WHILE buying something from a corner shop in a lower-middle class neighbourhood of Islamabad this past week I overheard the shopkeeper exhorting a customer-friend who had presumably tried and failed to find a way to the ‘West’ to get himself into Turkey and join the thousands of refugees streaming into Europe. The person being given the advice was clearly not a refugee himself, so one can only assume that others like him are jumping on the proverbial ‘refugee’ bandwagon in an effort to reach European shores.

On the surface the droves of people heading West on foot from the Arab-Turk zone are survivors of the bloody conflict that continues to play out in Syria — while the civil war is now three years in the making, there has been an escalation in violence recently due to a Russian offensive designed to give the besieged Assad regime some much-needed breathing space.

The mostly covert support being provided to anti-Assad rebels by the US and other Western powers has intensified accordingly. Hence an intensifying stream of displaced peoples.

Labour flows towards capital-rich heartlands.

Common sense suggests that the influx of people into Europe at the present time is abnormal. While the numbers are higher than usual, the truth of the matter is that millions of people — mostly from Asia and Africa — are constantly trying to find ways and means to get into Europe (and north America, Australia and so on). Indeed, labour flows constitute a central feature of the global political economy, which is to say that there is an urgent need to conceptualise the movement of people in terms of the international division of labour rather than assume that it only becomes a ‘problem’ during ‘humanitarian’ crises.

Certainly many commentators are calling attention to the man-made disaster that is the Syrian conflict. Imperialist interventions both in favour of and against an authoritarian regime have wrecked Syrian society and precipitated the displacement of millions of people.

But war and other overt forms of conflict are only one part of the much larger — and grotesque — story of capitalist modernity. So, for instance, while a majority of the world’s people today agree that the mass export of African slaves to the Americas was a heinous crime, very few take the time and trouble to consider how different modern forms of labour control and movement are from formal slavery.

We are alerted from time to time about what is called ‘human smuggling’, but again this barely scratches the surface. The fact is that a vast majority of those who move away from relatively poor regions in search of a better life do so not because of coercive force per se, but because labour flows towards capital-rich heartlands.

Staunch neo-liberals would argue that this conforms to the idea of the ‘global village’ in which we all apparently reside as equals. In fact global and country-level structures of power discriminate greatly against the labouring poor, and particularly migrant labourers. It is no surprise that (non-white) working people are trying to smuggle themselves into Europe under the pretext of the Syrian refugee crisis given the harsh restrictions otherwise placed on their movement.

In short, while capital is completely mobile to enter and exit countries, labour is not. This is just one of the many yawning gaps between ‘free markets’ in theory and actually existing capitalism, conveniently ignored by ruling classes, the media and mainstream intelligentsia alike.

The original ‘free market’ economist Adam Smith actually dreamt of a world in which labour was as mobile and unrestricted as capital. This would produce, for Smith, mutual benefits for all and the most efficient use of society’s — and the world’s — resources.

Yet the Smithian hypothesis of ‘unhindered’ markets is at best naive, and at worst deliberately misleading because in the real history and politics of the world, the poor, people of colour, women and so on are, to use an Orwellian phrase, ‘less equal’ than the ‘free individual’ found in the tomes of modern liberalism.

Of course we have moved on from the era of European colonialism but only insofar as it is no longer politically correct to be racist, misogynist or blatantly elitist. The rise of anti-immigrant political parties in Western countries indicates how much has actually changed. Whatever the contemporary context, the rules of the game remain heavily stacked in favour of the historically dominant and against the historically oppressed.

Yes, labouring people who do make it to capitalist heartlands generally enjoy some form of upward mobility. But life often remains very hard — and even this option can never be exercised by the vast majority of working people.

Those who can’t go abroad move to big cities within Pakistan, and even there they often suffer intense exploitation. Whatever their plight, working people are always on the move, seeking the right to life. Marx called it ‘wage slavery’.

The writer teachers at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, October 23rd, 2015

On a mobile phone? Get the Dawn Mobile App: Apple Store | Google Play