Ergomachia

 The vile wave of xenophobic scapegoating that is afflicting Western politics is the perfect distillation of the politics of despair. When people have abandoned any hope in the realization of egalitarian social progress, all that is left is a frenzied effort to monopolize the few resources that remain. When there is supposedly not enough to go around, each has no choice but to push the others out of the way in order to get his snout into the trough first. The result is the social phenomenon that the political sociologist Robert Michels (borrowing a term from an Italian medical writer) called "ergomachia"—"the struggle for the feeding ground." (Paul trans.) The goal of politics shifts from that of collective progress to scrambling haphazardly to "get one's own" in the struggle for life.  

One can see this dynamic unfolding throughout the developed West; and the center-left parties are scarcely more immune to it than the right. The snap elections in France brought the far-right anti-immigrant National Rally to within spitting distance of a parliamentary majority. The country's other "moderate" political parties have had to shift right on the issue, in order to defuse some of their electoral power and ability to campaign on immigration. In the UK, meanwhile, the Labour Party won a sizable majority and ended 14 years of Tory rule in Parliament. They did so in part by running against the Conservatives' notorious plan to ship asylum seekers to Rwanda. But the new Labour leadership has followed this up with their own pledges in turn to try to "reduce immigration." 

Meanwhile, in the U.S., neither major party candidate is saying anything in public to make the positive case for immigration. Trump continues to make xenophobic scapegoating the centerpiece of his campaign. At his notorious debate with Biden the other week, he responded to every question about every social problem, no matter how distantly related to the topic, by saying that immigrants were to blame. And Biden, meanwhile, has largely ceded the argument to him. The Democrats prefer to simply "not talk about immigration." And when they do, they advertise their own efforts to shut down the asylum process, pointing with pride to Biden's recent executive actions making it much harder to seek humanitarian protection at the border. 

It is only possible to get the general public to go along with this relentless scapegoating of a vulnerable population by first convincing them that there is not enough to go around for all. The political right have been past masters at this—allowing them to evade the most patent evidentiary difficulties with their position. If you ask the economists, after all, they will tell you that immigrants bring more resources to the country than they take. They pay more in taxes than they receive; they use fewer public benefits because immigration pre-selects for working age adults, etc. If there is a problem of scarcity in the developed West, therefore, it is that we do not have enough immigrants—not that we have too many. Plus, in an age of high inflation, immigrants are needed to bring down prices by increasing the labor supply. 

The right, however, has answers to all of these things. They say: immigrants are only bringing down prices because they are driving down wages for native-born workers (though they often leave unasked—if those wages were losing value in real terms, due to high inflation—prior to increased immigration—and were only gaining in nominal terms, then who was actually benefiting by artificially limiting migration?). Moreover, many conservatives have not even been willing to concede the argument that high immigration tends to slow inflation—even though most economists and Federal Reserve officials say this is indeed what is happening. Instead, a new crop of xenophobic rightists, led by J.D. Vance, is making the argument that immigrants are increasing inflation by driving up housing costs. 

Such claims are unsubstantiated by economic science or empirical studies; but they manage to obtain a superficial appearance of plausibility by appealing to the instincts of "ergomachia." Conservatives can point out that we shouldn't be trying to lower nominal wages, but rather to increase them—and they can legitimately accuse the Left of hypocrisy to the extent that it abandons the goal of higher wages and living standards for the working class. But the progressive strategy to raise the floor of wages for everyone would be to organize the immigrant workforce, include it in labor's collective bargaining agreements, and seek legal status for undocumented workers who otherwise fall through the cracks. This has, indeed, been the official strategy of the American labor movement for the last several decades—it has long since publicly abandoned the restrictionist views it used to hold on immigration (even if some of the rank-and-file members have not). 

In order to convince workers not to pursue this progressive solution, therefore, conservatives first have to persuade them it is a pipe dream. And a key way that conservatives do this is by actively making it harder for an enlarged workforce to bargain collectively. By rolling back the rights of organized labor—and blocking any progress toward legalizing the status of undocumented workers who are already in the country—conservatives do indeed make it impossible for unions to simply expand to include the immigrant workers. And so, they manage to create the conditions of scarcity and "ergomachia" which they then present to the American worker as inevitable. Once they have made it impossible for workers to defend their interests collectively, they have indeed forced each worker to fend for a place at the trough and crowd out his brothers—and so the conservative argument becomes self-fulfilling. 

The same applies to the housing argument. Right-wingers say that immigration is driving up housing costs by increasing demand for a limited supply. And this may indeed be true—in some cases—so long as the supply remains artificially constrained by zoning restrictions and other policy barriers to expanding the housing stock. A progressive structural solution to this problem might focus on increasing housing supply to meet demand. But this would undermine the conditions of scarcity that favor conservatives' arguments. They don't want to increase supply, because then there would actually be enough for everyone. Instead, they prefer to keep the supply constrained. Then, they can artificially engender the conditions in which there truly is "not enough to go around." America will indeed be "full"—with no more room for immigrants—though not because it had to be that way, but rather because policymakers chose to make it so. 

That is why I say that the anti-immigrant politics of our era depend on first convincing people to despair. So long as people believe that there is a possibility of a transnational labor movement that raises the floor for all workers, regardless of citizenship status—by contrast—then they will not feel the need to artificially limit the supply of labor by expelling new immigrants looking for a better life. So long as people believe that we can actually solve the policy problems that are artificially limiting the supply of housing stock in this country, then they will not feel the need to expel immigrants so that there will more to go around for those who were born here. Conservatives therefore first have to persuade people that there is no way for us all to advance collectively in this society—so that people will then turn their efforts to advancing their own self-interest exclusively. 

This is the dynamic Robert Michels saw unfolding in his era, and which led him to form his concept of "ergomachia." In his classic study of the socialist political parties and trade unions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he noted that many had evolved in an increasingly conservative direction. The unions abandoned hope in practice of realizing any significant social progress. And so, they evolved instead into a closed group of members that sought to monopolize benefits for themselves. They showed no solidarity with "unorganized workers," Michels observed. Instead of trying to organize the latter, they simply called them "scabs" and sought to exclude them from the workforce. "The trade unions, having become rich and powerful, no longer seek to enlarge their membership, but rather to restrict it [...]  in order to retain certain privileges in their own hands at the expense of other workers[.]" (Paul trans. throughout). 

One of the key examples that Michels cites of this "ergomachia" in action is the anti-immigrant agitation of his day—which was particularly pronounced in the United States. In words highly evocative of our own political moment, he wrote, "The anti-alien movement is the outcome of the same professional egotism, and is especially conspicuous among the Americans and the Australians, who insist upon legislation to forbid the immigration of foreign workers. The trade unions adopt a frankly 'nationalist' policy. In order to keep out the 'undesirables' they do not hesitate to appeal for aid to the 'class-state,' and they exercise upon the government a pressure which may lead their country to the verge of war with the labor-exporting land." He cites the example of how U.S. anti-immigrant agitation increased tensions with Japan. 

We can easily see the parallels to our present moment. We are witnessing the same kind of unthinking economic nationalism and self-interested "ergomachia"—and not only from the political right. In our current state of political malaise, our politicians have stopped promising solutions that might regulate for higher wages across the board, or increase the supply of housing for all Americans. Instead, they are proposing to discriminate as to who can gain access to those wages and that housing based on national origin. The French National Rally gives a particularly extreme example of this—campaigning on the open threat to earmark certain jobs for French nationals only. But even our center-left parties are appealing to very similar sentiments. 

Take the agitation about land sales in the United States right now. Instead of focusing on how we can increase the housing supply for all, politicians are seeking to limit demand by forbidding foreign nationals to purchase property in the U.S. Such efforts bear a disturbing resemblance to the racist "anti-alien" land legislation of the early twentieth century—which largely aimed at blocking Japanese immigrants from owning property. Today, most of this legislation appears to chiefly serve the purpose of discriminating against Chinese nationals who wish to buy land in the U.S. And while many of the most extreme examples of this legislation are being backed by right-wing state governments, the Democratic-led federal government is also promoting similar measures, albeit under far more restricted circumstances, on supposed "national security" grounds. 

We can also witness the same xenophobic "ergomachia" at play in the Biden administration's public resistance to the Nippon Steel acquisition of a major U.S. steel producer. There is no basis to oppose this deal on the grounds of the interests of American workers. The Japanese steel company has promised to preserve current wage and benefit levels, or to increase them. The only reason anyone is hostile to the proposal is that it represents a "foreign" acquisition of an iconic U.S. company. It scarcely seems to matter to the Biden administration that the "foreign" interest in this case is that of a democratic U.S. ally that poses no threat to U.S. security or jobs. It is therefore hard to escape the hypothesis that the real basis for the backlash is xenophobia, racism, and the selfish national posturing of "ergomachia." 

Is there no path out of this self-perpetuating cycle of beggar-thy-neighbor? After all, nationalist economic policies tend to bring about the very conditions of scarcity which then justify their core claims—making it hard to escape from political pressures to then double down even further on the same self-defeating policies. By restricting immigration, we really will have lower economic growth and higher prices. Then, when politicians tell the American people that there is "not enough to go around," they will in a sense be telling the truth; they will have simply left out of account the crucial fact that the conditions of scarcity were a policy choice of their own making. 

The only way out will be if people stop letting themselves be bamboozled so easily—if they stop allowing demagogues to deceive them as to the identity of their true enemy. "When I, the People, learn to remember," as Carl Sandburg once wrote—"when I, the People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year, who played me for a fool"—only under conditions such as those will people finally escape the merry-go-round of ergomachia. 

The "People"—the great American public; indeed, the public of the entire developed West—need to realize that the J.D. Vances of the world are playing them for fools, while robbing them blind. They are pointing the finger at immigrants—fellow workers, that is—people just as desperate as they are, who just want the opportunity to create a better life—while all the time they plan to cut taxes still further for the mega-rich. They dare to tell the American people that there is not enough abundance to be shared with immigrants in this land—all while they stuff that abundance into their own cronies' pockets. 

The American people need to not let themselves be deceived. They need to learn the same lesson that Bertolt Brecht tried to teach in his "Song of the Stormtrooper": the disfavored minorities whom the right-wing demagogues try to blame for the public's problems are victims themselves of the same system. By pitting these groups of workers against each other—by fostering conditions of "ergomachia"—the right helps to engender conditions whereby the workers collectively will lose, and there truly will be "not enough to go around"—at least for them, the workers. For the political elites of the new right-wing order, meanwhile—there will be plenty to go around indeed. And so the merry-go-round will continue: until, as Sandburg put it, the People "learn to remember."