Racial capitalism and the production of difference in Helsinki and Warsaw

ABSTRACT

Drawing on fieldwork among young among post-Soviet migrants in Helsinki (2014–2016) and Warsaw (2020), the article seeks an answer to the following question: what kind of work does racialisation of Eastern European migrant workers accomplish? The paper analyses young post-Soviet migrants’ position within the structures of racial capitalism in Europe, thus, shifting the focus from race as located in the body towards racialised positionings within the hierarchies of labour. I argue that following the analytical terms of racial capitalism and racial triangulation is a helpful way for thinking about the ways subjects racialised as ‘Eastern European’ are brought into the service of the capitalist order as located at a distance from both Blackness and hegemonic whiteness. In this article, I analyse the production and management of racial difference within whiteness and Europe itself for the purposes of economic exploitation. By bringing attention to the ‘peripheralised’ locations of the EU, the article highlights the workings of racialisation in the locations that tend to escape race critical analysis.

KEYWORDS:

• Eastern Europe
• migrant workers
• racial capitalism
• racialisation
• migration

Introduction

Scholarly work has drawn increasing attention to the role of racialisation in capitalist social formations (Williams 1994; Robinson 1983; Tilley and Shilliam 2018; Bhattacharyya 2018). This thinking has disclosed the ways in which racialisation as a processes that produces and stabilises difference justifies relations of power, making the dispossessions and structural inequality appear fair (Robinson 1983; Melamed 2011; Amrute 2020). But as Satnam Virdee (2019) has argued, the discussion on race in Europe has tended to locate its racialised Others as originating from beyond the imagined borders of the European continent, with race and racism typically analysed in core Western metropoles. In this article, I draw on the stories of Olha and Victor¹ – Ukrainian and Russian migrants in two white majority states of Poland and Finland, the countries often deemed ‘non-racial’, yet described in racial terms as ‘white’ and ‘homogenous’ (see Keskinen, Skaptadóttir, and Toivanen 2020; Balogun 2020 for a discussion). To both Olha and Victor, Poland and Finland could be easily reached through bus connections – the key sets of infrastructures that enable Russia-Finland, Ukraine-Poland cross-border mobilities and labour migration on the eastern limits of the EU. These locations of Europe rarely feature in scholarly debates on race, racialisation and racial capitalism (see, however, this SI; Balogun 2020; Narkowicz 2018; Keskinen, Skaptadóttir, and Toivanen 2020) as these topics have been predominantly explored in the context of Europe’s colonial empires. But what we can learn from Olha and Victor is that despite their phenotypical whiteness, geographic proximity of the neighbouring counties and the relative easiness of their mobilities across the EU border, these young people are not protected from processes of racialisation that produce them as ‘Eastern European’ migrant workers, as they are positioned within complex and relational entanglements of racism and racialisation in Europe.

Drawing on the stories of Olha and Victor, I explore the connections between practices of accumulation and processes of racialisation focusing on the role that the racialised production of ‘Eastern Europeanness’ plays in capital accumulation. I ask the following question: what work does racialisation of Eastern European migrants accomplish? I suggest that answers to this question require locating ‘Eastern European’ migrant whiteness not only in relation to the racialised East/West slope of Europe (Melegh 2005) but also in relation to Black/Muslim refugee racialisation. I argue that following the analytical terms of racial capitalism is a helpful way for thinking about the ways in which subjects racialised as ‘Eastern European’ are brought into the service of the capitalist order as located at a distance from both Blackness and hegemonic whiteness. What is specific for racialisation of Eastern European migrants is their simultaneous distance and proximity to the signifier of Europeanness (cf. Hesse 2007), which I argue produces a particular position as labour. By engaging with recent articulations of racial capitalism, I show how white ‘Eastern European’ migrants can be valorised vis-à-vis Black/Muslim subjects, yet simultaneously expelled from ‘hegemonic whiteness’ (Hughey 2010). This enables their inclusion as cheapened labour without challenging racial composition of the white majority while dividing workers along racial lines. The case of Eastern European migrant workers contributes to scholarly work on racial capitalism by demonstrating how the production of racial difference takes place within Europe itself, without colour-coded forms and references to a phenotype (see also Robinson 1983; Virdee 2019; Hickman and Ryan 2020). Furthermore, I argue that the case of Eastern European migrant workers allows us to move away from the somatically centred definitions of race towards relational racialised positionings within the hierarchies of labour.

In what follows, I start by outlining theoretical premises of the literature on racial capitalism to understand the ways in which racialisation is incorporated into the workings of capitalism (Bhattacharyya 2018). I then move on to discussing the relevance of race to East–West migration in Europe and the relations between ‘Eastern Europe’ and Europeanness. This theoretical discussion frames my analysis of two ethnographic cases: the case of Ukrainian student workers in Warsaw in transnational student recruitment, and of young Russian migrants’ day-to-day encounters with labour activation policies in Helsinki. The first, Olha’s example from 2020, demonstrates how Ukrainian students are actively recruited as more desirable ‘white’ workers, which needs to be understood against the context of a ban on quota refugees and anti-Muslim/Black racism in Poland. While white Ukrainian migrants are valorised vis-à-vis Black/Muslim-identified refugees, they don’t receive forms of protection against everyday and structural racism after migration, which expels them from Poland’s hegemonic whiteness. The case of Victor and his experience of labour activation programmes reveals how racialised surplus populations are included as precarious labour through day-to-day racialising and gendering encounters with the welfare state. Despite becoming devalued as unpaid labour, Victor set himself apart from other non-white people, thus further entrenching divisions of workers along racial lines. Olha’s and Victor’s stories demonstrate some important dimensions of the technologies recruited to produce economic exploitation as well as relational entanglements of multiple forms of racism and racialisation operating simultaneously in Europe.

Racial capitalism in ‘non-racial’ states?

While it is important to distinguish between the history of a specific term and a broader idea, a key intervention of the discussion on racial capitalism has been to show ‘the process, by which key dynamics of capitalism become articulated through race’ (Jenkins and Leroy 2021, 3). The promise of the term lies in linking the economic and the cultural, undoing the old unproductive debate about the primacy of race versus the primacy of class in the advancement of social justice (Bhattacharyya 2018). Racialisation is then understood as a mechanism that makes structural inequality appear fair and natural, ‘while appearing to be (and being) a normative system that merely sorts human beings according to categories of difference’ (Melamed 2011, 11). The focus on racial capitalism considers the ways in which racialising processes are incorporated in the workings of capitalism and understands racial ideologies and social structures emergent from capitalism as constitutive of one another (Bhattacharyya 2018; Robinson 1983). Challenging classical Marxism with its focus on a universal white (male) worker figure vis-à-vis the bourgeoisie, the analysis of racial capitalism draws attention to the ways in which capital accumulation operates through creating, leveraging and intensifying racial distinctions among workers themselves (Du Bois 1935; Fanon 1952; Virdee 2019; Jenkins and Leroy 2021). In line with this thinking, capitalist rule advanced through a hierarchical re-ordering of the proletariat, bifurcating workers along racial lines (Virdee 2019). Cedric Robinson’s (1983, 26) influential work on the Black Radical Tradition showed that racism is central to the historical development of capitalism and that ‘the tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenise but to differentiate – to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones’.

Unlike some previous important work, I am less interested in the role of internationalist worker solidarity or the role of racial consciousness in overthrowing capitalism. Theory of racial capitalism, as I use it in this article, provides ways of looking into the interlocking scales on which human distinctions are produced and capitalised on not only through a black/white binary (Khan 2021), but ‘precipitating out of the material circumstances’ that they rationalise (Melamed 2011, 13). It helps to trace a flexible and hierarchical ordering of populations and assigning different roles based on the exigencies of an economic rationale and of labour demands. Previous research that explored the differentiation of populations and ‘intermediary strata’ between free (white) and unfree (Black) labour is helpful for thinking about how racial distinctions can be manufactured depending on economic demands and circumstances. Lisa Lowe’s (2015) argument on the ‘social production of difference’ traces the links between the abolition of slavery and the importing of Chinese and South Asian indentured labour. This work demonstrates the singular logic under which racial dominance was deployed, without subsuming the particular experience of each group as one and the same. Other work further shows how the utility of the figure of ‘Asianness’ depended on its distance and triangulation from Black and white (Cheng 2013). An ‘obscure and contradictory figure of Asianness’ demonstrates the role of the intermediary strata – purposefully maintained by European imperialist powers – between a white ruling class and non-white subordinate class (Cheng 2013, 150). Following this logic, Indian labourers were racialised as ‘free enough to enter contracts, yet devoid of the industrial spirit that made them willing working without the aid of coercive legal mechanisms’ (Khan 2013, 89).

Previous work then shows capitalism’s remarkable flexibility in exploiting different logics of exclusion, always switching to new groups of labouring subjects depending on economic and political demands (Khan 2021; Lowe 2015; Melamed 2011). It demonstrates that racialised exploitation can be rearranged from one group to another through a purposeful manipulation of racial taxonomies and manufacturing of human difference. In the next section, I discuss the relevance of racial capitalism in the analysis of East European migrations and locations that are often deemed ‘non-racial’.

The production of racialised difference in peripheralised Europe

While the relevance of capitalism looks less questionable for analyses of East–West labour migration, ‘race’ as a category of difference may seem to be an uneasy fit in the discussion. The anglophone ‘core’ of postcolonial theory has almost exclusively attended to the binary relations between Western metropoles and the colonised Rest (Parvulescu 2016). This imaginative geography of ‘Europe’ as Western Europe may have unintended consequences of turning Europe into a common sense homogenous space, which is constructed only in relation to its non-white non-European binary opposite (Ivasiuc 2017), not to say that it may also conflate Europeanness with whiteness. But if we take scholarly work on post-coloniality across the internal east/west distinction of Europe seriously, it becomes clear that that not all the ostensibly ‘white’ subjects residing in the ‘European continent’ have been regarded as equally European and white (Todorova 1997; Wolff 1994). As Roberto Dainotto (2006) prompts, despite the land continuum of Eurasia, Europe (in theory) continues to embody the fantasy of a geographical and factual unity, willing to be separated from Asia. It is in this context that the space of ‘Eastern Europe’ embodies a position of demi-orientalism (Boatcă 2006). Сonsiderable effort is then continuously made to distinguish oneself from those located further East or from the internal non-white Others like Roma (Boatcă 2006; Zarycki 2014; Ivasiuc 2017).

Parvulescu’s (2016) work on European ‘racial triangulation’ is helpful for thinking through the tensions and challenges that the figure of the ostensibly white yet devalued ‘Eastern European’ poses to the binaries of white/Black, colonisers/colonised, with which theorising of race and coloniality in Europe has often operated. Drawing on the concept of racial triangulation (Kim 2000), Anca Parvulescu (2016) brings both semi-peripheries like Eastern Europe and ‘classical’ subaltern subjects from West European colonies to analyse the complexities of the workings of race in postcolonial Europe. This analysis brings to the fore the relational logics that the binary of white/black tends to obscure, making Europe – with external, non-European and internal, East European peripheries – into one object of postcolonial analysis. By observing the production of one European racial triangulation, formed by white Europeans, Black Europeans, and East Europeans, placed in relation to each other, Parvulescu highlights the workings of multiple hierarchies, producing complex modes of racialisation in Europe.

I put Parvulescu’s (2016) analysis in dialogue with the discussion on racial capitalism to understand how Eastern European subjects’ racial distance from both West European hegemonic whiteness and Blackness, the West and the Orient allows for the exploitation of their labour while dividing workers across racial lines. This allows me to move away from the somatically centred understanding of race towards racialised positionings within the hierarchies of labour. European racial projects have always worked by ‘distinguishing, ordering, and assigning roles to populations based on the exigencies of imperial labour demands’ (Khan 2021, 86). From this perspective, it becomes visible how differently racialised groups have been historically shuffled and placed at various distances from humanity, being assigned unequal value to groups as capitalism expanded (Khan 2021; Sharma 2020; Lowe 2015). This is similar to what Ivan Kalmar (2023) argues in the introduction to this special issue: ‘labour-oriented anti-migrant discourse allies with capital-oriented racism, using similar racializing tropes’. I also suggest that theory of racial capitalism offers a contribution to analysis of the relations between ‘Eastern Europe’ and Europeanness, which have been predominantly studied as a civilisational encounter, following Maria Todorova’s (1997) and Larry Wolff’s (1999) influential work. An extensive focus on the representation of ‘Eastern Europe’ as a semi-Oriental space leaves undiscussed material gains, effects and consequences that the knowledge/power about Eastern Europe produces. Analyses of orientalising of the region with a focus on discourse and representation leave undiscussed processes of economic exploitation, which recent literature on East–West migrations has importantly highlighted (e.g. Manolova 2021). My aim then is to examine racialisation as a process, which is materially produced by geohistorical conditions, economic demands and circumstances (Melamed 2011) and analyse it together with practices of capital accumulation. What I am interested in is how different forms of racism are constitutive of one another as Europe’s colonial imagination has always worked by grading all humanity in space and exploiting new groups depending on the economic and political demands: e.g. from African slavery to Asian ‘coolies’ to temporary migrant workers (Robinson 1983; Gilmore 2020; Sharma 2020). By using the theory of racial capitalism in the context of East–West migrations, I want to further examine what social and political work differentiation of populations and grading of humanity accomplishes.

Racialisation in the context of Finland and Poland

Finland and Poland provide perfect cases for analysing the production of difference within Europe and ‘whiteness’. Despite different geohistorical and geopolitical trajectories, both Finland and Poland are located on the eastern limits of the EU, often perceived as located at a proximity to the ‘civilisational borders’ of Europe. Both countries are white majority states, often perceived as exceptionally ‘homogenous’ white nations (see, however, Keskinen, Skaptadóttir, and Toivanen 2020; Balogun 2020 on their historically manufactured homogeneity). The countries’ position at the East–West border is visible in their migration patterns: most migrants come from post-socialist countries (Ukrainians in Poland, Estonians and Russians in Finland), who are predominantly employed in agriculture, construction, domestic work, care, trade, and gastronomy. What interests me is how ‘Eastness’ in general, ‘Russianness’ in Finland, and ‘Ukrainianness’ in Poland emerge as racialised and essentialised notions, distinct from the normative whiteness of Finland and Poland. Following previous ethnographic work that traces circulation of race in migration, I understand race not as a fixed signifier since racialisation ‘does not imply an ultimate truth about race’, nor treats race as a stable reflection of biology and culture (Amrute 2016, 4). I use racialisation to talk about the processes through which perceived naturalised capacities are attached to the bodies construed as ‘Eastern European’/‘post-Soviet’, Russian and Ukrainian, and how these processes of generating ‘difference’ are intertwined with labour value and accumulation (Amrute 2016).

Poland has been transitioning from a primarily migrant-sending country to a top receiver of labour migrants in the EU, and more recently, since Russia’s full-scale invasion into Ukraine, refugees from its neighbouring state Ukraine (Górny and Kaczmarczyk 2018). While Ukrainians had already started migrating to Poland in the 1990s, there has been a significant increase in migration from Ukraine since Russia’s occupation of Eastern parts of Ukraine in 2014. Migration from Ukraine is the largest of all post-USSR migratory movements to the EU, representing a significant reservoir of labour coming to Central Eastern Europe (Prát and Bui 2018). Before 2022, employment-related permits were the main category of entry to the EU, with Poland being the main destination for Ukrainian migration. In 2020 alone, Poland issued more than half a million of residence permits to non-EU workers (598,000, or 26% of total permits issued in the EU). Then, eighty-one per cent of these residence permits were issued to Ukrainians, with nine out of ten permits based on work (Eurostat 2020; Fedyuk and Kindler 2016). Although Poland is often imagined as having no relation to the questions of race, whiteness and Christianity have played an important role in articulating its national identity (see Balogun and Pędziwiatr 2023). As my field research in Warsaw before the full-scale invasion demonstrates, Ukrainian-ness was articulated as incompatible with normative Polish whiteness, as my research interlocutors experienced everyday, state and institutional forms of discrimination (see Zarycki 2014 on historical legacies). This takes place against the backdrop of Polish migrants’ own contingent whiteness in the west of Europe (see Narkowicz 2023).

Finland has the longest single border with a non-EU country, with Russian-speaking migrants (from Russia and Estonia) being the single largest migrant group. The historical legacy of relations between Finland and the Russian Empire/Soviet Union, such as Finland being part of the Russian Empire until 1917, Finland’s Civil War and World War II, has led to Russian-speaking migrants and minorities being racialised as the Other to the normative whiteness of Finland (Krivonos 2018). The collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s brought about a rapid increase in migration from Russia and other post-Soviet countries, and the attitudes towards Russian-speaking population became dominated by contempt. While travelling to Finland from Russia was relatively easy before Finland put limits on issuing short-term visas type C as a result of Russia’s full-scale invasion, residence in Finland for non-EU citizens is also conditional on obtaining and renewing residence permits, which often produces precarious employment relations and dependence on employers (Krivonos 2015). Extensive studies have shown experiences of discrimination and racism that Russian-identified individuals face in various spheres of life, as they become commonly framed as outsiders, a security threat and even secret supporters of the enemy (e.g. Kananen, Ronkainen, and Saari 2021). The presence of structural racism and racialised hierarchies of desirability become visible in job recruitment processes, in which applicants with Russian names have to send almost twice as many job applications as applicants with Finnish names in order to be invited to an interview (Larja et al. 2012; Ahmad 2020).

Ethnographic fieldwork in Helsinki and Warsaw

Drawing on fieldwork data from two wider ethnographic projects, this article draws on the insights of Olha and Victor, whom I met in Warsaw in 2020 and Helsinki in 2015, respectively. My exploratory research in Warsaw at the beginning of 2020 was based on interviews with young Ukrainian migrants (N = 18, 20–26 years old). The young people I interviewed were predominantly students or student workers, who had come to Poland to get higher education after finishing high school in Ukraine. All of them had stayed in Poland for several years with short-term residence permits or visas that had to be renewed. While previous research has mainly focused on circular migration among Ukrainians, my interlocutors envisaged a long term stay in Poland, which required coping with a complicated visa regime and bureaucratically induced temporality. Olha was one of the young Ukrainians I met in Warsaw. When we met, she had just finished her university degree in tourism and got a job in a hotel. Olha’s life rhythm, which was structured by morning, evening, and night shifts at work, and an irregular sleeping routine, made it difficult to be in touch with her face-to-face. However, we remained in contact via social media. In what follows, I use Olha’s thoughts and excerpts from an initial four-hour semi-structured interview.

My fieldwork in Helsinki (2014-2016) was based on observations in integration and labour activation programmes as well as semi-structured interviews with young people (N = 54, 20–32 years old), who mainly came from Russia and Estonia (ethnic Russians). I met Victor in a labour activation programme, to which he was channelled as a young unemployed person under 30. The aim of the programme was to tackle youth unemployment by assisting young people to acquire ‘workforce skills’ through participation in work-related activities and study programmes as a condition of receiving unemployment benefits. Victor came from a white majority background, had a university degree from Russia and a regular migrant status that gave him access to the welfare state when we met. Young people without post-compulsory education and the long-term unemployed have been main targets of activation programmes in the Finnish social policy (Haikkola 2019), and as I have shown elsewhere (Krivonos 2019), non-white and migrant young people are often considered as needing ‘activation’ regardless of their skills and education. In this article, I have used excerpts from the field diary I kept during participant observations in the activation programme where I met Victor, and the thoughts he shared with me about his and other people’s positionings in Finland.

Referring to a larger number of interviews could have allowed me to reach wider conclusions, but I chose to focus solely on two people so I could use longer descriptions and quotes rather than ‘a bunch of disembodied thoughts that come out of subjects’ mouths in interviews’ (Duneier and Back 2006, 554). My analysis has been informed by other conversations with the young people, which I put in dialogue with the ongoing academic discussions on race and racial capitalism in Europe.

Desirable ‘white’ workers, undesired Ukrainian bodies

As we sipped our coffees in a popular coffee shop chain in the centre of Warsaw, Olha, a fresh graduate working in the hospitality industry in Warsaw, told me that her story of migration started with the representatives of a Polish university visiting her school in Ukraine. This was one among many stories about recruitment practices and private agencies, which I heard about from young Ukrainians (Brzozowski and Pędziwiatr 2015). ‘Once a woman came to our school to tell us about opportunities to get higher education abroad, mainly in Poland and the Czech Republic. We did not even need to pass an exam to get in. It was a private university, so it was very easy. Eighty per cent of my classmates were Ukrainians, with other 20% Russians and Kazakhs’. To Olha, getting into a Polish university was a chance to pursue an idea of a better life in the nearby ‘West’, embodied to her by Poland, and to receive what she and others repeatedly referred to as ‘European education’ providing opportunities in the EU labour market. Polina Manolova (2021) suggests looking at contemporary migration in a relation to what Lauren Berlant (2011) has called ‘cruel optimism’, which allows us to see how the imaginaries of a ‘good life’ in the West continue to sustain global divisions and the centre-periphery interdependencies. While studying at the university, Olha worked hourly paid jobs in catering with other migrant student workers from Ukraine and India. After submitting her thesis, waiting for the thesis examination, meeting deadlines and juggling complex processes of renewing her visa, it took her several months to find a job as a receptionist in a popular one-star hotel chain.

Olha’s imaginaries and dreams of a better life in the ‘West’ were caught up in economic processes of transnational coordination, logistics and intermediary infrastructures (Krifors 2021). Recruitment of Ukrainian students has become one of the responses to the demographic decline and emigration of Polish workers (Rzepnikowska 2023; Narkowicz 2023). Ukrainians are seen as desirable future workers and students due to their perceived ‘cultural’, linguistic, and geographical proximity (Grasz et al. 2018). Private transnational agencies facilitate migration to Poland and other countries, offering job vacancies, language courses, translation services and educational opportunities abroad (Brzozowski and Pędziwiatr 2015). Public and private universities in Poland are active in recruiting Ukrainian students through education fairs in Ukraine and Poland, searching for new students and future workers. In the context of declining numbers of Polish students, the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education turned to the internationalisation of higher education and recruitment of foreign students, predominantly from Ukraine, and funds recruitment departments at Polish universities, offering training courses on recruitment practices. Research demonstrates that private universities actively cooperate with recruitment agencies in Ukraine, offering a percentage of the tuition fee for each recruit (Grasz et al. 2018).

Considerably lower tuition fees, ranging from 1500 to 6000 euros a year, as compared to west European institutions, together with lower entry exam requirements, made Polish universities into a migration channel for young people whose families can afford to pay for education abroad. As previous research on student migration demonstrates (Maury 2020), far from being an easy and privileged channel of migration, student migration is enmeshed in precarious labour arrangements, bureaucratically induced temporality and unpaid labour. Olha told me that she had started working while being a student, as she wanted to ease the load on her mother, who had to do several jobs in Ukraine to provide for Olha and pay for the university tuition. Olha’s friend, a fresh graduate, talked to me in a whisper that his parents had to pay 2000 US dollars a year for him to study in Warsaw – a whisper which I interpreted as a sense of uneasiness and perhaps embarrassment about being a financial burden on his parents. I was asked not to tell his friends how much his parents had paid for his education in Warsaw. The whisper when talking about the fees and Olha’s effort to share the cost of her migration make visible how young Ukrainians and their families bear the costs of social reproduction to enable student migration and the provision of migrant labour for Polish labour markets (Bhattacharyya 2018). In fact, some parents of the young Ukrainians I talked to were labour migrants in Russia, Italy or Poland. Their labour further ‘inserted’ their children as migrant student workers into the Polish labour market and service economy through the infrastructures created by private recruitment agencies and universities.

Following Parvulescu’s analysis, I suggest that these networks of transnational coordination and active recruitment of ‘white’, linguistically and ‘culturally’ similar student workers from Ukraine should be understood with and against the backdrop of a ban of quota refugees and wider anti-Muslim/Black politics within the regime of racial capitalism in the EU and Poland, specifically. Here I argue that different forms of racism and racialisation must be analysed in relation to each other as capitalism has been historically flexible in switching between and exploiting each new frontier’s logics of exclusion and exploitation (Khan 2021; Sharma 2020). The right-wing political party Prawo i Sprawiedliwość [Law and Justice], which came to power in 2015 at the height of the humanitarian crisis in Europe, refused to accept the refugees allocated through the EU quota system. The figure of a Muslim refugee has become a key trope of articulating xenophobic nationalist politics (Narkowicz 2018). Research has described Poland as an example of the ‘Islamophobia without Muslims’ phenomenon with the majority population having negative attitudes about Muslim-identified people despite having almost no Muslim presence in the country (Włoch 2009). The imagined threat of a ‘Muslim terrorist’ disguised as a ‘bogus refugee’ has become a dominant discourse around migration. The racialisation of the Other works not only in relation to non-citizens. As Balogun and Pędziwiatr (2023) argue in this issue regarding resistance to anti-Black racism in Poland, racism is integrated into the practices of everyday life of Black Polish nationals, construing them as ‘space invaders’. These everyday experiences are part of larger structural politics in which whiteness strips Black Poles of their belonging to the country. Against this backdrop, a broad network of recruitment and consultant agencies extracting value from Ukrainian workers makes visible racialised logics of valorising certain subjects as ‘culturally similar’, assimilable, more desirable and capable of producing value, while banning other migrants from entering the country and letting them die altogether.

Anti-Black/anti-Muslim forms of racism must be analysed vis-à-vis hierarchies of whiteness in which Ukrainian workers are placed. The relational logic of racial positionings of different groups of migrants and refugees becomes visible in how Ukrainian labour migrants are also denied access to complete or ‘hegemonic’ whiteness (Hughey 2010). Although Ukrainians benefit from more favourable recruitment policies that valorise them vis-à-vis Muslim-identified/Black migrants and Polish nationals, they are not protected from the processes that simultaneously produce their deviance and ‘difference’ from the white Polish majority. Olha went on to tell me how Ukrainian students can be singled out as deviant in day-to-day encounters in the context of higher education, at the same time as transnational agencies actively recruit them as more desirable and ostensibly ‘white’ labour force. During a lecture, as Olha was finalising a PowerPoint presentation for the seminar, a lecturer remarked that Olha was using a laptop in class, even though this was not prohibited. Rather than addressing all the students regarding rules of conduct in class, the teacher addressed Olha specifically as a Ukrainian student. Olha recalled the teacher saying the following in front of the class: ‘Did you study in a Ukrainian university before coming here? Did you behave same way in Ukraine? You are not in your home country here to behave this way!’ These remarks were followed by the teacher comparing Poland and Ukraine in front of Olha and other students, with Poland appearing as a more advanced country. ‘It was so harsh. I rolled myself into a little ball when she was telling me these things’, Olha evoked. Olha was targeted for harassment specifically as a ‘Ukrainian student’, whose behaviour was deemed deviant, tied specifically to her perceived Ukrainian-ness. These everyday practices take place in a wider context of unequal border regimes and institutional discrimination.

The story, however, did not end with being harassed by the teacher in class. The day after the incident, the dean of the faculty stopped Olha in the corridor asking her not to file a complaint about being abused as a Ukrainian student. The same institution that recruited Olha as a student from Ukraine and harassed her publicly as a ‘Ukrainian’ also instructed how she ought to react to the incident. She recalled the dean telling her: ‘I heard you had a conflict with a lecturer in class. I don’t want to get involved, but I just ask you not to make a complaint. You should understand that you have not yet graduated, and you never know if she [the lecturer] can have an impact on your future career. What if she [the lecturer] will be your thesis reviewer? Please, we don’t need problems here’. Olha’s complaint could have resonated with many other students, ‘as a good third of the university are Ukrainians’. By threatening how this could affect her future studies, career and employment, the dean managed to pressure her into not making a complaint. The very same structures that recruit young Ukrainians as desirable and ‘culturally’ similar (read, ‘white’) students and workers simultaneously construct them as deviant and different vis-à-vis Polish whiteness, providing no legal protocol and protection against harassment and discrimination. Olha’s graduation and entrance to the labour market was conditioned by her not making a complaint and moving on from the incident: ‘I understand that the world is small. Indeed, what if that teacher had ruined my career if I complained?’

When I asked Olha how the lecturer had managed to guess that she was from Ukraine, she said: ‘We are a small group, yes, nobody can distinguish us, we are all Slavs, we belong to the same race, but it is enough to read one’s name and surname in the student list. If there are no Polish letters or combination of letters in a name, one can easily distinguish a foreigner’. While Olha explicitly referred to the shared phenotypical whiteness, there are other modalities that produce difference. Previous research demonstrates that names play a major role in racialisation, being conspicuous signifiers of a stigmatised identity (Khosravi 2012). Names and surnames have an exchange- and commodity-like value, as names deemed ‘foreign’ lower one’s chances when applying for housing and jobs. Writing on racialisation of Black/mixed-race people in Poland, Bolaji Balogun (2020) has coined the term ‘Polish-centrism’ to describe racial contours of Polish self-conception and challenge its presumed racelessness. As Olha’s case shows, the contours of normative Polishness can be also drawn among ostensibly ‘white’ subjects and within ‘whiteness’ itself, even though Ukrainians benefit from more favourable recruitment policies that racialise them as assimilable and more desirable vis-à-vis Black and Muslim migrants and citizens. Olha’s and other Ukrainian migrants’ stories help us move away from the understanding of race as a somatically centred definition towards complex and relational racial positionings across various and mutually constitutive forms of racism. Olha’s story demonstrates the need to locate the racialisation of Ukrainian migration in relation to both anti-refugee/Black/Muslim racism and Polish whiteness. As Ukrainian students become valorised as more desirable labour vis-à-vis Muslim-identified/Black migrants and refugees, they are not exempt from racial logics that devalue them as deviant and inferior vis-à-vis normative Polish whiteness.

The differential production of labour in a welfare office in Helsinki

Gargi Bhattacharyya’s work (2018) considers racial capitalism and social reproduction to show how the means to reproduce life such as gaining entry to economic activity are unequally distributed along the lines of racialisation. Racialising processes divide populations into workers, non-workers and almost workers with differential access to economic resources. In this section, I analyse the ways in which Victor became included in precarious labour markets as an ‘almost worker’ through day-to-day institutional encounters with labour activation policies in Finland, that is, the policies that aimed at returning the unemployed young people to the labour market (Haikkola 2019; Krivonos 2019).

Previous scholarly work has demonstrated the ways in which marginalised groups, who are the target of institutional racism, may be specifically singled out for activation measures (Farris 2017, 119–123). The core logic of activation is the process of distinguishing beyond the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ poor, or those in need of ‘skills enhancement’ and those who are ‘job-ready’. In 2019, the unemployment rate among foreign-mother-tongue people (17.0%) was more than twice as high than among population with Finnish as the mother tongue (7.5%) (City of Helsinki 2021), which may make them subject to work-related activities as a condition to unemployment benefits. Neoliberal capitalism differentiates populations through the erosion of the welfare state, the consequences of which are born disproportionately by non-white people and migrants (Bhattacharyya 2018; Farris 2017). The shifting of the welfare state towards workfare makes racialised minorities subjects to neoliberal governance and new technologies that rely on old racial fictions of laziness and unproductivity (Farris 2017).

I understand labour activation programmes as one of the sites where differentiation of labour occurs and becomes visible, making it into a perfect case for an analysis of how racial-economic tropes operate on the ground. I conducted observations in the service line, which targeted unemployed young people in need of ‘skills enhancement’. The programme reported the progress of the young unemployed to the Public Employment Office, which is mandated with cutting unemployment benefits if activation measures like participation in work-relation activities are not met. Most of the young people who were funnelled into the programme were white majority Finns with secondary education, and foreign-born young people with more varying educational backgrounds, including university degrees. Rather than providing young people with stable and long-term employment, labour activation pushed young people into a handful of short-term unpaid training programmes in the service sector, represented predominantly by retail chains.

Victor had moved to Helsinki from Russia with a university degree in music. We sat together in a small room of the youth activation centre in downtown Helsinki: Victor, me, and a career counsellor. Victor was sitting at a table in front of a counsellor who was typing on a computer at the same time as he asked questions about Victor’s background and education. As Victor introduced himself and said that he had a degree in music, the counsellor continued with the same script that I had already observed several times (Krivonos 2019; Haikkola 2019), offering ‘jobs’ – in practice, unpaid work placements – in the field of logistics and warehousing:

Career counsellor (CC):

Would you like to do work outside the field of

culture?

Victor:

Only if it is in the field of starting my own business.

CC:

Would you like to do service work? Construction maybe?

Victor:

No physical job for me, please. I was created for

brain jobs. I want to study more Finnish, get to a Finnish university and maybe develop my own project.

CC checks some information.

CC:

Would you like to work in a supermarket? Like a

warehouse? You can learn Finnish there too.

Victor:

I am not sure I will learn that many words doing this job.

CC:

They don’t exclude one another. You learn Finnish in a supermarket too.

I intervened in their dialogue and asked whether

there were jobs in his field, as Victor asked. The

counsellor answered firmly that these jobs were all

in Finnish and required ‘good Finnish skills’. Victor

continued:

I know there is a vacancy at the Sibelius Music Academy,

I am interested in that.

CC:

There are too many applicants and there is only one job. [CC then finds some courses in Finnish]. These courses are really advanced, maybe you should attend courses for immigrants. (Field diary, June 2015)

This dialogue between a career counsellor and Victor made visible how certain assumptions about productive abilities and skills become normalised. Young male clients identified as having ‘migrant background’ were offered jobs in the sectors representing a high concentration of male migrant workers, such as logistics, construction and warehouse work for short unpaid periods, which means that they were paid with unemployment benefits for the work they were doing for private companies. Victor was persistently denied access to jobs for which he was qualified, and his place in the labour market was reified exclusively as a manual worker. In fact, Victor clearly contested being categorised as a construction worker, explicitly referring to ‘brain work’ (umstvennaya rabota). This body/mind divide as a struggle over the definition of labouring capacities and skills reveals how migrant and non-white workers are perceived through the prism of their supposedly natural bodily skills. Young men and women were channelled into particular labour sectors simply by virtue of being identified as ‘men’ and ‘women’ (Krivonos 2019). While lack of language skills is often used as a justification for denying better paid jobs, young migrants were often channelled to asocial work performed individually, sometimes at night or late, with few opportunities for communication with other workers. This left many of my research interlocutors in a precarious circle of unemployment and unpaid work in warehouses.

As we headed to a metro station, Victor told me about his own experience of living in Finland, perhaps as a little reflection on our two-hour-long conversation, that ‘the problem of Finland is that it accepts too many asylum seekers, the lazy ones, who do not want to work and are not able to work’. While being unemployed and struggling to be recognised as a highly-skilled professional, Victor set himself apart from other non-white people and especially from ‘refugees’ or ‘asylum seekers’. As I did fieldwork in 2015, European discourses around migration and Finnish media have centred extensively on asylum seekers, portrayed as a burden to the already over-stretched welfare state (Keskinen 2016). It struck me that despite his own struggles with finding work and becoming a recognised professional, Victor hurried to reproduce the racial imaginary that distinguishes non-white subjects according to the economic exchange they produce (Amrute 2020). When I asked him if he could see any similarity between himself and other migrants and non-white people, he answered in explicitly racial terms: ‘I am white’. W.E.B. Du Bois (1935) wrote famously about the ‘wages of whiteness’ almost a century ago, and the racial logics continues to distinguish labouring bodies in terms of their utility to capital. Previous research has traced the elite’s use of the language of whiteness to break the ties forged by subaltern groups who had nothing in common but a class position (Virdee 2019). Racism has worked as a weapon to contain the class struggle, making the system safe for accumulation (Virdee 2019). I suggest that similar logics operate in the case of Victor, showing how an Eastern European migrant, while expelled from hegemonic whiteness (Hughey 2010), tends to remain loyal to the system of white supremacy and anti-blackness. The story shows how people like Victor, who are subjected to negative racialisation, reproduce racist and nationalist myths that race and nation transcend class (Sharma 2020). The system of racial capitalism is thus reproduced by the very same subjects who are degraded by it (Kalmar 2023; Krivonos 2022). By choosing race and Europeanness as a distinction for solidarity, like other research participants in Helsinki and Warsaw, Victor buttressed the economic system that is sustained by the manufacturing of racialised difference. Victor’s story shows another logic of reproducing racial capitalism among subjects placed at a distance from both whiteness and Black/Muslim racialisation, who pledge allegiance to hegemonic whiteness.

Conclusions

Sareeta Amrute (2020, 376) astutely argues in the context of Asian IT migrant workers that ‘divisions in the category of the human determine categories of human labour’. In this article, I have demonstrated the divisions in the category of human, and the ways racial logics become enmeshed in the making of labouring subjects. Bringing questions of economic exploitation in dialogue with racialisation advances our understanding of the role that migration from the east of Europe plays in capital accumulation. Olha’s and Victor’s narratives help us trace the ‘placement of people at various distances from liberal humanity’ (Lowe 2015, 8, emphasis added). Eastern European migrants are situated at a distance from both hegemonic whiteness and Black/Muslim racialisation, which simultaneously valorises and devalues them as non-workers or workers for low-paid service economy. This shows distinct yet overlapping modes for constituting people as racialised subjects. In this manner, to borrow from Anca Parvulescu (2016), European racial triangulation produces ostensibly ‘white’ migrant labour, which can be exploited and expropriated, yet which does not challenge hegemonic whiteness of Europe. These processes of racial triangulation also take place on the eastern limits of the EU, among those who are already placed on the ‘civilisational borders’ of Europeanness. Post-Soviet migrants become included as a ‘non-white’ white cheapened labour force, at the same time as they don’t threaten the racial order of Europe by becoming incorporated into anti-black and anti-Muslim forms of racism. This allows us developing conceptualisation of race as located in the body towards relational positionings in the hierarchies of labour. This case, developed in the context of Central and Eastern Europe, can be further expanded and used in other locations.

I wrote and submitted this article before Russia’s full-scale invasion into Ukraine. After 24 February 2022, many academic and public commentators argued that it is precisely the whiteness of Ukrainian refugees that triggered the EU’s Temporary Protection mechanism and led to a rapid mobilisation of solidarity across Europe unlike in other contexts of displacement. As I am at the final stages of revising this article, I want to suggest that this claim overlooks a much longer history of the mundane and relatively invisibilised circulation of Ukrainian migrant workers and students like Olha, who were not regarded as (fully-)white workers, if what we mean by this is that substandard working and living conditions, as well as work in the so-called 3D jobs (dangerous, dirty, and degraded) are regarded as legitimate when experienced by non-white people. Meanwhile, deadly pushbacks and other forms of border violence in relation to non-white asylum seekers continue to take place across the EU borders. In the summer 2022, Poland, with the endorsement of the European Commission, completed a 186 km steel wall at its border with Belarus to expel asylum seekers from Africa and the Middle East, which is just one among many examples of racist violent pushbacks. The process of making Ukrainians ‘white’ along with violent expulsions of non-white asylum seekers should bring us closer to thinking about relational forms of racialisation and racism, which can be co-constitutive of each other. Building coalitional anti-racist politics without expecting easy alliances, abolishing whiteness, deservingness and the logic of competition for supposedly meagre resources is an urgent matter for activists and scholars of migration.

Acknowledgements

The author wants to thank her research interlocutors for their precious time. She is also thankful to the editors and anonymous reviewers for their careful and thoughtful comments on her manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All the names are pseudonyms.