ABSTRACT
In this chapter, after briefly mentioning covid-19 as a complex crisis and a missed opportunity for a radical change in the economic, political, and social formation of capitalism and international relations in 2020, i present the historic appearance of borders and the constitutive elements of capitalism in the latter’s evolution from feudalism to the present-day neoliberalism. In these, the historic subordination of women and the separation between the spheres of reproduction and production has been decisive as much as slavery, indentureship, the extermination, the downgrading of colonial populations and colonialism itself. All of these constitute the international division of labour, inequality, and class differences. Migrations too have been constitutive of capitalism both then and today. The manifestation of exclusive and inclusive populisms and nationalisms is mentioned, the exclusive forms being the trend in our times. Today, these mainly oppose immigration from poorer or war-torn and climate-afflicted countries, including fleeing from ecological disaster. For different reasons such conditions put limits to democracy. This particularly affects the EU and Europe at large, which are described as a kind of enclosures with barriers to the east and the south, on the boundaries of which too many migrants meet their death.
