(From Roarmag magazine online and the 2021, 11th paper issue of Roar Magazine)
To create a world where we all have a home, we have to dismantle the border regime — not just borders, but all bordering, all ordering and all exploitative regimes.
Harsha Walia has been involved in anti-colonial and anti-capitalist migrant justice movements for the past two decades. Her first book, Undoing Border Imperialism, offered a movement analysis of the foundational connections between migration, borders and imperialism, with insights into the grassroots organizing her work comes out of. Building on this, her latest work, Border and Rule offers a crucial resource for going beyond nation-based thinking about border regimes around the world and building an internationalist movement for their abolition.
In Border and Rule, Walia avoids comparisons of one border regime or another as “worse” or “better,” focusing on how borders are consistently a “method of capital” involved in seizing and holding territory and in the segmentation of the working class. Capitalism has always depended on the racialized ordering of social groups and the restriction of pools of labor. Border regimes are the institutional form of a racist logic that sees certain lives as more or less valuable, more or less disposable.
She shows how both right-wing and liberal perspectives converge on the idea that we are living through a “migration crisis,” only differing on whether they see this as more of a threat or a tragedy. Rejecting this crisis image as inaccurate and alarmist, Walia frames the current situation as a crisis of displacement and immobility. The true crisis is around why people move — dispossession, war and spiraling ecological destruction — and the mechanisms designed to then keep them out of sight and out of mind.
Grounded in her own experiences in solidarity struggles and the dedicated study of an array of radical thinkers and movements, Border and Rule helps us to grasp the deep links between forms of violence that are too often thought of as separated from each other: the connections between borders and racial citizenship, settler colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy and environmental destruction.
The book pushes for a no border politics that involves imagining and fighting for a genuine alternative to the world in its current shape. This means creating alternatives not only to the besieged visions of the right wing, but also to the already murderous and profitable border regimes as developed under neoliberalism. We need to build confident movements and organizations with the ambition of radically changing this world. Border and Rule is a challenging and aspirational work that urges us to aim for that kind of global solidarity and liberation, and it should be studied closely.
Liam Hough
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Forgotten Fighters: American Anarchist Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War
From the The Volunteer, the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade website, an excellent article (30/08/2017), by Kenyon Zimmer, on North American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War/Revolution.
Among the almost 3,000 foreign anarchists who fought in the Spanish Civil War, more than one hundred came from the United States. Their story has been almost entirely overlooked.
Although much has been written on the Abraham Lincoln Battalion and the International Brigades (IB), one group of volunteer fighters in the Spanish Civil War has been almost entirely overlooked: the approximately 2,000-3,000 foreign anarchists who either joined Spanish militias or IB units. Of these, between 100 and 200 traveled to Spain from the United States, in many cases never to return. Their motives and experiences differed markedly from those of most other volunteers. They highlight the many-sided nature of the Spanish conflict as well as the transnational networks of the pre-World War II anarchist movement.
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