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

• Published date: 01 December 2021
• Date: 01 December 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591720981896
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591720981896

Political Theory

2021, Vol. 49(6) 902 –933

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591720981896

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Article

Socialism and Empire:

Labor Mobility, Racial

Capitalism, and the

Political Theory of

Migration

Inés Valdez1

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

1Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

Corresponding Author:

Inés Valdez, Ohio State University, 154 N Oval Mall, 2140 Derby Hall, Columbus, OH 43210,

USA.

Email: inesvaldez@protonmail.com

981896PTXXXX10.1177/0090591720981896Political TheoryValdez

research-article2021

Valdez 903

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.

Keywords

empire, socialism, racial capitalism, popular sovereignty, migration, settler

colonialism

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 trace how popular discourses embraced by white

labor 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 enlisted the working class through-

out the European and the settler colonial world to defend imperial logics of

labor control and settlement. Moreover, while finding channels and insti-

tutionalization in emerging national states, white labor enfranchisement

demands were part of a transnational emancipatory imagination. These insti-

tutional formations emerged from the encounter between capitalists inter-

ested in facilitating mobility of racialized laboring subjects around the globe,

elite projects invested in sheltering settler spaces, and white workers con-

cerned with protecting their own labor from competition by excluding

exploitable non-white workers. Ultimately, however, 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 set-

tler logics.

The contribution of this essay is at once theoretical, methodological, and

historical. Theoretically, the essay shifts from a predominant attention to the

imperial character of the liberal tradition toward the entanglements of social-

ist writings with empire. Methodologically, the essay weaves together texts,

archives, and regions that are usually approached as separate realms of

inquiry. Finally, by grounding textual analyses in the varied imperial mobili-

ties of the era and the political formations that emerged from these encoun-

ters, the article shows that a rich historical contextualization can illuminate

previously unremarked dimensions of important political concepts.

In the rest of the article I first specify the contributions to the political

theory of empire. Then, I offer a framework to jointly consider the questions

of race, empire, and labor, bringing together writings on labor and world

904 Political Theory 49(6)

history with narratives of the British imperial bureaucracy that made sense of

the circulation of labor and its curtailment. I connect this conversation to

labor politics in England and its white settler colonies or former colonies and

read these events through the prism of popular sovereignty. I conclude by

drawing implications for both contemporary political theory and the current

politics of migration.

Political Theory and the Question of Empire

The political theory of empire has investigated how the liberal tradition made

sense of the paradoxical “inclusionary pretensions of liberalism and the

exclusionary effects of liberal practices” in European imperial possessions.1

This rich literature has advanced and diversified, but there remains a dearth

of examinations that take seriously the practices that avowedly clash with

liberal texts.2 Yet, the material practices of empire constructed and gave

meaning to the political world with which political theorists must grapple.

Instead, the literature focuses on textual strategies of exclusion, disavowal,

and deflection in liberalism, paying more attention to denial than to the theo-

retical implications of the practices denied. Even Onur Ulas Ince’s “material”

approach examines political economy texts, thus centering capitalism con-

ceptually but not in its practical operation.3 More grounded approaches to

liberalism and empire characterize the intellectual history of imperial law, a

central mechanism of transmission of liberal ideas. These scholars study how

law impacted everyday practices and was resignified—that is, circumscribed,

interrupted, and/or extended.4 This attention to the sociohistorical contexts of

articulation of liberal thought is necessary but still leaves aside the imperial

threads of socialist ideas and the racial capitalist formations and practices

that were the context to these articulations.5 By “material practices” I mean

those actions through which empire took shape on the ground and affected

the lived meaning of political institutions whose nature concerns political

theorists. Attention to practice is not simply about applying theory but about

correcting the formulation of central political theoretic concepts to account

for their (racialized) operation. If mobility was a central feature of empire,

leading to settler formations and the provision of labor in plantation and set-

tler colonies, political theory must go beyond textual kinships and investigate

how alternative archives of transit, displacement, and groundedness led to

entanglements that have theoretical ramifications.6 If existing scholarship

reveals that the inherited canon obscures a dynamic realm of imperial hierar-

chies, it follows that these works are ill-fitted to help us understand this

realm. The task remains to scrutinize how the material practices that consti-

tuted the reality of empire infused the social and political world in those

times, and how they transformed this world’s meaning and its trajectory.