Emigration = Preservation under hypocritical humanitarian appearances.

Trieste, May

Not on a general scale but in certain economically devastated areas, following the slaughter of the second world war, capitalism resorted to mass emigration, a hypocritical temporary measure intended to pull the wool over the eyes of the increasingly immiserated masses and take pressure off the regime: for example, from Trieste to Australia.

It is obvious that the State, the organ of defence of the ruling class seeks, under a humanitarian guise, to balance the system’s internal contradictions, drawing the unemployed masses from the most stricken areas and moving them to others with more breathing space and greater opportunities for exploitation — the classic case of killing two birds with one stone.

In its bloated development, in which the much-vaunted ‘individual personality’ disappears and is left to be resurrected by opportunists of every stripe, capitalism directs labour-power wherever it can best find relief and continue to reap a return.

But for us, in this dynamic, it is pressing that we underline the nefarious support carried out by the so-called workers’ organisations and so-called economic organisations of all the countries concerned: they are, in fact, the watchdogs of emigration, the lackeys of capitalist conservation.

Say we have a country where unemployment is rampant and a ‘relief valve’ needs to be opened. The authorities of that country will offer up their workers: the trade unions of the country that may eventually take them in thrust themselves forward with the full arsenal of slogans and platforms at the disposal of the parties that direct them — parties whose very foundations are opposed to those of the class party.

Thus, at that very moment the migrant is hired, it is the unions who step in — and it is they who demand — the scrupulous and meticulous presentation of documents mandated by the “humanitarian” host country. With these documents, the newcomer, in the rarest and most favorable case, is admitted only to a practical and theoretical test of his trade.

And since, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the migrant worker cannot pass this test — because, among other things, not knowing the language is a serious obstacle — he is excluded from large companies, especially state-owned ones where the trade unions effectively control hiring, and instead ends up in small firms, given assorted duties beneath his actual qualifications.

The collusion of the local unions with the ruling class is evident.

1) The task of selection, very willingly handed over to them by the state (thereby saving face for its humanitarian magnanimity), has the effect of extracting a higher yield from labour-power and provides a certain guarantee of security against those agitations which, under different circumstances, the unions would not fail either to unleash or to support.

2) The labour of those employed in small firms is subject to regulation and thus to the highest level of exploitation because, as is only natural, the emigrant clings to his first job in the new ‘homeland,’ even if beneath his own trade and therefore more poorly paid. Generally, he knows that if he loses that job he will not find another, for he has already been thrust so far down the socio-economic ladder.

3) This policy automatically sows disunity among the workers — a division so necessary to the class adversary. The work of fraternisation between natives and emigrants, which ought to be the primary task of a proletarian organisation, is replaced by the opposite policy, reinforced by linguistic, juridical, ‘documentary’ privilege, and so on.

Thus, the union of the country of immigration serves as guarddog for the boss, while the State makes itself out as the benevolent father, humane and liberal.

This bitter experience endured firsthand by the emigrant workers must be tallied with all the others for the great day of reckoning — the day when, under the leadership of the class party, the proletariat will cast off every blinder, every haze, every palliative remedy of this vile society and, with a surgical incision into the “democratic” social body, will at last cleanse its festering wounds.

Meanwhile, the so-called ‘free movement of people’ — replacing the old and detested term ‘emigration,’ yet so tellingly close to ‘free circulation of commodities,’ since human labour-power is itself a commodity — serves as a pillar of the regime, behind the mask of the most brazen and hypocritical humanitarianism.