The Refugee Crisis in Context

[polly7]

Neoliberalism’s Refuse

by Matt Reichel / June 19th, 2015

A report issued by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) this week provided a jarring statistical glimpse at the unprecedented crisis facing 59.5 million people who are currently displaced. With ongoing wars and sectarian conflicts raging in Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, South Sudan and Somalia, and record numbers moving in search of economic betterment, an additional 8.1 million people were uprooted in 2014. If all of the world’s refugees were to form one independent country, it would be the 24th largest, just behind Italy and ahead of South Africa. This country would contain .8% of the global population, which means that if it were instead composed of the world’s richest people, it would possess nearly half of the planet’s wealth.

What’s more, these two hypothetical countries would represent opposite sides of the same coin. It is no accident that the concentration of global wealth is accelerating alongside the numbers of the dispossessed. It is the very predictable result of a US-led system of economic and military hegemony that values the mobility of labor and capital, but not of people, and that reflexively destabilizes any regime it views as being inadequately obsequious. Meanwhile, the market fundamentalism it espouses effectively turns farms into agribusinesses and cities into slums. It displaces as a matter of course. This is the part that the UNHCR report missed: the refugee is neoliberalism’s refuse.

Unmanaged capitalism produces unmanageable waste, human included. The reserve army of labor has long been filled, and so the remaining population is superfluous. Meanwhile, the scope of neoliberalism is practically global. There is no longer a hinterland, nor much space for an alternative such as subsistence agriculture. Precarious, low-wage labor is the international norm, even increasingly so in the industrial north, where social-democratic protections are under steady assault. Nonetheless, conditions remain superior enough in these countries to attract millions of migrants each year, though the centrifugal force that propels people out of their home countries continues to operate in their adopted lands, driving them to the margins. Quite often they will find themselves veritably stateless: lacking any foundation to return to, and having no visible path forward. They become trapped in a state of “liminal drift,” as Michel Agier calls it. They are permanently transitory, forever seeking a resolution that stubbornly remains out of reach.

Neoliberalism has transformed the secure into the precarious and the subaltern into refuse. It has created previously unknown flows of information and capital, while holding the displaced in captivity. Indeed, the ever-rising American prison population must be seen as a connected phenomenon. Far from enshrining freedom, market fundamentalism converts flesh into monetary quantity. It also provokes fear, because we are able to witness the hardships endured by the underclass, thus reminding us of our own expendability. Zygmunt Bauman notes: “Rather than remaining a misery confined to a relatively small part of the population, as it used to be perceived, assignment to ‘waste’ becomes everybody’s potential prospect – one of the two poles between which everybody’s present and future social standing oscillates.” As long as one of us is deemed rubbish, the rest of us have a vested interest in identifying and addressing the underlying cause. The refugee crisis riddle will not be solved until we repel the forces that created it.

bbm.

Full article: http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/06/the-refugee-crisis-in-context/#more-58843

[DeadLetterOffice]

1. This bit is just horrifying...

If all of the world’s refugees were to form one independent country, it would be the 24th largest, just behind Italy and ahead of South Africa.

And yet we hear so very little about it over here. (not a shock, that)