 My name is Faizi Ismail, and I coordinate the series together with a number of colleagues and students. We are delighted to have Etienne Balabar with us this evening. He will be speaking on the subject of exiles in the 21st century, the new population law of absolute capitalism. Etienne is emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Paris, Nanterre, and anniversary chair of contemporary European philosophy at Kingston University London. Etienne studied at the École Normale Supérieure from 1960 with Louis Althusser, participating in Althusser seminars on Marx's capital in the early 1960s. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands in 1987 and joined the University of Paris Nanterre as professor in 1994 and the University of California Irvine in 2000. And his co-author is author or co-author of Reading Capital with Louis Althusser, race nation class, ambiguous identities with Emmanuel Wallerstein, masses, classes, ideas, the philosophy of Marx, Spinoza and politics, politics and the other scene. We, the people of Europe, reflections on transnational citizenship, identity and difference, John Locke and the invention of consciousness, violence and civility, citizen subject, foundations for philosophical anthropology, and in 2018 secularism and cosmopolitanism. So welcome to Etienne. We also have Martina Tazioli, who will be discussing Etienne's presentation. Martina is lecturer in political geography at Swansea University and she has a background in philosophy and politics and her work focuses on migration and borders in the Mediterranean region with particular attention to humanitarian and security practices. And she's the author of Spaces of Governmentality, Autonomous Migration and the Arab Uprisings, and co-author with Glenda Garelli of Tunisia as a revolutionized space of migration. And she's also co-founder of the journal Materiali Foucaultiani and she's on the editorial board of Radical Philosophy. So this event is being live streamed on Facebook and you can follow us there. And if you're tweeting during the presentation, the hashtags are SOAS Dev Studies and ESRC. And you can also follow us on Twitter at SOAS Development. So Etienne will be speaking for 45 to 50 minutes, after which Martina will share her reflections and then we'll open it out to your questions from the floor. So Etienne. Thank you so much. First of all, I would like to apologize for arriving late. I'm only coming from my own small university in South West London, but the transportation is not very regular these days. And I had little time, in fact. So please excuse me and thank you for being here, waiting for me. So many people, it's impressed. And above all, I want to say that I'm extremely honored to be speaking this afternoon in this great place and venue. I think it must be the first time, believe it or not, that I come to SOAS. Thank you so much for inviting me. And thank you, Martina, for agreeing to be my respondent or commentator. Can you hear me? Is it OK? Yes. Good. So I thought that I should present because of the place and also because of the themes of your programs and your interests, something that relates to my current investigations, my current interests for the moral, political, juridical, and anthropological issues involved in the dramatic situation of migrants and refugees everywhere in the world, but especially with specific features in the Euro-Mediterranean space. But also something that invokes and mobilizes my long-term dedication to the understanding and the renewed applications of the Marxist theoretical legacy, particularly the legacy of Marx himself and his critique of political economy. I am a European citizen, and I cannot feel, and I cannot not feel, the urgency of thinking about the causes and dimensions of the current crisis of the political as such in Europe and in every European country, including this one, of which the sheer incapacity of European governments and peoples to invent a solution that is both practical and hospitable for the reception of migrants and refugees from the South is a crucial component that over-determines all others. I'm also an old Marxist, although a critical one, and I believe that the challenges of globalization, perhaps introducing something like an absolute capitalism, I will return to this point, more than ever call for an analysis of its tendencies and contradictions a la Marx, I would say, making use of his tools, intellectual tools, while at the same time trying to renew them. Among these tools features prominently one of the most admired, but also one of the most disputed developments of capital volume one, namely the law of population, which according to Marx is specific to capitalism, forming the reverse side of the general law of capitalist accumulation. There are very apparent, very visible points of intersection between the issue of migrations and their functions or dysfunctional characters in today's globalized and financialized economy, and some of Marx's most striking formulas in the explanation of this population law, foremost the very idea of what he calls relative surplus population and its subdivisions to which I will return. But this remains to be discussed. On the other hand, I believe less than ever that Marxist concepts, however rectified and developed, could suffice to provide us with the intellectual and even political instruments that we need, but I will also try and return to this. I will begin with general considerations, forming the preliminaries or proligomena to a post-Marxian theorization of the population law if there is one in the conditions of global capitalism. Such a law, perhaps we should say simply a model to avoid from the very beginning the functionalist and deterministic connotations of the category law. Such a model then will take us from discussing in a preliminary manner issues of terminology relating to migrants, refugees, exiles to envisaging new regimes of mobility and immobility of populations and new functions of border lines in the global world. A law or model of population, of course, cannot limit itself to registering or modeling quantitative aggregate variations. It must essentially discuss unequal or uneven demographic distributions and differentiated patterns of mobility. I take my starting point from the current, sometimes virulent debates in Europe about the distinction that ought to be made or not according to different people between categories of people who, in increasing numbers, find themselves on the move, trying to cross institutional and physical borders, seas, mountains, deserts, located between countries and more generally between geopolitical and geoeconomic regions. The main distinction is between the official distinction is between refugees and migrants because it is recognized and used by administrations, border controls, home security agencies, et cetera, in order to discriminate between populations that are deemed acceptable or deserving protection on one side and others who are deemed illegitimate and undesirable on the other side. Refugees are legally defined in international law. They are supposed to be subject in the definition of the criteria that are officially defined. They are subject to forced involuntary displacement due to such causes as civil wars, political persecution, or ethnic cleansing, political or religious persecution, or ethnic cleansing perpetrated by dictatorial regimes. On the other hand, migrants are supposed to be individuals who, even if in great numbers, voluntarily decide to seek labor jobs, conditions of living out of their places of origin, which in practical terms means their country of birth and education by looking for opportunities across a border which also separates different economic situations or different markets. Not only this rigid distinction is permanently manipulated by the states who define them themselves, but it is less and less adequate to the real situation, to the conditions of population flows, the consequences of their treatment, and it is forcefully challenged by activists in NGOs and solidarity networks as by experts and scholars working on displacements of population today. Two categories, I mean activists and scholars, which also very often intersect. Not only do the legal criteria defining refugees voluntarily ignore certain massive causes of forced dislocation and exile, such as military interventions, sometimes deemed humanitarian, effects of climate change, economic disposition, which in the case of Central and Sahelian Africa today amount to what former Minister of Education in Mali, Aminata Traore, rightly called an economic war waged against the traditional modes of production and forms of life. But they also conversely turn a blind eye towards the effects of the virulent policies aiming at blocking migrants at the borders or if possible pushing them away from its line, such as walls, fences, detention camps, military operations, financial bargaining with intermediary rogue states, et cetera, which literally create a new, relatively massive population of refugees in the sense of homeless, errant groups of people wandering between spaces and borders and subjected to different types of organized violence, except that these refugees are not called like that and are denied every refuge. For this reason, it has been increasingly the preoccupation of intellectuals and activists who discuss these issues, particularly in Europe, to name or emphasize categories that at the same time encompass all the varieties of displaced people and people on the move permanently or temporarily, while allowing it to identify the critical internal differences and permanent transformations either of their status or their material situation. Such categories also reflect, of course, a moral and political, I would personally say civic point of view on the violence we are witnessing and the actions we think should be taken. In my title for this lecture, as it was announced, excites in the 21st century, et cetera, et cetera, I resumed the name excites, which in France, at least in my country, is now, but other countries as well, is now of wide use among human rights organizations. But there are others. There is also nomads, which has a more theoretical connotation because it calls for the consideration of long-term historical transformations in the regimes of mobility of populations locally and globally. Therefore, it rejects in the first place the idea that the current condition of refugees and migrants would be accidental and a temporary effect. But it also draws our attention to the fact already at the core of Marx's theorization that there must be a dialectical relationship between regimes of mobility and regimes of immobility, of which there are also many varieties. There are polar opposites in a single model or a single law with its economic, juridical, social, anthropological dimensions. Therefore, if something like a new regime of mobility is emerging, which is likely to reverse certain essential aspects of the dominant ideas, our dominant ideas, about the articulation of such crucial political notions as territory, population, and security, Michel Foucault's famous triadic formula about government. But also sovereignties, borders, identities, a new regime of immobility that includes a forced immobility must also arise. And I'll return to this probably no less complicated and no less conflictual. So perhaps we should not only have our eyes directed towards mobility, which is crucial, but also to its dialectical counterpart, which is immobility. Before I close these preliminary considerations a little abstract, I'm afraid I want to add another methodological remark. In the first place, I want to submit that on this very question of the dialectical reversals of mobility into immobility and conversely, we can anticipate why imagine in advance why references to the Marxian equivalence between the law of the accumulation of capital and the law of population that includes its variations and redistributions will be, at the same time, useful even necessary and insufficient. It will be necessary because the needs regulating capacities and legal instruments of capitalist development are globally determining and increasingly so. So, excuse me, with more fluidity of capitalist investments has also emerged more mobility of the human labor force, not withstanding the coercive means that are used to keep it under control. But Marx had a tendency, he has a tendency, if we speak of him in the present, a tendency to reduce the phenomenon of mobility to the more or less automatic adjustment to the cycles of capitalist growth, technological change, enlarged accumulation, therefore ignoring or marginalizing the geographic and geopolitical structures of the dynamic distribution of populations with its biopolitical dimensions. Foucault's precisely crucial invention of a new category, the biopolitical, that clearly overlaps with Marx's notion of surplus population but also is in tension with it. And also, this is my own suggestion, beyond Foucault, with its anthropological consequences, such as particularly the change in the relationship of mankind to its own mobile and immobile parts. Clearly, we are not deprived of very important theoretical propositions offered in the last years or decades to address this other side of the question of population. That includes the important dialectics of de-territorialization and re-territorialization that according to Delos and Guattari is intrinsic to capitalism. In other circumstances, I wish to be able to discuss this contribution of theirs. For this moment, I would rather emphasize the usefulness of another category with a dubious origin for some of us, the Schmittian category of the Nomos of the Earth, as exposed in Karl Schmidt's book from 1950, Der Nomos der Erde, where the Greek name Nomos transferred into German or English combines, in fact, two different meanings, a law in the juridical sense and a distribution and appropriation that is primarily for him the distribution of land but can become also applied to populations. And I believe that the current Nomos of the Earth is, in fact, a remarkably original combination of distributing land among peoples, nations, and states, and distributing populations among the territories themselves. I grant a privilege to this formulation, even if as expressed in the title of a well-known commentary, Karl Schmidt is a dangerous mind, because his description of the formation of international law in the modern state system includes a central idea that is certainly very more than ever relevant today. The idea that violence or extreme violence as such is also unevenly distributed on either sides of the great line that originally separated the imperial center of the world from its colonized periphery. Ironically, called by a 16th century legal theorist this is extraordinary, the Amity line. This is an idea that completely coincides, in fact, with the theorizations by such different others or concerned with the analysis of imperialism as Hannah Arendt, M.S.C. Zaire, W.E.B. Dubois, or Franz Fanon, about the imbrication of nation and empire and their respective forms of internal and external violence. It leads us to the hypothesis that in the case of contemporary migrations or erency, as in the case of past colonization, albeit in a very different manner, the distribution of humans and the distribution of violence into different zones, zones of life, zones of death are intimately connected. And of course, the boundaries are not always very clean, but the Mediterranean is becoming a zone of death. The Middle East in Iraq and Syria has been a zone of death now for a long time. The Central African countries under Ebola, epidemias, and others are also zones of death. That includes processes of elimination and processes of visible or invisible coercion exercised over movements, travel, settlement. From that point of view, of course, we fully understand the necessity of identifying the border as a strategic object of reflection. Not only its definition, its administrative uses, but its fortification, its displacement, and multiplication towards the interior of the territories, its discriminating political and anthropological functions function with respect to different types of humans inhabiting the planet in our times. And this is to be very easily and immediately verified in many parts of the world. I think of the English Channel. For example, I trusted this morning almost without noticing, or I was in the tunnel on the Eurostar. Although the checkpoints are becoming a little more complicated now, but they're more clearly also different shade between the groups of people who do or do not have the biotechnological passport. And of course, if you are in a camp or jungle near Calais, harassed by the French police, which is partly subsidized by British money, and then trying to use a little lifeboat, which is generally extremely bad to cross the channel, expected at the other end to be repelled or enclosed or imprisoned again. And therefore, meeting other possibilities of control inside the British territory, the border becomes something extremely complicated and the discriminating anthropological character also very visible, right or not, rightly or not. Such considerations might explain, if not justify, the fact that deep inside the object of my research is something like understanding from above but also from below the nomos of the earth that arises from the transformations in the law of population brought about by globalization. Let me now return to the Marxian text and spend some time with the questions it raises. As I already said, the core idea in Marx's theory is the idea that there are different laws of population which are specific for each historical mode of production, his central category, as we know, to periodize history and analyze social relations. Therefore, there can exist no such thing as a law or principle of population, in other terms, the demographic principle that is natural and transcendent to history and the change or even the revolution in the dominant economic structure. This is explicitly directed against Malthus, both because of the epistemological opposition between a biological and a historical materialist standpoint and because of the harsh, almost genocidal consequences that derived from the Malthusian discourse for the treatment of the poor, deemed superfluous humans. We are here at the core of the clash between two antithetic forms of biopolitics to put it again in Foucaultian terms. And this has never been as relevant as it is today since the question of what to do with the poor and their specific demographic trends, whether to employ them and sustain them or to eliminate them directly or indirectly, or some combination of both tactics has returned to the forefront and the center of the civic debate. Except that the poor, Malthus and Marx, were conflicting over, were essentially the domestic poor. At times, they were, of course, emigrating, for instance, from Britain and especially Ireland to Australia and America, whereas the poor we are asked today to accept or reject are coming from outside. They're mainly post-colonial poor from Africa, Asia, Latin America. To fully historicize the law of population, Marx explained that it formed the mere counterpart or in statistical terminology, the dependent variable of the law of accumulation, which is a cyclical process of centralization and decentralization, technological change, thus driving capitalism and with two words, excuse me, ever greater concentration and capacities to exploit labor. The correlation included the periodic effects of attraction and repulsion of phases of employment and unemployment, hiring and dispatching or ejecting masses of industrial workers and more generally wage laborers, which is directly dependent on what later such economists as Schumpeter will call business cycles or also long waves of economic activity and profitability, therefore including crisis as regulators, regulating phenomena, et cetera. Marx, and I don't think he's wrong on that, has a tendency to believe that a capitalist regulation of crisis always tends to impose the coasts of overproduction, speculation and recovery on the mass of the poor themselves in the form of either starvation or overworking, which also means that the working class needs to adopt itself, needs to adopt strategies or tactics of birth control sometimes or alternatively procreation to adapt their demographic to survival. Since capital combines strategies of technical revolution with policies of substitution of adult male workers by women and children who are supposed to be also more obedient, the labor in class may try to raise more children for them to contribute an additional revenue, et cetera. And this is something very relevant for today, given the incredible amount of forced, almost slave and slave child labor in this world. More generally, Marx's understanding of the articulation of population and accumulation, what he precisely calls the law is not purely economic on the contrary. It is completely political and it represents a sophisticated elaboration of the concept of class struggle as an organic phenomenon in at least three meanings. One, the cycles of attraction and repulsion of labor by capital leading to the constitution of what in a powerful metaphor borrowed from the capitalists themselves, Marx calls a permanent industrial reserve army of unemployed workers who are waiting to be employed or re-employed either in the same branch or not, in the same place or not, and disposable or, excuse me rather, this is not, this is a French meaning of the term, available for future use, but momentarily plunged into uncertainty and precariousness. This creates a permanent pressure towards lower salaries or counter pressure against rising salaries. It forms the essential instrument to install competition among workers or transform the competition among capitalists into a competition among workers, thus helping maintain, re-establish or increase the rate of exploitation of labor. This has of course direct and unequal application to the conditions in which today capital seeks to introduce low paid precarious immigrant labor forces onto the labor market, including or above all in the form of illegal, undocumented, but certainly not unwanted and not really unknown migrants. The second form in which the cyclical process of attraction repulsion and the industrial reserve army becomes an instrument of class struggle and class domination is the fact that masses of human beings who are threatened with unemployment, precariousness and starvation or simply impoverishment will never have any other choice than seeking the command of a master that is a capitalist and subjecting to his orders the laboring discipline of capital. Even if they change master, they remain what Marx dared to call and others did the same during the period, modern slaves. As Marx writes, they are attached to capital by invisible chains. The mechanism therefore secures the combination or economic dependency and human subjection to power. Finally and most importantly for our reflection, Marx explains that the mechanism of attraction and repulsion lies at the heart of the dialectics of class division and class consciousness. Therefore the very constitution of class on the side of the workers and the proletariat not only as an economic and sociological category but a political formation in history. The working class is permanently divided along fluctuating proportions and variable directions into two broad antithetic categories, active and passive, laboring or employed and non-laboring or unemployed labor forces with more or less antithetic interests. A division which is over determined by anthropological differences such as skilled versus unskilled, male versus female, adults versus children, et cetera. He doesn't explicitly include nationals versus foreigners but today of course we must bring in this crucial determination as well and see how it reacts on the general cyclical pattern although it's not of course entirely new. What is very interesting are the uses of the term proletariat in contra distinction to working class or wage labor in Marx's text. In fact proletariat is a relatively rare term or category at least in the great book capital. Since Marx reserves it for either the most precarious impoverished floating categories with as we know the difficult question of the so-called lumpen proletariat, the rabble that is the boundary zone between the proletarians and poor or on almost the other side, the virtually unified politically organized labor force that challenges the power of capital because it has succeeded to overcome the divisions created by unemployment and competition among workers for instance through the development of trade unions. In Marx's description the creation and the development of trade unions are of course a highly political phenomenon. By the way, I was informed that a strike is being waged now in this university and I was wondering whether I should speak or not in this space but I was told that the strike is not for so-as, it's for some other parts of the London University. A strike of cleaning people and other workers. I wholeheartedly support this movement. I want this to be, no, it's a funny thing that I had forgotten to say that and my text brings me to that. In fact, Marx wants to explain what Marx wants to explain is this. There is no such thing as permanent existing or developing social class which would be characterized by simply by its own cumulative process vis-à-vis the capitalist class. The working class is a political formation which we can call a proletariat in that case. Therefore, the potential revolutionary subject is intrinsically unstable. Althusser, my old master would say its existence is aleatory. Either it is decomposed by the law of population of capital or it succeeds to some extent in overcoming this decomposition in a political process that reverses the effects of the population law. Putting it in the terminology of Italian operaismo, especially Mario 20, a political composition of the proletariat is possible only as negation of the negation, that is its internal decomposition which takes economic forms. But it is also ultimately political. But of course, for this antagonism to evolve in one direction or the other, conditions are required ranging from economic circumstances to culture and ideology and organization. I will ask you to keep this in mind because in a sense the question I want to address now and with which I want to end is what are the conditions in which this dialectic of composition and decomposition of the proletariat have evolved today in a globalized capitalism which I suggest with others to name absolute capitalism. Is it possible to transfer the general idea that we found in Marx to the new conditions or should we admit that the problem itself has been displaced? I must now make this discussion a little more complicated by bringing in additional elements which derive from Marx's analysis or perhaps must be added to it. My first point has to do with the correlation established in capital volume one that is chapter 25 between two categories or perhaps two denominations of the crucial category, relative surplus population that I have apparently left aside until now and the already mentioned industrial reserve army. In fact, I submit that this problematic equivalence between relative surplus population and industrial reserve army harbors the strategic turning point where we might have to diverge somewhat from Marx, take a different path. But we cannot do it if we don't fully understand the value and the construction of his argument. Why? In fact, we are here again at the core of Marx's critique of Malthus and subsequent demographers. In whichever manner they understood its causes mixing biological, sexual, cultural determinations, they all spoke of an absolute surplus population or overpopulation, which for Marx means that the law of population would be independent from and external to the logic and the space of realization of the capitalist process. Interestingly, there are passages in which Marx seems to admit that there exists something like an absolute excess of population with respect to possibilities of survival which leads to processes of extermination or elimination. This is the case when he refers for example to the Irish famine in the 1840s although this famine had nothing neutral. No more than contemporary effects of economic war and climate change are neutral today. But ultimately he turns towards the idea that the absolute character of surplus population is only an appearance. Therefore it is itself related to a general cyclic, cyclic pattern dominated by capital which allows for excesses or extreme forms. And more generally, the central idea in Marx's explanation is that the average or in the average in the normal conditions of capitalist development, the surplus population is completely related to the cyclical movements of capitalist accumulation. Therefore it is also despite the sufferings, the violence, the chaotic oscillations, the conflictual effects in the life of the bourgeois society, a phenomenon that is functional including in its function as an instrument of class struggle and class rules, rule as I tried to explain a minute ago. This is something like the Marxian equivalent of the liberal metaphor of the invisible hand of the market. But the crucial mediation to understand this functionality in the last instance is the equivalence that has been established in practical terms between the two categories, relative surplus population and industrial reserve army. What capital needs is a relative surplus population and it tolerates or regulates its fluctuations because it needs an industrial reserve army. And it maintains this army because it is generated by the internal tendencies and the partial contradictions between technological change, business cycles, competition around wages and standards of living. Now my suggestion is the following, not my personal suggestion, it's not completely original. This construction is beautiful and powerful. It has a remarkable capacity of explanation but also very narrow limits of application because despite its intention to historicize demographic and economic discussions, it is in fact a historical. Not only it pictures a self-regulatory mechanism through crisis and conflicts admittedly but it describes a kind of pure capitalism. Pure capitalism and absolute capitalism are not the same. We might believe that in the age of global capitalism which is completely financialized and has more or less completely eliminated every form of free capitalist modes of production and which has incorporated or is on the way of incorporating not only production but also reproduction services, education, health, entertainment, communication, the possibility of a pure capitalism has been finally reached. It is just the opposite and I want to progressively move in that direction. In particular, through the incorporation of the historical elements that were left aside or misinterpreted by Marx. This will lead me to my last section. My first suggestion here will be that the process of historicization or historical rectification of the law of population or its incorporation into a more complex and in fact even more conflictual and less deterministic model had already begun in Marx himself or bite in distinct, relatively distinct modalities which have had independent theoretic effects in theory. The first set of considerations or qualifications emerges when in section four of chapter 25 Marx proposes a refined, more detailed typology of different forms of the relative surplus population which according to him consists of three categories. The names are very strange in fact, they're even stranger in English translation than in German. The floating surplus population consisting of laborers who are periodically ousted and incorporated again, therefore floating or oscillating between employment and unemployment but also emigrating, he notices this from one place to another following the displacements of production sites. This includes interesting considerations on the use of the human body and the destitution of successive generations. Second, we have what he calls the latent surplus population which essentially corresponds to the flow of free labor force continuously arising from the destruction of traditional agriculture and its transformation into mechanized capitalist farming. It is a considerable and complex category in fact because the idea can easily become extended to the general problem of how capitalism incorporates the surplus population arising from its development against other modes of production whether in the center, Europe, later North America or especially in the colonies of the periphery and the question should also be asked whether the transformation of women into domestic laborers in the household, no, excuse me, from domestic laborers in the household to servants, workers, employees which has a very erratic way of showing up and disappearing in Marx's text. He had some problems on that side should become registered in that category or in fact lead to disintegration. And third, we have the stagnant, still his terminology, surplus population, a strange form indeed which belongs to the moral judgment rather than the sociological description where we find the most precarious disposable this time is the right term. Part of the labor power which Marx says is located chiefly by the statisticians under the rubric of domestic industry where the combination of extremely low wages and continuous overworking leads to a permanent threat on the very health and lives of the laborers. Therefore, paradoxically leading to increasing the size of families as a defense mechanism I already mentioned. This category as it were is not only in reserve but permanently on the verge of annihilation which brings back the specter of the absolute surplus from within the relative, the relative. In fact, this population is not in reserve at all since it works but it works in murderous conditions. And finally, Marx seems to introduce a false category which had not been announced, namely, populism or the population thrown into begging, tramping but also into criminality, the famous dangerous classes. What to conclude from this terminology? Two ideas come to mind. One, in describing the concrete realizations of the mechanism of attraction and repulsion with its political consequences, Marx seems to indicate that at the two poles of the mechanism in exploited work and in the absence of work, there emerge forms of extreme violence, even elimination, which are dehumanizing, humanizing and lead to social, if not physical, elimination. From the core of the mechanism of reproduction in capitalism, a kind of black hole is created where it is not only the class unity but the society as such as a system of social relations or social bonds that is dissolved. Of course, this belongs to the moral and political incentives to put an end to the capitalist system through an anti-capitalist revolution. But there is another idea. It is in fact difficult to consider a latent surplus population in Marx's sense as a cyclical effect of attraction and repulsion. The reason why it can be included in the Industrial Reserve Army is that if capitalism continues its development, it will have been incorporated, this category, will have been incorporated into the labor force that is available for exploitation. And of course, until now, this anticipation has been more or less verified. More generally, we see that Marx wants to demonstrate through the unlimited application of his so-called law and through the multiplication of demographic categories that the whole society nationally or perhaps even globally is a virtual part of the same working class or proletariat with very limited exceptions, the managers, the intellectuals, the engineers, the bureaucrats. This will include a progressive impoverishment of what we today have come to call the 99% and a progressive fall of the society into the mill of precariousness and wage labor, one of his favorite metaphors, which jumping to the conclusion and returning to a question raised above seems to indicate that the dialectic of class unity or class composition and the dialectic of the decomposition and proletarianization of the whole society are two sides of the same coin. A very problematic idea, I would say, seen from the vantage point of contemporary history. The other great piece of historicization that we find in Marx's capital, however, goes into an opposite direction. This is the celebrated analysis of primitive accumulation or so-called primitive accumulation, as he writes, in chapter 26 that has received extraordinary developments in the history of Marxism and justifiably enjoys a great reputation today, for instance, in the work of David Harvey around the idea of accumulation through disposition. Marx had explained and illustrated that capitalism before entering the cyclical process of its reproduction through internal or intrinsic means needed certain preconditions to exist in terms of concentrated monetary wealth or, as we say today, liquidities and in terms of a labor force that is free or that is liberated in both meanings of the term. It is deprived of its own means of production and subsistence and it is released from the bonds of traditional communities which retain their members within themselves, within their own limits, generation after generation. And he had developed and he had described the extremely violent means used in pre-modern England from the Renaissance to the 18th century, but also in the colonies with Ireland, of course, as the first of them, to chase humans away from their birthplace with the enclosures destroying the commons and substituting humans with sheep on the fields. However, he presented these processes as provisional and transitional. It is as if there could exist a relative surplus population only after in the initial period paving the way for the development of capitalism and absolute excess had to be created that would become later regulated or normalized not withstanding its internal violent aspects. And as we know, this is where later Marxists theorizing imperialism would extend the debate. The first was Rosa Luxembourg. And in a sense, everything derives from her, from Samir Amin to Emmanuel Wallstein to David Harvey and others. What she says is the transition never ends, at least as long as there exists a capitalist law of accumulation. Because such a law, contrary to Marx's representation, requires often outside to the places of regulated exploitation. There's no capacity to maintain the rate of exploitation if there is no over-exploitation and overworking, but there is no overworking if there is not a permanent process of disposition or destruction of the remaining commons in the periphery of the world. The colony, the semi-colonies, or even the post-colony, which also means that the process of reproduction of the conditions of accumulation could find an end, which also means, excuse me, according to Marx, oh, to Rosa Luxembourg. But before it finds an end, it is bound to intensify by displaying extreme forms of cruelty that dismember communities, uproot masses of people from their land, prevent them from organizing and resisting. At this point we might think, here we are. We got it. Got what? The broad pattern of explanation that makes it possible to introduce a process of global migration, including various forms of extreme violence producing refugees, whether officially recognized as such or not, into the working of a labor market, which is absolutely competitive, but structurally divided, aiming at establishing the war of all against all, and has overcome national boundaries, or better said, as an absolutely cynical and instrumental use of national boundaries using, in fact, borders and border zones, such as the Mediterranean, not just to block and filter passages, but to make entries risky and murderous, decimating the migrants on a daily basis in order to keep them as fearful and subjugated as possible. De facto, many of the current discourses about migrations or even the population law that encompasses them in post-Marxian terms are near Luxembourgian discourses. And in that sense, they renew and they expand a possibility that was inaugurated by Marx's analysis of primitive accumulation, lifting, of course, the limitation that was inherent in his notion of primitiveness, or perhaps pushing it to the other end towards the final stage of capitalism. And I agree that there is something very important here. But in my opinion, there are also insufficiencies. They have to do with the one-sided representation of the processes of precariousness and proletarianization in today's global capitalism. And as a consequence, they produce a certain incapacity to really understand the conflicts within different segments of, excuse me, of the labor force in the broad sense which make the construction of a single class consciousness therefore a class in the political sense so difficult, more difficult, in fact, if not unrealistic than ever nationally and internationally. And also, to me, this is a single problem, generate catastrophic decomposition of our democratic polities. Let me try to explain summarily, and I conclude. To describe the trajectory of modern capitalism in the 19th and 20th century through the lenses of imperialism, colonialism and post-colonialism, North-South divide were by the condition for the normal operations of capitalist exploitation on one side is given by the abnormal or excessive forms of disposition, disposition, excuse me, disposition, which continuously liberate humans on the other side. This is useful. This is even indispensable, but this is insufficient. It leaves aside what happened in the center during the same period. And what is happening now to this center or former center, however vague the limits are in fact under the influence of the financialization of capital or its new liquidity. What happened in the center was the effect of the class struggle, the resistance, the organization of workers that Marx had called for, but that he had witnessed only very partially and briefly. Marx clearly did not believe that it would be possible within capitalism to limit the effects of savage competition among laborers, even if this was the horizon of his idea about class unity. Actually that class struggle took place and it won significant victories, fortified by the political consequences of the world wars and the fear of the communist example after the Soviet revolution. Just read Maynard Keynes to be convinced of this, that is permanent idea. This resulted if we don't change our social and economic relations, we'll have the Soviet Union at home. This resulted in the creation of the social state whose equivalent in the United States was the New Deal and it's aftermath until Reagan decisively reversed the course in alliance with Margaret Thatcher in Europe. Despite the dangerous connotations of this formula, I prefer to speak not only of a social state but a national and social state because I want to emphasize the fact that the existence of a social legislation and especially a legislation that creates subsidies for unemployed workers and therefore breaks the law that Marx had described. And more or less completely abolishes the processes of falling into poverty, never completely of course and not for everyone, particularly not for all races as we know, through indirect wages. This process is strictly conditioned by the fact that the state is a national state, granting social protection to workers or laborers who are also defined as nationals, that is national citizens. This is of the greatest importance and has political consequences when the social state and its relative mitigation of the inexorable mechanism of the industrial reserve army are progressively dismantled. But why are they dismantled? It is not enough to invoke an ideology called neoliberalism that has become dominant especially after the collapse of the socialist system or its transformation into aggressive national capitalism. Made it, excuse me, after the collapse of the socialist system or its transformation made it seem that capitalism could become unfettered, absolutely self-referential, fearless of internal and external challenges. We must invoke the economic basis of this absolutization of the common of capital over the supply of the labor force which is financialization or to put it in the terminology of our colleague Robert Meister, liquidity. Liquidity involves an increasing power of the financial market to organize or de-organize the strategies of production and consumption in order to maximize not only profits but the value of stock exchange assets, shareholders' values and their derivatives. But when it is combined with the information technologies and the revolution by in mass transportation at the expense, of course, of the environment, it also includes unprecedented possibilities to de-localize production and consumption processes. As some sociologists and economists argue, what precedes the mobility of people is the mobility of jobs which are less and less attached to a stable place, a country, or a region, although there is a residue of sedentary jobs that is shrinking more or less rapidly, especially in the personal services or the so-called care. The result of this pressure that the nomadism of capital has exerted on the sedentarity of labor has been a huge and brutal degradation of labor conditions and statutes which, coming after the relatively stable and dignified situation created by class struggles, class organization, social legislation produces an enormous combination of despair and resentment. More precisely, it produces objectively what the great French sociologist Robert Castel has called a de-affiliation of the old working class from its social collective standing and the phenomenon of negative individualism that is reinforced by the feelings of impotency with respect to the trends and accelerations of globalization. We might find it totally absurd, but we must understand that even in some cases, unemployed or extremely precarious national workers, whatever their origins in the long term, who experienced their embeddedness in a strong national tradition now devalorized, view the poor homeless migrants who are also able to adapt to mobility and dislocation despite the violence they experience as beneficiaries of this flexibility of borders. More exactly, and here I want also to draw lessons from the extraordinary description provided by Saskia Sassen in her book, Expulsions, Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy, published in 2014, where she describes different forms of violent destruction of the environment and the mutual support of territories and communities. I would say that the law of population of absolute capitalism today combines enormous local effects of absolute surplus population, which are only abstractly compensated and perhaps in fact not compensated at the global level with a division or decomposition of the labor force, not only between an active army and a reserve army of laborers, but between at least two kinds of precarious lives, two different kinds of proletarians as it were, one that is hunted away from its birthplace and exposed to the violence of states on the roads of exile, one that is stuck in its birthplace with a choice between unemployment, shrinking welfare, more and more repressive in its administration, see Ken Locher's movie, I, Daniel Blake, and devalued work, not only therefore the contradictions within the people, the famous formula from Mao Zedong, are greater than ever, but they tend to become nationalized and racialized, fostering all the prejudices and collective hatreds inherited from centuries of slavery, colonization and imperialism. And with this situation, Marx's ideal of a single class consciousness becomes at the same time more necessary in order to defend some crucial democratic values and more difficult to practically achieve or put it in the reverse or put it in the reverse order. Absolute capitalism, an expression that has been already in use for some time now on various sides, is a capitalism which after the end of the great transformation taking place in history between the beginnings of European expansion and colonization and the formal decolonization soon followed by the collapse of social states and the decadence of social democratic policies has extended over all regions of the world, therefore beginning to blur and redesign the limits of center and periphery, north and south, et cetera. Above all, it has completely incorporated its own reproduction processes and destroyed every form of economic otherness. There are no non-capitalist production processes, except perhaps in the form of some communist heterotopias, something which is important but limited and has little or no effect on the social environment. One might imagine therefore that it has reached a high degree of stability and self-regulation, but the opposite is true and there is nothing reassuring in that. Not only it is financially and politically unstable, but it is extremely violent and ensures no capacity to control or restrain its own violence. The violent effects of the now of the new population law are part of this global economy of violence, an important part. There always existed several patterns of distribution and exploitation of populations in historical capitalism and Marx had theorized only few of them. Now that they are fused into a single global but disjunctive and disruptive pattern of precariousness, the political challenge for progressives is even greater. Thank you and I apologize for the length of the video. Thank you very much, Etienne. So now we'll hear from Martina. Thank you. It's not very easy to speak after such a dance and great talk, but I try to do my best by focusing only on migration. So I won't speak about Marx by raising some points, building on your great paper. And I would like to start by saying that for me, this presentation has been very helpful for moving beyond processing, process of othering that characterize many of the analysis about migration, us and them, right? Trying to highlight the common metrics of that underpin process of exploitation, production of vulnerability and differential inclusion, but also highlighting at the same time how division between us and them are constantly reproduced through the racialization of those people who are labelled and governed as migrants. At the same time, I think that this angle on migration allows to expose the instability of the very notion of the citizen, right? And to interrogate how this notion of the citizen is constantly unsettled through the eruption of this emergency, migration emergency produced by the states on the public space. And now the very distinction between migrants and the citizen is constantly blurred. So I think that the paper also enables for grounding what can be called like the transversal alliances that have been created. Also, this is not a direct object of your paper, but I think that your reflection around the difficulties of producing the homogeneous collective subject and at the same time warning us against the risk of looking at the migrants as a revolutionary subject, right? Helps in foregrounding precisely the need and the existence of transversal alliances between these people in exile and those who are stuck, right? Without, however, dismissing the mechanism of racialization that constantly produce hierarchies of life and division. But, however, there are at stake, you mentioned Calais where there are many solidarity networks, but we can mention a huge multiplication of experiments of solidarity and attempt to produce non-hierarchical alliances between those people in exile and the others. And in particular, I really like the point, all your reflection around the organized violence which is going on in the Mediterranean and also your attention to these different nuances and actualization, enactment of violences that, as you rightly say, are the very result of border politics and that, however, are not recognized as sufficient elements in order to grant protection to the people. So the very effects of destitution, not only that, but even destitution of life and deprivation, death, and strenness that are the result of border politics and border violence. And these two, I don't know if I can summarize in this way, but these two modes of violence. So it is modes of violence through expulsion that push people to become constantly in exile. And on the other hand, modes of violence through what you call using the work of castell de-affiliation. So that the second kind of violence is more, if you want, invisible and difficult to detect, but that is anyway at the very core of how migrants experience borders. And so the four points that I would like to raise are precisely around violence and the nexus between violence and biopolitics, a second point around collective subject, and finally, around the risk of categorical fetishism that you have stressed about the risk of distinguishing in a so sharp way between migrants and refugees. So starting from the question of violence and building on the last point that I mentioned, so your articulation of violence in the sense of violence through expulsion and violence through the affiliation. I think that this paper, I don't know, I think it's a question, a question and a comment at the same time, if you think that this kind of analysis can help us to conceptualize violence in a way that help us moving beyond such a, let's say, a minimalistic biopolitics that is limited to reflection on the right to kill or the tactic of letting migrants die. So and is about reflecting on a broad spectrum of violences, most of which are also invisible, that we don't recognize as such. For instance, the violence produced by the protracted detention or protracted strenuous in informal camps. You mentioned Calais and there are many other similar sites of so-called migration crisis across Europe. What I have in mind, for instance, is the condition of migrants stranded on the Greek island and that are in this condition of strenuous, they have been in this condition of forced strenuous for one year or more. And their only way to escape the island is to prove that they are vulnerable. But at the same time, their vulnerability tend to be misrecognized, so not recognized by the doctors. So vulnerability becomes a struggle field for the migrants themselves to reach the mainland. But at the same time, it's precisely what is denied. And of course, this condition of high vulnerability is, as you described in the paper, precisely the result of this violent border politics. And I was wondering if you think that such a widening the focus on violence can help in rethinking biopolitical mechanism that move beyond precisely this classic Foucaultian formula of making leave or let him die or the right to kill or letting leave, leaving. By looking at mechanism that hold over migrant lives, producing the situation, deprivation, and also depriving the migrants from legal and existential terrain to stay. But also more generally, depriving the migrants from what Sharam Koshravi defined, the stolen time of the migrants. So migrants deprived of their own time, lifetime, deprived of their possibility to plan their future. And so in this sense, biopolitics is strictly related to a way of governing mobilities, but also to a certain use of mobility as a governmental strategy. So the migrants are governed in the sense that they are forced to be in exile. And this kind of errancy is also a way of governing them by constantly keeping them on the move as it is the case, in fact, in Kalei, where migrants are constantly chased away by the police or in other places across Europe without finding time to rest and also find a place to stay. And this question is related to a broader political question about how can we rethink critique and intervention, not necessarily political intervention, but just at the level of critical knowledge production, starting precisely from this heterogeneous field of violences that is not reduced to the production of death. But that requires us to move beyond the existing and very minimalistic debate at stake in Europe between should we let migrants die at sea or should we rescue the migrants. So I think that the paper point to the need of a more constructive and productive way of conceptualizing these violence, but also critique. And the second, very briefly, the second point about collective subject that you, so I think is a very important point not to fall in the trap of looking at the migrants as potentially homogeneous revolutionary subject. And in fact, starting from your suggestion, I think that what is going on in Europe, also starting from the increasing criminalization of solidarity network across Europe, is also for us a sort of warning about how to pay attention to these struggles, but in particular to the history of these sedimented struggles in Europe that didn't start yesterday, didn't start in 2015, and that have been sedimented across time and travel across places. And that have become part of the historical memory of this continent, producing a sort of very unstable, but mobile common that can be exploited to some extent beyond the idea of, in fact, as you said, of the migrants as the multitude or the migrants as a revolutionary subject, and instead by looking at this actual production of transversal alliances that push beyond the oppositional, the binary distinction between citizen and the migrants or us and them. And just to conclude a point on your important consideration on the risk of reproducing the distinction between migrants and refugees and what some authors define as categorical fetishes. And that is absolutely important. And at the same time, I was wondering if you think that this increasing criminalization of the refugees as refugees, so the very fact that in this moment, it seems to me, even refugees are or those who deem to be refugees or those who say, I'm a refugee, irrespective of the legal status, is at the same time a political claims on their part. And at the same time, they are increasingly object of criminalization. So these claims to asylum has become, to some extent, a catalyst in Europe for struggles that, however, are not limited to protection, legal protection, but also include on the part of the migrants claims to freedom. So the freedom not to be subjected to the spatial restriction imposed, for instance, by the Dublin Regulation. And these claims, precisely these claims that link the right to asylum with the claim for freedom, are those claims that, in my opinion, are the most intolerable and unbearable claims from the point of view of the state. So refugees should eventually accept the condition of hospitality that we offer without pretending to go where they want to go or to decide their condition of life. And so I don't know if you think that around this nexus between practice claims to freedom and practice of freedom on the one hand and claims to asylum, there is the possibility to reinvent a non-discriminatory politics of asylum that can be productive and that doesn't accept the entanglement between disciplinary and neoliberal discourse around how to govern the refugees, around refugees that should be self-reliance and autonomous, but according to our own conditions. Yes, I think we should open up. I will at some point say something, of course. These are very important questions. Okay. But I've spoken at length. So your questions, contributions. Hi, thank you so much for the really insightful presentation and comments. My question is about what is the role of the freedom of movement in the dialectic of composition and decomposition of the. The role of? Freedom of movement. Oh, freedom of movement, yeah. And there's a composition and decomposition of surplus population. Thank you. Yeah, I should say it, so immediately or? No, I think maybe four or five minutes. Okay, okay, not too many, but okay. Okay, we take a second round. Yeah, okay. Okay. Hi, at the end. I just wanted to ask you a question. Regarding, well, I mean, I found your paper very interesting also because it complicates the way in which like migration, for example, has been thought in the Marxist tradition. I was thinking about like a text that you have reviewed different times. There's like Lenin's capitalism and workers migration in which Lenin makes like an analysis of migration is kind of like a progressive force that breaks down national borders and breaks down a special national prejudice. And I was thinking, I mean, obviously in your analysis, you point out very well how today, in a sense, this is not, this is happening in very problematic way. Now you have like a resurgence of like new fascism. You have a resurgence of like new forms of nationalism. So I was wondering like how your analysis somehow extends and complicates like Lenin's understanding of Marx in this particular sense related to migration. Thanks again for your presentation. Just would like to ask if you think that Brexit is a turning point in terms of, you know, the socialist idea towards the kind of breaking the national borders and the organization of socialism with the continuous influx of migrants. And as you know, the gentleman said, because on the other side, you can see these resurgence of nationalism. So is it, for example, you mentioned Calais, is this a shifting of the border between UK and the rest of Europe and the rest of the world? So also is there a shift in the concept of international socialism or we're going to see kind of the existence of the idea of socialism in one country only. Thank you. I'm not sure I understand your last sentence. Yeah, the last sentence was, you know, there is also discussion in between the left circles in this country and possibly all over Europe, whether the left should stick to the concept of international socialism or instead going towards the idea of socialism in one country only. Thank you. I appreciate your discussion of the heterogeneity of migration and the way in which we understand migration. But I was a bit struck by the fact that there's no discussion of gender in your narrative and there is some specificity in terms of human trafficking. You did intimate about the fact that in some cases, say, women from, say, Asia moving into areas to take on the domestic work, enabling this sort of recent discussion about the rising place of women in middle class or management positions, but they're simply off sourcing their domestic responsibilities to other women. And I think there's a dimension of gender in the nature of migration, which is different than the dimension of the migration moving across the Mediterranean, moving up through Central America. And so I was just curious how you integrate that and differentiate that. Yes, up to you. Thank you very much for your very interesting presentation. My question is a bit more basic. It's more about the idea of Europe and how it has displaced all the sort of tensions. If you look at the origins in the beginning of the creation of the idea of the European Union, how all those, that conflict has been displaced outside of it, and those borders act as a limit to the problems that Europe itself, the idea of Europe was set up to try and resolve. I just wondered if there was sort of any comments you could make in relation to that. Why is the conflict being placed outside of the idea of the European Union and brought it together? And then we end up talking about issues of identity, et cetera, et cetera. Where's that displacement going on? And why do we end up talking about the legal, juridical, political constructs? Why do we end up talking about the legal and juridical concepts? The constructs are not the displacement of the problem outside of Europe. So we end up talking about the treaties, we end up talking about the juridical subjects, but the very simple, if you like, what's basically happening is a displacement of the tension, the economic contradictions inside of Europe, outside of the borders of Europe. So I'm just trying to wonder about the inside and the outside of Europe, and how we end up in that space. Okay, so I'm trying to not to... Can I stay here? Yes, yes, yes. Okay, thank you very much. A few minutes. These are beautiful questions. They're all difficult. I'm not sure I can really answer them completely, but I will suddenly acknowledge why I find them important. Okay, perhaps I will take them in reverse order, or partially reverse order. There are some affinities, I think, between... I'll come back to Martina, but there's questions two, three, and five for us to begin with. Now, let me begin with Calais. I mean, I don't make it too long a story. First of all, it's an extremely tragic history, and it continues. It's been such for decades now, and it continues. So I think that the situation in Calais is absolutely revealing of the relativity and, in a sense, secondary character of certain political and institutional changes that can take place in Europe, or may take place in Europe, with respect to the fundamental issues and contradictions we are facing. I'm not trying to argue that Brexit is nothing, that it is unimportant. For a long time, I maintained in every conversation that it would never take place, and now it's apparently taking place. But what is taking place? That is the question. And certainly, certainly, at least, when I say certainly, that's my guess, my position. There are some administrative forms and regulations, which may change, but the basic problem will remain exactly the same as it has been for decades. That is, the fact that within the European space, and however you describe it or delimit it as a historic, historical space, as a nexus of interdependencies and correlative policies, this of course will always include the continent and the British isles, themselves divided perhaps in a new manner. If you look at the function of borders, and especially the discriminating, I don't say this is the only function, but it's one we can absolutely no longer make abstraction of. If you look at the discriminating function of borders in terms of isolating human groups, and I'll come to the question of women, and imposing in a differentiated, differential manner on them harsh, extremely violent constraints, which of course also generate conflicts among the population itself, this will not change. This is one example. There are others in Europe. So it clearly shows that something like the absolute external border of the European space does not exist, or better said, the conflictual relationship between the interior and the exterior is reproduced, it's reiterated, it's replicated in the inside. And this is in fact where some of the most brutal forms of violence take place. So from that point of view, Europe is not a closed space, or geopolitical entity, and the fact that Britain is or is not within the European Union changes very little, it seems to me, to that. But then you also have to consider the reverse point of view, because when I'm saying that, I seem to admit that there is something like a super border, and we know that in fact there are at least five or six different legal enclosures or institutions which sometimes collect or group European countries in one way or sometimes in another. The European Union is only one of them. Schengen was not identical or is not identical with the European Union. The Eurozone is not identical with the European Union. The Council of Europe is much larger. NATO is of course much larger. So we are led to envisaging and considering the fact that nothing called Europe, even if the European Union tries to stabilise itself, will have any precise, fixed, and I'd say guarded borders with respect to the external worlds. That makes the ideology of protecting Europe against external invasions or flows an absolutely absurd idea or self-contradicting idea, which in my mind doesn't mean that Europe should pure and simply dissolve or should not try and set up some sort of regulation of these flows. But the regulation must right from the beginning take into account the fact that it is an open state space towards its exterior. And therefore, of course, the basic form of internationalism, if you like, because this word has been pronounced, is not only a moral or a political ideal, it's in a sense a fact or better said, a force, a constraint that is written in the situation itself. Now, the conclusion I derived from this you quote Lenin is, of course, not that we could decide abstractly that any regime of migrations or any form in which the flow of migrants is received is a plus or is a positive factor in the direction of internationalism. Not only because, and of course I am not tempted to find excuses for the rising nationalist and xenophobic and neo-fascist ideologies that you find in Europe, but not only because, as I tried to explain today, different forms of precariousness and vulnerability inevitably produce conflicts which must be addressed and taken seriously, but because different policies with respect to those human flows are internationalists in their substance or not. So from there I come to Martina's question which I think is intersecting with others that have just been asked about composition, decomposition or about turning points in the history of the articulation between nationalism and internationalism. The one thing I completely agree, there are many things I completely agree with in what Martina has said, but the one which I find particularly important is her insistence on the notion of collective subjects. And I believe to perceive or to understand that we essentially agree, we do not deny the difficulties, but we essentially agree on the idea that the collective subject that can make a difference or either protect, I would say, this part of the world against neo-fascist degeneracies or even push into the direction of inventing some new types of social policies and democracies are mixed subjects. Of course, this is where the difficulties lie. In a sense, everything I said was leading to the conclusion that it would be more difficult to imagine something like a class unity or a common interest expressed in a common language and perhaps organized in a single general framework today, then it used to be perhaps in 19th century Britain or France, although we should probably not underestimate the difficulty that existed at the time. It is enough to read what Marx writes about the relationship between peasants and workers in the 18th premiere of Reuben Aparthe to understand that there was something like a harsh conflict, although Marx probably had a very biased perception of what the peasants were and what political world they were in. But essentially, the idea is what is the most difficult is also the most precious and the most progressive, not some kind of self-organization of migrants pushing the door or claiming rights, even if this is very important, not a kind of humanitarian ideology and organization of the whites or the Europeans on their side, but every form of common action and encounter. And this leads me to acknowledging your question about why I left the gender issue aside. Honest answer might be because it's so difficult for me to articulate it with what I was saying that I probably left it for later or for somebody else to bring the issue in. But in general terms, I hope you don't find this purely polite and formalistic answer. I believe that there is no question of the distribution of violence in today's world that is not permeated and over-determined by the gender issue and the gender difference. Another example which is extremely dear to me and which I do not develop is the question of arms control and arms use and violence. But I leave it aside. So it seems that in this case, the gender issue is brought to the fore, I would say at least, at the very least, there are many forms in which it is brought to the fore, some of which are terrible. For example, the way in which women are treated among migrant groups themselves. Okay, sorry. But the two extreme forms or consequences are on the side. Over-exploitation in the most horrible form, that's the slavery you were mentioning. And on the other side, the very positive and important role that women play in the creation of those collective subjects that Martina was mentioning. I'm sorry we've had to cut that off.