Dollars, "Free Trade," and Migration: The Combined Forces of Alienation in Postwar El Salvador

Driven by new conditions of desperation and alienation, mass migration in postwar El Salvador has continued unabated. While this migration could be seen as a way of opting out of ongoing class struggle, we argue that it instead represents a critical dissipation of class relations and struggle. In the postwar context, the ruling class and the Salvadoran state seek to capitalize on the alienation of their own people and their responses to that alienationmigration and the remittances it generates. The ruling class has ensured its economic domination regardless of who controls the state. Seeking to legitimize and maximize the seizure of citizens' income as it flows across borders as a matter of economic and development policy, the ruling class has depleted the productive base through which class struggle would ordinarily occur, creating new forces of alienation in El Salvador and increasing the need for many Salvadorans to migrate.