°Harmondsworth riots
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Two days ago: “Britain’s largest immigration removal centre, Harmondsworth … is being run with a regime that is as strict as any high security prison, with those facing deportation victimised by staff and some strip-searched and temporarily locked in solitary confinement, according to the chief inspector of prisons.” | Indy update
Hey Angela,
I just came across this anouncement for the
“Day of Friendship with Workers without Papers” to take place in March, in the website of Organisation Politique. Somewhat similar to the “Day without Migrants” in the US last May 1. Considering how the date is set in March it seems like they have a big mobilization in mind. I paste a rough translation below.
http://www.orgapoli.net/
An enunciation of the sort “We the workers, with or without papers” does articulate a challenge, an unprecedented statement. But the whole question of how viable is a politics of rights-claiming is at stake, besides the rights in this case are being demanded “on basis of work” (school..etc) . But that is also what makes it possible to construct an alliance with the citizenry. The construction sites for European democracy as Balibar imagines it.
I think, with Ranciere, I do understand the demand for rights as a polemical (axiomatic) gesture, instead of rights “to become one of the social parts”. In other words, demanding what the state cannot grant, “rights” formulated as unconditional.
What is at stake in the following formulation is quite different however. Claiming a “common basis” for rights, work as common between the illegal immigrant and the citizen.
I guess the question boils down to that of “rights” understood as unconditional and polemical, on the one hand, and, on the other, the need for the concrete-abstraction of a common (work, in this case) to bring together the migrant and the citizen in a collective enunciation.
THURSDAY MARCH 22: POLITICAL DAY Of FRIENDSHIP WITH the FOREIGNERS FOR the ABROGATION OF SARKOZY’s CESEDA LAW -
November 2006
THURSDAY MARCH 22
THE WORKERS DO NOT GO TO WORK
THE CHILDREN DO NOT GO TO SCHOOL
FOR A NEW LAW APPLYING THE FOLLOWING PRINCIPLES:
Regularization for the workers on the basis of work
Regularization of the families on the basis of certificate of schooling of the children and the young people
Regularization for the major high-school pupils and students on the basis of study
Regularization of the patients on the basis of medical follow-up in France
Regularization of the refugees on the basis of recognition of persecutions in the country of origin
The CESEDA Law installed in France a radical persecution of the State against hundreds of thousands of people without papers: workmen, young people, families, patients, taken refuge… With the CESEDA law voted in June and implemented in July 2006, the tracking and hunting of sans papiers do not know any limit any more: great raids on the workplaces and deportationh on requisition of the public prosecutor, expulsion of workers without papers, arrests and attempts at expulsion of pupils without papers and their families, or attempts at police intrusion at the hospitals against the patients without papers.
This law covers practices of collaboration organized against the workers without papers and their families. The police force, the prefectures, certain municipalities and the company managers in close cooperation to expel without rehousing the families without papers, or to refuse the right of lodging of sans papiers. For those without papers, the access to the care is increasingly difficult. To live without papers is to live in the obsession of control and arrest. Any step becomes a test without name: to find work, a housing, to take along one’s children to school, to receive treatment, to move… To have a personal life, to speak one’s mother tongue with one’s children, to practise one’s religion, are threatened things. We saw in the case of studnts without papers that the organization of networks aiming at protecting them from the attacks of the government had obliged the latter to move back and grant, on a case-by-case basis, some regularizations.
In the spirit of the work of the Gathering, it seems essential to us to tackle the CESEDA law frontally and to make of its abrogation the objective of the struggle. To speak about regularization of illegal migrants is not enough any more, it is essential that positive principles for obtaining papers are included in the law, that respect the reality of the life of people here. To repeal or amend the CESEDA law by restoring for example the 10 years law would be a disastrous exit. There is a continuity in the laws on the foreigners of 1997 with today: it is necessary to put an end to it.
We consider it essential that along with the abolition of CESEDA law democratic principles are put on paper: to count a worker as a worker, a young person having education as a pupil, and so on.
It is in this new context of toughening of the official policy and emergence of networks of mobilization in favour of the sans papiers, that the Gathering of the collectives of workers without papers proposes the collectives to discuss the great day of friendship with the workers without papers and their families, for the abrogation of the CESEDA law, which will proceed on Thursday March 22, 2007.
pomagrenade [December 6, 2006 @ 1:11 am]
Many thanks for this pom. Badiou is associated with (or part of) the Organisation Politique, yes? This formulation of ‘workers with and without papers’ is interesting - but I agree: the cost of trying to articulate a class solidarity by accepting labour as a condition is not so good. But I am not sure that it’s so much of a challenge as the acceptance of a certain kind of logic - given that many of the problems in the EU have to do with the coupling of residency permits and work contracts.
Though, how does one articulate right as unconditional? That is, for example: without the condition of ‘being human’ that attaches to concepts or human rights, and the resulting definitions of what it means to be (fully) human?
s0metim3s [December 7, 2006 @ 1:13 am]
Absolutely, there is a double bind involved in trying to undo the conditioning of residence permit on the work contract, meanwhile trying to base a solidarity on work. Badiou (he’s indeed part of the OP) emphasizes quite a few times in Metapolitics that the term migrant has caused the disapearance of “the worker” from politics, hence the need to bring the name of the worker back (onto the “place of the name”).
The same problem was also part of the demonstrations in the US last year, where one of the most widely used slogans was “migrants: workers not criminals”.
Are we perhaps dealing here with the inadequacy of any name, alongside the absolute need to forge one to designate the common? Or is there something more fundamentally wrong about this way of searching for a common to form alliances between the migrants to the citizens? For the reason that the common can be created through processes that are, however, irreducible to a name?
As for the ‘rights’ discourse, I do share your reservations, yet also find plausible a position such as Ranciere’s, on treating them textually and utilizing them for further inscriptions.
take care,
pom
pomagrenade [December 9, 2006 @ 9:03 am]
This gives me another reason not to like Badiou (though I’ve yet to read Metapolitics, which I obviously should).
Are we perhaps dealing here with the inadequacy of any name, alongside the absolute need to forge one to designate the common? Or is there something more fundamentally wrong about this way of searching for a common to form alliances between the migrants to the citizens? For the reason that the common can be created through processes that are, however, irreducible to a name?
Negri and Hardt would insist that there is an absolute need to designate an identity for political struggles to occur, but I don’t agree. Among other things, there are too many illustrations of the re-orientation of struggles toward policing that identity when identity is seen as the principal condition of struggle itself. So, yes - I agree there is something fundamentally wrong with trying to assert an identity, particularly insofar as this distracts from asymmetries, hierarchies, differences.
This is why I like the term ‘undercommons’ - as a way to think about the commons at its borders, what gets excluded or what differences are erased (or absorbed) in the presentation of a commonality.
s0metim3s [December 9, 2006 @ 1:17 pm]