Oral Presentation by Yannic Wexenberger¹
¹ Universität Wien, Austria
TIME: Wednesday, 15 July, 10:30 – 12:00
Location: Room 3
Session: 11
Abstract
For migrants, the reduction to their economic function is omnipresent: Negative, when the populist and the far right as well as conservatives describe migration as ‚illegal’ and migrants as ‚superfluous’ people who would be a social as well as economic threat to the country’s competitiveness as a business location. Positive when self-proclaimed progressive (left-)liberals defend migration by pointing to the usefulness and, ultimately, necessity of migrant workers for the business location in light of skilled-labour shortages and the demographically induced crisis of the pension system. Although this abstraction from concrete human beings and their individual needs and qualities is universal under the rule of exchange value, migrant workers are affected in a particularly brutal way because of their position within the social order. Of course, this does not leave their subjectivity untouched. Thus, my analysis of the lived experiences and interpretations of migrants working in care, the construction industry or logistics in Austria, made accessible through narrative, problem-centered interviews, points to a relation to themselves and others in which they repeat that same abstraction. Without complaint, they cling to their economic function, despite the immense deprivations that necessarily accompany it. To simply declare this irrational, however, would misrecognize the life situation of these migrants. They simply experience the proof of their own usefulness and employability as the only chance to at least partially escape racist discrimination, to receive recognition from the society of arrival and thus ultimately to secure their self-preservation. In an irrational, racist class society, even the affirmation of one’s own painful working and living realities becomes rational - reason as a means of self-preservation. However, as my empirical analysis also shows, some migrants “take revenge (…) for the pain whose expressions they were not allowed to show, which they had to repress” (Adorno 2003: 682; Translation by me): Victims are particularly other migrants, from whom they not only demand the same hardship that they inflict on themselves. They also sometimes reproduce the racist hatred of supposedly lazy, useless migrants that they themselves are subjected to. *** (please note the Abstract addendum in the comment section)