Lea Ypi is professor of political theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
The left-wing criticism of open borders, that condemns liberal hypocrisy by emphasising how cheap labour benefits wealthy elites and harms poor workers, presents a distorted understanding of how social class functions in relation to the state. Marx was one of the first political philosophers to draw attention to the devastating effects this argument had on workers’ struggles.
To understand capitalism, Marx argued, we must understand political conflicts as existing not between states and groups with different cultural profiles, but between different social classes, with distinct and historically specific alignments to global capitalism. This is one of the main ways in which Marxist thought departs from previous Enlightenment thinking, which saw nations and states as the relevant agents in world history.
Class conflict cuts across state boundaries. An analysis of politics based on class rather than borders acknowledges the role that a political and economic elite play in upholding a system of global capitalist exploitation. States make and enforce laws that control particular territories. But the distinction between migrant workers and domestic workers identifies workers only with the borders that contain them, rather than a broader transnational class struggle against global capitalism.
Put simply, to argue that migrant workers pose a problem for domestic workers ignores the global structural conditions that turn immigration into a problem. Treating immigration as a threat to domestic workers reduces social conflict to state conflict. It artificially creates a “we” that must be protected, pitted against a “them” that must be controlled. This division undermines the joint struggle of working classes across the world.
Marx termed this false opposition “the secret of the impotence of the working class”. The more we emphasise national boundaries and borders, the more we undermine class-based solidarity and diminish the prospects of joint action. It’s a division that plays into the hands of the ruling elites.
As Marx put it, “it is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes”.
The real threat to the labour movement is not foreign migrant workers or open borders. It’s the capitalist state that protects the interests of a ruling elite through practices of border management and policies of integration that render migrant workers dependent on the whims of employers. Their vulnerability flows from the same mechanism that keeps domestic workers in check and weakens collective bargaining.
To agree with Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s argument that we must acknowledge the pressure on borders is to align with the capitalist state and against the working class…The division that anti-immigration rhetoric introduces between domestic and foreign workers is “the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power”, Marx argued. This class was “fully aware of it”. It is time that champions of the working class became aware of it, too.
