Abstract

International migration keeps on growing. Even more impetuous is the rise in the numbers of people without work or permanently situated on the margins of the labour market. In this context, a lot of attention is naturally being paid to Marx’s thinking about migration and the industrial reserve army. Sometimes, however, his ideas are not so much used as misused, with false appeals to his authority to cover phrases and arguments that are his only in appearance. This reaches an extreme in nationalist, or plainly racist, positions that are poles apart from the theory and political practice of this master of internationalism. Two cases of impudent counterfeiting in Italy and in Germany.