I write this letter as a youth from Portugal, who has been very much involved in the kinds of disputes discussed in the recent reply to Donald Parkinson's “Faith, Family and Folk”. I became politically active in a context with a relatively big and active Communist Party in Southern Europe, which adopts at a mass-level a lot of the approaches suggested in that letter. Indeed, some of the positions presented – such as the view on “cultural wars” and on the PMC – have been presented, in Portugal, by the party’s right-wing. A few years ago, I was part of a (quite informal) tendency inside the Portuguese Communist Youth that denounced internal issues of transphobia. Though I'm not going to discuss LGBT and feminist politics directly here, we have had to develop a certain level of preparation against this type of argumentation. In an effort to think through the party’s failings with respect to sexual politics, we had to go back and study various lineages of communist debates – from communization and operaismo, to discussions within the PCF and PCI, and the classical texts of the main PCP dissident, Francisco Martins Rodrigues –, making this effort both radicalizing and educational. Inversely, the kind of positioning present in the letter seems to me to be developed through absorbing and rationalizing right-wing agendas rather than through strategic analysis and debate on the left.[1] A lot of what I will discuss about Europe, of course, also applies more or less directly to the US.
On Immigration
In the letter, immigration is analysed solely as a “divide and rule” tool by the bourgeoisie. However, this is a very mistaken view of the way immigration politics have been articulated in the West, and we don't have to look at the far-right to see the enormous racist structure which defines both immigration and labour-processes in the region. For instance, here in Portugal, a considerably poorer country than the US, plenty of centrist figures have been representing deeply anti-immigration positions. Last January, the then-General Secretary of the Socialist Party, Pedro Nuno Santos, defended a “responsible immigration strategy” centred around “our way of life”. A month later, one of the chief editors of a mainstream newspaper, owned by the main private company in the country, Sonae, argued for a Danish-like immigration policy (meaning, stuff like this) as a way to inhibit the far-right surge.
The picture is quite clear: maybe chauvinism within Western working-classes really is a “rational survival strategy”, but these aren't the workers being abandoned by the left-wing parties. Last December, the two main trade union federations in the country organised a general strike against an anti-labour package, but not a single union intervened in the same way to support immigrant organising against the anti-immigration laws being proposed by the government. So why should we tail right-wing workers when there's a huge mass of immigrant workers already inside the West being strongly politicised, often outside the frame of union and electoral politics? Why should the approach to local workers be one of disregarding immigrants instead of trying to build ties and alliances in actual struggles? Is racism not a much bigger impediment to labour unity than the mere presence of immigrant workers? Is this not in a way profoundly dehumanising, legitimising right-wing precepts of immigration?
On Imperialism
The view that immigration is encouraged (either because of the absorption of cheap labour or because of multicultural policies) is in truth very puzzling, especially in light of the mass death produced yearly by European border policies. Whether the European capitalist classes are favourable to immigration or not is in itself a motive of intra-class competition – positions vary depending on industrial sector, geopolitical conditions, etc – and overall secondary to the fact that the structure of global production and the interstate system are profoundly racialised.
Regardless of a country's specific policy, the EU has had consistent agreements with Middle Eastern and North African states to limit immigration, which have in turn become informal alliances with regional militias. Over the last decades, the European border police, Frontex, has become the first de facto European standing army, supplied with Israeli drones and surveillance technology to police the Mediterranean, in turn making it into a mass grave. And, be it in foreign or economic policy, the EU's general approach towards the Global South, and mainly Africa, is one of impoverishment, extraction and exploitation (for example, the data on the EU’s land consumption in particular is very impressive), not to mention that it firmly remained Israel’s biggest commercial partner through the Gaza genocide.
Should an internationalist politics not see these conditions as the general grounds for strategy? And isn't the EU's imperialist structure a major factor in European class formation, in specific, of a national labour aristocracy and declining intermediate strata? That is, in my view, it's this structure which produces chauvinism as a “rational” option, as opposed to it being, in the abstract, a rational response to neoliberalism.
On Strategy
Overall, the main problem within the letter is one of methodology, of wrong strategic thinking preceding wrong analysis. A “unitary working-class”, defined on a national basis, is seen as the main political subject, and the rest follows from that. This is very noticeable in the comment on the professional-managerial class – thereby contrasted with “ordinary workers”. The depoliticised worker is taken as the prioritary subject, and the difficult, necessary discussions among politicised workers are to be relegated to the background. This view is akin to electoral politics, whereby “workers” are mainly seen as an audience to be reached with a message.
However, the very opposite is true: working-class politics have long been in disarray in the West, and they can't just be taken as the single starting-point for all politics. Indeed, social forms such as islamophobia and transphobia have become main forms of discipline and violence in the West; so why should they be strategically neglected? Are sex and race not themselves tied to contemporary class formation? And, as grounds for political organising and mobilising, are sexual and racial oppressions inherently more susceptible to liberal co-option than, say, union politics or anti-war movements?
This “unitary” (we could also provocatively call it “identitarian”) view of class thus ignores the actual mediations of class society, and as such makes it difficult to understand the challenges that we face on the ground – in all kinds of organising, be it in trade unions, tenant unions or in social movements. What is also very noticeable to me, however, is that this same concept of class has long been exposed by, for example, Western European Communist Parties, understood as a way to include all waged strata in a broad "anti-monopolist" front. Once again, this wasn't just an ideological development – for instance, through the proclamation of the Popular Front strategy in the 7th Congress of the Comintern – but also a material one.
The imagined working-class becomes akin to the one constituted in post-war Europe, integrated in the nation-state, a sociological group that can be quantified and governed. According to Alberto Toscano:
The post-war ‘Fordist’ compact cannot be understood without factoring in the nationalisation and racialisation of the working class, and without attending to the multiple borders that demarcated workers with social rights from the superfluous and the subordinate.[2]
All in all, the conceptual baggage that we've inherited from these traditions isn't at all sufficient to understand the societies we live in, and for that task popular-frontism is a much bigger problem than so-called identity politics. If we want to recompose communism as a mass politics, we'd be better off focusing on the areas of harsh antagonism both in global capitalism and within our nation-states – which, I think, also point to profound structures of social reproduction, of a world-building and everyday life dependent on mass slaughter and systematic exclusion. Avoiding intra-class conflicts around chauvinism only means abandoning our immigrant and queer comrades, ultimately delaying the composition of the working-class as a subject capable of a communist politics, which requires very high levels of solidarity, analysis, self-criticism, etc, all fundamental to conduct the antagonism necessary for social transformation.
On Liberation and Internationalism
I find that a lot of this is also downstream from a fundamental misunderstanding of how neoliberalism came to exist in the West, and the way it related to the previous period of capital accumulation, under which working-class security and political capacity “was premised on a tightly enforced sexual division of labor that relegated women to lower-paid, precarious forms of employment and indexed the wage of the Fordist worker to the costs of maintaining a wife and children at home”.[3] The way I see it, this period, at least in Western Europe, was one of ongoing capture or outright decline of liberation politics, feeding into anti-internationalism – the more well-known case being the PCF's position on Algeria.
As such, was neoliberalism just an attempt to disarticulate these configurations of working-class politics and welfare state? Were these, as they existed, ever such a threat to capital accumulation? Or was there something else involved? I'm thus very receptive to Melinda Cooper's argument (on the US in specific) that “it was only when the liberation movements of the 1960s began to challenge the sexual normativity of the family wage as the linchpin and foundation of welfare capitalism that the neoliberal-new social conservative alliance came into being”.[4] This should at least make us rethink a bit about the kinds of communities and mass organisations that existed in the past and those that came to exist later on; that, in many instances, class struggle corresponds very directly to antagonism against the (national, religious, patriarchal) communities we belong to.
I do, however, sympathise with the last section of the letter, because we really do have to reconstruct forms of material solidarity that enable proletarian internationalism to flourish, and we evidently can’t change the behaviour of large sections of the population through simple persuasion. What I do not get, however, is how those efforts would be separate from a theoretical critique of the patriarchy, family, nationalism, and so on. In fact, to my mind, this project absolutely cannot avoid being extremely antagonistic to Western nation-states: we ought to look, for instance, to the immigrant defense campaigns in LA or Minneapolis, or to our heroic comrades of Palestine Action, now incarcerated in British prisons.
In the Palestine solidarity movement, women and queer comrades have consistently been in the frontlines, doing very hard work behind the scenes, making sure Palestinians in Gaza remain fed and clothed, and, above all, they've been suffering the brunt of state repression and encountering at every turn the anti-terror apparatus that has been built in the West over the last decades (which, too, is a, if not the, main impediment to material solidarity across borders today). This fact can't just be ignored or sidelined in the name of tailing, say, male workers in Christian communities. I believe we have much wider horizons than that.
- Luis Toledo
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