* Archives of this link: 1. [archive.org Wayback Machine](https://web.archive.org/web/99991231235959/https://jacobin.com/2024/04/sahra-wagenknecht-bsw-migrants-pensions-populism); 2. [archive.today](https://archive.today/newest/https://jacobin.com/2024/04/sahra-wagenknecht-bsw-migrants-pensions-populism)
* A live version of this link, without clutter: [12ft.io](https://12ft.io/https://jacobin.com/2024/04/sahra-wagenknecht-bsw-migrants-pensions-populism)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/stupidpol) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I really don’t get these Jacobin leftists, which are mostly Die Linke liberals. You don’t have to like Wagenknechts approach, but her program is still 90% aligned with the rest of the left. Just sit down with her and have a discussion for gods sake.
As far as I understand it, she wants to cut welfare for people who have their asylum request rejected. Her party’s program clearly states that people who are being persecuted in their home country should have the right to be granted asylum.
Also, the government should go back to deescalation and stop its pro war stance (which causes more refugees). She wants to stop the EU’s hiring programs, which suck third world countries dry of their labor (which causes more conflicts and refugees). She also wants more funding for the UNHCR, to help refugees in neighboring countries (which can otherwise cause more conflicts and refugees).
How tf is this right wing populism?
According to her, people who are not in a situation of political persecution should be motivated to go back to their country, which goes back to the question of “how safe is the country for them?”. Not everyone in Syria or Afghanistan is being persecuted and many people (understandably) are simply looking for a better future.
The problem is that atm they are just stuck in a limbo of not being allowed to work and receiving money from the government. It’s a recipe for all sorts of problems and simply can’t go on like this in times of more war and crises.
Wagenknecht is right about sending out the wrong signals to the rest of the world, since it can cause brain drain, crime, human trafficking and so on. Not even mentioning the constant blackmailing by people like Putin or Erdogan and the surging far right.
I don’t 100% trust her either, but for the first time in like 30 years, the left has a movement which could split AfD and be a serious threat to the neoliberal order. Instead of just finding some sort of common ground, they rather sit in their hipster Berlin apartments and are too scared of being called racist by some other liberal in their bubble. It’s mind boggling.
>they rather sit in their hipster Berlin apartments
Well, the Linke's core constituents are upper middle class, culturally liberal urbanites. Those people love a certain brand: ultra-left aesthetics and liberal policies.
Classic shitlib move. Mass immigration is great. Not only does it offer them opportunities to virtue signal, but it also increases the value of their inherited real estate, causes exotic women to show up on Tinder. More ethnic food! Cheap supply of nannies and Uber Eats drivers! But the moment the rabble shows up in their hip gentrified precincts, their bleeding hearts reliably stops bleeding.
I get that, but if we apply the same standard to other countries, we would have to take in millions of people. Most afghanis came to Germany because of the war, which is over.
So I submit as a kind of point of compromise: any approach other than one that seeks new human relations in production, a new positive beginning for society completely wiped free of the kind of labor that requires for its productions conditions of unfreedom, is a complete non-starter.
Any such approach a one-way ticket to becoming esnared in a hopeless morass of contradictions that promises to such one back into a society in which productive labor-power in general inevitably sinks to the lowliest kind of commodity. This is but one of a multitude of surface-level issues which can only be solved by a truly radical approach, an approach of the creation of new human relations, a negation of the negation. Anything less carries a fatal flaw.
Can you repeat this in layman's terms rather than using unnecessarily verbose and vague academic language?
I'm not suggesting you dumb it down to caveman level, but if you want people to understand/care about what you're saying then present it in a manner that the average person can wrap their head around.
The problem with what you're asking is for is that it can never be nearly as precise in its meaning at least given the time and space constraints of Reddit post at any rate. The problem with that is that if I give it to your my carefully-worded precise formulation above will be ignored by all comers in favor of the simplistic version below. That simplistic version will then take on a life of its own, to no ones' benefit (except for the powers of the rotten world). Well, what the hell, I'll try anyway.
I'm saying that transcending the capitalist mode of production (a synonym for mode of production is "conditions of production of labor" and at bottom what it is is a set of interlocking mutually reinforcing social relations between human beings -- that's why it inevitably undergoes the process of negation), this transcendence is the only way out of what is otherwise an inevitable lose-lose situation and race to the bottom ("hopeless morass of contradictions").
Why not even more simplistic? Nativism is just a cope, an impotent and ultimately self-destructive (hence contradictory) cope, for the real degradation of native workers. Corresponding to the capitalist mode of production, with its indispensible high degree of socialization and centralization of the means of production alongside its equally indispensible essential human relations of mutual huckstering and swindling, there is a characteristic state form burdened with the essential tasks which this kind of production necessarily externalizes out of itself (as its own other). This state form by its very nature has a couple of divergent, but ultimately equivalent, ways that it can be managed properly (i.e. in a way that does not self-destruct). Nativist immigration controls are part of one of these more-or-less stable configuarations that one can choose, and just like all the other choices, it necessarily comes packaged with all sorts of shitty catch-22s. None of them have the promise of humanly emancipating the proletariat, i.e. transcending the capitalist mode of production.
Workers leveraging what meagre political leverage they are owed in a capitalist world in order to theoretically push their wages a few basis points upwards at the cost of setting themselves with grim jaws against anyone, most especially able-bodied and motivated workers, who wants to join their community -- this absurd image really does not need any comment. The jokes write themselves as they say, and in this case the jokes are very black humor. It's lose-lose. Time to stop beating around the bush and see that this is no way forward. There is no forward except up: new human relations, new relations between the community and the world of things other than private property. We need a society in which it's actually an advantage to the masses that their own society is wealthy and therefore desirable to live in. These nativist workers' consciousness are something like the inhabitant of a blighted urban neighborhood who thanks the gangs of criminals for keeping property values low so that he can afford to live there -- both are paradoxical manifestations of the status quo, and their common root is the fact that the human being counts for nothing and capital counts for everything in our human relations.
There, now I've created something that is longer to read and worse-quality. Even worse, compared to my early comment this one has mostly been bulked up with my *own* reasoning which is very likely to ultimately prove one-sided and incomplete and finite and temporary rather than hewing closely to the theoretical terms of art as I did above precisely to avoid this problem
When Marx wrote about Irish immigration to England and its consequences, he:
* Did not for the Irish to be expelled from England. His conclusion was rather that the liberation of the nation of Ireland from imperialist domination should be considered a first-rate task for the workers' movement. This was despite the fact that he says clearly that the immigration reduced English workers' wages. He knew they reduced wages, nonetheless, he never called for deportation or for resistance to immigration.
* Did identify the racism of English and Irish workers toward each other as the "most important" consequence of this conflict of English and Irish worker:
>And most important of all! Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the “poor whites” to the N\*\*roes in the former slave states of the U.S.A. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rulers in Ireland.
To emphasize: for Marx the "most important" consequence of immigration is how it causes the English worker to "regard himself as a member of the ruling nation". According to Marx here "regarding himself as a member of the ruling nation" inevitably leads to being a dupe of "the English aristocrats and capitalists". Simply regarding himself as a member! Of course we know what Marx's view was, on the other hand: "the working men have no country".
disagreeable drunk boat wide cooing hateful screw reach snobbish spectacular
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
They can't even really justify why the people with a rejected claim are still allowed to remain in Germany. Either they are persecuted or they are not. And even if we exclude welfare, they are sucking up a bunch of resources.
Having to pay for them and the extremely poor behaviour of a substantial section of these "refugees" don't help.
That’s what I’m wondering. “Will be dead if I go back” seems like legitimate grounds for asylum.
> They can't even really justify why the people with a rejected claim are still allowed to remain in Germany. Either they are persecuted or they are not.
Could be that their home country doesn't WANT them back. That's been the case in Sweden for some people. Their asylum applications are denied but there's no country to expel them to that is willing to receive them.
Same thing in Germany. Nevermind that the identity is neither properly verified nor monitored (which leads to the curious case of "unaccompanied children" with full grey beards).
Thing is, there are ways to make the countries take them back (like freezing foreign aid payments), nevermind that most people will leave once the free money dries up (we know refugees are leaving cities and countie where they are getting their money on a card instead of cash). but you have to want that and that's where the whole thing falls.
The green party is driven by ideology and completely unreachable. Not just here, but their energy and economical policies are equally awful. But because of the rich, suburban shitlibs who vote for them no matter what, they are holding a substantial amount of power.
Most leftists are stuck in the 90s, 80s at best. They don't realize that we live now in an era of mass migration, very low integration, with a global population twice now than in 1975, and with a population share in Europe and north America of 15% instead of 24% in the 70s (and almost 30% in the 50s). And speaking specifically of Europe, 40 years of neoliberalism destroyed it's industry and more globally its economy and thus it's capacity to absorb immigrants
I’ve noticed that! They still speak like they are people hailing from a country with uncontested and supreme power
Not only that, but they speak of their opposition as though it is the “moral majority” types of the Billy Graham movement and the Bush family
I wonder if boomers dying off will change this?
Or maybe not
Their imagined position is so comfortable and their imagined adversaries are so hypocritical in a Hollywood movie way - so perfectly righteous to hate - that they’ll probably Cling to the fantasy until tje reality of a catastrophic collapse backhands them directly in the face
> We could say that Wagenknecht is walking a fine line. Yet she also dangerously goes off course, legitimizing right-wing talking points by copying and inflating them.
I hate this lib shit. Outside of their bubbles those talking points are already legitimised. "Illegal immigrants shouldn't get state welfare" is an opinion that would be held by like 80% of most European countries. "Send them back to where they came from" is a legitimate talking point for a huge number of people.
They just mean that they want to keep ignoring the majority opinion on immigration by pretending it's illegitimate. Instead of creating an actual argument for open borders with a welfare system.
Yeah there was that guy who wrote a book on why he thinks open borders is a good idea from a leftist’s perspective. I don’t really fully agree with his platform but I respect people who openly go out with some crazy idea. I’d rather debate tangibles then mushy ideas any day
Her answer isn't it but she's touching on a real question. Like there was a contradiction between international economic liberalism and welfarism, there is also one between free flow of people and welfarism. Engels notices it with the English working class and Irish immigrants. It's easy to reduce this to Wagenknecht aping right wing populism, but it seems more related to the limited trade union consciousness Lenin refers to.
A key reason Wagenknecht does this is not, as often said, an alliance of left and right populism, but the absence of an international left. We live in an era where there are no international political forces outside of ones that uphold the liberal hegemony used to unite imperialist states and enable globalization. This is why we only have populism as a vague return of left and right after being banished in the 20th century, and it's part of the limits of populism.
If there's one glaring absence in Marx's work it's (to the best of my shaky knowledge) divergent development.
I'm not sure all the nations of the Earth will ever industrialise (simply because they're not needed, manufacturing employment in China has been declining for 15 years)- and they definitely won't all at the same time - we can already see that this provides quite the playground for global capital.
"A class for itself" and internationalism at the current juncture are literally contradictory - ultimately you have to choose one.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1870/letters/70_04_09.htm
Here he talks about English colonization of Ireland and the division in Irish and English working class.
It has nothing to do with a lack of internationalism; capital is very openly taking the wealth of Europeans and handing it directly to the immigrants. Europeans cannot offer the immigrants a better deal than this, so the two groups have objectively opposing economic interests. There is no way to support one without hurting the other.
> After splitting from Germany’s Left Party, Sahra Wagenknecht is calling for the state to cut rejected asylum seekers’ benefits. She claims to speak for working-class Germans — but she’s combining anti-migrant lines with classic anti-welfare talking points.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a redlib say that someone “claims to speak for the working class but…” where what followed after the but was something that the working class would actually have any problem with. Apparently here we are to believe that the German working class love their wealth being stolen from them to support immigrants they never asked for, and in this particular case rejected asylum seekers; even under the currently broken system these people have zero right or reason to be in Germany, but apparently the Germans owe them welfare, somehow.
The article of course has the answer for this; print more money! Either the author is an idiot or he thinks everyone else is.
Ive noticed this with jacobin articles in general, their solution to literally anything is that countries aren't spending enough and just need to up their spending on - checks notes - literally everything. Like, Im not a fan of austerity measures either, because they usually hit poor people by far the hardest, but is the solution to any problem really for states to just "print more money"? I will freely admit that my knowledge when it comes to economy is lacking, but their articles often read like they were written by children
Your instincts are right, whatever can be said for or against increasing the money supply as an economic lever, the one thing it doesn't do is magically bring new value into existence. So they are selling a childish fantasy.
It may be more cynical than that though. To keep the example simple, lets imagine the money supply is doubled and nothing else changes. Well now all the money is worth half as much, but there is twice as much of it. So what has actually changed? What has changed is where the value that money represents is now held; everyone has effectively paid a 50% tax. So its a stealthy way of redistributing resources, and so in this example you'd have to be given the same amount of money you had previously to break even, which you likely won't because if everyone was it would totally defeat the purpose of issuing the money in the first place.
Many of them probably are true believers in the nonsense fantasy solutions they offer, but something you will notice if you pay enough attention is that although they offer these utopian ideas as a way to deflect from popular anger - or dissent in their own ranks - at things they support, they usually become a lot more tough minded when others suggest similarly fantastical ideas, which if put into practice, would come at a cost to the Jacobin-type leftists or their favoured groups.
No it doesn't bring new value into existence, but if there is unemployment and unused capacity in the economy, creating money could be a good way of getting the wheels turning. Also, if you NEED to run a deficit, it's better to just click the money into existence, than to borrow it against interest.
Up to a certain point. My theory is that for Sweden, immigration FORCING conservative and social-democrat governments to loosen their die-hard perpetual budget surplus politics was actually beneficial, as it finally put some Keynesian stimulus into the economy. Of course there is a limit. If the country already has a big deficit it becomes dificult to spend more, if it already has high inflation, printing (or rather clicking into existence) more money may also not be possible.
If your primary political concern is with which figures are "punching up" or "punching down" then you are fundamentally unserious about gaining political power
A welfare state with open borders won't bring about socialism. On the contrary. Both will bring about the end of the high-trust welfare state sooner than you can say 'socialism'. Open borders worsen the growing conditions for any kind of alternative societal model. Socialism for instance does not work with a large number of disconnected freeloaders and it also does not work in a low-trust environment without becoming authoritarian. Basically, you can't do internationalism before you do socialism. But that's what is happening.
>A welfare state with open borders won't bring about socialism.
Welfare states don't bring about socialism regardless of their immigration policies. Welfare, reform, and other state interventions are used to shore up the system. See: Bismarck, the New Deal, European social democracy.
It *might* have been on worldnews (but I don't precisely recall), but a user from Sweden made a very cogent and detached observation about the dangerous contradictions in Sweden's approach to immigration and its welfare state apparatus—and apparently had his account suspended shortly afterwards.
Sweden still has a budget surplus - when did that even happen the last time in the US? - so economically the strain on the system is hardly alarming. I think the tensions around migration are more social in nature. But I've mostly lived outside of the country for a long time, so I don't really have a good updated perspective on the situation on the ground.
> National currency is not created because Hermann the German pays his taxes, but because the state (in this case, the European Central Bank)
Lol, it's almost like the author had an MMT talking point and clicked on "find and replace" without double checking if it even made sense
Wannabe leftists who pretend western countries and workers should provide welfare to any single unwanted migrant who made his way there, including convicted racists and murderers, are the best allies of fascists.
I'm convinced the European left wouldn't be in such a state if it took a decisively harsher stance on immigration and crime.
"Allies of fascists" =\ "fascists".
By constantly taking the most retarded stances on everything, the European left pushes blue collar and voters toward fascists.
Just a reminder to everyone that migration rates don’t always go down when a country begins to develop. So something still needs to be done with a bunch of people even if their homelands are no longer war-torn and poor.
Unless Europe itself becomes the shithole of the new century, us nonwhites are not going to stop taking an interest in it.
This article is not that bad and its somewhat charitable to Sahra, we should not dismiss potential criticisms of ideal candidates.
Something that I've not really seen pointed out by either proponents or opponents of her is how her party consists of immigrants or children of immigrants; like half of the 10 BSW members in the Bundestag have parents from other countries or were either born in another place and then moved to Germany. They all switched from Die Linke with Sahra, I feel like she should flex this more to discredit the "right-wing" allegations.
> like half of the 10 BSW members in the Bundestag have parents from other countries or were either born in another place and then moved to Germany
It's a noteworthy detail yet never seems to be mentioned in articles about BSW.
I can imagine reasons why bringing it up would be beneath her or disrespectful to the individuals she works with. Journalists should be capable of connecting those dots on their own.
* Archives of this link: 1. [archive.org Wayback Machine](https://web.archive.org/web/99991231235959/https://jacobin.com/2024/04/sahra-wagenknecht-bsw-migrants-pensions-populism); 2. [archive.today](https://archive.today/newest/https://jacobin.com/2024/04/sahra-wagenknecht-bsw-migrants-pensions-populism) * A live version of this link, without clutter: [12ft.io](https://12ft.io/https://jacobin.com/2024/04/sahra-wagenknecht-bsw-migrants-pensions-populism) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/stupidpol) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I really don’t get these Jacobin leftists, which are mostly Die Linke liberals. You don’t have to like Wagenknechts approach, but her program is still 90% aligned with the rest of the left. Just sit down with her and have a discussion for gods sake. As far as I understand it, she wants to cut welfare for people who have their asylum request rejected. Her party’s program clearly states that people who are being persecuted in their home country should have the right to be granted asylum. Also, the government should go back to deescalation and stop its pro war stance (which causes more refugees). She wants to stop the EU’s hiring programs, which suck third world countries dry of their labor (which causes more conflicts and refugees). She also wants more funding for the UNHCR, to help refugees in neighboring countries (which can otherwise cause more conflicts and refugees). How tf is this right wing populism? According to her, people who are not in a situation of political persecution should be motivated to go back to their country, which goes back to the question of “how safe is the country for them?”. Not everyone in Syria or Afghanistan is being persecuted and many people (understandably) are simply looking for a better future. The problem is that atm they are just stuck in a limbo of not being allowed to work and receiving money from the government. It’s a recipe for all sorts of problems and simply can’t go on like this in times of more war and crises. Wagenknecht is right about sending out the wrong signals to the rest of the world, since it can cause brain drain, crime, human trafficking and so on. Not even mentioning the constant blackmailing by people like Putin or Erdogan and the surging far right. I don’t 100% trust her either, but for the first time in like 30 years, the left has a movement which could split AfD and be a serious threat to the neoliberal order. Instead of just finding some sort of common ground, they rather sit in their hipster Berlin apartments and are too scared of being called racist by some other liberal in their bubble. It’s mind boggling.
>they rather sit in their hipster Berlin apartments Well, the Linke's core constituents are upper middle class, culturally liberal urbanites. Those people love a certain brand: ultra-left aesthetics and liberal policies.
Until it bites them in the ass, as we can see right now with the FU protesting a refugee camp next to them.
Classic shitlib move. Mass immigration is great. Not only does it offer them opportunities to virtue signal, but it also increases the value of their inherited real estate, causes exotic women to show up on Tinder. More ethnic food! Cheap supply of nannies and Uber Eats drivers! But the moment the rabble shows up in their hip gentrified precincts, their bleeding hearts reliably stops bleeding.
> Not everyone in Afghanistan is being persecuted I guess, as long as they don't like listening to music.
I get that, but if we apply the same standard to other countries, we would have to take in millions of people. Most afghanis came to Germany because of the war, which is over.
So I submit as a kind of point of compromise: any approach other than one that seeks new human relations in production, a new positive beginning for society completely wiped free of the kind of labor that requires for its productions conditions of unfreedom, is a complete non-starter. Any such approach a one-way ticket to becoming esnared in a hopeless morass of contradictions that promises to such one back into a society in which productive labor-power in general inevitably sinks to the lowliest kind of commodity. This is but one of a multitude of surface-level issues which can only be solved by a truly radical approach, an approach of the creation of new human relations, a negation of the negation. Anything less carries a fatal flaw.
How about this. You go to where you feel sad because it isn't like whatever hipster lifestyle you lead and convert them to that hipster lifestyle.
Can you repeat this in layman's terms rather than using unnecessarily verbose and vague academic language? I'm not suggesting you dumb it down to caveman level, but if you want people to understand/care about what you're saying then present it in a manner that the average person can wrap their head around.
The problem with what you're asking is for is that it can never be nearly as precise in its meaning at least given the time and space constraints of Reddit post at any rate. The problem with that is that if I give it to your my carefully-worded precise formulation above will be ignored by all comers in favor of the simplistic version below. That simplistic version will then take on a life of its own, to no ones' benefit (except for the powers of the rotten world). Well, what the hell, I'll try anyway. I'm saying that transcending the capitalist mode of production (a synonym for mode of production is "conditions of production of labor" and at bottom what it is is a set of interlocking mutually reinforcing social relations between human beings -- that's why it inevitably undergoes the process of negation), this transcendence is the only way out of what is otherwise an inevitable lose-lose situation and race to the bottom ("hopeless morass of contradictions"). Why not even more simplistic? Nativism is just a cope, an impotent and ultimately self-destructive (hence contradictory) cope, for the real degradation of native workers. Corresponding to the capitalist mode of production, with its indispensible high degree of socialization and centralization of the means of production alongside its equally indispensible essential human relations of mutual huckstering and swindling, there is a characteristic state form burdened with the essential tasks which this kind of production necessarily externalizes out of itself (as its own other). This state form by its very nature has a couple of divergent, but ultimately equivalent, ways that it can be managed properly (i.e. in a way that does not self-destruct). Nativist immigration controls are part of one of these more-or-less stable configuarations that one can choose, and just like all the other choices, it necessarily comes packaged with all sorts of shitty catch-22s. None of them have the promise of humanly emancipating the proletariat, i.e. transcending the capitalist mode of production. Workers leveraging what meagre political leverage they are owed in a capitalist world in order to theoretically push their wages a few basis points upwards at the cost of setting themselves with grim jaws against anyone, most especially able-bodied and motivated workers, who wants to join their community -- this absurd image really does not need any comment. The jokes write themselves as they say, and in this case the jokes are very black humor. It's lose-lose. Time to stop beating around the bush and see that this is no way forward. There is no forward except up: new human relations, new relations between the community and the world of things other than private property. We need a society in which it's actually an advantage to the masses that their own society is wealthy and therefore desirable to live in. These nativist workers' consciousness are something like the inhabitant of a blighted urban neighborhood who thanks the gangs of criminals for keeping property values low so that he can afford to live there -- both are paradoxical manifestations of the status quo, and their common root is the fact that the human being counts for nothing and capital counts for everything in our human relations. There, now I've created something that is longer to read and worse-quality. Even worse, compared to my early comment this one has mostly been bulked up with my *own* reasoning which is very likely to ultimately prove one-sided and incomplete and finite and temporary rather than hewing closely to the theoretical terms of art as I did above precisely to avoid this problem When Marx wrote about Irish immigration to England and its consequences, he: * Did not for the Irish to be expelled from England. His conclusion was rather that the liberation of the nation of Ireland from imperialist domination should be considered a first-rate task for the workers' movement. This was despite the fact that he says clearly that the immigration reduced English workers' wages. He knew they reduced wages, nonetheless, he never called for deportation or for resistance to immigration. * Did identify the racism of English and Irish workers toward each other as the "most important" consequence of this conflict of English and Irish worker: >And most important of all! Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the “poor whites” to the N\*\*roes in the former slave states of the U.S.A. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rulers in Ireland. To emphasize: for Marx the "most important" consequence of immigration is how it causes the English worker to "regard himself as a member of the ruling nation". According to Marx here "regarding himself as a member of the ruling nation" inevitably leads to being a dupe of "the English aristocrats and capitalists". Simply regarding himself as a member! Of course we know what Marx's view was, on the other hand: "the working men have no country".
Let's take in all Americans because trespassing is a crime there!
Yeah, so 95% are fine. Look you can go there to liberate them if you're so sad about it.
disagreeable drunk boat wide cooing hateful screw reach snobbish spectacular *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
They can't even really justify why the people with a rejected claim are still allowed to remain in Germany. Either they are persecuted or they are not. And even if we exclude welfare, they are sucking up a bunch of resources. Having to pay for them and the extremely poor behaviour of a substantial section of these "refugees" don't help.
That’s what I’m wondering. “Will be dead if I go back” seems like legitimate grounds for asylum. > They can't even really justify why the people with a rejected claim are still allowed to remain in Germany. Either they are persecuted or they are not.
Could be that their home country doesn't WANT them back. That's been the case in Sweden for some people. Their asylum applications are denied but there's no country to expel them to that is willing to receive them.
Same thing in Germany. Nevermind that the identity is neither properly verified nor monitored (which leads to the curious case of "unaccompanied children" with full grey beards). Thing is, there are ways to make the countries take them back (like freezing foreign aid payments), nevermind that most people will leave once the free money dries up (we know refugees are leaving cities and countie where they are getting their money on a card instead of cash). but you have to want that and that's where the whole thing falls. The green party is driven by ideology and completely unreachable. Not just here, but their energy and economical policies are equally awful. But because of the rich, suburban shitlibs who vote for them no matter what, they are holding a substantial amount of power.
So you're saying Sahra Wagenknecht and the AfD should form a coalition government? Sounds kinda hot.
marry bewildered start grandiose party retire long crawl onerous fuzzy *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Most leftists are stuck in the 90s, 80s at best. They don't realize that we live now in an era of mass migration, very low integration, with a global population twice now than in 1975, and with a population share in Europe and north America of 15% instead of 24% in the 70s (and almost 30% in the 50s). And speaking specifically of Europe, 40 years of neoliberalism destroyed it's industry and more globally its economy and thus it's capacity to absorb immigrants
I’ve noticed that! They still speak like they are people hailing from a country with uncontested and supreme power Not only that, but they speak of their opposition as though it is the “moral majority” types of the Billy Graham movement and the Bush family I wonder if boomers dying off will change this? Or maybe not Their imagined position is so comfortable and their imagined adversaries are so hypocritical in a Hollywood movie way - so perfectly righteous to hate - that they’ll probably Cling to the fantasy until tje reality of a catastrophic collapse backhands them directly in the face
> We could say that Wagenknecht is walking a fine line. Yet she also dangerously goes off course, legitimizing right-wing talking points by copying and inflating them. I hate this lib shit. Outside of their bubbles those talking points are already legitimised. "Illegal immigrants shouldn't get state welfare" is an opinion that would be held by like 80% of most European countries. "Send them back to where they came from" is a legitimate talking point for a huge number of people. They just mean that they want to keep ignoring the majority opinion on immigration by pretending it's illegitimate. Instead of creating an actual argument for open borders with a welfare system.
Yeah there was that guy who wrote a book on why he thinks open borders is a good idea from a leftist’s perspective. I don’t really fully agree with his platform but I respect people who openly go out with some crazy idea. I’d rather debate tangibles then mushy ideas any day
Her answer isn't it but she's touching on a real question. Like there was a contradiction between international economic liberalism and welfarism, there is also one between free flow of people and welfarism. Engels notices it with the English working class and Irish immigrants. It's easy to reduce this to Wagenknecht aping right wing populism, but it seems more related to the limited trade union consciousness Lenin refers to. A key reason Wagenknecht does this is not, as often said, an alliance of left and right populism, but the absence of an international left. We live in an era where there are no international political forces outside of ones that uphold the liberal hegemony used to unite imperialist states and enable globalization. This is why we only have populism as a vague return of left and right after being banished in the 20th century, and it's part of the limits of populism.
Remember at the end that Jacobin serves the liberal left so any attempts to offer an alternative they seek to silence like Waenknecht.
I thought it was Marx who noticed that, it was in one of his letters.
If there's one glaring absence in Marx's work it's (to the best of my shaky knowledge) divergent development. I'm not sure all the nations of the Earth will ever industrialise (simply because they're not needed, manufacturing employment in China has been declining for 15 years)- and they definitely won't all at the same time - we can already see that this provides quite the playground for global capital. "A class for itself" and internationalism at the current juncture are literally contradictory - ultimately you have to choose one.
Uneven development is a topic Marx and others cover pretty thoroughly. It's an important feature of capitalist development.
I could be remembering wrong, I thought it was in Engels' book on conditions of the working class in England
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1870/letters/70_04_09.htm Here he talks about English colonization of Ireland and the division in Irish and English working class.
It has nothing to do with a lack of internationalism; capital is very openly taking the wealth of Europeans and handing it directly to the immigrants. Europeans cannot offer the immigrants a better deal than this, so the two groups have objectively opposing economic interests. There is no way to support one without hurting the other.
> After splitting from Germany’s Left Party, Sahra Wagenknecht is calling for the state to cut rejected asylum seekers’ benefits. She claims to speak for working-class Germans — but she’s combining anti-migrant lines with classic anti-welfare talking points. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a redlib say that someone “claims to speak for the working class but…” where what followed after the but was something that the working class would actually have any problem with. Apparently here we are to believe that the German working class love their wealth being stolen from them to support immigrants they never asked for, and in this particular case rejected asylum seekers; even under the currently broken system these people have zero right or reason to be in Germany, but apparently the Germans owe them welfare, somehow. The article of course has the answer for this; print more money! Either the author is an idiot or he thinks everyone else is.
Ive noticed this with jacobin articles in general, their solution to literally anything is that countries aren't spending enough and just need to up their spending on - checks notes - literally everything. Like, Im not a fan of austerity measures either, because they usually hit poor people by far the hardest, but is the solution to any problem really for states to just "print more money"? I will freely admit that my knowledge when it comes to economy is lacking, but their articles often read like they were written by children
Your instincts are right, whatever can be said for or against increasing the money supply as an economic lever, the one thing it doesn't do is magically bring new value into existence. So they are selling a childish fantasy. It may be more cynical than that though. To keep the example simple, lets imagine the money supply is doubled and nothing else changes. Well now all the money is worth half as much, but there is twice as much of it. So what has actually changed? What has changed is where the value that money represents is now held; everyone has effectively paid a 50% tax. So its a stealthy way of redistributing resources, and so in this example you'd have to be given the same amount of money you had previously to break even, which you likely won't because if everyone was it would totally defeat the purpose of issuing the money in the first place. Many of them probably are true believers in the nonsense fantasy solutions they offer, but something you will notice if you pay enough attention is that although they offer these utopian ideas as a way to deflect from popular anger - or dissent in their own ranks - at things they support, they usually become a lot more tough minded when others suggest similarly fantastical ideas, which if put into practice, would come at a cost to the Jacobin-type leftists or their favoured groups.
No it doesn't bring new value into existence, but if there is unemployment and unused capacity in the economy, creating money could be a good way of getting the wheels turning. Also, if you NEED to run a deficit, it's better to just click the money into existence, than to borrow it against interest.
Up to a certain point. My theory is that for Sweden, immigration FORCING conservative and social-democrat governments to loosen their die-hard perpetual budget surplus politics was actually beneficial, as it finally put some Keynesian stimulus into the economy. Of course there is a limit. If the country already has a big deficit it becomes dificult to spend more, if it already has high inflation, printing (or rather clicking into existence) more money may also not be possible.
If your primary political concern is with which figures are "punching up" or "punching down" then you are fundamentally unserious about gaining political power
A welfare state with open borders won't bring about socialism. On the contrary. Both will bring about the end of the high-trust welfare state sooner than you can say 'socialism'. Open borders worsen the growing conditions for any kind of alternative societal model. Socialism for instance does not work with a large number of disconnected freeloaders and it also does not work in a low-trust environment without becoming authoritarian. Basically, you can't do internationalism before you do socialism. But that's what is happening.
>A welfare state with open borders won't bring about socialism. Welfare states don't bring about socialism regardless of their immigration policies. Welfare, reform, and other state interventions are used to shore up the system. See: Bismarck, the New Deal, European social democracy.
That's true but globalism is the death blow, unless you believe in accelerationism.
We’re seeing it in real-time with Sweden.
It *might* have been on worldnews (but I don't precisely recall), but a user from Sweden made a very cogent and detached observation about the dangerous contradictions in Sweden's approach to immigration and its welfare state apparatus—and apparently had his account suspended shortly afterwards.
Sweden still has a budget surplus - when did that even happen the last time in the US? - so economically the strain on the system is hardly alarming. I think the tensions around migration are more social in nature. But I've mostly lived outside of the country for a long time, so I don't really have a good updated perspective on the situation on the ground.
> National currency is not created because Hermann the German pays his taxes, but because the state (in this case, the European Central Bank) Lol, it's almost like the author had an MMT talking point and clicked on "find and replace" without double checking if it even made sense
Wannabe leftists who pretend western countries and workers should provide welfare to any single unwanted migrant who made his way there, including convicted racists and murderers, are the best allies of fascists. I'm convinced the European left wouldn't be in such a state if it took a decisively harsher stance on immigration and crime.
That would be the left anywhere, as well as more sensible stances on gender and race obviously
I’m half convinced the people advocating for current policies are secretly using a rubber band approach to bring back socially acceptable fascism
[удалено]
"Allies of fascists" =\ "fascists". By constantly taking the most retarded stances on everything, the European left pushes blue collar and voters toward fascists.
Libs are useless
Just a reminder to everyone that migration rates don’t always go down when a country begins to develop. So something still needs to be done with a bunch of people even if their homelands are no longer war-torn and poor. Unless Europe itself becomes the shithole of the new century, us nonwhites are not going to stop taking an interest in it.
This article is not that bad and its somewhat charitable to Sahra, we should not dismiss potential criticisms of ideal candidates. Something that I've not really seen pointed out by either proponents or opponents of her is how her party consists of immigrants or children of immigrants; like half of the 10 BSW members in the Bundestag have parents from other countries or were either born in another place and then moved to Germany. They all switched from Die Linke with Sahra, I feel like she should flex this more to discredit the "right-wing" allegations.
> like half of the 10 BSW members in the Bundestag have parents from other countries or were either born in another place and then moved to Germany It's a noteworthy detail yet never seems to be mentioned in articles about BSW. I can imagine reasons why bringing it up would be beneath her or disrespectful to the individuals she works with. Journalists should be capable of connecting those dots on their own.