Reviews & Culture
No Borders: A Movement in the Process of Becoming?
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Reviews & Culture
A review-essay of
Natasha King, No Borders: The Politics of Immigration Control and Resistance. London: Zed Books, 2016
by Chris Gilligan
Natasha King’s No Borders focuses on the struggle against Western states’ controls on immigration and immigrants, rather than on the controls themselves. As King puts it, the book is:
not really about border controls, but about how people find ways to practice the freedom of movement despite such controls. It’s a book about practices for free movement, against the border. Because border controls are and have always been resisted … the term ‘migration struggles’ encapsulates both organized struggles by migrants and those in solidarity with them, and daily strategies of refusal. [pp. 2–3; emphasis in original]
No Borders makes two important contributions to migration struggles. Firstly, King reflects on her own experience in the No Borders Movement, and attempts to make explicit the theory underpinning No Borders practice. Secondly, she is honest and does not shy away from identifying limitations to the current stage of the struggles and she tries to think about how we advance the struggle. Sadly, however, she avoids the difficult issue of how we can––and to a large extent, even the question of why we should––end immigration controls and create a world without barriers to the free movement of people.
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Monsters vs. Zombies: Review of Phil Mullan’s Creative Destruction
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Reviews & Culture
Phil Mullan, Creative Destruction: How to Start an Economic Renaissance, Bristol, UK and Chicago: Policy Press, 2017.
by Barry Curtis
Phil Mullan, business manager and chief economist at the magazine spiked-online, is, by his own admission, ‘obsessed with economic growth.’ This goal, alongside others, is precious to many people. Mullan makes his case that we are currently living through a ‘Long Depression’ that began with the economic downturn in the 1970s. The rate of expansion of Gross Domestic Product in Western nations has shrunk in relation to the levels of the post-war boom. Consequently, rises in living standards, which Mullan the humanist cares about, are held back. Appearances of dynamism in things like the stock market are essentially parasitic upon the real, productive economy where value is created. If that is seizing up, then finance is just another bubble like the dot-com bubble waiting to burst. Another Crash like 2008 is imminent in the context of the persisting Long Depression. The escape from the protracted depression, says Mullan, lies in increasing productivity, for which it is essential to demolish zombification trends. Read More
Bull Fight on Wall Street
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Reviews & Culture
by A. J.
New York is abuzz about the recently installed “Fearless Girl” statue now confronting the massive, bronze “Charging Bull” statue in the heart of Wall Street. The petite girl holds a defiant stance as she stares down the big, brutish symbol of a rising stock market.
The girl was put there temporarily, but many women and girls want her to remain permanently. The creator of the bull, Arturo Di Modica, demands the girl be removed, claiming that she infringes on his sculpture.
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