Build Bridges Not Walls. A Journey To A World Without Borders. By Todd Miller, City Lights Books, 2021. 161pp.
A book about a world without borders is always going to be one that interests socialists who themselves envision a borderless, stateless society of free access to all goods and services organised democratically on the basis of each according to ability to each according to need. And in this book, the author establishes his own imaginative credentials from the very first pages by envisioning the world as ‘a land without political boundaries’ which ‘connects us to one another’ and stating his intention to ‘examine the natural inclination of human beings to be empathetic with one another, to forge solidarities with one another, and how such inclinations contrast with the borders that invoke and perpetuate chronic forms of racial and economic injustice’. His book focuses mainly on the way in which the policing of the border between Mexico and the USA creates immense suffering – violence, dehumanisation, early death – for refugees from Central America seeking but being prevented from finding better lives north of that border. But in so doing, it throws off a large number of reflections on how similar borders throughout the world provoke similar suffering and suggests that the abolition of borders ‘could make the world a more sustainable, habitable place for all’.
Both its reflections on the author’s personal experiences in reporting on border zones over many years and its analysis of the political system that dictates and enforces border control constitute a powerful indictment of nationalism and the nation state and the way in which they make life hell for people on the move from one country to another for reasons of war, persecution, crop failure, drought, flood, or just plain old-fashioned poverty. He tellingly makes the point that no such preventions exist for ‘people who are very wealthy’ or for those associated with the capital which flows from one country to another. And he illustrates how governments are prepared to spend massive resources on ‘drones (engineered with locust-like wings and… armed with facial recognition software), high-tech cameras, motion sensors, war technology, night vision goggles and an arsenal of weapons’ to keep out those who nationalist fervour considers politically or economically undesirable. Meanwhile, worldwide, he points out that, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, ‘2.1 billion people suffer from malnutrition’.
So what is to be done? The author makes the point that ‘demanding to abolish the border is as unthinkable to many people today as it once was to ask to abolish slavery’, but that chattel slavery has been (largely) abolished and so we should use our imaginations to try and step over the new frontier he points to. However, it must be said that the abolition of chattel slavery can be seen to have been in the interest of a system – capitalism – that was always going to be more efficient in the more advanced stages of its development by using another kind of slavery, the kind that exists today – wage slavery. Much less likely is it that the abolition of borders will be seen as being in the interest of capitalism and of the national capitalist classes that own the world, since, as the author himself tells us, ‘2,153 billionaires have more money than 4.6 billion people – 60 percent of the world population’. Since the small minority is unlikely to give that up of their own accord, it can only be left to the majority of the other class in society – those who sell their energies for a wage or salary – to make that happen and to bring about the end of the wages system, which will also mean the end of the border system and the nationalism that underlies and sustains it.
So the author is right to say that ‘building such a world [i.e. a borderless world] means imagining a radically different global order than we have now’ and it is heartening that he refers approvingly to the book by Ian Shaw and Marv Waterstone, Wageless Life: a Manifesto for a Future Beyond Capitalism. But after such a powerful set of arguments against the nation state and the system it supports, it is a little disappointing that he does not take those arguments further and make them even more imaginative by openly advocating the abolition not just of borders and states but of money, wages and the whole of the profit system. Instead he seems to remain entrenched in the idea of money as the currency of human interaction (‘The resources are there. The money is simply misdirected’) and to limit himself to advocating arrangements like ‘the bottom-up democracy of the [Mexican] Zapatista movement’. The fact is that, so long as the money and wages system and the profit motive underpinning them continue to exist, it is inconceivable that the competing states supporting their national capitalist classes will be dissolved and their borders taken down. If you stick with that system, you are stuck with the state, and with the plurality of states, in conflict as their political and economic interests rub against one another.
Howard Moss
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