Producing fear of the migrant seems to have preoccupied reactionary movements in the past decades in Europe and beyond. Are we, on the Left, equipped to face the challenge? Speaking from the vantage point of Eastern Europe – both as a space where a vast number of people cross borders inwards and outwards to flee social deprivation and as a space, whose “collapse” some thirty years ago choke the globe into Thatcher’s “there is no alternative” – I attempt to salvage some of the progressive meanings of migration. Focusing on multiple temporal displacements and fragmented episodes in the production of migrant subjectivities in both socialist and capitalist settings, I seek to revisit the socialist struggles against capitalist forms of migration, to historicize past hopes and awaken possible political strategies for the present. Focusing on two distinctive figures in Eastern European politics of migration: “the socialist friend” and the “welfare scrounger”, I will try and identify potential tracks for our future struggles against the extractive logics of migration.
Raia Apostolova is an assistant professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Department “Knowledge Society: Education, Science, and Innovations”, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Her current research explores political theories of socialist internationalism and migration developed in the context of socialist and postcolonial encounters, their social effects on international labor and educational relations, and their subsequent eradication from the social fabric following the capitalist restoration in Eastern Europe. She is the author of Capitalism and Migration: Freeing and Hunting Labor Power Across the European Union (Prof. Marin Drinov Publishing House of BAS, 2024).
