Description
The paper explores the intersection between migration and the changing image of labour in the context of the so-called ‘migrant crisis’ on the English Channel – a perspective which is commonly left out of any debate on the subject. I locate this ‘crisis’ within a wider historical problematic in which the figure of the worker and the figure of the migrant exist as distinct yet essentially connected political and historical categories. The apposition of these figures, as theorised by Marx in terms of the ‘reserve army of labour’, generates a tension which is constitutive of (racial) capitalist relations not only through the fragmentation of the working class but also because the global mobility of labour is essentially connected to the production of difference through the racial subordination of the migrant-figure. Drawing on over a year of ethnography in Dover, England, the paper suggests that the investigation of current political subjectivities concerning these two figures – that of the migrant and that of the worker – elucidates forms of thinking which may complicate and disrupt dominant discourses which frame the ‘Channel migrant crisis’.
