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Tag: Latin America

One Question
Open Borders

One Question
Open Borders

One Question is a monthly series in which we ask leading thinkers to give a brief answer to a single question.

This month we ask:

What is the Left case for open borders?

With responses from: Tithi Bhattacharya; Joseph Carens; Harald Bauder; Parvathi Raman; Viewpoint Magazine Editorial Collective; Sandro Mezzadra; Céline Cantat; Justin Akers Chacón; Carol Farbotko; Christine Leuenberger; Paolo Novak; Dalia Abdelhady; Alex Sager; Michael Huemer; Nandita Sharma.

Borders

Tithi Bhattacharya

Borders exist in order for capital to

(a) control the global distribution of labour power and

(b) ideologically shore up the nation state for the ‘native’ working class, thereby legitimising and reinforcing that control.

Any support for border control, no matter how minimal or provisional, is a support for this set of political technologies.

If it appears, then, that the case for open borders is an easy one for the Left, this is far from the truth. Historically, the organised Left, in both its social democratic and Stalinist iterations, has had a murky record on border control and support for migrants. And today, as neoliberalism falters ideologically after the crash of 2008, several social democratic regimes across Europe have made anti-migrant rhetoric their distinct political signature.

In Greece, Syriza, who had promised to close migrant detention centres, now oversees such centres where migrants lack basic resources to battle hunger, harsh winters and social isolation. This in addition to the government doing a deal with neighbouring Turkey to stop the flow of migrants into Europe. In France, the leader of the radical Left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has long been opposed to free movement even within the EU. Events in Germany perhaps best distil this political tendency. In September 2018, Sarah Wagenknecht and Oskar Lafontaine, prominent left-wing politicians of Die Linke, with support from sections of the international Left, launched Aufstehen, a movement openly committed to imposing immigration controls in the name of prosperity for German workers.

It is not my purpose here to produce a list of betrayals by various traditions of the Left. Rather, it is to contend that for an anti-capitalist Left, the question of open borders is not one issue amongst many. For instance, one cannot be advocating for universal healthcare for a section of the global working class, marked as ‘citizen’ simply by geographical accident, while denying that same provision to the rest of the class.

Anyone who has crossed international borders knows that leaving home is not an easy or trivial decision. Most people seeking refuge in Europe have been forced to do so because of the numerous violent wars Europe has waged on their homelands. In the United States, it is families from Latin America, ravaged by dictatorships backed by the US, or devastated by economic policies of the IMF and World Bank who are forced to seek out a better life across the border.

If these families are at the borders of countries whose governments have colluded to deprive them of a life of dignity, then the borders should be opened wide, not because the West needs to be compassionate – but because it is the right of these families to demand from western governments what was taken from them.

In the coming years, capitalist ravages upon our planet will force more people to leave their homelands as the very air and soil turn against them. Migrants cannot be welcomed on liberal grounds because they bring fresh labour or creativity to the West. That is capital’s logic predicated upon regimes of work. The Left must hold to all people’s inherent right to free movement because borders only exist to assist capital accumulation. Sometimes just crossing a border is a political act of defiance.

‘Workers of the world, unite’ is not a meaningful political call unless it is filled with practical solidarity between all workers. While capital erects barbed wire fences, miles long border walls and militarises the waters, it is the task of the Left to dismantle – above all the hostile tension between the ‘immigrant’ and the ‘worker’. A migrant caravan is a working class on the move. Active support for free movement is therefore a strategic disruption of capital’s narrative.

Open borders is not a ‘blind spot’ that can be ignored, it is what restores sight to the Left, allowing us to see the mechanisms by which capital hierarchises abjection. READ MORE

Jon Lee Anderson
On Che Guevara

Jon Lee Anderson
On Che Guevara

Jon Lee Anderson

To mark what would have been Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara’s 90th birthday we republish our 2010 interview with Jon Lee Anderson, author of the biography, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (Bantam press, 1997).

Cihan Aksan: We could start with why you decided to write a biography of Che Guevara when you did.

Jon Lee Anderson: After reporting in Central America I had become fascinated with the idea of exploring and somehow chronicling the world of the revolutionary, of the insurgent world so to speak, which at the time took up a fairly hefty part of the globe. It wasn’t on the maps of the world, but I knew from Central America that there were in some cases generations-old insurgencies which were new human tribes in the making, and by dint of the fact that they had been there for so long, were creating their own social structures. They were clandestine societies. They were parts of nations that had been dispossessed, for better or worse, whatever the reasons, and this was a feature of the world in the latter stages of the Cold War, which had lasted a long time. So you had unreconciled conflicts, unresolved political and social situations right across the world.

At the time I set out to do this book, Guerrillas, in 1988, the Soviet Union was still in existence, and there were at least forty full fledged insurgencies in the world. You could travel around the world from one clandestine stop to another. You could almost circumnavigate the world through outlaw territories, so to speak, and so I set out to do that. I set out more or less to find out what the differences and similarities were between those people fighting in such insurgencies from different regions and different ideologies. That was really what I set out to do with Guerrillas. So I went from El Salvador, to Western Sahara and to Gaza, to Burma, to Afghanistan. I did this in the run-up to, and in the aftermath of, the breakup of the Soviet Union and the communist world. While I was doing this the world was changing dramatically. The Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan while I was there, Tiananmen Square happened while I was in Burma, and Ceausescu fell just after I returned home from there, and so on. Everything began to happen. I was with the Salvadoran guerrillas when Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990 – I listened to it on Radio Havana up in the mountains. I noted all these big events that formally make up the history of that period, but I was with people whose lives were day-in and day-out the same as they had been for years, and for them it was still all about the need to survive and carry forward a struggle that had been in many cases forgotten by the world. And soon some of them would dry up as a result of what was happening, as their Cold War sponsors cut off their funding. They were obliged or were encouraged to sue for peace. READ MORE

One Question
International Women’s Day
(Part Two)

One Question
International Women’s Day
(Part Two)

One Question is a monthly series in which we ask leading thinkers to give a brief answer to a single question.

This month, to mark International Women’s Day on March 8th, we asked a number of women academics:

What is the biggest challenge facing women today?

The response has been huge. Overall we have received 25 answers, and as such have split them into two parts. Part one can be found here. Please take the time to read through both.

International Women's Day
Sara R. Farris

I think we should begin by acknowledging that not all women are the same and not all of them face the same challenges. The brutality of neoliberal capitalism in the last twenty years or so – with its anti-welfare agenda, its profound class inequalities and its intensification of racism – has deepened the divisions among women along class and racial lines in particular, but also along gender lines when we think of the exclusion that trans-women encounter in some feminist and women’s circles.

While the women belonging to the wealthy 1% of the population – and I am thinking of course of the ‘neoliberal feminists’ à la Sheryl Sandberg – face the challenge of feeling in full control of the corporate boardrooms and making even more money, the large majority of women, or the 99%, have the problem of making ends meet. Migrant and ethnic minority women face additional challenges insofar as the racism ingrained in western labour markets and societies at large relegates them to the most precarious, low-paid and under-valued jobs in the socially reproductive sector (as cleaners, nannies, domestic workers and so forth). READ MORE

One Question
International Women’s Day
(Part One)

One Question
International Women’s Day
(Part One)

One Question is a monthly series in which we ask leading thinkers to give a brief answer to a single question.

This month, to mark International Women’s Day on March 8th, we asked a number of women academics:

What is the biggest challenge facing women today?

The response has been so great that we have split the answers into two parts. Please take the time to read through both.

International Women's Day

Cinzia Arruzza

If I had to summarise in a slogan the greatest challenge women face today, I would say that ‘taking feminism back’ is the one. From the 1990s onwards, contrary to the past, in a number of countries formal gender equality and the recognition of formal rights for LGBTQ people has ceased to be a taboo. Even right-wing political forces have started to adopt some form of ‘feminist’ discourse to justify their policies. The most notable phenomena in this sense are those recently labelled as ‘homonationalism’ and ‘femonationalism’, that is, the mobilisation of ideas of gender and sexual equality stemming from feminism and gay liberation struggles in order to justify military aggressions.

This, of course, is not a novel phenomenon as women’s bodies and ‘liberation’ have been instrumentalised by colonial forces already before. But neoliberal capitalism has managed to both exhume and greatly expand this practice. Besides this adoption of feminist slogans by nationalist and neoliberal forces, we have also witnessed an increasing capacity of right-wing or conservative parties to endorse women’s leadership: Sarah Palin, Marine Le Pen, Theresa May, Angela Merkel and Giorgia Meloni are only some examples of this phenomenon, which shows all the limits of a formalistic approach to gender equality and the representation of women in elected institutions.

The candidature of Hillary Clinton in the US presidential election of 2016 also marked the impasse of the liberal feminist approach to gender equality. Hillary Clinton, in fact, embodied the kind of lean-in feminism that privileges the experience and aspirations of upper middle class women, while leaving the rest behind. Her candidature also symbolised the disconnection between women’s representation in elected institutions and the improvement of the large majority of women’s lives.

The challenge we face today is, therefore, to retrieve feminism as a force of social transformation for all women – starting from the liberation of working class, migrant, trans women and women of colour – and as a form of critique of social relations in their complexity, starting from capitalism and its effects on women’s lives. Together with other feminist authors and activists I have labelled this anticapitalist and antiracist feminism as ‘feminism for the 99%’, by which we understand a class-based feminism capable of being a force of transformation not just for women, but also for what we understand by class struggle, and for the life on this planet as a whole. READ MORE