We had nearly the same number of immigrants twenty years ago. But they had another name then: they were called migrant workers or just plain workers. Today's immigrant is first a worker who has lost his second name, who has lost the political form of his identity and of his otherness, the form of a political subjectification of the count of the uncounted. All he now has left is a sociological identity, which then topples over into the anthropological nakedness of a different race and skin ...

Fanon's nuanced analysis of colonisation as spatial organisation is important to understanding our 'postcolonial' time. Colonial spatial organisation relies on everyday racism, which is thus both a lived ideology and an alienating spatial relation. Colonial violence and domination are inscribed into and mediated through the spatial organisation of colonisation, its compartmentalised socio-racial order. Fanon emphasised that the colonial spatial organisation and racialisation of life impose a double siege upon the colonised: one simultaneously spatial, and of their consciousness and existence. Never solely based on naked force, colonialism depended on the more complex and mediated form of moderating violence constituting the colonial subject, and imposing the present as definitive.

We are living a 'long war' in which urban destruction is the dominant strategy. The 'long war' against terrorism and fundamentalist Islamism is fought as an urban war. If we take the equality of all human beings as our premise, then the attacks in Paris, Brussels and Nice are no more terrorising than is the systemic destruction of Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. But we do not have 'unity' marches for the terrorising destruction of urban life in these other geographies. [...]

[...] even anti-racist organisations that do not define themselves as anti-capitalist should be supported by the Left, for a very specific reason: I think that anti-capitalism is not about statements, but about what you are really struggling against. [...] we cannot evaluate movements like Black Lives Matter (BLM) only through their relationship to the class struggle and to anti-capitalism. BLM involves various tendencies, some anti-capitalist, some not; but, frankly, what is at issue not only a group's rhetoric and organising around class - important as they are - but how they relate to the fact, that can't be ignored, of the huge role that racism plays in the accumulation of capital and, more broadly, in capitalism. As such, radical struggles against racism - whether from within or from outside the workers' movement - play an important role in the general struggle against capitalism, as well in the rise of class consciousness.