Migration Beyond Capitalism

Hannah Cross

• Éditeur: Polity
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509535965
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Economía
• Sous-sujet: Política económica

Harshly exploited migrant labour plays a fundamental role in the political economy of contemporary capitalism. The abstract and utopian theorising of many liberals and leftists on the migration question often ignores or downplays patterns of displacement and brutal class dynamics, which divide and weaken working people while empowering the ruling class. In this important new book, Hannah Cross provides a sober analysis of the class antagonisms of migration in the context of the nation, social democracy, and the racialized ordering of the world. Bringing Marxist methodology and strategy to a careful analysis of existing emancipatory movements, she sets out the programmes and approaches that are needed to promote global worker solidarity and create a future in which cheap labour is no longer a mainstay of wealthy economies. This focus on the labouring classes allows her to identify some important new directions for migration in a world beyond capitalism, exploitation and injustice. This book will be essential reading for students, scholars and general readers interested in the politics and political economy of migration in a world unhelpfully caught between racist authoritarian capitalism and the wishful-thinking of contemporary left-liberalism.

1
Introduction: Migration Politics and the Left

In the mid-2010s, the urgency and renewal of socialist politics brought its core ideas to the centre of mainstream debate in many high-income countries. Panic about migration to Europe, combined with Britain’s exit from the European Union (EU) and Donald Trump’s election in the USA, was strongly associated with the rise of anti-immigration movements. The potential of renewed fascism looms over these movements and over many countries’ national politics, as neoliberalism, the dominant world political order since the 1980s, can no longer conceal itself in liberal democracy.

This book is concerned with the impossibility of challenging neo-liberal brutality, the dominance of the Right and abuses of working people within the framework of capitalist development. It looks beyond capitalism as a strategy for the Left. I argue that this strategy needs to focus attention on three premises of the political economy of migration which, taken together and of equal significance, are distinct from the typical formulas found in the Left’s politics of migration, whether in left-liberal, mainstream social democratic, nationalist or ‘no borders’ approaches. First, cheap labour is central to the accumulation of capital and this is articulated in states’ management of migration. It is sustained in policies relating to labour mobility, citizenship and border management. Second, national chauvinism in countries of immigration presents an ideological foundation for cheap labour and its engine, imperialism abroad. It enables the exploitation of migrant workers, while sustaining divisions (and further subdivisions) between a national and foreign-born working class, to the detriment of all working people. Third, with class prejudice, the cousin of national chauvinism, influential and wealthier sections of the Left deny the domestic class dimensions of the migration regime. Migrant labour tends to benefit the middle and upper classes, while it is deliberately used to drive down working conditions among diverse groups in the sections of the labour market that are undervalued within the capitalist economic system. This alienates and ultimately disempowers the working classes, whatever their citizenship status.

As the next chapter will show, Marx’s 1870 correspondence with collaborators in the US on the ‘Irish Question’ illustrates this composition of the political economy of migration. It provides a map for interpreting and responding to the contemporary global system of migration and informs the structure of this book (Marx 2010c [1870]; see also Wilson 2017). Marx’s analysis of English domination over Ireland linked processes of land eviction and forced emigration from Ireland with immigration in England, the lowered position of the English working class, and antagonisms between English and Irish workers. The ruling class intentionally aggravated these antagonisms using all means possible, allowing it to gain even more from cheap labour than from the imported meat and wool that had been produced on expropriated Irish land. This was the secret of its power in England as well as in Ireland, and this division of workers also agitated working-class cooperation between the USA and England.

Foremost in the concept of migration beyond capitalism developed in this book is Marx’s conclusion that the only way to wrest power from the English ruling class was through the emancipation of Ireland, and that this required a social revolution in England that sided with Ireland. On this basis, the defence of migrants’ rights and of workers’ rights more generally demands an internationalism, one shared by working classes in oppressing and oppressed countries and which recognizes how the interdependence of imperialism, racism and labour exploitation ensures the continued dominance of the ruling class over the countries that both send and receive migrants.

We are therefore presented with a ‘simple’ strategy of promoting worker solidarity within and beyond the nation-state in the interest of all workers. This also, however, poses the ultimate struggle for the Left. It is filled with radical meaning precisely because the destruction of this solidarity remains the secret of capitalism’s success. Politicians, journalists, academics, factory managers, farm owners and other employers reactivate these divisions from one day to the next ideologically and socially in the workplace. Yet the struggle against division is not beyond conception. It is worth serious consideration and elaboration, drawing on new theoretical advancements for alternatives to crisis-ridden capitalism, informed by the existing struggles found within a globalized labour force. These strategies reflect the logic and validity of Marx’s argument.

With such an analysis in mind, this book envisages a future in which cheap labour ceases to be a structural feature of capitalist development: the social relations of globalized labour and production, informed by peasant uprisings and labour insurgencies in the world’s centres of agrarian and industrial production, are integrated in progressive Northern political programmes. Work is revalued according to the social needs of communities, the architecture of the world system no longer generates cheap labour and vast inequalities, and countries have a simple and egalitarian registration process for entry. The logic of militarized borders is destroyed by the decline of corporate domination over land, resources and labour and by the end of imposed competition between workers. Popular resistance to elite strategies of communal, gender and class identification helps to remove the class antagonisms that weaken the labour movement.

Why indulge in such social-science fiction at a time when parliamentary Left projects have fallen in Europe, the US and Latin America, while elsewhere they have failed even to gain traction in recent history? It is because, as it stands, the emancipatory politics of migration are at a counterproductive impasse, their methods and logical conclusions bringing little resolution to the far-reaching causes and consequences of the capitalist migration regime. The suggestion of an endgame indicates where energies might be focused and which cracks might be opened up to bring social transformation, working against liberal obscurantism and the failures of reformist politics.

What also makes this imagined future timely is the gravity of political and ecological crisis. By April 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic, continuing at the time of writing, had placed up to half of the world’s population in lockdown. This has provided authoritarian governments with new powers and disaster capitalists and corporate giants with new opportunities. The repurposing of the military and industry to medical provision and greater public sector intervention show that a more socially directed economy is possible, yet, as International Monetary Fund (IMF) economists put it, it comes with a ‘sunset clause’ that augurs a roll-back to the private sector and heightened debt and austerity once the enemy has been defeated (Dell’Ariccia et al. 2020). The industrial model of agriculture is closely connected with the release of pathogens into livestock and human populations as well as creating climatic crisis and cheap labour reserves. The importance of food sovereignty to progressive programmes and due consideration of the ways that commodities are produced has become more urgent (Wallace 2016; Zeilig and Cross 2020). And, suddenly recognized as essential, a diverse body of precarious and underpaid workers on the ‘frontline’ is being exposed to dangerous viral loads, while the wealthier strata are forced into isolation. The international division of labour and racialized character of the labour market have left a high representation of black and ethnic minority groups in this body of workers, suffering disproportionate losses to the disease, while the expansion of police powers has amplified the historical violent policing of black communities. The police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on 25 May 2020 led to global Black Lives Matter protests in an uprising demanding an end to racism and social inequality. For Arundhati Roy (2020), the coronavirus outbreak presents ‘a portal . . . [we] can choose to walk through . . . dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world.’

Migration in Capitalism

Capitalism in its world-historical development places patterns of migration and labour mobility at the centre of global and domestic inequalities. It is not that all migrants, and migrations, are driven by the market under oppressive conditions. It is not a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ phenomenon in itself: to be ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ migration is a redundant question, which undermines the dignity of people who have migrated. Migration represents the diversity of humanity and human experience and does not singularly define people or their life trajectories.

What is at the core of this book is the understanding of a global regime of labour mobility that constrains the character of migration, and from which oppression expands far beyond the individuals who confront the regime directly as they travel and work. The vast majority of economic migrants do not become so by choice (Delgado Wise and Veltmeyer 2016: 3). Capitalism as a specific mode of production creates structural migration as people are compelled to move from one place to another for work, whether by concerted labour policies such as, historically, the slave trade, colonial or apartheid-type labour regimes, or by guest worker programmes and more recent policies of ‘managed migration’. More generally, people are forced out of their communities and into the unknown, towards a restrictive number of destinations. The crises that ensue lead not only to migrations of individuals who face the prospect of threats to their lives, hostility, instability, intolerable working conditions or destitution, but also to their households’ dependence on a share of their wages and to a relatively lowered position for those households that have not successfully sent migrant workers. Cross-border migration is overly determined by immigration policies that are guided by the demands of employers and by national policies that submit to those demands, while we will see that internal migrations in divided countries can share many of these characteristics of international migration.

It is not inappropriate to speak of a ‘global apartheid’ by which a legal-bureaucratic structure controls discriminatory mobilities, in which geographical regions contain impoverished people who are forced to migrate for household survival and whose labour is exploited in squalid conditions. While migration is framed as a ‘problem’ for wealthy countries, those same countries use borders, deportation regimes and varying forms of citizenship to manage migration in service to the market. Without the existence of ‘unwanted’ people, employers would be forced to improve conditions for their employees. South African black labour coming to mines from regions in South Africa and surrounding countries, during apartheid, was also treated as an ‘unwanted flood’, even though migrant mineworkers were at the core of the creation of wealth for mining companies (Cross and Cliffe 2017: 393). To celebrate people’s ability to subvert or bypass these regimes, or to commend their usefulness as workers within it, does not show us how to progress out of a grotesquely unequal balance of movement which leads to the devastation of families, gruelling journeys, the dependence of communities on remittances, and pressures on working people everywhere. Instead, as this chapter will further explain, the social, historical and material context of migration is a key part of the analysis.

We are in a long age of neoliberalism, in which global finance has deepened its role in economic and social life. While neoliberalism is a contested concept, too often substituted for capitalism in general or even removed from it altogether, some key characteristics are necessary to our analysis. Financialization has transformed the role of the state, advancing its power ‘to impose, drive, underwrite and manage the internationalization of production and finance in each territory, often under the perverse ideological veil of promoting noninterventionism’ (Fine and Saad-Filho 2017: 687). This has amounted to a capitalist revolt against labour, augmenting the depression of wages, degraded workers’ rights and economic dispossession that have advanced at disastrous levels in the global South since the early 1980s and have more recently accelerated in the global North.

As we will see, the attack on labour by capital is a permanent feature of capitalism. However, neoliberalism is a particularly aggressive and increasingly primitive phase of capitalism centred on the supremacy of the market, which seeks to dismantle what are termed ‘frictions’ or ‘inflexibilities’, such as workers’ bargaining power, safety or environmental regulation, or democratic controls over the movements and uses of capital. This expands ‘immiserating growth’ and a model of ‘lumpen development’ based on subcontracting and resource extractivism. Instead of productivity and wages rising together, we see the open crocodile jaws, with productivity rising as wage shares decrease (Selwyn 2017: 62; Amin 2014; Standing 2018).

This radical market orientation does not simply erode the state and create the ‘freedom’ on which neoliberal thought is premised; it reconfigures the state in a way that leads inexorably to greater control and authoritarianism because the vast majority of people lose out in terms of the economic order. Democratic channels of contestation are thus degraded. State interventionism remains extensive, ‘favouring private capital in general and finance in particular’ and emptying the institutional channels from which challenges and alternatives can emerge (Ben Fine, in Bush et al. 2018: 295). What is more, we end up with ‘the most unfree market system ever conceived’: instead, we have rentier capitalism, which amounts to a plunder of the commons, shrinking nonwage social benefits while extending high levels of government welfare for corporations, reaching £93 billion per year in the UK by 2018 (Standing 2018: 364). Neoliberalism was never a coherent ideology and is in decline in its ‘centre-left’ home, unable to sustain the liberal values of equality, rights and democracy that were supposed to prevail after the Cold War. Its economic rationale, if it ever presented a coherent programme, was destroyed by the 2008 global financial crisis, yet this event took it into a new phase of further state intervention to encourage private financial participation in the provision of infrastructure (Ben Fine, in Bush et al. 2018: 296).

Financialization hence goes unchallenged and neoliberalism has mutated in conservative nationalist administrations, like those of Narendra Modi in India, Donald Trump in the US, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Boris Johnson in the UK. They extend global capitalism by other means. Their elections led to immediate and triumphant market confidence as they ensured the unmitigated privatization and deregulation of natural and public resources by means of accelerating class antagonisms, division and oppression of minorities. Their programmes and movements have been linked with a feared ‘Internationale of twenty-first-century fascism’ led by such political agents as former chief strategist in the Trump administration Steve Bannon and corporate financiers to the benefit of the transnational capitalist class (Robinson 2019: 3). The implosion of the neoliberal centre has opened up the political space for progressive social movements to advance from the fringes of the political landscape and into the corridors of power, but no such Internationale for the Left has been able to usurp capital’s war on people and the environment despite the resurgence of democratic socialism as a mainstream political project.

Austerity programmes and the expansion of extreme class inequalities pushed the Left from protest to politics, with opposition to neoliberal globalization moving from the streets into the state (Panitch and Gindin 2017). The capitulations and defeats for Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the British Labour Party and Bernie Sanders’s run for presidential candidate in the US have all revealed the limits of Left reformism as a solution to the uncompromising nature of the neoliberal economic programme, but they have also exposed the gross injustices of its power, its moral and ideological bankruptcy. They have punctured its hegemony, the dominance that is produced not only in state authority but also within society, by party and trade union officials, journalists and television presenters, educators and think-tank employees. Popular democratic socialist campaigns have produced a counterhegemony and have gained the majority of youth votes in US, French and UK elections, suggesting a different future in dominant Northern countries as well as those on the periphery of global power (Cross 2017). Moreover, working-class challenges to capitalism have become radicalized outside the hollowed-out structure of trade unions, drawing comparisons with the strikes and occupations of the late 1930s. They show class solidarity, opposition to class compromise and bureaucratic power, and a commitment to freedom from capitalism (Ness 2014, 16). A pamphlet from the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research explains:

In the heartlands of the West, socialist politicians have had a new beginning, while protests along the grain of Marxist theory have broken out from Oakland (California) to Paris (France). Signs of a fraying hegemony become more and more evident as the bourgeoisie resorts to tear gas and to taser guns. The people who are now popularly known as the 1% no longer pretend to have answers to the planet’s problems. Few are left to believe that privatization and entrepreneurism are the ways of the future. Even billionaires are doubtful that they will be able to control the world order. Their gated communities – defended by high walls and armed guards – will not be enough as the waters of climate change rise and as the mobs of an atomised society run towards them. (2019: 13)

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Table des matières

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Migration Politics and the Left
• 2 Socialism, Marxism and Migration
• 3 Imperialism and Migrant Labour in the Capitalist World Economy
• 4 Borders, Militarism and Inequality
• 5 Wages, Organized Labour and Post-Work Utopianism
• 6 The Production of Class Antagonisms in Capitalism
• 7 Strikes, Internationalism and Solidarity
• 8 A Socialist Approach to Migration
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement