Assault on the Border

by sasha k

The next WTO ministerial will meet within the safe borders of Qatar. This is no surprise; did anyone really believe all this talk of dialogue? During the Seattle meeting, an official from China commented that if the meetings were held in his country there wouldn't be such problems as we saw in the streets. And so it is. Some British biotech firms are shifting their genetic-crop testing precisely to China; no elves of the night there yet. Quebec¡¯s new wall is being built to protect the FTAA meetings. So what is to be done? More city based Global Days of Action anyway? How about an assault on the border?

There has been a lot of talk about globalization as the disappearance of the nation-state or the border, but the truth is that exclusion is the other face of capitalist globalization. Borders are getting more flexible for the flow of capital and commodities and stricter for people. Those who cross borders illegally are facing harsher treatment. This is necessary for the continued accumulation of capital. Labor is trapped and separated while capital can easily pick up and move to where labor is the cheapest. Maintaining differences in wage rates is essential to an always-globalizing capital; that is why capitalism can never do without the state and its borders. Thus nationalism isn¡¯t an alternative to globalization, as a minority within the anti-globalization movement would have it.

The border is one of capitalism¡¯s weak points, both physically and rhetorically. All the talk of globalization and one world fades under the harsh lights of the border patrol and the detention centers. Every week we hear more horror stories of human transport, of escape and capture: escape from low wages and destroyed lives and capture within new regimes of precariousness and powerlessness. And the immigrants keep coming. And the walls must be built higher, the penalties harsher.

Instead of another Global Day of Action in the cities, instead of activist tourism to Qatar, let¡¯s target the border, the detention center, the gated community, the sweatshop (the sweatshop is the child of the border after all). We need to fight the regime that identifies some as illegal and others as legal. This division enforces a precariousness upon us all, a precariousness that disciplines each of us and opens us to greater exploitation. A continued focus on the WTO and financial capital builds the impression that we are only against a certain type of capitalism. It also opens the movement to cooptation by nationalists and the far right. A focus on borders will expose the wrongheaded arguments of the nationalist fair-weather friends within the anti-globalization movement, and it will show that the globalization we desire can only be accomplished through the destruction of the nation-state and capitalism. Immigration struggles are found everywhere; for this one we don¡¯t need to follow the bureaucrats on their holiday in the sun. The struggle against borders and detention centers is an ongoing struggle of the excluded, the exploited, to determine our own fate. We are all illegal until no one is illegal. Exclusion kills us all.

The targets are everywhere; you choose the tactics. Such a struggle is not a one-day event.

http://www.geocities.com/kk_abacus