Class Analysis Gone Wrong

Wagenknecht and her political allies claim that the influx of irregular migration to Europe creates a situation of increased competition in the low-wage sector. On this reading, capitalists can “play the workers and employees off against each other because they now have people who naturally work for even lower wages due to their personal situation.” This sounds like a compelling argument — creating the impression that if leftists want to stand for the interests of the working classes, they may need a reasonable skepticism about the real effects of migration. It appears necessary to take a stand and choose a side: either going for class politics or embracing the fight against racism.

Now, it is true that the low-wage sector in Europe is impressive in size. The last EU-wide calculations dating from 2018 estimated the share of low-wage earners among the European workforce to be around 15.3 percent of all employees, hitting 18.2 percent for female employees. What counts as low-wage work varies widely, also reflecting local differences in purchasing power; in Germany, anything under €11.50 an hour was considered low-wage in 2018. While this may be the EU’s biggest economy, its low-wage sector — 20.7 percent of the waged workforce — is also far bigger than the European average. The introduction of the minimum wage in 2015 didn’t bring about the effects desired by the Left, and made at most minimal changes to the income structure. But this still leaves another question: Can the rough conditions within this huge precarious sector really be attributed to high levels of low-skilled immigration, such as Wagenknecht and her allies likes to argue? There are at least four obvious arguments why this is not the case.

First: the share of migration to the EU marked as irregular amounted to just 9.6 percent of a total 3,777,063 migrant arrivals in 2022. Even though the distinction between regular and irregular migration is in many ways artificial, it should nonetheless be noted that the vast majority of migration to Europe is considered regular and as consisting of skilled workers. As long as their qualifications are recognized, these migrants mostly do not work in classical low-wage sectors and thus can’t exercise wage pressure in this sphere. Except for 2015 and 2023 — due to the wars in Syria and Ukraine — these proportions have been at similar levels across the last decade. As Wagenknecht claims not to challenge the right to seek refuge from wars, there shouldn’t be any problem with these peaks of irregular immigration. However, if by far the biggest share of migration to Europe is considered regular — and is indeed wholeheartedly desired by the EU because of demographic developments — pretending that the tiny, irregular share of migration causes the biggest problem simply misses the point.

Second: the unemployment rate in Germany is at historically low levels. Compared to 11.7 percent in 2005, it stood at only 5.7 percent in 2023. This is little reason for celebration. Anti-social labor-market “activation” policies launched by the Social Democratic Party (SPD) have forced workers into precarious occupations in the low-wage sector to keep the export-oriented German economy running. However, this development surely is indicative of a broader point: Germany’s reserve army of labor is shrinking fast. The share of the population employed for wages is at a historic high and predicted to rise further. Due to demographic changes and an ever-greater lack of workers — both skilled and nonskilled — the bargaining position of the organized workforce vis-à-vis capital has seriously improved. Some unions realized the historic opportunity, and are trying to seize it in an offensive for reduced working hours. So, to pretend that, because of irregular migration, the workforce is becoming too big to exercise pressure against the capitalists is again to miss the mark.

Third: according to current estimates, the informal economy in Germany has grown to approximately 11 percent of total economic activity. Informal work spans activities such as caring for the elderly or other persons in need, cleaning, sex work, trade in illicit commodities, or various activities in the construction sector. The informal economy mostly consists of workers with a migration history, and it is a particularly feminized field, too. People with low formal qualifications or ones that aren’t recognized in Germany are often forced to work within these sectors, particularly if they struggle with legal status or the German state denies them work-permits. While some make the conscious decision to work in these areas, the vast majority of native workers, whether qualified or not, abstain from the informal economy whenever they can. In contrast, a large share of irregular migrants tends to end up in the chains of the informal sector, where native workers are mostly absent.

While there is a clear division between migrant workers in the informal economy and native workers in the formal economy, in some areas there is a competition between the informal and the formal economic sectors as such. Quite often, employers in the care or construction sectors, for example, will favor informal over formal employment because this decreases their labor costs as they save spending on social security and other taxes. However, this is not a problem caused by the presence of migrant workers, but by employers’ thirst for profit and the failure to control them. Here, Wagenknecht and her allies confuse cause and effect. What would be needed, instead of raging against migrants, is to fight for labor rights compliance. Blaming migrant workers for being exploited in the informal economy misses the point.

Fourth: empirical analysis regarding central and northern Europe clearly shows that the short-term effects that immigration by low-wage workers has on labor-market competition level off after five years. Other studies conducted in Sweden and Portugal demonstrate that, in the long run, immigration in the low-wage sector even tends to prove beneficial for native workers as these latter tend to achieve higher levels of qualifications and promotions vis-à-vis the recently immigrated workers. While this is good news for native European workers, this is but one part of the exclusion and discrimination that migrant workers (or people perceived as such) face in the EU. To speak in numbers: in Germany, all qualifications being equal, workers with a migration history tend to earn 17.6 percent less than their longtime German counterparts. So, to pretend that native workers are the ones suffering from irregular migration is not only missing the point but is a blatant reversal of reality.

Escaping the Trap

But what do these considerations imply politically? Socialists with a materialist approach to reality shouldn’t be scared to label the argument by Wagenknecht and her allies for what it is: fishing for far-right voters by embracing racist rhetoric. It is not a politics aiming for the emancipation of the working classes. Even worse, it is pure culture-war rhetoric void of any materialist analysis — the exact opposite of what Wagenknecht claims to stand for. The culture-war strategy of riding the rising tide of racism to attract right-wing voters seems unlikely to achieve the desired effect. Nor is such an approach in the interest of the working classes in general, or workers with migration history in particular.

In contrast, any serious materialist analysis and politics knows about the high and increasing share of people with migration history in the European working classes, both in the formal and the informal economy. This isn’t bad news per se. Surely it would be bad if workers with migration history ended up stuck in precarious working conditions in the often-informal areas to which unions virtually have no access. But the path of materialist politics is to organize with people suffering from often abhorrent working conditions and to offer them solidarity; and this is, indeed, what many unions aim and work hard to do. Given the bargaining power workers currently have vis-à-vis capital, chances for collective improvements not only in the world of paid employment, but also in those of public infrastructure and society in general, are comparatively good. These changes are urgently needed, to counter the incessant onslaught by the political right.

Abolition and Left Politics

There is a long history to the debate between abolitionists and anti-racists, on the one side, and leftists who resist this in the name of defending working-class interest, on the other. In 1846, Hermann Kriege — a self-proclaimed communist from Germany who had recently emigrated to the United States — declared that the Left must wholeheartedly repudiate any abolitionist ambitions. He believed these would “throw the Republic into a state of anarchy . . . extend the competition of ‘free workingmen’ beyond all measures, and . . . depress labor itself to the last extremity.” He argued that a focus on abolishing racist institutions would be a distraction from class politics — and even undermine working-class interests. He was using the same argumentation today adopted by Wagenknecht.

However, on May 11, 1846, a group of communists, including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, issued a circular against the politics of the anti-abolitionist Kriege, condemning his political stance, stating he “is not communist.” The grandfathers of materialist analyses knew very well that emancipation from slavery and the institutions of racism was a cause to be embraced by the Left. Not only Marx and Engels, but various actors on the political Left — including large sections of radical leftist Germans — decided to stand on the right side of history and counter the wrongheaded, pseudomaterialist argumentation as represented by Kriege.

Joining the mostly black struggle of ending slavery was right — even if the historical opportunity to fully democratize the United States and overcome capitalism was missed, as W. E. B. Du Bois famously outlines in his work. The same stance for the abolition of structural racism has to be unequivocally defended today. Any serious materialist analysis knows about the constitutive role of race and racialized work both in historical and contemporary capitalism. Abolishing the racist status quo (the politics of killing people on the move in the deserts of the Sahara, the forests of Belarus, and the depths of the Mediterranean, or confining them in camps if they do make it to Europe), collectively fighting for the improvement of living conditions and the abolition of capitalism whose destructive drive forces vast amounts of people to leave their home regions in the first place, is as integral to socialist politics as was the abolition of slavery. Playing dehumanizing culture wars is not.

Organizing and building alliances with migrant workers is the path to follow if the European left wants to stand any chance to counter the rise of fascism. And who knows, it might even result in the historical opportunity to fully democratize Europe.