ONE particular Marxist interpretation of the so-called ‘free market,’ and an observation that I happen to share, is that capitalists have been perpetuating a huge contradiction for quite some time. I am taking about ‘relations between things’ and ‘relations between people’.
Commodities are freely circulated and yet the movement of people has always been rigorously controlled. However, whilst the Marxists would prefer to see the removal of all barriers to human migration, regardless of the consequences to existing communities and the environment in general, it remains a fact that over the last few years the nature of global capitalism has changed dramatically. The Europe of the past, for example, was based on the perceived superiority of its indigenous inhabitants and a desire to maintain cultural identity. Although this state of affairs once suited the overall capitalist agenda, the Continent’s rapidly ageing birth-rate has made it necessary for them to import millions of African and Asian immigrants. Without them, the capitalist project would collapse.
It is this, and not so-called ‘cultural Marxism’ which has led governments to make changes in the socio-political sphere, many of which help to provide the false illusion that we are living in an age of racial and sexual progress. At the same time, one wall comes down another goes up and thus Brexit was a way for the capitalists to control things rather differently outside the borders of Europe itself. Not to mention, of course, that England, Scotland, Wales and Ulster have already been filled with labour from overseas and, coupled with that fact, widespread foreign ownership now remains the order of the day.
What is presented as patriotism, therefore, is merely a means of practicing capitalist economics in a slightly modified fashion. The Marxist interpretation I mentioned earlier continues to apply to the British Isles, but no longer to a Europe that has decided to scrap its restrictions on ‘relations between people’. Horses for courses, perhaps, but the same old people still control the racetrack.
