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Despite all the scandals and protests of recent years, the situation in German refugee camps is still characterized by racism, harassment, untenable living conditions and sickening hygiene, as well as the permanent fear of nighttime deportations – especially for women. With the Corona pandemic, this inhumane situation has once again become extremely aggravated. Elizabeth Ngari has been fighting the camp system for almost 20 years with the group Women in Exile. In conversation with ManyPod, she reports on the current situation and the resistance of women refugees in the camps against their disenfranchisement under the conditions of Corona.

Linkliste:

Women in Exile: https://www.women-in-exile.net/

Women in Exile Tour 2021: https://cooperativa-film.de/women-in-exile-tour-2021-bremen-fight-for-maternal-rights/

International Women Space: https://iwspace.de/

Originally published on: https://www.rosalux.de/

Foto: Rasande Tyskar/ Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)

In June of this year, the new right-wing Italian government denied multiple rescue ships operated by private NGOs permission to dock in Italian ports. This move marked the dramatic opening salvo of a further reinforcing of Fortress Europe. Since then, civil rescue missions in the central Mediterranean have been almost completely blocked, while captains and crews are threatened with legal proceedings for, among other things, “supporting illegal migration”. According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), these moves caused at least 700 people to drown in the Mediterranean in June alone.

 Urban civil society has risen up in protest across Europe. The statements issued in June by mayors of southern Italian coastal cities such as Palermo, Naples and Ravenna attracted international attention. All of them harshly criticized the national government’s refusal to allow the rescue ship “Aquarius”, carrying over 600 refugees, to anchor in an Italian port and declared their willingness to accept the refugees in their cities. The municipal governments of Cologne, Düsseldorf, Bonn, Berlin, and Kiel also signalled their willingness to take in refugees shortly thereafter. Prior to that, the Berlin Senate had been involved in negotiations with the governments of Barcelona and Naples to collaborate on further refugee protection measures.

Many of the cities currently pushing for taking on more refugees belong to the network of administrations of major European cities established in 2016, “Solidarity Cities”. This alliance of cities, however, is no activist network, but rather a “circle of heavyweights” composed of the administrators of European metropolises, mostly port cities, pushing for a coordinated approach to what its founding document labels the “refugee crisis”. They call on the European Commission to increase social infrastructure funding in the European cities in which most refugees arrive or already live.

Political pressure also comes from the activist base, however. Last year, refugee councils, migrant organizations, welcoming initiatives, left-wing movements, urban policy NGOs, church groups and academics in cities like Berlin, Bern, Cologne, and Zurich as well as countless smaller cities founded the alternative city network with the almost identical name, “Solidarity City”. The coalition’s demands go far beyond the official European city network: they call for halting deportations and directly accepting refugees, but also for a fundamental democratization of urban life.

These examples show the growing significance of urban policy coalitions in the struggle against Europe’s rightward drift and the sharpening of European border and migration policies (Kron 2017). After all, it is not only the fortified borders on the Mediterranean, the question of national citizenship and foreign residency status — the policies of cities and municipalities also play an important role in the living conditions of migrants in the EU. It is thus central for developing a left-wing migration policy strategy to take a more critical look at the various city networks. More than anything, we must ask how local political measures can be developed which at least side-step or even disable national and European migration controls and exclusion mechanisms at the municipal level.

The Solidarity City: Global Freedom of Movement and Social Rights

What initially appear to be two separate topics — EU border policies and social rights in the city — turn out, upon closer inspection, to be closely related. Insofar as solidarity cities experiment with new ideas of delinking access to rights and resources from national citizenship, such as through municipal ID cards, they strengthen (at least implicitly) struggles for open borders. For although a growing number of people regard it as the precondition for access to social rights, the right to (global) freedom of movement and settlement is thus far not recognized as one of the catalogued social rights in the stricter sense. So-called “free movement” — i.e., the free choice of one’s place of residence — is by its nature more of an individual right and thus belongs to the category of civil rights. Paragraph 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights gives every person the right “to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state” and “the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return”. The human rights charter thus acknowledges the right to emigrate, but not to immigrate.

The UN Sustainability Goals agreed upon in 2015, which primarily humanitarian and development NGOs refer to either affirmatively or in a critical manner, also fails to identify global freedom of movement and settlement as a development goal. It is instead addressed only as a sub-point featuring a very vague formulation, that “orderly, safe, regular and responsible” forms of migration should be established, including through the “implementation of planned and well-managed migration policies”. Further sub-points make indirect reference to migration. They contain issues such as reducing transaction fees for migrant remittances or the fight against human trafficking and forced labour. Yet the sustainability goals make no mention of a right to migration for everybody — a right that most people in Europe and North America take for granted.

This legal and developmental gap is the subject of intense controversy in the social sciences and humanities. Authors who attempt to adopt a global perspective in inequality research or political philosophy see the restricted right to global freedom of movement and settlement as one of the most important preconditions to accessing many further (social) rights and thus to the goal of global social justice (Cf. also Cassee 2016; Forschungsgruppe “Staatsprojekt Europa” 2014). Political scientist Joseph Carens writes that, in light of the restrictions on mobility in place for the majority of the world’s population, being a citizen of a wealthy country is comparable to a feudal privilege, as life chances are extremely unequally distributed. Anyone who takes individual freedom seriously cannot get around accepting a general right to international freedom of movement (Carens 1987).

The “visa politics” pushed by the EU and US in the northern hemisphere and the “global mobility divide” associated with it is described by sociologist Stephan Lessenich as a central pillar of the “externalization society”. It maintains the “imperial mode of living” and privileges people in the Global North at the expense of people in the Global South: “Mobility chances are a monopolized resource here, which one claims for oneself while denying it to others. Physical regulation of movement — some are mobile; others are demobilized — is a central element of the Western lifestyle” (Lessenich 2017: 137).

In the movements and networks for a solidarity city, the right to global freedom of movement and settlement is factually acknowledged and attempts are made to assert Global Social Rights in the local political space. This becomes particularly evident in the Charter of Palermo formulated by Palermo’s mayor Leoluca Orlando in 2015, to which many European solidarity cities have since subscribed to. Orlando explicitly calls for the abolition of residency permits, the linking of civil rights with one’s place of residence, as well as the unconditional guarantee of the (human) right to global freedom of movement and settlement.

Urban Citizenship: Rights for All

These kinds of municipal citizenship policies are referred to as “urban citizenship” in the Anglo-American debate. Conceptually speaking, the debate refers to, among other things, sociologist T.H. Marshall’s 1950 essay “Citizenship and Social Class”. The concept of “citizenship”, however, is understood in markedly broader terms than the German term Staatsbürgerschaft, allowing for a nuanced and historically informed understanding of social, political and economic participation in social life  (Marshall 1950). The urban citizenship debate applies this perspective to the local level and to urban processes (Hess and Lebuhn 2014). Against this backdrop, notions of urban or regional forms of citizenship are discussed to denote the introduction of local political instruments which grant or extend social participation not only to (state) citizens, but also to urban inhabitants who have no formal citizenship status or rather cannot assert it due to their marginalized social position (García 2006).

In recent contributions to the debate, citizenship is understood as more than just a status which people either do or do not have. Instead, political and social struggles are also highlighted through which recognition, rights and access to resources can be won in the first place. Primarily with view to the situation of migrants and refugees, Engin Isin and Greg Nielsen have coined the term “acts of citizenship” to describe these struggles for rights (Isin and Neilsen 2008)

The Sanctuary City as a Model

A prominent model for the European network of solidarity cities is the “sanctuary city” movement (or “cities of refuge” movement), which started in Canadian and US cities and localities in the 1980s (Lippert and Rehaag 2013). Pushed forward by the mobilization of strong immigrants’ rights movements, progressive mayors and municipalities forbid local administrations and police departments from working directly with national immigration authorities. This goes a long way in preventing raids and deportations, as the federal authorities responsible for executing checks and deportations are generally dependent on the assistance of local authorities. Yet many of the US and Canadian municipalities are concerned with more than “just” stopping deportations and a more or less precarious “right to stay”.

Some, such as New York City or San Francisco, have issued municipal ID cards for years: so-called “City IDs” (Lebuhn 2016). These allow people without regular residency permits as well as other marginalized groups in the city to deal with local administrations more easily, and offer them more security in their everyday city life more generally. Although the reach of such policies of recognition is limited, the everyday alleviations that sanctuary city status or a municipal ID facilitate should not be underestimated: whether it be registering children for public schools, using public libraries, accessing city resources in the broadest sense, or opening a bank account or signing a rental contract.

Compared to the German-speaking world, it is also interesting that the topic of migration is not addressed exclusively through discourses of cultural difference such as the dispositif of integration, ethnic ascriptions or the alleged formation of parallel societies. Instead, it has to do with the tension between belonging to a political community on one hand and the possibilities of social participation this entails on the other (Holston and Appadurai 1999: 4). This, in turn, affects not only migrants, even if they are often excluded from (formal) citizenship, but rather all people pushed into social marginalization over the course of neoliberalization who have had their social as well as civil rights factually restricted.

An Example: Health for All!

Urban citizenship is not limited to stopping deportations. Rather, it is about strengthening social rights and social participation in their various dimensions: that includes the social rights to health, education, shelter, work, but also cultural and gender-specific rights. Contrary to the often repeated prejudice that fundamental change in these spheres can only be reached at the nation-state level, there are in fact spaces to manoeuvre at the regional and municipal level — that is, if activists, local politicians and administrations all work together (Fried 2017).

An exemplary case can be found in the field of health care policy. Although no area is more tightly regulated than access to the public health care system, it has been possible in multiple federal states to enable medical care for people without access to the public health insurance system through alternative public programs. This in turn helps not only migrants without regular residency permits, but also many other people who were pushed out of the standard insurance system due to social marginalization. In Berlin, for example, 1.5 million euro is to be spent on medical care with an anonymous medical certificate beginning in autumn 2018. Those in need receive the certificate through a non-state clinic without having to indicate their identity or legal status. Such programs are anything but perfect, as they continue to work as a kind of parallel system, but they relieve activist networks like the Medibüro which until now have provided medical care for disadvantaged groups in a volunteer capacity, and institutionalize it. More than anything, however, they represent the insight that the ensuring and public financing of the right to health for all people is a responsibility for the whole society.

Radical Democratization or Neoliberal “Diversity”?

It is precisely these socio-political and material components which distinguish urban policies asserting Global Social Rights from “diversity” programmes of the more neoliberal persuasion. Many states and municipalities have introduced these kinds of diversity programmes in recent years (cf., inter alia, Rodatz 2014). At the European level, the Intercultural Cities Programme (ICC) has functioned as a network of meanwhile over 100 European cities pursuing intercultural reforms since 2008 (Lebuhn 2018).

It is without a doubt positive that such programmes seek to normalize migration rather than depicting it as a “problem” for cities from the beginning. At the same time, the term “diversity” is often oriented towards concepts taken from corporate management. Migration is understood as an economic resource which can prove useful for cities in inter-urban competition. The World Economic Forum (WEF), for example, emphasized in a 2017 study on the effects of migration on large cities worldwide that inclusive urban migration policies have a positive influence on “economic development” in the urban space. To the extent that the notion of “citizen” is deployed, it tends to exhibit qualities like “self-responsibility” and “self-optimization”, combined with the utilization of neo-communitarian notions of a civil society-driven “responsibility for the community”. Unlike in the solidarity cities debate, which is inspired by the “Right to the City” approach and demands the “Right to Rights”, questions of distribution, justice or social security are secondary at best. Points of connection for left-wing movements and politics are thus hardly to be found.

Criticisms and Counter-Criticisms

Although the political approaches of the Solidarity City network and Sanctuary City policies differ significantly from urban “diversity management” programmes, they are also criticized from the left. Often described as problematic is the fact that urban citizenship policies only have “local” effects and generally remain focused on “pragmatic” aims. In practice, however, the urban movements grouped around the idea of the solidarity city are in fact highly important. On the one hand, they seek to mobilize broad political alliances. The Solidarity City network, for example, seeks to develop “a city for all” in which “everyone shall have the right to live and work”, “no matter what ‘legal’ and financial status they have”. This makes the campaign attractive for rent control, housing and trade union initiatives as well. On the other hand, opportunities are created — not only for migrants with insecure residency status — to access rights and resources, at least at the city level. For those affected who otherwise are deprived of fundamental rights to shelter, education, health and work through national laws, this has a very immediate utility, the significance of which cannot be emphasized enough.

A major problem is without a doubt the fact that municipal regulations, due to their local reach, cannot ensure access to social security systems which are generally established at the federal level. Moreover, Albert Scherr and Rebeccas Hofmann (2016) argue that no regular access to the labour market can be enabled and that Sanctuary City policies as we know them from North America also facilitate the emerge of “shadow economies”. Ultimately, no real protection from deportations occurs, which can perhaps give those affected a false sense of security.

This can be countered, however, with the fact that despite all limitations, there is no reason not to take action at the local level to make the everyday lives of refugees more secure. The criticism concerning the “shadow economy” is also not unproblematic, as it overlooks the fact that local protection from deportations also makes it easier to assert regular working standards for all. Especially for people without regular residency status, legal advice from the trade unions and social movements is made easier to access and legal action against manipulative employers is facilitated — that is to say, the emergence of the “shadow economy” is addressed on the capital side and migrants are supported in their labour struggles. Nevertheless, it remains clear: whether Solidarity City or Urban Citizenship, municipal citizenship policies are an important but nevertheless small step in the right direction.

Global Social Rights and Migration Struggles

The movements and coalitions of cities of solidarity, refuge and sanctuary in Europe and North America are politically heterogeneous, pursue different interests and raise diverse expectations from other political actors. We can distinguish between four dimensions of municipal interventions into migration policy: these include, firstly, protecting against legal prosecution and deportation of irregular migrants and rejected asylum applicants. This is the common denominator of the meanwhile 560 cities, districts and states participating in the US and Canadian sanctuary cities movement (Kron 2018). The second dimension is that of human rights interventions. The mayors of European cities like Berlin, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Bonn, Barcelona, Palermo and Naples who declared their willingness to take in refugees in their cities directly in the summer of 2018 are primarily concerned with intervening in the humanitarian crisis on the basis of human rights. Third are the policies of municipal citizenship. With innovative experiments to strengthen urban citizenship such as municipal IDs in New York, San Francisco, Barcelona and Zurich as well as the planned anonymous health card in Berlin, city governments seek to assert Global Social Rights at the municipal level and thereby detach them from the residency status and nationality of city inhabitants. The fourth dimension is the “Right to the City”. The Solidarity City network, for example, pursues a fundamental democratization of urban life. It is a social movement that fights for a more solidary, socially just and participatory city for all. Thus, while neoliberal actors like the WEF highlight city policies of inclusion and diversity as motors for economic development, left-wing movement actors see in solidarity cities a “space for progressive politics in Europe”.

Irrespective of their differences, the coalitions and networks of solidarity cities and sanctuary cities articulate a deep political disagreement with the increasingly restrictive and exclusionary migration policies being enacted on the national and regional levels. Herein lies their political relevance and potential strength, although they still encounter inevitable limitations. It cannot be our long-term goal to transfer the question of social rights onto the municipal level and produce a patchwork quilt of local regulations. The municipal recognition of the right to global freedom of movement and settlement thus possesses a strongly appellative character, but will have little positive impact for most refugees as long as national and regional governments — such as in the current blockade on sea rescues in the Mediterranean — continue to pursue such demonstratively exclusionary policies.

For global freedom of movement to make its way into the catalogue of accepted human rights and Global Social Rights to be asserted beyond individual urban spaces, new or strengthened coalition politics are needed — with, for example, civil society actors working on development policy, open-minded government administrations, and progressive politicians at the national and regional levels. A growing number of politicians and activists in urban policy coalitions now know that migration struggles and urban citizenship policies are not sectoral issues, but rather emphasize the common interests of (allegedly) disparate groups, namely social justice. Particularly the linking of demands for a right to free movement and Global Social Rights in the city opens the possibility of posing a solidary answer to the neoliberal and far-right European elites currently succeeding in sewing divisions of “we Europeans” or “we Germans” against “the Others”.

Translation by Loren Balhorn

Stefanie Kron is a Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung fellow working on international politics and social movements.

Henrik Lebuhn is a researcher in city and regional sociology at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and serves on the editorial board of PROKLA

Bibliography

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-Fried, Barbara (2017): "Sanctuary Cities sind in Deutschland nicht utopisch." Interview mit Helene Heuser, in: Luxemburg, Nr. 1/2017, URL: http://www.zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/sanctuary-cities-sind-in-deutschland-nicht-utopisch/ (7.4.2018)

-García, Marisol (2006): "Citizenship Practices and Urban Governance in European Cities", in: Urban Studies, 43, No. 4, 745–765

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-Lebuhn, Henrik (2016): "'Ich bin New York' - Bilanz des Kommunalen Personalausweises in New York City", in: Zeitschrift Luxemburg. Gesellschaftsanalyse und linke Praxis, 2016. Jg, Nr. 3, 114-119

-Lebuhn, Henrik (2018): "Stadtbürgerschaft 'Light'. Migration und Vielfalt in der neoliberalen Stadt", in: Prokla - Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialwissenschaft, No. 191, 325-333

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-Rodatz, Mathias (2014): "Migration ist in dieser Stadt eine Tatsache. Urban politics of citizenship in der neoliberalen Stadt", in: sub/urban. Zeitschrift für kritische Stadtforschung, 2, Nr. 3, 35-58

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Originally published on: Solidarische Städte: Globale Soziale Rechte und das Recht auf Mobilität. - Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung (rosalux.de)

Photo: European migrant crisis | Oct. 11, 2015 - Lesbos Island, Gre… | Flickr

The social question is back, returned to the political agenda as a question of global (in)justice by the migration movements of recent years. The dramatically unequal global distribution of wealth and imperial mode of production and way of life underlying said distribution constitute a central source of worldwide migration. Even Angela Merkel was compelled to acknowledge as much in 2015, remarking that the globalisation which many in Germany have experienced as relative beneficiaries in one of the world’s leading export countries had now returned in the form of refugees. Her comments hint at the deeper question of what “our” way of life has to do with the wars, authoritarian regimes, hunger, climate change, and economic exhaustion under which so many millions suffer. That said, it often comes across as rhetoric and false moralism when the Left claims that “we” live at the expense of “others”. After all, the injustices of exploitation, marginalisation and degradation confronting many in our own country pale in comparison to the levels of suffering rife in large parts of the world, while the interconnected social relations which produce misery both here and abroad are largely obscured from public discussion. But how can a political project seeking to organise majorities for social change in a wealthy capitalist centre address these people as well?

Right- and Left-Wing Conceptions of Justice

For the time being, the political Right appears to be the social force posing the social question most successfully. It does so by portraying the challenges of a globalised world and the immigration society which has long since become German reality as a conflict of competition and distribution between those already here and those seeking to come here, whether real or imagined. The everyday concerns of many people – constant insecurity, the inability to plan their own lives, pressure at work, the threat of downward mobility, a lack of durable infrastructure and the fear of never escaping exhaustion and becoming politically marginal – are taken up by right-wing discourse and juxtaposed to the allegedly comfortable situation of refugees. Desires for justice are diverted into anger and hate towards an open and pluralistic society. Security and fairness, so goes the line of argument, are only possible within the confines of a homogenous German nation-state which insulates itself from the impositions of the outside world. The Right casts the social question as a cultural struggle, and thus as an attack on a society of the many, and ultimately on the conditions of life for everyone.

But what could left-wing responses look like in this constellation? So far, the debate has proven divisive:

Parts of the Left have taken the Right’s success as an occasion to (re-)focus their attention on those actually or at least allegedly attracted to the Right’s narrative – sometimes by making “concessions” to their racist and national-social arguments in the process. The price of these concessions is an at least implicit reproduction of the notion that a socially relevant conflict between society’s “left behind” on one side and refugees on the other does in fact exist.

Others in this constellation correctly emphasise the struggle against racism, sometimes sharply disassociating themselves from positions which seek to win people over to a left-wing project currently on the fence vis-à-vis right-wing mobilisations. If necessary, they argue, we must accept splits on the Left in order to pursue an emancipatory project exclusively with the “dissident third” (Seibert), that is, with those already committed to solidary praxes and an open and pluralistic society. Or, as Jan Ole Arps put it in Analyse & Kritik: “as the Left, why not simply focus on those who are threatened by the Right, rather than on those who trail behind it like the Pied Piper, even if they are not dedicated racists?”

Class Relations and Struggles for Emancipation

Or is the question posed in the wrong way? After all, this phrasing seems to suggest that racism and social marginalisation can or even should be addressed separately. Yet racism and class relations are intimately intertwined – in fact, it is precisely this false dichotomy between emancipatory and way-of-life questions on one hand and issues of social justice on the other that has allowed the Right to do so well in the first place. It is true that parts of the Left inhabit academic subcultures, while others refuse to recognise anti-racist, queer or feminist praxes as true social struggles, helping to further this division. The emancipatory struggles of the “New Left”, the women’s and environmental movements, and struggles for a pluralisation of modes of living (whether of LGBTI people or migrants) allowed themselves to be painted into a corner as struggles of social recognition, and often failed to pose their issues as also questions of social justice. They were reduced to middle-class projects in many instances, far removed from the day-to-day lives of large segments of the working class – as if workers were not gay and lesbian, interested in ecologically sustainable modes of living, or unaffected by racism. It is for this same reason that social gains in emancipation and freedom were so easily integrated into the neoliberal project, and why the Right manages to portray their rebellion against the status quo as a battle against the “musty 1968ers” and their alleged political correctness.

For feminism, this meant that labour market integration and gender quotas effectively became political demands for highly-qualified women, while women from less-qualified sections of the working class either already worked anyway or were forced to by downward pressures on the family wage. Often part-time, menial and poorly paid, this work brought most women neither financial independence under patriarchal conditions nor self-realisation in the form of a good job, while exerting tremendous pressure on the traditional family model and destabilising dominant conceptions of masculinity without offering alternative frameworks. This crisis of family and gender relations and the frustration of not having profited from gender equality measures is part of the reason why the Right can discredit them as part of the system of the elites.

The women’s movement has become a movement of the well-paid and highly-educated. Similar is true for the “migrantisation” of society. Globalisation and transnationalisation of modes of culture and living were seized upon by post-1968 left-liberal milieus as a way of life and cultivated self-image. While some managed to profit from diversity, transculturality and freedom of movement, others remained trapped in culturally and economically declining regions and peripheries. As the Left retreated from social struggles almost entirely, it was also largely uninvolved in the labour struggles of migrant wage-earners. The Left “took care” of refugees, but rarely viewed migrants as subjects of emancipatory struggles in their own right. All exceptions aside, the prominence of the renters’ association “Kotti & Co” shows how uncommon praxes like a common struggle for affordable rents and the right to the city between socially and culturally heterogeneous groups have become in recent decades. The selective integration and depoliticisation of struggles around social recognition and the ignoring of class relations within them ultimately came at a cost to the overwhelming majority – both “native” workers as well as migrants, most of whom also belong to the working class.

Following years of separation, a distinct lack of theoretical and practical experience in leading struggles for emancipation and recognition as social struggles cannot be denied. This also explains why analyses of the Right’s success are often oversimplified, counterposing cultural and economic moments. It is true that the poorest in our society do not vote overwhelmingly for the Right – 45 percent of the poor do not vote at all. Nevertheless, failing to connect the Right’s success to the systematic destabilisation of labour and social relations, hyper-exploitation, the growing gap between the superrich and the majority of the population, systematic political marginalisation, demobilisation and the hollowing out of democracy would be analytically negligent, to say the least. The reverse, however, is also true: taking precarisation seriously cannot mean ignoring the “cultural” moments of right-populism, as affects like xenophobia, fear and hate of difference certainly play a role. Étienne Balibar and others have argued that the culturalisation of social difference belongs to the standard repertoire of contemporary racism; the production of cultural Otherness is the precondition to integrating segments of the subaltern into an increasingly authoritarian state project in the first place.

Marxist cultural theory has pointed to this connection for some time now. As Stuart Hall once observed: “racism is also one of the dominant means of ideological representation through which the white fractions of the class come to ‘live’ their relations to other fractions, and through them to capital Itself. […] This is the ideological class struggle, pursued, precisely, through harnessing the dominated classes to capital by means of the articulation of the internal contradictions of class experience with racism.” Organising growing social discontent to establish a new, authoritarian-neoliberal political project along racist, anti-feminist and culturally homogenising lines is precisely what right-populism is (successfully) attempting at the Moment.

The Left must oppose this division of the subaltern by placing questions of emancipation at the heart of social struggles and formulating them as class questions while, on the other hand, making questions of social justice core themes of struggles around modes of living. Only an anti-racist class politics and advocacy for a solidary immigration society with a social safety net for all can offer an attractive alternative to the Right’s false promises.

Anti-Racist Class Politics

But what could such an inclusive anti-racism look like? What about an intersectional and internationalist class politics? LuXemburg 1/2017 surveys the terrain and takes a closer look at points of departure for connective perspectives and solidary praxes in this field.

A credible Left cannot afford to limit its politics to the national sphere. In light of transnational production, trade and communication, our only option is to “sublate” this globality. In order to do so, relations of inequality must be accounted for and addressed as transnational class relations – beyond passive moral economies and appeals to reduce consumption (see Adamczak in LuXemburg 1-2017). Many struggles today revolve around the right to global freedom of movement. Here, we must take up these impulses while simultaneously countering the fears of “unstoppable floods” stirred up by the Right both discursively and with concrete, material policies. An offensive debate for a socialist immigration policy offers a possible point of departure for such an initiative (see Kreck and Schindler in LuXemburg 1/2017). However: not everyone wants to come to Europe – this notion itself is an absurd fantasy pushed by the Right. Everyone who wants to determine their own future beyond economic and political coercion, who wants to live their hopes and dreams – wherever they may be – must be part of a Left project. Trésor (in LuXemburg 1/2017) correctly stresses the importance of the right to leave and to stay in the context of current debates. Here, the Left could simply “participate” – that is, join in existing praxes.

Yet bringing “struggles of migration” (see Kron in LuXemburg 1/2017) to the centre of our attention applies not only with regard to transnational questions – particularly at the local level, there are more instances of successful conviviality and solidary co-existence than most debates on the Left acknowledge. Kotti & Co stands for a praxis of social struggle which is not only led by and with the local population, but even in cooperation with “native Germans” and the Turkish and Kurdish communities (see Hamman at LuXemburg-Online). Movements for sanctuary cities and cities of refuge have also grown in importance in recent years (see Heuser in LuXemburg 1-2017). The most successful example can be found in New York City, where the project for a New York ID successfully built a cross-class, intersectional coalition transcending the immediate demands of undocumented migrants. Many queer people also apply for the card, as it does not obligate holders to specify their gender. Middle-class parents use it to access discounts at local recreational and cultural institutions, while many homeless and stateless persons use it, as it allows them to list an NGO’s address as their residence and avoid police harassment and intimidation (see Lebuhn at LuXemburg-Online). Developing similar policies which cohere distinct local interest groups and build coalitions between the middle- and lower-classes capable of transcending imaginary distinctions between native and foreign will be crucial to the Left’s future success or failure. Communal actors are not only improving conditions for new arrivals, but joining together in transnational networks of “Rebel Cities” to bring in refugees from the hotspots in Northern European countries (see Orlando in LuXemburg 1/2017). They find room to manoeuvre precisely where the European border regime stands diametrically opposed to an emancipatory migration policy, seeking to expand these spaces and connect them to social policies for all. In doing so, they chip away at the increasingly fragile self-image of Fortress Europe and its political elite, which seeks to preserve prosperity and secure its position vis-à-vis rising right-wing movements and parties at home by striking deals with foreign despots.

How to build and maintain such alliances is a central question confronting the Left today – as well as to what extent such initiatives can be extended into the struggle for democratically organised and free social infrastructure. Millions of people active in the welcoming initiatives of recent years had to grapple with decrepit or dysfunctional infrastructure, as well as with repressive and failing state authorities. To what extent can these experiences foster activism for the expansion and preservation – or against the privatisation – of hospitals, child care, and public transportation (see Mira Wallis on LuX-Online)? What role can the Left play in these contexts, and how can it root itself deeper and more broadly in Society?

Ultimately, we have to ask ourselves: what could communicative strategies against the social divisions described above look like?

The most important thing is that we begin speaking with people instead of about them. We cannot be satisfied with having the right answers, but rather must combine an openness to dialogue with uncompromising stances in, for example, questions of anti-racism, and thereby transcend the borders of social milieus which separate much of the Left from the subaltern and their daily lives. We are hardly prepared for taking steps into these lifeworlds and discursive constellations, but we must if we are to explore potential shared interests (see Steckner in LuXemburg 1-2017). A wide variety of people live in marginalised city neighbourhoods – how can shared concerns in the district be formulated, how can experiences with the unemployment office or municipal government be combined? How can experiences with globality occur in local organising projects without coming across as an Erasmus student or transnational jetsetter?

As far as these questions are concerned, praxis is not the only thing in short supply – we must take exploratory steps in conceptual terms as well. Although the debate on combining anti-racism and social justice is further along in the US (see Taylor in LuXemburg 1-2017), the German Left is not necessarily beginning from zero, either. How to retain the Left’s emancipatory struggles without permitting forms of selective integration will be a central question in the years to come.

Translated by Loren Balhorn

Barbara Fried ist leitende Redakteurin dieser Zeitschrift und stellvertretende Direktorin des Instituts für Gesellschaftsanalyse der Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. Sie ist im Netzwerk Care Revolution aktiv und arbeitet zu Fragen von Sorgearbeit und Feminismus.

Originally published on: The Left in an Immigration Germany | Zeitschrift Luxemburg (zeitschrift-luxemburg.de)

Photo: Refugees Welcome means Equal Rights for all - Demonstratio… | Flickr

Could you briefly tell us about your personal political background and introduce us to the gym you are currently living in Berlin?

Since the beginnig of the Syrian demonstration movement in 2011, I have worked in a network of political activists, and also did social work with displaced persons in various parts of the country. For political reasons I had to leave the country. Since January 2016, I’ve been living in the gymnasium on the Treskowallee campus of the Berlin University of Applied Sciences (HTW) in Lichtenberg. We are a total of 190 men living in one hall, mostly young people from Syria and Iraq, with smaller groups from Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Eritrea.

What did you and your friends do within the camp in order to improve living conditions?

We organize for both internal and external aims. Internally, we just try to improve our living conditions and make the decisions we take together in a more democratic way. Externally, our aim is to build up some communication between the camp inhabitants, the neighbourhood, and the HTW staff and students. As far as improving material living conditions is concerned, we have the support of camp management, which at least in our case is very open to all suggestions and ideas. The responsible institution is Sozdia, a small organization with only one camp in Berlin. We often sit together with management until midnight discussing how to make the camp a better place to live. For example, we asked for a community room, a reading room, and also a Mosque room – all these are small rooms within the part of the building where showers and bathrooms are located. And after devising a set of rules and responsibilities for how to use the rooms, we got them. Demands that depend on the decisions and finances of the LaGeSo (Berlin social services authorities) are more difficult. In some cases, takes took a couple of weeks, like the lockers and washing machines, but we finally got them. In other cases, we never get the demand at all: for example, we tried to establish some form of privacy within the gymnasium by constructing walls that were designed by a young engineer living here, in order to have separated four-bed cabins. But we never received permission to set them up. The hall is not at all made to be a residential space. Nevertheless, we’ve already been here for months and nobody knows how much longer we will stay.

Nearly everyone is depressed in some way or another. Living in such a closed situation without doing anything but sleeping, eating and waiting for a LaGeSo or for a BAMF (federal immigration authorities) appointment is horrible. Most of the people here have worked all their life and are not used to doing nothing but lying on a bed for weeks on end. One of the guys said to me: “We could have easily put together a team in this camp with all the necessarily skills to construct a fine building with everything in it by now.”

How did you try to change relationships and organize the camp in a more democratic way?

In the first months, one big problem was that the security guards would enter the hall at night and walk between the beds, ordering us to be silent in a very authoritative manner without showing any respect. Many of us were really upset about this situation, and we thought about how to find a better way for everybody to sleep, and also how to solve conflicts by ourselves more generally. There are a lot of different opinions and interests within the camp, which is quite understandable. Any place in the world where there people don’t enjoy privacy leads to these type of problems. One guy is speaking too loud, the other is talking on the phone too much, others want to sleep, and so on.

So me and my friends initiated a process of self-governance. We organised ourselves in a group, some fifteen guys who were most interested in organising and debating the issues. We gathered a group of seven or more friends around each of them, so that these fifteen – you could call them social delegates – debated everything with their friends and then reported back to common meetings. We also chose a group to walk the hall every night and ask people in a very kindly way either to keep quiet or to go up to the community room. We prepared and agreed on “new rules” and announced them publically. It was really like the Agora Square democracy in ancient Greece! The new rules involved issues such as a smoking ban, mandatory quiet hours at night, or setting up a ventilation system. We just wanted to express that we don’t need the security guards to solve our problems and dodge mandatory qonsequences.

Looking back on it now, I can say that we were partially successful, and more so than expected. In the dictatorships we come from, we are used to dealing with repression, and therefore there was a different current within our camp that strongly opposed our initiative. They argued that repression is the only way to solve problems, particularly when people had never tried democracy before. They wanted stronger punishments: For example, if someone smoked, he should be punished by spending the night in the camp yard – even in the middle of winter. In our common debates, we replaced this punishment, instead requiring that the offender perform some kind of social service in the camp. In the beginning I expected that only 20 guys would participate in this initiative, but now a lot of people in the camp like the idea of developing our own rules. The effect is less offenders, less harsh punishments, more responsibility and more cooperation, and security staying out of the camp at night.

What, generally, are people’s previous experiences of self-organisation or political activism like in the camp?

In our countries, “the government does everything”. Generally, people who are in our camp have lived this reality. There was no possibility to experience how to decide on a local or community level, and people therefore have generally no experiences in self-organisation, because nearly everything is forbidden. Most of social work activities, as for example in Syria, have developed in times of insurrection, against the will of the authorities. However, after some events we did together outside of the camp and after all our organising efforts inside the camp, there are a lot of people who are really interested in doing some kind of work for the community or for others

What events are you talking about, developing activities outside the camp?

Our other aim from the beginning was to get into touch with the neighbours in order to build up participatory relationships and to say that we want to play a role in our new local community. One first action was the idea of some guys in the camp, they suggested we do a street cleaning day on the first of January, when the streets are still full of the remains from New Year’s. It was a total success: a lot of guys, like 40, wanted to help out, and we even had to do a second shift so that everybody could participate. The feedback from the neighbours was also really good.

Another action was for the HTW staff and students, in order to say thanks for hosting us and also for the party and dinners they had organised for us. We did an exposition for them, a collage with photos of historical and cultural sites in Syria and a little description about every one, we titled it „From Syria with love. The cultural language is the common language of the world.” It was a simple thing but it was amazing, we connected with a lot of students who asked questions about these places.

We also went to a demonstration in front of LaGeSo after there had been the rumour that someone had died waiting in the LaGeSo queues. This was not true, but it is true that people are suffering there. We don’t have to wait until someone dies. I saw people collapse from exhaustion or illness in the LaGeSo queues. When people have an appointment, it is normal to go there the night before and stand in the queue. You can imagine how this was during the winter. The security guards working there also behave very badly. Some Berlin activists organized this demonstration in January, and I went with some of our camp to participate.

There was another demonstration organized directly by the camp inhabitants, after the media reported about the events in Cologne in Silvester night. You told me that you didn’t participate. Why?

Some guys wanted to show the public that what happened in Cologne doesn’t express the attitudes of all refugees, and that they opposed sexual violence and harassment. So they wrote banners in English and German, they announced the demonstration in the camp and around and they went, like 50 people, to the Tierpark U-Bahn station. I didn’t participate because I don’t see why I should feel guilty or react to something wrong any Moroccan or Syrian or any other person does in another city far away from me. The problem is the media, which always connects criminal behaviour to one source, the refugees. I reject this category of refugees as one homogeneous group. In my opinion it promotes racism, increases isolation and leads to violence. It seems absurd to me to have to go to a demonstration in order to explain that I don’t like sexual violence. Besides, a German friend told me that sexual harassment is normal within German society and that she has been the victim of it three or four times at university, so it is nothing new in Germany.

You had another bad experience with these sorts of criminalising media images affecting your camp itself. On the 25th of February, your camp manager was injured by security guards, but the media claimed a massive brawl among refugees had been the cause. How did you confront these kinds of lies in reporting? 

It was important that we had a smartphone video made by one of the guys living in the camp proving that a security guard had injured the camp manager by throwing a heavy metal object at him from behind. Some of these guards had demonstrated very aggressive and discriminatory macho behaviour from the beginning. The conflict started when an Iranian man protested against the use of physical violence by one of the security guards. We reacted by writing everything down. Together with people from camp management, we wrote a detailed record of events and published a press release,  and later Sozdia also held a press conference. The media showed a lot of interest and we were quite successful in changing the slant of their coverage – a lot of Berlin newspapers published some sort of retraction. For the camp inhabitants, it was an experience that brought us closer together.

How do you connect to volunteers engaged in supporting your camp and the neighbourhood? Are there perspectives of politically organizing together and building alliances?

Actually, in our small camp we met a lot of volunteers working hard to improve the situation in the camp. In the beginning they brought clothes and food. Now they are still engaged, by offering German classes. Currently, the most important and also very helpful form of activity is that they support people they have established friendships with individually. However, we have to say that the capacities of volunteers are limited. What we need is a different government policy and financial support, which is not the responsibility of volunteers, who cannot change this. Concerning the neighbours more generally: We received positive feedback when we did our external events and we’ve noticed that they visit the camp more often after the events. Still, there is no stable relationship or kind of common political organizing between us and the neighbours or engaged volunteers.

Did you try to organize beyond the camp, connect with other camps or relate to older refugee struggles and the organizing structures still existing from these struggles?

We visited other camps, like one big camp nearby in Köpenicker Allee. But we did not get positive responses about working together, because every camp is so busy trying to alleviate their own daily emergencies.  We did not find people who wanted to struggle together for a more long-term perspective. Perhaps nobody believes that this would realistically bring tangible results. A general problem is that we know very little about existing organization structures here in Berlin. For example, we did not hear about the older refugee struggles. The only connections we have is with groups or organizations who come to visit the camp. Most of them are groups organizing exchanges between children or adolescents – like initiatives from schools or youth clubs.  There was also one delegation from the CDU who came to visit once, I would say on a kind of diplomatic thing.

But there is another reason why we do not think about political perspectives for organizing in the long term: this camp should be for the short term, but what they define as short term is really far too long. After three months of hard political organizing work within the camp, if someone asks me how to improve the situation, I can only tell them: The best initiative would be to close the camp. It is so absurd. The integration policies cost a lot as a long term project. Nevertheless, what is really happening in these camps in the short term, is the opposite – it is a policy of segregation, isolation and exclusion. In fact, people in our camp feel like they are still in Damascus, Baghdad or Aleppo. Why should they feel like they were living in Berlin? They still meet the same people, only much more closely, and with the difference that their former lives in Damascus, Baghdad or Aleppo were, despite war and repression, much more liberal than daily life in a camp like this.

Berlin, late April 2016Interview by Susanne Schultz

Originally published on: "This camp accommodation is already far too long..." | Zeitschrift Luxemburg (zeitschrift-luxemburg.de)

Photo: Refugees Welcome | Sven-Kåre Evenseth | Flickr