There are currently 3 million Syrian people that have fled
Syria to the neighbouring countries (Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan) and
another 6 million Syrians displaced within Syria who are fleeing the war and
trying to procure a basic standard of living. Every week Syrians along with
other refugees are found dead on European shores and in trucks traveling across
borders. The displacement of myriad number of people is currently the next
phases in the global class struggle and can be in part explained through the
lens of capital accumulation and the contradictory relations within the formula
of capital accumulation.
Capital is a process, not a thing. Capital accumulation via
the creation of surplus value is predicated on capital’s ability to overcome
major barriers in the process of capital. One of the most important
obstacles/barriers that circumscribes capital accumulation is the political and
social power of labour, such as the politically conscious working class in
Syria that are demanding a larger share of the social wealth and political
power. The displacement of millions of people is a surface manifestation of
latent, and foundational, contradictory relations within capital accumulation.
The contradictory relation between labour and capital in Syria, as witnessed
through the repression of the Syrian protesters by the Syrian armed forces (the
state of Syria), where the working-class, inspired by the Arab spring,
struggled against the Assad regime to procure a larger share of the
surplus/wealth via exercising political influence through months of street
protests and general strikes (and demanding to overthrow the Assad regime),
became tantamount to an absolute contradiction: total civil war and a
significant pause to the process of capital accumulation in Syria.
The foundational contradictory relation between labour and
capital, as well private vs. common appropriation of wealth, is insoluble
(within the context of capitalism) and is ossified in the heart of capitalism.
This contradiction which is normally mitigated in a palliative way through
concessions made by either the state or the working-class, does not always
escalate to an absolute contradiction where the process of capital is no longer
possible. However in Syria, the Assad regime, seeing the demise of neighbouring
despots in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, chose to diplomacy via the military and
war machinery: slaughtering hundreds of thousands and displacing millions of
others in order to discipline the working class of Syria.
The Syrian civil war is a conspicuous proxy war between
major imperialist powers in the East and the West: Syria is an essential part
of a larger geo-political economic plan in imperialism’s division of the world.
Syria, a country that was only several years ago teeming with revolutionary
spirit and aspirations for a better future, is now ransacked by war and is
bereft of many social institutions, basic infrastructure and working class
organizations. Further, this conflict, added to the neighbouring conflicts, has
created the vacuous space necessary for the inexorable growth of groups such as
ISIS.
The social and political effect of the displacement and
migration of millions of Syrians in the Middle East as well as Eastern and
Western Europe, has further augmented the power of capital over labour. With
the large unemployment numbers, or what Marx calls the “industrial reserve
army”, capital has the power to pressure its resident working class to sell its
labour at a cheaper price and/or to accept a lower standard of living. Further,
nascent right-wing anti-immigration parties will flourish through creating
divisions in working-class via nationalism, racism and the creation of the
outside “other”. Capitalism will do almost anything to deny and to occlude
these migrants from accessing social services and the welfare state (that the
working-class has procured through decades of class-struggle in Europe).
Through racism and nationalism, capitalism is attempting to
dehumanize the migrant and refugee population in order to lessen its responsibility. The responsibility of capital is essentially
to pay the cost of the social reproduction of labour (the necessary cost to
reproduce the worker’s social labour, day after day, via social services such
as subsidized housing, education and healthcare) that capital has a penchant
for billing the wages of the working-class itself. In this way, capitalism is
attempting to frame the refugees as “burdens” on the social services (which
after decades of neo-liberalism assault on the working-class, is mostly paid
through the taxation of the working-class) and only to grant them entry where
it fits capitalism’s class interests.
Anther inexorable outcome of the unbridled mass migration is
the dissolution of Europe as a closed community. The latent inequality within
capital (foundational, via the contradictory relation between labour and
capital), as a process, and capitalism, as a system, manifests itself in relative inequality within domestic
markets (between capital and labour). It also manifests itself in absolute inequality via global markets,
such as the inordinate inequality of power and wealth between the Northern and
Southern hemisphere of the world as well as the West and the East. This is to say that a human being (in the
working-class) born in Western Europe is likely to have a better standard of
living than a person born in central Africa. The mass migration from a
deprived, war torn South and Middle East will further erode these boundaries in
standards of living. Socially, the working-class and the European community
will no longer be impervious to the lower standards of living as experienced in
other places in the world. The European working-class in Western European
countries, the 99%, will now, more than ever, experience the untrammelled force
of capitalism’s dehumanizing machine as more and more drowned corpses of
refugees wash upon European shores. Conversely, the 1% will create ever smaller
communities to isolate and protect themselves from the deprived and dehumanized
masses of working -class.
Capitalism does not solve its crisis but moves it around
geographically. The crisis of capitalism in the Middle East, Central and North
Africa is now found ubiquitously in Europe via the masses of migrating
refugees, as the global class struggle between capital and labour to augment a
greater share of the wealth in society continues. The European working-class
must stand united with the migrants and refugees fleeing to Europe and pressure
the European states to fulfill their responsibility for providing a humane
standard of living for all: the refugee crisis is produced by capitalism and
capitalism must be made responsible for its cost.
Chia Barsen
WWW.CHIABARSEN.COM
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