GUESTWORKERS: A TAXONOMY

In: New left review: NLR, Heft 84, S. 84-102

Abstract

Just over a century ago, a young Max Weber assumed his first professorship in Freiburg with a highly politicized inaugural lecture in which he invited the audience to follow him to the eastern marches of the Reich. There he described the Junkers' turn to Polish seasonal labourers--people with 'inferior physical and intellectual standards of living' brought in to work the sugar-beet fields. These 'troops of nomads recruited by agents in Russia, who cross the frontier in tens of thousands in spring and leave again in autumn', appeared desirable, 'because by employing them one can save on workers' dwellings, on poor rates, on social obligations, and further because their precarious situation as foreigners puts them in the hands of the landowners.' Yet these 'unviable colonies of starving Slavs' were propping up an outmoded, labour-intensive system of production, and represented essentially a 'side-effect of the death throes of the old Prussian Junkerdom'. The neophyte went on to rally the audience with the call that 'the German race should be protected in the east of the country, and the state's economic policies ought to rise to the challenge of defending it.'. Adapted from the source document.