Syrian refugees along with the thousands of other refugees
from war stricken countries are fleeing to Europe as a safe haven. Their home
countries, for the most part vacuous of ordinary life, flattened by bombs, occupied
with war machinery, and peopled with soldiers, is no longer a place to live. With only the options of being displaced within
the country or to flee the country entirely, many have chosen the latter
option. There are now thousands of refugees streaming from the southern tip of
Europe heading north-west to procure a sense of safety, security and humane
standard of living. However, despite escaping poverty and destruction at home,
these fleeing migrants are being acquainted with the draconian and insidious barriers
of capital in the form of state boarders, anti-migration laws, and state armed
forces. It is here that capitalism is employing its state monopoly on violence
(via police and army) and its state legislations, in order to incessantly
impose its hegemonic and dehumanized definition of a refugee.
There is a question at the heart of the refugee crisis: who
has the power to define citizenship? Currently the answer is that capital has
the power to impose its definition of
citizenship and in doing so it also has the power to impose its definition of
humanity. The European working-class, after four decades of neoliberal
privatization of the welfare state (education, healthcare, and social
security), deindustrializing (through globalization) and union busting, and debt
encumbered, is disempowered. Ever since
capitalism oscillated to the supply side of capital (since mid-1970 with Thatcher
and Raegan) capitalism has shifted the cost of reproduction of alienated social labour to the working-class
to pay through their wages (which has remained stagnant since the 1970’s). This
is while an oligarchy, literally a select few families - the top 1% and even
more so the top 0.01%, have seen exorbitant increase in their wealth. Further,
capital has placed itself invidiously against labour in this refugee crisis and
is currently using market logic to cull thousands of migrants, and only the
debt encumbered disempowered European working-class that has the power and the
gruelling task of stopping it.
The mainstream media continues to frame the reception of the
refugees by the working people of Europe as something extraordinary and outside
the norm of society (as defined by the individualism
inherent in a neoliberal society). Frequently people are questioned about why
they are providing food, water and clothing for refugee families and the
resounding answer is “they are human beings too!” The narrative of international solidarity,
human equality and the human right to a decent standard of living is porous
within the working-class. Thousands of people of London and other European
capitals have demonstrated their solidarity with the thousands of migrants and
refugees through street demonstrations and acts of generosity. This reception
of the refugees is disparate to the unpalatable and dehumanizing market
ideology of capital. At the heart of this working-class ideology is an equal
world without borders: making the paper proclamations of citizenship
meaningless. It is the working-class that produces this world and it is working-class
that is entitled to its ownership.
Capital has proven that it cannot answer to the question of
creating affordable housing, creating solidarity between people, or providing a
decent standard of living for the majority of people. Capital, with its crisis
prone internal contradictions, is itself the cause of war and the refugee
crisis, and it must not be allowed to use its market logic to deny anyone
access to shelter, safety and a decent human life. The question of who has the power to define
citizenship must not be answered in the terms of capital. It is only the
working-class unity that has the power to restore the human being’s dignity;
and the remedial solution to the refugee crisis is only found in the expansion of
the working-class solidarity.
Chia Barsen
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