The World Turned Upside Down?

Socialist Register 2019

Greg Albo, Leo Panitch

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781583677513
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A World Turned Upside Down? poses two overarching questions for the new period opened by the Trump election and the continued growth of right-wing nationalisms. Is there an unwinding of neoliberal globalization taking place, or will globalization continue to deepen, but still deny the free cross-border movement of labor? Would such an unwinding entail an overall shift in power and accumulation to specific regions of the Global South that might overturn the current world order and foster the disintegration of the varied regional blocs that have formed? These questions are addressed through a series of essays that carefully map the national, class, racial, and gender dimensions of the state, capitalism, and progressive forces today. Sober assessment is crucial for the left to gain its political bearings in this trying period and the uncertainties that lie ahead.

THE CONTRADICTIONS OF GLOBAL MIGRATION

ADAM HANIEH

In the wake of Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory, commentators have frequently pointed to the new administration’s erratic style of governance, constant policy reversals, and apparent lack of strategic vision. In spite of this seeming chaos, however, there is one consistent anchor to both Trump’s political messaging and practice: the claim that weak borders and lax immigration laws constitute an existential threat to the fabric of US society. Unlike the zigzagging seen in other policy areas, Trump’s heavily racialized discourse has steadfastly vilified migrants as the root cause of numerous ills – poverty, crime, terrorism, low wages, and unemployment. Emblematic of social decay in general, the image of the migrant has come to symbolize danger and criminality in Trump’s steady stream of twitter tirades: these are people who would never ‘go back to their huts’, ‘the animals that we’ve been protecting for so long’, and by whom ‘our country is being stolen’. While it is essential not to forget the actual anti-migrant record of the Obama administration – indeed, the annual rates of migrant deportation and arrests in the three years of Obama’s first term were more than double that of Trump’s first year¹ – the willingness of Trump to openly articulate such repugnant tropes marks a rhetorical break with preceding years. Such language has not only helped normalize racist and white supremacist movements across the US, it has been central to Trump’s carefully cultivated image of maverick-outsider, detached from the accepted niceties of conventional bourgeois politics.

In all of this, Trump’s rise has aligned seamlessly with the startling renewal of right-wing populism and nativist forces throughout the rest of the world. These movements deploy a wide range of symbolic referents, with varying material roots that have found fertile ground in the decades-long crisis of social democracy; but what is most striking about the current conjuncture is how the question of migration has been rendered so central to all political speech. Debates over national security, economic growth, crime, the erosion of public services, and even ecological sustainability are inevitably framed as issues of migration; while struggles over the meaning, causes, and implications of migration shape the constellation of political power and forms of popular mobilization at every level. The movement of people across (and within) borders has been entwined with the development of capitalism since its origins – but there has rarely been a period in modern history where political discourse has been so pervasively saturated by the figure of the migrant.

Why is this so? What is it about the present moment that has propelled the issue of migration to the centre of political debate, and how should we respond to the emergence of Trumpism and other anti-migrant movements across the globe? For many, the answers to these questions are largely found at an ideological level, with the rise of a newly branded right representing a resurgence of protectionism, a narrow parochial outlook, and a national chauvinism epitomized in slogans such as ‘Make America Great Again’. One liberal response to this has been to reassert a universalism based on human rights and international norms, emphasising respect for the dignity of refugees and other kinds of migrants, the provision of humanitarian assistance, and the meeting of government obligations under international law. In place of the foreign ‘threat’, a welcoming attitude to migrants is said to offer considerable benefits to host countries – bringing skills, entrepreneurial dynamism, demographic growth, and increased consumer demand.

Such positive framings of migration can be found across the political spectrum – from business leaders arguing that migrants are vital for firms to meet their skilled labour needs, to politicians depicting migrants as a necessary source of population growth in the face of slowing birth rates, and NGOs in the US and UK asking us to imagine what a ‘day without immigrants’ would look like. Yet while providing a counterweight to overt racist stereotyping, such arguments in defence of migration frequently reinforce the implicit categories of ‘deserving’ and ‘non-deserving’ migrants, with a balance sheet ultimately measured in relation to an ill-defined national good. The bogey of the ‘good’ migrant versus the ‘bad’ emerges, and the policy challenge becomes one of managing, identifying, and filtering the movement of people across borders in accordance with the needs of the national economy.

Running through all these perspectives is a conception of migration as a contingent epiphenomenon of the world economy; one that arises from a variety of factors ‘somewhere else’ and ends up at ‘our’ borders demanding a policy response. In this essay, I propose that this framing is not only false, but that it also leads to a set of political problems for those concerned with building campaigns to support migrant struggles today. In place of such perspectives, I argue that we need to situate migration as an internal feature of how capitalism actually functions at the global scale – a movement of people that is relentlessly generated by the movement of capital, and which, in turn, is constitutive of the concrete forms of capitalism itself. Only from this global perspective can we understand the recent rise of racism and xenophobia, and the profound changes in how borders operate and are managed throughout much of the world. Most importantly, such a perspective allows us to sketch what an effective solidarity with migrants might look like.

In making this argument, I focus on three interconnected features of migration in the current period. First, I examine how migration arises from the inherent dynamics of capitalism: a totalising system of accumulation that continually generates multiple forms of dispossession. Within this process, the movement of people across borders becomes an essential factor in how class formation – of both labour and capital – actually occur. Such an approach runs counter to standard neoclassical and institutionalist explanations of the drivers of migration, which typically focus on individual choice and so-called ‘push’/’pull’ factors. For Marxists, as I explore further below, foregrounding migration in capitalism (and vice-versa) carries a range of significant implications for how we think concretely about categories such as class in the global economy.

I then turn to look at the instrumental role of borders in these dynamics, analysing the ways in which borders act to demarcate various forms of difference within national and global labour markets (including the value of labour power, and the construction of categories such as race and illegality). Through this differentiation, borders act as filters, mediating the concrete ways that classes come into being. There have been major transformations in how borders and migration policy operate across the world over recent times, including: (1) the securitization of borders; (2) the growing weight of private capital in migration and border management; and (3) so-called extra-territorialization, where responsibility for border controls is increasingly offloaded to third countries. These changes have occurred as part of the mantra of ‘managed migration’ that continues to dominate policy-making circles across the world, and I outline and examine some of their consequences below.

Finally, migration is also essential to how periods of crisis unfold and are perceived – a theme that is explored in the final section of this essay. Precisely because of the centrality of migration to capital accumulation, a very large proportion of the world’s population has been integrated into global financial circuits through the sending and receiving of remittances. At moments of economic downturn, this relationship permits the (partial) spatial displacement of crisis through the corridors of migration and remittance flows. Moreover, migration itself is frequently portrayed in terms of ‘crisis’ – most notably in the case of the millions of people now displaced across the Middle East and around the Mediterranean Sea. In this latter case, I show how the framing of migration as crisis is being utilized as a means to further deepen neoliberal market-led development models throughout much of the affected region.

MIGRATION, DISPOSSESSION, AND CLASS

As with much conventional social science, standard explanations of migration typically take as their starting point a conception of society made up of rational, atomized individuals motivated by the desire to maximize self-interest. When faced by worsening conditions of income and employment at home, individuals make a self-interested choice to move to another location in search of better wages.² This process is often described through the terminology of ‘push-pull’ factors: migrants are pushed from a particular location, while simultaneously pulled by the lure of better conditions elsewhere. Within such accounts, the policy challenge becomes one of properly ‘managing’ migration to produce a positive sum outcome – matching labour-surpluses with labour-demand in an orderly fashion, and channelling migrant remittances in such a way that they can be an ‘aid to development’.

In the academic literature, a range of probabilistic rational choice schemas have been developed to model such flows, encompassing factors such as the asymmetries of information on labour markets and wage rates, costs of journey, the chance of unemployment, and an assortment of other variables.³ Beyond these mathematical complexities, however, the basic notion of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ has become part of the common-sense way of understanding contemporary cross-border migration. As the International Organization of Migration (IOM) puts it in their 2018 annual report on global migration:

Factors underpinning migration are numerous, relating to economic prosperity, inequality, demography, violence and conflict, and environmental change. While the overwhelming majority of people migrate internationally for reasons related to work, family and study, many people leave their homes and countries for other compelling reasons, such as conflict, persecution and disaster.⁴

Such accounts have an alluring simplicity, and capture the obvious reality that – for a range of possible reasons – people move from where they are in order to seek better conditions of life elsewhere. But what usually goes unspoken in these kinds of ‘push-pull’ framings is their implicit view of the world market as a simple agglomeration of divided national territories whose developmental trajectories are externally related to one another.⁵ Despite the clear sympathies that organizations like IOM and a range of other international institutions may demonstrate with the plight of migrants and refugees, the reasons behind displacement are almost always explained as purely contingent factors whose causes are to be found simply at the point of origin, unrelated to the policies that richer countries may pursue overseas, or the systemic patterns of unevenness that capitalism incessantly breeds.

In contrast, if we insist that the forms of power and accumulation within global capitalism act to generate and exacerbate the social conditions that push people to migrate, while simultaneously contributing to the wealth of core zones such as the US and EU, then it makes little sense to think about migration from the vantage point of territorialized silos of individualized choice. The conditions underlying migration are produced by the very nature of capital accumulation and the hierarchies that sustain it, including features such as imperialist war, economic and ecological crises, and the deep-seated neoliberal restructuring of recent decades. The latter factor is almost always ignored in popular discussions of migration, as it directly implicates Western states and international financial institutions in producing displacement and dispossession.⁶ Seen from such a perspective, the uneven and combined development that typifies contemporary capitalism means that the ‘pull’ is causally linked to the ‘push’ (and vice-versa) in a mutually reinforcing process. In this sense, as David Bacon has compellingly argued in relation to Mexican migration to the US, it is capitalism’s undermining of ‘the right to stay home’ that has actually made the ‘right to move’ such a perilous imperative.⁷

Framing migration through the dynamics of capital accumulation at the global scale highlights a further critical insight into what happens to people when they move: through the very dispossession that generates movements of people across (and within) borders, migration comes to powerfully shape processes of class formation in specific national contexts. Of course this connection between capitalism and migrant labour is not new – as Cedric Robinson reminds us in relation to Europe: ‘there has never been a moment … that migratory and/or immigrant labor was not a significant aspect of European economies’.⁸ Indeed, the origins of the modern world system were underpinned by the forced transfer of millions of enslaved people from the African continent – and such movements continued through the indentured labour programmes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,mass migrations to the settler-colonies, and the European ‘guest worker’ schemes established in the wake of World War II.⁹ However, alongside the deep restructuring of the global economy over the last four decades, there have been numerous major shifts in the key patterns of international migration. These include an increased predominance of South-South migration flows, the growing feminization ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Trumping the empire
• Extreme capitalism and ‘the national question’
• The contradictions of global migration
• The Capitalocene: Permanent capitalist counter-revolution
• Trump and the new billionaire class
• Locating Trump: Paleoconservatism, neoliberalism, and anti-globalization
• China’s new globalism
• Can China unmake the American making of global capitalism?
• Decoupling is a myth: Asian capitalism in the global disarray
• Amplifying the contradictions: The centrifugal BRICS
• Neoliberal capitalism: The authoritarian turn
• Humanitarian intervention today
• ‘Death to the corporation’: A modest proposal
• America’s tipping point? Between Trumpism and a new left
• The European crisis and the left
• Corbyn and Brexit Britain: Is there a way forward for the left?