Free trade without free people
Neoliberalism, migration, and a burgeoning international labor movement
In this month’s guest post, Kevin Thomas writes about how capitalist states use harsh border policies to boost corporate profits. Kevin writes the Marx and Friends newsletter, to which you can subscribe here.
no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
Americans increasingly oppose Trump’s ramping up of deportations. Trump’s mass deportations have created an increasingly volatile and divisive situation across the US, in which militarized, masked agents are in the streets grabbing, beating, and kidnapping people; ripping them from their cars; tackling them in their workplaces; and ambushing them while they walk their dogs or leave court hearings.
ICE’s cruelty has been bolstered by decades of bi-partisan efforts to ramp up deportations. Obama became known among the left as the “Deporter-in-Chief” because he deported far more immigrants than Bush Jr. Notably, Obama also deported significantly more per year than Trump did in his first administration. And one of the most controversial and definitive aspects of Harris’ campaign was her emphasis on the need for a “strong border.”
But is a “strong border” even in the interests of the average American? Is ICE on your side? Whom does the border really benefit?
Mass deportations are part and parcel of the bi-partisan “free trade” policies which have defined the last half century. A response to capital’s ceaseless quest for higher profits, these policies have driven displacement and migration, while the increased criminalization of migrants serves to keep workers divided and reduce wages across the board.
Capital’s quest for profit
Marx argued that there exists a constant downward pressure on profit rates in a capitalist society, driven by the mechanization and automation of production. Capitalists, and their allies within the state, are constantly seeking out new ways to counteract this downward pressure. Marx identified several factors which could help to slow the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, including financialization, increased exploitation of labor, and technological advancement.[1] These mechanisms for increasing profit, however, only provide a temporary solution, and not without wreaking havoc on society.
These tendencies and counter-tendencies help to explain the ways in which the economy has been restructured for the past half century, through the rise of an ideology known as neoliberalism - a key component of which were so-called “free trade” policies.
After a post-World War II economic boom, profit rates began to decline in the mid-1960s, leading to slumps in the mid-‘70s and early ‘80s. These downturns led to the closure of old plants and industries, with many companies going bankrupt, while new companies took over in new sectors. Amid mass unemployment, wages fell and unions were weakened, enabling new government administrations like those of Reagan and Thatcher to legislate against trade unions, privatize state companies, cut pensions, reduce corporate taxes, and deregulate the financial sector.[2]
As a result, profits began to rise again. The technological advance of the “dot.com revolution” in the 1990s helped to restore profits by considerably reducing costs. By 1997, however, profit rates once again began to fall, leading to the dot.com crash. After a relatively mild recession in 2001, supplemented by a global expansion of credit, the way to the Great Recession was paved by the deregulated banks. The world’s major economies were fueled on credit until the credit crunch of 2007, beginning the longest recession since World War II.[3]
Hard borders and high profits
The advanced capitalist countries responded to the crisis of the 1970s by restructuring economies externally as well as internally. Along with rapid increases in inequality, poverty, and precarity throughout society, one result of this neoliberal economic restructuring was mass displacement and migration as a result of the transnational free-flow of finance capital.[4]
For example, the free-flow of US capital into Mexico via the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)—which became a model for similar policies replicated around the globe[5]—drove down authentic labor unionism and drove up unemployment, displacement, and austerity within Mexico, in turn driving migration to the US.[6] The neoliberal politics concerned with “strengthening the border” are the same politics responsible for creating the recent waves of migration.
Despite their condemnation and scapegoating of undocumented immigrants, the capitalist class benefits from the criminalization of migrant labor and the divisions that harsh border policies create within the working class. Criminalized migrant workers are kept in a state of poverty and isolation, making the working class less organized and weaker overall. Additionally, undocumented migrant labor is conditioned for especially exploitative work since they lack all the rights and protections of citizens.[7]
Free movement of capital can only increase profits if it is coupled with restrictions on the movement of labor. Indeed, free movement of labor over the border would allow for cross-border organizing and wage equalization. The persecution of workers for crossing the border, combined with capital’s free international movement through policies like NAFTA, represents open class war.[8]
“Strong borders” serve to maintain differences in labor status and wages within the US, despite participating in the same workplaces or divisions of labor. Two workers doing the same job may be subject to different levels of oppression and exploitation simply because one was not born in the US.
An international labor movement
One unintended result of all this free flow of capital over the border is the transnational character of labor. This international division of labor holds great potential for organizing against this profit-oriented system, a potential that has begun to show itself in recent years in the form of cross-border strikes and movements of solidarity.[9]
The antidote to neoliberalism and xenophobia is an international labor movement, one that boldly champions long-term causes like abolishing ICE, while organizing in the short term to regain organized power on both sides of the border and beyond. Solidarity with migrant workers in the US and the community resistances against ICE strike at the heart of these destructive processes and push toward an alternative direction for the future of humanity—one in which no one is illegal.
[1]. Karl Marx (1991) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: Vol. 3, trans. by David Fernbach (London: Penguin), 339–75.
[2]. Michael Roberts (2016) The Long Depression: How it Happened, Why it Happened, and What Happens Next (Chicago: Haymarket Books), 61.
[3]. Ibid, 61-3.
[4]. Harsha Walia (2021) Border and Rule (Chicago: Haymarket Books), 62.
[5]. Justin Akers Chacón (2021) The Border Crossed Us: The Case for Opening the US-Mexico Border (Chicago: Haymarket Books), 13
[6]. Ibid, 16.
[7]. Ibid, 14, 9.
[8]. Ibid, 13.
[9]. Ibid, 16-17.
 | A guest post by
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The irony of it is that the principles of free market doctrine laid out in the early stages of capitalism by David Ricardo and his contemporaries were predicated on the immobility of capital (capital in those days mostly being immovable land) and the free mobility of labour. That was supposed to be the basis of the freedom that capitalism and markets would bestow on hitherto tethered feudal serfs. And yet today, a complete inversion of those principles is what passes of as free markets!
Capitalists make their profits from squeezing surplus labour out of the exploited working class, who are forced to work long hours for subsistence wages owing to the fact that they do not own the means of production. When those profits are reinvested back into the production process in keeping with the dictates of market competition, it increases the demand for labour and consequently the bargaining power of the working class. That directly threatens profits, and therefore it becomes imperative for capitalists to make workers dispensable through the adoption of technology. But the adoption of technology poses another problem in that it replaces the very golden goose (labour) from which the surplus value is derived. That is the contradiction that capitalism has always contended with.
Wouldn't it be just great if workers could be rendered so vulnerable, precarious and exploitable that they wouldn't dare to ask for higher wages? How do you do that? Break their unions, destroy public services on the way to privatization, eviscerate the welfare state, keep workers divided using race and nationality and anything else that fits the bill, instil an individualistic ethos of "each to their own" through relentless propaganda and finally, wield technology as a weapon. Forget the emancipatory potential of technology, the possibility of doing way with drudgery. Technology must be used to hammer the working class into obedience and submission, not to produce flying cars and cancer drugs. Is it any wonder that supposed technological advancement isn't showing up in productivity statistics but is already causing unemployment?
But how long can this continue? How much more exploitable can the working class become? How much more oppression can be meted out to them in addition to the Washington Consensus, the wars, the genocides and the climate breakdown already being foisted on them? And that is where the ultimate aim comes into play: full spectrum dominance. There are large territories and populations up for grabs, those of the defiers of Western capitalism's hegemony, the Chinas, the Russias, the Irans and so forth. Is it any wonder that military spending is being jacked up? Any wonder that genocide and starvation are being normalised? Any wonder that the imperial overlords are making grand pronouncements of the need to defend freedom and democracy in their bid to whip up consensus for capitalism's ultimate quest, WW3?
"free movement of labor over the border would allow for cross-border organizing and wage equalization"
I'm assuming that you are referring to the upholding of the ideological underpinning of "othering" of workers outside of "our" nation-state as "our" competitors? That aside, internationalisation of labour is seemingly the only antidote to the globalisation of finance in the race to seek the highest profit extraction irrespective of the native rights of conditions of the workers being profited from; the gulf between labour solidarity boycotts and Trumpian tariffs being the opposing class interests being upheld?
I'm merely also aware that: on my own damp wee island: our economic woes are increasingly being somehow displaced on to the plight of those benighted souls perilously crossing the world's busiest sea-lane in unseaworthy dinghies, obfuscating how the entire UK social and economic infrastructure has over the last half century - been incrementally ripped out from beneath us and tipped into the global roulette wheel.
Above all: thank you for such a thought-provoking article! ☺️