La actual crisis económica que sacude al Occidente capitalista es el resultado de una historia que comenzó en los años setenta, con la respuesta neoliberal a la caída de la tasa de ganancia producida como resultado de la lucha de clases y los trastornos geopolíticos durante las tres décadas posteriores a la segunda guerra mundial. Volver a leer esta historia con Marx es indispensable para comprender las dinámicas y los desarrollos posibles de la crisis. Pero esto implica evitar toda simplificación (...) determinista y tener en cuenta el papel a menudo decisivo desempeñado, en los procesos materiales, por los factores subjetivos. (shrink)

The period we are living through is one of restoration, reminiscent of the 1930s. In a bellicose atmosphere that has proved conducive to an unstable reassertion of imperialism, we have seen a renewed dramatisation of questions of demography and migration, leading to an ethnicisation of social and political relations. Though Europe actually has a structural need of a migrant labour-force, its States have instituted a differential management in dealing with questions of race, depending on the origins of the migrants and (...) the nature of the jobs involved. The result has been to reduce vast numbers of migrants to the condition of illegal, clandestine workers, while operating as a powerful factor in the aggravated exploitation of labour and, in some instances, as a factor in the collective criminalisation of migrants. What Europe’s former Nation-States are thus witnessing, is the emergence of a citizen-foreigner duality which both occludes and perverts the structure of class relations. (shrink)