Name: A Seventh Man
Rating: 5 (2 reviews)
ISBN: 9781844676491

Jean Mohr

John Berger

Sven Blomberg

A classic study of migrant workers includes stunning black-and-white photos that bring the plight of this often-overlooked group to light. By the author of Ways of Seeing. Reissue.

A Book of Images and Words about the Experience of Migrant Workers in Europe

A Seventh Man

Marion

To be underdeveloped is not merely to be robbed or exploited : it is to be held in the grip of an artificial stasis.

Underdevelopment not only kills: its essential stagnation denies life and resembles death. The migrant wants to live. It is not poverty alone that forces him to emigrate. Through his own individual effort he tries to achieve the dynamism that is lacking in the situation into which he was born.

 It is not men who immigrate but machine-minders, sweepers, diggers, cement mixers, cleaners, drillers, etc. This is the significance of temporary migration. To re-become a man (husband, father, citizen, patriot) a migrant has to return home. The home he left because it held no future for him.

In the cities of his country, poverty and a blocked economy have led to a proliferation of the unproductive service sector. Every day more peasants abandon the countryside and tom to the nearest city to look for a living; their main hope there is to invent a service to sell - to try to become a shoe-black, an unofheal parking attendant, a match-seller, a man with a weighing machine The proliferation leads to starvation and physical chaos. The cham is exemplified in the shanty-town. This is what he left.

He left his country to come to the metropolis. In the metropolis the concentration of capital and the affluence of goods have led to the proliferation of another kind of unproductive service sector, made up of salaried employees whose principal function is to produce and reproduce the consumer. The metropolitan prolitera-tion leads to wastage and environmental chaos. The focal point of its apparatus is the shop window as a magnifying lens.

The presence of migrant workers, seen as intrinsically inferior and therefore occupying an inferior position in society, confirms the principle that a social hierarchy - of some kind or another - is justified and inevitable. The working class comes to accept the basic bourgeois claim that social inequality is finally an expression of natural inequality.*

Once accepted, the principle of natural inequality gives rise to a fear: the fear of being cheated out of one's natural and rightful place in the hierarchy. The threat is thought of as coming from both above and below. The working class will become no less suspicious of the bosses. But they may become equally jealous oi their privileges over those they consider to be their natural inferiors.

This is why the working class, if it accepts the natural inferiority of the migrants, is likely to reduce its own demands to economic ones, to fragment itself and to lose its own political identity. When the indigenous worker accepts inequality as the principle to sustain his own self-esteem, he reinforces and completes the fragmentation which society is already imposing upon him.

That this will continue happening is the calculation of the ruling class.

This seminal text from John Berger has been on my reading list for a while since I became obsessed with his writing. It’s particularly prescient given the current violent anti migrant sentiment in South Africa. As a migrant worker myself it helps me understand why this is happening and have empathy for all affected. South Africa needs a revolution, looting Somali shops is not going to bring it.

I think my frustration in these moments that seem to occur in South Africa every two years or so is how the state is outsourcing it’s immigration failures to its citizens just like many countries in the world illegality is manufactured by the state. Why are so many people waiting for visas, refugee status etc for years. Of course as Berger notes in this book, having this precarious labour force is the work of capitalism and he notes that their expulsion would actually break the economy.

While workers are declared illegal, the surplus value they create is never deemed illegal

This seminal text from John Berger has been on my reading list for a while since I became obsessed with his writing. It’s particularly prescient given the current violent anti migrant sentiment in South Africa. As a migrant worker myself it helps me understand why this is happening and have empathy for all affected. South Africa needs a revolution, looting Somali shops is not going to bring it.

I think my frustration in these moments that seem to occur in South Africa every two years or so is how the state is outsourcing it’s immigration failures to its citizens just like many countries in the world illegality is manufactured by the state. Why are so many people waiting for visas, refugee status etc for years. Of course as Berger notes in this book, having this precarious labour force is the work of capitalism and he notes that their expulsion would actually break the economy.

“While workers are declared illegal, the surplus value they create is never deemed illegal” - Harsha Walia

A Seventh Man A Book of Images and Words about the Experience of Migrant Workers in Europe

Reviews

Highlights