lbo-talk-digest V1 #4687

[James Heartfield]

In message <ALECKMBMCHBPNIIJBLGJIEOGCMAA.erikempson at wanadoo.fr>, Erik
Empson <erikempson at wanadoo.fr> writes
>I wasn't suggesting for a moment that people shouldn't be free to move
>around. What I was problematising was calling an act of necessity a free
>choice, and something that was the basis of a politics or ethics of
>emancipation. In many cases immigration is just that, an act of economic
>need, changing ones own circumstances, skills and location in order to fit
>in with whatever industries and locations capital finds as most conducive to
>accumulation.

I agree with Eric that there is a difference between defending the
*right* of workers (and all people) to move freely across borders, and
embracing it as a positive condition.

I agree with him that the conditions of migration are generally forms of
economic coercion.

But it might still be the case that the international disciplining of
labour by the capitalist class might - for all the wrong reasons - have
a positive effect. I mean of course that tendency that Marx identified
for the ruling class to create its own opposition in drawing working
people together, and homogenising their experience.

On an empirical note, though, the tendency is not solely for workers to
migrate to the developed North, but in terms of the growth of the
industrial working class, for new points of production to be created in
the developing world, judging by the labour statistics. (see my article
in the New Zealand magazine Revolution, with P Ray and J Woudhuysen).

-- 
James Heartfield