‘To see the experience of another’: learning from Berger’s A Seventh Man

J. Berger, The Shape of a Pocket (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 164.

J. Berger and J. Mohr, A Seventh Man: A Book of Images and Words about the Experience of Migrant Workers in Europe (London and New York: Verso, 2020 [1975]). It should be pointed out that Race & Class published an extract from the book in the months leading up to its release. See J. Berger, “The Seventh Man,” Race & Class 16, no. 3 (1975): 251–7. John Berger also served on the journal’s Editorial Working Committee from 1992 to 2016.

Berger and Mohr, A Seventh Man, 7.

The escalation of migration as a national security threat is certainly not an innovation of the latest US federal administration. It is a residual and enduring feature of the US state, and, more broadly, reflects tendencies of what Bridget Anderson calls the ‘global state system’ of citizenship. Nevertheless, the undeniable radicalisation of securitisation, which I summarise here as the force of expulsion, is apparent on multiple fronts, including: the barrage of xenophobic executive orders; the breakdown of asylum processes; the degradation of asylum seekers especially along class, gendered and racial lines; wall building; criminalising and deploying military forces against citizen solidarity initiatives; increasing detention infrastructure; the brutal violence of ICE deportation strategy; and expanding these and other state interventions through massive funding appropriations to the US Department of Homeland Security. For a summary of funding appropriations see H. Altman, T. Broder and B. D’Avanzo, “The Anti-Immigrant Policies in Trump’s Final ‘Big Beautiful Bill,’ Explained,” https://www.nilc.org/resources/the-anti-immigrant-policies-in-trumps-final-big-beautiful-bill-explained/. On national citizenship as a global system, see B. Anderson, Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 112. For an analysis of how current asylum policy and enforcement exacerbates the vulnerability of asylum seekers along class, race, and particularly gendered lines, see C. Donoso, “Keeping Them Vulnerable: Female Applicants and the Biopolitics of Asylum in Texas,” in Challenging Borders: Contingencies and Consequences, ed. P. McKenzie-Jones, S. McManus and J. Young (Athabasca, Canada: Athabasca University Press, 2025).

Berger and Mohr, A Seventh Man, 7. Berger reserves the term ‘economic fascism’ for neoliberalism; I take it as apt for the order he is exposing throughout. Note his characterisation of the wider economic context: ‘The history of the last two centuries, if the apologetics are put aside, is nothing less than infernal. It is hard to credit that it was exactly during this period that the notion of Evil as a force was abandoned. Every child in developed Europe who goes to school learns something, however mystified and prejudiced the school books may be, of the previous history of capitalism: the slave trade, the Poor Laws, child labour, factory conditions, the Armageddon of 1914–18’ (100).

See J. Berger, Pig Earth (New York: Vintage International, 1992 [1979]), xi–xxvii.

Berger and Mohr, A Seventh Man, 130. A Seventh Man has found resonance across time and place with many people, texts, albums and ideas since its publication. Reading it today, its fierce repudiation of systems that waste human life calls to mind the recent work of F. Vergès, Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism (London: Goldsmiths Press, 2024).

Berger and Mohr, A Seventh Man, 108.

Berger and Mohr, A Seventh Man, 108.

The three calculations can be summarised as: (1) that the national working class will direct grievance against the migrant class for relieving manufactured labour shortages, accepting bourgeois mythologies of race and inferiority; (2) trade unions and working-class coalitions will not overcome nationalist fictions of belonging, which is the condition of solidarity; (3) dreams of migrant workers are lifelines to survival but like a cruel optimism they will also sustain the first two calculations by projecting future relief through labour (‘That he will save enough soon enough’). Berger and Mohr, A Seventh Man, 141–151; 151. On the notion of cruel optimism, see L. Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

In advance of the radicalisation of expulsion across the US in 2025, in 2021 the state of Texas supercharged the xenophobic ‘prevention through deterrence’ policy through a multi-billion-dollar escalation known as Operation Lone Star. The catastrophic and well-documented policy led directly to an increase in deaths and has reinforced the need for unsafe routes of travel and the smuggler economy. Just over a year into the Texas experiment, in June 2022, the state witnessed the deadliest single event involving migrants in state and perhaps US history as fifty-three migrants died in the back of an abandoned tractor trailer on the southwest side of San Antonio. For coverage of Operation Lone Star casualties see U. J. García, “After El Paso joined Abbott’s border crackdown, the number of dead migrants in the New Mexico desert surged,” Texas Tribune, June 16, 2025, https://www.texastribune.org/2025/06/16/texas-operation-lone-star-border-el-paso-deaths-migrants-new-mexico/. Note that the US Congress approved reimbursement for Texas’s escalation in border violence. See “Governor Abbott Thanks U.S. House for Passing $12 Billion Border Reimbursement,” May 22, 2025, https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-thanks-u.s-house-for-passing-12-billion-border-reimbursement.

Berger and Mohr, A Seventh Man, 141–2.

Berger and Mohr, A Seventh Man, 12.

Berger and Mohr, A Seventh Man, 145.

‘But I believe the full measure of violence being done to him is revealed by what happens within him.” Berger and Mohr, A Seventh Man, 200.