The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #86026   Message #1610146
Posted By: Piers
21-Nov-05 - 09:00 AM
Thread Name: BS: Paris Immigrant?Riots
Subject: RE: BS: Paris Immigrant?Riots
There is nothing fluffy about the idea that every mouth to feed is attached to a face, which is attached to a body containing a brain capable of thought and hands capable of work (and like most human beings willing to work). Physical capacity to support people is a non-problem (the capacity of a the capitalist system to provide is another matter), a vast portion of working people do work that in no way contributes to meeting the material needs of the population. Feeding, clothing and housing people is not a problem, that capitalism does not allow this is a problem.

This boils down to whether you align yourself with your fellow workers or with the bosses. The really fluffy ideas and specious arguments (e.g. all foreigners are lazy, the national (state) interest is your interest, it is your country (What bits are mine? Well let's not go into that)). These fluffy ideas are necessary to maintain the belief that despite that fact that the state treats you like scum if you are unemployed, disabled or a pensioner, sends you to war and restricts your civil rights, and the capitalists who live off your labour, who you are consistently at odds with for higher wages, better working conditions and cheaper things, you are better off with them than those who are in the same position as yourself in other territories. International combinationism, solidarity, collectivism and all that, is a danger to privileges of the capitalists that the state protects.

What is really a paradox is that people bang on that migrants should accept their new country's 'culture' (as if culture respects political boundaries). Yet folk cultures which is just about the only genuine bottom-up, historically rooted, culture going but the state and the music capitalism has been a bigger factor than any in destroying that culture.