Mute magazine - Culture and politics after the net - Immigration

Mute Vol 2 #7 - Show Invisibles? Migration / Data / Work

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 16:41:01 +0000

We are living through an intensification of citizens’, and non-citizens’, visibility to capital. Database convergence, states of emergency and points-based immigration systems destroy the legal and informational grey zones in which the poor shelter and organise. As black economies and shadow sectors are exposed to the light of networked information in the interests of population management, border enforcement, welfare clamp-downs and, above all, profit, what are the risks and advantages of visibility? What do (political and artistic) representation and rights have to offer the illegal and ‘invisible’?

Undocumented Migrants Win Unpaid Wages in Sweden

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 16:34:21 +0000

The syndicalist SAC union in Sweden has over the last few months been campaigning for fair wages for undocumented immigrants , resulting in thousands of pounds in unpaid wages being paid to migrant workers.

Nuclear spring / Class struggle in a German town: temp workers on the construction site of the Philippsburg nuclear power plant

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:15:32 +0000

ByWildcat (Germany)

On March 26 a Financial Times 'Lex' columnist wrote:
"Happily for nuclear power, there are new bogeymen in town. Flatulent cows and coal fires are heating up the planet, while autocratic regimes seem to control most of the fossil fuel reserves. As democratic Canada and Australia sit on plenty of uranium, and nuclear power generation is relatively clean once the plants are up and running, the industry seems set to make a comeback. [...] Russia announced this month that it expects to build as many as 42 new domestic reactors by 2030, compared with the 31 it is running now. Its nuclear holding company, Rosatom, created in another fit of state-led industrial reorganisation, hopes to export another 60. Some of these will go to China, which has 11 reactors in operation and five in construction. The plan is to increase Chinese nuclear generation capacity fivefold by 2020, and then triple that by 2030. In the US, plans for 30 new plants have been announced, and several developed countries are eyeing the replacement of similar reactors.
So a burst of activity similar to the 1980s, when building work on half of the world's 438 nuclear power stations began, seems likely over the next two decades..."
All of which makes now seem like a good moment to return to this 1986 article from German Wildcat (http://www.wildcat-www.de/), which argues that nuclear expansion was never just an 'energy' question: rather it has always played a key role in the restructuring (i.e. casualization, contracting-out, 'precarization', as it's now known) of labour on a geographical and technological basis. The article gives a concrete account of how this worked and how it was resisted last time round in Europe. The analysis of work in a construction boom based on outsourced casual labour is obviously pertinent right now; as for state-initiated, privately implemented nuclear projects, it looks like the implications could be seen soon on a much bigger scale in Russia and China.

Plague Politics

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:48:45 +0000

ByC. L-Stavrides
While bird flu panic made a return to the UK mainland last autumn, the promised pandemic failed to materialise. What does continue to evolve, however, are repressive forms of population management sustained by hypothetical threats of megadeath – writes C. L-Stavrides

Mute Vol 2 #7 - Show Invisibles? migration / data / work

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:11:19 +0000

We are living through an intensification of citizens’, and non-citizens’, visibility to capital. Database convergence, states of emergency and points-based immigration systems destroy the legal and informational grey zones in which the poor shelter and organise.
As black economies and shadow sectors are exposed to the light of networked information in the interests of population management, border enforcement, welfare clamp-downs and, above all, profit, what are the risks and advantages of visibility? What do (political and artistic) representation and rights have to offer the illegal and ‘invisible?’

Region Price

Europe 7.00€

United Kingdom £5.00

USA 10.00$

Rest of the World 8.50€

Mute Vol 2 #7 cover

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:52:26 +0000

Rights of Man, detail

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 12:53:55 +0000

Human Factory1

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 12:15:39 +0000

Human Factory2

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 12:14:06 +0000

Invisible Workforce

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 11:53:44 +0000

Home Counties

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 11:48:38 +0000

Twilight of the Swampoid

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:37:43 +0000

ByLeutha Blissett
As database profiling of non/citizens grows increasingly pervasive and the dubious promise of 'techno-communism 2.0' haunts the blogosphere, real material differences will continue to sort the technologically ‘liberated’ from the dataslaves, declares Leutha Blissett

Editorial Mute 2 #7

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:23:01 +0000

ByJosephine Berry Slater
We are standing on the brink of an immense revelation. The revelation of people to states. In the UK – the surveillance workshop of the world – people are becoming increasingly visible through IT projects like the Electronic Patients Record and the National Identity Register, as well as a forthcoming points-based immigration regime premised on the ability to identify subjects and then track and cross-reference their data as never before. Joining-up data, and hence governance, is the name of the game. What are the implications then of this dangerous regime of identity capture, assessment, and tracking for political demands for representation and rights? What are the risks and advantages of visibility, of joining the demos, when identification by the state triggers joined-up ‘knowledge’, often with punitive results? The bright light of IT in the hands of increasingly authoritarian regimes is chasing away the shadows that once provided the minimum of protection, income and manoeuvrability to people at the edges of society. The basic survival of the poor, undocumented or ‘illegalised’ often depends on the ability to operate without detection, the necessity of ID, or the creation of official records. This grey zone of anonymity is constantly squeezed in the interests of population management, border enforcement, welfare clamp-downs, technocratic convenience and, of course, the economy. This issue of Mute focuses on the exposure of subjects not just to state surveillance and databasing, but to sovereign state power enacted either through the ordinary rule of law or through its suspension in the state of emergency.
As Elizabeth Povinelli writes in these pages, ‘The state of exception and its tethering to moral panic, is a routinised form of state action.’ State/media orchestrated panics, usually presenting a society on the brink of calamity, have become the precondition of the state’s operations. In order to justify massive social change such as ‘managed migration’, in which would-be immigrants to the UK will be subjected to an inhuman assessment based on ‘skills’, the emotive bomb of ‘swamping’ is detonated again and again. In order to roll back hard-won indigenous rights and ‘neoliberate’ communities and their lands in Australia, the bomb of culturally ingrained child sexual abuse amongst Aboriginals is detonated. As Povinelli says, these moral panics are like screaming fire in a movie theatre – no time to think, just act. The time of the here and now privileges those with power, after all, this is the time-frame in which the world’s traders make fortunes.

No One Is Legal

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:40:20 +0000

ByUnterschereber
Where the struggle for migrants’ rights can be risky and divisive, informal organising by ‘illegals’ is a means to ensure survival. But both formal and informal organising can combine to protect an essential buffer zone of invisibility for undocumented workers — writes Unterschreber

Points-based Peonage

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:42:55 +0000

ByJavier

All immigrants are equal, but some are more equal than others. The introduction of a points-based immigration system in the UK will intensify workers’ vulnerability to the state and employers, reports Javier

Region	Price
Europe	7.00€
United Kingdom	£5.00
USA	10.00$
Rest of the World	8.50€