Citizenship

From Inalienable Right to Conditional Privilege

Morning Comrades.

Irrespective of ones understanding of History, irrespective of ones ability to see and understand the parallels of what is happening today and draw conclusions from our past, alarm bells have to be ringing, loudly, for everyone, now. No snark comment that this should have been the case 25 years ago but let’s focus on one fact, for now, out of the unimaginable amount of imaginary “red lines” our lib-indoctrinated brains have drawn and been crossed by those in power in those decades.

United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have arrested a Palestinian graduate student who played a prominent role in last year’s pro-Palestinian protests at New York’s Columbia University, the student workers’ union said on Sunday. Khalil’s lawyer, Amy Greer, told the Associated Press news agency that she spoke by phone with one of the ICE agents during the arrest, who said they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil’s student visa. Informed by the lawyer that Khalil was in the country as a permanent resident with a green card, the agent said they were revoking that too, according to the lawyer.

So much for the facts, let’s rage for a hot minute or so. Obviously, what has happened is that a citizen was disappeared because the current Trump administration disagreed with the message and power said citizen had. The University, like all institution have in the past and will in the future, irrespective of what moral standard we falsely project onto them, gave their student up and puff, there goes another dissenting voice with the ability to organise. That, my dear comrades, is the dead canary in the coal mine, we can argue about linguistics till the cows come home but any pretence about rights, laws, “safety” ascribed to citizenship, now, by the very latest has to be thrown out the window. ( A side note to the euro-ignoramus’s I can hear snickering already, this is the reality here, today, also, grow up ). This brings up a garbage truck amount of questions, obviously, and I’ll get into some of them now.

Again, as brazen as this act is, it has very little to do with Trump and his goons and has been happening for decades to anyone genuinely threatening the capitalist power structure, yet, this is a turning point. For one, the past existed to build the infrastructural framework to make dissent “disappear”, to forge and mould the moral acceptance thereof ( they were “enemy combatants, so off to Guantanamo they go ) and to create the alienation of this process from us - it can only happen to them, never to me, I am a citizen. Secondly, this all has been achieved and I fear a purge of dissenters against their death cult is here.

The concept of citizenship has traditionally been perceived as an inalienable bond between the individual and the state, conferring rights and responsibilities that are both protected and upheld by legal frameworks. However, in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, this perception has been increasingly challenged. States, particularly in the Western world, have adopted measures that allow for the revocation of citizenship, thereby transforming it into a conditional privilege rather than an immutable right. These developments can be interpreted as manifestations of the capitalist state's fascist tendencies, revealing an inherent disposition towards authoritarianism when faced with perceived existential threats.

Citizenship: From Inalienable Right to Conditional Privilege

In the post-9/11 era, the global North has witnessed a reorientation of citizenship towards public security concerns. This shift is exemplified by cases such as that of Shamima Begum, a British-born individual who traveled to Syria and was subsequently stripped of her UK citizenship. This action underscores the state's assertion of power to redefine and rescind the rights of its citizens under the guise of national security. As noted in the Journal of Human Rights Practice, "In the post-9/11 context, citizenship in the global North has been reoriented towards the concept of public security."

Similarly, several states have proposed or enacted legislation to revoke the nationality of individuals suspected of terrorist activities, even at the risk of rendering them stateless. These measures reflect a broader trend where citizenship becomes a tool of exclusion, employed to delineate and protect the boundaries of the national community. The Chicago Journal of International Law observes that "some States are proposing to revoke the nationality of suspected terrorists as part of their comprehensive counterterrorism strategies."

The assertion that citizenship is a "conditional privilege rather than an immutable right" implies that the state holds ultimate authority to grant or revoke the legal and political status of individuals at will. While historical instances—especially in the post-9/11 era—demonstrate the arbitrary nature of state power, this argument ultimately reifies the ideological structure of the bourgeois state rather than challenging its foundation. A clear materialist analysis reveals that citizenship, rather than being a privilege, is an inherently material relationship grounded in social production and class struggle. The neoliberal state’s authoritarianism emerges from the structural logic of capitalist accumulation, which necessitates a repressive apparatus to manage labour and capital flows. Anything that challenges this, is removed.

Rights, including citizenship, are not abstract legal constructs but as material relations that emerge from specific historical and economic conditions. In On the Jewish Question (1843), Marx critiques the liberal conception of rights, arguing that they are rooted in private property and serve bourgeois interests. Citizenship, in this framework, is not an arbitrary privilege but a material form of political subjectivity tied to labour, production, and class struggle.

Under capitalism, the state does not arbitrarily grant or revoke citizenship; rather, it shapes and manages it in accordance with the needs of capital. The proletariat, regardless of formal legal status, remains structurally essential to the functioning of the capitalist system. Even those stripped of citizenship (such as stateless refugees or undocumented workers) continue to be integrated into global capital flows through precarious labour and exploitative economic arrangements. As Étienne Balibar argues in Citizenship (2015), “citizenship is not merely a legal status but a dynamic process of inclusion and exclusion tied to economic and political structures.” Thus, citizenship is not simply a revocable privilege but an active site of class struggle.

Neoliberalism and the Restructuring of State Power

The post-9/11 transformations in citizenship laws—such as the expansion of citizenship revocation policies in the UK, France, and the US—do not indicate that citizenship is inherently conditional but rather that the neoliberal state has restructured political subjectivity to better facilitate capital accumulation. As Wendy Brown notes in Undoing the Demos (2015), neoliberalism subordinates all forms of political life to market imperatives, eroding democratic rights while strengthening the repressive functions of the state.

Far from being arbitrary, the neoliberal expansion of state control over citizenship is deeply systematic. Policies such as the denationalization of suspected "terrorists" or the militarization of borders function to manage surplus populations, discipline labour, and regulate migration in ways that benefit capital. Rather than proving that citizenship is a privilege, these developments demonstrate that the state is instrumentalized to maintain the material relations of capitalist production.

If citizenship were a mere privilege, one might expect that its revocation would be random or politically neutral. However, a materialist analysis shows that denationalization, deportation, and legal exclusions overwhelmingly target specific populations—primarily the working class, racialized minorities, and political dissidents. This is not incidental but a reflection of the repressive function of the neoliberal state. As Nicos Poulantzas argues in State, Power, Socialism (1978), the capitalist state is not a neutral arbiter but an apparatus that actively sustains capitalist relations through both coercion and ideological control.

In the neoliberal era, the state's authoritarianism is not an aberration but a necessary function of a system that faces constant crises of accumulation. The increasing use of surveillance, the criminalization of migration, and the stripping of citizenship from political enemies are all strategies that allow capital to continue extracting value while managing instability. This does not mean the state is inherently fascist but rather that neoliberalism requires increasingly authoritarian mechanisms to maintain its legitimacy and order, or plainly, fascism is a tool capitalism utilises.

The transformation of citizenship into a revocable privilege and the state's gravitation towards authoritarian measures in the post-9/11 context underscore the precariousness of individual rights when confronted with state power. These developments reveal the state's fascist tendencies, which surface in response to crises that threaten the capitalist system.

I do believe it is vitally important to understand our relationship with the capitalist class and their system this coldly, they do and it is costing us our lives. As brazen as this act of intimidation, violence and repression is, understand that it is nothing new and we are way past having to get our shit together to not only oppose this, but change it.

First they came.. and you know the rest.

As always, thank you for your time and attention,

Yours, ragingly,

V.