The gaze of autonomy: capitalism, migration and social struggles

The essay examines the politics of mobility from the perspective of migrant subjectivity. Situating such a politics in relation to the transformation of capitalism under contemporary conditions of globalization, it conceptualises irregularity as a key strategic stake for an autonomous migration approach that seeks to shift our gaze toward a migrant-orientated perspective. Such an approach, the essay suggests, entails a consideration of the ways in which migrants – both regular and irregular – act as citizens, regardless of their juridical status. It also entails a consideration of the ways in which migrant practices are politically mobilized in relation to the struggles, tensions and violences that run through a politics of mobility. In developing a migrant-oriented perspective on the politics of mobility the essay contributes to a body of work on autonomous migration both through fleshing out its Italian autonomous Marxist impulse as well as through drawing on the radical democratic theories of Jacques Rancière and Bonnie Honig. The author poses the autonomous migration approach against what he describes as a ‘new orthodoxy’ in migration studies, which privileges the migrant in terms of the communitarian values that migration revives. In so doing, he exposes managed migration as a struggle to exploit the productive powers of living labour, conceived of as the ‘excess’ or ‘autonomy’ of migration. Situating this politics of control as part of a longer history of tension and conflict between capital and living labour, the essay shows how migrancy itself features as a driving force not only in the restructuring of social and economic relations but also in the formation of political community. He does this by drawing attention to the centrality of migrant struggles within the contemporary politics of mobility, and by suggesting that an understanding of the autonomy of migration potentially allows us to move beyond our current imaginations of political community. Irregularity from this perspective, the essay suggests, cannot be separated out from migration at large, nor can it be viewed simply as a stake that emerges in the struggle between a politics of migration and a politics of control. Rather, the author claims that irregularity concerns the common conditions of social cooperation and production, and thus forms a key stake around which heterogeneous coalitions can be constituted.