ABSTRACT
Neoliberalism and austerity are not ‘false policies’, but strategies of
increasing profits by reducing labor and welfare costs. In the process of
dismantling labor rights and the welfare state, a part of the population
is being marginalized. It becomes ‘superfluous’, and its living conditions
approach those of the inflowing refugee masses. However,
between indigenous and ‘foreign’ (refugee and immigrant) superfluous
populations a clear demarcation line is being reproduced by state
apparatuses and the ruling ideology: the demarcation line created by
the nation, which excludes the non-nationals (refugees and immigrants)
from the polity and certain state provisions. In fact, the nation
may be regarded as a facet of the state itself: the ‘historically homogenized’
population of a given capitalist state. Marginalized Greek (or
other European) ‘nationals’ tend to consider themselves ‘superior’ to
(equally marginalized) foreigners. Fighting nationalism and, even
more, transcending divisions reproduced by ideologies of particularism
(often being reproduced in solidarity movements that focus on
‘the rights of the ethnic other’), is a precondition for shaping of a radical
left internationalism, through the consolidation of what is universal in
all subaltern classes and communities: the need of proletarian unity,
first of all within the country, struggling against capitalism.
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