leave to go abroad."
A Seventh Man.
All the propaganda pouring from the presses of the pro-Marketeers in the last few weeks has been trying to sell us the Common Market dream, the 'international fraternity' of the EEC. This book gives us another side of that dream, the nightmare of the experience of immigrant workers in Europe-oneseventh of the European workforce. This is the real face of the capitalist Common Market, this is the real international fraternity which the EEC stands for-the fraternity of exploitation and oppression.
In 1972 the author John Berger won the Booker Prize for his novel 'G', and at the presentation denounced the imperialist role of the Booker family-one of the main sugar monopolists in the Carribeanvowing to use the money to help overthrow them and their class. He gave half the money to the Black Panthers and used the other half to finance the writing of A Seventh Man.
Most books with political themes fall into the categories of fiction or non-Ticuona oolecuve ana yss. This book is different. Berger has attempted a skilful combination of the objective situation of immigrants from Turkey, Portugal, Greece, etc. in imperialist Europe, with a semi-fictional reconstruction of the immigrants' subjective experience of that situation. To achieve this he uses a technique of reportage, analysis and the brilliant photographic work of Jean Mohr.
The result is a bitter and moving condemnation of an economic system, which by its very nature condemns large numbers (over - immigrant worker quoted by John Berger in migration.
But Berger doesn't simply reduce the phenomenon of temporary migration to crude economic causes:
*Underdevelopment not only kills; its essential stagnation denies life and resembles death. The migrant wants to live. It is not poverty alone which forces him to emigrate. Through his own individual effort he tries to achieve the dynamism that is lacking in the situation into which he was born ... *Without the example of a revoluonary party, the economic and social relations which create and maintain rural poverty, appear to be unchangeable. Therefore unose with most initative do the one thing which seems to offer hope: they leave.' (Pelican paperback, £1-00p)
This refusal to give a crude econ omic determinist picture -his vivid attempts to give substance to the ideological and social factors in the process of migration-is one of the main strengths of the book Nevertheless he does recognise the economic importance of 'guestworkers to une buropean economi *So far as the economies of the metropolitan country is concerned, migrant workers are immortal: immortal because continually interchangeable. They are not born. mey are not brought up; they do not age; they do not get tired; they do not die. They have a single functionto work. All other functions of their lives are the responsibility of the country they came from."
However he puts equal stress on the political convenience of migrant labour. They can be used to divide and weaken the metropolitan workforce, by the use of racism and the creation of a labour aristocrat' mentality. They can be instantly expelled, if they threaten to become politically organised. And as far as the country of ongin is concerned, emigration can reduce the political tensions that mass unemployment brings in its wake. RECRUITMENT project. In the space of a year two are killed and three suffer crippling injuries-a hundred workers forced to travel thousands of miles for a one in 20 chance of death or disablement!
And the unions? Although many of the migrants do become unionised, they are continually sceptical of their ability to fight for migrant interests. As Berger notes: sure that the domestic workers' living standards are not threatened by immigrant labour. To do this misation of extremist elements who may arise.
Then there is the return after two years:
imagined, it never happens. go abroad once more. • No, these aren't chicken-houses. They are some of the shanty-town novels that Algerian immigrant-workers are forced to live in on the outskirts of French cities *The unions have never been able to think or act beyond the proposition that the migrant worker belongs to the country ne nas lent and tererore does not belong where he works...
The unions mainly work to enthey often actively help in the victiMYTHIC RETURN nine months or a year, or sometimes *The final return is mythic. It gives meaning to what might otherwise be meaningless. It is larger than life. It is the stuff of longing and prayers. But it is mythic in the sense that, as *Because the village has scarcely changed since he left, there is still no livelihood there for him. When he carries out one of his plans, he will become the victim of the same economic stagnation which first forced him to leave. He will join the already swollen and parasitic service sector ... wo or three years after his final return he or other members of his family will be compelled to This is a moving, committed book. However, it has two main weaknesses. The first stems partly from the fact that it was completed before the present economic recession bit deep into Europe, bringing with it not just passive hostility and chauvinism but increasingly organised violence against immigrants by right-wing organisations. The attempted pogroms of Algerian workers in Marseilles, the attacks on North African workers by French marines in the streets of Toulon, the burning of the houses of Turk ish workers in Rotterdam are just the best-known incidents.
This increasingly frightening aspect of the immigrant's experience of Europe-the shrink-back in the job market, the violent attempts by the right to blame foreigners for the crisis and unemployment, the moves by various governments to exclude or curtail guest-workers'is not really touched on But more important, Berger omits totally the isolated but exemplary attempts by migrant labour + to fight back. No matter how com mitted and sympathetic a study of oppression is, if it doesn't point to the possibility of rebellion and change, then it runs the danger of remaining an exercise in demoralisation, portraying a depressing 'norm' And the seeds of revolt are there. Against all the odds-their isolation, the national chauvinism of the native working class, the ineffectiveness of the trade unions, their lack of experience of proleta rian organisation, their vulnerability to victimisation ana expursion they have fought back BEGINNINGS There were the Hella workers in Lippstadt in Germany, who introduced forms of struggle from Spain and Italy into Germany for the first time; the Spanish workers at a Geneva engineering works who organised the first strike in that sector for decades; the Tunisian workers' strike at Blindex in Marseilles, which won the support of the French workers; and the Spanish building workers strike at the Muser site in Switzerland which with the help of militants of the Fourth International, organised a solidarity demonstration of 3,500 people All these were small beginnings, made against the stream. But they must be popularised, generalised, built on and extended if the deadly brutality of the migrant worker's lot in the European heartland, as depicted by Berger, is to be ended •And that can not be seen as separ ate from destroying the economic oppression of their home countries by imperialism which forced them to take their long journey to I nowhere in the first place
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'One day it will be better at home than abroad and when I go back there, I'll be able to work for myself and I'll build myself a house. It'll be a kind of paradise. If the wages at home were a bit higher and if everyone could find work there, nobody would
Carl Gardner reviews John Berger's 'A Seventh Man'