Correction on my article about ICE
https://substack.com/@pokepreet/p-186167600
I must take an opportunity to correct myself. I claimed in a previous article that ICE’s deportation efforts gain capital a great service, as they are able to rebalance its organic composition of capital to a favorable ratio, and therefore the rate of profit.
What I forgot, however, was that while labor is deported, constant capital remains the same. This actually hurts capital in the short term, as relative surplus value falls and socially necessary labor time increases. Migrant labor, through doing labor far below the cost of their labor power, is a huge boost to the system of capital itself. However, capital stomachs this short term raise in the cost of necessary labor, as mass deportation has two great effects
Disciplining of the labor force: the remaining migrant workers do not get deported, but come to accept the most abysmal conditions
False Consciousness: Even as deportation causes the non-migrant population to see a rise in their necessary labor costs, through distraction and scapegoating of migrants, capital is able to externalize the anger it faces as a class towards alienation onto another, a cost capital is more than happy to pay in the short term to avoid large-scale class uprising.
Finally, capital finds other ways to offset this loss in such cheap labor power, through revolving door migration (silently allowing migrants to come in as it deports others), prison labor, and making it’s remain workforce work more for less pay.
I still stand by everything else within the article.