"IF UNITED EUROPE IS DEAD, EVERYTHING IS ALLOWED"
Law and order is not just a motto serving to oppress minorities; it can also function as a motto to protect them
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I must confess that I read with great interest Raphael E. Alvarenga’s detailed – and, I must admit, well-thought-out – criticism of how I deal with immigration. A longer quote is needed here which, I think, renders the gist of his argumentation:
“The utter impossibility of open borders within multinational capitalism is precisely why it is strategically essential for radical left politics today. As Žižek very well knows, every serious anticapitalist movement in the past has pressed on the system’s constitutive impossibilities. From the abolition of slavery to equal civil rights, from the eight-hour day to reproductive freedom... In practice, this means that while we can agree with Žižek that neoliberal multiculturalism is an inadequate response to migration, and that both xenophobic nationalism and naïve liberal humanitarianism should be rejected, we must not let fear of right-wing backlash dictate our strategy. Rather than choosing between social chaos and top-down crisis management, we should embrace bottom-up, democratic, grassroots internationalism in the form of migrant mutual aid networks, urban solidarity initiatives, and cross-border labor struggles. /.../ Anti-colonial struggles were not doomed because their vision was necessarily flawed or naïve; for the most part, they were crushed, contained, or co-opted because imperialist powers, acting in defense of the global capitalist order, could not tolerate successful experiments in economic sovereignty and redistribution. Whenever anticolonial movements had room to maneuver – as in early Tanzania (Ujamaa era), Burkina Faso under Sankara, Kerala’s left governments, or the Mozambican and Vietnamese experiments – they achieved tangible egalitarian gains. Where these projects were rolled back, the causes were overwhelmingly geopolitical rather than cultural. /.../ Recently, widespread collective resistance to federal immigration enforcement has taken shape in the U.S., sparking mass protests, mutual aid efforts, community support for affected families, and nationwide solidarity actions, demonstrating how locally rooted networks can confront exclusion and police brutality. Žižek, however, underestimates the formative dimension of such struggles. /.../ These practices do not merely respond to indifference and state violence but actively shape political subjectivities, collective capacities, and new horizons of emancipation. Only by building bottom-up, cross-border networks within today’s urban landscapes riven by inequality, precarity, and ecological hazards can we confront the systemic forces driving flight and immiseration, reclaim the universalist, emancipatory horizon of radical politics, and avoid reproducing the very structures of oppression and economic triage we seek to overturn.”1
Respectfully, I must bring out points where I disagree with this critique. Should we really insist on “constitutive impossibilities” of the existing global order today, at a historical moment when this order can only reproduce itself by way of brutally violating what appeared till now as its constitutive impossibilities? Is Trump’s government not ruthlessly violating not only the basic law-and-order rules (recall the law-breaking violence of ICE gangs) but also what was proclaimed till now to be the basic features of the “normal” market economy? Does the trend towards techno-feudalism not give power to agents who are no longer “normal” capitalists but new feudal masters who control each their own domain? When the Trumpian gangs infiltrated the Congress building to prevent Biden’s inauguration in 2021, was the moderate Left not fully justified in demanding a stronger presence and intervention of police and the National Guard?
