A Reader writes to Freerk Huisken: "I am not a nationalist because I fear foreigners taking my job!"

 

A reader writes: ".... in a recent lecture in.... you framed the fears of fellow citizens for their jobs amid increasing demand from foreigners for work as nationalist. Your 'arguments' were not at all convincing to me. I personally have nothing against foreigners; I just fear for my job. Therefore, I am not a nationalist. I would never vote for the AfD or any other right-wing extremist party. That's why I think it's good when you and others speak out against the AfD. However, I am writing to you so that you reconsider your 'arguments' and refrain from calling harmless fellow citizens nationalists in the future..."

Before anything, I'd like to set a few things straight: First, I didn't – directly – oppose the AfD in the aforementioned lecture. More on that in a moment. And second, I didn't call anyone a nationalist. Rather, I tried to criticize the slogan that foreigners are taking "our" jobs, and to point out its flaws and its nationalist partisanship. You would have completely misunderstood me if you equated my criticism of a slogan with the moral discrediting of the person who spouts it. I certainly wasn't interested in exclusion or in putting people in the right-wing corner, especially since there wouldn't be enough room in those corners for all the supporters of this slogan. How could I? I just want them to stop using it!1

More on that below. In this lecture, I was, on the one hand, concerned with demonstrating the flaws that underlie this home-loving mentality called nationalism. Secondly, I wanted to demonstrate that these errors have harmful effects of all kinds, not just for the citizens who indulge in them, but also for the fellow citizens they marginalize. That was and is my sole concern.

***

On the merits and the core of your criticism: None of the proponents of this slogan want to take the fact that foreigners are taking "our" jobs away from them literally. Anyone who needs to work for someone else to earn a living knows that it's entrepreneurs or their human resources managers who assess their suitability for a company or office, hire them, reject them, and then fire them again when the worker is no longer needed in the company. I don't need to spend much time clarifying who is the subject of job allocation and who, as the object of this, has to accept the job offers. Nor do I need to provide evidence of the suitability assessment criteria that apply to applications for and daily delivery of work. It's also no secret that one's own wage expectations are regularly embarrassed by what the company is willing to pay, and that ultimately it's all about obediently submitting to the company's requirements, meaning that only those who satisfy the employer's profitability interests in terms of qualifications, willingness, and unpretentiousness get jobs.

Consequently, it would not be an excessive theoretical achievement to identify the economic contrast between oneself, the income-dependent, and the entrepreneur, and to draw conclusions from it.

Not so for the proponents of the slogan! They refer to competition in the labor market: There, foreign competitors are supposed to "take jobs away" from "us," the German competitors, by subjecting themselves to exactly the same competitive conditions as their German colleagues. This is strange in several respects: First, these are conditions that none of the job seekers chose. All competitors – German and foreign – are pitted against each other by the "employers" in the same entrepreneurial suitability test. Although they all want the same thing: namely, tolerable work for a decent wage — no wonder, since they all find themselves in the same economic situation without their own source of income — they are all driven into a conflict against one another. And this conflict is exploited by companies to drive down wages to the extent that demand for labor exceeds supply. In this permanent struggle for paid work, established as a labor market, job seekers of all stripes only have a chance if they undercut their competitors in terms of the required unpretentiousness. Foreigners, especially refugees, whose material situation is even more dire than that of the average German wage earner, have to take what they can get.

In this context, no competitor "takes anything away" from another; just as entrepreneurs, equipped with the full power of capital ownership, grab one or another from the array of desolate characters, thus simultaneously sorting through the mass of job seekers with generous rejections. The slogan turns all of this on its head: It simply declares those who are hired by companies to provide wage labor to be the true decision-makers in the competition.

To be more precise – and this is the crucial point – only one group of competitors, only foreigners, are supposed to be the ones taking jobs away from the Germans.2 The competition for jobs is thus pre-sorted in a highly revealing way. This pre-sorting does not take its criterion from the competitive business, in which entrepreneurs alone assert their economic interests. Rather, it brings entirely irrelevant national differences into account, thus ideally inserting a criterion into the competition that entrepreneurs do not even consider in their profitability calculations. And this sorting is anything but merely formal. Rather, it is linked to the implicitly or explicitly expressed claim that foreigners have no place here, in "our labor market," as non-Germans, they have no right to be here – and this is the nationalist core of the slogan. As if such eligibility were derived from origin and passport and not solely from the companies' demand for qualified workers! One competitor "takes something away" from another; just as entrepreneurs, equipped with the full power of capital ownership, grab one or another from the supply of desolate characters, thus simultaneously sorting through the mass of job seekers with generous rejections. The slogan turns all of this on its head: It simply declares those who are hired by companies to provide wage labor to be the true decision-makers in the competition.

And this nationalist pre-sorting of competition turns the plight of job seekers into a privilege that only "we," the Germans, are entitled to. Not only are the subject and object of the job decision turned upside down, but the world of work itself, in light of competition from unauthorized foreigners, experiences an opposite, a positive, evaluation: Would the world of work—is my rhetorical question—be a completely different, more bearable, more pleasant one if only "pure-bred Germans had the pleasure of being subjected to wage and performance comparisons by calculating employers,"4 which, after all, doesn't suit any applicant for the jobs offered here? Does competition for scarce jobs become unbearable with only foreigners as competitors? Aren't German workers just as likely to be pitted against each other and forced to forgo wages? Is the world of work primarily characterized by the national identity between employer and employee, with the differences between them secondary, if not negligible?

And how does this fit, firstly, with your initial claim of concern about jobs and secondly, with your admission that you "personally have nothing against foreigners"? Firstly: Anyone who is solely concerned about losing their job and thus their income would have a completely different set of complaints. They would demand the remediation of an entirely different deficiency, namely the lack of reasonably paid and sustainable jobs. They would complain about the damage to their material interests in and through the "social market economy" and not about poor creatures from abroad who have fled to somewhere else after a fruitless job search in their homeland. And secondly: Yes, if you take foreigners only "personally," as "people," then you have nothing to object to. But they are members of another nation who don't really belong "to us" at all. And that alone makes the matter rather impersonal for you. In other words: You couldn't say anything against foreigners in your everyday life, your living environment, or your working life.5 

"Personally," from person to person, there are no grounds for exclusion for you. These only attack you when you think of yourself, quite impersonally, as a member of the German nation and, moreover, value your German nationality to such an extent that foreigners, non-Germans, have no right to enjoy life in this excellent nation. No, that is, of course, not xenophobia! By the way: Have you ever considered how you actually came to be a member of your nationality? And furthermore: Since you are for Germany, have you ever taken stock of how you live in this nation, what determines your life in this nation? Is it all sunshine and roses and friends everywhere? When one indulges in partisanship for the nation with every "we," "us," and "our," one must make an effort to disregard all decisive power relations in politics, economics, and social affairs that do not exactly serve the majority of the job-seeking population well.

***

For me, all of this leads you and your fellow campaigners to ask yourselves a crucial question: Are foreigners in the job and housing markets unbearable for you, or is it your economic situation, in which you constantly fear having too little or no wages to live on, that is causing you constant worry? If the latter is troubling you, then it may have become clear to you that you have chosen the wrong opponent in these poor bastards from abroad. And by choosing the wrong opponents, you would have practically delivered yourself to your real opponents: always driven by the patriotically tinged notion that German entrepreneurs could never be responsible for the hardships of German workers. So much for the flaws of this abstract partisanship for the nation – and nationalism is nothing else – along with the indications of the negative consequences it entails not only for the excluded, but also for the advocates of foreign exclusion.6

By the way, it may also have become clear to you that your slogan differs little from the slogan of the NPD fascists, Pegida, or parts of the AfD, "Germany for the Germans, foreigners out." Where your slogan calls on the state to ensure a labor market free of foreigners, the NPD merely radicalizes this dictate of exclusion to its logical conclusion: foreigners out completely, or not even allowed in at all.7 I don't at all want to doubt that you now emphasize that you have nothing to do with the NPD or AfD and would never vote for these parties. I only want to doubt the validity of your reasons for refraining from supporting the NPD and AfD. 

Am I correct in thinking that, as a German, you consider it inappropriate to vote for parties that evoke Germany's Nazi past? If I'm right, then you are thereby providing evidence of successful post-war national education, which still resonates with many today: Nationalism, we – you and I – have learned, is a politically incorrect, non-existent, indeed outdated mentality that distinguished and set apart only German fascism. We should learn that nationalism is hatred of everything foreign and is therefore equated with fascism or National Socialism; whereas today, patriotism, love of one's own country, is required for us as German democrats. That perhaps the "hatred of everything foreign" stems precisely from "love for one's own country" – as not only the local right-wing extremists, the AfD members constantly assert – that this distinction between permitted and forbidden patriotism quickly dissolves, was not and still is not part of the curriculum in Germany.8 Rather, people have been taught to be ashamed of Germany's Nazi past, and to this day, with an admission of guilt – regularly renewed on relevant holidays – they declare themselves partly responsible for fascism, simply because these fascists from 1933 to 1945 were also German. And you are doing this – as I understand you – of all people, as a critic of the AfD and fascism! That fits together: namely, when you thoroughly hide your anti-fascism behind a commitment to your Germanness because your partisanship for this Germanness is so important to you that you want to cleanse it of brown stains with gestures of shame and confessions of guilt.

It's a lovely paradox, this post-war upbringing: deriving pride in a Germany that – uniquely among warring states in the post-war period – openly acknowledges its fascist past from the fact that Germany, as the successor state, is degrading itself. Thus, this post-war education has succeeded, by rejecting fascist nationalism, in anchoring a new nationalism — one could call it democratic nationalism — in the minds of citizens.9 For some time now, one can once again be proud of Germany without resorting to the somewhat outmoded official post-war anti-fascism10: of its successes in Europe and on the global market, of its increased international reputation, of its right to have a say in the UN or at the G20 meetings. "We" have long since become somebody again, can sometimes "let ourselves" get away with things, and have to put up with less and less. The AfD, by the way, sees it the same way; however, for them, the validity of purely German sovereignty at home and abroad still leaves much to be desired.

Footnotes:

1) The thrust of your email falls under the FAQ for me and indicates that I indeed need to be more precise in my arguments in my lectures and writings.

2) But that's not all: If we dwell on this blatant misinterpretation of competition for a moment, we can hardly avoid the conclusion that every newly hired person would have 'stolen' the job from those who continue to struggle in the labor market – including the natives from the foreigners, the foreigners from their colleagues from afar, or the natives from other natives, e.g., all those natives who are freshly released from school into the labor market, or those natives who are learning what a mass layoff is. That would be the logical consequence of this incorrect definition of labor market competition.

3) This is underscored by the state's authorization system: foreigners, refugees, and others are admitted to the labor market if, for example, German capital has a "skilled labor shortage," day laborers are needed for asparagus picking, etc.

4) From: “To the ‘concerned citizens’: Your slogans are wrong!” in: GegenStandpunkt, Issue 4/18, p. 

5) You may know the joke in which a German pensioner says: "Foreigners have no business here. Except for Ali, who always takes out my trash!"

6) My concern was and is to criticize the right-wing thinking of large segments of the local population – regardless of whether they vote for the AfD or the CDU/CSU/DP/GREEN/LEFT. If I had been concerned with criticizing the AfD, I would have examined its party platform.

7) This is what the German-European refugee policy is currently radically implementing, with the approval of the AfD.

8) See also the study I conducted with a colleague on the Nazi era in German school curriculum: Gutte/Huisken, Everything Overcome, Not Understood, Hamburg (3rd edition) 2019; and: K. Hecker, Fascism and Its Overcoming, Munich 1996, pp. 267ff.

9) Quite a few have also come to terms with the old pre-1945 democracy.

10) As I'm currently revising the response in the virus year of 2020, a new line has emerged: I'll just say "Erfurt"!

Original text: https://www.fhuisken.de/downloadable/korrespondenz/korrespondenz-Ich-bin-doch-kein-nationalist.pdf