Satnam Singh was killed by the system, the only antidote is anti-capitalism

Insight by Camilla Donzelli

After his death, Satnam Singh has been the subject of continuous discussion. Yet, adding up all the information that can be gleaned from the feverish media flow, what we know about him is very little. The most brutal details have been recounted and analyzed incessantly: the severed arm left in a plastic box, the confiscation of phones to prevent the news from leaking out, the conscious – if not intentional – neglect of the master to provide help, the urgent transportation to the hospital, and finally his death. We could all recite this last brief but tragically crucial part of Satnam Singh's story. However, we know nothing about him. In the media narrative, his identity has been reduced to two single variables: nationality and class.

Satnam Singh was an Indian farm worker, an “economic migrant”. In the narrative constructed by in-depth reports, talk shows, and various newspaper articles, his life story begins only three years ago with his arrival in Italy. In between, before the tragic news, there is a void: what we know is tied solely to his condition as an exploited migrant worker, without papers and a work contract. The same narrative gap is particularly evident in the part of Satnam Singh's life before his arrival in Europe. We do not know what defined him as a human being. We do not know where he came from, what drove him to migrate, what his dreams and aspirations were, or what his plans for the future were.

According to the Franco-Algerian sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad's theory, migration can be described as a “double absence” that takes the form, on the one hand, of the physical emptiness left in the country of origin and, on the other, of discrimination and exclusion in the context of destination. From this perspective, the migratory experience takes on the characteristics of a true “social fall”: the individual, deprived of any preexisting identity, is forced to renegotiate from scratch their space of existence in the new context.

What Sayad describes is not an accidental phenomenon, but the result of systemic factors that are intimately intertwined. Discrimination and exclusion are, in fact, the direct products of an entrenched racist mindset, which in turn is one of the main tools capitalism uses to grow and thrive. As feminist theorists Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser remind us in the manifesto “Feminism for the 99%”, it is precisely the concept of racial superiority that over the centuries has provided the ideological excuse for the colonial plunder and exploitation upon which the capitalist system has been built.

Following the processes of decolonization and democratization, the exploitation of racialized people has taken on different nuances, in some cases perceived as less aggressive and more politically correct, but it has never changed in substance: apartheid, neocolonialism, and the international division of labor are devices disguised as “free wage labor” that capitalism uses to increase its profits at no cost.

A striking example is the United States of America. Formally, slavery was abolished with the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. In her book “Black Women in White America”, Gerda Lerner describes the reality in the United States in the mid-20th century, more than 70 years after the nominal abolition of slavery: “Every morning, rain or shine, groups of women with cardboard bags or cheap suitcases stood on street corners in the Bronx and Brooklyn, hoping to find work [...]. Once hired in the slave market, the women often discovered, after a day of hard work, that they would work more than they had agreed to, be paid less than they had been promised, and have to accept clothes instead of money, in addition to being exploited beyond the limits of human endurance. Only the urgent need for money made them submit to this daily routine”. All this happened during a period that official historiographies describe as an “economic boom”, ignoring the fact that the prosperity of the white bourgeois class was nothing more than the result of a socioeconomic system in which the exploitation of racialized people was considered legitimate, if not indispensable.

In the year 2024, in the Italian countryside, almost identical scenes are replayed. History repeats itself, eerily similar even in such distant geographical contexts. So when we ask ourselves how an employer can leave a dying man on the street, his amputated limb in a plastic box, it is enough to add up all the systemic factors mentioned above to get an answer: the absence that Sayad speaks of is deliberate, planned.

Internalized and institutionalized racism works incessantly, producing a one-dimensional image of the migrant, perceived as an entity without agency and therefore less human. So much less human that, in an interview with Rai, Satnam Singh's white master did not hesitate to blame the worker, suggesting that he “acted on his own” and calling the incident “a frivolity that cost everyone dearly”. As if Satnam Singh was nothing more than a disposable – and easily replaceable – cog in the machine, all in the name of the sanctity of profit.

In such an advanced stage of normalization of the exploitation of racialized people, one also wonders if and how institutions can play a decisive role. Caporalato has been a scourge in Italy for a long time, and over the years the seriousness of the problem has become particularly evident in certain agricultural areas where large communities of exploited and silenced migrant workers gather. These are situations that have been repeatedly denounced by organizations and trade unions and known to the authorities, who have always shown total inertia, even under successive governments of different political orientations.

It's not only a problem of the right-wing parties, but also of a significant part of the left, which relies exclusively on compassion, presenting the issue as a purely moral question, typically attributed to the “white savior” mentality that seeks to improve the living conditions of ethnic minorities seen as incapable of responding on their own. This approach not only fuels the infantilized and dehumanized image of migrant people, but also contributes to obscuring a crucial issue: calling for legislative intervention in a context where the racist capitalist system is not being challenged is utterly futile. Demands that call for containment and regulation by the authorities may be partially accepted, often for political opportunism, but they remain top-down concessions that risk remaining nominal. Ultimately, these demands could undermine the foundations of an economic system whose validity is not up for debate.

As long as such issues remain confined to dilemmas of “morality” and “humanity”, the struggle for freedom and equality will be weakened. What is needed is to contextualize and politicize these subjects, to recognize and name the systemic factors at the root of the inequalities and injustices that normalize exploitation based on ethnicity and class. We need to deconstruct the foundations of what is taken for granted and build cross-sectoral alliances among oppressed groups.

Mark Fisher, in his book “Capitalist Realism”, points out that we have become so accustomed to the capitalist framework that it is easier for us to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. However, radical theory reminds us that the goal of emancipatory movements is precisely to dismantle the status quo, the apparent “natural order”, and to demonstrate that what is presented as inevitable is merely contingent.