Over 10,000 people died in transit to Spain in 2024 alone.[1] On June 2022, the border fence of Melilla, one of two Spanish enclaves in Morocco, was witness to a massacre that killed or disappeared over a hundred African migrants.[2] A recent BBC investigation revealed that Greek border guards systematically repeal immigrants already on Greek land, hurling them back into the sea. Meanwhile, Frontex (Europe’s ICE) has become the EU agency with the largest budget and is fast assembling 10,000-man-strong army to counter immigration, with its own ships, aircrafts, drones and weapons. The Standing Corps, as it’s called—the first and only pan-European armed force.
Reports of massacres punctuate the short history of European borders. The repetitive media cycle of death, indignation and forgetting is by now customary. The accumulation of massacres barely even registers among political forces or the broader public. Europe’s “left,” both moderate and “radical,” alternately decries or plays down migrant death, depending on their own position in government.
In between the more mediatized massacres, however, an uninterrupted stream of death is the rule. Mostly unreported, hard to even count. Advocates calculate that at least 60,000 people have been killed at Europe’s borders since 1993; others calculate that over 30,000 have died or gone missing since 2014 alone (excluding the 10,000 of 2024).[3] These are minimum estimates. The reality is bleak—it is time to transcend moral lamentation and understand this situation structurally.
Critical social forces in Europe have called it a “human rights crisis.” Nonprofits highlight the contradictions between “European values” and this ongoing “scandal.” But is it a crisis? Mass slaughter at Europe’s southern borders undoubtedly is—but not in the way painted by liberal-progressive European civil societies. The migrant genocide is not a crisis because it shakes the consciousness or self-perception of Northern publics. Rather, it is at once a structural imperative of the late imperialist arrangement and among the direst expressions of the broader crisis of global capital. This piece attempts to explain how, exactly, this is.
The world-historical development of capitalism generates an agrarian question that, while “solved” in the North, appears unresolvable in the South. Capital’s only solution to the southern agrarian question, as Third World authors have long argued, is some form of mass death. The migrant genocide on European shores is but an expression of that generalized tendency, which is otherwise chiefly borne out in the peripheries, out of the sight of European publics. This piece moves away from Eurocentric analyses of immigration and class struggle in Europe by centering the social formations of the Third World. In this light, immigration to the core appears as the coming home to roost of capital’s primary contradiction—that between core and periphery. It is then no surprise that it becomes the central issue of Northern polities, defining the cleavages between resurgent fascism and emancipatory alternatives as well as revealing the continued bankruptcy of social democracy. Contra this, centering Europe’s genocide at sea provides the basis for a solid anti-imperialist position that wards off the analytical confusions of Northern chauvinism—the basis of our historical defeat—and puts peripheral national liberation front and center.
While much ink has been spilled on Trump and immigration, nearly no coverage of this genocide exists. On the continuous slaughter of migrants, a core component of the European social formation, media is largely mute. It is effectively normalized as part of Europe’s regular operation, buried and hoped forgotten by forces both left and right. But forget we won’t.
Europe’s Genocide at Sea
Brice had just emerged from the water when he felt a strong pain under his left eye.[4] Blinded and offset, he gasped for air as he struggled to stay afloat and keep moving toward the shore. He and a group of fellow migrants were so close to land, just a few meters away. Some had spent years journeying North. Now a police motorboat encircled them from behind, while in front, armed guards fired shots from the sand of Tarajal, a beach on the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, in North Africa.
As the ten-minute “standoff” came to a close, bodies were brought ashore. “There were corpses everywhere,” a survivor recalls. Scores of the arrived were returned to Morocco in expedited fashion, in an illegal yet by now common practice in Europe. As Brice arrived, he looked around and recognized the dead bodies of three of his close friends. He himself was bleeding. He received no medical attention then. A few days later he found out that the impact of the rubber bullet on his face had cost him an eye. Years later, having waited long to come forward for fear of repercussions or deportation, Brice would report his experience to the UN Committee Against Torture.
That murderous day, February 6, 2014, would remain etched not only in Brice’s memory, but in that of the Spanish antiracist movement as a whole. Every year, commemorative rallies take place across the country. But popular grief has achieved little. Eleven years later and after countless attempts at justice, the case has been archived three separate times by judicial authorities. All manner of procedural pretexts have been used. Courts have refused to bring in survivors or hear their accounts. The sixteen police officers involved walk free, with total impunity.[5]
The message is clear and it echoes well beyond this case. The Tarajal massacre is the paradigm of Europe’s southern borders: bullets fired at people for simply trying to move. The Tarajal paradigm can be summarized as follows: the intentional, calculated, and murderous enforcement of the immobility of the working peoples of the South, coupled with the generalized impunity of Northern forces, all under veneers of liberal legality.
In 2014, social democrats took the opportunity to denounce the then-conservative administration in Spain, if quite faintly. When in government eight years later during the 2022 Melilla massacre, they changed their tune: everything had been “well resolved,” the border-crossing had been a “violent assault” to Spain’s territorial integrity, and “traffickers” were to blame. Unambiguously supporting state forces, they vetoed the creation of a congressional investigative committee, repeatedly defending their administration’s border policy.[6] As one of the only “left” governments in Europe, the Spanish case shows how Europe’s electoral spectrum, from far-right to “radical” left, remain in agreement about border slaughter.
The Tarajal paradigm resounds far beyond European shores. Though well out of the media spotlight, it applies throughout the Mediterranean and Atlantic routes, on every sunken ship and abandoned raft, and throughout the land routes that lead to Europe.[7] Bullets may not be fired, but as Engels famously put it:
When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live—forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence—knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.[8]
Every time a ship is pushed back or rescue agencies are prevented from doing their work, Tarajal recurs. Once again, most of these deaths go unreported, unnoticed, and ungrieved by the supposed torchbearers of “democracy” and “international law”—Gaza all over again.
In 2023, the Greek Coast Guard let more than six hundred people drown in a shipwreck they left unassisted. Evidence abounds on the systematic pushing back of arrived and arriving migrants, rifles in hand atop deck, firing shots around rafts as dissuasion. “If you come back, we will kill you.”[9]
Recently, reports have emerged that go beyond everything previously recorded. The Greek agency has also hurled people into the water at night without lifejackets, sometimes with their hands zip tied. It has thrown migrants back into the sea aboard punctured, rapidly deflating or motorless rafts; or come to the rescue of ships only to then abandon them in rafts. “We immediately began to sink, they saw that…. They heard us all screaming, and yet they still left us.” Perhaps most tellingly, the agency unofficially deploys hooded men—Europe’s Klansmen, we might call them—in unmarked vans in islands to “hunt down” migrants and send them back.[10] These hooded forces, by all accounts police officers or at least police-adjacent, blur the distinction between state and parastate enforcement—a common feature of historical white supremacy. The color line, as Black Marxists have long recognized, is “sustained through genocidal terror.”[11]
It is impossible to recount all the massacres, yet this remains the overarching dynamic. That state agencies rescue some migrants at sea does not alter this critical conclusion; it simply signals the sheer untenability of the policy for Europe’s legitimacy, providing the latter with plausible deniability. This is the nature of European deployment on its southern seas: restrict movement on pain of death. In years of endless violence against peoples across the global South, the uninterrupted, industrial-scale nature of these murders hardly scratches the surface of public discourse.
While most academic and nonprofit talk has focused on notions like “necropolitics,” advocates on the ground have started to call this the “migrant genocide.”[12] Unlike more inaccessible theorical concepts, the term indexes the systematic, ongoing, and murderous policies of European liberal democracies, and the unrelenting death tolls that result from the militarized closure of the sea. In liberal and legal circles, what often serves to distinguish “genocide” from other instances of mass death is “intent.” But what does explicit intent matter for the person forsaken in the waves? To follow Engels, the difference between being shot and being abandoned at sea is trifling. Social murder at sea on a collective, systematic basis amounts to genocide. Is the policy that continues to choose murder after decades not enough proof?
The South’s Agrarian Question
When Prabhat Patnaik declares that “metropolitan capitalism does not have any answer to this problem of ‘refugees at the gate’,” he’s not entirely wrong—indeed, capital has no sane answer.[13] But he misses what Samir Amin pointed out as early as 2003: that the only solution that capitalism really has for the agrarian question in the South—the basis of the huge labor reserves that feed immigration to the North—is some form of genocide.[14]
Following Marx, Amin points out that the historic transition to capitalist relations in agriculture in Europe resulted in the mass expulsion of peasants from their lands, resulting in their alienation from their means of subsistence and their insertion into wage labor regimes. The mass of expelled peasants filled the ranks of emerging industrial production, satisfying its demand for labor. Later, classical Marxists argued that this relation would inexorably extend to the entire world-system as capitalism expanded. “Kautsky generalized the scope of the modern European capitalist model and concluded that the peasantry was destined to disappear due to capitalist expansion itself. In other words, capitalism would be able to ‘resolve the agrarian question.’”[15]
Over a century later, however, rural populations continue to make up a huge section of the Third World, and peasant production is a key component of most peripheral social formations. In addition, urban and industrial production have proved themselves largely unable to absorb masses into employment, fostering the exponential growth of slums and informal labor.[16] What explains this? Amin gives two reasons. First, that “the European model developed…with labor-intensive industrial technologies,” while “modern industrialization cannot absorb more than a small minority of the rural populations concerned because, compared with the industries of the 19th century, it now integrates technological progress—the condition of its efficiency—which economizes the labor that it employs.”[17]
The second reason is that classical Marxism did not consider that the “resolution” of the Northern agrarian question was, even then, only partial: industry did not at all absorb all the newly proletarianized masses. The problem of soaring European surplus populations was solved only through the “great safety valve of immigration to the Americas,” voluntary or forced. Expropriating indigenous people’s lives and means of production served to make room for Europe’s “dangerous classes.”[18]
Yet in the contemporary Third World, none of these conditions apply. There are certainly no “five or six Americas” to ease peripheral contradictions.[19] And not even miraculous rates of growth, Amin notes, could absorb these surplus populations. In short, the world-historical development of capitalism and the “resolution” of the core’s agrarian question has generated “a gigantic agrarian question in the peripheries, which it can only solve through the genocide of half of humankind.”[20]
To return to Patnaik, then, it is not that Europe has no solution to the problem of “refugees at the gate.” Rather, it is that its solution is mass death. The industrial killing of migrants at sea is the solution. The migrant genocide is simply the more tangible expression of Amin’s clairvoyant observation. Beyond its confines, the migrant genocide expresses a more generalized global phenomenon, a deeper malaise of global capital: the unsolvable agrarian question of the South, that of its “surplus” peoples—its semi-proletariat in both city and countryside.[21] It expresses the only solution this senile system, as Amin calls it, really has for the majority of the world’s peoples—and increasingly the rest of us. Europe’s southern seas are in this sense paradigmatic of a global trend.
The migrant genocide, then, is an integral part of capitalism’s ongoing solution to the South’s agrarian question. As Sam Moyo, Paris Yeros and Praveen Jha put it, “the systemic contradictions [are] reaching once again genocidal proportions.”[22] It is, in this sense, a structural tendency—one that exceeds Europe’s southern maritime theater.
For this genocidal solution is one that has long been underway in the South, and that is most visible—despite it being even more normalized than maritime migrant slaughter—in the mass shortening of Southern lives and the generalization of premature death relative to historically possible rates (i.e., life expectancies in the North). This is what already in 2005, shortly after Amin’s prescient analysis in Monthly Review, Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros called “systemic genocide.”[23] They took Amin’s analysis a step further to argue that the southern agrarian question’s only solution is not some coming genocide; rather, the solution is already being effected structurally through lives being cut off short en masse. As they put it in a 2012 piece with Jha critiquing David Harvey’s “friendlier” theory of imperialism:
That really-existing capitalism is organically linked to primitive accumulation, and that this consists in a structured center-periphery relationship, is expressed not least in the appalling national statistics of maternal and infant mortality, malnutrition, illiteracy, and life expectancy—itself a form of systemic genocide.[24]
More recently, Ali Kadri has built on these foundational insights to posit the centrality of the “accumulation of waste” to monopoly-finance capital. “Wasted lives” become central to the accumulation process, resulting in a “structural genocide of humans and surrounding nature.” Among other effects, he argues, this “attenuates the brunt of the capital-population contradiction,” which it addresses “by winnowing the excess labor and its labor power relative to spare capacity.”[25]
Generalized premature death in the South and migrant slaughter at sea, then, are two sides of the same phenomenon. If there’s a crisis, it is not one of European values or “human rights.” It is rather the crisis of global capital. The sea is simply where those contradictions play out in a more visible form. In this sense, Frontex and Europe’s Klansmen are only Europe’s structural response to this most fundamental “problem” coming back to European shores. There’s nothing uniquely brutal about them; their actions align with the general trend. What changes is only that genocidal pressure is actively carried out rather than structurally produced out of the sight of European publics.
This reframes Eurocentric analyses of the issue (Marxian or otherwise) in terms of the world-historical development of capital. Far from simply a European scandal, this is the scandal of capital’s world—one that plays out chiefly in the peripheries but that comes back to haunt Europe without remedy. This also counters predominant critical analyses, which have a thin and “muddy understanding” of imperialism, particularly as it unfolds in peripheral social formations.[26] As we will see later, this “muddiness” sets the ground for a frail internationalism, which is the antechamber of social democracy, social chauvinism, and ultimate defeat.
Samir Amin places this question at the center of his analysis of unequal development. The unavailability of emigration outlets for the South—expressed most brutally at Europe’s southern seas—is among the chief reasons why the developmental model of the core is not possible in the peripheries, and why “catching up is…an illusion.”[27] The migrant genocide, then, is in some way a most tragic vindication of Amin’s central thesis: the impossibility of catching up under the law of worldwide value and the resulting imperative to delink. Death at sea, like systemic genocide across the South, is but the bloody expression of catching up not being possible, of what catching up encounters in capital’s reality: phenomenal waste.
The Unraveling of the Neocolonial Arrangement
Understood in this light, immigration to the core is but the coming home to roost of imperialism’s contradictions. Contradictions in the South become too great to be contained there, expressing themselves in secular out-migration trends and constant “insurrectional pressure.” Immigration is, in this sense, the way in which capital’s “principal contradiction”—labor versus capital, as displaced historically onto core and periphery—returns to the core, disrupting its basic developmental and social peace arrangements.[28] It is no surprise then that immigration becomes the single most defining issue of contemporary core social formations.
Often forgotten in Kwame Nkrumah’s definition of neocolonialism is that “neo-colonialism, like colonialism, is an attempt to export the social conflicts of the [core] countries.” According to Nkrumah, this culminates in the formation of the Northern welfare state, which aborts Northern class antagonisms in compromise and transfers “the conflict between rich and poor from the national to the international stage.”[29] The neocolonial arrangement, then, hinges on not only the indirect control of the Third World, but also on the guarded co-optation of the white segment of the global working class, expressed chiefly in Northern welfare.
Contemporary immigration to the core, then, fundamentally undoes this neocolonial arrangement: (1) it “re-imports” the contradictions that capital had exported and (2) it puts at risk the partition of the global working class—some in the labor aristocracy, some variously superexploited and/or wasted—that is the bedrock of the neocolonial compromise.
Nkrumah notes that “above all, neo-colonialism, like colonialism before it, postpones the facing of the social issues” of the core. Immigration spells the end of that hopeful postponement. As he presciently anticipates, the exported and postponed social issues “will have to be faced by the [North] before the danger of world war can be eliminated or the problem of world poverty resolved.” And while “in the short run [neocolonialism] has served the developed powers admirably,” in the long run “its consequences are likely to be catastrophic for them.” This rings particularly true in current conditions, as the definite rise of fascism—on the heels of the migrant question—risks endangering the social peace and essential compromises of European social formations.
Immigration in the core, then, as that which re-imports the primary contradiction, becomes the defining issue of contemporary times. Fascism in Europe is thus not only caused by secular accumulation problems or intra-core inequality. It is caused most centrally—as its explicit anti-immigration and non-redistributive politics show—by the dangerous unraveling of the neocolonial arrangement that sustained the core’s stability. This is why social democracy is entirely unfit for the current moment, focused as it is—if faintly—on intra-core redistribution amid worsening global crises.[30] It is also why it is unable to provide a solid response to fascism, for it sidesteps and minimizes, as it has historically, the imperialist question—today expressed within the European core through Third World immigration. While fascism tackles it head-on, social democracy has barely an answer. While fascism proposes, social democracy equivocates.
This is expressed in electoral trends throughout Europe. The promise of mid-2010s “left” experiments has now been exhausted, and the far right heads steadily towards electoral and cultural supremacy—if not through their parties, through the spread of their ideas to “moderates.” Europe’s peoples know that social democracy provides no real solution. With no tangible emancipatory options on offer, they fall back into what they know: the neocolonial arrangement—the racially guarded labor aristocracy—and those who swear they’ll maintain or restore it.
The neocolonial postponement, then, is clearly at its tail end. Immigration, as we see before our very eyes, is the coup de grace of neocolonialism’s fragile bargain. As Nkrumah prophetically put it—and contrary to seven decades of neoclassical development gospel—neocolonialism “cannot endure as a permanent world policy.” It is a fundamentally weak arrangement whose effectiveness is coming to an end. The migrant genocide is but the foremost expression of this decadence. Fascism, in turn, is the desperate attempt at salvaging what’s left.
Keeping with Nkrumah, then, neocolonialism might just be the last stage of imperialism, as the subtitle of his work states. Paris Yeros and Luccas Gissoni have emphasized this recently: “monopoly capitalism is unable to resolve its underlying contradictions of accumulation without the colonial system which maintained capitalism for centuries.” We thus enter a “long stage of systemic decay,” fascism in the core being only one of its many expressions.[31] Trump’s second term and the decisive rise of the far right across Europe in 2024 are but the last chapters of this steady deterioration. At the core of the late neocolonial situation is that monopoly capital, as Foster and McChesney argue, enters in “endless crisis.”[32]
The migrant question shows that the “maturation of the center-periphery contradiction,” which came to head in the post-war moment and prompted the banding together of the Triad in collective imperialism, is reaching new levels, as it becomes irreversibly internalized in the European core and as its becomes its defining cleavage.[33] The very weight of monopoly capital’s own contradictions—at its root, the protracted insolubility of the global agrarian question—puts the neocolonial arrangement in serious crisis.
This is the reason why Europe’s foreign policy becomes increasingly about “containing immigration at source”—put another way, containing the principal contradiction in faraway lands, ensuring it stays as “exported” and “postponed” as possible. The latest focus of academic critique, border externalization—the mass transfer of funds to Southern governments for immigration control, the deployment of European agents across Africa and the training of local police in “source countries”—are but the expression of this fact. Europe’s deployment is proof, in the last analysis, that those contradictions are its own. They are also an attempt to prevent the migrant genocide at sea, which is all too visible and scandalous for its liberal publics, and risks mass radicalization by making visible the actual infrastructure of the European “way of life.”
Conclusion
The migrant genocide is the ghost that haunts European politics. It is the irrepressible backdrop against which immigration, the defining issue of European societies, unfolds. As such, it must subtend our analysis as well as our political strategy.
The revolutionary window that opened in Europe until the mid-twentieth century, as Nkrumah teaches us, was resolved through a compromise. This historic compromise is now coming to a close. Not only is the co-optation of Northern majorities in secular decline—and attempts to reverse it dishonest, ineffective, or under attack—but immigration challenges and gradually undoes the basis of that co-optation: the deliberate partition of the global working class and the pitting of one sector against another.
It is up to those of us in the core to tear that compromise apart and move in revolutionary direction. To do this, it is crucial to understand immigration beyond the reductive frame of racism as “discrimination” or fundamentally “moral.” This framework is by now not only the backbone of multiculturalist state discourse, but it most importantly overlooks that the migrant question in the core is a subset of the global core-periphery question, the primary contradiction of capital’s world-historical development. It is time to overcome national or provincial frames. It is time for our analysis and politics to become irreversibly internationalist.
The migrant genocide is the dark side of European social democracy, that which is often used as a foil for progressive arguments in North America. Further, European social democracy’s complicity with EU border policy is structurally equivalent to its betrayal of the world’s peoples in the Second International. Its deafening silence (and at times selective, functional, or performative outrage) on the migrant genocide is but the new expression of social imperialism: the burial of the colonial question, a “new denial of imperialism,” and an ideology consistent with a particular position in the global class hierarchy.[34]
As Third World Marxists have so often emphasized, the historic abandonment of solidarity with the South’s national liberation has been the death knell of Northern socialist strategy. Marx already noted this with reference to the English working class and their chauvinism on the Irish question, which he considered the single greatest obstacle to their cause. George Jackson said as much about “white racism.”[35] Amin notes that social democracy’s fealty to its bourgeoisies has “not, however, been ‘rewarded,’ as the very day after the collapse of the first wave of struggles of the twentieth century, monopoly capitalism shook off their alliance.”[36] After undoing the gains of the periphery and with the definitive decline of the Soviet Union, capital, no longer needing the social democratic prop, went on the offensive at home. Today, the ruins of European welfare are the foremost testament to this historic mistake.
It is thus of crucial importance to develop a solid anti-imperialist position that prevents the backsliding to chauvinism, social democracy, and defeat. Today, this entails engaging with the irreversible fact of the internalization of the core-periphery contradiction to European social formations, the migrant question, and its crudest genocidal face.
Our response to this can only come through practice. No theoretical conclusion can preempt this, and only the real world can tell. Provisionally, however, two fundamental demands arise from the analysis. First, unshaking opposition and end to the migrant genocide. As the fundamental backdrop of the migrant question, as the backstage disciplining mechanism of the immigrant as racialized underclass, and as growingly central component of the accumulation process (per Kadri), this cannot be sidelined. It is imperative to oppose it not just morally but analytically: European class struggle starts at the bottom of the sea.[37]
Second, and most obviously, equal rights for immigrants already in Europe, challenging the system of cheap labor that undergirds all immigration to the North.[38] Ultimately, we must see these two as part of fundamentally one demand: the denial of equal rights on land is an extension of the denial of the right to life at sea—itself an extension of manufactured premature death across the South.
The first is the rallying cry of Europe’s anti-racist movement: we don’t forget those murdered by the border or the state. The second is the organic demand of Europe’s immigrant peoples: immediate regularization and an end to systemic racism. Both must be understood beyond their moral and pragmatic content—beyond simple opposition to racial murder and hierarchy and beyond responding to basic status and legal needs. Our demands can only succeed if understood as part of a broader international confrontation with the contemporary imperialist arrangement, overcoming our provincialism and joining “the rest of the colonial world.”[39]
Imperialism kills us, not least of all at sea. Our struggle must “arrest this momentum and overturn it.”[40] As Brice, the brother shot in the face by Spanish police in Tarajal, put it: we must stop Europe’s savagery.
Notes
[1] The vast majority of these victims were recorded in the Atlantic route to the Canary Islands, which is among the most dangerous in the world and has reopened in recent years. See Hannah Cross, “Return of the Atlantic Route from West Africa to Europe: Imperialism and Regional (De-)Integration.” Monthly Review 76, no. 1 (May 2024). For precise data, see “Monitoring the Right to Life 2024” Ca-Minado Fronteras, December 2024, https://caminandofronteras.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/DALV2024_EN-WEB.pdf
[2] This tragedy is broadly referred to as the “24J massacre,” referencing the date of the events. “The Nador-Melilla Border Trap. A counter-investigation into the racist massacre of 24 June 2022,” Border Forensics, Irídia-Centre for the Defense of Human Rights and AMDH-Moroccan Association for Human Rights, June 2024, https://www.borderforensics.org/investigations/nadormelilla/
[3] “Open Letter: Frontex’s 20th anniversary should also be its last,” Abolish Frontex, October 2024, https://abolishfrontex.org/blog/2024/10/23/open-letter-frontexs-20th-anniversary-should-also-be-its-last/. “Missing Migrants recorded in the Mediterranean,” Missing Migrants Project, last modified February 2025, https://missingmigrants.iom.int/region/mediterranean
[4] The following account is a reconstruction of real events that took place on Spanish shores in 2014. It is based on several testimonies by survivors. See “Un superviviente de El Tarajal denuncia a España ante el Comité contra la Tortura de la ONU,” Youtube La Marea, February 2025, https://youtu.be/b6enrak1NeI and “TRAGEDIA DEL TARAJAL | “Nunca olvidaré que esa noche me morí,” Youtube El País, February 2019, https://youtu.be/bW7gXfaG0Z8.
[5] “Caso Tarajal: 14 muertes y 11 años de impunidad,” Comisión Española de Ayuda al Refugiado, February 2025, https://www.cear.es/noticias/caso-tarajal/, “Brice O. V Spain. El Tarajal In Front Of The Un Committee Against Torture. Case Summary,” European Center for Consitutional and Human Rights, Iridia, February 2025, https://www.ecchr.eu/fileadmin/Tarajal_Case_summary_Brice_O.__February_2025_.pdf
[6] The administration is comprised of a coalition that includes the center-left PSOE, the “radical” left (including Podemos and adjacent formations), and other regional groups. It worth noting that while Podemos called for PSOE not to block congressional inquiries into the massacre, they have done little beyond that. See “Cuando Sánchez no lo veía tan ‘bien resuelto’ con Rajoy: ‘No menciona la muerte de 15 seres humanos’,” El Confidencial, June 2022, https://www.elconfidencial.com/espana/2022-06-27/sanchez-tarajal-rajoy-muertos-frontera-marruecos_3450644/, “Masacre en Melilla: la peligrosa decisión de socialistas y populares,” El Pais, November 2022, https://elpais.com/planeta-futuro/3500-millones/2022-11-26/masacre-en-melilla-la-peligrosa-decision-de-socialistas-y-populares.html
[7] Throughout this essay, reference to “genocide at sea” is not to be understood as excluding border-caused deaths on land routes. These are an integral part of the migrant genocide. For an exhaustive and updated analysis of the effect of Northern border policy in the Maghreb, see Corinna Mullin’s excellent “Border Imperialism in the Maghreb. Violence, Exploitation, Accumulation and Resistance,” Transnational Institute, January 2025, https://www.tni.org/en/publication/border-imperialism-in-the-maghreb.
[8] Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1845. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch07.htm. Emphasis added.
[9] Videos taken by survivors capture some of these interactions. See “The EU countries ‘pushing back’ asylum seekers at sea,” BBC, July 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-57809909.
[10] “Greek coastguard threw migrants overboard to their deaths, witnesses say,” BBC, June 2024, https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-57809909
[11] Charisse Burden-Stelly, “Modern U.S. Racial Capitalism. Some Theoretical Insights,” Monthly Review 72, no. 3 (July–August 2020).
[12] Youssef M. Ouled, @ymouled. https://x.com/ymouled/status/1669249928307064832. The move to call it “genocide” mirrors the historic 1951 We Charge Genocide petition to the UN, written by radical Black activists on the US government’s centuries of sustained anti-Black violence. Its analysis, spearheaded by Black Marxists William and Louise Thompson Patterson, similarly questions the bourgeois definition of genocide and asserts the validity of the category for Black people in the US. See Burden-Stelly, “Modern U.S. Racial Capitalism.” The language of genocide was also adopted by most imprisoned Black Marxists in the 1960s and 70s. See Orisanmi Burton, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023).
[13] Prabhat Patnaik, “Migration as Revolt against Capital,” MR Online, October 2016, https://mronline.org/2016/10/16/patnaik161016-html.
[14] Samir Amin, “World Poverty, Pauperization, and Capital Accumulation,” Monthly Review 55, no. 5 (October 2003). Cited in John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 147.
[15] Samir Amin, Ending the Crisis of Capitalism or Ending Capitalism? (Dakar: Pambazuka, 2011), 119. See also pp. 106, 124.
[16] Paris Yeros, “Generalized Semiproletarianization in Africa,” Indian Economic Journal 71, no. 1 (2023): 162–86. See also Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2017).
[17] Amin, “World Poverty”; Amin, Ending the Crisis, 56.
[18] Amin, Ending the Crisis, 56.
[19] Samir Amin, The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013), 122.
[20] Amin, “World Poverty.” Emphasis mine.
[21] Paris Yeros, “Generalized semiproletarianization in Africa.”
[22] Sam Moyo, Paris Yeros and Praveen Jha, “Imperialism and Primitive Accumulation: Notes on the New Scramble for Africa.” Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 1, no. 2 (2012): 182.
[23] Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, “The Resurgence of Rural Movements under Neoliberalism.” Reclaiming the Land. The Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America (London: Zed, 2005), 35. In his blurb to this foundational work, Amin pointed to the crux of the matter: “imperialism appears thoroughly unable to resolve the agrarian question and to respond to the challenge of growing rural and urban dislocation.”
[24] Moyo, Yeros and Jha. “Imperialism and Primitive Accumulation,” 187. For a critique of contemporary thinking on imperialism in the left, see John Bellamy Foster, “The New Denial of Imperialism on the Left,” Monthly Review 76, no. 6 (November 2024).
[25] Kadri’s analysis is extremely rich and impossible to do justice by in this format; I develop his insights for the European migrant question in a coming piece. For now, it is worth noting that he sees the mass shortening of southern lives as inextricable from global ecological breakdown: “under capitalism, people and nature prematurely perish[.] Both of these inputs are objects of the same law of value. We cannot arrest the consumption of one, without arresting the consumption of the other.” Moreover, contra Western Marxisms, Kadri posits “imperialist genocide as a value forming process.” This means that genocidal pressure cannot be conceived as external to value relations, or even just as mechanism of racialized class discipline. Rather, it is part and parcel—indeed, according to him, the mainstay—of accumulation and value formation. Under secular overproduction conditions and the unrelenting rise of the reserve army of labor—undeniable in the evolution of peripheral social formations over the last 30 years—“the principal capital-labour contradiction appears as the capital-population contradiction.” What emerges then is the “industry of wasting the reserve army of labor.” It is here that the migrant genocide fits. Ali Kadri, The Accumulation of Waste. A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction (London: Brill, 2023), ix, 20, 41, 102–03, 11, 381.
[26] Max Ajl, “Palestine and the Ends of Theory,” Middle East Critique 33, no. 4 (2024): 627.
[27] Amin, Implosion, 122.
[28] Paris Yeros, “A Polycentric World Will Only Be Possible by the Intervention of the ‘Sixth Great Power,’” Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 13, no. 1 (2024): 15. See also Paris Yeros, “Elements of a New Bandung: Towards an international solidarity front.” Agrarian South Network Research Bulletin 10 (2021): 29–40.
[29] Kwame Nkrumah, Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (Panaf, 2009 [1965]). All emphases mine.
[30] While it is true that social democracy has been the target of systematic attacks in the electoral realm—from the EU’s response to Syriza during the crisis, to coordination against Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, to lawfare against Podemos in Spain, to the most recent soft coup against La France Insoumise in France—the long-term decline of its electoral purchase cannot be fully explained by this targeting. Beyond electoral results, social democracy’s inability to tackle the crisis is most evident in the Spanish case, where social democracy—through a coalition of moderate and “radical” flanks—has been in power for nearly seven years, having provided no real solution to the cost-of-living crisis, which is only exacerbating, and presiding over a period where social combativity and fascist politics are both rising, while “radical” electoral experiments steadily decline into irrelevance.
[31] As they put it, “general decolonization is, fundamentally, the political basis of the permanent crisis of imperialism.” They further note that the “historic trap” related to the “massive size of labor reserves” created by late neocolonialism “is the concrete starting point of socialist transition.” While they refer to delinking projects in the South, we might take their cue to think about the role of migrants in the European situation. Paris Yeros and Lucca Gissoni, “Imperialism and the late neocolonial situation,” Agrarian South Network Research Bulletin (January–April 2024): 9.
[32] Foster and McChesney, The Endless Crisis.
[33] Just as the Triad banded militarily in the post-war period, so European powers band together today in border enforcement. Not only does accession to the EU require acquiescence and implementation of EU immigration policy, but border policy is increasingly centralized and unified. The maturation of the center-periphery contradiction is also shown by the growing preeminence of Frontex among European institutions, as it acquires the largest budget of all agencies and becomes the first pan-European militarized-coercive power. The concept of maturation is taken from various of Amin’s works and Moyo, Yeros and Jha, “Imperialism and Primitive Accumulation,” 182.
[34] Foster, “The New Denial of Imperialism.”
[35] George Jackson, Blood in My Eye (New York: Random House, 1972), 111.
[36] Amin, Implosion, 120.
[37] From the perspective of the “native” or white working class, we have to understand that every time a migrant is killed (or denied any other right), the wage floor of all of Europe sinks. While racial hierarchy and the real conflict between racialized class interests should not be understated, this alignment is both real and imperative to our current task. This much Houria Bouteldja makes clear. A central theme in her work is the critique of “moral antiracism,” which “ratifie[s] the schism among the (inter)national proletariat.” Rednecks and Barbarians. Uniting the White and Racialized Working Class (London: Pluto Press 2023). Amin has also pointed out that despite minority anti-imperialist opposition in the core, it has “nevertheless failed to build effective alternative coalitions around themselves,” rendering their opposition ineffective. Thus, alignments are a strategic necessity. Amin, Implosion, 120. See also “Self-criticism,” Prairie Fire (New York: Prairie Fire Distributing Committee, 1974), 10-11.
[38] Hannah Cross, “Borders and corporate domination over land, resources and labour: an interview with Hannah Cross,” Review of African Political Economy Blog, March 2021, https://roape.net/2021/03/04/borders-and-corporate-domination-over-land-resources-and-labour-an-interview-with-hannah-cross/.
[39] Jackson, Blood in My Eye, 3.
[40] Kadri, The Accumulation of Waste, 12.