Refugees, Capitalism and the British State: Implications for Social Workers, Volunteers and Activists

by Tom Vickers

Today, in a period of economic crisis, public sector cuts and escalating class struggle, Marxism offers important tools for social workers and service users to understand the structures of oppression they face and devise effective means of resistance. This book uses Marxism's lost insights and reinterprets them in the current context by focussing on one particular section of the international working class - refugees and asylum seekers in Britain. Vickers' analysis demonstrates the general utility of a Marxist approach, enabling an exploration of the interplay between state policies, how these are experienced by their subjects, and how conflicts are mediated. The substantive focus of the book is twofold: to analyse the material basis of the oppression of refugees in Britain by the British state; and to examine the means by which the British state has 'managed' this oppression through the cultivation of a 'refugee relations industry', within a broader narrative of 'social capital building'. These questions demand answers if social workers and other practitioners are to successfully work with refugees and asylum seekers, and this book provides these through a detailed Marxist analysis.

222 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2012

Reviews

[Don · Rating 2 out of 5]

The revival of interest in Marxism in recent years has much to do with the contribution its critical analytical framework has made to understanding the character of the current global economic crisis. Even ideologues situated on the right of the political spectrum have been prepared to concede that Marx and his collaborators were onto to something when they identified tensions and conflicts deep within capitalism whose resolution lay beyond the nostrums of classical, supply and demand economics.

The virtue of Tom Vicker’s book is its interest in examining the type of exercise of political will that would be required to bring order back into the world of people moving across international frontiers. He tells us that we are where we are today because the aggressive interests of western metropolitan capitalism have rolled out across the world disordering all they have come into contact with. As globalisation moved peasant farmers off their lands to make way for cash crops destined for international markets, so their labour power similarly became available to enterprises which whipped communities and nations into a state of constant transience, some of which was destined to move far beyond the borders of the country of origin.

Vicker’s is quite right to argue that a large part of contemporary immigration policy can be read as an attempt to reimpose discipline on all those workers for whom the direction of life has taken them beyond the traditional modes of control of the village, the regional labour market, or traditional forms of culture. It is a task complicated by the fact that a good proportion of this international labour power is actually needed by global capitalism, wanting both the skills it represents, but also the economic constraint working to hold down wage growth which comes from the function of a ‘reserve army of labour’.

The logic of the analysis takes us through consideration of the role which racism plays in structuring labour markets which contain migrants and refugees. It acknowledges the fact that this has moved from the crude race aversion of earlier epochs, which allowed the state to take explicit action to maintain disadvantaged ethnic groups at the margins, to the more modern approaches typical of New Labour and the coalition government, where prejudice was so often managed by ‘triangulating’ its core assumptions into the operation of immigration control and the provision of public services.

The book dwells on this experience by considering the particular experiences of refugees. The practice of dispersing asylum seekers across the country had the effect of drawing in a range of other social actors into their management, from housing officials, social workers and voluntary organisations which were supposed to be attending to the welfare and other needs of the refugees. However, the bigger logic of a system which was intended by the politicians to ‘send the message back’ to people contemplating flight to the UK that they would find themselves facing a new sort of anguish if they made that journey, left the welfare function of social workers and other professional groups deeply compromised.

This is the point at which Vickers hopes he is able to offer concrete advice to people working in the sphere of welfare who have retained sufficient integrity to want to resist the coercive role they had been co-opted into. Regrettably it seems to me to be the point where his argument becomes diffuse and pessimistic. What might be done is marginal in the context of a powerful state machine supporting imperialism abroad and the racist subjection of migration to the needs of the exploiting countries. Though the system might be in crisis it still holds the whip hand when it comes to ensuring that the global proletariat pays the price for its turmoil.

At this point a flaw in Vicker’s reasoning about the range of insights to be gleaned from Marxism becomes apparent. He is probably too keen to gallop in the direction of an analytical framework which privileges the explanatory role of imperialism in determining outcomes that belong to the terrain of class struggle. His book pays too little attention to the social and economic fabric of the societies in the metropolitan heartlands of capitalism, which were also the products of contradiction and tension as much the things that went on at the intersections of imperialism and the subject regions. The book’s early and brief potted history of migrant settlement in the Newcastle region during earlier times does not do service to the analysis which needs to be undertaken there, and because of this there is a large hole in a work which aspires to offer concrete advice and strategy for activists.

Others working in the Marxist – or Marxian-influenced – traditions have begun this with people like Doreen Massey, Saskia Sassen, Mike Davis, Nigel Harris and David Harvey making important contributions to understanding how the physical space of the modern city is shaped by contradictions and tensions which create the vast inequalities underpinning the physical form of buildings, neighbourhoods, amenities, housing markets and property prices and which in turn structure relations between classes and communities. Understand this and we’ll have a better sense of what the class struggle is likely to look like in the decades ahead.

Vickers does not look into these areas and as a result the ‘implications’ which he draws out for the social workers, volunteers and activists who presumably are the audience he hopes for, are limited and pallid. On the face of it Marxism, which is a theory of the way in which value is formed in human society under the conditions of capitalist markets, changes its shape as it circulates through the processes of production, distribution and consumption, ought to be able to offer insights into the role which the movement of people plays in sustaining the types of market which support the movement of capital as it travels on its journey from labour power to profit. If we can understand that better perhaps we will be able furnish social workers, volunteers, activists, whoever, with a better sense of what needs to be done to permanently disrupt that process, allowing social value to remain a closer to the people who make it.

[Fiona · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unsettling account of asylum process and the role of professionals in mediating for the state and suppressing anti racism- particularly found chapter on 'Refugee Relations Industry' fascinating- and so true and relevant.