Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - What Do Far Left Activists Want？

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Aug. 25, 2017 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

27:06

What Do Far Left Activists Want？

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	So I found a series of short interviews from a minor far-left activist that I'll put in all in this video.
	And I think it'll give us a real insight into her worldview.
	I'm here in Pecking with Antonia Bright from Movement for Justice.
	So something I've noticed recently is that the term by any means necessary appears to have been popularized in the far left as if they think that they are a bunch of violent revolutionaries and they think this is all justified.
	And I only say this because it's always followed by like a knowing smile.
	By any means necessary.
	any means necessary so um i talked to you a while ago about brexit and um how's things how's brexit for you now it's as it was It is still motivated, driving racism and driven by racism.
	But Europeans are white.
	I mean it would make more sense to say xenophobia, wouldn't it?
	Driven by anti-immigrant bigotry.
	Well there's no doubt that immigration was a hot button issue when it came to Brexit and mass immigration in general is definitely something that the working classes in this country have had enough of.
	They certainly are tired of dealing with the consequences of it.
	I really wouldn't go as far as to call this a form of bigotry because I think she's deliberately trying to conflate this with racism.
	But I think I'll give her that.
	The people do want less immigration.
	And we're fighting to stop Brexit.
	Why?
	There was a democratic referendum.
	It was decided that we would leave the European Union by the majority of the country.
	What's the problem?
	The biggest issue of Brexit was always the attack on immigration.
	For people in the north of England, where mass immigration has been a severe and significant issue, for people in the south, they were more concerned about sovereignty.
	But what I find really confusing about this is the commitment to immigration.
	Why?
	What difference does it make to this person if people are allowed to immigrate to this country en masse or not?
	And it's a catch-all, it's like a scapegoat that means being able to drive through an awful lot of dreadful policies and so on.
	I've already watched these videos once, and as far as I can recall, we never get to find out what dreadful policies she's talking about.
	But it's the concentration of racism and anti-immigrant bigotry that we are seeing around us, not just in Britain, but around Europe, in the US.
	An idea that, you know, utilising the scapegoating of immigrants, you know, by the right, to drive through the kind of division and cuts and attacks and driving down of living standards that we're seeing.
	Okay, so division, cuts and attacks are the things that she's objecting to.
	Well, things would probably be less divisive if you were to understand why people in the north particularly are objecting to mass immigration.
	If you could find your way to empathising with these people, then perhaps this would be less of a divisive issue because you would be on the same side as them.
	The Bank of England did a 2015 study to see whether there was an impact on wages through mass immigration, and they found that there was.
	The problem is that this was hidden, because when you take in aggregate all of the wages for all of the people in the country, it's very hard to find any particular impact.
	But when you break it down into occupational groups, you find that the groups with the poorest people, such as the semi- and unskilled services occupational group, receive the biggest impact on wages.
	There is actually a net decrease in their wages because of mass immigration, because of supply and demand.
	Because if you bring over millions of unskilled workers to compete with the native unskilled workers, that naturally drives down their earning potential, reducing their standard of living.
	So mass immigration does indeed affect the living standards of the poorest people in our society.
	So it is completely rational that the poor people in our society would be opposed to mass immigration and not for reasons that are racist.
	And this is not even taking into account the social problems that these immigrant groups bring.
	And saying that immigrants are the problem and utilising that is just allowing so much of a degradation to our society.
	This puts her in direct conflict with the working class in this country, who find the effects of mass immigration to be degradation to their own living standards.
	And we do have a study from the Bank of England to back that up.
	So this appears to be her talking from an ideological perspective, rather than talking about the real world consequences of mass immigration.
	The other side of it is like the importance of the fight for immigrant rights.
	I don't really understand what she means by the term immigrant rights.
	Immigrants in this country don't have a special set of rights that is separate or different than the rights of native British people.
	And the importance of the fight of migrants, like workers and communities and so on, for progress.
	I think that it just, if you look historically, you know, at the forefront of struggles for real progress, you're seeing at the forefront immigrants, like just decade upon decade, generation after generation.
	I watched that clip about five times and I'm honestly not sure what she's trying to say.
	The struggle of migrants and workers who are presumably the same thing and the struggle towards progress, but progress towards what?
	If anything, this seems to be confirmation that these migrants are trying to get jobs that should otherwise be available to native British workers, and they have to compete with the British workers, which is what I presume the struggle is.
	But I can't be sure, so.
	And I think that's what is under attack.
	It's not because of, you know, it's not because these are just weak people to attack and it's not some sort of sort of security or whatever it is.
	I have absolutely no idea what she's talking about.
	The problem isn't that immigrants who come here lose their rights.
	The problem is that too many immigrants are coming here.
	And the argument seems to be simply have less people allowed into the country.
	And personally, I can't see an issue with this request.
	We know that unlimited mass immigration is harmful to the communities that have to deal with this mass immigration.
	And I don't think it's unreasonable for them to say, can we please have less mass immigration?
	So I really don't understand what her contentions are.
	That they claim it is an attack of the poorest and the working classes.
	It's an attack on the oppressed.
	So let me see if I've got this straight.
	It's an attack of the poorest and working classes, presumably white British working class, on quote-unquote, the oppressed, which I presume she thinks are the immigrants themselves.
	The oppressed have got to reject racism to be able to fight for a better life.
	Okay, that's fine, but you have at no point actually proved any racism is occurring here.
	There are perfectly rational reasons that are not racist for people to want less mass immigration in this country.
	It seems to me that what you're saying, and I'm happy to be corrected on this, is that people in other countries are being oppressed, and it is the duty of the British working class to allow them into this country and settle in their communities so they won't be oppressed, even though this could rightly be considered a form of oppression against the British working class.
	And this is usually orchestrated by the middle and upper classes for their own advantage.
	The middle class doing it so they can feel good about themselves, because they look at the plight of people in other countries who are struggling and say, well, if they just lived here, that wouldn't be a problem.
	And for the people who are the upper sort of capitalist class, because it means that wages go down and they make more money.
	So who is this really to the advantage of?
	Because it doesn't really seem to be to the advantage of the British working class, and you seem to be pleading with them to appease your own moral desires at the expense of their physical well-being and their financial success.
	I find this rather unfair because it's not the fault or responsibility of the British working class that foreign countries are more oppressive.
	So the Labour Party position, well, let's talk about Jeremy Corbyn.
	Jeremy Corbyn's position, which was, you know, a lot of people were not happy about.
	Yeah, I think a lot of people who have really supported Jeremy Corbyn have felt pretty betrayed or, you know, thrown up in the air over this.
	Some people say, oh, is it a tactic or, you know, is it going to change?
	Okay.
	The problem with dealing with these activist groups is that they're such an in-group and they have almost their own language.
	And so this is a point that I'm sure any far-left activist will be able to tell me exactly what this is about.
	But she doesn't really specify.
	So I'm going to assume that what she's complaining about is Jeremy Corbyn saying that he was not wedded to free movement from the EU.
	I could be wrong, but I think that's what she's talking about.
	The idea that the bottom line is that we're still talking about this control of movement of people, control of movement of labour, as if that's going to save jobs and, you know, sort of save people's living conditions.
	Well, we've already covered how it will improve people's living conditions if free movement of labour is ended.
	But yes, we are talking about the limitation of the movement of people, because that is what national borders are.
	The limitation of movement of people from one area to another.
	Now, that's not to say that people can't move.
	They just have to do it via the standard legal process.
	And there may well be restrictions on how many people and when and who and where.
	And I am fully in support of this.
	I think national borders are important and they should be respected.
	They should be defined and they should be maintained.
	And it is entirely up to a country to decide how many people it wishes to take in per year.
	And if that number is zero, I see absolutely no moral problem with this whatsoever.
	I really parallel it back to the 50s and times where people were coming over from Caribbean, from South Asia, Africa, and There was movements in this country to fight against that saying, oh, these are people going to steal your jobs, you know, housing, whatever.
	Well, we've already covered how it does put pressure on working class people because of extra competition.
	But yes, it does cause a housing crisis.
	At the moment, we allow around nearly 300,000 people a year into the country.
	And shelters say that we need to build 250,000 homes a year to alleviate the housing crisis.
	It seems that if we just stopped immigration, or at least the majority of it, we wouldn't have a housing crisis and we wouldn't then need to build 250,000 new homes.
	As they say, this is not about houses, really.
	It's about people.
	And to me, there's nothing sophisticated about it.
	That's the argument today, that somehow people coming from different countries are going to steal the jobs and drive down wages.
	These are verifiable facts that we have already covered in this video.
	So I'm assuming that she is simply ill-informed on this topic.
	But people move.
	People have to move.
	If you're locked into poverty, then it's a way of maintaining poverty, maintaining low wages, low conditions.
	So her argument here seems to be that it is the responsibility of British people, particularly the British working classes, who will be bearing the weight of this, to allow mass immigration from the third world, I assume that she's talking about, to help alleviate poverty in the third world.
	This won't work, and I'll use a clip from a viral video about poverty and gumballs to demonstrate why.
	5.6 billion people in the world who live in countries with average incomes below that of Mexico.
	That's 5,600 gumballs.
	And so what is it that the elites are telling us?
	They're telling us that when we take this 1 million immigrants, that we somehow or another are tackling world poverty.
	And we have to do it regardless of the effect on our unemployed, the working poor, the most vulnerable members of our society, regardless of the effect on our natural resources.
	Even if we went by the most radical proposals in Washington, which are to actually double our immigration to 2 million a year, which would totally overwhelm our physical, natural, and social infrastructures, we couldn't make a noticeable difference.
	And we may be really hurting the impoverished people of the world because the million that we do take are among the most energetic, often the better educated, certainly the most dissatisfied people that if they did not immigrate would be the agents for change to improve the lot of all the people in these countries.
	The true heroes in the global humanitarian field are the people in these countries who have the wherewithal to immigrate to another country but instead stay in their countries to apply their skills to help their fellow countrymen.
	Unfortunately, our immigration system tends to entice these very type of people to abandon their countrymen.
	Mass immigration doesn't solve extreme poverty, but what does is capitalism and free trade and having these people in their countries creating businesses and being economically active is actually bringing people out of poverty.
	Extreme poverty has been halved in 15 years thanks to capitalism.
	And it would probably be quicker if these people remained in their countries and built their businesses and actually improved the living standards of the countries in which they live.
	rather than coming here, which hurts our poor, it hurts their poor, and it only benefits those people who in fact are being selfish by wishing to come here as an easy, quick fix.
	And you're facilitating that.
	The truth is that I think that the leaps and bounds forward that the working classes, trade unions and all the rest have made through the efforts of people from the Caribbean, from Africa, from South Asia, fighting for better conditions, that the way the integrating effect that's had on the working classes is so important.
	It's breathed life into workers' struggles.
	It's made the most groundbreaking changes for progress.
	And because when people move, they don't just move as units of labour, they move as people thinking and standing up for equality and respect, like moving, wanting a better life and being ready to fight for that.
	There was absolutely nothing of substance there and so I'm just going to ignore it.
	So you're going to go to the Labour Party conference?
	Yeah, I'm going to be part of Movement for Justice.
	Hopefully like lots and loads and loads of people.
	We're organising coaches to go down to demonstrate on day one of that conference to demonstrate for immigrant rights, for putting the free movement of people and the real fight against racism back on the agenda.
	These seem to be two unconnected issues, but I find it interesting how the Labour Party is going to bust activists in specifically for their agenda.
	The free movement of people is not beneficial to the working classes of Britain, and it is only beneficial to the upper classes.
	I don't agree that we should benefit the upper classes at the expense of the lower classes, and I don't agree that ending free movement is in any way tied to racism.
	There are going to be loads of people going to that conference for the first time ever who are going because they were inspired that this could be something progressive, that they could fight for something progressive in this labour movement.
	She makes it sound like this is entirely ideological.
	She's doing it for the progressive movement and the Labour Party.
	It's not that she's doing it for practical real-world effects, because it's not going to alleviate third world poverty.
	It's not going to alleviate poverty in Britain.
	In fact, it's going to contribute to it.
	But she seems to consider this to be a moral good.
	And I'm failing to see what the moral good of this is.
	And it's not even good for other immigrants.
	For each new immigrant that arrives, they fractionally reduced the wages of the last immigrant that arrived and increased the difficulty of finding housing and put more social problems that cause tensions with the native population.
	If anything, immigrants who arrive here should be anti-immigration.
	And they don't need to leave demoralized and disappointed when that's not the case.
	Like it should be the case.
	And we're going to demonstrate and hopefully galvanise people who do want to fight for free movement of people, who understand the centrality of that fight in amongst everything else we could want and ask for.
	The fighting back against anti-immigrant bigotry and attacks on free movement of people is pivotal.
	It's pivotal to all the other agenda that we would want to see for education or healthcare or anything else.
	I honestly can't see the argument for unrestricted free movement of people.
	And I don't think this woman is very well informed on the consequences of such a thing.
	I think that it will eventually leave us all poor and worse off.
	And she won't even know that it's her fault.
	I've got no doubt that she will blame someone else for the results of the policies that she is advocating for.
	And we need to demonstrate that physically, in person, loud, visible.
	And I think there's going to be a lot of people at the conference who agree with it.
	And they need to show it and fight for it, you know, on the agenda, vote for it and fight for it in every area of the country that they're coming down from.
	So, like, even though we've got the Brexit, you know, we've also got like Trump and sort of like this country's relationship with Trump, Theresa May, and how that's tied in with, like, you know, the sort of like collapse of the White House, the collapse of American politics.
	I think, so we have a sister group in the US as well, and kind of looking closely, as I'm sure everyone is, especially with what happened at Charlottesville.
	There is a huge, there is a movement getting on its feet against Trump.
	It's not waiting for the Democrat Party, and it cannot wait for the Democrat Party.
	The Democrats are behaving more like they're all happy to keep Trump for the time being and hope that he destroys himself.
	But the problem is that that's not how you defeat fascism.
	Like, that's not how you defeat a far-right movement.
	And they've got a far, far-right movement also getting on its feet.
	I'm not contesting that there is a nascent far-right movement that is on the rise and probably is growing, but it seems that it's being fueled by mass immigration.
	It seems that if Western countries were to end mass immigration, then it would go a long way to preventing the impetus towards joining these far-right fascist groups.
	And it would really just take the wind out of their sails.
	If they're complaining about mass replacement through mass immigration, stopping the mass immigration ruins their argument.
	You have to have hope.
	You have to have a politics of hope.
	That sounds like the politics of my feelings.
	And I'm afraid I'm more concerned about the politics of facts.
	What is the actual fact of the matter?
	You have to be seeing yourself as having the capacity to stand up alongside neighbours, friends, classmates, you know, colleagues, everyone to repel, you know, to stop the fascists from being able to march, to fight for on the streets, you know.
	This sounds remarkably like you wanting to take away the right to peaceably assemble and protest of people that you consider to be fascists.
	I'm afraid that even fascists have rights in our country.
	And one of those rights is the right to peacefully assemble.
	I'm sorry.
	I don't like it either.
	But they do have the right to do that.
	And you don't have the right to just simply stop them because you disagree with their politics.
	To defend the communities, real defense of the communities.
	And these, the example of these Confederate statues that have been going up that were the center of the fight that happened in Charlottesville, those were statues being put up in the like 50s.
	They were being put up to celebrate the Confederate Army's fight for saving slavery at a time when the civil rights movement was really starting and black communities were starting to really march, really go against the grain and fight for civil rights, for the rights to vote, for the rights to exist.
	Okay, but I don't really see what that has to do with anything that you've talked about so far.
	The right to vote and the right to exist is not under threat for anyone in Western societies.
	It's just not something that's on the table.
	Nobody's saying that we're going to take rights away from brown people or immigrants or any group.
	The rights we have are going to be protected.
	They're going to be universal.
	The question is, how many people do we allow into our countries?
	And given the last 10 years of mass immigration, it seems the answer is we need to let in less.
	I don't see what tying this to the civil rights movement has really to do with any of it.
	To me, it's just traceable back.
	And the fight, it just says that the fights that have happened, we can do it.
	An integrated movement can be built.
	We are seeing it being built.
	It needs more of the urgency and it needs more people to step up and recognize the centrality of the question of racism in all our fights and all our struggles.
	And if that's what's happening, then there isn't a reason to feel hopeless, even with the terrible things that have been going on.
	It's a question of what we do as an independent movement that's not reliant or waiting for any of the, you know, mainstream parties.
	Our fight here isn't one that's just going to take part in parliament.
	It's not a parliamentary struggle.
	And I think this is where we get to the real meat of the issue.
	And I think this is very revealing.
	It's not a parliamentary struggle because there are no more rights that need to be fought for.
	There is nothing legislatively that can be fought for at this point because all of these battles have been won.
	Now I think that what she's talking about is a culture war, a social struggle against people who simply disagree with her worldview.
	It's a struggle in life, in all aspects and all areas of life.
	And so waiting for Corbyn or the Labour Party isn't how we win.
	We have to fight on every front.
	And what takes place in Parliament at the end of the day is going to reflect what's taking part in the society as a whole.
	And in the society as a whole is where all the integrated communities, the immigrant communities, young people, the whole generation of new people stepping forwards, trying to figure out how they have a role in politics, have just got to really step forward and take it on and learn and develop and be new leaders that are fighting for an equal, you know,
	society where you can be who you are, whatever your colour of skin, religion, sexuality, gender, identity, etc.
	I didn't interrupt there because it just said everything about this.
	She doesn't know what she's fighting for.
	She's fighting for total control of society, some kind of social dictatorship.
	And she wants everyone to be involved and to live the way they want to live, despite the fact that everything she said there is available to people right now.
	We have all of these movements with various gender identities and racial identities and whatnot, all active and living peaceably in society if they want to live peaceably.
	This is something that is actually available now, but they don't want people who don't agree to have a voice and to be able to express their dissent.
	I find this rather troublesome, rather problematic, if you will, because I think that people who disagree should be allowed to disagree.
	And like she said, this isn't a legislative fight.
	This isn't something they're going to go to parliament over because they're not going to be able to withdraw the rights of these people.
	So now what they have to do is simply oppress them by social means.
	And that's what we've been seeing in the past few weeks.
	This is the future we're moving into and this is the future that these people want.
	A real chance to be who we are and exist and have a right to respect and dignity in every aspect of life.
	But the thing is, that appears to come at the expense of the respect and dignity that you afford to people who disagree with you.
	So, how really are you any better than them?

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