Socialism and Empire: Labor Mobility, Racial Capitalism, and the Political Theory of Migration

Abstract

This essay brings together political theories of empire and racial capitalism to clarify the entanglements between socialist and imperial discourse at the turn of the twentieth century. I show that white labor activists and intellectuals in the United States and the British settler colonies borrowed from imperial scripts to mark non-white workers as a threat. This discourse was thus both imperial and popular, because it absorbed the white working class into settler projects and enlisted its support in defense of imperial logics of labor control. While white workers’ demands of enfranchisement were part of a transnational imagination that was both imperial and narrowly emancipatory, this discourse reemerged as one of popular sovereignty and found channels and paths to institutionalization through national states. These institutional formations arose out of the encounter between capitalists interested in facilitating mobility of racialized laboring subjects around the globe, elite projects invested in sheltering settler spaces, and white workers concerned with protecting their own labor from competition by excluding exploitable non-white workers. White labor’s embrace of racial prejudice and the exclusion of workers of color created segregated labor spaces that fit neatly with both capitalist goals of labor control and the protection of the settler status of emerging polities. Bringing to the forefront the imperial genealogy of popular sovereignty and immigration control disrupts liberal political theory frameworks that condemn restrictions as well as those that find migration restrictions permissible. The analysis also illuminates contemporary immigration politics.

Empire, Popular Sovereignty, and the Problem of Self-and-Other-Determination

“…These contributions note that lynching as a form of spectacular group violence affirmed the whiteness of the sovereign people and the subordination of African Americans (Gorup 2020). They also explore how transnational solidarity and the adoption of the imperial discourse of racial superiority by the white working class in the British settler colonies served to constitute the people while excluding nonwhites already in these territories (Valdez 2021a). My Duboisian account of democratic despotism and self-and-other-determination builds on these works and the broader political theory of empire but also complements them in important ways.…”

Toward a Narrow Cosmopolitanism: Kant’s Anthropology, Racialized Character and the Construction of Europe

“…Perhaps this latest event motivated Kant to revise his draftswhich originally remarked upon the hospitality of Bedouinsand single out Barbary Coast pirates as a threat to peace. It would fit with Kant's concern with the intermingling of commerce/war and sailors/soldiers and war and military expenses as an obstacle to republics' consolidation (Valdez 2017), but it further fits with Kant's anthropological account of 'Orientals' as ill-fitted to partake as free and sovereign peoples in the world of peaceful commerce he envisioned. Indeed, corsairs are only mentioned one more time in Kant's works, back when his anthropology was still part of his geography lectures:…”

“…This article expands on work on Kant and race, anthropology and politics (Tully 2008;Mills 2014;Valdez 2017;Idris 2019;Marwah 2019) and on Kant's account of character (Mensch 2017;Cohen 2006Cohen , 2020 by, first, clearly specifying connections between Kant's account of Northern European and Mediterranean peoples' character and his cosmopolitan project. Second, I highlight wider racial influences on character which operate via the faculty of desire, whose vicious and virtuous features are racially distributed.…”

“…By either singling out the Barbary Coast corsairs in the published version or offering a more balanced account in the Drafts that nonetheless placed the commercial leadership squarely in Europe, Kant's racialized anthropology is visibly at work in his politics. While arguably also concerned with English expansionism and dominance in world politics (Valdez 2017), Kant cannot see the space of the Mediterranean as a site of alternative politics, i.e. where weaker actors prompt transfers of resources from and contest the dominance of powerful European states.…”

Migrant women becoming British citizens: care and coloniality

“…We add to the key body of work which identifies neoliberal and neo-national trends specifically in the context of naturalisation (see, for example, Badenhoop 2017) by addressing the lacuna in this citizenship scholarship with an explicit perspective on race, racism, and colonialism. This article positions migrant women's citizenship with a multifaceted focus on colonialism (see Farris 2017;Fortier 2018) and class formation and struggle (see also Virdee 2019;Valdez 2021). These perspectives on naturalisation foreground racialisation processes embedded in colonial foundations (see El-Enany 2020;Erel 2017;Fortier 2018).…”