On January 6, 2021, a mob attacked the U.S. Capitol with the goal of suspending the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the U.S. presidential election. Three years later, on March 26 of 2024, the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed after being struck by the Dali Cargo Ship, carrying 4,700 containers and a 21-member crew from India and Sri Lanka. Five road construction workers from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, who were repairing roads on the bridge, lost their lives as a result, while several crew members remained confined in the ship for almost three months after the incident. While these events appear unrelated, thinking of them together can illuminate connections between politics and capitalism that are central to contemporary discontent and the appeal of far-right politics to citizens in the wealthy world. 

The January 6 mob was incensed by the racialized rhetoric of the speech then-President Trump gave at the White House earlier that day. This speech, which inaugurated the still powerful “Stop the Steal” mantra, singled out Arizona and Georgia as sites of possible electoral fraud, hinting at the active Latino and Black organizing that secured these states for Biden. But this visible animosity coexists with the fact that these groups sustain—in a very material sense—the life of all Americans. This became clear in the Key bridge collapse on March 26, when vulnerable Latino and South Asian workers laboring in exploitative conditions tragically crossed paths. While the focus was on dock workers and the urgency to rebuild the bridge, an alternative reading brings into relief the central role of super-exploited¹ racialized labor in sustaining the infrastructure that delivers packages to our doorsteps and guarantees smooth commutes in the morning. The events of January 6 and March 26, together, demonstrate that racialized groups are targets for both political exclusion and super-exploitation. This is a “bash and reap” strategy that denigrates the very subjects that are conscripted to sustain us. More specifically, their working and living conditions in the Global North (as migrants) and in the Global South (as workers) is predicated on these twin factors: their disenfranchisement entangled with and necessary for their exploitation. These combined features sustain societies in the Global North. 

As I will argue below, it is no mere coincidence that the far-right’s anti-immigrant hysteria is thriving as precarity reaches the wealthy world and conflict and poverty pushes people from the post-colonial world. While formally over with the end of colonialism in the course of the 20th century, the postcolonial order preserved the exploitative domination of a ‘core’ composed of Global North’s liberal democracies over the ‘periphery’ of the Global South’s newly sovereign countries. These dynamics of racialized political subjugation, resource extraction, and labour exploitation have enabled the prosperity that sustained western democracies both under the colonial and post-colonial global orders. As the relative prosperity enjoyed by workers in the wealthy world is crumbling, social anxiety in western democracies is being directed not against those whose wealth has multiplied, but against the groups that were supposed to stay subjected according to the post-colonial deal. If a less unjust world is to emerge after the demise of neoliberalism, democracies need to rethink their struggle for justice as one that does not require the subjection of others as in the system that prevailed under the colonial and continues today, but contests the exploitation and dehumanization of racialized others at a global scale. 

 

The underbelly of 20th century western democracy

Democracy in the west took shape through the gradual enfranchisement of the white working class, which proceeded in the context of empire in the early- to mid-twentieth century. As I argue in my recent book Democracy and Empire, the white working class was enfranchised after abandoning radical anti-capitalist demands and acquiescing into an agreement to share the spoils of empire with capitalists. The process was mediated by states that unions pressured to commit to welfare regimes, which reached their golden age in the postwar era. The politics of organized labour during this period cannot be understood without the imperial context. Settler colonies, for one, provided an escape valve for the poor and the unemployed, prevented labor unrest in the metropole, and facilitated upward mobility for white workers escaping abject poverty in industrializing England. Workers emigrating to British colonies became settlers, requesting enfranchisement for themselves while demanding the fencing off of land and working opportunities for other non-white foreigners arriving to the same territories. Questions of labor, mobility, and migration were heavily debated during this period at the level of British imperial bureaucracy and—eventually—state-based immigration regimes emerged not to restrict foreigners from entering, but to absorb the imperial system of labor control. Despite its formal focus on the foreign, migration systems were not created to exclude foreigners but to establish a gradated system. Migration control did not exclude white foreigners, but incorporated them to the polity while implementing their claims to self-government as including the ability to restrict non-white Chinese and South Asian migration to Australia, South Africa, and Canada. Failing that, popular movements fought to legally relegate them to the most arduous jobs, conveniently setting them up for exploitation.² U.S. debates proceeded alongside similar paths. Chinese restriction gave way to reliance on Mexican labor, whose “advantages” purportedly included their bodily resistance to arduous work in the fields and the ease of their return or deportation to Mexico when no longer needed. This racially gradated migration regime served to control labor, allowing for the provision of cheap and exploitable work where it was needed, while preventing the political enfranchisement of most racialized migrants. 

The division of labor between white and non-white migrants in settler colonies had a counterpart in the global division of labor, with racialized workers overseas tasked with providing food and raw materials to feed citizens and machines in the industrialized world.³ This combined regime of migration and global racialized division of labor evolved but did not substantially change during the twentieth century for those groups singled out as racial others (in contrast with the more fluid access to whiteness by Southern and Eastern Europeans). It can still be seen in racialized migrants’ overrepresentation in care, gig, farm, and construction work in the west and in contemporary exploitative extractive economies and export-oriented growth based on the toil of badly paid workers for apparel or high tech factories. Historically, countries in the Global South fought anti-colonial wars and resisted the imposition of anti-democratic development models. These models were eventually imposed by western-backed authoritarian regimes and enacted by co-opted local elites committed to pacification and stabilization programs. These dynamics of oppression were later augmented by structural adjustment policies under the ‘Washington Consensus’ policy agenda and implemented by neoliberal or neodevelopmentalist democratic regimes. 

The history of western democracy is thus also the history of empire shaping the world to serve this island of prosperity, where the political and economic emancipation of the domestic working class entailed the appropriation and redistribution of resources garnered through force and oppression, which destroyed communities in the subjugated territories in the service of capitalist accumulation. The democratic citizens in these imperial projects were thus united by two factors: first, a possessive feeling that organized the rule of others despotically to extract resources, and second, reciprocal political relations among themselves. These two factors mandated the redistribution of the capitalist gains from exploiting the Global South, itself predicated on citizens in western democracies claiming the right to set the rules of interaction with the Global South. This imperial mode of democratic politics, which I call “self-and-other-determination,” elicited significant resistance abroad, and multiplied conflict through the waging of colonial wars like Vietnam, the arming of friendly militaries, and the sabotaging and support for coups of regimes pursuing socialist projects like Arbenz or Allende. This mode of engagement bred instability because it militarized social conflict, both generally by favoring repression of social protest and progressive demands to make countries “safe” for investment and, specifically, by tackling socio-economic questions like the consumption and trading of drugs as if they were security issues. 

 

The breakdown of the imperial deal as a breakdown of western democracies

Fast forward to the present, and factor in the dismantling of welfare states and what Albena Azmanova has described as ‘epidemic of precarity’, understood as “a condition of vulnerability — disempowerment rooted in social threats to lives … experienced as incapacity to cope due to a discrepancy between responsibilities and power.” The imperial deal is breaking down. Unsurprisingly—and as Marx anticipated in his writings on English and Irish labor—the deferral of the white working class to empire and capitalism only strengthened capitalism’s hand and backfired: capitalism struck back by reneging on the domestic ‘democratic’ pact. In parallel, we have witnessed the sensationalized construction of migration as a threat by the extreme right and, in many countries, the increasing transformation of the problem into one of security across the political spectrum. The migrants that make it to the Anglo-European world are a small proportion of a very real exodus of people escaping poverty, violent conflict, climate change, and facing possible death in militarized paths they traverse well before reaching European or U.S. borders. In other words, they are escaping capitalism’s ravages.

These ravages are the other side of the deal between capitalism and the white working class. The stable access to resources and exploited labor in the Global South entails significant force and co-optation of local military and civilian elites willing to govern their populations to facilitate the extraction of labor and natural resources, as noted earlier. Conflict, climate change, development models predicated on cheap labor pushed people toward migration, made easier by the proliferation of information and ease of mobility. It is well known that the great majority of displaced populations remain within their home countries or in neighboring countries. For those who venture toward the Anglo-European world there is no unproblematic access to dignified labor conditions upon arrival. Rather, the militarization of immigration control creates ideal conditions for vulnerability and exploitation of undocumented migrants or asylum seekers who successfully cross the militarized barriers. This connection between vulnerable status and exploitation was clearly at play in the spike in underage labor drawing from the pool of unaccompanied minors crossing the U.S. Southwest border in recent years.

Thus, the crisis of the two pillars of western imperial democracy (capital and labour sharing of imperial spoils and their cordoning off and “pacification” of populations conscripted for labor exploitation to ensure stable capitalist extraction) has thrown imperial democracy out of whack. This understandably creates anxiety and perhaps a sense of threat, as Azmanova’s Capitalism on Edge makes clear, but my point here is that this anxiety is associated with the crumbling of the imperial bargain, and the demand is to restore it. That is, the boisterous and peevish publics in the west have reacted to precarity not by demanding a rethinking of capitalism or redirecting their attachments toward forms of life not predicated on the exploitation of others, but by blaming migrants and refugees for said publics’ misfortunes. . The modes of visibility and sensationalizing of migration suggest that immigrants are not staying in their place, i.e. racialized subjects are seen as being guilty of exceeding the modes of labor mobility dictated by empire such as explicitly sanctioned guest-worker programs or exploited labor overseas. But this is not entirely transgressive, because the contemporary model of surveilled populations with irregular status is merely an update of imperial indenture programs and postwar guest labor. It is an update in that it produces, through other means, exploitable populations (like the road repair crew in the Key Bridge without proper means of communication or a safety skiff) in line with the formations demanded by metropole and settler working classes. 

 

Shedding democracy’s imperialist addiction

This historicized account of imperial democracy shows that western politics and models of emancipation remain addicted to and entrapped by empire and capitalism. In so doing, it also challenges the ideological apparatus that frames migration as a matter of sovereign states’ prerogative to control borders. Instead, it presents contemporary institutions of migration control as functional equivalents of a global regime of racialized labor control, now administered by democratic nation-states. 

The proposed framing of democracy and migration control allows for a better assessment of both contemporary far-right politics and left responses in historical perspective, rather than continuing to rely on ahistorical contemporary commentary that takes migration to be something that “happens” to societies. For example, a recent piece reflecting on the European turn to the populist right notes that “[n]o country, including the United States, has ever dealt happily with the panic, no matter how unfounded, prompted by mass migration, legal or clandestine, and the Europeans are doing no better.” Among scholars, migration is posited as one more “flow” that comes with market-driven globalization and prompts an authoritarian or right-wing populist backlash. But this begs the question of why the backlash against globalisation takes the authoritarian, far-right hue that it does, which only the historical account of imperial democracy proposed here properly addresses. Shortly put, migration is central to the crisis because its growth is a symptom of the proliferation of conflict and crises in the Global South.⁴ These crises are themselves indicators of a destabilized system of capitalist extraction resulting from the excessive exploitation of communities and nature. This, alongside the growing egoism of capitalist elites, even vis-à-vis their compatriots, signals the crumbling of the imperial bargain between capital and labour within western democracies and fuels a nostalgic demand for a past of “orderly”, insulated (hence, racialized) welfare. Importantly, the racist reaction to non-white migration, now, as in the past, fuels ever more violent regimes of migration restriction and surveillance, thus turning racialized hostility and violence into means of labor control and capitalist accumulation. 

In other words, anti-immigrant restriction is imperial racial capitalism returning with a vengeance, relying on racial hostility to create opportunities for accumulation but this time (mostly) refusing western working classes a welfarist agenda. The proposed diagnosis, moreover, brings into relief the danger for left parties of a return to the imperial socialism of the early 20th century. Notably, before passing a measure granting parole to undocumented spouses, President Biden enacted an executive measure akin to the measures approved by Trump, which suspended asylum at the border after certain triggers.⁵ UK’s brand new Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer, on the other hand, has set “illegal immigration” as his government’s top priority and promised “no more immigration” through a strategy that would use “counter-terror style tactics” to “smash the gangs” that facilitate crossings at the English Channel.⁶ The New Popular Front in France presents a welcome contrast, with a legislative contract that proposes revising European and French asylum policies, the creation of a rescue agency, and the extension of rights to work and citizenship to asylum seekers. The authorization to work aside, the (welcome) humanitarianism measures are insufficient if they do not come accompanied with a more decisive anti-capitalist program that tackles global processes of accumulation rather than merely sheltering domestic publics from their harshest effects. Thus, the challenge for the western left at the current moment of crisis is to return to its anti-capitalist project and to globalize it, rather than limit itself to adjudicate an ever-shrinking slice of public funds domestically while, at best, standing by the violent global order and the destructiveness of capitalism. At worst, left governments in western states continue to enlist their political clout and military power to sustain and expand their corporations’ influence in a process that can only strengthen corporate actors.

An alternative left politics is one of commitment to universal labor justice, where gains for western citizens are not extracted at the cost of migrants and workers in the Global South but obtained by directly attacking the power of corporations and wealthy elites. Projects like the job guarantee, the $17 minimum wage and 4 day working week are excellent examples of projects that aim to guarantee the wellbeing of workers. But these proposals ought to be global, like the otherwise relatively modest proposal for a 2% tax on wealth. Grappling with migration fueled by conflict and lack of opportunities means grappling with the fact that the deficiency of opportunities in the Global South is by (capitalist) design. This is what dependency theorists argued, and what export-led growth-qua-cheap-and-unprotected-labor-led growth continues to show. Another lesson of dependency theorists and other critics is that capitalism is a global system.⁷ If this is the case, then a left anti-capitalist project that doesn’t challenge the global division of labor falls short of challenging capitalism. But domestic-centered left projects leave untouched (or fuel through international organizations and foreign policy) capitalism’s global reach only at their own peril. This is because a domestic-centered anti-capitalism is not merely neutral in two senses. First because it permits unfettered capitalist accumulation abroad and strengthens capitalist elites as a domestic actor, and, second, because it protects its own constituencies/workers only by allowing and reaping the benefits from the continued super-exploitation of racial others. Thus the real danger of the embrace of anti-immigration measures by left parties is not only that this sends them down the far-right’s path into projects of immigration restrictionism and militarization, but also that it fails to genuinely challenge capitalism. It may be cheaper to militarize borders and buy off transit countries to repress migration in the short term, but absent a significant improvement in the conditions of sending and receiving countries alike, migration will continue and capitalism as a global and domestic project will only gain strength. Recently, commentators have grappled with this reality, but instead of grounding the staggering global wage inequalities in the historical transfer of wealth from the periphery to core countries, they have suggested it “create[s] the largest arbitrage opportunity on the planet,” which could be realized through temporary guest worker programs administered through “secure digital identities” and punitive penalties on businesses that move temporary workers outside of this legal schema. Indeed, a violently enforced global division of labor that produces inequality in combination with militarized borders and racial hostility does create arbitrage opportunities! Offering low-wage labor opportunities through “time-limited labor mobility” to address the demographic crisis in the west while employing digital technology and punishment to make sure imperial gains remain protected is the definition of adding insult to injury. Moreover, far from constituting a new “solution,” it comprises the very structure of the current system of irregular, hyper-surveilled migrant labor.

In sum, the growing popularity of far-right movements in Europe and the US reveals citizens’ wish to vanish non-white subjects or relegate them to even further margins of society. This is the repetition of an old mistake: democratic peoples in wealthy countries turning a blind eye to capitalism’s the intensive exploitation of racialized workers while hoping to appropriate a larger portion of these imperial spoils. This impulse is not foreign to the left, whose emancipatory orientation has too often narrowly concerned domestic workers, whose grievances are presumed separate from the global ills that capitalism produces abroad. But this is misguided. There is no way forward for the left without recasting the challenges of capitalism as global ones. As we witness, at the time of writing, the advance of the far-right in Europe and the U.S., it is imperative to understand the Capitol uprising in January 6 alongside the Key Bridge collapse three years later as symptoms of the persisting imperialist orientation of western democracies. We must grapple with the capitalist and imperial dynamics that brought Latino road workers and South Asian crews into violent collision in Baltimore – a collision that revealed the subterranean ways in which racialized exploited labor sustains western democracies. The racist hatred toward racialized groups represented by the January 6 uprising tells us something important about the democratic polities we live in. This is because by elevating aggrieved white citizens supposedly threatened by racialized political advances, it continued a tradition of white citizens joining capitalist projects as minor partners while keeping racialized workers at home and worldwide vulnerable and set for exploitation for capitalist accumulation. The challenge as we face the contemporary resurgence of this hatred is to undo the overall structure, rather than refuel it.

Footnotes

1. In Dialectics of Dependency Ruy Mauro Marini defines super-exploitation as the mode of labor typical of dependent countries. This mode of labor entails an increased intensity of labor, longer working days, and below subsistence remuneration.

2. In addition to establishing poll taxes and banning property ownership by non-white migrants and residents, the United States and the Anglo-settler colonies restricted access to certain trades for non-whites either informally through Anglo settlement and displacement of Mexicanos from the best occupations after the Mexican American war, or by enacting explicit measures, like in Canada and South Africa.

3. Workers in the Global South were both native and foreign, like the millions of indentured Chinese and South Asian workers enlisted to build railways in Africa, extract nitrate in Perú, or replace slave labor in Caribbean plantations.

4. Migration was historically considered and has worked as a safety valve to poverty, instability, and the potential for societal unrest, as British political economist and politician Edward Gibbon Wakefield argued in his writings on emigration/colonization in A Letter from Sidney (1829).

5. Specifically, asylum would be suspended at the border whenever border arrests hit a daily average of twenty-five hundred arrests in a given week. This suspension wouldn’t be lifted unless the number of arrests dropped below 1,500 and stayed that way for the duration of two weeks. This measure was harsher than the failed Senate bill that was rejected in the House.

6. The specifics of his plan are yet to be released.

7. See Rosa Luxemburg, Oliver Cox and Immanuel Wallerstein, among others.

 

---

Inés Valdez, political theorist, is associate professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. Valdez’s most recent book Democracy and Empire: Labor, Nature, and the Reproduction of Capitalism (Cambridge UP) theorizes the material underpinnings of western democracy and its embededness in empire.