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

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.

Writing (for) Workers: Alternative Workers’ Magazines in Francoist Spain and in State Socialist Poland in the 1960s and 1970s

This article explores how repression and everyday conflicts at the workplace were connected with labor rights and trade unionism in two authoritarian regimes. It focuses on worker and labor activists’ media in Francoist Spain and in state socialist Poland during the years 1965–68 and 1977–79, respectively. Spanish and Polish workers both lacked the right to join and form independent trade unions, the right to free assembly and association, and the right to strike. At the same time, they faced comparable problems in their everyday working lives, including low salaries, excessive overtime, incompetent management, and deficits in safety and hygiene standards. In this context, (illegal) magazines for workers emerged. They provided new arenas for exchanging experiences, advertised strike actions all across the country, called for united action, and explained national legislation and global labor norms. Based on an analysis of Spanish and Polish workers’ publications, this contribution investigates how labor activists in these states addressed day-to-day problems and the constant violations of internationally binding labor norms.

The Heroic Guerrilla

Daniel Bravo is a young boy in San Martin, a department in the Amazon. The son of a peasant labor leader, he experiences the effects of a police massacre of labor activists in Tabalosos. Victor Polay and Nestor Cerpa head up a guerrilla front in San Martin to commemorate the anniversary of the death of Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara. The state counterinsurgency, headed by Defense Minister Enrique Lopez Albujar, comes to San Martin

The Brotherhood of Co-operative Commonwealth: Modernizing Infrastructure and Public Welfare at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

In 1897, the confluence of a four-year national depression; interracial violence; unpredictable flooding and epidemics; and legalized segregation and disenfranchisement spelled intense social disruption for New Orleanians of color and impoverished whites. Trem-based Creoles of color joined a renewed effort to bring utopian socialism to bear on state-sanctioned economic and political oppression. Meeting in integrated labor halls and saloons, multiracial socialists and labor activists translated American, Caribbean, and European utopian socialist theory into a cooperative blueprint for equitably integrating unemployed workers into the city’s economic structure. These interracial utopian socialists, called the Brotherhood of Co-operative Commonwealth, and later, the Laboring Men’s Protective Association, built coalitions with labor, women’s rights, and political reform allies to temporarily reknit the city’s fractured labor movement, improve the city’s crumbling infrastructure, and implement an egalitarian public welfare system to benefit all New Orleanians.