I’m not sure which is worse: treating the political units we call countries as quasi-religious fetish objects as some on the extreme nationalist right do; or pretending they don’t exist in order to smooth the algorithmic working out of quasi-Marxist “logics” as is the practice of some on the “left”.

At the moment we see what happens when each of these tendencies is heightened by the other, at least in the discursive spaces of the English-language media.

The MAGA trope, and the right’s overheated rhetoric about the effect of non-natives living in and attempting to enter the US, has led many on the left to adopt “NO BORDERS” as a slogan in response to “BUILD THAT WALL”. Neither position is new, of course. Socialists have long believed in an internationalist solidarity among the working classes of the world that would one day result in a dissolution of borders. And nativism in various flavours of racist anti-immigrant sentiment has long flourished in parts of the American polity.

And neither is it new that MAGA and The Wall and teargas and heavily armed troops deployed along the border are the chosen expressions of the people holding the reins of state power while “NO BORDERS” and all the cries of racism and xenophobia are the preferred expressions of virtually disenfranchised keyboard warriors and a small segment of the mainly online media.

A more poignant illustration of the relationship between “the left” and “the right” and their respective relationships to political power is hard to imagine.

Donald Trump got elected by appealing to a distinctly ugly form of nationalism- “illegals” were murderers and rapists; immigrants from Muslim countries were terrorists; foreign nations, whether allies or not, were robbing Americans blind.

He situated his nationalism in a populist frame: it was the Washington elites who had sold out the American people. He showed none of the polite “respect” that is imagined to be the norm among the political classes. Unlike social democratic superstar Ocasio-Cortez, who eulogized racist warmonger John McCain as leaving a legacy of “unparalleled human decency”, Trump mocked the notion of McCain as a hero for having spent 5 years of the Vietnam war as a prisoner.

In an angry time of increasing immiseration and alienation across the developed world, you have to ask yourself whether “trash-talking Trump” or “shit-eating Ocasio” hit the most-likely-to-succeed note in commenting on an icon of the bipartisan perpetual warmakers of the American ruling class.

And if you are the kind of leftist who believes that the way to change the world for the better is for the left to gain power in the real world rather than parse moral perfections in online discourse you have to ask yourself what contribution is being made by the “beautiful souls” who wave banners proclaiming NO BORDERS and call out leftists like Angela Nagle as “fash” or “blood and soil nationalist” for daring to question orthodoxy.

“Leftists” who talk about borders as “bourgeois fictions” have obviously not spent much time hoiking their luggage up the long and lengthening lines leading to customs and immigration desks, passport in hand, hoping to gain permission to leave the no-man’s land that is the cynosure of every international airport in every country around the world and enter the country that like it or not is demarcated by a panoply of international laws, customs and regulations that in aggregate constitute “borders”.

It goes without saying that none of these NO BORDERS people actually believe that what they are calling for is even remotely likely to happen in their lifetimes. And neither do they appear to concern themselves with how the call for NO BORDERS is likely to impact the future of socialist organizing among the working classes of the US. As Zizek pointed out three years ago in commenting on the EU version of the “immigrant crisis”:

The greatest hypocrites are those who call for open borders. They know very well this will never happen: it would instantly trigger a populist revolt in Europe. They play the beautiful soul, superior to the corrupted world while continuing to get along in it. The anti-immigrant populist also knows very well that, left to themselves, people in Africa and the Middle East will not succeed in solving their own problems and changing their societies. Why not? Because we in Western Europe are preventing them from doing so.

Unpacking this short passage is revealing of the quandary we find ourselves in.

Any attempt to dismantle the contemporary state by throwing borders open to all and sundry would trigger a reaction in the voting publics of those states that would see a massive shift to the populist right, whether in the EU or the US. Any suggestion that the call for open borders could work as an effective recruiting tool for a “revivified left” in any part of the developed world is patently ridiculous. For much of the contemporary “left” it seems that hectoring and chiding and calling people “fascists” will suffice to magically enact Brecht’s ironic call to “dismiss the people and appoint a new one”. For the rest of us, reality in all its manifest disturbances has more appeal.

When the “left” calls for OPEN BORDERS or at least unrestricted immigration from the countries of the so-called “global south” as a solution to the economic and political problems encountered by the working classes in those countries, they are proposing that we ignore our responsibility in creating those problems.

No doubt some sort of lip-service will be paid to acknowledging the role of international capital in maintaining “first world” dominance, but ultimately this “left” sees these countries as disposable abstractions rather than as the sites of homes and families and communities and political networks that if not constantly arrayed against the overwhelming force of local rulers backed by “first world” capital and military-political power might have far more success at establishing leftist governments than the arrogant “suffer the children to come unto me” “left” arguing that the solution to the global south’s problems is to let them all become first worlders just like us and wank on about identity politics online rather than organize to oppose capital and its minions.

The American “left” has failed to support union organizing, has failed to mount anything resembling an anti-war movement, and has tended to restrict itself to internecine squabbling over issues related to identity politics and an awful lot of performative virtue signalling. Even among those who claim to be practitioners of “material analysis” and “class orientation”, the issue of OPEN BORDERS has revealed an unwillingness to consider organizational strategies above and beyond “ideological purity”.

It’s about time these people either abandon their faux leftism and let socialists get on with the task of organizing the working class beyond the bearded Brooklynites presently overseeing the plantation of the politically correct or get over their bougie sensitivities and join the working classes themselves.