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Crisis, Migration and the Death Drive of CapitalismAuthor(s): Vassilis S. Tsianos and Dimitris Papadopoulos

Reviewed work(s):Source: Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry, Issue 31 (Autumn/Winter 2012),pp. 4-11Published by: The University of Chicago Presson behalf of Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design,University of the Arts LondonStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/668918.

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Contexts: Migration and Capitalism |5

Since we met Sapik in the summer of in the Pagani refugee camp on the island ofLesbos, Greece, we have been regularly talking to him on the phone or via the internet.1Hebecame a co-researcher and adviser for our research project of [email protected] has a veryactive Facebook account, which is linked to a well-informed and useful blog about mobilityand transit issues relevant to the Afghan community. Suddenly, while writing this essay,it became impossible to contact him. We were very concerned. For many years there hasbeen a steep increase in fascist and racist attacks in Greece, and Sapik a well-known

and active figure in the migrant community could have been targeted. Fortunately,he contacted us again and said that he wasdoing well. He had moved to Athens. Toughthe race riots there in March and April were frightening, he said, he needed to goto the capital because he wanted to under-

stand what is happening in this country. He was not hopeful that the large-scale mobilisa-tions against the government and the imposed austerity measures from May and June would be successful. His voice was quiet. We asked him when he would go back to Lesbos,where, at least in comparison to Athens, things were much more secure. He didnt reply;the silence indicated that we didnt understand what he was saying. He was in Athens inorder to understand the current situation in Greece. He said that he didnt know when he

would be able to contact us again, and that hed closed his Facebook account because he wasthreatened by neo-fascist users. Ten he said goodbye and hung up. Very shortly aer thisphone call we received a text message with a new Facebook name and a smile emoticon.

I

Te death drive is not towards death; rather it is the tendency to immerse oneself in arepetition that paradoxically brings only its own destruction. Migration is the death driveof capitalism. Te more it becomes an indispensable feature of the capitalist formation, themore it destabilises capitalisms foundations. Tat is, the more peoples mobility becomesnecessary for sustaining the productivity of capital, the more this mobility undermines the

social, political and organisational structures of sovereignty. Sovereignty becomes fiction,and at the same time the obsession with preventing the drive for repetition leads to death.Frontext, the EU agency regulating the movement of people across borders, is just onesymptom of this obsession. Te department only makes the end of sovereignty palpable.Tis is what the autonomy of migration approach3tries to capture: that migration has

Bouchra Khalili,The Constellations,Fig.6, 2011,silkscreen printon BFK Rives paper,40 60cm. Bouchra KhaliliGalerie Polaris,Paris

Crisis, Migration and theDeath Drive of Capitalism Vassilis S. Tsianos and Dimitris Papadopoulos

Vassilis S. Tsianos and DimitrisPapadopoulos sketch out a reading of thecurrent euro zone crisis through migrationand its socio-economic ramifications.

1 Sapik is one of the three pseudonyms that he has used since his arrival in Europe.2 Mig@net is the acronym of a border-crossing research group in the framework of the EU-research

project Transnational Digital Networks, Migration and Gender, funded under FP7 Co-operationSocio-economic Sciences and Humanities. For more information, see http://www.mignetproject.eu/(last accessed on 12 July 2012).

3 The understanding of the relations among mobility, labour and sovereignty probably representsthe most important insight of the autonomous perspective on migration. The autonomy of migrationapproach attempts to see migration not simply as a response to political and economic necessities

but as a social movement that becomes a constituent force in the formation of contemporary polityand social life. See Nestor Rodrguez, The Battle for the Border: Notes on Autonomous Migration,Transnational Communities, and the State, Social Justice, vol.23, 1996, pp.2137; Yann Moulier-

Boutang, De lesclavage au salariat. conomie historique du salariat bride, Paris: Presses Universitairesde France, 1998; Serhat Karakayali and Vassilis Tsianos, Mapping the order of new migration:Undokumentierte Arbeit und die Autonomie der Migration, Peripherie, vol.97/98, 2005, pp.3564;Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson and V. Tsianos, Escape Routes: Control and Subversion inthe 21st Century, London: Pluto Press, 2008; and Sandro Mezzadra, The Gaze of Autonomy: Capitalism,Migration and Social Struggles, in Vicki Squire (ed.), The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzonesand Irregularity, New York and London: Routledge, 2010, pp.12044.


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become a social force which by its very existence challenges the organisation of controland power. Its autonomy lies in the fact that it drives (together with many other forces,of course) capitalism, rather than being driven by it. And it drives capitalism to its end.Tis might sound apocalyptic, and, indeed, any talk about the death drive inherits thetwentieth centurys sorrowful fixation with disaster, risk, dystopia/utopia and catastrophes.Apocalyptic thinking is a comfortable discourse for pretend revolutionaries in an age ofcounter-revolutions, as well as for professional academics who like to see grand societalnetworks and systems rise and collapse.

But what if we try to conceive of migration outside of thinking and practices that aremagnetised by apocalypse and catastrophe? In this text we propose a reading of the currenteuro zone crisis through migration and its socio-economic ramifications. Here one couldobject: there is always a danger of falling back into some kind of apocalyptic thinking whenone talks about capitalism. Te capitalist spell is so insidious, capitalism is so abstract meta- and everywhere that it is difficult to talk about it without summoning life hereaer.But we want to suggest that thinking through migration could be a good antidote to this.We want to think of migration as a contribution to a history of the future: to think capitalistfutures through the actual movement of people. In this we rely on Sandra Hardingsconcept of strong objectivity' to develop a notion of objectivity that allows us to approachactual processes from a situated perspective.4By harnessing this speculative experiencewe are able to move beyond a nave utopian idealism or blunt versions of materialistdialectics. It allows us to approach the futures of capitalism from a situated practice oftransformation unfolding in the present: migration.

II

From forced migration to managed migration during the s and s in Europe,mobility was governed productively by territorialising the dynamic of transnationalmovements and inserting them into the national welfare state regulation of workinglabour.5Te current economic crisis in Europe began with the housing and sub-primecrisis of to . While the suppression of wages in Southern Europe has been

engendering protests, an exit from the credit system will, some argue, ignite a class war6 this time from below! in the Global North. 7Across the globe, and on differentscales, numerous mobilisations have attempted to defend society and the environmentagainst the effects of past decades neoliberal policies: campaigns for womens rights,for the environment, for reclaiming the city, for free and open soware and hardware;the struggles of precarious workers; rural mobilisations. Newly emerging segments ofthe middle class in the Global North are also under constant pressures of precarisationand some even participate increasingly in these social struggles. Tese conditions needto be analysed against parallel changes in the global economy: emerging economies in particular India and China have become powerful players in the past years.Excluding Japan, which experienced a similar slowdown to other Global North/Atlantic

economies aer the s, Asias total share of world GDP almost doubled from . percent in (twenty years earlier, in , it was . per cent) to . per cent in .8Labour productivity was considerably higher for most of the emerging countries as well.

Te consequences of these transformations for global labour are well known. Te vastmajority of the workforce in global manufacturing is unskilled, deskilled or low-skilled,and is exposed to intense marginalisation and exploitation.9Te background to the riseof global productivity was the opening up of the periphery to the neoliberal policies

4 See Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Womens Lives, Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, 1991.

5 See Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller, The Age of Migration: International Population Movementsin the Modern World, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

6 For a provocative analysis, see Christian Marazzi, The Violence of Financial Capitalism (2009, trans.

Kristina Lebedeva), Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011.7 See Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times, London:

Verso, 1994; and G. Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century, London andNew York: Verso, 2007.

8 See Angus Maddison and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, The WorldEconomy: Historical Statistics, Paris: Development Centre of the Organisation for Economic Co-operationand Development, 2003.

9 See Yilmaz Akyz, Developing Countries and World Trade: Performance and Prospects, Geneva and London:United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and Zed Books, 2003.


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of the s, a process which was initiated in a moment when capital, as we saw earlier,was not investing in Global North/Atlantic societies. Profit instead streamed into theUS from the periphery,10while cheap loans were offered to the developing world.Tis is one of the main functions of financialisation,11which on the one hand achievedthe complete inclusion of the periphery into the new global accumulation structure andon the other hand endangered the working populations of these countries.12Globalfinancialisation created the infrastructure for a globaleconomy and the new transnationalneoliberal system for capital profit. When, towards the end of the s, interest rates wentup and capital flows were redirected to the US, a series of countries defaulted on their loans a chain of regional crises spreading through the world. Faced with what they saw ascorruption and bad administration of funds, the IMF and World Bank imposed structuraladjustment programmes on the countries that defaulted: cutting spending on socialprovisions, opening the markets to the global circulation of capital and increasing workerproductivity. Te neoliberal transnational order had devastating consequences for theso-called periphery, but ironically the periphery had already become the centre for thegeneration of capital profits (and simultaneously the centre of exploitation).

In these conditions migration became crucial for propelling the new mode ofproduction and social reproduction. And in these same conditions, despite the fierce

labour and social struggles, the ghosts ofthe working class disappeared in the dawnof the twenty-first century. Wage labourdoes not seem to be the death drive ofcapitalism, as Marx alleged. But the spectreof the working class undergoes a transmu-tation that equally threatens politicalinstitutions and the fragile identities ofthe North Atlantic populations: it has beentransformed into the spectre of migration.

For almost forty years now the response has been to exclude mobility from the constitutionof polity. But this is no longer sustainable. We are facing a new situation, one which will be

dominated by a different question: not how to immobilise migrants but how to institution-alise mobility. How to codify it and make it productive and sustainable? How to combineit with a new configuration of polity and sovereignty? ransnational precarious labour! Tis is the moment when the cards of labour, mobility and sovereignty are mixed anddistributed again. We used to think of mobility as a movement through space. And this is,of course, true: migration is applied geopolitics on the ground. Tis way of thinking wascaptured in the dominance of territoriality in conceptualising mobility. Nation state-territory-people is the golden triptych of capitalist sovereignty. But as soon as mobilitybecomes fused with labour and with the structures of sovereignty which try to contain it,a new dimension emerges. Moreover, the current regulation of migration does not takeplace solely in a spatial dimension; the control of mobile populations and the sovereign

power over peoples mobility also takes place through the control of biopower. 13oday theborder regime does not block migration; it tries to institutionalise it by controlling its speedand magnitude. Sovereignty is not about sovereign borders; it is about regulating theporosity of borders.14

However, here we want to change the perspective: we are interested in how movementcreates control and in how power relates to the mobile people.15In conditions in whichmigration is autonomous, the role of control is not to suppress mobility. Migration control

10 See Gerard Dumnil and Dominique Lvy, Neo-liberal Dynamics: Toward a New Phase?, in Leo Assassi,Dylan Wigan and Kai van der Pijl (ed.), Global Regulation: Managing Crises after the Imperial Turn,New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

11 See zgr Orhangazi, Financialization and the US Economy, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2008.12 See Karl Heinz Roth, Global Crisis Global Proletarianisation Counter-perspectives,Wildcat

[online journal], 2008, available at http://www.wildcat-www.de/en/actual/e068roth_crisis.html(last accessed on 28 May 2012).

13 Michel Foucault, Geschichte der Gouvernementalitt I: Sicherheit, Territorium, Bevlkerung. Vorlesungenam Collge de France 19771978, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2004.

14 See the concept of porocracy as discussed in Chapter 11 of D. Papadopoulos, N. Stephenson and V.Tsianos, Escape Routes, op. cit.

15 See Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Mode rn State, Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 1999; A. Negri, The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century,Cambridge: Polity, 2005; and Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004.

Te more peoples mobilitybecomes necessary forsustaining the productivity ofcapital, the more this mobilityundermines the social, politicaland organisational structuresof sovereignty.


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seeks to make compatible different time registers of productivity on the paths of mobilepopulations; it attempts to render the speed of absorption into the local labour marketscompatible with the speed of flows of mobile populations. Migration control is aboutspeed and its regulation; it works as an equaliser between labour markets and migratorymovements. For example, refugee camps are less a form of blocking the circulation ofmobility; they reinsert illegalised and clandestine migration back into society. Legal orillegal, regular or irregular, managed or unauthorised, migration is directly entangledwith labour. In order to understand migration we need to rethink the changing formsof exploitation that are at the heart of the current regime of accumulation.

Te exploitation of living labour is usually understood in terms of variable capital. TeoNichols has written:

By calling labour-power variable capital Marx made it clear that surplus value the value that was produced over and above that [which is] necessary to sustainand reproduce labour was not determined in some mechanical, a-social way.

For one thing it was affected by the duration of labour. [] For another thing, it wasaffected by the intensity of labour.[]Te term variable draws attention to thefact that the surplus actually created varies according to the relative strength of

the combatants within the production process. 16

In other words, capital is variable because of the political pressures that living labourexercises towards the shape of the labour process. Te duration of labour and its intensitydefine the degree of exploitation. Tis is true for a liberal definition of labour power, whichwas formerly understood as the individuals capacity to work, his or her skills and capabil-ity to produce. However, the neoliberal counter-revolution and the transnationalisationof labour and capital (you can call it globalisation) intensified exploitation by expandingwhat was appropriated as labour power. Work in order to become productive becomes incorporated into the non-labour sphere: the productivity of culture workers,for example, is not the result of the pure exchange of information, but of the creation

of an indeterminate excess in informal, affective, world-making connections beyond thedivision of private life and work time. Te exploitation of labour power extends beyondthe boundaries of work into social and personal investments (e.g. social relations, generalskills, informal networks, ideas). Living labour is remunerated for its labour powerbut the expenditure for sustaining labour power is much higher in cost than labour poweritself. oday we are not only dealing with an intensification of exploitation but also withits extensification, as exploitation extends across the whole existential conditions ofliving labour.17Consider, for example, the deskilling of work: free labour in internships;unpaid work within the home; affective labour in services, communications and culture;migrant labour; work below the lower earnings limit; post-contractual dependency;informal labour, etc. Of course these patterns of double exploitation are geo-politically

contingent and are realised differently in different situations. Te precarisation ofwork in the Global North/Atlantic economies corresponds to the changing structureof production, in particular through the massive increase of the services and retailsectors. Te developments of new modes of automation and technical innovation furthercontribute to this intensification and extensification. Moreover, intensification andextensification of exploitation have both created a different pattern of surplus valueextraction: capitalism becomes embodied, ingrained in the body and in social activity.And one of the key dimensions of the embodiment of capital is extracting surplus values

16 Theo Nichols, Capital and the Capitalist Labour Process, in T. Nichols (ed.), Capital and Labour: Studiesin the Capitalist Labour Process, London: Fontana, 1980, p.35. Emphasis original.

17 In emerging economies in which informal labour conditions were always the rule intensification

and extensification correspond to the rise of manufacturing (especially through the relocation oflow-technology, shipping, car and textile industries and chemical plants); the transition frompeasantry to urban workers that has put large segments of the newly emerging working classes inpoverty; the self-employment and self-subsistence of large parts of those classes; and their conditionsof mass migration and cross-border existence. See, for example, Maurizio Lazzarato, ImmaterialLabor, in P. Virno and M. Hardt (ed.), Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp.13346; Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, From Precarityto Precariousness and Back Again: Labour, Life and Unstable Networks, Fibreculture, vol.5, 2005,available at http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/neilson_rossiter.html (last accessed on 3 July 2012);and D. Papadopoulos, N. Stephenson and V. Tsianos, Escape Routes, op. cit., Chapter 5.


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from the very fact that bodies can become mobile in the most averse circumstances.

Te capacity to be mobile and the subsequent classification of a particular segmentof a mobile population as migrants is one of the key dimensions of the extensificationof exploitation.

III

When migrants are considered as irregular citizens they are commonly conceived eitheras criminals or as being forced to move, not as active creators of the realities they findthemselves in or of the realities they create when they move. Te category of the illegalmigrant is not created, primarily, by a legal context, but by the political and theoreticalview in which forms of agency are driven by internal necessities; the legal context only

follows to consolidate this perspective and standardise the migrants into manageablecategories. However, in conditions where illegal migration has become one of the main,or probably the main, migration route to the societies of the Global North, irregularitycan always be perceived in a double perspective: either from the perspective of citizenship which attempts to disclose how irregularity is maintained through control or fromthe perspective of mobile migrants who operate off the grid (not registering for socialservices or as residents). Te difference here is very small but important for understanding


Ursula Biemann,

Sahara Chronicle,200609,video series,78min, still.Courtesy the artist


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the approach of the autonomy of migration: irregularity is nota political act in itself.

Irregularity is a practice of governance thatillegalisesmigrants in order to controlthem through the current arrangement of borders, security demands and public safety.Yet illegalised migrants use clandestinity as an everyday strategy of movement. Readingirregularity as a political act is problematic because it reduces migrants to potentialpolitical subjects that local political forces can use to contest aspects of the given politicalorder, such as restrictive immigration laws. Irregularity makes sense only asillegalisationof migrants through the machinic order of sovereignty and the governance of citizenship,not as an intended (or even unintended) political act of migrants: the governance of theirregular citizenship.

From the perspective of the current digitalised, porocratic configuration as control,mobility is not the enemy. Mobility is considered, in fact, an economically indispensable

element of current European societies: it only needs to be institutionalised throughdiscourses of citizenship in order to sustain the new flexible configuration of labour thatrelies on extensified exploitation (as discussed earlier in Section II). Tis creates a politicalproblem for every approach to migration through citizenship. Te more one tries tosupport rights and representation through citizenship, the more one contributes to therestriction of movement. Tis dilemma is well known to activist organisations that engagewith migration and border radical politics, and is exacerbated by the fact that migrants

Ursula Biemann,

Sahara Chronicle,200609,video series,78min, still.Installation view,Kunstmuseum Bern,2011. Courtesythe artist andKunstmuseum Bern


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do not usually get involved in political mobilisations about migration as such. Tey tendto become invisible, to disappear, to dis-identify themselves. And when migrants mobilisepolitically, they only do it in a strategic way because they encounter a particularanddirectform of discrimination in a concrete situation.

Many of the migrants we talked to in the refugee camps of Pagani, on Lesbos, andIgoumenitsa, on the western coast of the Greek mainland, in the past three years used thephrase I work only for papers. Initially we struggled to understand this phrase. On theone hand we know that a lot of them work in the worst possible conditions, undocumentedand only for money. On the other hand papers the necessary documents which oneneeds in order to reach a target destination are not something to work for but somethingto which one is legally entitled (or not). Tese migrants challenged two of the most wide-spread assumptions underlying popular and academic positions regarding the definitionof a migrant: firstly, that migrants are labourers, whose subjectivity is defined by theircapacity to offer their labour power in foreign markets. Secondly, they contested thedistinction between legality and illegality by questioning the dualism between those whohave papers and those who do not. For these migrants not only is work secondary andirrelevant for their subjectivity, but they see that the actualwork they do is the workforacquiring papers that is, working for papers is an irregular formality that articulatesthe fluidity between irregular and regular statuses from the migrant point of view. Tisis a double blasphemy against the logic of labour as well as the logic of citizenship. In factthese migrants do not intend to play the game of political participation in our institutionsor engage in acts of citizenship through mobilising their subjectivity as citizens or asworkers. Or we could even say that they would engage in any act of political participationif this would help them to get the necessary papers.

Te spectre of migration will always be with us, among us, more real than anythingelse: cleaning your home, cleaning your office, taking care of your kids, maintaining yourcomputer or your car, providing sex, ironing your shirts, answering your phone calls,doing your gardening, building your houses, collecting your strawberries, living in theflat next door. Crossing the borders in the Balkans can be seen as an act of and towardscitizenship only to the extent that the very moment of hiding in a lorry is an illegalised

activity. From the perspective of migrants this is an act of immediatejusticefor everydaylife. Let us put it in a different way: to the extent that migration is the death drive ofcapitalism, it is also the death drive of the le liberal and revolutionary thinking asinherited from the previous century. Tis sounds perhaps disappointing, but there arereasons to celebrate also. It forces both capitalism and its opponents to change strategiesand to take seriously the most important principle guiding migrants mobility: freedomof movement for all.

IV

In the period between the fieldwork for and the writing of this paper, Sapik decided

to leave his clandestine existence in Greece. Although he was satisfied with his life thereand had already built a strong community, with close links to political activists and astable way to make his living, he wanted to leave behind the life without papers. I wantto live like you, he told us. He arrived in a city in Northern Europe and claimed asylum.He was strongly supported through his connections in his transnational communityand the trans-European activist networks, and his lawyer was confident that he wouldbe granted asylum. Just a few days before finishing this text we talked to Sapik, and hetold us that he was preparing his illegal trip back to Greece. We were very surprised, evenhorrified, when he said that he had firmly decided to leave the country and effectively drophis asylum case even as his application was progressing smoothly. Tere is no life here!he said. See you in Greece.

2012 CrisisMigrationDeathDrive Afterall TsianosPapadopoulos

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