Migration, Temporality, and Capitalism

Entangled Mobilities across Global Spaces

Pauline Gardiner Barber, Winnie Lem, Pauline Gardiner Barber, Winnie Lem

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319727806
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319727813
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Social Sciences

Bringing together a range of illustrative case studies coupled with fresh theoretical insights, this volume is one of the first to address the complexities and contradictions in the relationship between migration, time, and capitalism. While temporal reckoning has long fascinated anthropologists, few studies have sought to confront how capitalism fetishizes time in the production of global inequalities—historically and in the contemporary world. As it explores how the agendas of capitalism condition migration in Europe, North America, and Oceania, this collection also examines temporality as a feature of migrants' experiences to ultimately provide a theoretically robust and ethnographically informed investigation of migration and temporality within a framework defined by the political economy of capitalism.

© The Author(s) 2018

Pauline Gardiner Barber and Winnie Lem (eds.)Migration, Temporality, and Capitalismhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72781-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Migration, Temporality and Capitalism: A Brief Introduction

Pauline Gardiner Barber¹ and Winnie Lem²

(1)

Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada

(2)

International Development Studies, Trent University, Peterborough, ON, Canada

Pauline Gardiner Barber (Corresponding author)

Winnie Lem

End Abstract

Migration and Capitalism: Setting the Scene

What have been called the ‘timescapes of modernity’ (Adam 1998) are synonymous with migration and the changing forms of capital.¹ Timescapes are often encapsulated in terms of ages. The period from the late twentieth to the early twenty-first century, so it has been suggested, is the ‘age of migration’, in which the scale and scope of the global mobility of people across borders has been and continues to be unprecedented (Castles et al. 2014). Yet, following Wolf (1982), clearly other ages were also substantively shaped by migrations that enabled the dynamics of accumulation . Capitalism and its transformations are distinguished by a dominant set of social relations associated with accumulation and surplus appropriation. From the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, the ages of mercantile capitalism prevailed within regimes of colonialism and imperialism in which the key dynamics of accumulation entailed buying cheap and selling dear. Mercantile capitalism and its economies based on the traffic of people—basically, forced migrants commodified as slave-labor—were key in the setting up of the preconditions for the emergence of industrial capitalism (Williams 1944). Mercantile capitalism was superseded by the age of industrial capitalism , in which the appropriation of surplus through the relationship between wage labor and capital enabled the reproduction of national economies from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Industrial capitalism in this period was sustained in the war-torn economies of Europe through the mobilization of migrant labor from localities on the margins of Europe , its colonies and Asia.

In the late twentieth century, we see the emergence of what has been described as ‘post-industrialism’. In this era, under the aegis of neoliberal forms of global transformations, a key dynamic of accumulation centers on finance and the appropriation of surpluses through interest and speculation (Ho 2009). Here, we question how the temporal designation of the age of migration reveals (and conceals) capitalism’s continuing quest for access to global labor along with capital markets. This volume highlights the significance of migration in capitalism’s long durée as we draw upon Marx’s observation in Capital concerning the formation and reformation of surplus populations under capitalism as “one of the most energetic agencies for its reproduction ” (Marx 1977: 785). Throughout history, the forces of change within capitalism have rendered populations as mobile and immobile , insiders and outsiders, citizens and denizens, and necessary and disposable, in different places and over time. These same forces have also simultaneously repurposed and eliminated localities as sites for capital accumulation.

Capitalism’s Concern with Time and Mobile Workers

We are proposing that the history of global capitalism is the manipulation of time and space as capital seeks ever greater efficiencies through the bending of time to accumulation imperatives. Along with temporal adjustments associated with new reckonings of time under industrialization and so-called modernization came the disruptions, sometimes violently accomplished, of encouraging people into mobility, both as internal and international migrants. Writing about industrial capitalism and time discipline in Western Europe, E.P. Thompson (1967) noted that the arrival of clock time in the fourteenth century coincided with the imposition of “Puritan discipline and bourgeois exactitude” (p. 46) so central to European industrialization. As peasants were (and are to this day) compelled to partake in the new social relations of wage work with employers, a long struggle ensued over the discrepant temporalities of agricultural versus factory time: from the task-oriented rhythms of rural labor routines to the timed labor power which employers purchase through the wage relation. Such struggles over time and the routines and rhythms of daily life continue to pervade the workplaces of today; such struggles can become more acute in circumstances where migrant workers are employed to address labor gaps as they interact with employers’ demands, the scrutiny of local workers, and the legal policy frameworks that define the legitimacy of their status. Migrants without status can also serve as a potential labor pool for employers who may draw upon them as a kind of labor surplus: disposable but available to replace—and thus discipline—those who hold the available jobs.

Historically, as ever more efficient industrial technologies held out the promise of greater efficiencies for labor control, and colonization and technologies for both movement and communications opened new territories for the exploitation of resources and people, we see the capitalist’s obsession with controlling labor time’s productivity taken to new heights. For example, at the turn of the twentieth century, industry applied Frederick Winslow Taylor’s theories of scientific management, which involved rigid time management in the disciplining and deskilling of workers (Braverman 1974). Digital technologies have further enabled the efficiencies of capital’s productivity through the flexibilization of production regimes entailing the redistribution of production into chains across time and space. While the new regimes of mobility (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013) can involve various forms of mobile capital for accumulation , including the inducing of migrants to invest and even speculate in property and infrastructure projects in places they left behind (see Pido 2017), here we primarily explore the conditions and temporalities of capitalist enterprises, labor markets, state regimes, family relations, and the biographies of migrants. We also emphasize how capitalist enterprises rely upon the labor of immobile populations, people who function as relative surplus populations, of Marx’s “industrial reserve army” (Marx 1977: 783); those who are bought in on an ‘as needed basis’ and then let go, as disposable surplus populations in instances where capital moves to labor and then withdraws (Kasmir and Carbonella 2014). Or again, where mobile populations cross borders in anticipation of labor contracts that offer no stable employment or the prospect of obtaining the official documentation necessary to settle in the destination country. In the latter case, mobile people can also be considered as disposable labor surplus, stuck in time and precariously situated within a national space. Commencing from these kinds of scenarios in which people engage with capital, our primary concern is with the temporal entanglements of mobile populations with global capitalism, and primarily with those groups who undertake international migrations inspired by the hope of a better, more settled future.

Discrepant Temporalities

Our volume thus focuses its attention on the world of capitalist change and highlights how migration has been shaped by forms of capital accumulation in distinct eras. We examine the disjunctures of time wrought in the lives of migrants as they confront the shifting dynamics of accumulation. To do this, we offer the optic of discrepant temporalities to highlight the inconsistencies and disjunctive time scales in the lives of migrants as they contend with change within regimes of labor, security, family and citizenship under different phases of capitalist transformation in the past as well as the present. Toward this end, we propose that our concept of discrepant temporalities best conveys the variations and disjunctures between time scales that frame migrant lives relative to the temporal priorities of neoliberal state agendas. Our ethnographic interventions focus on such discrepancies within distinct regimes of labor, security, family, and citizens...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Migration, Temporality and Capitalism: A Brief Introduction
• 2. Chronotopes of Migration Scholarship: Challenges of Contemporaneity and Historical Conjuncture
• 3. The Timescape of Post-WWII Caribbean Migration to Britain: Historical Heterogeneity as Challenge and Opportunity
• 4. Time at Sea, Time on Land: Temporal Horizons of Rescue and Refuge in the Mediterranean and Europe
• 5. Conjunctural Reversals, Capital Accumulation and Family Adjustments in Chinese Trans-Pacific Migration
• 6. Migrating for a Better Future: ‘Lost Time’ and Its Social Consequences Among Young Somali Migrants
• 7. “Wait, and While You Wait, Work”: On the Reproduction of Precarious Labor in Liminal Spaces
• 8. Migration Across Intersecting Temporalities: Venezuelan Migrants and ‘Readiness’ in Montreal
• 9. The Entanglements of Neoliberal Temporalities and Class Politics in Philippine Migration to Canada
• 10. The Dialectics of Uneven Spatial-Temporal Development: Migrants and Reproduction in Late Capitalism
• Back Matter