Quelle: noborder2016

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Today, with neoliberalism established across the planet, it is clear that capitalist relations are being intensified, together with nationalism and patriarchy. Fences and borders are being built not only in the physical space, but also across social relationships. However, the movements and transnational struggles of migrants are constantly producing new cracks in the system, new thresholds and pathways into an unexplored world.

More specifically, transnational and global agreements further liberalize “free” markets and the lifting of tariff restrictions further ensure property rights for the wealthy. At the same time the former social contract of the welfare state is breaking down and the neoliberal state is claiming the role of manager-partner of companies, keeping for itself solely the army and the police in order to retain some of its administrative and legislative power. Gender oppression, racism and fascism are being remobilized for the control of populations.

However, social struggles in the form of riots, rebellions, campaigns and movements both before and during the process of this recent “crisis”, seriously challenge all this. Prime examples are the riots in the French banlieues in November and December 2005, the Oaxaca Commune in 2006, the riots in December 2008 in Greece, the magnificently widespread Arab Spring in 2011, the Indignados Citizens Movements in Spain in 2011, the London riots in 2011, the “Occupy” movement in the USA in 2011 and 2012, the uprising at the Gezi park in Istanbul in June 2013, the Brazilian Spring in 2013, the uprisings in Bosnia and other Balkan States during 2013-2014.

The response of neoliberalism to the recent structural crisis, one that is interpreted by some as a crisis of over-accumulation, by others as a result of civil disobedience, or as the long expected explosion of “abstract labor” in a fully monetarized economy, to extend and intensify its strategy of land-grabbing and pillage of resources, of means of production and of reproduction of whole societies.

Austerity programs in the countries of the European South, war, religious intolerance and the intensification of gender oppression in the countries of the Arab Spring are part of the same strategy. Thus, whole populations are made to abandon their homes. These people, deprived of their natural and social space, migrate, cross borders, fences, barbed wire, rivers, seas, mines and police patrols. They also face exploitation by traffickers, they are detained in concentration camps and then they are forced to search for a job (usually in the black market, often unpaid) even under extremely dire conditions. Most end up unemployed and they form a kind of reserve workforce or are forced into prostitution, trafficking networks and organ smuggling. […]