Abstract
John Berger’s 1975 study of migrant labour, A Seventh Man, is an example of the enduring relevance of a Marxist approach to migration. Berger’s analysis is rooted in Marxist concepts of alienation and ideological mystification, expanded through three further concepts: the naturalization of an unequal hierarchy of labours; the fragmentation of the worker into a bundle of capacities and needs that both underpins and is reinforced by this inequality; the mystified idea of belonging, in which migrant workers do not belong where they work and exist. Berger’s Marxist approach is contrasted with the “methodological nationalism” characteristic of liberal political philosophy and Hannah Arendt’s focus on exclusion and statelessness. Approaching the migrant as worker provides a necessary corrective to these approaches, but comparison with Arendt helps clarify Berger’s ideas about how to adequately challenge and overcome inequality by politicizing the status of migrant workers and asserting a radical principle of equality.
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- 1.
While the book is co-authored by Berger and Mohr, I assume here that Berger is the primary author of the text and so refers to its ideas as his. Britain is ruled out in part by Berger’s decision to focus on migrants from within Europe “in order to define as sharply as possible the new phenomenon of millions of peasants migrating to countries with which they had no previous connection” (Berger & Mohr, 1975/2010, p. 12). Thus, he ignores migrants from former colonies (who constituted the majority in Britain), acknowledging that “the distinction is an artificial one, but it helps narrow the focus” (Berger & Mohr, 1975/2010, p. 12). A further artificial narrowing is made by his decision to focus entirely on male workers, ignoring the two million women migrant workers, about whom “to write of their experience adequately would require a book itself” (Berger & Mohr, 1975/2010, p. 12).
- 2.
At the same time, the migrant is even more dependent on the employer to meet their immediate needs of reproduction (food, shelter, etc.), often provided on site in barracks and canteens.
- 3.
Marx’s most explicit writings on alienation appear in what have become known as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, written largely in Paris in 1844 but not published until the 1930s.
- 4.
I focus here on Arendt, but similar points can be made about Giorgio Agamben’s account of “bare life” (see Schaap, 2011).
- 5.
For example, Gündogdu suggests that the concept of stateless covers “not only those who formally lost their nationality but also those who could no longer benefit from their citizenship rights: refugees, asylum seekers, economic immigrants, even naturalized citizens who faced the threat of denaturalization in times of emergency” (2015, p. 2), while Astra Taylor suggests extending it to “citizens, of individuals who are being financially dispossessed through the denial of fundamental rights by an emerging global oligarchy” (DeGooyer et al., 2018, p. X).
- 6.
This has clear affinities with the “differential inclusion” discussed by Papadopoulos and Tsianos (2013, pp. 180–184) in the context of their “autonomy of migration” approach.
- 7.
This would also suggest similarities between Berger’s understanding of equality and Rancière’s, for whom equality is “a mere assumption that needs to be discerned within the practices implementing it” (Rancière, 1999, p. 33).
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Acknowledgements
This is an outcome of the project “Towards a New Ontology of Social Cohesion,” grant number GA19-20031S of the Czech Science Agency (GAČR), realized at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. I am grateful to my project collaborators Petr Kouba and Petr Urban, to the editors of this volume, and also to Mark Bergfeld, Joe Grim Feinberg, and Lorna Finlayson for their helpful comments.
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Swain, D. (2022). Inequality, Fragmentation, and Belonging: John Berger on Migrant Labour. In: Ritchie, G., Carpenter, S., Mojab, S. (eds) Marxism and Migration. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98839-5_7
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