New Left Review 45, May-June 2007
Against celebrations of the messianic potential of migrant labour, John Chalcraft presents the case of Syrian workers in Lebanon, where porous borders and hybrid identities serve to reproduce exploitative conditions. What motivations and aspirations underpin migration—and what routes might lead out of commodification’s web?
JOHN CHALCRAFT
LABOUR IN THE LEVANT
Syrian migrants in Lebanon
What am I, a man or a resource?
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Visions of international migration have, on the Left, been divided into two broad political and historiographical currents. [1] On the one hand, an anti-colonial Marxist and feminist tradition has long seen labour migration as a means for capitalism and imperialism to exploit menial, cheap and quiescent labour, the ‘new helots’ of the post-colonial world. [2] On the other, scholars in cultural and post-colonial studies have generally told a more upbeat story, in which border-crossing, hybridity and migrant agency work to destabilize foundationalist metanarratives, complicate simple binaries of Self and Other, and raise hopes for a ‘cosmopolitan dawn’.
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