Thank you very much for this interview. I was recently rereading your essay ‘Intersectionality, Identity and the Riddle of Class’, in which you trace the concept of intersectionality back to black feminist struggles. You make the point that, in the idea’s original conception, race, gender, and class were viewed as deeply interconnected. So, how do you see this historical understanding being distorted — or perhaps lost — in today's mainstream uses of identity politics?
SM The concept of intersectionality appeared in an essay written by Kimberlé Crenshaw, in 1989, which — based on a judicial case centring on black female industrial workers — provided the occasion for her to elaborate this concept. Regardless of the term itself, the concept of intersectionality originates in black feminism and the struggles of black women in the United States. In the 1930s and 1940s, there were very important contributions by black women who were militants and even leaders of the Communist Party USA. And, according to E.P. Thompson, it was women like Claudia Jones who developed concepts such as triple exploitation and hyper-exploitation.
My view is that these are very important and interesting anticipations of what later became known as intersectionality, a notion that emerged from the need to both problematise and radicalise the concept of exploitation. Again, the question of class was central and continues to echo in the theories of intersectionality, although since the 1990s, the concept has been increasingly reinterpreted in a way that is closer to what we now call identity politics. This shift is also part of the history of social movements and class struggles, both in the US and elsewhere, during the 1980s and the 1990s.
If you look closely at the theories of intersectionality, there is usually an emphasis on two principles. The first is that each system of domination — whether based on race, gender, sexuality, or class — must be considered in its autonomy. The second is that you always have to look at the way in which different systems of domination intersect; how they articulate with each other. It is quite easy to see, retrospectively, that these two principles are in tension. The main
Neoliberalism was a discourse used in fact to promise a better future. It promised to valorise individual skills and efforts through the concept of human capital.
reason is that the first can nurture an exclusive focus on a specific system of domination, reinforcing a kind of identity politics.
Can you please elaborate a bit more on what you said regarding the prevalence in thought since the 1990s of single systems of domination instead of their interconnection?
SM Although proponents of what we call identity politics might not agree, I believe this trend is part of what many critical scholars, including Nancy Fraser, have referred to as progressive neoliberalism in the 1990s. In that period, particularly in the US under the Clinton administration, the prevailing tone of neoliberal discourse was quite optimistic, promising the creation of spaces for the recognition of difference.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire can be read precisely as a critical analysis of this progressive neoliberal moment which emphasised liberalisation and the inclusion of difference, particularly at the level of discourse, rhetoric, and culture. Of course, this inclusion was largely symbolic. At the economic level, neoliberalism was actively promoting the dismantling of the welfare state and other structures of social support.
At the very least, progressive neoliberalism laid the basis for the development, the blossoming, of identity politics which at that time was not necessarily in contradiction with the mainstream political and economic discourse. This is radically different from the present situation.
Needless to say, if you take together progressive neoliberalism and identity politics, you have to acknowledge that they contributed to the fragmentation of social movements and of what I continue to call living labour, that was at the same time going through profound transformations in the 1980s and 1990s, also in the US.
These transformations, described by many friends and comrades and, modestly, in my work, pointed in many ways to the crucial role played by social cooperation. Social cooperation, which emerged as a key terrain for capitalist valorisation, was a new kind of productive force in the wake of the crisis of Fordism. This is a crucial point, and if we take it seriously we can better understand the way in which the combined effect of progressive neoliberalism and identity politics contributed to the fragmentation of the very materiality of cooperation.
And in the current Trump era, we see identity being mobilised simultaneously by oppressed groups to demand recognition, and by reactionary forces who weaponise anti-woke rhetoric not only to discredit identity politics, but also to undermine the struggles against racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression. So, we are witnessing a kind of double movement. What does this mean for the possibility of building solidarity across different lines of struggle?
SM This is a very important question. I was already saying that the prevailing tone of neoliberal discourses — particularly, but not only in the US — in the 1990s, was completely different from that of today. To be honest, I even doubt if the concept of neoliberalism is still adequate to capture the nature of our current conjuncture.
Certainly, we continue to face neoliberal policies in education, urban development and elsewhere, but in a different context. However, these policies no longer promise a better future. Here, the contrast with the past is striking. Neoliberalism, to put it simply, was a discourse used to in fact promise a better future. It promised to valorise individual skills and efforts through the concept of human capital, an idea grasped by Michel Foucault already in 1979. This promissory tone is now absent.
Take, for example, Trump’s rhetoric about the future of the US, which is a promise of re-industrialisation. Independently of the fact that this is quite unrealistic — we could talk at length about this — it is not really a vision of the future. It is nostalgia for the past. And, as I have said, I believe that this is a very significant change.
Now, to turn more directly to your question. The anti-woke crusade in Trump’s campaigns and terms in office aims at getting rid of, at deleting the legacy of the struggles which, in one way or the other, could gain some kind of recognition in the period of progressive neoliberalism. The real aim of this crusade is the restoration of patriarchy, and of a hierarchical model of race relations.
In that context it is understandable that the resistance to this crusade and these policies often takes the form of a renewed identity politics. I argue that in the current conjuncture identity politics cannot be effective. The reason is that the present situation is different from that of the 1990s, when — allow me to put it in this way — there was a kind of dialectical relationship between identity politics and mainstream political discourse. And it was this dialectic that opened real spaces for struggles and movement-building.
Today, this dialectic no longer exists. We now have, on the one hand, an anti-woke crusade and, on the other hand, movements and struggles, forms of resistance that often — but not always-take the form of identity politics.
So, I believe that our task is again to emphasise intersection, to emphasise the need of alliances that include differences without denying them. I know this is a very general formulation; but, in my view, this can connect social movements and social struggles in Argentina, in France, in Italy. The slogan in our times should be ‘unite the struggles’. That was also necessary in the 1990s, of course, but today it has become urgent. And if we want not only to resist but to open up a political horizon, we have to stress that it is the moment of alliances and of convergence, as people used to say in Italy, inspired by the GKN factory workers’ collective: Convergenza delle lotte — the convergence of struggles.
This is not an easy task but, even now that we speak, there is a convergence of struggles in many places. In France, for instance, there has recently been a general strike. In Argentina people shout the slogan ‘unir las luchas’ (‘Unite the struggles’) in rallies. This slogan suggests that it would be a serious mistake to assume that the recognition of difference and heterogeneity belongs to a past phase, or that it failed to produce any lasting effects. Today, we must again emphasise the need for unity, a unity that can be gained through the valorisation of differences capable of converging.
Let’s return for a while to the US and the Trump era. In your new book The Rest and the West you analyse the shift of global power in today’s multipolar world, and you suggest that this unity of struggles no longer exists. At the same time, we see that those who most loudly denounce identity politics are those who often rely on very powerful identity claims about themselves, like whiteness, western supremacy, and the image of the strong nation, an identity that is always defined in opposition to the racialised ‘other’.
In this context, do you think that progressive neoliberalism of the 90s was more open to difference and espousing a new vision for the world, as compared to the neoliberalism of today that seems structured around nation, whiteness, patriarchy, etc.? Can one trace this transition in the global power shift? To put it simply, do you believe that the new reactionary movements emerge because certain groups feel more threatened than before?
SM Absolutely, yes. And, I would add that this is not the first historical conjuncture in which something similar has happened. The period of World War I was also characterised by a growing anxiety about what Oswald Spengler famously termed the decline of the West. And this anxiety, both in Germany and Europe, and even more in the US, was often tied to the fear of the decline of whiteness itself. Even in Spengler’s work there is a fear of the so called ‘dark races’.
What is really interesting, as we hint in our book, is how this idea of a crisis of whiteness in the West was received by anti-colonial thinkers. Some intellectuals, like W.E.B. Du Bois and C.L.R. James, referred to the ‘rise of dark races’, but from a completely different perspective. What they foreshadowed was the end of racism and the emergence of a new world order beyond the hegemony of the West and whiteness. At the beginning of the 20th century, Du Bois spoke of the need to move beyond the colour line. I turn to the past because I believe it can help us imagine a world beyond the darkness of the present.
The irony is striking: today, those who most loudly denounce identity politics are the ones most deeply invested in an exclusionary identity project of their own, centred on whiteness, which is entirely different from the historical concept of identity politics, given that whiteness is the dominant identity in the West. It often remains invisible, perceived not as an identity, but simply as ‘the norm’. Still, what we are witnessing now is an aggressive reassertion of that identity, which signals a deep vulnerability. And perhaps, for that reason, it won’t last very long. Another key point that you implicitly raised in your question is that today, more than in previous historical periods, domestic developments in countries such as the US, but also in our European states, and global power dynamics are structurally intertwined. What happens inside a nation-state, like the US or France or Italy, cannot be separated from what is happening in the broader shifts of global capitalism and geopolitics. I think — and I'm certainly not alone in thinking this — that the shifts in the global distribution of power and wealth are fundamental for understanding our current conjuncture. These shifts inevitably have implications at the regional (which for us means European), national, and even local level, and they are creating a kind of structural crisis, one that reactionary movements are responding to.
You have written about the need for transversal struggles that cut across identities. Drawing from your own experiences about struggles from a decade ago, like the project Mediterranea, or the struggles of today like transnational solidarity for Gaza, which practical forms of coalition-building do you think have been successful, and which have failed? What are the critical moments or issues that social movements need to focus on today?
SM That’s an important, and of course difficult, question. I will begin by saying that the struggle for the support of Palestine is not just one among others. I am not particularly optimistic, but while I am deeply terrified
I think we have to be attentive not only to the shifts in the global distribution of power and wealth, but also to the change through which social movements express themselves.
by developments on the ground in Gaza, I am encouraged by the way the solidarity movement is growing, expanding, and radicalising in many parts of the world, including Europe and specifically Italy.
I think we have to be attentive not only to the shifts in the global distribution of power and wealth, but also to the change through which social movements express themselves. And recently, probably due to the global Sumud flotilla, we have witnessed a transformation of the forms that the Gaza solidarity movement is taking. It is, of course, a movement clearly mobilised against the genocide in Gaza. But at the same time, it is a movement that addresses a multiplicity of political issues that go beyond Gaza itself. And that is, I think, where its true potential lies.
Speaking from my own position — because I'm based in Italy and I participate in the Italian movement — I can say that recently something has shifted. Until May-June, there were certainly a lot of initiatives in solidarity with Gaza; but, in a way, they were fragmented as they often revolved around specific political groups and identities. In Italy, and I would say not only in Italy, there were also elements of identity politics in the movement of solidarity with Gaza.
This has changed in recent weeks. You can feel it. When you go to a demonstration, you see that the atmosphere is different. There is something more, something in addition. You call for a demonstration, you expect 1,000 people. And those that show up are 4,000. This may sound banal, but it is very important.
What is especially important is that the dynamic of mobilisation is not limited to, or led by existing political groups. If I can offer you a kind of reference or propose a hypothesis about that, I would say that the mobilisations in support of Gaza are now quite similar to the trans-feminist mobilisations that have been so strong in Italy in recent years. That’s my impression, not as a scholar, but as an activist who has some experience on the ground.
When I go to demonstrations today, I have the same feeling that I always had when I was joining trans-feminist mobilisations: a kind of joy, an openness, a blurring or debordering of identities. And I think that this debordering of identities may be a useful concept to work with.
From my perspective, both as an academic and as someone very much involved in social movements, I think that a key element in this kind of transversal struggle is precisely what you said earlier: not to bypass difference. We should not adopt simplistic slogans like ‘we are all equal’, but go a step further by recognising difference, putting it in a broader field of antagonisms and do something with it in a collective way.
SM Yes, the reason I mentioned the trans-feminist mobilisations is not because I want to idealise them; mobilisations in different countries and in different moments have different characteristics, and of course limitations. I find them very important precisely because they were able to foreshadow the coming together of people, social groups, and identities, willing to accept the challenge of building something new without sacrificing their own experience.
In this sense, I associate the concept of transversality with trans-feminist mobilisations, which have been among the most important struggles in Italy and beyond, in recent years. As I said, they foreshadowed and powerfully anticipated the present convergence.
If we are to reflect on migration politics and migration theory, I see a kind of cultural turn in the way we approach the topic. Migration has been framed through questions of religion, otherness, language, and adaptation. The question is if we can think of migration, politics and struggles in a different way. What you suggest in your work is that migration can be used as a lens through which to understand many different things in our societies. Migration studies is not a closed field; it is a lens through which we think about labour, democracy, and various forms of oppression. So, do you think this is the direction we should be moving towards?
SM I think that this idea has proven very productive. It has spurred and nurtured many studies in academia related to migration and borders, but also practices in social movements. However, recent developments have made me rethink some of its aspects.
In my work and discussions with others, over the past 30 years, I have made two points on migration and borders. The first is that we should not look at migration through the lens of exclusion; instead, we should examine the way in which migration policies are transforming the very idea of inclusion, a concept that is central in The Border as Method, the book I wrote with Brett Neilson. The second point is the autonomy of migration, an emphasis on the political nature of movements of migration insofar as they challenge borders. So, there is a politics of migration beyond the existence of social movements in which migrants play a major role. The very challenge to borders in the Mediterranean has a political dimension. It's a different kind of politics, but it is politics.
Now, let’s look at what is happening in the US in the age of Trump. Marines patrol Los Angeles to round up ‘illegal’ immigrants, and ICE raids a Hyundai factory in Georgia to detain and then deport — if I remember well — 300 Korean workers. These actions apart from creating problems for US capital in agriculture, construction, and other sectors, seem – because their ostensible aim is to exclude immigrants from any supporting role in the US economy — to challenge the understanding of differential inclusion that I have long worked with.
It is also interesting to see what is happening at the US–Mexico border. Here we have a paradigmatic case in critical border studies, which is central to my work, particularly in collaboration with Nicholas De Genova, where borders appear as spaces increasingly impossible to cross.
I associate the concept of transversality with trans-feminist mobilisations, which have been among the most important struggles in Italy and beyond in recent years. They foreshadowed and powerfully anticipated the present convergence.
Taking these two snapshots, several questions arise about the way in which we have understood migration over the past decades. Perhaps we are living in a transitional period, and in a moment of transformation. But if I were to say something about how migration, as an analytical tool, helps me understand contemporary capitalism in the US, I would return to my earlier point about re-industrialisation, the broader project underpinning the operations of ICE and the Marines in Los Angeles.
It's clear that these operations are not only undermining the possibility for thousands of migrants to live and work in the US, but they also threaten a kind of societal fabric that has been crucial for US capitalism in the past. Is the idea that we should drastically reduce the number of migrants in order to reopen factories where only US-American workers will be employed, like in Detroit in the 1950s? Is this the vision being proposed?
As I was saying before, this is not a realistic scenario, nor is it a very attractive prospect for young people in the US today. What I see when I apply the lens of migration to the US context is a kind of restoration that is also a sign of exhaustion, a depletion not only of US capitalism, but of the US itself. This is just a glimpse, of course, and we need to reflect further on this.
In Europe, over the past ten years, we have witnessed a radical hardening of the migration regime. In this sense, the situation is similar to that in the US. But at the same time, in many European countries there has also been a continuous reorganisation of migration policy, shaped by national recruitment schemes that are sensitive to the flexible needs of national economic systems.
Take Hungary, for example, a country at the forefront of the struggle for whiteness and Christianity, against migration etc. Yet, in recent years, thousands upon thousands of Asian workers were recruited for factories across the country. This tension makes clear why the concept of differential inclusion remains so relevant.
We have long emphasised that differential inclusion also implies differential exclusion. So, on the one hand, there is exclusion at sea, on land, through strict border regimes and the ongoing war on so-called ‘illegal migration’, and on the other hand, there are processes of selective recruitment and inclusion of migrant workers. This is taking place in a region of the world haunted by demographic aging, and it is very difficult to imagine how Europe can reproduce itself without migration. What is important here is the connection of these recruitment schemes to the hardening of borders. In the US, at least for now, we don’t see anything like this. The border is closed, not only for migrants from Central America, but also for students coming from East Asia, which is difficult to understand, considering that the elite universities in the US have always played a crucial role in the deployment of the US’ so-called soft power.
If people are no longer able to study in the US, they may simply choose to go elsewhere. Macron, for example, is trying to attract talents from all over the world to France, but perhaps Beijing and Shanghai will be even more appealing to many young Asian students.
I have been reflecting on the idea of the border as a spectacle — the way border regimes are hardening everywhere, with deportations affecting a small fraction of migrants, while the back door remains open. This spectacle always was more about discourse and ideology than about the economic needs and politics of capitalism.
I understand what you're saying that in the US, right now, it doesn't feel like that; they're really shutting things down. But I wonder how the economy of the US will keep on working if this continues. Will it run on crypto coins?
SM That was also my question. The idea of the spectacle of the border, first introduced by Nicholas De Genova, in a way worked in tandem with the concept of differential inclusion, the ‘sliding door’, as you said. Nowadays, I have the impression that in the US — because as I was saying in Europe it is still different — the situation is challenging the very idea of the spectacle itself.
I was really struck reading a recent long article in the New York Times by an author whose name I don't remember now, that opened saying that the border has been transported into the very centre of US life, and that it is not a line that one can see on the map. It crosses, he said, our cities, our economies, our cultures.
That really struck me because, as you know, this is a point that we have been making several times for decades. It was first made in a very elegant way by Étienne Balibar, I think at the end of the 1990s, or early 2000s. Reading something like this in the New York Times is quite striking. But, again, when we originally argued that the border operates at the very centre of political spaces we understood it as a kind of ‘productive device’ (productive in quotation marks, of course), linked to the logic of differential inclusion.
Today, if you look at the US — and I want to repeat that this is a kind of frozen snapshot, as nobody knows how things will look in two, three, or in four years — you have the impression that the border no longer seems productive; it appears simply destructive. If thousands of migrants from Mexico and Central America are no longer going to work in agriculture or construction because they fear apprehension by ICE, this is a problem not only for them, but also for people who have invested their capital in these sectors. It is in this sense that I say that the border has become destructive.
From a broader perspective, I think we need to return to the kind of approach we have been developing over the past years. We have to look at developments in the medium term, in order to examine the way in which migration and border regime in the US might be reorganised after this current phase of disruption. Because what we are witnessing now is precisely the breakdown of the previous regime. And that should raise questions.
As I said before, what we are seeing might signal a kind of shrinking in the very dynamism of US capitalism. That’s what lies behind the current snapshot. And it’s also connected to what we were discussing about whiteness, about a kind of whiteness backlash, functioning as a defensive formation. But again, I repeat that we need to think more about this. We need to investigate further.
For a final question — and perhaps to bring together the threads from this rich discussion — what would you say are the most urgent theoretical questions emerging in this moment, especially in relation to migration? Given all the contradictions we’ve touched on, where do you think critical research should be headed from here? What should we pay attention to, in order to rethink how capitalism functions when viewed through the lens of migration?
SM If I had to respond directly to your question, I would say that one of the most urgent theoretical tasks today is to develop new tools to understand the intertwining of global politics and domestic politics. This interconnection has become increasingly visible, and Palestine is a key issue here, as it represents a moment of politicisation that reveals the global-local entanglement of struggles. And behind this, of course, is the historical question of proletarian internationalism and the need to imagine new forms of international solidarity today. Palestine speaks to that as well.
When it comes specifically to migration we must be aware that migrants continue to be central political actors in many social struggles, both in Europe and beyond. But as we’ve discussed — particularly regarding the US — the landscape is shifting, and we’re confronted with new political and theoretical challenges. These demand fresh reflection.
For me, it is crucial to stay grounded in the local: to pay attention to what is happening in your city, your region, your country. But at the same time, if we want to grasp the wider picture of how migration relates to contemporary capitalism, we need to look beyond Europe, and beyond the West. East Asia, for example, has developed migration regimes that can still be analysed with concepts like differential inclusion, but they function very differently from those in Europe or the US.
So, if a young scholar were to ask me where to start, I would tell him to look beyond Europe. Looking at distant geographies often sharpens your sensitivity to what’s happening right around you. The global perspective feeds back into the local one.
Finally, we cannot ignore the role of war. I believe that war must now be placed at the centre of any serious political or theoretical agenda. The links between migration, borders, capitalism, and war are becoming increasingly inseparable. Understanding these connections is not optional, it’s essential.