"It becomes urgent, also in the field of research and theoretical debate, to perform a substantial revision of the way, with which migrations are regarded, putting in centre of attention the subjectivity of the migrants." This text by Sandro Mezzadra makes an assessment firstly about the
struggles of migrants in Italy, valueing migrations later on in general as social movement and globalisation from below.
1. The days are gone when in Italy one could speak of the presence of foreign immigrants as a new factor in the history of a country that had lived in a painful manner an experience of mass emigration. Now that presence has established itself, and represents a structural element of the demographic make-up, and, a fact that has not been sufficiently stressed, of the make-up of the labour force. Consequently, the moment has come to make a first assessment of the way in which the immigrants have been confronted in the recent years. And I am not so much referring to the way in which the dominant public discourse, strung between the obsession of security and following of new nationalisms and racisms, has represented the “foreigner†and the immigrant, legitimating in fact the stigmatisation and exclusion brought about by governmental politics and legislation . In my opinion it is also necessary to come to terms with the image of the immigrant as a weak subject, hollowed by hunger and misery and needing above all care and help, that has been diffuse beginning from the late 80ies, especially among those who have regarded the migrants with greater benevolence. Without a doubt around this image there have grown, among lay and catholic voluntary workers, the noblest experiences of solidarity with the migrants, which have often had an essential role in offering points of reference within a social texture deserted by the crisis of other “agencies of socialization†– beginning with the Welfare State and the traditional organiwations of the labour movement. In more general terms, however, it is necessary to note that this image lends itself easily for reproducing “paternalistic†logics, renewing an order of discourse and a complex of practices that demote the migrants to an inferior position, denying them all chance of becoming subjects. Likewise, on a different yet adjoining level, the emphasis on the “right to difference†that characterises the “multicultural†understanding shared by most of the political and social left often ends up, to the vantage of a stereotyped representation of migrants (in which the “culture†is often understood as an element of “folkloreâ€), in removing a substantial part of the plurality of positions and problems that define the figure of the migrant in contemporary society .
2. The requirements for overcoming this image of migrants, and the consequent impacts, are today politically given in Italy. In the first place concerning the development of the “movement of the movements†beginning with the demonstration of the July 19th 2001, which, opening the protests against the G8 meeting in Genoa with the slogan “Freedom of movement – freedom without boundaries†has for the first time put the issues of the migrants before the “global movement†born in Seattle. During the following autumn and the winter, from Brescia to Genoa, from Treviso to Mestre, from Naples to Caserta, from Marche to Sicily, we have witnesses and intensification of initiatives against the plans of the Bossi – Fini law, which concluded in the extraordinary Roman demonstration of January 19th. 2002, with more than 100.000 people marching without the support of the major unions and parties of the “leftâ€. From that day up to the present, despite the approval of the Bossi – Fini law, the mobilisation against it has continued to shape Italy’s political landscape, resulting in a series of actions against detention centers, struggles for housing and labour rights of the migrants, and eventually involving at least a significant part of the traditional organizations of the labour movement (most notably the unions). A characteristic element of all these initiatives has been the exceptional leading role of the migrants, who have followed closely the movement of “Social Forumsâ€, the unions, the institutional and the radical left, compelling them in fact to make the question of immigrants as one of the central fields of their political activity. It is this subjective leading role of the migrants that puts the struggles of these last three years objectively beyond the defensive, especially antiracist character of the initiatives that had been produced during the decade of the 90ies about migrations. Quite significant, from this point of view, is the fact that within the same movement of the “Social Forums†there has been strengthened a climate of debate and organisation about these themes which aims at developing politically the paradigmatic capacities of the condition of the migrants, uniting the struggle against the centres of temporary stay (as the detention centers are called in Italy) to the slogan of a “strike of migrant labourâ€, emerging with force in particular precisely where the establishment of the migrants in the industry and their penetration into the dynamics of trade unions is more consistent. And a first strike of the migrant labour took place indeed in May 2002 in the province of Vicenza, in the north-east of the country, involving more than 30.000 migrant workers.
3. In this context it becomes urgent, also in the field of research and theoretical debate, to perform a substantial revision of the way with which migrations are regarded, putting in the centre of attention the subjectivity of the migrants. This operation is the more necessary the more it is put as a countertendency, whether with regard to a certain current understanding within critical left, whether with regard to how migrations are represented in dominant public discourse, or whether with regard to the way in which they have historically been studied by the mainstream of social sciences. Regarding the first, one can note for example that in the writings on “neoliberialismâ€, the bodies of the migrants are represented most of the time as simple objects, dragged along and overwhelmed by the “global mobilisation†of the capital. Regarding the dominant public discourse, it is enough to think of the obsessive use by the media of naturalistic metaphors (‘waves of migration’, ‘flood-gates of migration’, ‘migratory floods’, etc.) and of interpretative schemes derived from demography (which present the migrations as a necessary outcome, after a mechanism borrowed from the channels of communication, from the imbalances of the development of populations in various adjacent geographical areas), to understand how deeply it is conditioned by an image of the migrations as “objective†processes, which are determined completely independently of the actions of subjects. Social sciences, from their part, have been characterised during the 20th century by a substantial predominance of “hydraulic†models, which too reduce the migrations completely to “objective†causes, looking for the factors of push out and pull up, and putting in particular an emphasis on the naturalised imbalances of the international division of labour . Also when the behaviour of migrants has actually been the focus of sociological research, as in the case of the Chicago School since the twenties , it has still been carried out from the unilateral assumption of the point of view of the “receiving society†as is shown by the predominance within those works, even if very innovative and original, of the preoccupation for the “integration†and “assimilation†of the migrants.
4. Among the theoretical approaches that have questioned the dominant paradigm within the social sciences – as well as within many of the “neomarxist†analyses – with regard to the migrations, especially the feminist research comes to my mind . It has placed an emphasis precisely on the decisive role of factors that are not simply “economicalâ€, in determining female migrations, concentrating in particular on the specific structure of the gender relations prevailing in the societies of origin of the migrants and in the countries of destination. But at the same time, precisely contesting the implicit assumption of the mainstream research on migratory processes, according to which the only migrant of any importance is the man, and the woman is considered only in her position inside the family, the feminist studies have put in ever sharper relief the subjectivity of the migrant women: and they have above all underlined how the migration of women outside family dynamics does not simply represent a compulsory response to conditions of economical need by single women, widowed or divorced, but stems more often than we imagine from a conscious decision to leave behind the long shadows of societies dominated by patriarchy. It is elaborating these and other suggestions that I have recently proposed, to highlight the elements of subjectivity which permeate the migratory movements, and which must be kept in mind if one wants to produce an image of those movements as social movements in the full sense, to utilize the concept of right to escape . I want to stress that this is not to claim the irrelevance of the “objective causes†at the origin of contemporary migrations, wars and misery, environmental catastrophes and political and social tyrannies prevailing in vast areas of the planet. The point is to underline the fact that for migrations to exist, there must be an individual motion (made concretely by a concrete woman or a man, surely embedded in family and social “networksâ€, but nonetheless capable of agency) of desertion from the field where those “objective causes†operate, a reclaiming precisely of a “right to escapeâ€, which, even if most of the time unconsciously, constitutes a material critique of the international division of labour and marks nevertheless profoundly the subjectivity of the migrant also in the country where she/he chooses to settle down.
5. It must be specified that the concept of “right to escapeâ€, applied to the analysis of the contemporary migratory movements, functions of course in different ways depending on the diverse figures of migrants and refugees on which the attention is focused. If we look for example at the destabilisations of entire populations caused by various “local†and “global†wars of the recent years, we confront a situation of mobility where the degree of subjective “voluntariness†of the migration is quite limited, if not nonexistent. A different case is that of “illegal†migrations, where too often, also and especially within the left, there is a tendency to focus the attention only on the role of the criminal organisations that are running it. The rhetoric of “merchants of human beingsâ€, of “new slave trade†and “new slavery†cannot in fact hide the fact that, even if there are undoubtedly elements of coercion within the organisation of the “travels of hopeâ€, the majority of their participants, unlike the slaves of all times, set out of their own wil l. But more generally, the “average†experience of the contemporary migrants (as is shown for example by the research done on the conditions of the latinos in the United States, or those of Moroccans and Senegalese in Italy) clearly shows how the migration is often undertaken purposefully, and thus represents a proper strategy of organization from “down-upâ€, in a “transnational†dimension of the social reproduction of vast “subaltern†sectors in countries which the capitalistic command continues to confine to the periphery of the global system. And on the other hand to put the emphasis on the subjectivity of the migrants, as well as on the elements of the “riches†of which they are carriers, does not necessarily mean to assume the theoretical attitude, greatly diffuse within the Anglo-Saxon “cultural studiesâ€, which considers the migrant as a paradigmatic figure of the rootless and “hybrid†character of the postmodern subject, no more bound to any kind of roots and free to cross nomadically the boundaries between cultures and identities. The paradigmatic characteristics of the condition of the migrants are instances of transformations which do not regard only them, and emerge rather where is underlined the ambivalence that distinguishes the condition, strained as it is between reclaiming a radical instance of liberty and the functioning of old and new mechanisms of domination and exploitation.
6. On the other hand the light that a political interpretation of contemporary migrations such as suggested here sheds on the very processes of globalisation is ambivalent. In the first place, it leads in fact to putting in relief a main characteristic of these processes, characterised contemporaneously by a tendency to sweep away every obstacle of free circulation of goods and capitals and by the multiplication and strengthening of borders against the free circulation of labour, of women and men who are the carriers of labour. We are facing a truly global tendency, which manifests itself from the “outer borders†of European Union to the border between United States and Mexico, passing by the new walls against the mobility of labour erected around Hong Kong, to the southern China, to the countries of South-Eastern Asia assailed by the crisis of the ’97. Around these and other “global borders†there has been for years going on a proper war, which has caused (and continues to cause) the death of thousands of refugees and migrants in their attempt at bypassing them. Taking up the thesis presented in an important work by Yann Moulier Boutang , one can claim that the intensity of such struggles is determined by the violence with which the instance of freedom, cosmopolitan in the objective sense, there is in the migrations crashes with the imperative of control over the movements of labour, which, ever central to the capitalistic mode of production, finds itself today challenged, on a precisely global scale, by various elements of unpredictability, of turbulence, that mark the migratory movements . It is indeed on this unstable terrain that the “neoliberalist†apology of the market, as well as the “fluid†and flexible character of social relations it promotes meets and co-exists without particular difficulties with the rhetoric of “small homelands†and with the defence, often openly xenophobic and racist, of the presumed purity of cultures on a varied scale, from the “Padanian†to the “occidentalâ€. At the same time, nevertheless, the analysis of the migrations allows to bring to light an other globalisation, or rather an unspoken genealogy of contemporary processes of globalisation. Recently it has been claimed, in a quite convincing way, that the above mentioned characterise a historical phase in which the command of capital extends itself on a planetary scale, compelled to do so by the necessity of following the very rhythm of the proletarian and anti-imperialist struggles of the 20th century . The communist internationalism, the anti-colonialist rebellions, the global uprising of the ’68, constitute in this sense fundamental passages in the “secret history†of globalisation, picturing at the same time a prospect of unifying the planet in a radically different way from the hegemony of capital which has guided its progress during the last two hundred years. Analogously, even if on a rather different level, the new migratory movements represent a formidable laboratory of that which, reclaiming a method utilised for defining the action of the global movement that has been going on and strengthening between Seattle and Genoa, we can call “globalisation from belowâ€. And this in an absolutely elementary sense, in the sense that it is through the migrations that millions of women and men have materially organised their own existence, their own social relations, their own production and reproduction, giving no thought to the boundaries between states and constructing new “transnational social spaces†.
7. The condition of the migrants reveals itself as paradigmatic, again in its ambivalence, also with regard to the transformations that have influenced the dimension of citizenship. It surely tells us, first of all, of a rupture of universalism and of a crisis of the inclusive and integrative model of social citizenship that has been asserted in the Occident after the war, in the context of construction of the Welfare State . This model of social citizenship was no earthly paradise, and has indeed been dismantled and criticised, long before neoliberal politics, by the worker’s struggles and the movements of the -60ies and -70ies that from a multiplicity of perspectives have exposed its tendency to domination and social discipline. But without doubt it incorporated a material credit, truly democratic, translated into specific conquests and had found its approval in the acknowledgement of a series of rights. That credit has been equally materially attacked by the capitalist offensive during the last two decades, and the re-appearance of the problematic of exclusion, not limited to migrants, is a symptom of how profoundly it has affected in the redesign of the contemporary profile of citizenship. The ghost of “clandestineâ€, the radical denial of the very “right to have rights†(H. Arendt), is indeed exemplified in a dramatic way by the condition of the migrants, finding in the scandal of what an Italian law which has been promoted in 1998 by a center-left government calls “Centres of temporary stay and help†(proper concentration camps where are imprisoned subjects who haven’t committed any crime) their most disturbing incarnation ; it insinuates itself also, however, within the formal space of citizenship, shattered by the politics which have “performed†the crisis of the Welfare State. Under this profile, then, the condition of the migrants can be defined as paradigmatic since it exposes in full light a series of “negative†processes of de-structuring of citizenship and social stigmatisation. But this is not all: the migrants also tell us of an attitude of “suspension of identity†and of a problematic relation with the nevertheless defined belonging which, investigated appropriately, is collocated in resonance with a series of movements and social behaviour which bear the “positive†mark of ambivalence. Consider for instance the distrust with which many migrants, even though quite determined to reclaim specific rights of citizenship, regard the prospect of “integrationâ€. Even though it is true that this distrust transforms itself, in the conditions of rigid social and political exclusion in which the migrants are condemned to live in the “receiving societyâ€, to a “communitarian†turn, which must be studied in the complexity and ambivalence of it significations, it is also true that it introduces again the positive problematic nature of the relation between the individual and collective dimension of the experience, which within the “movement of movements†has expressed itself among other things in the fortune that the concept of multitude has had. And it introduces itself for example, even if at a very abstract level, in a line of continuity with the refusal of a specific model of “integrationâ€, that of the patriarchal family, which the feminist movement has indicated and criticised as one of the unexpressed presuppositions of the very social politics of welfare.
8. An analogous discourse can be made regarding labour . Migrant labour in fact charges itself with “paradigmatic†forces in as much as it exemplifies the radical condition of stripping off of rights which tends to involve, even if in varying degrees, the whole complex of social labour. The purpose of the Bossi – Fini law, from this perspective, even if it puts itself in many regards in a continuum with the Turco – Napolitano law (the law approved in 1998 by the center-left majority referred to previously) and with a model of government of flows of migrants defined at the level of European Union by the Schengen pact, intends to produce a relevant leap of quality. The figure of the “contract of residence†in particular, the very strict link presupposed in the new Italian law between employment contract and permit of residence, shows how the initiative of the right-wing government turns against migrants in general, succeeding in fact calling into question the very distinction between “the regular†and “the clandestineâ€: bound to the power of personal mood of the private entrepreneur with whom he signs the employment contract, the “regular†migrant is daily and explicitly exposed to the instability of his condition, to the threat of falling back to clandestinity and thus becoming at any moment “expellableâ€. And it is evident how here opens the space of and objective convergence between the condition of the migrants defined by the proposed Bossi – Fini law and the complete redefinition of employment relationships foretold by the “White book†of Maroni, which has been the base of the attempt undertaken by the government to dramatically change the structure of the labour market in the direction of further “flexibilizationâ€. Also for this reason, however, the analysis cannot stop here. Instead it must be confirmed how the mobility of the migrant women and men is an expression of a series of subjective movements of escape from the rigidities of the international division of labour which constitute one of the eradicated and denied motors of the radical transformations which have influenced the capitalist mode of production during the last two hundred years. And it puts itself again in a continuum with those refusals by workers of a specific model of organisational and “biographical†rigidity of industrial labour that within the very “occidental†countries, as the best informed sociology now recognises , have played a leading role in putting materially in crisis the regime of accumulation defined as fordist. Discovering the power and the immanently political character of the mobility of migrant labour can in this sense be a decisive theoretical step for articulating a critique of capitalism truly capable of answering the challenges put forth by it and by the composition of the contemporary living labour.
