Capitalism and Migrant Labour Gareth Dale Introduction The 1990s have witnessed an explosive growth in research on migration. In Europe, following North America, the subject has become strongly defined as a specialist subdiscipline. In the process numerous informative (and some ground-breaking) studies have been published. One can leave major libraries with armfuls of volumes covering such topics as Tunisian women in Milan, US policy on Mexican immigration, and the assimilation of Italians in Santiago. The expansion of migration studies has generated abundant empirical research; however, subdisciplinary specialization has tended to encourage a narrowing of focus and concomitant lack of attention to the overall social processes within which migrations occur. Glance at the index of most volumes on migrant labour in the modern world and you will find a range of categories that are invoked in the course of analysis: labour markets and mobility, wages and skills, (un)employment, (uneven) economic development, globalization, citizenship and rights, law and illegality, nation-states, nationalism and racism. However, although frequently discussed in useful and insightful ways, such concepts tend to be handled as if self-sufficient, with scant regard to their interrelatedness. Some scholars, the outstanding example being Robert Miles, do pay greater attention to higher order concepts, analyzing migrations against a backcloth of theorized social change. Currently one of the most influential paradigms in such studies involves the counterposition of civil society (embracing human rights and private capitals) to the states-system. As if in an inversion of Hegel's Weltanschauung, the itinerary of civil society is depicted as universal whereas states are tethered to particularity. Capitals are posited as footloose, paying scant respect to borders. They represent the principles of fluidity and dynamism. Their movements stimulate those of labour; their interests therefore lie in its free mobility. With internationalization, the appropriate scale of labour mobility is global. Capital thus enhances the shifting and mixing of populations across the globe. It is a universalizing force, sowing a cosmopolitan future. Migration control is alien to its logic. Nation-states, according to the paradigm, are geographically emplaced, static. Their raison-d'etre is the maintenance of sovereignty over a demarcated territory. Their rule is sustained at one level through the monopoly of legitimate force, and at another by loyalty of 'their' population. The core of that loyalty is nationalism, which stems from culturally latent and politically constructed uniformity, defined in opposition to other nations. The forging and maintenance of national uniformity entails administration and surveillance, which ideally demands fixing the national population in place. States therefore have an interest in restricting the mobility of population. Immigrants represent a threat to national unity and, by extension, to state power. States erect walls and fences around peoples and territory, in defence of Heimat. To this sort of problematic some would add a rider to the effect that, in the present world, global economic integration lends increasing weight to capitals vis-a-vis states. The result is increased labour mobility in the face of which states, their relative powers dwindling, will become impotent. Nation-states may even dissolve, with national citizenship evolving into world citizenship. 1 This chapter dissents from the above approaches. It sketches an alternative conceptualization of the categories listed above (from labour markets to racism), suggesting that they are all, in determinate ways, 'internally related' (Ollman 1993) as moments of the developing social system known as capitalism. The argument is not novel, but draws on the works of Marx as well as contemporary Marxists - particularly Colin Barker, but also David Harvey and others. It proceeds along a 'spiral' path, beginning with a discussion of capitalism, its defining elements presented in bare abstraction; and proceeds through analyses of the regulation and mobility of labour, and the international system. In these sections - the bulk of the chapter - the regulation by states of people and territory is shown to be bound into the relations of production, class and property that define capitalism at its core; the accumulation of capital is shown to create and depend upon the disempowering and alienation of workers, their competition over jobs and resources, and the corresponding encouragement of divisive ideologies of nationalism and racism; and both the mobility and immobility of labour are shown to be produced by inherent tendencies of capitalism, rather than by separate dynamics of the 'economic' and 'political' spheres. The chapter concludes by discussing the implications of the preceding arguments for understanding the spatial economy of capitalism and the politics of migration and racism. Exchange and Exclusion2 Marx's starting point in analyzing capitalism is objects produced for exchange: commodities. Commodities have two properties: they are exchanged ('exchange values') before being used (what he calls 'use values'). The latter process is determined by their qualitative aspects; the former by quantitative comparison with other commodities, with 'abstract labour time' as the common standard. Each act of social production is validated through external 1 comparison of the abstract labour ('value') contained within. Under generalized commodity relations, the coordination of the activities of producers occurs 'behind their backs', through unplanned exchange. Such interaction is, on the one hand, based upon interdependence - the mutual need of independent producers for one anothers' products. On the other hand, it is coercive, with competition forcing all producers to conform to prevailing prices or risk returning from the marketplace with their commodities unsold. The social basis of generalized commodity production is thus a systematic separation whereby interdependent producers assume the form of atomized units governed by relations of competitive antagonism. For such a society to exist, some system of property rules must hold sway. Because exchange depends upon the alienability of commodities, ownership must be absolute, with others by definition excluded from possession. Generalized commodity production entails a system of private property, in which the whole world of use values 'is criss-crossed by innumerable property-fences, each in principle labelled "Trespassers Keep Out!"' (Barker 1998: 26). Property fences are erected on the principle of mutual recognition among commodity owners, thus presupposing a practicable notion of right. Their exchanges involve consent - the right to buy from and sell to whomsoever they choose. Formally, exchange is 'free and equal'; it is necessarily a 'juridical relation, whose form is the contract' (Marx 1976: 178). As Marx continues, the possessors of commodities 'must place themselves in relation to one another as persons whose will resides in those objects, and must behave in such a way that each does not appropriate the commodity of the other, and alienate his own, except through an act to which both parties consent.' However, equality is formal only. Equal rights define property relations that govern an unequal distribution of resources that is based upon a social division of labour in which producers relate to one another competitively, on the basis of the systematic separation of each 'from the objects of their need' (Barker 1998: 27). Pressures toward the transgression of property rights are thus an ever-present potential. If the freedom and equality of commodity exchange is to be upheld and respect for property rights enforced, an apparatus of management and coercion is necessary. In short, property, and therefore exclusion and force, are essential to the commodity form. As Barker elaborates (1998: 28), 'without the continuous organization of means of violence, the very possibility of the world of "value" relations would dissolve. . . . "Economic" processes demand, as a vital presupposition, the consolidation of a system of "rights" and "freedoms" and a set of means by which they may be maintained.' These tasks, above all the constitution and arbitration of contracts and the enforcement of exclusion (right), require a segment of society to be 'separated out to act as the universal force that objectifies all particular rights' (Kay and Mott 1982: 61). In practice, such unitary authorities take the form of states. Bourgeois states relate in contradictory ways to the sphere of commodity production. On the one hand, their tasks are specifically 'political' and public, involving authority over society as a whole. In this sense, their guiding principles contrast with those of commodity exchange. In Barker's words (1998: 30), 'the state's transactions with its subjects are not conducted according to the rules of the market, those famous principles of freedom, equality, property and [self-interest]. The freedom of the subject is always conditional; the state may declare its subjects free, but it also constitutes them as its creatures.' On the other hand, those authoritative relations are indeed rooted in a similar sort of absolute claim as private property, and operate according to cognate principles of possession and self-interest. States make exclusive claims to certain forms of authority over 'their' subjects, imposing their will upon people and things, usually within a framework of legal right. Their territory is spatial property; thus, like the fences around private property state boundaries are jealously guarded 'and maintained by force and the threat of force.' (Barker 1998: 47). Consequently, each state is concerned above all to protect and 'build' itself, a project that requires the development of policies for managing society. These functions, in turn, depend upon creaming a surplus from the 'economic sphere' (via taxation), giving states a compelling interest in 'economic' organization and direction. In the process the laws of private exchange and property are qualified - just as the rights of private property qualify the powers of states.3 In short, the state is obliged to treat civil society at least partially as its own property. Private property can be conceived broadly, as a differentiated totality - in Barker's words (1983: 68), as a system of social exclusions whereby the real community of producers (world-wide) is denied access to the socially produced and defined means of production. Frontier posts, immigration officials, passports, import regulations, tariffs and so forth are all manifest aspects of private property - and of the processes of exclusion which Marx examined at their most fundamental level in his consideration of the 'commodity-form'. Certainly in this perspective, state property is not a negation of private property, but merely one of its forms. Wage labour, States, Capital The concepts discussed so far have been introduced at a high level of abstraction, as characteristics of 'generalized commodity production'. But, as used by Marx in Capital, such a system is synonymous with capitalism. For, if 2 social wealth takes the form of commodities, then the 'factors' that produce that wealth are themselves exchanged. Production therefore depends upon money being advanced, and that, in turn, will only occur if profits are envisaged. Marx's innovation was to solve the paradox of how profits can be systematically produced without violation of the rules of fair and equal commodity exchange. Famously, his answer involved the discovery of a special kind of commodity - the energy and intelligence of workers ('labour power') - which possesses the apparently supernatural ability to produce a greater value of commodities than that required for its own production. The initial relation between capitalists and wage labourers is as 'free and equal' commodity owners. The former own their labour power, the latter the instruments and conditions of production which, when set in motion by labour, produce the goods. As commodity owners, wage labourers are posited as free subjects, owners of their selves. At least ideally, they can take their labour power to market and choose which employer to sell it to; after work they dispose over their wages howsoever they please. But, Marx's argument continues, they are also 'free' of instruments of production, and hence compelled to sell their labour power. Wage labour 'is therefore not voluntary but forced, it is forced labour.' (Marx 1975: 326). At work, wage-earners' rights to self-ownership may be partially asserted, but technically they are mere tools in the hands of capital - indeed, the very instruments of its aggrandizement. The contradictory 'freedom' of wage labour has a juridical expression. Wage labour is a peculiar sort of commodity (and therefore property), being embodied within a person with a will. Formally, workers and capitalists meet as equivalents, but in their exchange workers agree to submit their wills to the capitalist, so losing real subjectivity. Although Marx therefore describes the worker's freedom as an 'illusion', it is nonetheless one that does manifestly and juridically exist, and 'thus essentially modifies [the wage-worker's] relation [to appropriators of labour] by comparison to that of workers in other social modes of production.' (1973: 284). Thus, if the market appears as the realm of freedom and 'human rights' it does so on the basis of despotism. In Barker's rendition of Marx's account (1997: 36), the buyer and seller of labour power meet together, as formally free contracting agents, in the market. They transact their business under conditions of legal equality, with each of them entitled to refuse to enter into a contract with the other, and each entitled to bargain over the terms of any contract they do make. But, once the bargain is struck, they move off into a quite different sphere of social relations, within the workplace. Here the buyer of labour power demands the use of the property he has just hired, and sets the seller to work, as a worker. Now the relationships between them need to be described in a quite different language. . . . Marx turns to the political language deployed by the analysts of slavery and ancient empires, the language of 'despotism'. Within the workplace, the buyer of labour power has become the 'master', the 'boss', while the seller has transmuted into the 'hand', the 'worker', the 'wage slave'. Evidently, the worker's 'supernatural' ability is in reality the product of a distinctive set of social conditions, notably the commodification of the means of production and of labour power. Here too, we discover the role of states to be less the antagonists of capital relations than forces vital to their emergence and continuity. In crucial ways, capital and wage labour are created and constituted through states. At the heart of Marx's account is the cleavage of social productive forces into objectified property on one side and producing but propertyless subjects on the other. Historically this severance first developed during an epoch of 'so- called primitive accumulation', a global colligation of processes centring on the expropriation of the English peasantry but also embracing 'the colonies, the national debt, the modern tax system, and the system of protection' as well as the 'discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black skins' (1976: 915). It is only on the back of these coercive developments that labour power and means of production became commodified in a systematic and generalized way. Plainly, states were not mere midwives at the birth of capitalism but the very muscles governing contraction. However, their indispensability to capitalist production relations does not rest at progeniture. They give legal form to the relations between capitals, and between capital and labour; they enforce law - arbitrating disputes, enforcing contracts, and punishing breaches. 4 In this regard, argues Bob Fine (1984: 153), the 'state is the juridic aspect of capital', and 'should be seen not as a thing but as a class relation.' States constitute and uphold the walls of property exclusion - crucially, the dispossession of workers, if need be through direct coercion. Further, they engage in shaping the coordinates of capital accumulation: regulating the production and circulation of labour, the media of commodity exchange, and so forth. In this light it is clearly unhelpful to conceive of political and economic institutions simply as representing contrasting interests as regards the creation and management of wage labour. Although the interests of particular states and enterprises do constantly diverge, the two types of institution nevertheless also share an underlying 3 unity. Claude Meillassoux points us, I think, in the right direction, by positing a division of labour between states and businesses in securing the conditions of exploitation: the development of wage-earning does not eliminate the costs of law and order necessary for the exploitation of labour, which are always, both at home and in the colonies, supported by the capitalist State. In no case can the resort to such political means be treated as extra-economic. They reveal a given differentiation of costs and labour . . . between private entrepreneurs and the capitalist State, to set up the structures which most effectively exploit labour and realise profit. (1981: 92). Wage labour and capital are creations of their interrelation, but that relation is itself constituted through states. States, like capitals, depend for their existence upon the extraction of surplus labour, and must engage directly in that activity. They are themselves class relations, as well as the organizing forces of 'economic' class relations. Both states and capitals thus stand against wage labour 'as the alienated form of its own powers.' (Fine, 1984: 153). Separation, Competition, Struggle Thus far we have encountered two great antagonistic 'separations'. The first is of producing units from one another, expressed juridically in fragmented property relations, and which underpins (or exacerbates) a further fracture - of state from civil society. The capitalist class, worldwide, is riven and driven by competition, with individual firms compelled to expand, to invest, to outcompete rivals. States, being farmers of surplus extraction, are forced to intervene in, consolidate, and perpetually remould social relations in the interests of capitalist development. The second involves the separation of objectified property (capital) from propertyless labour, and thus the sundering of productive capacities from human needs. It occurred (and occurs) 'originally' through the expropriation of peasants and their concomitant uprooting from communal, 'tribal' and/or kinship networks, and persists through the exploitation of workers by capital and the relative impoverishment of the former. The two separations are internally related. Competition relentlessly forces capitalists to maximize accumulation, which involves, among other things, intensive management of the workforce. Mechanisms of control must be erected, greater security for and loyalty of employees may be sought, and attention may be directed to influencing external parameters such as state policies regarding employment, taxation, immigration, and working conditions. Accumulation, in turn, underpins a set of tendencies towards increasing socialization of production. Driven by competition, capitals expand. Businesses merge, form alliances, and swallow rivals. Close bonds with states may be forged; while expanding international trade and investment extend and integrate the worldwide division of labour. As a result, workers become combined (in the 'natural' or 'technical' sense) as the limbs of an ever- expanding and increasingly integrated (even 'globalized') collective labourer. But this is, in Marx's depiction (1973: 470), a collectivity of an alienated kind, whereby the overall process . . . [is] the work of the different workers together only to the extent that they are [forcibly] combined, and do not [voluntarily] enter into combination with one another. The combination of this labour appears . . . subservient to and led by an alien will and an alien intelligence . . . Hence, just as the worker relates to the product of his labour as an alien thing, so does he relate to the combination of labour as an alien combination. In contradiction to the various forms of socialization of the processes of production of worldly wealth is the situation of workers outside that realm. Here they exist, in principle, atomized as individual consumers and commodity owners. Paradoxically, then, where workers collectively produce society they possess no real subjecthood, no real autonomy or property; only where they are practically powerless, as individuals spending their wages and 'free time', do they enjoy 'sovereignty' in their actions. The commodification of labour power delivers formal rights, but these come in a package deal together with social atomization and alienation, with commodity owners (including wage-workers) posited as isolated subjects, their interdependency existing in the form of relations between their objects (including labour power). If the argument thus far is credible, capitalist relations may be viewed as arising from and operating through a matrix of antagonistic separations. Divorced from the conditions of production, workers are dependent upon them (in the form of capital), above all for wages - those keys to the means of needs-fulfilment (including survival and pleasures). The wage relation is the fundamental form of control of labour; as Marx put it, if 'workers could live on air, it would not be possible to buy them at any price' (1976: 748). Secondly, there is the antagonism of capitals, reflected in (and based upon) that amongst workers on the labour market. 5 Here, the owners of labour power are rivals: victory for one spells defeat for another. Labour market 4 competition means that occupational insecurity and the relentless compulsion to work hard, obediently, etc., although ultimately caused by the existential dependence of workers upon capital, appear (in part at least) in the guise of other workers and the unemployed. Further fragmentations, of course, include those rooted in the technical division of labour, stratification along axes of pay and conditions, as well as seemingly 'natural' fault-lines of gender, locality, nation and ethnicity. The result is a proliferation of cross-cutting status hierarchies through which the competitive aspirations of individual 'social mobility' can take on a political charge. Workers alienated from one another, divided into competing individuals and groups, are ideal material for domination and exploitation. As Michael Lebowitz argues, '[w]hen workers compete among themselves, they press in the same direction as capital - the tendency is to increase the rate of surplus value! [Thus] the efforts of wage labourers as individuals to act in their self-interest run counter to the interests of wage labour as a whole.' (1992: 66). He concludes that 'a necessary condition for the existence of capital is its ability to divide and separate workers' (1992: 85). 6 Conversely, the greater the degree of workers' conscious combination, the greater will be their ability to contest the dictates of capital. If powerlessness and subjugation to those dictates breed upon competition and division, then overcoming divisions is presumably a condition of successful resistance. Mobility of labour If the generalization of the commodity form provides a suitable first step towards understanding the alienated, class-divided and competitive relations of capitalism, it also offers an approach into conceptualizing the mobility of commodities, including capital and labour power. For Marx, generalized commodity production centres on a process of 'real abstraction', in which all particular kinds of social labour are rendered commensurable via reduction to their common denominator, 'abstract labour'. Through production for exchange, commodities 'acquire a socially uniform status as values, which is distinct from their sensuously varied objectivity as articles of utility.' (1976: 166). In capitalism, production is determined by relations of exchange value, which is 'a generality, in which all individuality and peculiarity are negated and extinguished.' (1973: 157). This dynamic of homogenization is contrasted by Marx with pre-capitalist societies, in which the producer's 'productive activity and his share in production are bound to a specific form of labour and of product, which determine his relation to others in just that specific way.' In Marx's view, if economic relations function through the comparison of quanta of abstract labour time, labour power itself must be universally alienable and generically applicable. This, in turn, implies universal mobility. As Marx puts it, '[i]ndifference towards specific labours corresponds to a form of society in which individuals can with ease transfer from one labour to another, and where the specific kind is a matter of chance for them, hence of indifference.' (1973: 104). Wage labour is universal, generalized labour; in principle it can attach itself to any and every employer. Like money, it is in essence unrestricted in its activity and movements by customary norms, legal rules, political organizations and so forth. Wage-workers are, in theory, indifferent to their occupations, and can retrain and relocate according to the demands of market forces.7 Like any other commodity, the circulation of labour power is, in principle, governed by the law of value. Wage- workers, because the chief use value of their labour power to themselves is money, are, in theory, always 'ready and willing to accept every possible variation in . . . [their] activity which promises higher rewards.' (Marx, in Harvey 1982: 381). The wage system enables labour to be allocated via the labour market such that the complex and changing needs of capitals can be met. This enables the supersession of petrified divisions of labour and the organization of cooperative labour on an ever-extending basis. As such, mobile labour power is essential to accumulation. In Marx's words, capital accumulation, in the modern age, constantly 'revolutionizes the division of labour within society, and incessantly throws masses of capital and of workers from one branch of production to another. Thus [modern] industry, by its very nature, necessitates variation of labour, fluidity of functions, and mobility of the worker in all directions.' (1976: 617). In addition to enabling the transformation of the division of labour, labour mobility intensifies competition by hastening the flow of capital into more profitable sectors. Accumulation is an inherently uneven and fluctuating process, with workers 'constantly repelled and attracted, slung backwards and forwards' (1976: 583) among positions within a firm, between firms and between branches of industry, and even from one country to another. In his brilliant discussion of this question, Harvey concludes that the 'versatility and geographical mobility of labour power as well as the "indifference" of workers to the content of their work are essential to the "fluidity of capital". . . . The more mobile the labourer, the more easily capital can adopt new labour processes and take advantage of superior locations.' (p.381). If this appears to be an 'economic' argument it surely has political consequences. For capitalists it would appear to warrant support for policies of maximizing labour mobility, perhaps in conjunction with a philosophy of economic liberalism. It would justify the 'abolition of all laws preventing the labourers from transferring from one sphere of production to another and from one local centre of production to another [and the elimination of] all the 5 legal and traditional barriers that would prevent [capitalists] from buying this or that kind of labour power' (Marx, in Harvey 1982: 381). Capitalism, in sum, seems to generate processes of 'abstraction' in which the relations of qualitative properties are determined by quantitative yardsticks, thereby giving rise to a society in which all workers, being free and universally mobile, 'are alike in the face of capital' (1976: 364). The Commodity's Double Edge In reality, however, commodities are not unrestricted in their movements, workers are not alike in the face of capital, nor indeed are capitals alike in the face of workers. Commodities are not pure, fluid distillations of abstract labour; exchange values only exist through use values, and use values cannot create themselves out of thin air. Production and distribution take place in real determinate ('concrete') space. They occur thanks to the organization in a complex social, technical and spatial division of labour of real people (with particular attributes) and physical means of production in actually existing places. All such conditions of production are in one sense 'concrete'. None exist in a frictionless world. In this manner, Chris Harman describes capitals as follows (1991: 12): each individual capital has a twofold character. As well as being measurable in terms of exchange value, it is also a concrete use value - a concrete set of relations between individuals and things in the process of production. Each particular capital has its concrete ways of bringing together labour power, raw materials and means of production in the production process, of raising finance and getting credit, of establishing networks for distributing and selling its output.8 Different moments and types of capital have different relations to material infrastructures. Some are more territorially rooted than others. But none exist 'in themselves' in a pure mercurial form, for the creation of value necessarily entails the interconnection of different capitals in relations of dependency and competition; such connections make up different moments of the pathway of capital in its process of self-expansion. Therefore even the most ephemeral forms of circulating capital are linked both into and against networks of more incarnated forms in a dialectic of the restless and the stationary, of flux and fixity. 9 Reflected in capitalists' orientation to policy, the emphasis of some, depending on circumstances, may be on forms of freedom of circulation whereas others may prioritize the need for secure conditions of production and reproduction. If the distinction between use value and exchange value offers a way towards grasping the contradictory forces that shape the mobility of capital, the same holds good for labour power. The exchange value of labour power is expressed in its price, albeit determined at bottom by the labour time necessary for its production and reproduction. As an aspect of capital, the laws governing its production and distribution are 'embedded within those that regulate the mobility and accumulation of capital in general.' (Harvey 1982: 380). But its use value (to capital) is something else entirely. First and foremost it is the capacity to labour to produce profit. It is hired to perform specific tasks, which depend upon definite combinations of energy, imagination, strength, particular skills and other abilities. Perhaps unfortunately for capitalists, these attributes are not stacked, disembodied, on supermarket shelves, but arrive at the workplace attached to walking, talking, living creatures. In their aspect as living profit-making beings, wage-workers pose a series of problems for capitalists. Capital- producing labour does not exist in nature but must be created. This can occur through the 'seduction' of workers from non-wage relations, in a process commonly involving migratory movements. 10 Where land is freely available for occupation, however, and where proletarians are scarce and labour markets primitive, coercive measures may take centre stage, in the interests of ensuring the supply of profitable labour, via the denial of workers' ownership rights over their 'own' labour power and restriction of its circulation. 11 In circumstances where capitalist production is fully developed the supply and cost of labour power is regulated by the wage system and the production and absorption of a 'surplus population'. A cardinal moment of accumulation is the reproduction of workers; as Marx puts it, '[t]he labour power withdrawn from the market by wear and tear, and by death, must be continually replaced by, at the very least, an equal amount of fresh labour power.' (1976: 275). Wages provide the means 'to reproduce the muscles, nerves, bones and brains of existing workers, and to bring new workers into existence.' (1976: 717). Regulating the level of wages and supply of labour is the 'reserve army' of the unemployed, a fluctuating product of two tendencies of accumulation. On the one hand, capitals are driven by the imperative of producing an ever greater mass of surplus value that, to be realized, demands greater quantities of labour power. In Marx's account, '[i]t is a law of capital . . . to create surplus labour, disposable time; it can do this only by setting necessary labour in motion . . . It is its tendency, therefore, to create as much labour as possible . . . This is why capital solicits the increase of population' (1973: 399). On the other hand, due to the imperative of maximizing productivity, 'It is equally a tendency of capital to make human labour (relatively) superfluous'. The outcome of these contradictory tendencies towards both increasing and decreasing demand for labour power is, as Miles 6 explains (1986: 53), anything but spatially even, for certain sectors of the economy 'may be undergoing major reorganisation of the labour process, leading to the expulsion of large numbers of workers from production, while others are recruiting new workers.' Nor is the process temporally smooth. In Marx's account (1976: 785), the formation, absorption, and re-formation of a 'reserve army' of labour performs an active role in the business cycle. In times of crisis labour reserves increase, thereby enabling accelerated accumulation thanks to 'the possibility of suddenly throwing great masses of men into the decisive areas without doing any damage to the scale of production in other spheres.' Contradictions in the Regulation of Labour Power The regulation of labour through 'automatic' economic mechanisms, however, does not resolve all contradiction. For example, individual capitals require a pool of available labourers with particular attributes and certain kinds of price-tags attached; to them, however, this pool is an 'externality', it is affected by employers' behaviour but its regulation is beyond the power of any private interest. It is therefore possible for the procedures of capital to contribute to the exhaustion of workers - the 'vital force of the nation' (Marx 1976: 348). The imperative upon capitals to raise the rate of exploitation results in pressures to lengthen and intensify the working day, reduce wages, skimp on safety measures, and make workers redundant. As a consequence, given their propertylessness, workers' lives tend to be intrinsically insecure and subject to pressures that cripple, reduce, or even kill them. In Marx's impassioned words, accumulation is a process that 'does away with all repose, all fixity and all security as far as the worker's life-situation is concerned' (1976: 618). Capital's 'blind desire for profit' drives 'towards a limitless draining away of labour power' (1976: 348). With the tendency to create relative surplus population comes 'the misery, the sufferings, the possible death of the displaced workers during the transitional period when they are banished into the industrial reserve army!' (1976: 793). Thus the 'economic' forms through which labour power is regulated, distributed and priced, create what Harvey terms 'an endemic crisis of fluctuating intensity for much of the working class.' (1982: 161). Individual employers may seek to ameliorate such tendencies, for example through granting workers an allotment, or usufruct rights to a parcel of land, or tied accommodation. These provide the worker with a degree of security, and, by tying them to the property of their employer, provide the latter with a stable workforce. However, responsibility for workers' conditions of life and work, as well as for the regulation of the supply and price of labour power, are generally displaced onto the public sphere. In this regard states mediate two 'economic' pressures. One is to maintain the supply, mobility (and 'flexibility') and to lower the price of labour power. Hence they may seek to ensure that the force of surplus population is brought to bear on workers, to 'encourage' the conversion of labour power into labour. On the other hand, states look to preserve and cultivate the workforce. The two underlying principles - social policy and profit making - may clash in detail, but share a singular basis. In the revealing words of a nineteenth century Poor Law commissioner, '[i]t is an admitted maxim of social policy that the first charge upon the land must be the maintenance of those reared upon it. Society exists for the preservation of property; but subject to the condition that the wants of the few shall only be realized by first making provision for the necessities of the many' (cited by Chris Jones and Tony Novack, in Corrigan p.145). States attend to the 'necessities of the many' in several key areas. First, the regeneration of the workforce must be secured. This takes place primarily through unpaid labour in the family household, which is therefore an institution that states are generally careful to shape and maintain. A second task involves direct measures to bolster the material security of workers, such as restrictions on the length of the working day, ensuring that an affordable infrastructure of sanitation, health, and housing is in place, and maintaining the 'reserve army' through social security schemes. Finally, states appropriate many of the general tasks of 'tailoring' the attributes of the workforce to the needs of business. Capital is produced not by raw muscle but by labour power with specific characteristics - such as particular languages, literacy, experience, or skills. Productivity may be greatly enhanced through improvements in such fields as education, training, and health. In general, more equipped workers are less replaceable, and in direct competition with fewer others. Accordingly, businesses may have to worry more about gaining access to and keeping hold of such workers. States may be obliged to attend to the detailed management of the domestic workforce, entailing investment in complex, durable and typically immobile social and physical infrastructures (cf. Harvey 1982: 398ff.). Mobility and Immobility of Labour Clearly the circulation of labour power cannot be understood separately from its production and reproduction. Clearly, too, the supply of appropriate labour power to capital is not automatically spirited from within the accumulation process itself. Labour power exists as particular labourers with specific capacities; it is a notoriously 'inelastic' commodity, and provokes all manner of strategies for administering its production and circulation. 7  Accumulation depends upon the regulation of the workforce such that it is available, willing, and appropriately equipped. In the achievement of these ends contradictory tendencies in respect of labour mobility appear. One author who has touched upon these is Guglielmo Carchedi (1979: 57). After outlining the interests capitals have in free labour mobility he then asks 'But how can we explain the recurrent capitalist attempts . . . to bind the production agents to certain positions, locations, etc.?' The answer he gives is instructive, namely that both mobility and immobility can be ways in which capital attempts to increase the rate of exploitation and reinforces its rule over labour. The mobility "enjoyed" by labour power transforms itself into its opposite when labour power transforms itself into labour, i.e. when it leaves the labour market and enters the production process. But, on the other hand, both immobility of labour power on the labour market (e.g. in order to keep an abundant supply of labour power in certain branches or areas) and mobility within the production process (dismissals, dequalifications, promotions [etc.]) can be, and usually are, necessary to achieve capital's aims. Employers may rely upon labour mobility but they generally also benefit from what Harvey describes as 'a stable, reliable workforce and captive labour supplies' (1985: 148), especially where they have invested in the education and training of their workforce. In this regard employers may gamble that the labour market permits such stability, but many will hedge that risk with schemes involving company pensions, promotion promises and other sub-market means of binding employees. Moreover, businesses may fund or support welfare and training programmes, and other examples of social infrastructure, and may well give backing to social and economic policies that in practice restrict the mobility of labour. Similar contradictions also affect the policies of states. Although capitalist states have, historically, shouldered responsibility for the creation of nationwide labour markets, because all contracts are constructed through states in a system of many states, even the freest internal mobility inevitably comes up against national barriers. Moreover, conjoined to the management of free internal mobility is the coordination of welfare. 12 Bourgeois states have always been 'welfare states' - maintaining and constraining the material security of 'their' populations. They help to regulate and mobilize labour reserves, keeping them in place as a permanent threat to those in employment, or encouraging emigration in the hope that foreign exchange inflows will ensue. As discussed above, they attempt to shape, or directly manage, the institutions in which the reproduction and education of the workforce occur. In the process, powerful interests in the governance and indeed restriction of labour mobility arise. In the extreme, recourse may be made to outright emigration control, whether selective - such as the restrictions by the Turkish state on emigration by Zonguldak miners (cf. Collinson), or general, such as the Berlin Wall. Clearly, the management of social reproduction invariably entails the transgression of another inherent imperative of capitalism - toward the free mobility of labour. These clashing imperatives find reflection in the twin poles of bourgeois political thought: liberalism, with its emphasis on free mobility, equality of opportunity, and universal rights, and conservative currents whose chief sympathies lie with institutions of social stability and control. Reflected in the literature of migration, conservatives tend to justify curbs on mobility in the interests of 'stability', whereas liberals - such as Julian Simon and James Hollifield - advocate the extension of rights and/or lowering of restrictions.13 From the arguments of the last few pages it appears that labour power is only in one aspect a universally exchangeable and mobile commodity. Comprising its other aspect are particular workers. They speak a language and may wish to remain in the area where it is spoken; they have particular skills that may chain them to an occupation or a branch of industry; their attributes and mobility are shaped and carefully monitored by spatially rooted institutions. Viewed historically, the rise of capitalism entailed the erosion of feudal ties of dependence, but generated in their place modern forms of spatial fixation - including that of workers to their employers and to states. As Nicos Poulantzas has expressed it, '[t]he direct producers are freed from the soil only to become trapped in a grid - one that includes not only the factory but also the modern family, the school, the army, the prison system, the city and the national territory.' (1980: 105). The Contrary Subjects of Labour Power The discussion so far has been of labour power as a bundle of muscles and other attributes of use to employers, with workers taking the stage, as in Marx's Capital, primarily as automata - 'personifications of economic categories' (1976: 92). However, labour power is peculiar. As Felton Shortall puts it, 'whereas all other commodities appear as objects that are not only alienable but also separable from their owners, labour power, although it is alienable . . . is inseparable from the subjective being of its bearer - the worker.' (1994: 271). Workers are not merely subjects of capital, but are subjects in the human sense: they are active and conscious, involved in myriad social relations that find conscious representation in the form of 'identities'. Workers make 8 sense of their social situation, expressing feelings, discussing meanings, deliberating actions. The attributes of energy, cooperation and imagination that are indispensable use values to their hirers are simultaneously use values to themselves, even enabling them to organize collectively against - or for - any or all aspects of the social order. In short, workers experience and interpret the economic, juridical and cultural relations mentioned above, and act upon them. They express hostility or sympathy towards the system of exploitation, towards workers occupying different rungs of the ladders of social status, towards foreigners, and so forth. The methods used by workers to resist the ravages of exploitation bear upon the issues of labour mobility and the role of states. Workers engage in a tug of war over the value of their labour power, over the condition of the reserve army, and the rules and norms governing labour mobility. They may press for 'rigidities' in the labour market in so far as these protect their conditions, and oppose 'flexibilization'. Unions may gain influence over hiring and firing policy, secure collective bargaining on a nationwide scale, and may attempt to influence recruitment from the 'external reserve army' into the national labour market. Second, workers, understood as 'creative subjects . . . perpetually roam the world seeking to escape the depredations of capital, shunning the worst aspects of exploitation, always struggling, often with some success, to better their lot.' (Harvey 1982: 380). Although, as Harvey continues (1982: 384), '[c]apital in general relies upon this perpetual search by workers for a better life . . . as means to orchestrate labour mobility to its requirements'; migration nonetheless tends to reflect and reinforce an upward drift of workers' needs and aspirations. Migrants benefit from and contribute to the 'fructifying effects of living in the tension of two cultures' (Simon 1989: 100), and transmit those effects back home. In the process, migration develops the geographical and cultural interconnectedness of the working class, strengthening the potential for the erosion of local and national parochialisms. Third, workers counter the destruction and disruption of what Harvey calls 'traditional support mechanisms and ways of life' by establishing 'networks of personal contacts', 'support systems and elaborate coping mechanisms within family and community', which may function as islands of solidarity (1982: 384). Workers exist in a complex system of social relationships in the realms of work, family, leisure, etc. These involve those interpersonal, cultural, and linguistic solidarities and commonalities which render labour power such a 'sticky' commodity: one which, thanks to the financial and psychological costs of moving, may often stay put even where that is, in market terms, an 'economically irrational' strategy. To paraphrase Michael Piore (1979: 52), most people work in a community setting, where each job is one of a series of interlocking social roles in terms of which individuals are 'identified' as persons by those to whom they relate, and through which they in turn define themselves.14 Such identities tend to act as barriers to geographical mobility, though may also provide bridges for 'chain migration'. Their self-definition may refract antagonism to ruling classes. Or they may take divisive forms; as Harvey puts it, '[e]xclusion of other workers - on economic, social, religious, ethnic, racial, etc., grounds - may also be seen as crucial to the protection of the islands of strength already established.' (1982: 384). Finally, negotiating the trammels of exploitation may drive workers to illegal activity, such as theft, moonlighting or tax evasion. In the light of these considerations it is apparent that the problematic of labour 'regulation' is not simply bound up with its production and circulation, but with the conscious reactions of workers to their social relations, including exploitation. The question of 'control' is raised again, this time from another angle. Once again, one can point to a variety of 'economic' mechanisms that 'encourage' workers to sell their labour power at a convenient price, and which assure their submission to the laws of capital. These include the 'fragmentations' of the working class mentioned above, and the wage system, which operates in such a way as 'to prevent the workers, those instruments of production who are possessed of consciousness, from running away,' (Marx 1976: 719). They include the reserve army of labour, which 'weighs down the active army of workers [and] puts a curb on their pretensions.' (Marx 1976: 792). And they include the spatial concentration of the labour process into workplaces where supervision is more effective.15 However, control can never be imposed by economic forces alone. Not only do the laws of capital tend to undermine the material bases of production, but workers can and do resist. In response, states become involved in wider tasks of social control - in effect, the management of workers' reactions to exploitation and alienation, whether those take the form of organized struggle, crime, interpersonal violence, or sundry 'deviance'. These tasks - sometimes summarized as 'law and order' - involve labelling, policing, and terrorizing. Significantly, they often involve, wittingly or not, the organization of forms of discrimination and oppression, involving the invention or buttressing of divisions amongst workers. Combined with the state's aforementioned responsibilities for welfare and education, they necessitate intensive activities of surveillance, registration and - crucially! - taxation. In turn, these impart states with a keen interest in ensuring a degree of stability of population. In part due to their role in the regulation and policing of workers, capitalist states have become adept at intervention in all spheres of society, developing what Michael Mann (1988) terms 'infrastructural' power to a tremendous extent. Although recent decades may have seen a weakening of some powers of some states, others seem to be growing. For example, Mann suggests that over the last twenty-five years nation-states have continued to usurp erstwhile local powers, and 'have increasingly regulated the intimate private spheres of the life cycle and 9 the family' as well as areas such as 'consumer protection and the environment' (1993: 118). Regulating migration, presumably, could be added to the list. Abstract and Real Subjectivities Workers are not mere hirelings of capital, but are subjects in their own right. Their real, concrete subjectivity, its expressions and suppression, have been discussed above. But workers also, in so far as they are 'free', possess formal, abstract subjectivity. They are constituted juridically - through states - as legal persons and owners of property (their labour power and, by extension, their own selves). The two variants of subjectivity interact in significant ways. Workers, in general, positively value the rights that adhere to their status as propertied persons. Although formal, rights are eminently real, and bolster substantive claims and actions. Workers' organizations have historically been at the forefront of struggles for the extension and deepening of citizenship rights - in the forms of civil liberties, rights of suffrage and of industrial and political activity, as well as 'social rights' to welfare provision. In turn, the expansion of such rights generally furthers the capacities of workers to organize, to press for reform within the workplace and beyond. However, the systems of formal rights, legal authority, and citizenship are simultaneously the juridical clothing of the very relations of exploitation and domination that suppress and deny workers' real subjectivity. One notorious effect of this contradiction is that liberal principles are persistently subverted by the very states that proclaim them. Law may be simultaneously based upon abstract principles of equality, whilst actually enforcing norms of inequality and discrimination in the pursuit of social control. Just as capitalism's 'abstract' tendency towards the universal freedom and equality of commodities is undermined by the exigencies of competition and the management of exploitation, so its 'abstract' tendency to the universal freedom and equality of citizens is subverted - essentially by the same concrete realities. The juxtaposition of these two contradictions is not arbitrary. Where rights to property in the form of labour power are denied, legal and political rights are likely to be lacking, too. This is apparent when one considers systems of unfree labour, such as slavery in antebellum USA. Bonded labour in the American colonies initially developed as a method of ensuring labour supplies in a context where appropriate indigenous labour was scarce and 'free' land was readily available. It was not imparted with a radically racial character until the late seventeenth century, when numerous, frequently interracial, rebellions shocked plantation owners and other elites into establishing racial segregation as a means of incorporating white workers. These were vouchsafed legal privileges that cemented formal commonality with the white bourgeoisie, against enslaved blacks. As a number of historians, notably Theodore Allen, have shown, the racism of employers and officials was deployed as a deliberate - if often unspoken and sometimes only dimly recognized - instrument of social control. Even though labour competition was thereby attenuated, the erection of a racial division of labour was profitable, for it rendered white workers 'glad to hold what they have, rather than reach out for more.' (Allen 1994: 158). In this light it is worth noting that the American constitution, one of the great documents in the history of bourgeois right, implicitly made immigration a white-skin privilege by classifying Europeans as immigrants, Africans as imports. It was followed in 1790 by an Act which provided that 'any alien, being a free white person . . . may be admitted to become a citizen' of the US (Allen 1994: 185). White arrivals, often facing an insecure material future, were offered a solid place at the upper table of racial equals; they were implicitly enrolled - at least in their formal subjectivity - into a system that erected 'the social honor of the "poor whites" . . . upon the social declassement of the Negroes.' (Weber 1968:391). 16 As Friedrich Engels remarked, 'it is significant of the specifically bourgeois character of these human rights that the American Constitution, the first to recognize the rights of man, in the same breath confirms the slavery of the colored races existing in America: class privileges are proscribed, race privileges sanctioned.' (in Draper 1977: 268). 'Specifically bourgeois character'? What can Engels mean but that the development of capitalism underpins tendencies both to the greatest formal freedoms and the most repugnant inequalities; that the lofty ideology of civilization and human rights was built upon the sweat and blood of forced labour. Seldom has this contradiction been more clearly illuminated than by Fox-Genovese and Genovese (1983), in their argument that the origins of racism lay in the (initially barely conscious) response of bourgeois advocates of slavery to the contradiction in which they found themselves: The bourgeois apologists have had a point: capitalism . . . created a new and dynamic theory and practice of individual freedom and carried it . . . to the far reaches of an astonished world. Along with that freedom, capitalism also carried slavery, serfdom, peonage, genocide, and, in general, mass murder and cruelty on a scale previously perhaps beyond sadistic imagination and certainly beyond technological and political capacity . . . Thus the anomaly: capitalism, which rested on free labor and had no meaning apart from it, not only conquered the world; it created new ones, including systems of chattel slavery, on an unprecedented social scale and at an unprecedented level of violence. . . . Thus, slavery in a bourgeois world context required a 10  violent racism not merely as an ideological rationale but as a psychological imperative. (1983: vii, 403). Clearly, even the most hallowed laws of free competition, not to mention human rights, are forgotten if their transgression leads to the greater prize of the division of the exploited. In short, citizenship and civil rights are not universal goods but in practice the property of states.17 These are locked into relations of exploitation which, in turn, depend upon mechanisms of oppression and social control. Citizenship and rights are used as instruments to divide, privilege, and control sections of the subject population. From the American constitution, to Joseph Chamberlain's 'Natal Formula' (which imposed proficiency in a European language as a hurdle for admission to Australia in order to maintain its 'whiteness' without disobeying the principle of equal standard), to the widespread denial of rights to 'undocumented' immigrants in today's world, liberties are selectively administered by states. Though formally universal they function in practice in particular, often discriminatory, ways. Citizenship and Nationalism If the first effect of the paradoxical unity of the systems of formal rights and exploitation relations is to refract rights into inequalities, the second is ideological. If relations of substantive inequality are manifested in the juridical form of equivalence, then distinctions between, say, owners of capital and wage-slaves are flattened and shrouded. Both are citizens, equal before the law, and with an equal voice and equal vote in the political arena. And with abstract, universal law appearing as the arbiter of legal dispute, the coercive rule of particular interests adopts a mystified form as 'the authority of an objective, impartial norm.' (Pashukanis 1980: 96). That legality, citizenship and bourgeois democracy simultaneously expand the substantive capacities of workers and their organizations and yet subserve the 'economic' relations in which workers are shackled to capital, has had profound effects upon workers' movements. Historically, as the numbers, power and political experience of workers developed, their organizations tended to press for a fair share in the civic and political rights allowed to the privileged classes. All such rights, including the rights to association and political expression, are individualized and exist through states, however, their realization involves, as it were, an invitation of workers as individuals into their respective states. In most of the world, workers have fought for and received entry tickets to the political community, but only as aggregates of 'isolated individuals, without property and abstracted from communal solidarities' (Wood 1995: 211) and from their social existence as collective producers. Admittance of the masses, moreover, invariably occurred alongside the diminution of citizenship, which lost its participatory qualities as it became standardized and universal. In the process the 'nation' to which citizenship endowed membership became more and more imagined, as compared to the earlier commonwealth of the political nation which 'corresponded to a real community of interest among the landed aristocracy.' (Wood 1995: 212). The democratic nation is thus based upon what Marx, anticipating Benedict Anderson, termed 'the abstraction of a community whose members have nothing in common but language etc., and barely even that' (in Sayer 1991: 82). Seen from this angle, the rise of institutions of citizenship and democracy underwrote the creation of workers as isolated abstract persons, cells in the organisms of munificent states. The process involved tendencies both to the strengthening of national sovereignty (in opposition to dynastic or imperial rule) and thereby the 'legitimization' of state power, and to the integration of workers into a cross-class 'imagined community'. Bourgeois revolutions - in the narrow sense of the creation of popular and cohesive sovereign states - developed in relation to other nation-states. In other words, 'the people' arose not only in opposition to dynastic or imperial rule, but also laterally, in reaction to other 'peoples'. 18 In a system of nation-states, immigrant workers are by definition rendered vulnerable; as Portes and Walton put it, '[t]he very fact of crossing a political border weakens the status of workers' vis-a-vis states and employers (1981: 50). In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels, assuming that socialist revolution would not be long coming, suggested that national differences and antagonisms were in the process of disintegration. In certain respects they were right; but continued capitalist development also furthered the consolidation of nation-states. The rise of citizenship and democracy involved the positioning of workers' organizations within a landscape demarcated and defined by nation-states, with the latter operating as a bargaining partner not unlike employers - conceding certain rights to workers and their organizations in a process whose boundaries are by definition those of national territory. In short, the extension of bourgeois subjectivity to workers involves their constitution as persons by states, in a negation of their social existence as collective subjects of internationally constituted relations of exploitation. In so far as collective subjectivity is recognized, it is at the political level, as threaded into national structures. As the growth of the working class and its collective organization in unions and parties grew, ruling classes became increasingly concerned with the 'social question'. As Jones and Novack put it (in Corrigan 1980: 147), the '"condition of the people" became a major concern to ruling classes around the end of the nineteenth century, with intensified economic competition during the Great Depression'. Partly as a result of pressure from below, partly to 11 promote fitter, more loyal workers and soldiers, rights were extended. Churchill, applauding the benefits of national insurance in 1909, lucidly expressed this argument: The idea is to increase the stability of our institutions by giving the mass of industrial workers a direct interest in maintaining them. With a 'stake' in the country in the form of insurance against evil days these workers will pay no attention to the vague promises of revolutionary socialism . . . it will make him a better citizen, a more efficient worker, and a happier man. (In Corrigan 1980: 166). Apparently the creation of an infrastructure of national belonging underwrote ruling class attempts to institutionalize class struggle through shaping 'the consolidation of the subjectivity of labour' (Kay and Mott 1982: 139). In this light it can be seen why the period in which immigration control began to be (re)introduced on a widespread basis was in the decades around the turn of the century. It was a period of heightened international economic competition and political tension, and of increasing state supervision of industry and welfare. It was also a period in which ruling classes were urgently developing strategies to counter large-scale workers' movements and social democracy. Those movements were typically infused with an internationalist spirit - witness for instance the mass participation of Irish workers in the New Unionism in Britain, or the setting up of the First and Second Internationals. Regulation of national labour markets represented in part the attempts by states to counter internationalism through drawing lines of demarcation whereby nationals qualified for privileged rights and non-nationals for fewer or none - with states assuming the mantle of protector of the former against the foreigner. Global Capitalism The evolution of bourgeois rights and national sovereignty is connected to the emergence of what Charles Tilly (1993: 35) refers to as the 'consolidated state' - typically 'large, differentiated, ruling heterogenous territories directly, [and] claiming to impose a unitary fiscal, monetary, judicial, legislative, military and cultural system on its citizens.' Consolidation, Tilly suggests, accelerated in Europe from the eighteenth century alongside processes of 'circumscription' and 'control', whereby the capacity of states to demarcate and shape their territories and the people and social relations within grew dramatically. Bureaucratic apparatuses of rule, of surveillance and welfare provision and all-encompassing legal systems were constructed, producing a qualitatively new type of 'muscular' state (1993: 29), which reaches 'daily - and nightly - into the lives of most of [its] citizens.' It is no accident that this revolutionary change occurred contemporaneously with the development of capitalist production and the rise of the world market. As mentioned earlier, the actions of states - including geopolitical rivalry - were crucial to the emergence of capitalism. Conversely, the rise of mercantile and, later, productive capital stimulated the consolidation of states. An intrinsically fragmented form of social relation, capitals, as we have seen, rely upon stable political and cultural infrastructures. Historically, these developed in regionally combined forms, upon the scaffolding of existing states, and forming socio-geographic centres for the struggle over global surplus value. The growth of capitalist production generated and/or exacerbated those contradictions that underlie state power - between states, between private interests, and between classes. States became increasingly consolidated structures of authority and organization serving to defend investments already sunk and promote accumulation of those capitals based within their bounds. The nation-state evolved as ideally suited to the management and control of capitalist society. It posits relatively clear demarcations between private property and its own prerogatives; is internally uniform and well positioned to appeal to popular legitimacy; and is remarkably cheap, centralized, cohesive and strong, and hence well adapted to ensuring its own survival as well as that of capitals based within its borders. 19 States dismantled local obstacles to the circulation of commodities, including labour power, creating free - albeit administered and territorially circumscribed - markets. 20 They established structures for the creation of those standardized and interchangeable workforces that, as we have seen, are essential to the capitalist division of labour, and appropriated other tasks, such as the minting and regulation of currency. In all of these cases the operations of states (including the establishment of labour markets and welfare systems) are in one sense national - circumscribed by, or at least grounded within, state territory. It seems that the tendency towards 'nationalization' is inscribed in the development of capitalism; its triumph - contrary both to the predictions of Marx and to the retrodictions of many theories of globalization - is the globalization of the nation-states system in the latter half of the twentieth century, contemporaneously with the fullest encircling of the world by capitalist relations. Though ostensibly parcellized, the framework of political society mediates commodity relations which are inherently transnational in potential. In Justin Rosenberg's felicitous formulation, in so far as 'capitalist relations of surplus extraction are organized through a contract of exchange which is defined as "non-political"' it becomes possible 'in a way that would have been unthinkable under feudalism, to command and exploit productive labour (and natural resources) located under the jurisdiction of another state.' (1994: 129). The implications for the inter- 12 state system are resounding. Each state is imbricated in a world society and economy whose movements it can influence but not control. Not only, then, do capitalist states exist in relations of interdependence and antagonism to external powers, compelling each to stake forceful claims to definite forms of control over territories and the people and things within them. That is the case with any states-system. In capitalism, however, 'the state's own stability and health are dependent upon social processes beyond its borders . . . Therefore in order to play the role of the state the national state must strive to burst through its own national character' (Wright 1997: 12). States' interests in maintaining power and supporting the processes of accumulation upon which they depend entail intervention not only within but beyond their home territories. Not only must they counter threats from other states, but are compelled to seek influence over property and populations beyond their home territories - massaging and manipulating external frameworks of rights, defending investments, and partnering and clashing with other states. In the course of responding to these imperatives, incidentally, nation-states may well undermine the cultural homogeneity upon which basis they supposedly exist - notably through the encouragement of international flows of labour-power. Thus, in Rosenberg's words (1990: 255), 'the political structure of nation-states is the channel for the projection of political and economic power across borders.' (italics GD). States are inherently international, not simply through their mutual relations, but because they are dependent upon and threaded into the transnational circuits of economic life. As those circuits intensify and interpenetrate across borders, states are drawn into not weaker but denser interconnections and experience, if anything, greater pressure to exercise influence in the interests of accumulation. In the long run the internationalization of capital has developed in tandem with the globalization of the nation-state system, which 'involved, in practice, raising enormously the effective coercive power of the state' and the 'accumulation of permanently mobilised military power' (Rosenberg 1990: 255). Uneven Accumulation Geo-political and geo-economic competition produce tendencies both to the equalization of conditions of production and to their differentiation. The compulsion to organize production according to a singular law of value may determine the actions of capitals and, in different ways, of states; but both these types of capitalist institution in reality assume tremendously varied shapes and sizes and operate in sharply dissimilar conditions. That some forms of capital relations arose in one part of the world affected their rise in others. So, the extension of capitalist markets to non-capitalist areas could, for example, shore up pre-capitalist regimes, or indeed form the basis of capitalist systems of unfree labour, as in North America and the Caribbean. Capitalism did not merely originate in an irregular way, it is intrinsically uneven - the accumulation of value at one moment engenders devaluation at another, innovation in one centre threatens the viability of extant forms of production elsewhere. A dialectic of combination and unevenness can be observed in the world system as a whole. On the one hand, the operation of even 'free' international trade produces powerful tendencies, as Anwar Shaikh has persuasively argued - pace the sanguine axioms of classical and neoclassical economics - generating a spatial mapping of the tendency toward the polarization of poverty and capital onto a widening gap between poor and rich nations (1980: 232). In turn, economic unevenness develops synergistically with the dynamic asymmetry of the states-system; consolidated states with a stronger fiscal base are able to project power where others cannot. Colonialism and other forms of imperial power projection have tended to exacerbate global asymmetries, not only through plunder, conquest and the undercutting of local industries, but also through the denial or limitation of sovereignty across vast swathes of the world. On the other hand, the very ploughing of the law of value into all areas of the globe stimulates the emergence of countervailing tendencies, whereby the economic consequences of, or the political means of dealing with, 'backwardness' may induce the development of the technological or military muscle required to achieve a greater purchase on global surplus value. Thus, the early capitalist powers were joined by second and third waves, and recent decades have witnessed some regions of the 'Third World' approaching economic comparison with those at the top. The upshot is a world combined more intensively than ever into one system, with each capital governed by a law of value that measures particular producers more firmly than ever against prevailing standards, and yet where the average organic composition of capital and value of labour power varies severely between regions. Similarly, at the political level, the generalization of the nation-states-system has reached its zenith, with inter-state relations institutionalized in an increasingly dense manner, yet any investigation of the substantive content of sovereignty reveals awesome degrees of inequality. It is a steeply differentiated yet constantly combined system, one where dynamic growth in one period gives way to deep crisis in another, where accelerated accumulation in one part coexists with the depths of stagnation elsewhere. In such a world, all varieties of transnational interlinkages, of deprivation and oppression, of aspirations, provide the bases for unprecedented flows of international migration. Yet at the same time states are as obliged as ever to keep a watchful eye not only on the objective conditions of accumulation (and the sluice gates to immigration) but on suppressing the collective organization and consciousness of workers. 13  The reason why immigration and refugee issues have surged up the political agenda in many countries since the 1970s, therefore, is not because these decades saw a spillage of rights issues into the political arena, as James Hollifield argues (1992: 29), nor because global economic integration combined with aggravated wars and poverty have spurred accelerated flows of migrants, as is commonly assumed. Rather, it is because resurgent economic crises have intensified the contradictions faced by states. On the one hand, intensified competition spurs employers' requirements for enhanced labour market flexibility - for which immigrant labour is ideal. On the other, in such periods questions of social control tend to become more pressing. Governments strive to uphold the ideology of 'social contract' even as its content is eroded through unemployment and austerity. The logic, commonly, is for less political capital to be derived from the compact's content, while greater emphasis is placed upon its exclusivity, on demarcation from those who enter from or lie outside - immigrants and foreigners. Conclusion Capitalism is a system based upon the exploitation of a large majority by a tiny minority; and is inherently crisis prone. As such, it depends upon the continuous decimation of working-class solidarity and the creation of cross- class community. It is certainly not far-fetched to note, with David Harvey (1982: 383), 'the importance of racism, sexism, nationalism, religious and ethnic prejudice to the circulation of capital', or indeed that the rule of capital rests upon the fragmentation of the working class, the repression of workers' aspirations, demands and solidarities and their refraction along trajectories of individual mobility, national and racial community. These are not empty claims. Historical evidence indicates that when workers' struggles rise, sectional, national and racial antagonisms tend to recede, or to face emboldened resistance. And when the sort of pitch is reached where the overthrow of bourgeois rule appears on the agenda, internationalist currents come to the fore - most famously in the Russian empire of 1917. Does this, however, mean that xenophobia is best explained as a consequence of Machiavellian strategies of divide and rule deployed by elites in the interests of social control? Certainly, many identities and oppressions of the contemporary world are rooted in calculated policy. Peter Taylor (1989: 116) gives the example of British imperial rule: British governors throughout the world "officially" recognized various cultural groups in order to play one off against another. Official designation in administrative documents such as the census turned these groups into political strata competing for the favours of the Empire. Quite literally the British Empire was the great creator of "peoples" throughout the world. The legacy of this policy remains with us today in such political rivalries as Hindus, Moslems and Sikhs in India, Tamils and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka [etc., etc.]. Nor are such strategies relics from bygone ages. Across the globe, elites seize upon national and ethnic differentiations, generating vulnerability of the oppressed vis-a-vis capital and states, and incorporating workers into cross-class alliances, i.e. into alignments of intra- rather than inter-class struggle. Nevertheless, of the causes of racism and xenophobia only the conspicuous surface can be put down to intentional actions of employers and states. The soil in which modern prejudice and institutional discrimination grow is deeper, produced by the dynamics of capitalism considered as a totality. Some of these have been touched upon in this essay: labour competition appearing in the form of other workers; the alienation of workers' 'real' collective powers, endemic insecurity, and the corresponding appeal of 'communities' of race and nation; the construction of formal subjectivity along national lines; and the competitive struggles that have shaped the uneven geography of economic and political development, of colonial and imperial strategies of control. Conversely, and as the chapters on England and Germany in this volume have shown, xenophobia can be undermined. This struggle may be assisted by liberal institutions of formal equality, but its core lies in the processes of the social coalescence and everyday solidarities of workers of different ethnicities, especially where working-class confidence is strong and where resistance to racism is organized. As I have argued elsewhere (Barker and Dale 1999), questions concerning racism are therefore inherent aspects of class conflict, 'for they affect the nature and quality of life and struggle within capitalist society and hence are of quite as much concern to "labour" as immediate questions about wages and working conditions within workplaces. Anti-racism is not "outside the scope" of the class struggle, but is part of a struggle to constitute a political force with the capacity to attack the very roots of its alienation.' Notes 1 Thanks to Andrew Wright for critical remarks on an earlier version of this paper. 2 See for example the world citizenship manifestos of Kenichi Ohmae and Ulrich Beck. Also, though more tentatively, Nigel Harris (this volume). 14 3 This section draws heavily on Barker (1998). 4 Hence, writes Bob Fine (1984: 153), 'the private right of individuals to dispose of their property as they will turns into the expropriation of this right by the state as monopolizer of legal authority.' 5 See Miles (1987) for a concise discussion of some of these points. 6 cf. Weeks (1981:160-3). 7 This may be obvious, but is worth emphasizing given the prevalence of such opinions as that 'capital has an interest in dividing the working class only when it is united and threatening' (Harris 1991: 87). 8 There are, moreover, processes that operate in practice to render workers more commensurable, uniform and universally interchangeable - as if cut from one cloth. One example is 'deskilling', which lubricates labour mobility as the recalcitrant edges of craft specialism are sanded down. Universal literacy is another. 9 He adds, 'It inevitably turns for assistance in all of these tasks to other local capitals and to the state in which it is located.' 10 Even money capital though extremely fluid (at least when simultaneously 'hard' and 'liquid'), can only exist thanks to its repeated transmutation into productive capital, as investments which are sunk into land, labour power, etc. 11 cf. Standing (1981); Miles (1993: 112-4). 12 For discussion of the contradictions involved in the creation of capital-producing 'unfree' labour, see Banaji; also Miles (1987). 13 In Britain, for example, the Poor Law Amendment of 1834 simultaneously directed policy towards freely mobile national labour and towards a centralized welfare system. 14 Interestingly, I have come across not one liberal author who advocates genuinely open borders. Do only Marxist internationalists consistently defend this liberal freedom? 15 This helps us to understand why migrants can be so beneficial to employers. '[M]igrants appear by far to be the most plastic, the most readily adaptable to the requirements of the labor market.' states Piore (1979: 90). They are generally more mobile than other 'marginal groups' such as youth and housewives, because for the latter groups 'the social roles and community settings to which they owe primary allegiance significantly constrain their adaptability to job needs. In virtually every case except the migrants, the geographic location is determined by factors external to the labor market'. 16 Spatial concentration is typically associated with major migration, whereby the capitalist, in the course of bringing workers 'under his command as wage labourers' seeks to 'draw them away from their home towns and to concentrate them in a place of work' (Marx 1973: 510). 17 Weber's discussion on this point is insightful, although his insistence that 'racial antipathy . . . was quite foreign to the planters' is presumably open to doubt. 18 As witnessed, for instance, by the small print in British passports: 'This passport remains the property of Her Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom and may be withdrawn at any time.' 19 The creation of nationality within a territorial state - real or projected - invariably takes an 'ethnic' form, equating a particular 'people' with a particular territory. Whether the model of nation is 'universalist French' or 'particularist German', it necessarily entails exclusion of foreigners. 20 Just as the development of absolutism was key to the survival of the nobilities of late feudal continental Europe as independent ruling classes, so too the nationalization of the state seems to have played a similar role during the rise of capitalism, with geopolitics acting as selection mechanism. 21 In England the abolition of the Speenhamland system was central. As Thomas Mackay put it (1904: 15), the old Poor Law did not see that the 'migration of men was a necessary accompaniment in the changed course of trade'; it preserved the contradiction whereby '[c]apital was free to migrate, but labour was imprisoned in its settlement.' The old system penned labour reserves in the villages during a period where a key lever of accumulation was spatial concentration in industrial centres. The 1834 Amendment facilitated mobility to those centres. 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