Solidarité Avec les Immigrés*
Since yesterday 300 immigrants are on hunger strike, most of them in the School of Law in the University of Athens, and about fifty of them in the Labour Centre in Thessaloniki. They are protesting against Greece’s admittedly outrageous immigration policy, but not just that; they are giving voice to a message that more often than not gets lost in the midst of the dominant liberal-democratic discourse about “practical solutions” and “realistic assessments”…
This message is that no person is “illegal”, that there should be a way for everyone to enjoy equal rights and to have a share in any country he or she chooses. In fact, the most important aspect of this message is that we should under no circumstances accept the premise adopted by almost the entirety of the political spectrum that “we can hold no more immigrants” – on the contrary, we should raise the stakes by insisting that rather than finding efficient ways of keeping them out, we should be inviting more of them in.
Understandably this sort of emancipatory maximalism will come up against all kinds of arguments advocating “reason”, “practical problems” and “obstacles in the real world”. But it is important to maintain that it is exactly this sort of emancipatory maximalism that is needed to demystify such arguments and point out that although they pose as “common sense”, they are in fact deeply ideological, entrenched in an ideology that has become the driving force of Liberal Democracy, an ideology that obscures all fundamental issues by substituting them with their “practical” equivalent. There might be a quantitative difference between all-out fascism and the dominant stance that guiltily admits that “we can hold no more immigrants”; but there is no qualitative difference – harsh as this may seem – and those that are bothered by such an assertion might do well to consider it. In contemporary Greece, we live in a political situation where the Minister for the Protection of the Citizen – I can’t get over how Orwellesque this sounds! – intends to build a wall in our northern border, and where a neo-Nazi organization, Chrysi Avgi (Golden Dawn) that terrorizes immigrants and political opponents has occupied and completely controls the central square of Agios Pandeleimonas, under the unashamed tolerance of the Government, the Parliament and the Police. These are not “reasonable” times.
The hunger strike in the Athens School of Law has been organized through what has been named Solidarity Initiative, a coalition comprising of small and fringe Left-Wing political parties, NGOs and other groups. Reactions have been immediate and not all that varied (I do not mean reactions of the “patriotic” type, but rather mainstream reactions that pose as reasonable while in reality embody fascism in the shell of reason): alongside the most ridiculously racist, such as concerns about an “unhygienic environment” affecting the health of the students, most were focused on two issues: first, on the legitimacy of occupying a university for this kind of protest and consequently on the threat to “academic purity” that it poses; and second, on the exploitation of the “unfortunates” by elements of the Left that make up the Solidarity Initiative.
I think there is some merit in both reactions. I am not convinced that the Law School is the most appropriate place for this, more appropriate, anyway, than Syntagma Square, in front of the Parliament. And, having no sympathy anyway for the hysterics of much of what is the fringe Left, I don’t have any difficulty in accepting that political exploitation is in some measure involved. (Although it should be said that “exploitation” is a hugely misleading choice of word: this is what the Left does, it is not exactly “exploiting” something, unless we are willing to say that a Labour movement is exploiting workers, a Feminist movement is exploiting women, an LGBT movement is exploiting gays and lesbians and so on – the paradox should be obvious to everyone.) But, in any case, I mostly think that both these issues are marginal and that their occupying much of the public discussion generated by the hunger strike is suspect, particularly if we factor in the complete disproportionality of representation of Right-Wing and Left-Wing views on immigration by the mainstream Media.
To put it succinctly: yes, there is an issue of legitimacy but it pales next to the issue brought forth by the hunger strike. And yes, there is an issue of political exploitation, but it is only part of the picture: the other part is political solidarity, and political solidarity is a requisite for the political subjectivization of people that have no political rights, no political existence. We should not fall into the trap of letting the argument about exploitation mask this subjectivization into its opposite and convince us that the immigrants are objects in the hands of the Left – we should rather see this as the most skilful and treacherous of liberal-democratic attempts to debase any sense of solidarity. All doubts and scepticism notwithstanding, we have to see that this is the strongest case of political subjectivization of immigrants we have ever seen in this country. And it should make us immensely proud.
[*] On Saturday January 15th there was an antiracist demonstration in Athens. This was the chant shouted by African immigrants in the demonstration. It is the same as the one shouted by the Sans-Papiers demonstrators in France.
