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MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS
Attila Melegh
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
Series Editors
Marcello Musto, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
Terrell Carver, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Wherever the critique
of capitalism re-emerges, there is an intellectual and political demand for
new, critical engagements with Marxism. The peer-reviewed series Marx,
Engels and Marxisms (edited by Marcello Musto & Terrell Carver, with
Babak Amini, Francesca Antonini, Paula Rauhala & Kohei Saito as Assis-
tant Editors) publishes monographs, edited volumes, critical editions,
reprints of old texts, as well as translations of books already published
in other languages. Our volumes come from a wide range of political
perspectives, subject matters, academic disciplines and geographical areas,
producing an eclectic and informative collection that appeals to a diverse
and international audience. Our main areas of focus include: the oeuvre
of Marx and Engels, Marxist authors and traditions of the 19th and 20th
centuries, labour and social movements, Marxist analyses of contemporary
issues, and reception of Marxism in the world.
Attila Melegh
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
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tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Titles Published
v
vi TITLES PUBLISHED
12. John Gregson, Marxism, Ethics, and Politics: The Work of Alasdair
MacIntyre, 2018.
13. Vladimir Puzone & Luis Felipe Miguel (Eds.), The Brazilian
Left in the 21st Century: Conflict and Conciliation in Peripheral
Capitalism, 2019.
14. James Muldoon & Gaard Kets (Eds.), The German Revolution and
Political Theory, 2019.
15. Michael Brie, Rediscovering Lenin: Dialectics of Revolution and
Metaphysics of Domination, 2019.
16. August H. Nimtz, Marxism versus Liberalism: Comparative Real-
Time Political Analysis, 2019.
17. Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello and Mauricio de Souza Saba-
dini (Eds.), Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits: A Marxist
Analysis, 2019.
18. Shaibal Gupta, Marcello Musto & Babak Amini (Eds.), Karl
Marx’s Life, Ideas, and Influences: A Critical Examination on the
Bicentenary, 2019.
19. Igor Shoikhedbrod, Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism:
Rethinking Justice, Legality, and Rights, 2019.
20. Juan Pablo Rodríguez, Resisting Neoliberal Capitalism in Chile:
The Possibility of Social Critique, 2019.
21. Kaan Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature, 2020.
22. Victor Wallis, Socialist Practice: Histories and Theories, 2020.
23. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The Bourgeois and the Savage: A
Marxian Critique of the Image of the Isolated Individual in Defoe,
Turgot and Smith, 2020.
24. Terrell Carver, Engels before Marx, 2020.
25. Jean-Numa Ducange, Jules Guesde: The Birth of Socialism and
Marxism in France, 2020.
26. Antonio Oliva, Ivan Novara & Angel Oliva (Eds.), Marx and
Contemporary Critical Theory: The Philosophy of Real Abstraction,
2020.
27. Francesco Biagi, Henri Lefebvre’s Critical Theory of Space, 2020.
28. Stefano Petrucciani, The Ideas of Karl Marx: A Critical Introduc-
tion, 2020.
29. Terrell Carver, The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels, 30 th
Anniversary Edition, 2020.
30. Giuseppe Vacca, Alternative Modernities: Antonio Gramsci’s Twen-
tieth Century, 2020.
TITLES PUBLISHED vii
ix
x TITLES FORTHCOMING
I started writing this book in January 2017, and many people have
assisted me in this endeavor ever since. Diana Mishkova, the head of
the Sofia-based Institute of Advanced Studies, invited me to be a guest
for two months in 2017, which set me on this intellectual journey and
was the actual starting point for the research that I summarize in this
book. Chris Hann, who has always been a great inspiration for my ideas,
offered me a four-month stay in Halle at the Max Planck Institute of
Social Anthropology in 2019, where not only him but also many of
his outstanding colleagues commented on my early arguments, proving
particularly formative. Ulf Brunnbauer has also been very helpful and
assisted me in various ways as part of a collaboration with The Leibniz
Institute for East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg. I also
owe a lot to some of my critics and readers. Just to name a few of
them: Iván Szelényi, Antal Örkény, Tamás Krausz, Erzsébet Szalai, Raquel
Varela, József Böröcz, Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, Péter Szigeti, György
Lengyel, Lika Tsuladze, Ágnes Hárs, András Kováts, Márk Éber, Attila
Antal, Katalin Kovács, Beáta Nagy, Endre Sík, Dorottya Mendly, Dóra
Gábriel, Ayman Salem, Kari Polanyi Levitt, Dragana Avramov, Robert
Cliquet, Sonia Lucarelli, Michela Ceccoruli, MIhály Sárkány, Joseph
Salukvadze, Giorgi Gogsadze, Arland Thornton, Tamás Kiss, Radhika
Desai, and Margie Mendell made valuable comments on my work in
various phases. I owe a lot to two friends and colleagues who have sadly
since passed away: I miss the conversations and, very importantly, the
xiii
xiv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
“A timely and most sharp Polányian and Marxist unpacking and contex-
tualisation of migration and population politics since the 1980s, Attila
Melegh’s precious and thorough analytical intervention defogs migration
issues from the pervasive false choice between chauvinistic delirium and
callous utilitarianism that throttles the current public imaginary in much
of the world. He accomplishes this politically important demystification
by shedding much needed light on the ruthless capitalist roots behind
the latest intensification of worldwide mass dislocations.”
—Salvatore Engel Di-Mauro, Professor, Department of Geography, SUNY
New Paltz. Editor-in-Chief of Capitalism Nature Socialism
xv
xvi PRAISE FOR THE MIGRATION TURN AND EASTERN EUROPE
“What has astonished me when reading Attila Melegh’s new book is that
it succeeds in addressing so many of the key questions of contemporary
migration studies, across a vast canvas, and yet remains highly accessible
and readable—I devoured it in a single sitting. Whether in the interpre-
tation of migration debates or analysis of migration data, Melegh’s book
brims with insight and theoretical curiosity. His theses on migration in the
age of global marketisation, and on the role of Eastern European regimes
in promulgating a xenophobic response, are major contributions.”
—Gareth Dale, is a Reader in Political Economy, Brunel University
Contents
xvii
xviii CONTENTS
Appendix 357
Index 421
List of Figures
xxiii
xxiv LIST OF FIGURES
xxxi
xxxii LIST OF TABLES
ventures to undertake this task via analyzing some key historical, socio-
material, and discursive processes. Due to the heated and controversial
debates presently ongoing, it was important to revisit some of the most
basic data and their implications. This was an exercise not without its
surprises.
Europe is getting weaker and weaker, and is on the brink of having to fight
even for its regional status… Demographic crisis… A community that is
unable to reproduce itself renounces its right to exist. This problem cannot
be solved from the outside by means of smart tricks and settling down
people, because through this we would give up our national identity…
Our house is on fire, too. (Orbán, 2017)
The next excerpt from an interview with the Speaker of the National
Assembly of Hungary also sheds light on the discursive elements in this
argument:
1 All quotations from works listed in the bibliography as published in Hungarian were
translated by Kyra Lyublyanovics.
6 A. MELEGH
vast database of Google Books) has been on the rise since the 1970s,
and the frequency of the word “migration debate” reached a historic
peak in the period of globalization from the 1980s onwards. The term
“migration” accounts for 0.002% of all words in such publications in this
period; that is, its frequency has doubled since the 1960s (Fig. 1.1; see
also Fig. 2.1 later, in Chapter 2).
Why is the migration debate intensifying during the period of glob-
alization? Why has it become a central theme in political, public, and
intellectual disputes in certain regions, and why this way, and this time?
Why have anti-migrant discourses gained a foothold in certain regions, as
opposed to open-border policies in others, and what historical conditions
have facilitated these changes? Why has this occurred in this particular
period, and through which historical mechanisms can these debates and
their polarization be linked to the processes of marketization?
These historical sociological and political-demographic issues make up
the backbone of this book; these will be addressed both from a discur-
sive and a historical and socio-material perspective. The whole debate
and its flaring-up is the subject of my analysis because I believe—as
opposed to many other scholars who conduct research into nationalism—
that the interaction shall be examined in its entirety. The new wave
of nationalism cannot exist without the pro-globalization, open-border
policy arguments, and the discursive critiques that challenge it (Berezin,
2009; Feischmidt, 2014; Harvey, 2005; Kalb, 2011). Nationalist and
Fig. 1.1 Frequency of the term “migration debate” in Google Books database
between 1960 and 2019 (Source Ngram Viewer, 2021)
8 A. MELEGH
(Hann, 2018; Joppke, 2021; Polanyi, 2001). These relationships are not
the ones of the “normal” supply-and-demand guided market exchange of
market goods, but refer to the expansion of such models to other social
spheres. This term implies various changes and developments in human
societies. One of them is the privatization and market control of economic
activity or services previously managed and coordinated under some form
of social, communal, or state ownership. These include the marketization
of pension, health care, and public utilities. I treat similarly the “exter-
nalization” of previously familial or household duties, like care for the
elderly or other members of such groups. It may be equally important that
certain social relationships, such as those facilitated by social media and
infosociety, are increasingly dominated by market interests. In a certain
respect, we should also consider the freer movement of foreign capital
and that of foreign investment (the increasing role of global markets), as
such processes are intimately linked to marketization and, most impor-
tantly, privatization. In these processes, due to inherent destruction and
market and profit logic, the role of international migrants increases, and
this we need to look at closely in this book.
Among other changes, one crucial transformation is the rise of the
global care industry. This also shows that this is a cumulative process
(marketization leads to further marketization). Losing jobs due to priva-
tization, the decline of welfare systems, the informalization of labor
markets, and stripping people’s capacity to care about close family
members leads to fictitious exchanges of care migrants, meaning that—
for instance—women in Romania move to Italy to undertake such
duties, while there is a need to “import” care workers for instance from
the Philippines or from Ukraine (Aulenbacher, 2020; Gábriel, 2022;
Melegh & Katona, 2020).
We can observe the same marketization process when new market roles
and tasks emerge, like those associated with international labor agencies,
who for instance take over the role of organizing care work from social,
religious, or other charitable organizations and actors. These are powerful
and dynamic processes, which are inherently material and ideational at
the same time. It is also important to note that there have been waves
of marketization in global history, thus there have been historical periods
of expansion and of contraction too (e.g., after World War II) (Braudel,
1980; Burawoy, 2020; Chase-Dunn et al., 1999, 2000; Hann, 2019). In
this analysis, I focus only on the most recent cycle of opening-up, while
1 INTRODUCTION: TRILLION-DOLLAR BILL ... 13
We are concerned above all with the principle at work here: the principle
of rationalisation based on what is and can be calculated.… The capitalist
process of rationalisation based on private economic calculation requires
that every manifestation of life shall exhibit this very interaction between
details which are subject to laws and a totality ruled by chance. It presup-
poses a society so structured. It produces and reproduces this structure in
so far as it takes possession of society. (Lukács, 1971, p. 102)
One of the main claims in this book is that in this process of marketi-
zation, the market integration of migration advanced more and more,
a global labor market emerged, and this is associated with a rational,
abstract, and universalized market category in terms of its “management.”
It was reified, to use Lukács’s term. Such processes have also happened
earlier, in the later nineteenth century, but a new cycle started in this
regard after 1980.
14 A. MELEGH
Finally, there are grounds for suggesting a rethink of the concept of inter-
national migration. An alternative view is that it is a diverse international
business, wielding a vast budget, providing hundreds of thousands of jobs
world-wide, and managed by a set of individuals, agencies and institutions
each of which has an interest in promoting the business. (Salt, 2001, p. 32)
This leads to the reification not only in the market exchange of labor,
but also in scholarly circles, governments, international organizations, and
entities, which also applied a market language and mode of thinking
when they started developing concepts like “managed migration.” It
is important to clarify that science itself has an inherent tendency to
create abstract categories, but here the point is not just abstractness but
understanding the complex phenomenon, including family migration and
seeking asylum, as based on or to be integrated into market rationality on
collective and individual levels.
In my view, this development transforms the discourse on migration
and polarizes the debate. There are protagonists of such rationality and
there are those who challenge this approach, at least partially (like nation-
alist isolation or the developmentalist critique of the market). Therefore,
there are discursive blocs in support of market transformation and open
borders, while there are also blocs that promote strict border measures
and state control, and there are those blocs that call into question marke-
tization and market relations due to their perceived cultural and social
consequences.
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