders!” is just as much a corporate slogan as it is the slogan of spoiled and pampered ANTIFA youngsters who never have to worry about predatory multinational corporations shutting them down or firing them
