The specific message of ‘with and without us’ reveals the danger of entrenching the existence of categories of people who have a ‘natural’ privilege in occupying a certain space, merely by their nationality. It accepts the fixing of some people as citizens or nationals and some people as migrants, categories or subjectivities that thereby become understood as natural and inevitable. These categories are certainly useful in some respects, particularly in activists’ everyday struggles, and we cannot do without them. But the point remains that the practice of critical analysis – i.e. praxis – must be to caution against the habits of the everyday acceptance of why things are the way they are. Here, the ‘natural’ aspect of the privilege of nationality is constructed – and needs to be maintained – by the illusion and ideology of national borders in a liberal context that allows for economic rationality and utilitarianism.

Specifically, it seems logical to this ideology that where and to whom one is born should determine what resources and conditions one should survive in – justified legally by the respective principles of ius solis and ius sanguinis for determining nationality rights. The anti-immigrant rhetoric in most European countries today reinforces and restricts these principles. However, in other contexts such as North America, as Jessica Evans reminds us, indigenous peoples are ‘internal outsiders with a prior claim to both jus solis and jus sanguinis’ and yet ‘access to the state and to the right for a state of their own’ remains denied to them. In both contexts, however, xenophobic and exclusionary rhetoric finds refuge in the cataclysmic sense of emergency where everybody is meant to accept that the world is dying, resources are limited and cannot be shared, and, crucially, (European) Christian culture is threatened. Thus, people should stay where they are and deal with the lot they were given, whether this means war, famine, persecution, discrimination, colonial theft and trauma, unemployment, lack of healthcare, and more. What this implies is the erosion of the principle of solidarity. Although this principle, when coupled to Western liberal ideals, has often led to the worst of liberal interventionism’s civilising missions, it remains a cornerstone of basic human decency and co- existence, and of socialist politics. It therefore must be protected from European liberalism’s securitisation, retrenchment and paranoia.

[...] Liberalism is currently deemed at risk by the advance of the far right; as critics of liberalism, should we not be rejoicing? No, because what is really at risk is not liberalism, but the principle of solidarity that some liberalism contains. Instead of dying, liberalism is merely becoming more and more securitised and economically ‘rational’. The principle of solidarity is trapped in the farcical tragedy of liberalism’s never-ending schizophrenic dance-off to two different songs; trying to cleave to its ideal of harmonious economic migration and human- rights discourse on one hand, and its need for retaining and cajoling the interests of state and capital through cheap labour and border controls on the other.

The fixing of territorial borders, the corresponding determination of nationalities and need for passports as markers of identity, are very recent phenomena. They were mostly consolidated worldwide in the long nineteenth century, the age of mass international migration, and one easily forgets how significantly lower today’s levels of cross-border migration are in relation to the nineteenth century. The process of fixing borders began in Europe, but occurred simultaneously in colonised parts of the world where people either continued to resist the imposition of colonial borders, or managed to use national borders as a means to help overthrow colonisers. [...] Of course, these are no golden days justifying nostalgia for a time of more open and welcoming borders. Although this period privileged the movement of low- income populations, this era of ‘free’ and mass migration entrenched North-South inequalities and sealed with a deadly kiss the fate of colonised peoples and ‘semi-sovereign’ countries (e.g. Siam, China, the Ottoman Empire) in providing cheap and resourceful labour to Western Europe and the Americas.

Taking a broader historical view of the category of ‘the migrant’ – and how it has become entangled with nationality – is to reflect on the origins of the right to move and its links to territorial sovereignty and borders. What becomes apparent is that the more fundamental shift is not whether we have the right to move or live somewhere other than where we were born, but the ways in which it became necessary to invent and shape this right. Like most rights, the right to move only becomes necessary to establish, protect, respect and fulfil, once the actual freedom to move is taken away. Global capitalism in the nineteenth century was not the first large- scale transformative social process to create dispossession and movements of people. Slavery, servitude, war and environmental disasters, such as floods and droughts, have consistently forced people to move or flee their homes for thousands of years. However, what capitalism changed in or added to these phenomena was that it institutionalised a specific form of movement through the process of primitive accumulation.

The origin of capitalism is based on the movement of people away from their land, as the process of enclosure forced people to find other means of subsistence and gradually transformed their social relations. [...] If, then, for Evans, migration embodies a ‘specific mechanism by which so-called backward formations were drawn into the remit of the market’, is migration the logical consequence of the spread of capitalism, faced with the ‘so-called backwardness’ or unevenness of societies? Or is there something also in the origins of capitalism and the capital relation that makes individuals more subjectively prone to or accepting of moving as a necessary condition for survival?

Evidently, people move for a variety of religious, cultural, linguistic, economic, personal or political reasons, and reducing analyses of migration to the history of capitalism would be reductionist and counter-productive. Yet we assume as natural and inevitable the necessity to move to sell our labour, in the sense of being detached from our means of subsistence and production. What is this imperative or condition that unites the processes of migration inherent in the production of surplus-value – where people are forced away from their land, where labour becomes fetishised as a commodity, and where one’s relationship to nature and others becomes redefined by capital – to the global cross- border migrations where capitalism spreads, in as unevenly and combined a fashion as it can? In other words, -is there something that unites the origins of capitalism and its spread_? And, if so, is it the subjective condition of being a migrant? Or, to quote Evans again, ‘the political subjectivities’ underwriting ‘migrants’ material strategies of reproduction’ as ‘active and agential human beings struggling to reproduce themselves in differential, historical and material conditions’?

Thus ‘migrant subjectivity’ under capitalism is a false category that naturalises borders and national citizenship. By forgetting the ways in which capitalism forces us to be on the move as a systemic condition, we create and reinforce relations of hierarchy and inequality between people that are constructed and historically contingent. In turn, those relations make it seem ‘unnatural’ and even shocking that in a capitalist mode of production, we are all – at least in a subjective sense – necessarily migrants. More precisely, movement – or the expectation of its potential – is an inherent condition of our indebtedness and servitude to capital accumulation and of our alienation as happy citizens and passionate workers, as Frédéric Lordon describes neoliberal individuals. People reject migrant subjectivity as a secondary, desperate and devaluating status in relation to the holy grail of citizenship, as if citizenship and national belonging will save us from the moral depravity of having to sell our bodies to work. Inescapably, however, accessing citizenship is also one of the only ways for migrant struggles to achieve real short-term benefits and progressive living conditions, and often to escape persecution, death and poverty. The One Day Without Us campaign is a necessary part of this protest against increasing processes of subjective dispossession, with the means and categories we have at our disposal. However, we must also remain critical of our complicity in completing this vicious circle of liberalism, by which we never allow for its tragic end to come forward. For this struggle, the teaching of theory and history, however elusive, remains worth salvaging.

One well known wit quipped on social media upon Trump’s election that the real story would be its implications for Marxist state theory. Yet what we’ve seen since the election is merely more substantive proof of a theory of the state that arguably goes back to Marx’s 18th Brumaire. The uniquely American state is not merely ‘relatively autonomous’ from capital. It is a factor required for the social reproduction of capitalist social property relations – and one of these structural requirements is this degree of autonomy. It is indeed the ‘Executive Committee for the Management of the Common Affairs of the Bourgeoisie’. Yet, I ask, dear reader, have any of you ever been on an Executive Committee, say, in a political organization or a union? Does the ‘exec’ usually speak with one voice? Executive committees are cut-throat pressure cookers, packed with opportunists who would throw their grandmother under the bus if it meant more power, more control. So then how do we define the American state apparatus if not as a container for a ‘war of all against all’ as adjudicated, of course, by varying branches, that may well, themselves, be rife with duelling factions?

Once you start wandering around the wilderness of mirrors, anything is possible. It is akin to Peter Ustinov’s film Romanoff and Juliet, in which Ustinov plays the Prime Minister of some tiny entity akin to San Marino, who spends his time wandering back and forth between the U.S. and Soviet embassies. First, he learns the U.S. knows the Soviet Code and he thus duly notifies the Soviets. The Soviets claim they already have this information, thus Ustinov tells the Americans: ‘they know you know their code’. The Americans claim they already have this information. Back he goes to the Soviets, explaining: ‘they know you know they know your code’. And so on, until finally, after a dozen ‘you knows’ and ‘they knows,’ one of the Ambassadors exclaims ‘they do??!!’

This is the proverbial last instance.

When it comes down to it, in regards to the parapolitics of Trump and the deep state, and the interests at play – Wall Street and manufacturing wanting an opening to Russia, the military industrial complex wanting new enemies, tech wanting free trade and less surveillance – there is no ideological unity within the ruling class, and hence not within the state itself. They are all Peter Ustinovs, wandering around between embassies. Yet it is not enough to merely say ‘neither Washington nor Moscow but Peter Ustinov!’ on one hand, or to dismiss this as petty politics within the state that have no bearing on capitalist power in general, or the repressive, racist authoritarianism of the Trump regime in particular on the other hand. It actually is the playing out of the real competition of the former within the latter, and how the dreidel lands after spinning around is the moment in which an Ambassador is shocked. There is no telling what is going to happen next, so while it would be folly to end up like Angleton, convinced everyone around him was a Russian agent, it is useful to adopt an approach that examines the necessary internal relations within what cannot simply be called ‘the deep state’. Instead, given the fluidity between state apparatuses, the blurring of lines between coercive on one hand, and ideological on the other, it makes more sense, at this point, to merely call it the state.

So in what sense is sarcasm being referenced by Gramsci? In Note 29 from Volume 1 of Joseph Buttigieg’s translation of The Prison Notebooks, he distinguishes Marx’s sarcasm as a ‘passionate’ or ‘positive sarcasm’. Marx wants to ‘mock not the most intimate feelings’ associated with worldly illusions ‘but their contingent form which is linked to a particular “perishable” world, their cadaverous smell, so to speak, that leaks from behind the painted façade.’ He even aims to ‘give new form to certain aspirations,’ the better to ‘regenerate’ them.

But these ‘new conceptions’ are only germinally in existence, somehow not susceptible to being expressed in ‘apodictic or sermonic form’. Thus, if Marxism is to be effective, it must create new tastes and ‘a new language’ – sarcasm is ‘the component of all these needs which may seem contradictory’.

Gramsci’s claim is that, somehow, without sarcasm these new conceptions would be utopian. Sarcasm, that is, is a language for the not-yet-fully-realised, for that which struggles to be born, against that which resists death. Indeed, it is difficult to detach sarcasm from a half-occluded utopianism; the things we are sarcastic about tend to be those that outrage our sense of what should be.

However irresistible, it is of course resisted. If the form of prophesy is invoked, it is also to tacitly admit that we cannot be prophets. There is no Word of God to which we, mere flesh, could or should be subjected. And so we must analyse our situation with ruthless scorn, not sentimental illusions. We yearn for salvation, rapture, but we must not yearn so. We are down here among the garbage, and it is out of our rubble, the conditions of our existence, that we have to fashion new embodiments of these old aspirations.

Sarcasm, in this sense, is both this-worldly and other-worldly, both secular and divine, disillusioned and devoted. Organised sarcasm is yearning, bitter disappointment and still more yearning raised to the level of praxis.

There is so much to say about a system that increasingly treats housing as a means to accumulate capital, never as a home. A creeping worldview that only understands the value of housing as a commodity, as something to be bought and sold, speculated in, land banked. To them, where you live is only a piece of property subject to global markets, real estate whose value is tied to location and status rather than its conditions, the wellbeing or stability of its tenants, its impact on the neighbourhood. By this system, boarded up and empty houses with front yards full of weeds are somehow worth more than deeply-loved homes that have witnessed the joy and pain of generations and yield harvests, or seasons of flowers.