What Can We Learn from Gramsci Today? Migrant Subalternity and the Refugee Movements: Perspectives from the Lampedusa in Hamburg

Global metropolitan cities have become vital hubs of exploitation, of profit making, class hierarchy, competition and struggles over local and global resources . The metropolis is where marginalisation, destitution and precarity are generated and then attempted concealed from the urban centre and the business districts. Gentrification performs the ‘creative destruction’ that is necessary to award capital the necessary space for development, circulation and further accumulation, particularly in times of capitalist crises .
The general de-regulation and hypermobility of goods and capital flows (and in particular of finance capital) have been significantly facilitated by past and present urban re-shifts, with a direct impact on urban social class composition and development. While the movement of those who ‘circulate capital’ has been facilitated to a degree that it is today virtually unrestricted, increasing controls, barriers and surveillance still attempt to contain and restrict the movement of those who are circulated by capital and whose mobility is regulated by the needs and demands of the capitalist labour market . The migrant metropolis stages the unfolding of these tensions and of the competing power relationships: urban spaces (re-)produce the processes of socioeconomic inequality, marginalisation, segregation and exclusion prompted by the capitalist production and accumulation. At the same time, the migrant metropolis is where the struggles for the rights in and over the city take place, enacting forms of mobilization and protest that engage old and new social classes