Abstract
Throughout the modern era, migration has taken place in a specific context—that of the nation-state and its practices of inclusion and exclusion. This chapter considers how the Marxist tradition informs understanding of the state and its contradictory approaches to mass population movement. Karl Marx offered important insights into migration as integral to capitalism in the phase of primitive accumulation. Migration served the purposes of the market—the drive for profit. At the same time, the emerging state required close control over such movements. This chapter considers these contradictions, focusing on tensions between diverse sectors of capital—those focused upon demands of the market, and those preoccupied with social control and exclusionary powers of the state. It uses examples from the early phases of the nation-state in Europe, the consolidation of the state in North America and the complex and contradictory policies of states worldwide in the twenty-first century.
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Notes
- 1.
Many thanks for comments on this chapter in draft to Adrian Budd, Joseph Choonara, Nick Clarke, Jane Hardy and Lynne Hubbard. Wherever possible references to the work of Marx and Engels cite online resources, in particular the archive at: www.marxists.org. Marx’s work is extraordinarily rich, and this chapter can only highlight key ideas that he and Engels raised in relation to the state. For insights into their approach and its implications for understanding societies past and present see Barker (1978), Callinicos (2009), Clarke (1991b), and Draper (1977).
- 2.
- 3.
The periodization and location for emergence of “the nation” have long been contested. See debates in Ichijo and Uzelac (2005).
- 4.
- 5.
See Miliband (1965) on Marx’s early writings on the state.
- 6.
- 7.
Engels had shown an interest in Irish immigrants in English cities, addressed in The Condition of the Working Class in England, written before he began his collaboration with Marx (Engels, 1845/2009). Marx addressed the issue in his article of 1853 on “Forced Emigration” (Marx, 1853) and later considered migration as part of his analysis of The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation in Volume 1 of Capital (Marx, 1867/1976, ch. 25). In his original plans for a six-volume work on capital he had also planned to tackle the issue of emigration more systematically—the later volumes were never completed.
- 8.
Britain, for example, maintained a policy of open entry: between 1800 and 1900 no one was refused admission to the British mainland. See Porter (1979, p. 1).
- 9.
Around 1850 a special police department was established to monitor refugees in Britain. It undertook low-key surveillance, prompted some immigrants to move to the United States and expelled a number of French refugees from Jersey in the Channel Islands (Porter, 2003, pp. 46–47). The unit, under John Hitchens Sanders, can be seen as a first step towards a modern secret service. (The Secret Service Bureau, later the Directorate of Military Intelligence Section 5 [“MI5”], was established in 1909).
- 10.
Coughlan notes that a full volume of Marx’s and Engels’s writings, notes, letters and speeches on Ireland amounts to some 500 pages (1994, p. 291).
- 11.
In a similar vein, Ralph Miliband observes that in relation to the two most advanced capitalist countries of the day, England and France, Marx considered it was not necessarily the ruling class as a whole but a fraction of it which controlled the state, and that competition between different factions of the ruling class might make easier the passage of measures favourable to the exploited class (1965, p. 283; see also Barker, 1978).
- 12.
This comment about rural ecology anticipated by over a century debates about capitalism and ecological crisis.
- 13.
On the scale and implications of the famine see Kinealy (1995).
- 14.
Marx’s references to “England” include the territories of England, Wales, and Lowland Scotland. The “English” state implies the institutions of the British state, established by the Kingdom of Great Britain, following the Act of Union (of England [plus Wales] and Scotland) in 1707. In 1801, Great Britain unified with the Kingdom of Ireland, to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
- 15.
- 16.
Marx did not develop this point theoretically. For a recent assessment of debates about immigration, labour and wages, see Wilson (2017).
- 17.
A similar surge in mass displacement took place during World War I. As Russia collapsed, millions of people were displaced, producing what Gatrell calls “a whole empire walking” (1999, p. x). Dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and emergence of the Turkish state brought similar mass movements: on the “exchange” of populations between Greece and Turkey, see Hirschon (1989); on the impact in the Arab East, see Chatty (2010), and Marfleet (2020).
- 18.
The modern state viewed mobile communities in general—including itinerant people, travellers and nomads—as aberrant and potentially threatening to the security of the settled majority, seen as appropriately “rooted” in national soil. See Marfleet (2013).
- 19.
European colonial powers had earlier begun the movement of “indentured” labour from Asia. The role of the state was particularly important: Sen notes that “the state power as well as capital in Britain” (2016, p. 7) played a key role in securing indentured labour in India.
- 20.
- 21.
As in England, anti-Catholic prejudice had earlier dominated movements hostile to immigrants in the United States, notably in the form of the “Know-Nothing Party” (officially the American Party) of the 1850s, which promoted nativism under the slogan “Americans must rule America”. The Know-Nothings rose and fell quickly, their anti-immigrant policies taken up and projected at a national level primarily by the Republican Party. See Daniels (2004) and Zolberg (2006).
- 22.
The colonial state had its own profound impact upon migration: like the states of Europe and North America, foundational projects often involved population displacement and later shaped states of the postcolonial era among which many have experienced major episodes of displacement. See Marfleet (2007, 2013, 2020).
- 23.
Thanks to Adrian Budd for these insights on Gramsci: see Budd (2015). The state and the system in which it was embedded were not seen as unassailable, however. They were constantly under pressure from below, including during repeated revolutionary crises in Europe. In 1917, the Russian state fell to a movement in which a Marxist current, the Bolshevik Party, played the leading role. See Lenin’s The State and Revolution for an analysis drawing on and elaborating the insights of Marx and Engels (Lenin, 1917/1970).
- 24.
- 25.
On the role of the European Union in sealing borders against cross-Mediterranean migrants, see Marfleet and Cetti (2013).
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Marfleet, P. (2022). Marxism, Migration, and the State. In: Ritchie, G., Carpenter, S., Mojab, S. (eds) Marxism and Migration. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98839-5_3
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