TRASHFUTURE - Riley's Commie Book Club: 'Violent Borders'

Episode Date: July 19, 2018

It’s another month, the moon has turned, a butterfly rustles its wings in the Amazon, and it’s time for yet another episode of Riley’s Commie Book Club! This month we’re reading 'Violent Borders' by Reece Jones, published by Verso Books. We talk about the roots of borders in exploitation, and the important role they play in allowing capital to externalise its own contradictions. Riley gets frequently distracted and remembers stories from his personal life. Ably produced as ever by Nate. Check it out here: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2516-violent-borders

Well, wouldn't you know it? I've done it again. I picked up and read a book. And so now you have to listen to me talk for the next little while, minus Hussein and Milo, neither of whom reads, mostly because Hussein only reens manga. And Milo has the attention span

of what you guys keep telling me I should replace him with. Usually it's a tropical fish, a small dog, a shop, I think someone said. What else was the most recent one was a nice plate of meat and cheeses, which actually, since we started recording at the studio, is an element of Trash Future,

the podcast about how the slogan is not something I say anymore on a regular basis, because I'm going to keep it as a treat for everyone. It's not a regular feature anymore, the luxury food, because the studio is not my house. And my house is close to the nice, nice shops, we'll say, and the studio is not. It's got a co-op nearby.

So usually we might have a couple of beers, which explains why it's so coherent all the time. Anyway, let's talk books. Why not? Because it's Riley's comic book club. Hello and welcome. I'm the Riley from the title that I just said. And this is my book club.

So we are this month, we've read Violent Borders, Refugees and the Right to Move, which is out on Verso. It is by Rhys Jones, who is a geographer at the University of Hawaii. I strongly recommend you pick it up. I think the e-book is,

either it was for a while, pretty heavily discounted. It's really worth a read. It's not super long. It's a sort of forensic and historical discussion of the growth of the border regime globally. We start looking, we look especially at the European Union and the States with sort of little delves into Australia, into even like the developing worlds,

the relationship between Bangladesh and India and Myanmar and Bangladesh. And so on and so forth. So yeah, it's very good. What struck me about it was that like a lot of, like more sort of academic socialist literature, it's really, really, really good at diagnosing what's going wrong.

But I feel like you never, okay. Sometimes I use this similarly to talk about when, design and sort of help clarify when sort of solutions are almost so broad that they're almost useless, right? Because the solutions that are offered are almost like, well, of course. So I'll just, I'll spoil it because you know, this is the, this is Riley's commie spoiler cast, I guess.

Some of the key solutions to the problems caused by borders, which we will delve into over the next however long I do this. The solutions really, are we looking at sort of opening borders globally? We're looking at sort of harmonizing labor markets to prevent like arbitrage between different regimes. And what was the third one? Sorry, Nate.

Yeah, and then like just limits on private property. And what that sounds to me like, if you were to imagine a global regime with high uniform worker protections and limits on if not the abolition of private property, I mean, other than just a very big, dicked version of earth that basically sounds like successfully globally exported communism.

And, you know, aside from the helpful guidebooks written by Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov, some of you might know as Lenin, other than sort of permanent revolution and permanently exporting revolution, I'm not really sure how we get there. But then again, a lot of good socialist writing is critique. And I think rather than being a sort of manual for praxis,

violent borders is a very, very good, very, very strong critique of the global border regime. I think that's how it's sort of most useful. So let's think of the chapters we're looking at. We are focusing first on the European Union, the world's most deadly border. It's the MS-13 of borders. Although I recently found out that MS-13

is the world's second most dangerous gang, of course, obviously, thank you, right-wing talking points. Chapter two, the US-Mexican border is looking more at militarization. Chapter three looks at the sort of global border regime. So we're like, okay, we've looked at the European Union and the US-Mexico border, the greatest defenders in the world of violent borders,

but we can see it popping up sort of everywhere. And then sort of the latter chapters, so that's the first three are kind of looking at, okay, what's the border situation now? The latter chapters are looking at kind of the sources of borders. Like, well, what do they come from? What's the point?

And really, one of the key conclusions, and we'll sort of explore this more later, is that the global border regime, whether it's looking at the borders of private property within states, administrative borders that sort of crop up all the time, within states sort of in history and now, and really how they're able to be used

as a method of control. And one of the things that we get out of this idea is that borders have sort of throughout history like been put up when somebody wants to engage in extraction or even slavery, because they want this sort of exclusive right to just pull as much from somewhere as they can without needing to share it with anyone

or being accountable to anyone. And how really it is, it's a way, and also he explores this through his discussion of the environmental effects of borders, which spoiler alert are bad. How it's, and this is something that really strikes me throughout the entire book, is that it's a way for,

it's a way for an actor who wants to act irresponsibly to create an internal and an external world into which they can externalize the negative consequences of what they do. And we see sort of over and over and over again, that's been the point of borders. So, whether it's a wealthy English aristocrat in the 16th, 17th century who's enclosing

a large sort of plot of land in order to plant cash crops, then gets to externalize the fact that, well, most of the people who sort of depend on him for support in the feudal system are just going to starve to death, because many of them did. But it allows him to say, well, that's not my problem, because this is my land,

and what happens on my land is my responsibility, and that's not my problem. What happens on my land is my responsibility, and my job is to keep people off of it. Don't worry about what it was 10 years ago, because that's the past, and we're a forward-looking England with our industrialization

that has only had good consequences. Anyway, so let's get into it. So, like I said, we're looking at internal borders, implied borders, national borders, even international borders like the European Union or what states are in NATO, or even like what states are in the West, because there was this picture

that sort of went around on Twitter a while ago called sort of the Great Wall, and it sort of notes that the top 20 most livable cities in the world, your various Nordics in Toronto and in San Francisco and whatever, all these wealthy places are contained behind what can actually be taken together as a way to keep the poor out.

That if you imagine a big wall along the southern border of the United States, a big wall against Africa in the Middle East in the European Union, of which there is, whether it's a physical wall, a fence, militarized sea outposts, there's the wall between Israel and the rest of the Middle East,

there's the wall between North and South Korea, and then there's Australia's sea wall. And taken together, it is actually a way to sort of all of these states that have been imperial powers or that have sort of enjoyed the sponsorship of imperial powers, with the slight exception of East Asia,

which we can, you know, it's a different thing, but thought by and large, either imperial powers or their settler colonial states, after having sort of plundered the world of most of, well, everything, have taken all the wealth back to their states, and then when the global system of states sort of solidified, not just in Westphalia,

but after the Second World War, and we sort of have the, we have the nowhere on earth isn't sort of covered by an independent state or nominally independent state, then the wall went up, and we sort of forgot that, you know, we forgot that it was through the plunder of empire, you know, that even most modern welfare states exist.

We forgot all of that and said, okay, the distribution of resources is now set, it's done, it's all natural, it's all, it's all good from here, and no one else can come in, right. So we talked sort of a little bit about, okay, what is a border? So it's not just a national border, like I said, you know, it's the long as you put up and defend a wall,

and you exclude and defend your right to sort of have exclusive access to an area, congratulations, you have a border. And Jones finds that sort of borders and violence are tied together in sort of five key ways, and sort of, it's important to I think about not just that borders are bad, but also that borders are specifically,

they're bad in ways that facilitate the power of capital by restricting anyone's ability to challenge capital. And so they do that sort of through violence, so five ways, there is direct violence, which is border guards just fucking shooting people, which occurs in Mexico, you know, if an ICE agent finds you and you're with, well, it used to be within 100 miles of the border,

now it's just fucking anywhere, but if an ICE agent finds you, they will do direct violence to you for having, either for trying to cross the border or for having crossed the border, direct violence. But there also is an increased chance of death, which is that most of these regimes have kind of walled, most of these states have sort of walled off

the easy ways to get across their borders, and thereby funnel people into ways that will probably kill them. And so you can remember, like there are organizations that leave water out for people crossing the southern border of the United States, because the places where it's easiest to get across are also the places where you'll probably die,

or rather the easiest to get across in terms of, well, it's least patrolled. And so there are organizations that have to leave people water or else they'll die. Or even you see that since 2005, like between 2005 and 2015 in that 10 year period, some tens of thousands, like 25 to 35,000 people, or some obscene number,

died trying to make their way across the border into the European Union, largely because, and here's actually something interesting. It's not something that Jones mentions, it's something that I'm aware of, because I actually have spent some time in this area, where the two worlds have rubbed up against one another, and it's been quite raw in the Greek islands.

Anyway, that airlines, there's a European regulation, that airlines, if someone is refused entry into a country, if someone is flying in without a proper visa, then the airline is liable to fly them back. That's why, quite frequently, airlines will actually check if you have the visa to go to the country you're going to. And so one of the border checks is kind of

externalized to airlines, just like the UK is now sort of trying to make its sort of border regime penetrate into the country by making banks' border guards, and university lecturers' border guards. And like when I was at university, if you didn't attend all of your tutorials, like the border, your tutor was supposed to be like,

well, they're not here for the real reasons of their visa, it's now my job as a university professor to take off my university hat and put on my border guard hat and be a border guard. So no, states love externalizing that. So they also externalize it on the airlines. And that's one of the main reasons that refugees to Europe can't just fly in.

Many of them, especially the people, and we'll talk a lot about this more, but many people fleeing the Syrian conflict or were at the time, middle-class Damascus folks, these are people who could easily afford an airline ticket, but they were denied the opportunity to purchase one because the airlines don't want to take the risk. And so then they're sort of forced,

not even by their own material conditions, but by the violence of the border regime to then undertake this very dangerous crossing in a boat from Turkey or Libya or wherever it is that they go. There is the threat of violence then for having crossed, whether that comes from sort of local fascists as I saw quite a bit of when I was in the Greek Islands in 2015, which I'll talk about a little more later,

or like I was saying regimes like ICE for just having crossed, having committed the crime of crossing, entry into society is illegal. But then those are the obvious ones, but then there are some less obvious ones. There is, and this is actually created by a sort of mismatch between the mobility of labor

and the mobility of capital, which is that economic well-being around the world is hurt because borders cause regulatory competition. And in a world where capital can move freely, competing regulatory environments will sort of tend to have a race to the bottom in terms of like worker protections and stuff because they want capital.

And so the fact is, Bangladesh as Bangladesh is tied to the land of Bangladesh. It's tied to the estuary that it's in. It can't upstix and move to Nevada and compete with Nevada for being there. Like no, it's there, its people are there, it's got its own resources, it's got its own cities, whatever.

But like capital, capital can scout the world for the best labor conditions. It can leave somewhere like the US, for example, where wages are high and workers have quite a few rights to then go to Bangladesh where they don't. And that kind of hurts everybody except for John Walmart. And finally, we also have environmental. And I think that the environmental damage

caused by borders is manyfold. It's both literal and the fact that just you know, borders that are put up don't just like the fences are blocking rivers and migratory paths and so on. But equally, again, like it creates a sort of short termism where a bunch of sort of arbitrarily defined units, we call countries are competing for

to be the most hospitable to capital, which is then able to once again start, it creates an external world for environmental issues to be externalized into, right? And so when the sea level, when sea levels rise, there are countries and that will fare well with it. Like I'm relatively certain, most of England will be mostly all right.

And that's because it's just got relatively high by the sea level or because it's, most of its cities are on hills or it already has the infrastructure to control variable sea levels from being ocean going power. Whereas what the fuck are desertified Sub-Saharan African countries gonna do? Bangladesh and the Maldives are gonna be underwater.

The borders allow certain entities to externalize these problems. So I'm gonna read a little bit from the book. This is actually from the end of the book. Like I said, we're not doing spoilers here. It's a little bit long, but I think it's very good. It sort of sums it all up. So here it goes.

Walls, borders, maps, properties, identity documents and enclosure laws are technologies of governments that are fundamentally about controlling and excluding. In the past, rulers and states use slavery and other coercive practices to control the movement of people within the state to ensure a stable supply of labor and troops for battle. It was only under the unique parameters

of the age of colonization that the poor of Europe were briefly encouraged to move in relatively large numbers to new places. So sorry, I'll do a brief digression here. This is why anybody who fucking says the United States is a nation of immigrants is a complete fool that should be immediately disregarded, but you can probably bamboozle them

with a wallet inspector scheme because I don't think they're technically sentient. This is the difference between settler colonialism and sort of modern migration or the modern conception of what an immigrant is. These places were used, the sort of the terra nullius. Well, of course it wasn't terra nullius. It was inhabited by people,

but the point of the sort of world of not states represented by the Americas and Australia and Africa to the world of states in Europe was that, oh, here is a place we can externalize our problem of urban poor. Here's a place we can go and extract from and the only people there are people we don't consider people and so we can displace.

So a settler colony, a settler colony is not founded by sort of migrants or refugees or anyone seeking a bet, seeking who's just simply seeking a better life because they are downtrodden. Rather, it is like once again another act of violence and extractive domination. So, you know, all that July 4th,

we were a nation of immigrants shit that people in the USA can fucking do one. Anyway, throughout the 20th century, I'm going back to reading, states have reasserted their ability to regulate the movement of the poor as more sophisticated passports and visa systems were put in place and more countries

began to patrol their borders for an authorized migration. The hardening and militarization of borders does not signal the retreat of sovereign authority. It signals the expansion of the ability of states to monitor and regulate movements in their territories and beyond. The rearticulation and expansion of sovereign authority means that it is no longer necessary

to maintain the internal external distinction between the police and the military as they maintain the boundaries of the state and private property. So I think that last line is really, really interesting because there is this sort of conflation of the state and property because the nation state, as we imagine it now,

kind of, you know, obviously it was not ever thus. I mean, nothing was ever thus. You know, but it, and it was, and the nation state now is sort of particularly unique because within a nation state, there really is very little, there's very little of it that isn't somehow property. Like if you think about England,

with the exception of, say, maybe, I don't know, various areas of outstanding natural beauty that are sort of parkland and maybe government buildings, the rest, the higher rest of it is private property. And even then, sort of, public property is sort of just private property that's owned by the state and in which we all have some kind of share. Like it's still conceptually very similar

even if the ownership model is different. It is still a bounded piece of land where certain rules apply to it. Those rules just happen to be slightly different from, say, privately owned private property. Anyway, the English border regime sort of, or any sort of modern border regime in many ways exists to protect the,

exists as the kind of grouping together of English property, of UK property holders, protect all of this private property in the UK from the global poor which are going to well come and maybe make demands on it. So, you know, can't have that. And the only reason something like the EU can exist with its sort of relaxed sort of freedom of movement,

whatever, is because more or less, everyone in that area is more or less rich and more or less won't, is basically can be trusted not to make any demands on that private property. Also, of course, it exists for how European countries to engage in sort of labor arbitrage and hollow out all of the middle classes of those territorial areas because they can do,

because they're really, what they're actually doing is they're competing, is they're allowing companies to compete with one another. Anyway, yeah, it's like competition of who can humiliate themselves the worst for the glory of, to get this new Amazon warehouse, which is definitely not just gonna, you know, kill all the businesses in a particular town

and then, you know, render its workforce into serfs who all live in tents. Anyway, I'm getting distracted, but the police protect private property, the military protects the border, they more or less work together to make sure the private property within a state is more or less protected more or less all of the time.

Whether that's from the poor within the state or the poor outside the state, they basically just have the same role. So that's sort of the, that's sort of how to think about borders in this book. And I mentioned Westphalia earlier, which I think many listeners are probably familiar with, but some might not be.

It was at the sort of, at the end of the, of the sort of a reformation and counter-reformation and the sort of various wars fought throughout what was then the Holy Roman Empire, which is more or less now lots of sort of Germany and Italy. There was this conflict between the sort of, I feel like the Lord's temporal, the various aristocrats who controlled

various feudal holdings. And notice I didn't say owned, they just sort of controlled them. So there was, there was a relationship between sort of the Knight of the Castle or the Duke or whatever, and his relationships up the great chain of being to the Holy Roman Emperor and or the Pope,

and then the relationships down the great chain of being. And there were sort of to the feudal serfs. And, you know, while I'm certain, you know, being a serf was probably a pretty bad existence, there were still mutual obligations that ran up and down the chain. So there would be land that would this, that would just sort of be under the sway of this family.

And they would have their serfs on it and their serfs would be working the land for the Lord, but they would also be working it for themselves. They would also be gathering firewood from around places and hunting animals and so on and so on. And there was not necessarily a, well, this is my land, this is your land. It was just sort of land because that's,

well, it's quite simply how the feudal economy worked. But, and that's also sort of how feudal states worked. It was, there wasn't like, there was just the areas controlled by certain families that had sort of obligations to one another that held so old fealty to the Pope in Rome or in the Vatican city. And it was sort of,

it was sort of a web of not as well-defined relationships. Obviously, any scholar of that period who's listening to this is probably tearing out their earbuds because I'm glossing over so much shit, but I'm so sorry to please write, write to the trash future DMs if you want a condolences. Maybe a sticker, we're gonna have stickers. Anyway, so what we get,

sort of as we get sort of modern capitalism developing out of this system is a sort of two-fold change. We get, and this is sort of, then this comes sort of through the piece of Westphalia and the Holy Roman Empire and the growing enclosure movement in England and Western Europe. The piece of Westphalia basically says,

look, all of these Catholic, Dutchies fighting the Protestant Dutchies, sort of wars of religion over sort of, reasserting papal authority over states that have decided they don't want that anymore. Let's state, sorry, over sort of various sort of nope sort of feudal collections that don't want sort of to obey the Pope, whatever.

The piece of Westphalia said, okay, we're actually gonna change things. We're gonna create a sovereign entity that is able to control a given area and they decide everything that goes on in that area. They can control it. They can take censuses of it. They can do whatever.

And then the Pope, his authority is now just spiritual. He can't actually command you to do anything. He's in the Vatican wearing gold slippers. He's fine. And so what this creates is the Westphalian state, which is the state as we would know it today, a sort of bureaucratic legal body that administers everything in a given area.

And usually in Europe, this would be concomitant with a nation. And a nation, as Benedict Anderson defines it in his book, Imagine Communities, is an imagined community. That is to say, you feel a kind of kinship with a person without ever having known them. You're not really in community with them

because you could know like what, 150 people actually well through your lifetime. But just like when everyone was happy about football coming home, we had experienced this, well, temporarily, we experienced a sort of imagined community with others throughout, well, I guess just England. Sorry, it's Colin Wales and no, no, no, no.

But we experienced this imagined community, which enabled us to feel a sort of sense of solidarity. This is in fact why Germans, not all Germans, but for example, Germans were more happy to sort of have subsidy payments flow West to East than they were to have subsidy payments flow from Germany to Greece to deal with the Euro crisis. There is a sense of community,

just as in the UK, subsidy payments flow up, but we are terrified of them flowing out of the country. Oh, you have to get rid of DFID, but everyone's fine with subsidy payments moving around the country because we have this sense of imagined community. Anyway, that's the nation, that's the state. Put them together, you have the nation state.

At the same time, this enclosure movement I was describing earlier is also happening. We begin, this is sort of the foundations of capitalism and how borders are so crucial. You put borders around private property, you put borders around a collection of private property that's sort of owned or managed by one kind of super organization that takes on defense,

and then you have this idea of the nation that sort of keeps everybody bought into this defensive private property, even though they have no real material stake in it. That is to say, that's why you can get a sort of poor, a poor city dweller from, you know, fucking, I don't know, from 17th century Prussia, to rise up and defend Germany against their aggressors,

even though really you're just defending the interests of the private property holder alone, Germany, Prussia. You're defending the interests of Prussian private property holders to maintain sort of extractive, exclusive use of their property. So this is why you can never extricate borders and nations and states, private property and capitalism.

It's all kind of tied up together, and it's all kind of is this ideology, it's all mixed together into this ideological soup that maintains these powers. So what we kind of get to give us this, well, this modern condition is that we mentioned earlier that I mentioned in the passage that I read that there was a time where European states

were able to use what we might call settler colonialism to deal with their own problems of the urban poor. That is to say, capitalism has always been very good at dealing with its internal contradictions by externalizing them. Now, there was another book I was reading, I don't have with me, but it's called How Will Capitalism End by Wolfgang Strick.

It's also very, very, very, very good. I strongly recommend it. And he was thinking, well, look, we've been calling time on capitalism since for fucking ever, and yet it still persists. He's like, okay, well, why is that? Because we know it has contradictions. We know it's not an internal system.

You've had other systems before now, and we'll have other systems subsequently. What will they be? And so what Strick sort of comes down on is like, look, capitalism has always had a few Trump cards in its hands because it is such a totalizing control of everything. Now, he doesn't go sort of frank for at school

and say, well, yeah, the Trump cards are sort of based on sort of culture and psychology and stuff. He says that he's much more sort of an economist. And he says that the Trump cards have been stuff like privatizing public debt. So encouraging lots of people to engage in sort of private consumption smoothing

by taking out lots and lots of loans by making credit available very cheaply through private actors like banks. It's able to respond to or massive injections like after the Great Depression into public works and all this. So it's able to respond to crises by sort of kicking the can down the road.

Now, of course, Strick thinks that we've probably used the last Trump card and that it's probably gonna collapse from now. And hey, maybe it will. Maybe it's got another Trump card up its sleeve. I think it probably doesn't. But hey, what the fuck do I know? Anyway, but I think like this whole idea

of settler colonialism was a very early Trump card where capitalism was able to solve one of its crises, was able to sort of externalize one of its contradictions. I say, okay, well look, we're France, we're England, whatever, we have an enormous population of working poor that we can't possibly, well, we don't want to provide for particularly because I need more gold shoes. So, but also there are fast tracks

of as far as we're concerned, empty land. So why don't we just increase the available pool of resources to split among everybody so we don't have to give anyone anything. And then maybe we can also send some companies out there to wall stuff off and engage in sort of extraction. And so we send the French, the English, the Italians, the Germans, laterally, sort of begin,

ship everyone everywhere. And what this does is this, this is, well, this is not a rational or reasonable response from a moral point of view. It's a way for a poor underclass to, well, depour itself. It's a way to get resources. Well, the problem, because let's see, the problem is I'm a working stiff in London,

I've got a life expectancy of like three. Most of my kids are dying and I'm living in a place the size of a couch. I'm being, and I'm told, oh, hey, I can stop being that. I can go just get a farm. Like in that movie, The Vividge, where a goat will kill me, but I can go, I can get a free farm somewhere else.

Great, my issue, I have, because I am poor, I have needed to move. The state has facilitated me moving. There was this huge single minute through settler colonialism of movement. But then the problem is fast forward to now and there are no terra nulliuses left. Because the modern day equivalent

of the poor working stiff in London, who sort of is on the one hand, the backbone of the economy, but on the other hand, it's most intensely exploited subject. That person doesn't really live in London anymore. That person lives in Manila. That person may live in Brazzaville.

That person lives in Dhaka. In fact, we come back to Bangladesh again and again, because it's where wages are low and a lot of garment manufacturing takes place. But I digress. So, you know, we had to ask ourselves if the solution to extreme poverty in sort of the West, in the newly industrialized West,

in fucking the sort of 15th to 19th centuries was just to go and use the resources of another place to not be extremely poor. What's the solution now? Where the fuck is the, you know, where the fuck's the guy in Bangladesh who's working 20 hours a day as a garment manufacturer for, you know, 75 cents?

Where the fuck's he gonna go, the moon? Probably not. So, there is sort of this fudge, this thing that capital was able to do to sustain its own existence has, well, it's used that trump card, it's gone. You know, there is nowhere left for the global hyper-exploited to go

to kind of kick the can of the internal contradiction of their situation down the road. Because the problem is, to sustain levels of consumption in the West as they are, we need that hyper-exploitation. There is no, you know, eight pound shirt, eight pound t-shirt, plus a high level of corporate profits for the H&M group or Walmart or whatever.

There isn't that without hyper-exploitation of labor in Bangladesh. So, if you like, we've got this impossible trinity of cheap consumer goods, profitable companies, and basic human rights for people who aren't here. And like I said, borders allow us to externalize that problem.

We don't have to, like, cheap consumer goods and the Industrial Revolution, along with profitable manufacturing concerns, required the hyper-exploitation of local labor. You know, they required the hyper-exploitation of people who were right there and who would then agitate for change because of the inherent contradiction

of the system they were in. But Bangladeshi workers can't agitate for change in English wage policy because, well, A, they can't, maybe it wouldn't affect them even if they could. So they can agitate for change to Bangladeshi wage policy and, by and large, they haven't really been as able to for a whole wide variety of reasons. And even if they could, even if they did,

which I guess they did after roundup plaza collapse, which I'll get into a bit later, then the Walmarts of the world would just go elsewhere. They would find another place to race to the bottom or they would say, okay, we're actually done overseas, we're done overseas manufacturing entirely. We've realized we can actually re-onsure everything but automate it.

Thank you, Bangladeshi workers, for sacrificing your bodies, your lives, or your fingers, whatever, to sort of allow us to keep making enough profit to automate everything. Checks in the mail, you know? That's all they can really, I will have obviously checks not in the mail,

nothing's ever in the mail from them. And that totally externalizes that contradiction because what can they do? Well, I'll tell you what they can do, and this is what they do do, is they can be like, well, we can't go to where there's nobody, but we can go to where there are higher wages

as mandated by law. We can go, it's almost, and this sort of, if you like, I'm not gonna say migration crisis because as we talked about on our recent episode with Zoey Gardner, there is no migration crisis. It's just worded that way, but as part of the global wave of migration

that sort of has always been occurring, but parts driving this one is the fact that this is the contradiction coming home. This is, we wanted cheap shirts and profitable companies and we didn't wanna see the problem. And so the problem was never gonna go away. The problem now is that people are saying, well, we're gonna come in to Europe,

which again, they should, because that's where there is money. That's where there are rights. That's where, if I'm working in a garment factory, it's not gonna be great, but I'm not gonna be constantly at risk of dying, whether from starvation or a collapsing building. And this is why the distinction between

mere migrants and refugees is such a politically useful and pernicious one, because the global border regime has its exceptions, but its exceptions were built specifically in the wake of World War II. And again, I won't go into this too much because you can just listen to our episode with Zoey about it, but to distinguish between someone who would die

because they're gonna starve to death because their job isn't paid them and they have to work in a shoebox teetering on top of a high tower, and someone who's gonna die because they're gonna be shot by a political enemy. Like we said in the episode, you're just as dead either way. So why are we sort of saying,

well, no, you should respect the border regime and just make the best of it as you can in Bangladesh. Fuck you, why? Right, like the West has benefited off of the creation of the conditions that has made it basically unlivable to be in so much of the developing world, which is also a euphemism.

It's developing because we stopped it from developing. Anyway, so we're saying, well, that's an illegitimate migrant because they're just looking for a better life. Again, sorry, there's a police nearby. Yeah, again, go fuck yourself. This is someone who's gonna be as dead, and they're gonna be as dead because of us,

not because of a more localized conflict. So that's why that's sort of such a pernicious idea and should be resisted at every turn. Cause that's the other thing that sort of I keep thinking of. Because this is sort of, I guess, something I saw. Cause like I mentioned a little earlier, I sort of had some up close experience of this. So in 2015, I had finished my final degree of university.

I had just finished a writing project. I was starting a new job the following and early 2016. I didn't have much to do. And one of my friends, who shall remain nameless, was a sort of fledgling reporter, decided that he wanted to do a story. And so we did, we went to the pub, and we were like, okay, I should add,

I was a photographer, I did, but I mostly just fucking went around Europe taking pictures of DJs, but I was on his board. So we went to the pub and we were like, all right, what's the cheapest place where we can go where something newsworthy is happening? And we sort of narrowed it down to Donetsk in eastern Ukraine or coasts in the Greek islands.

So we saw that there was a Thompson flight, so a package holiday flight going to coast, basically the next day that was fucking cheap as shit, way cheaper than Donetsk, which would have been very expensive. And so we were like, okay, fuck it, let's do it. So we booked an Airbnb, we grabbed our stuff, we sort of got up early the next day and we flew out.

And he spoke Arabic and Farsi, and I had a couple of words, I can open up a conversation, whatever. And we were basically just gonna go in bed and see what the story was. You know, we got in a tip that there was a hotel called the Captain Elias that was abandoned by its owners and was just owned by one of the Greek banks

that was doing so well at the time. And we were like, when we heard, I can't remember how, that the bank was going to send in goons of the hired variety to go clear out the refugees who'd been encamped there, because apparently they posed a risk on their insurance. Okay, well, I guess let's go bear witness to that and see what comes of it.

So we were there for a little while in this town, in this seaside town. It was a relatively harrowing experience because I don't know, nothing really prepares you for that. We're seeing that, I mean, it becomes difficult to continue feeling like a journalist in the face of something that is so inhuman as understanding that this town is now a sort of camp of people

whose lives had become impossible and who had decided that the best thing to do for themselves or their families was, you know, to roll the dice, come here. We found lots of guys who were saying, look, who were talking about their plans, they were like, look, if I say I'm gay, I won't be able to go back to Iran.

If I get a tattoo of a cross, all, if I go back, a lot of them were from Iran, actually. Some were Afghan refugees living in Iran or then came over a lot or West African. That's beside the point. You know, if I get a tattoo of a cross, then, you know, I'll be at risk of dying in my home country of Iran.

And then, you know, then I won't be able to be, they can't deport me. And, you know, these are people who were basically just faced with the prospect of, well, my life's gonna suck and be short. And the global border regime says, no, you have to be okay with that because reasons. You have to be okay with that so that, you know,

fucking ghouls and Tory shires, you know, don't vote out their blood-sucking MPs. I mean, if you wanna know why I'm sort of so mad all the time, I mean, I haven't really stopped being mad since I got back from coast. Especially because a lot of the, when I was there, a lot of the sort of Syrian families had sort of already come and gone, right?

These are the easy migrants to process. These are the obvious refugees, you know, regardless of whatever else. This is, they're the ones with the easy cases. They're the ones where it's even easy to sell them politically. When we were there, it was basically just single men. And the air of despair was pretty palpable.

The most difficult, I mean, so let's say difficult. It sounds weird. There was, you know, the most, I guess, affecting. And something I still haven't really gotten over was I met this guy from Iran. I won't say his name, but he came over because, you know, he was highly educated, he spoke perfect English.

I'm not saying that gives him more of a right to be here. That's a dumb fucking lib take. This is slightly more personal, I guess. And his parents were on the wrong side of the revolution. And, you know, that's a big grandparents, rather. And that's a big thing in determining sort of what position you get. So he could either look forward to a life

as, you know, limited to no opportunity, or he could, you know, go somewhere where you'd have more of a chance. And I remember so keenly that we'd met this, these German girls who were just sort of coordinating logistics of just getting food to the camp all the time. But I really, I couldn't deal with,

I couldn't deal with the idea that I was standing on one side of an object, of an objective journalism wall, and there was another guy who I felt such a sort of close connection with. I sort of, it was sort of like a thing on the edge of my mind that I felt, like when I returned to London,

I sort of expected to just be able to text him and have him be at the pub because it just felt like a natural friend, and that there was this border that was keeping that from being a thing. And I remember that I was talking to these German girls running this NGO, and I really, hey, can you go tell people we're serving food?

But when I was talking to him, I believe we were just, I would just talk about, I just wanted to fucking hang out. And I went out there and I was like, hey, they're serving food. I don't know if you care, if you feel like it. And you know, he said, well, of course, man, I'm starving.

And it was the border that created that relationship. It was the border that made that hierarchy that I was so angry about, and I was very struck by it. It was very upsetting. So I gave him my email address, and I didn't hear from him after that, which is, I guess, not ideal.

Yeah, I think about that all the time. Anyway, yeah, borders, borders hurt everybody. In a jarring shift in tone, shift in tone, I kind of want to, sorry, a jarring shift in tone, I kind of want to go back to how borders hurt everybody, not just personally, but economically also, where Jones is then writing about how,

and I quote, the overt coercion of state-sanctioned slavery is largely in the past, but the poor are still contained in developing countries and forced by lack of other options to work for very low wages in order to make products to benefit the very wealthy. Now, this is something I've sort of gone through, but we can then ask, well, now what does that do to the working class in the countries

that if you like benefit from the global border regime? Because I'll give you a hint, it's nothing good, because what borders prevent the movement of is people, they don't prevent the movement of, especially in this world of sort of free trade, WTO, NAFTA and the European Union, is they do not prevent the movement of capital. Capital can go anywhere.

And so if you are Roosevelt and you're creating the new deal, right? If you're creating this body of law that prevents excess speculation by business that stimulates sort of, that includes minimum wages, that includes the banning of child labor, that basically just makes it more okay to be a worker, what you're doing is you're making it more okay

to be a worker only in the United States. You need to be basically isolationist for that to work. Because also you need to be in a situation where, well, capital, when you say capital, you mean a factory that you can't just move. But now, especially after the 70s, the financialized capital that can sort of move freely, you're able to sort of engage in arbitrage.

You're able to make the working class of one country more or less obsolete. You're able to hollow it out, as happened in Britain in the 1980s, as business has been happening in the US for the last sort of 30 years. All of these working people who managed to win themselves protections,

those protections were ephemeral because then the liberalization of capital meant that capital could just upstix and fuck off. So if you win a minimum wage law, that's only effective in as much as you can make sure that the money to pay you with a wage still stays fucking there. We say in terms of capital flight,

like we're gonna make this a better place to be a worker. Good luck taking your house and car with you. In many ways, I think there is something to that, where it's just you have to do the job all the way. So if you raise minimum wages, say, without expropriating the rich, that gives the rich enough sort of power to strike back and hire other people.

And so the working class of the United States isn't really the working class of the United States. The people who are producing the products with their relationship to capital, where they're working at a factory at a low enough wage, produce things they can't afford, creating one of the internal contradictions of capitalism and causing the rate of profit to fall over time,

that working class just isn't in the United States, it's in China, it's in Bangladesh, it's elsewhere. And so the working class in the United States is then made obsolete. And so either it has to continue existing on sort of residualized and residualizing benefits, where, oh, we're gonna make work pay. It's like, well, we did make work pay,

it's just we made it pay way less elsewhere. And we're able to do that because we have these hard borders, more or less keeping people in prisons. So we have the hard borders within the US, for example, keeping people from just going in and taking stuff from the rich. And we have the hard borders between the US and Mexico, preventing Mexican workers from coming

and enjoying the fruits of their own fucking labor. So Jones concentrates on Bangladesh in the ways in which sort of regulatory arbitrage has caused problems there. Regulatory arbitrage is just what happens when a company sees there are two, it can make a profit by relocating itself from one country to another.

So in 2013, when Rana Plaza, a sort of large textile manufacturing complex with lots of little factories in it that subcontracts to the contractors who they're then contracted to make, I don't know, H&M's next shirt or whoever the fuck, I don't know who they make shit for. In 2013, when the Rana Plaza collapsed,

the minimum wage in Bangladesh was $39 per month, one of the lowest in the world. If a worker worked a standard eight hour shift, five days a week, that wage would be 24 cents per hour. Although many workers work more hours than that per month because they are routinely given productivity targets that are impossible to meet. In order to finish the task,

they have to stay awake late or work hard holidays or days off. If they miss their targets, they're not paid or fired. And because factory owners want to maximize profits, they cut corners on safety issues, ventilation, sanitation, they don't pay overtime, they don't offer worker assistance, they don't offer fucking vacation.

They're basically just slaves just with a small amount of payment. And so, if you're a company and you want to make the most possible money, why the fuck wouldn't you go over there? You can say, oh, well, consumers in the West won't stand for it. And it's like, well, they will.

They have, they'll continue to. And, you know, again, it's like Jones says, you can't focus on the bad apples of the global labor system. Just like you can't focus on the human traffickers that are bringing people over the borders because just like borders externalize problems physically, borders are also a way

because we like to imagine that they're natural and they're sort of exogenous to the system to exogenize the cruelty of the modern capitalist system. You know, we're able to say, well, that's just individual companies taking advantage of Bangladeshi labor laws. Well, it's like, well, but the system is created. The system not just of capital,

of hyper exploitation by capital, but the system of borders creating prisons in which people must live creates the conditions where they're incentivized to do that. I mean, obviously we should shame them for, you know, being horrible, but you have to understand that, you know, if even if they close, another one's just gonna take their place.

You know, you can never look at just the actors. You must look at the system and you cannot look at the global capitalist system without also looking at the borders that it depends on to constrain labor and prevent a global labor movement from coming up and overthrowing it in any case. And so what we say, you know, is, yeah, this is what Jones says.

He says the economy has been hampered by artificial barriers, political borders that contain labor and regulators, but not capital. And yeah, like I said, in the beginning is, I mean, his solution is basically good, but you know, it's just institute global communism. I'm all for, but I don't know how we get there.

Oh, fuck, you know what? At the beginning, I was gonna, you know, give my simile that I always use when I want to, when someone gives sort of an overly broad solution to a very specific problem. Just imagine that your, this is what I used to say when people used to give me dating advice and be like, just be confident.

I'd be like, well, I'd say imagine if you have been dropped into Shanghai, right? You're in Shanghai. Welcome to Shanghai. It's really fun. I used this, I spent a lot of time there. It's really fun. But you're in Shanghai and you need to ask yourself

to ask directions to the airport because you don't live in Shanghai. You've just been dropped here. And you're just like, okay, shit. All right, I need to get to the airport, but I don't speak Chinese. What do I do? And you know, the advice that you get through a magical,

or maybe a plane flies by dragging a banner behind it. It says, you should just speak Chinese. And it's like, I mean, yeah, but there are a whole host of more immediate problems to solve in order to get to that state of affairs, right? Like that state of affairs kind of just describes what the solution looks like. And just to be honest, I know I've been ending

sort of commie book clubs. There's sort of note of despair recently. If anyone has a book, I didn't want to recommend to me, not for next month, where I already have the book chosen, but maybe for the month after. Maybe that won't make me really sad. You know, do send it up. Anyway, so I don't know really what to do about it,

of course, other than, you know, institute global revolutionary communism, which sounds pretty good. Anyway, I strongly recommend reading this book. It is a very penetrating look at the ways in which this invented construct of the border, whether internally or externally, only exists to protect the privilege of a very small number of people

at the expense of everyone else. And by believing in it, and by believing in things around it, like the nation, or by believing it's natural, and oh, the traffickers fault for herding people is because they brought them over the border. It's like, well, there wouldn't fucking be traffickers if there wasn't a border to bring them across, and there wasn't critical, crucial, insane,

historically unjust levels of inequality between states. Now fucking would there, you know? Anyway, this book is a great exploration of all this shit. In fact, it's such a great exploration that it can get depressing at times. I strongly recommend you read it. Anyway, I also strongly recommend you check out Jinseng on Spotify,

who provides our theme song, Here We Go. I strongly recommend you commodify your descent with a t-shirt, and you know, hey, you know, maybe you can break down the border between yourself and great flavor with some Vremi cookware. We're gonna do an episode, I think, a little more on Vremi in the future. Actually, Nate, cut that out.

Cut that out. I don't wanna tell them that we're gonna talk more about Vremi. I want it to be a discontinuous surprise. Anyway, that's been me. Thank you very much for listening to all the dumb shit we produce, including the Kami Book Club,

which has, for some reason, very swiftly become one of my favorite things to do. Do you know that it's possible to monologue for an hour plus about a given topic if you get pissed off enough? I didn't know that, but it is. So yeah, thank you for listening. Buy this book.

Tell your friends about the show, I guess. This is great. I rarely have enough time at the end of episodes to actually concentrate on a subject, because usually, one of the dinguses I record with has gone off on some riff about what if the Caliphate of Tower Hamlets invaded Islington or some such thing. But do tell your friends about it,

because that's literally the only way we grow. I mean, we just started this because we bought a mixer and we're joking around with it and we basically have no backing. Except, of course, by cookware companies and t-shirts. So yeah, do that. So thanks to my co-hosts for not being here, distracting me with a name, Nonsense.

Thanks to Nate for your heroic efforts at producing all of my Nonsense. And thanks to you. Thanks to all the hustlers and thanks to you, the customer. I've been Riley. This has been Kami Book Club. This has been Trash Future.

You're all beautiful. I love all of you. Have a lovely evening.