Concerning borders

There’s been a lot of talk lately about immigration and separating families. And rightly so, because what is happening both in the US and all across the world, with detentions, deportations, draconian border regimes and so on, is nothing short of a disgrace. It is a sort of collective moral collapse with even many of those espousing the values of solidarity starting to point fingers at others while supporting policies of closed borders and state violence against immigrants, working class people, activists and dissidents. Trump and his likes, on the other hand, have become a sort of symbol of the unabashed straight out racist, sexist and elitist politics that are at the forefront of all of this.
 
But that being said, there is a risk here of missing the broader point. Because this is not really about the Trumps of this world. Obama not only oversaw and expanded a deadly drone war, was in office while black people were being persecuted and killed to an extent that caused the rise of Black Lives Matter, but also, importantly, massively expanded the institutions and agencies designated for persecuting “illegal” immigrants – the very infrastructure Trump is now building upon.
 
Realizing that this is not simply about Trump is important, because that leads to realizing that the solution cannot simply be replacing him. Obama, Hillary, and even a Bernie Sanders, they are all beholden to the same power dynamics and pressures of the institutions. And the same “inertia” that sometimes has overturned Trumps outrageous policies, would overturn those of a very radical “left”-leaning president. The bottom line here is the following: Politicians are not the cause of social change, but the reflection of it. They are to social change what a thermometer is to heat. Sure heat affects us, but it would be futile to try to change it by manipulating the thermometer – at best we’d just be fooling ourselves.
 
Change does not happen when the “right” people are voted into office – it happens when social movements force change upon those in power, by themselves becoming the change they want to see. It happens through riots, strikes, agitation, assemblies, organizing, blockades, occupations, insurrections, and through a thousand other grassroots-oriented forms of direct action that undermine the power of political and economic elites while multiplying and building their own. This is the only way real change, change that promises more than just a brief pause or a band-aid solution, can be achieved.
 
It therefore infinitely saddens me when people bemoan separation of children from their parents, but still say that “we” need these borders, controls and detention centers. This is not true. The borders and the institutions protecting them (and which they in turn protect) do not serve us or make us safe. On the contrary, they are part of the problem, part of a system of nation states and global capitalism that most of the time also is the very cause of the unnatural disasters that generate refugees in the first place.
 
There are of course those that immediately say that abolishing borders altogether is unrealistic, and instead put forward piecemeal reform as the “practical” way to go about the issue. Yes, we can’t just abolish borders and keep everything else the same, because they are an inseparable part of a larger, tightly interdependent system. But that does not mean that the goal of abolishing them, and a practice towards that end, are in themselves unrealistic. Compared to trying to affect radical change through a system that is practically immune (and often openly hostile) to such change, directly attacking the problem at the grassroots is both more effective short term and promising long term.
 
While reforms can be part of that, they can never be seen as the thrust of such change. They are rather, if anything, a by-product of people’s struggles for freedom and equality. These struggles have to be based on grassroots social movements, or will just wind up getting recuperated into the very institutions they seek to abolish. So, for instance,
 
Where we see borders, we undermine them and help people cross. Where we see ICE or police repression, we create sanctuaries, mutual aid networks, and make the oppressors as miserable as we can through occupations, blockades and protests, and with an eye to abolishing these institutions and replacing them with our own ways of dealing with social problems, ways that are actually human-centered, not tailored for preserving the power of small elites.
 
Where we are being exploited at work, we organize not only to get decent wages, but to get rid of the dictatorial notion that bosses and private ownership of the resources we need to survive are concepts any more legitimate than feudalism.
 
Where we fight landlords that live off of our need for a home, and the gentrification of our societies, we organize not only for affordable housing, but to eventually put into practice the notion that these are *our* homes and societies, and any claims on them that landlords or big land owners put forward are as archaic as those of their medieval namesakes.
 
All these grassroots movements, linked together, form the bigger picture and the road map that I’m thinking of when I say “abolish ICE”, “abolish borders” and so on. I really think we can and should do it, but I think that we can only get there through this type of broad, diverse and direct action based social movements. To me, this is a more practical and inspiring starting point, than trying to persuade others (and ourselves) that if we only elect the right rulers, or convince enough of them to “do good” through reasoning, things will get better. Nothing about this system indicates that such a thing is even possible, because this system didn’t emerge to bring about equality, but to preserve and expand already existing power of a small minority.
 
That’s why I think it is important not to focus just on what the current US administration is doing, but on the system that led to this as a whole.

In the era of Trump

As I went out for a small picket protesting the inauguration of Donald Trump today, it gave me the opportunity to reflect on the recent events, and the ongoing drama that has unfolded like a horror show ever since he announced his candidacy in the primaries last year.

The protest, held in the center of Cambridge, UK, where I currently live, brought together a curious mix of people – from disgruntled liberals, Labour voters and Corbyn supporters, to union organisers, socialists and a couple of us anarchists. Among the signs and chants condemning racism, sexism and anti-immigrant sentiments, ours stood out a bit – while we agree with all that, we also reject what many people unfortunately mistake for the solution. Let’s face it, where would most of these people be had Clinton picked up her expected win?

Comically, a passer-by reproached us for being anti-Trump and anti-Brexit, telling us that we should accept the democratic outcome, as he would have done. Obviously missing the part of our signs saying no to Clinton and Remain as well as Trump and Brexit. After hearing that we seemed to have a broader critique of the system, and of capitalism, he backtracked and told us communism doesn’t work. He then discovered our red and black flags: “Oh, so you have the anarchy flag…” he said, “but how do you organise things without leaders?” Soon after he disappeared into the crowd again. I guess sometimes you just can’t win either way.

And that is sort of the point here. Saying no to Trump, for many, implies saying yes to Clinton, or perhaps Bernie Sanders. But the fixation with these false dichotomies is a symptom of a deeper problem with politics today, where representatives and celebrity-like political figureheads are hailed as saviours. Instead of analyzing the systemic issues, the particular interests of various powerful groups, and of the capitalist class as well as of the government, we reduce the problem to simply one of having the wrong ideas or personality traits. That is dangerous, because if your analysis misses the point, so will any action you take based on said analysis.

The outrage over Trump’s sexist, anti-immigrant and populist rhethoric, and the hypothetical difference that a Clinton would make, has to be put in perspective, beyond the type of superficial identity politics by the logic of which, Clinton, as a woman, would mean a victory for the struggle over patriarchy and sexism. As quick as some people seem to be in hailing the next saviour, as fast do they seem to forget what just played out before their very eyes.

The outgoing president, Barack Obama, a black man, if that eluded anyone, oversaw a regime of brutal war, detentions, neoliberalism and, crucially, blatant structural racism towards indigenous as well as black people, to the point where violent clashes with the police and a growing Black Lives Matter movement materialized as the desperate outcry of various hugely marginalized and horribly abused communities. Behind the scenes, the entire prison-industrial complex with it’s lifeblood – the war on drugs – ensured black americans could be used as cheap labor, in what is nothing else than modern day slavery. Exactly how did the symbolic presence of a black man at the helm of this oppressive system help those people?

The anarchist revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin, in his eerily prophetic polemics against authoritarian socialism in the late 1800s, once pointed out that the people do not really care whether the stick they are being beaten with is called “The People’s Stick”. Likewise, today, we can say that any oppressed group – be it women, blacks, immigrants or LGBTQs – is not automatically better off just because “one of them” is administering the oppressive system at some level. This is because the dynamics of power itself , be it political or economic. A shared identity, in some narrow sense, does not necessarily mean a shared interest in abolishing all those structures of power.

Now some could say that Obama, for instance, faced a hostile Republican party apparatus that crippled his possibility to enact meaningful change in many areas. While this is partially true, it has to be noted that this is pretty much by design. No matter if we’re talking of a system rigged for a two-party setup, or one with a multitude of bickering political interests, the entire point is to direct people’s attention to something that does not and cannot emancipate them – the theater of parliamentarism – and away from what can – self organisation and direct action.

Change has never emanated from parliaments, it has rather reached them after often long and arduous grassroots campaigns and people’s struggles in the streets, in their communities and at their places of work. But it is easy to mistake the cause for the effect, when, day in and day out, we’re fed media images of those parliaments as the real seats of power, while we rarely get to see the people that really make change happen, or force it on parliaments, by their own actions. What parliaments do, though, is often to take the momentum out of such social movements and struggles, pacifying them, and in that making them reliant on an alienating form of politics that limits them to adjustments within the pre-determined parameters of the system.

Shortly after Donald Trump was sworn in as the president of the United States, several sections of the White House website were taken down. Most notably, those concerning LGBTQ rights and environmental issues. Many take this as an ominous sign of things to come. While it is true that we should not expect much good from Trump in this regard, it could be argued that the US government now operates according to a more honest policy than it has in a long time. Because despite Trump’s awful politics and track record, it is not at all obvious which is actually worse; the powers that be openly rejecting the important problems facing us, or ostensibly acknowledging them and then pretending to be doing something about it.

While the latter will just pacify us and make us expect someone else to actually make the change we want and desperately need, the former offers a meaningful alternative, although disguised as a sobering realization.

We have to be the change we want to see. We have to fight for ourselves.

The Context of Sweatshops

Every now and then, human beings are burned alive, die from an explosion, under a building that caved in, take their own lives or collapse due to exhaustion having worked for hours and hours on end in one of the many facilities across the world colloquially referred to as sweatshops. What follows usually entails some moral outrage in western social media and public discourse, a few stories on the generally horrible conditions facing vast amounts of workers that we otherwise never hear of, and some amount of debate concerning the advantages and disadvantages of this particular arrangement.

Within the discussions that follow in the wake of such events, unless we get caught up in particularities or dead ends, we inevitably at some point arrive at the baseline argument: Yes, the sweatshops and the conditions are bad, but it is the best option for many of these people. Charts are presented. Graphs displayed. Look, these poor countries are pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. They have growth. We get cheap clothes, and they get a chance to at least earn a living. No one forces them to work in the factories, in fact, they are lining up for the jobs. Isn’t this the definition of win-win?

Before addressing the core of this argument, it might be worth to refresh our memories concerning exactly what kind of conditions we’re dealing with for these sweatshop workers around the world. On April 24th, 2013, a nine-story building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, housing thousands of workers, collapsed, leaving over 1000 dead and 2500 injured. [1] Despite large, visible and growing cracks in multiple parts of the building, textile workers were “ordered” to return to work a day after the building was briefly evacuated. For many of them, that was the last thing they did as the building came down and buried them alive. Some spent days under the rubble, desperately screaming for help among decomposing bodies. Yet others lost limbs, friends or family members. Still, a year after the accident, investigations uncovered continued systemic abuse, for instance regarding “girls as young as 13 forced to work 11 hours a day in unsafe conditions”. [2]

On the night of August 12th this year, in the huge Port of Tianjin in eastern China, an explosion killed over 100 people, injuring almost 700, in a curious mix of state bureaucratic nepotism and corruption, capitalist pressures, and systemic safety violations. [3] Meanwhile, in Qatar, approximately 1200 migrant workers have died building facilities for the FIFA World Cup to be held there in 2022, with another 2800 projected to die by the time the games take place. [4]

We could keep going, just to drive home the point that these are not isolated incidents, but a reoccurring trend – from simply exhausting work, to straight out lethal working conditions. Beyond these spectacular death tolls, lies an entire world of worker health issues, human trafficking, inhumane work hours and degrading treatment – from diamond mines in South Africa, through soft drink producers in India to garment factories in Central and South America. Just in Malaysia, there’s an estimated 2 million foreign workers, often tricked into debt contracts by agents, and stuck indefinitely in what can only be described as modern day slavery. [5]

We often picture all these things as a distant phenomena, at least at arms length from our western societies. But when 7 Chinese sweatshop workers died in Italy in 2013, the joys of global capitalism had, geographically at least, gone almost full circle. [6] The mood could hardly be more somber as the Reuters article simply states that

One of the dead suffocated as he tried to escape through a window guarded by iron bars.

No further explanation needed.

But it doesn’t end there, as for instance the slave-like conditions of workers in the American prison-industrial complex testify to. Truth is, the effects of our system are not only felt someplace far away, in exploited countries throughout Africa, Asia or the Middle East, but are present all around us, also in western societies. They manifest as alienated and largely empty labor, “bullshit jobs” to lend David Graeber’s term, the constant conflict over wages and other concessions, and the way in which we, despite all so called progress and technology, often work more and endure greater psychological duress than did people of feudal societies or hunter-gatherers. Thus the standard liberal left narrative of unfortunate injustices far away that we collectively benefit from, rests on a false premise that here at home, everything is pretty much fine.

In fact, what the last 30 or so years of neoliberal policies have shown, is that not only are countries outside the western sphere exploited, coerced and dominated, but this very exploitation is used as a leverage to undermine hard fought gains even in the wealthy parts of the world, fought for by anarchists and other socialists, in Haymarket, in the streets of Paris, or on the barricades in Barcelona. Because when cheap labor is available abroad, even social democrats succumb to the pressures of market logic and see themselves forced to squeeze domestic wages, undermine working conditions and deregulate markets in the name of keeping national industries competitive. What we have seen since the late 1970s is not a political shift, but an ideological one. It is not the case of right wing parties taking over political power everywhere, but to a large extent also social democratic governments, left drifting aimlessly amidst the debris of shipwrecked Keynesian policies, capitulating to the hegemony of neoliberalism.

The notion that we’re universally benefiting, because we can buy cheap clothes, does not tell this full story. What we see when the veil of social constructs taken for granted is removed, are various groups of working class people pitted against each other and irrational use of both human and natural resources. The win-win, it turns out, applies to capitalist interests or corrupt bureaucracies, not the relationship of western workers versus those of the global south. We might be privileged compared to them, but we’re all worse off because of the coercive impositions of neoliberalism and, in the end, capitalism. The division is thus not a geographical one, this place versus that, but one of social relations – class versus class.

The story only gets better when we start to investigate why it happens to be the case, that all these workers are available and dirt cheap in all these countries, “voluntarily” entering death traps and enduring these horrible conditions. This piece of historical context goes back to the colonial era, when colonial powers seized and tried to put their new domains into good use:

In most places in Africa, Asia, and South America, colonisers initially had a very difficult time getting natives to work in their mines, factories, and plantations. To solve this problem, they either forcibly removed farmers from their land or levied onerous taxes in order to coerce them into seeking wage work, all under the guise of the “civilising mission”. This caused hundreds of thousands of people to move to industrial cities where they constituted a reserve army of workers willing to take whatever job they could find. [7]

Enclosures of commons, high taxes, brutal oppression – wait, haven’t we heard this story before, in another time and place? Indeed, it is precisely what had transpired in the heartland of industrial capitalism, not long before, and what is probably best known as the process described by Marx as primitive accumulation – an early, initial form of building up capital and, “enticing”, what was earlier largely self-sustainable farmers and rural populations to submit to wage labor. More recently, David Harvey revamped this term into accumulation by dispossession, which seems apt, because there is nothing strictly initial or primitive about this accumulation, and it has been ongoing, in different forms and parts of the world, ever since it began in the early days of European capitalism.

When the former colonies increasingly started to gain independence, new ways were added to the arsenal of incentivizing impoverished populations to perform work for the benefit of capital accumulation. One of these was national bondage, as for instance was the case for Haiti. All around the world, former colonial masters demanded compensation for the work they had, erm, overseen in said colonies. These societies were facing the option of complying or dealing with worldwide trade embargoes or military interventions, and so money continued to pour from the global south to the global north, often with humanitarian crises as an ignored side effect. This also happened to countries like Madagascar, Bolivia, the Philippines – the list could go on. Yet others, finding themselves on the wrong side (i.e. not the side of western powers and capitalist interests) of a conflict, were made to pay reparations.

With neoliberalism, a new tool emerged to further squeeze populations in the global south, and this was the process which seriously triggered the new age of sweatshops. In the wake of the crises of the 1970s, with rampant inflation combined with stagnation around the western world, the tune of the new ideology was privatization, deregulation and globalization, albeit somewhat selectively. New global institutions, such as the IMF, were central in administering the implementation of new policies in the countries of the global south. Those struggling with debt or poor finances – often themselves symptoms of earlier and ongoing domination by former colonial nations with imperialist ambitions – were offered a way out: Introduce the policies we require, and we will lend you money. This was the start of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs).

These deals were usually constructed to remove trade tariffs and subsidies in poor countries, deregulating their markets and opening them up for foreign investment, and removing any existing safety nets and public spending on education, health or other related things. Without the protective tariffs, these countries markets were flooded with cheap, subsidized western crops and other farm products, effectively putting entire domestic sectors out of business, once again, driving desperate populations into city centers where, you guessed it, western capitalists, thanks to the new policies, could buy up land, build factories, and take advantage of desperate people in an attempt to restore some of the profits that had gone missing since the end of the Keynesian era. To add insult to injury, these deals were often worked out with unaccountable and corrupt political elites, and much of the loans would often disappear never to be seen again by the general population. Where populations tried to or successfully overthrew such arrangements, outraged western interests would make the populations pay reparations.

An interesting case in point is the story of Ladakh, an isolated and sparsely populated area in the northernmost India. The inhabitants of this area lived without major outside interference, in agricultural communities on the mountainsides and plateaus of western Himalaya. They were self-sustainable, enjoyed good conditions with a lot of leisure time, and none of the social problems associated with western lifestyles – unemployment, inequality, and so on.

In the mid 1970s, Ladakh was suddenly thrown open to the outside world. Cheap, subsidized food, trucked in on subsidized roads, by vehicles running on subsidized fuel undermined Ladakh’s local economy. At the same time, the Ladakhis were bombarded with advertising and media images, that romanticized western style consumerism, and made their own culture seem pitiful by comparison. [8]

Suddenly unemployment, poverty, divisiveness, inequality and even violence cause by social tensions became part of the everyday life for the people of Ladakh.

These changes weren’t the result of innate human greed or some sort of evolutionary force. They happened far too suddenly for that. They were clearly the direct result of the exposure to outside economic pressures. [T]hese pressures created intense competition, breaking down community and the connection to nature that had been the cornerstone of Ladakhi culture for centuries. This was Ladakh’s introduction to globalization. [8]

Returning to the topic of sweatshops in general, it should now be clear that we are not dealing with a situation where the word “voluntary” makes sense as soon as we contextualize what actually happens. Desperate people, people made desperate by institutions that work hand in hand with business, are funneled into exploitative and dangerous labor, often under geopolitical conditions that make a mockery even of washed out concepts of representative democracy. The result is that groups of people are played out against each other across regions, and thus it is incorrect to simply say that the workers in the west benefit – often they lose their own jobs, security or autonomy in the process of globalization. It is also wrong to put the blame on the plate of consumers. Not only is it extremely hard for people to even know what layers of abuse and exploitation hide behind the commodities as they appear to them in the stores, but the entire purpose of this anonymous market of commodities is precisely to decouple the social relations of producers and consumers.

Very few people, if put in directly social relationships with others, would even think of submitting their peers to these levels of abuse just to get a shirt or some consumer good – never mind that without the backing of a strong coercive force, they wouldn’t have the power to do it. But from the vantage point of each individual actor in this individualized yet global setting – consumer, producer, distributor, worker – they are all doing what the system presents as their best option. This is often mistaken for a reflection of some sort of inevitable human nature, or an expression of self-interest, when it is just the result of people choosing between sets of rigged options. It is a systemic issue, that needs addressing beyond consumer boycotts, even if such boycotts and particular incidents where abuse is laid bare can be used as focal points of organizing resistance. What is needed, is thus solidarity with the exploited workers, as their cause is also ours, and only together can we overcome the real causes of our problems.

In summary, what can be said about the discussion concerning sweatshops is quite simple. When put in its proper context, saying that sweatshop work is the best option available for all these people around the world is not a successful defense of sweatshops, but rather a devastating critique of the present system.


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Savar_building_collapse

[2] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/06/bangladesh-garment-factories-child-labour-uk

[3] https://libcom.org/news/tianjin-explosion-tragedy-profit-corruption-chinas-complicated-transition-21082015

[4] http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/06/03/qatar-world-cup-deaths_n_7500920.html

[5] http://www.humantrafficking.org/countries/malaysia

[6] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/29/us-italy-sweatshop-insight-idUSBRE9BS04D20131229

[7] http://thoughtleader.co.za/jasonhickel/2011/07/02/why-jeffrey-sachs-is-wrong-about-sweatshops/

[8] The Economics of Happiness (2011, Grolick, Page, Norberg-Hodge)