Who are they or, rather, who are Polish economical immigrants in the United Kingdom? Independent specialists who yet found the desired confirmation of their membership in the mediate class, in the form of adequate income for endurance from the first to the first?
Declassed intelligents? Above all, do we consider ourselves 1) immigrants, b) workers?
Self-identification problems
Notable inconsistency in the self-identification of our behind the Channel, that is, speaking with academic clear contradictions between identity and awareness (especially class) encourage research, not only concerning inactive close to the millionth Polish community in the UK, but the environment in which it lives and works. Without knowing both components determining the form of British society: cultural / racial and classy, it is impossible to realize either the forms of cultivating our separateness in the Islands, or to analyse the processes of incorporation / assimilation to Britishness, or yet to realize the motives that those who return to the country, frequently after respective years of absence.
Poverty Safari
Critics of the current state of social relations in the UK mention among its causes, among others, the dismantling of the British welfare state by thatcherism, the actual transition to neoliberal positions of the so-called. New LabourTony Blair in the late 1990s, yet the strategy of draconian belt tightening (Austerites) implemented by all subsequent cabinets, with an indication especially of the infamous conservative-liberal coalition David Cameron and Nick Clegg 2010-2015. This policy was, on the 1 hand, a consistent privatisation of the public sector, followed by a codification and financing of further areas of life, with a clear shift of costs to final consumers and direct producers. The active participation of the British economy in the globalisation of the financial sector, with the progressive deindustrialisation and shift of interest in the labour marketplace to the sphere of services, has made a major contribution to the emergence of the "British subclass" as defined by Darren McGarvey, a loud author Poverty Safari[and], description of the part British rust belt, according to successive authors drawn from Red Clyde (formerly) in Glasgow, through flooded mines of Wales, replaced with flat buildings of the mill of Nottingham (before 200 years of the capital of Luddism) until forgotten by politicians and unnoticed by marketplace analysts the corners of the inactive pretending capital of the London world.
Visitor loneliness
This British anger, bitterness and discouragement are besides encountered regular by immigrants, not only Polish ones. Polish post-accession smiling plumber, intended to form a panacea on the migration tensions that were already present at the time, turned out to be a suspicious kind of swans hijacking from parks for consumption purposes. The creative improvement of these slogans and stereotypes was carried out during campaign for BREXITAfter which, interestingly, bad immigrants, East- and South-Europeans replaced temporarily a somewhat better Indian, Bengali and African students, with work permits part-time and/or cultural quotas. The sense of alienation whether from the English community or in the environment with the dominant presence of another immigrant groups prevails in the discussions of members of Polish groups in social media. The position of belonging to a place of migration, adopted by sociologists and expressed by (some) politicians, seems to be at least hard under specified conditions.
Who is guilty of your poverty?
The UK is besides the leading centre of applicable neoliberalism. The division into "deserved and undeservedly poor" is profoundly rooted not only in the politics of the authorities, but besides in the attitude of the higher classes in particular. However, in order to keep social peace, besides those "deserved poor" must receive an explanation of their situation wider than the constant blaming of themselves, their origins, their evil tendencies, laziness, etc. There must be at least as bad a person, and in full even a penny, due to the fact that the petrifying state of inability to get out of poverty. That individual is evidently an immigrant, especially 1 who at the same time only arrives for benefits and takes distant the work of the average British. Furthermore, the analysis of hard data shows that in reality the labour force of fresh arrivals is higher than that of locals, both due to their willingness to work under worse conditions and in sectors that are not attractive to British workers. As a result, it is not so many immigrants who supply a reserve labour army in the UK, but alternatively that they shift further excluded groups in England and Wales from the labour market, and to a lesser degree in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
"Insufficient white"
This alienation affects Polish workers in a natural way (including many immigrant precarriages). On the social side, income, social and professional ladder positions should be more combined with English and Welsh colleagues than with members of their own class having, besides trace, but notably present in the Islands, in corporate ranks or in young people from good families in costly colleges funded at prestigious British universities. The sense of community or solidarity comes along with time, and even if it does, it is mostly limited to a peculiar workplace.
Similarly, an English individual should besides have more in common with a Polish visitor, at a work station next to, say, the king CharlesOh, my God! Meanwhile, there are mechanisms that Friedrich Engels[ii] he described by analyzing common hostility and playing groups of English and Irish workers against each another in the mid-19th century. Racism from this position is besides part of the class hierarchy of capitalism, in which individual must always act as a “black man” and, if necessary, a “white nigger”[iii]. In detail, specified a constitution leads to a further diagnosis of the inequalities facing racial and cultural minorities in the UK, mostly made up of immigrants, in terms of access to health, education, housing, and stableness and improvement opportunities in the British labour market. In British realities, akin barriers are of course not only racial and ethnic. However, it is simply a fact that visitors feel "xeno-raisism" (this word avoids the sterile and delicate problem of defining the concept of race) and the designation of any immigrants, especially those from east Europe, including Poles, as "insufficiently white"[iv].
Individual nature of ‘banal nationalism’
In turn, digging at the position of “national representatives of qualified workers”, as if consecutive from the era of the work About the position of the working class in England, in fact, it prevented the building of the basis of worker solidarity by the large union centres, of which smaller independent organizations were eagerly used, appointed specifically for and by Polish, Latin, Romanian and Hungarian service workers, from cleaners, bodyguards and caretakers, to lower hotel and social staff. However, the full number of visitors functions not only outside organizations (Polish or British), but besides outside group self-identification. Even the manifestation of Polishness ("banal nationalism" in terms of Michael Billig[v]) is alternatively family/individual in nature, coming to buying in shops with products considered to be Polish, frequently Holy Mass in Polish and (and little often) sending children to Saturday Polish schools. Even ethnicity is so not a collective experience (unless specified discussions on FB are considered to be so), let us talk about classiness or designation of social structures another than the family, a very vaguely accepted nation and a sentimental, local and family-side treated homeland.
What is class?
Of course, dominant in both the UK and Poland neoliberal paradigm, frequently in general questioning any community (deciding, besides about emigration, has only an individual rational choice of the optimal strategy!), he is peculiarly reluctant to mention especially to classiness, even in its non-Marxist, and e.g. the Veberian view. The class is no longer there! – they are not especially seen by members of the class having, and surely there is no working class, brought to the historical picture, Poles already known almost exclusively from Promised Land and dark crowds descending towards mill chimneys to challenge sirens. Clearly, there is no extended, modern explanation of classiness, even as promoted in 1960 by Italians operaismo, predicting the inevitable transformation of the working class due to the weakening and failure of large industrial production along with the full Keynesian Fordism system. Adopting a position identifying a "new working class" with a "social labour force" (e.g. Antonio Negri[vi]) allows the recognition of workers to be found besides among precarriages active in social reproduction, students and prosumers of digital economy. These are modern workers, The buzzing of the smartphones replaced the sirens.
Are we one?
Ours, too, on emigration, although categorized among “independent professionals”, belong to the vast mass of working classes, objectively inactive existing, though on a mass scale lacking class awareness. Especially established in Polish studies on migration, the tendency to recognise the uniformity of Polish migration besides in class is due in general to the weakness of Polish economics and sociology, dominated by neoliberal doctrine. The mistake of establishing the expected unity of Polish labour migration is simply a derivative of, among others, the inability to perceive the pertrified classiness of societies, specified as in peculiar British. Since the UK strategy and structure are naive (?) to be referred to, for example, as a ‘retirement’, it is no wonder that the ‘professions’ and ‘capacity’, alternatively than real reasons for functioning in social structures, will focus on the deficiency of analysis.
Declassification
On the 1 hand, Lukacs' "imputated class consciousness" continues to be widely present.[vii], favoring petty bourgeois appearances (the mediate class!), sustained regular rhythm of work clearly working. At the same time, however, if there are no classes, then where does the subjective feeling of declassification come from?[viii] (or, in another categories, failure of status) felt by a crucial part of Polish visitors? Further – if class divisions are anachronism both in the UK and in Poland, why any groups of Polish immigrants consciously make them / reproduce them, trying to separate them from the immigrant masses, clearly perceived as “worse”[ix]? And as far as status, position, earnings or property are concerned, why is it so frequently that the strategy of individual social promotion ends with failure, as a consequence to the historical barriers that are yet seen, but which are denied class character?
“ Alone among his”?
Knowledge of the contemporary British labour marketplace confirms the transformation of the story of the "medium class" into the reality of the "hourglass society", thus expanding inequalities and barriers that can stimulate the feeling of social inability to advance, which in turn can influence the decision to migrate back. Others are characterized by greater determination, so they reiterate attempts to join the dominant class by aspiring Poles, which is frequently the negation of ties with the same ethnically part of the working class, while the hosts themselves do not make specified a mistake, skillfully utilizing the slogans of Britishness, a relation with the ruling family, national-state belongings (both these categories are in the UK strategy out of focus and frequently utilized interchangeably). As a result, the Polish individual may feel rejected by both ‘his own with ambition’ and by English workers. Class alienation overlaps with ethnicism.
What does it mean to be a Pole?
An additional national context is the issue of the cultural heterogeneity of the United Kingdom, which is poorly perceived especially during the first period of Polish immigration. And this is not about the inactive controversial multiculturalism among Poles, which is hydraulically regulated by British migration policy, It is besides crucial to experience BREXIT (including attempts to re-create English as an authenticity different from Britishism at political level), as well as the issue of national centrifugal movements, aimed at the independency of Scotland and Wales and the unification of Ireland. The feeling of Polishness in the UK may besides mention to the surrounding feeling of Britishness, Englishness, Scotchness, Welshness or Irishness. It is different to be a Pole in cosmopolitan London, or in almost exclusively the English Allerdale, or Edinburgh, or else in Belfast, where in worker surveys he asks straight about confession and attitude towards a conflict that a large part of visitors have never heard of. Question what it actually means to be a Pole It most likely appears much more frequently than “am I a worker?” and even “means how am I an immigrant too?” (because immigrants are only those on boats...), although frequently the process of applying for... British naturalization becomes an chance to think about it, erstwhile something we have mostly since birth, Polish citizenship – we face the problem of becoming British / English, etc.
Who are we on emigration?
It seems that economical migration, breaking out from an environment that allows us to forget the reality of class divisions, suppressed by both liberal ideology and the habit of being elevated from the times of real socialism, let us to see one more time the social disunity of our cultural group, functioning outside the environment in which it was majority. And in parallel, being in a multicultural environment, as well as among the tensions of ongoing ethnogenesis, makes you look at your own sense of national identity from a different position and (even without defining) feel it subjectively.
This experience of going outside the social and self-conscious comfort region should be considered as the starting point of further investigation on the coupling of national and class factors with respect to Polish migration decisions.
Who are we on emigration? – that is the question.
Konrad Hand
[and] D. McGarvey (2018) poorness Safari: knowing the Anger of Britain’s Underclass. 2nd edn. London: Picador. See besides D. McGarvey (2022) The Social Distance Between Us: How distant Politics Wrecked Britain, London Penguin Random House.
[ii] F. Engels (2009) The Condition of the Working Class in England. London: Penguin Books Ltd. (Orignal worked published 1845).
[iii] E. Balibar and I. Wallerstein (1991) Race, Nation, Class, Ambigious Identitys. London: Verso.
[iv] W. Shankley and J. Rhodes (2020) Racisms in Contemporary Britain. In: Byrne, B. et al., eds. Ethnicity, Race and Inequality in the UK: State of the Nation. Bristol: Policy Press, p. 203 -228.
[v] M. Billig (1995) Banal nationalism. London :Thousand Oaks.
[vi] Cf. A. Negri (2022) Marx in Movement. Cambridge: Polity Press.
[vii] G. Lukács (1988) Class past and consciousness. The crowd from the German M. Siemek, Warsaw: technological Publishing home PWN (Original work published1923).
[viii] ‘Declassamento“class degradation, implemented especially in the service sector with the implementation of neo-Taylorist management methods. Op. cit. A. Negri, Marx in... ,p. 109.
[ix] Cf. M. P. Garapich (2016) London’s Polish Borders: Transnationalizing Class and Ethnicity among Polish Migrants in London. Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag.
