Abstract
Influential rightist opposition to neoliberalism currently takes the form of populism, a significant component of which is Great Replacement theory which counters labour market competition by means of racist ideology. Contrasted here are two different kinds of leftist response to this sort of populism. One involves fighting on the same ground as its opponent, a problematic convergence since the focus of mobilizing discourse is ethnic/national identity, an ideological domain that historically is the traditional stronghold occupied and consolidated by the political right. The other builds on Marxist theory about class and class struggle, a path followed by Lenin, at the centre of which is not just the threat to worker solidarity of the reserve army, now increasingly a global resource available to capital, but also a transition to socialism.
Introduction: The onward march of Great Replacement
A key aspect of the debate about the industrial reserve army, albeit not interpreted as such, has resurfaced in the discourse of those on the right of the political spectrum in the form of theory about Great Replacement (hereafter GR). Associated principally with the recent writings of Renaud Camus, GR conceptualises what its exponents argue is a process of ethnic/national displacement by an incoming population of an existing one, a supplanting effected as a result of mass immigration from one country (or continent) to another. 1 It is a transformation that is perceived to be total, involving not just ethnic composition but also culture, religion, language, and politics. In metropolitan capitalist nations, GR is seen as responsible for generating a rising populist backlash. The latter reaction extends from support for far-right parties, via calls to ‘take back control’ of borders, to advocating national withdrawal from transnational political unions, institutions, and treaties.
Significantly, the counter-attack by those on the left against GR populism is weakened by the fact that much of it shares many of the same epistemological views as GR itself, not least an adherence to identity politics, and the primacy of race not class. A recent instance of this is the analysis by Ibram Kendi of the political impact of GR theory, which depicts it as an innate aspect in the history of racist ideology. 2 Accordingly, whereas many on the left currently refuse to engage with GR, simply dismissing it as racist and as such unworthy of any further analysis, Kendi adopts a different approach, maintaining that all forms of racism necessarily incorporate GR traits. 3 While the former view depicts GR as unimportant, therefore, he by contrast tends to regard it as ubiquitous.
Neither of these interpretations, it is argued here, is politically satisfactory, because each overlooks or underplays the way GR discourse addresses – albeit from the other end of the same political spectrum – a crucial issue interpreted by Marxist theory as the role in the class struggle of the industrial reserve. 4 This is underlined by the way the same kind of questions were approached previously by Lenin: that is, the centrality to Marxist theory of labour market competition, and the capacity of the worker to sell his/her own labour-power as a characteristic of production relations that are free, which necessarily feature together in any examination of the way capitalism benefits from the reserve army. Lenin, it is argued further, provides the Marxist answers to questions that Kendi and other leftists these days do not ask.
This article is divided into three sections, the first of which examines a recent leftist critique of GR theory that recognises the divide-and-rule objective, but overlooks its significance for the restructuring of the capitalist labour process. Why essentializing migration as an issue simply of race misses both labour market competition and how this fuels GR populism is considered in the second, while the third explores the way in which Lenin dealt with these same issues earlier.
I
Central to the critique Kendi makes of GR theory is the political and analytical primacy he allocates to ethnicity. Hence the view that ‘[t]o be a racist is to see peoples of colour as eternal immigrants . . . [t]o be a racist is to see White people as eternal natives’ is not just ahistorical, in that the perceptions referred to come from nowhere, seemingly without cause, and are seen therefore as innate and unchanging, but also fails to stipulate economic context, and why people from elsewhere are there in the first place? 5 To begin with, the idea of a contested presence hinted at for non-whites in Europe is, ironically, little different from the one invoked by, for example, Indian nationalism in order to drive British colonialism out from India. More importantly, Kendi makes no distinction between migrants fleeing persecution and those coming in search of ‘a better life’, attracted by higher wages in the receiving country. Such a conflation not only hides the presence, role, and economic impact of the reserve army of labour, but also how the latter benefits capitalism as a system.
Divide-and-rule
Kendi notes that GR indicts as ‘replacists’ elites which ‘intentionally’ engineer demographic change to secure a cheap migrant workforce in order to - suppress wages/conditions, inhibiting pay increases and unionisation. 6 Although making important points, particularly concerning the GR divide-and-rule tactic used by capital to undermine the solidarity of workers across different ethnic and national groups, his useful critique nevertheless exhibits a number of shortcomings. These range from a tendency to see the presence of GR in all cases of racism; underestimating or overlooking the economic dimension of GR discourse, its referencing labour market competition and the deleterious role in this of what Marxism terms the industrial reserve army; and how the identity politics of the ‘new’ populist postmodernism can end up facilitatating an open door migration policy that is advantageous to capitalism.
Among the many examples deployed by Kendi to illustrate his case about the ubiquity of GR theory, and its centrality to any/every form of racism, is the South African apartheid system. 7 In support of the argument linking racism automatically with GR, therefore, he notes that white Afrikaners not only ‘fashioned South African apartheid’ but also ‘framed the anti-apartheid movement as subjecting Afrikaners to “cultural genocide”’, the inference being that it was the latter aspect that corresponded to the replacement process, underlining thereby the affinity between racism and GR theory. 8 Interpreting the undoubted racism of the apartheid system as a form of GR, however, is faced with a number of difficulties.
To begin with, it can be argued that ideologically GR does not apply in the case of apartheid, since Afrikaners did not consider blacks to be sufficiently developed economically to be able to compete – let alone replace – whites such as them, a perception consistent with the infantilisation of the non-white ‘other’ that underwrote the racist ideology of the South African apartheid system. 9 What Afrikaners did fear, however, was that, unchecked by the authority of their traditional chiefs, working class blacks might attempt to seize power and bring about socialism, which is not the same kind of transformation as that envisaged by GR theory. 10 Furthermore, GR is a discourse about an ‘other’ who is foreign displacing the authentic indigenous local, whereas in the case of South Africa blacks were not a foreign ‘other’ but rather themselves the authentic indigenous locals – it was their own country. 11 The foreign ‘other’, by contrast, was the white colonizer: the Boer, and then the English.
Observing that the political objective of GR theory concerns the attempt by the ruling class (‘powerful elites’) to dominate and exploit ‘low and middle-income White people’ (mainly workers) amounts to the spread of false consciousness, Kendi argues – rightly – that it is a discourse which masks the onward march of capitalism by feigning opposition to the latter and support for ‘the people’. 12 Hence the emphasis he places on the significance of the divide-and-rule tactic used by GR politicians designed to undermine solidarity between those belonging to different ethnic groups, highlighting thereby the role of false consciousness, a term which Kendi does not use. 13 Missed, however, is a crucial divergence in GR theory: while its claim to be on the side of workers in the class struggle is indeed fictional, that concerning a ‘from above’ (capitalist) wish to replace them is not. Therein lies the ideological power and political effectiveness of populist discourse.
Labour market competition
What is seemingly not recognised by Kendi, however, is the connection between on the one hand the divide-and-rule tactic used by employers against workers, and on the other how migration adds to labour market competition. Part of the capitalist tactic, played upon by GR theory, is precisely to restructure the labour process by replacing existing locals, relatively more expensive to employ and well-established in terms of rights and conditions of work, with migrants who are cheaper to employ and easier to control. Where this restructuring involves labour-power of different ethnicities, as is increasingly the case when people cross borders or continents in search of work, the struggle can rapidly become one about race, not class, which is obviously to the advantage of capital. Overlooked by Kendi (and others) is the increased role of the industrial reserve army of labour, which as Marxists have long argued, is one of the most powerful weapons in the capitalist armoury.
Restructuring the labour process combining unfreedom, withholding wages, and replacement of one lot of workers by another and cheaper one, has a long history covering many different kinds of economic activity undertaken by capital. In the case of shipping, for example, at the end of the eighteenth century restructuring involved wholesale labour substitution: an existing crew, to whom back pay was owed, was abandoned in port, deemed to have ‘deserted’ and thus forfeit wages held back, and then replacing it with another crew taken on at cheaper rates. 14 Much the same kind of capitalist restructuring occurred more recently, when in the space of a single day owners of a shipping line sacked the entire crew and replaced them with cheaper foreign labour. 15
It is the overlap between this particular aspect of the class struggle waged by capital (= restructuring the labour process) and the claims made by GR discourse (= migration-as-replacement), each of which in different ways address the same issue of labour market competition, that Kendi fails to notice. As he is aware, the real villains of the piece are capitalists, and their need to ensure the reproduction of the accumulation project. 16 But in order to accomplish this they do in fact do what GR – and Marxist theory about the reserve army – say they do. Rather than acknowledging this economic dimension, Kendi restricts the negative impact of GR simply to the realm of politics (‘the replacement of democracy with dictatorship’), which – notwithstanding its importance – is only part of the story.
The claim that replacement in the job market of Whites by ‘unqualified’ non-Whites is false also overlooks the impact of deskilling, and its facilitation of a capacity by employers to draw on unskilled labour-power taken from the reserve army. 17 Non-economic issues, too, affect the labour market, in that the fact of an ‘other’ culture – uncontentious in itself – licenses a slide into the argument made by the ‘new’ populist postmodernism that entry into the receiving context by the bearer – the migrant – should be assessed on this criterion alone, because not to do so is to negate an crucial aspect of his/her identity which is empowering for the subject concerned. 18 In short, a situation in which an essentially non-problematic dimension of ‘otherness’ (= culture) is mobilised in support of a more contentious one (= economy): in such instances, culture operates to benefit capitalism and its continued access to the industrial reserve. This is different from the issue as presented by Kendi, which focusses simply on culture itself, and its role in erasing White history.
II
A claim frequently encountered in advocacy of open-door migration from Third World nations is that such population movement is not new, that migrants have always been coming to Europe, where their communities are long-standing and well-established, and that migrants contribute economically and culturally to the receiving context. Among those holding this view is Kendi, who maintains that, so as to fuel white anxiety GR exponents ‘wildly exaggerate demographic changes involving migrants’, and further, that ‘migrants generally boost economic and cultural activity in the countries and neighborhoods they enter’. 19 Opposed to this interpretation is the GR view that migration is, much rather, a more recent phenomenon, and further that its subjects are not integrated but ill at ease in the receiving context, whose culture and values they do not share.
Nation, race or class?
For two reasons, Kendi challenges this negative view about migration. First, on the grounds that the object of GR is to denigrate ‘people who are redistributing their immense wealth and philanthropically supporting organizations and leaders struggling for antiracist democracy’, giving as an example the financier George Soros. And second, the efficacy of migrant ‘job-taking’ is dismissed as fiction, since ethnically ‘other’ asylum seekers fleeing crisis wish for nothing more than to be able to return home. 20 Among the ‘politically more dangerous’ falsehoods disseminated by GR, therefore, is that ‘White people are supposedly being replaced in coveted jobs . . . by unqualified peoples of colour. 21 Consequently, that current migration patterns can have anything to do with Marxist concepts such as the industrial reserve, labour market competition, and capitalist restructuring, is in the opinion of Kendi a fiction.
What those like Kendi, who reduce the debate about migration to one of race, or nation, essentializing the identity of its subject as one solely about ethnicity, miss, is that grassroots opposition to this process does not object to ‘otherness’ per se but only where it operates as part of immigration. It could be argued, consequently, that the real target is not race – although hostility may indeed be expressed in terms of this abhorrent ideology – but the fact of immigration, regardless of its ethnic composition. It is not so much the case that antagonism to immigration stems from its racial features as hostility towards the latter derives from the former process. In this kind of instance, therefore, ‘from below’ working class concern derives not from the ethnic/national identity of the migrant – as depicted by Kendi – but rather from the economic impact its subject has on labour market competition.
Whereas an all-embracing focus simply on race tends to pre-position the issue as one about ethnic identity, from which all else then follows, the alternative view – a Marxist one – is that the main driver of how an issue is framed ideologically lies elsewhere: in the case of migration, not so much ethnicity as the implication for existing livelihoods of the resulting additions to the labour market, whatever their identity, exacerbating thereby competition for jobs where employment prospects are already on the decline. In these circumstances, therefore, the hostility of the existing working class can just as easily be aimed at migrants who are themselves not perceived as being racially ‘other’.
That people have always moved is true, but for the most part historically this has been confined within nations; now it is to a large degree a movement between nations. 22 Thus, for example, the number of migrants that arrived in the UK during 2023 amounted to almost one million, a scale that only with difficulty can be described as negligible, especially if other resources (housing, health care, education, etc.) are taken into account. 23 Similarly, the claim that migration boosts the economy of the receiving country overlooks that it is the prospects of employers, not workers, that benefit, to the disadvantage of local and migrant labour alike. So the beneficial economic impact of migration is not as progressive as Kendi claims it is. Equally problematic, not to say naïve, is his casting of Soros as a benign exemplar of capitalist philanthropy, interested only in income redistribution, a view which overlooks the dual object of his funding democracy in the erstwhile soviet bloc nations of Eastern Europe: to prevent the return of any regime that advocates socialism, and to extend the power of the market and neoliberalism.
Rival populisms
A consequence of focussing on ethnicity as the main driver of GR discourse, and not addressing its economic dimension in the shape of the impact on labour market competition of an increasing reserve army of labour, is that Kendi misinterprets crucial aspects of politics. For him the appeal of GR extends across the political spectrum, from right to left, in effect an interpretation that indicts all ideologies as essentially and innately racist. 24 Not the least problematic aspect of this is what it actually misses: the overlap between the approach of GR and his own framing of the issue, each of which is informed by identity politics. Hence the emphasis of both is largely on the ethnicity of the subject, for and against. This in turn underlines the extent to which, politically, they form two sides of the same ideological coin, one that consists of rival populisms. Such a view is different from that of Marxism, the mobilizing discourse of which is, by contrast, on class. Thus the commonality is not quite as Kendi suggests: the distinctive element is overlooked, resulting in a mistaken conflation.
Moreover, the range of support for GR discourse across the political spectrum is itself backed by an odd notion on Kendi’s part of what these ideologies stand for. Socialism is said by him to advocate that ‘government resources should improve the livelihoods of everyday (White) people (not immigrants of colour)’. 25 This is a very strange claim, since this sort of discrimination (= racism) is not what socialist theory, socialism generally, and socialists in particular, have espoused historically, much rather the opposite. The dynamic informing shifting political allegiance, however, is somewhat different from that depicted by Kendi: not so much an absence of ideological difference, therefore, as an ideological betrayal. Overlooked is that it is when parties do not reflect the concerns of their adherents, or governments fail to act on them once in power, that people move their support to political organisations that do. This is why currently populist parties flourish, since they guarantee to act on immigration, either by making it more difficult or by deporting those who arrive as migrants. The distinct ideologies concerned remain the same in terms of what they proclaim and advocate; once those who represent these views fail to uphold or implement them, erstwhile followers begin to shift their political allegiance to others who undertake to realise these same goals and objectives.
It is easy to forget that the political right, too, has a discourse that is critical of specific kinds of capitalism (foreign, financial), one that is designed to save the accumulation process from a socialist transition, a task it allocates to populism. As with the latter, the object of GR is to realign class politics, transferring the solidarity of workers from that shared with other workers across nations and ethnicities, to that uniting them with employers of the same nationality and ethnicity. Although the focus of GR discourse remains on cultural erosion as the main form of displacement, this is now accompanied by concern expressed about migrants ‘taking jobs’ from existing workers, moving onto the ground – labour process restructuring, the industrial reserve – that leftist politics has for the most part abandoned. 26
Earlier, therefore, the focus of the political right was simply on what was perceived as the erosion of national culture by the migrant ‘other’. Hence many aspects reproduced in current GR discourse about culture and ethnicity are prefigured in the arguments of Stoddard, who in the 1920s blamed ‘humanitarian internationalism’ for advocating open-door migration into the United States, bringing ‘all sorts of ill to Americans themselves’, leading to ‘a troublous transformation of American life’, whereby America ‘would become a sort of microcosm of the whole world – a mosaic of races, cultures and contrasting attitudes’. 27 Not only was the migrant equated with the arrival of Bolshevism, underlining the extent to which the target of this discourse was socialism, but – unlike Afrikaner ideology in apartheid South Africa – the ethnic ‘other’ was seen as capable of effecting a displacement in America. 28
Currently, however, there is a discernible shift in this populist discourse, as not just the political right but also the centre-right are referring to the migrant-taking-jobs argument in their analyses. Although not exponents of GR theory, therefore, this move is evident in the publications of influential UK political commentators, such Murray and Goodhart. 29 Instead of class, both the right and postmodernism frame the resulting divide in terms of identity politics. Hence the intensification of labour market competition that is the consequence generates a populist backlash, as conservatives and the far right champion local workers (capital + labour of the same nationality) against migrants, while the latter in turn are supported by postmodernists (who see the issue simply as a way of empowering workers of an ‘other’ nationality). The dangers this poses for leftists in general, and Marxism in particular, ought to be clear.
III
The shortcomings in the analysis of GR by Kendi raise a number of concerns, among them one in particular: how should leftist theory confront the issue of GR, or more importantly what should a Marxist analysis say as an alternative to this discourse, and why. Like GR, Marxism involves a conflict-driven process of replacement: of feudalism by capitalism and of the latter by socialism, a transformation that also entails wide-ranging economic, political, ideological, and cultural change. Despite there being some overlap between GR and Marxism, however, this does not involve political agreement, much rather the opposite. For GR, therefore, the transformation is demographic, one population displacing another, whereas for Marxism by contrast it entails one class supplanting another. Different, too, is the nature of their respective trajectories: whereas GR is a backwards-looking discourse, attempting to restore what it perceives as an earlier and more benign version of the same capitalist system, by contrast socialism constitutes a forwards-looking going-beyond the accumulation process.
Lenin returns
Unlike GR, moreover, what Marx himself advocated was co-operation between workers and working class organisations located in different national contexts, which is not the same as support for the kind of open-door migration favoured by employers and the ‘new’ populist postmodernists alike. That Marx opposed these kinds of interpretation is clear from his views about the political and economic link between England and Ireland, outlined in a 1870 letter to Siegfried Meyer and August Vogt. There he argued that the threat an increasing reserve army posed not just to hard-won wage levels and employment conditions in England but also to the protection of these gains – by means of solidarity among and capacity of an existing workforce to organise – was such that serious consideration was given by him to opposing further migration from Ireland. 30
This divergence also surfaces in the way Lenin addressed many of the same arguments that circulated in debate at a much earlier conjuncture. 31 Like Marx, he warned against turning what for socialists should be a struggle about class into one about ethnicity or nationality. 32 Underlining the difference between the way Kendi and Marxism oppose the political approach of and the positions held by GR, therefore, Lenin stressed the importance of three interconnected questions: the formation and role of the industrial reserve in the accumulation process; the reliance of the latter on labour-power that is not free; and the contribution made by the agrarian sector to all these developments.
About the centrality of the industrial reserve to the capacity of the capitalist system to reproduce itself, Lenin – like other Marxists – was adamant. 33 Writing about pre-revolutionary Russia, but making a point with more general application, he observed that ‘[t]he formation of the reserve army of unemployed is a characteristic of capitalism in general’, a situation whereby ‘a certain (and . . . quite large) section of the rural population must always be ready to undertake such work, must always be in need of it’, adding that it ‘is a condition for the existence and development of capitalism’. 34 Disagreeing with the agrarian populists (Narodniks), who regarded surplus labour merely as an anomalous and inexplicable outcome of economic development, Lenin by contrast indicated how accumulation required – and, indeed, depended on – a reserve army, both a consequence and also a cause of class struggle. 35
Focusing on the internal dynamics of capitalism giving rise to the industrial reserve, Lenin then indicated how a labour surplus necessarily results from the use of machinery in both agriculture and industry, which in turn makes possible the employment of female and child labour, and the displacement of relatively more costly adult male workers. 36 As technology makes possible the employment of female and child labour, moreover, so competition between capitalist enterprises attempting to sell their products on the world market increases, leading to overproduction and economic crises. 37 Defining capitalism in terms of production relations, and how those with little or no property are required to hire themselves out as workers, Lenin emphasised that in order to maintain or increase profitability employers – not unnaturally – sought to pay as little as possible for this commodity. 38 For their part, workers attempt to get the ‘highest possible wage’, which leads to constant struggle between capital and labour. Whereas the employer ‘is free’ to hire any worker, and tries to obtain the cheapest, the worker ‘is free to hire himself [or herself] out to an employer of his [or her] choice’: the commodity labour-power, in short, is sold to the highest bidder.
However, like other Marxists before and since, Lenin then underscored that such an exchange between owner and purchaser of labour-power is invariably affected by the additional presence of unemployed workers located in the reserve army, since ‘those who are hungry drive wages down lower and lower’. The result is that any worker demanding a good wage, or resisting a wage cut, is replaced by the employer, who tells him (or her) that there are plenty of unemployed – in the reserve army – willing to work for the low wage offered. Again in keeping with the way Marxist theory conceptualises production relations, Lenin stressed that, in order to organise and conduct an effective struggle against capital, labour has to be free: in his words, ‘[t]he workers need liberty in order to launch a wide struggle for the complete emancipation of labour from the tyranny of capital, for the abolition of all exploitation [and] for a socialist system of society’. 39
Globalising the reserve army
Accordingly, to the way the internal dynamics of capitalism that gave rise to the reserve army were addressed by Marxism in the time of Lenin it is now possible to add the important external features that have become increasingly significant in the interim, as the accumulation system has metamorphosed into a global phenomenon. Of these changes, that having most impact in terms of political economy, driving as it does the GR discourse criticised by Kendi, is migration from one country or set of countries, to another. The result has been downward pressure on wages and conditions in receiving nations, generating yet more labour market competition in such places, enabling capitalists there either to survive or to gain higher profits.
This internationalisation of capitalism, argues current Marxist theory, is crucial to an understanding of how and why neoliberal laissez-faire economic policy is reproduced systemically. In terms of political economy, this shift entails a fundamental transformation: from a situation where the reserve army is generated internally, the result of machinery and migration, with the former dominant, to one where it is created externally, again a consequence of technology plus migration, but with the latter dominant. It is a change that highlights, or indeed brings into play for the first time, all the characteristics and conflicts associated with ‘otherness’: notions of replacement, entitlement to employment or livelihood denied, views about ‘belonging’, nationality, and ethnicity. Privileging these same non-class identities, populist discourse emerges and is empowered politically, to the detriment of class and class struggle aimed at overcoming capitalism.
On basis of a detailed analysis of data contained in the 1907 census of Germany, Lenin challenged the familiar populist trope about the viability of peasant economy under capitalism. 40 He showed how poor peasants who own or lease ‘insignificant’ plots of land, from which they cannot make a livelihood, are part of the reserve army which helps sustain capitalism as a whole. This confirms the view that what capitalism requires of such peasants is not their produce but much rather their labour-power, as components of the industrial reserve. His case about surplus labour as an internally generated process – within the nation – can now be applied to the existence and operation of a global, and thus externally formed and reproduced, reserve army. The latter now crosses national borders, appearing in the midst of metropolitan capitalism, where it contributes substantially to the reproduction of the accumulation process.
Hence the contemporary relevance of Lenin’s view about the significance of the reserve army is clear, not least from the emphasis he placed on two things in particular: first, that an important source of surplus labour was rural; and second, that the reserve was composed both of the unemployed and of peasant cultivators who – though not unemployed – cannot exist on what they get from their smallholding, and are consequently required to sell their labour-power to employers, as part of the reserve army on which capital then draws. Unmissable, therefore, is the similarity between the pattern Lenin conceptualised as happening in Russia and Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century, and what occurred subsequently in Third World countries, where peasants driven off the land as a result of how the Green Revolution contributed to the formation of a reserve army that is now global in scope. Equally prescient is his view about the increasing significance of temporary labour, leading to a decline in permanent, well-paid employment, as deskilling makes it possible to draw on this expanding source of labour-power, a view that anticipates what is now interpreted as the growth of a ‘precariat’.
Conclusion
The recent emergence of Great Replacement theory can be seen as a reaction to interconnected processes; first, how a people from another place increasingly move to and are found to be settled in a context that locals have long regarded as their own; and second, where this movement appears numerically significant to such a degree that it is seen as displacing. As such it signals a transformation in the way that the ‘other’ is perceived ideologically, politically, and economically: from an initial historical image that was positive and unthreatening, as an inhabitant of an exotic, faraway non- or pre-capitalist nation, to a more recent negative one, as an aspiring or actual inhabitant of the locality of the self, in the process of becoming a serious economic rival in the midst of capitalism, as a competitor in the same job market.
This distinction can be traced in the way racism does not always and necessarily involve a process of economic replacement. Because it infantilised the black ‘other’ as innately unequal, the racism of the Afrikaners in apartheid South Africa discounted a capacity to replace those such as themselves; that of GR, however, unwittingly recognises the equality of the nationally or ethnically ‘other’ migrant as a serious economic competitor in the same labour market. Ironically, therefore, it is a shift that in a sense recognises the presence of an equality between the self and this erstwhile ‘other’; were this not so, as historically was the case under the South African apartheid system, there would be no reason to fear the ‘other’ in the manner indicated by GR discourse.
At present, the weakness of leftist opposition to GR populism stems from a shared focus on culture and, consequently, the essentialisation of non-class identities such as ethnicity and nationality. Although recognizing the divide-and-rule strategy of populism, much leftist theory fails to connect this to the reserve army of labour. Acknowledged is the distraction element (= false consciousness), therefore, but not its link to labour market competition necessary to the survival of capitalism. Forgotten, consequently, is that Marxism, too, opposes the proliferation of surplus labour, but – unlike GR – because employers use migrants to restructure the labour process, maintaining or enhancing profitability, and empowering capitalism as a system.
Economically, central to both the industrial reserve and GR is a capacity to replace: to obtain sources of labour that can, in short, undertake the same kind of tasks and jobs for less than the incumbent. It becomes possible, therefore, for producers to substitute the former for the latter in the capitalist labour process. Where restructuring involves workers of different ethnicities or nationalities, the resulting labour market competition generates racism, which in turn politically and ideologically empowers a populist reaction. The effectiveness of this combination, together with its crucial role in the class struggle, was recognised by Lenin.
He showed how the reserve army not only enabled capital to exercise downward pressure on wages and conditions, but also to replace more costly adult male workers with female and child equivalents. Over time, moreover, the composition of surplus labour has undergone a twofold change: from a resource available to capital within the nation to one generated and reproduced globally; and from a reserve army consisting of the unemployed to one incorporating peasant smallholders unable to subsist on what land provides. These are the sort of economic developments that, as Lenin pointed out, in turn require not just Marxists but leftists generally to do two things: struggle against the ideology of GR populism that entails opposing capitalism as a system, and (therefore) putting on the political agenda once more a transition to socialism.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.