"It can happen," John Berger suggests, "that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass", and this could be the case with A Seventh Man. First published in 1975, it is now clearly outdated in terms of its statistics and the changes that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. But western Europe's continued dependence on millions of migrant workers during the worst economic crisis since the second world war shows that the economic system can no longer exist without their labour. This impassioned portrait of migrant life is therefore more relevant than ever as an incisive response to eruptions of anti-immigration rhetoric. Originally envisaged as a film-documentary-cum-family-album, the book is arranged into three chapters depicting departure, work and return. Its powerful mix of facts, figures, poetry, abstract theory and photographs opens up the dehumanising experience of migration to reveal a stultifying lack of freedom at the heart of neo-liberal capitalism, which Berger bluntly recoins "economic fascism".