Part II - Reproduction through Popular Rule of Labor/Nature

3 The Brown Family and Social Reproduction in US Capitalism

This chapter conceptualizes processes of capitalist racialization that ensure social reproduction in the United States. This regime materially supports the white commonwealth, whose pursuit of historically evolving models of heteropatriarchal family depends on nurturing and care by disposable brown workers. The provision of social reproduction is part of the mode of rule of popular sovereignty through the racialized possessive attachments theorized in the first two chapters. These attachments underpin a demand for comfort and spaces of regeneration that are secured through the relegation of nonwhite racial groups to the strenuous work required for their provision. This scheme is propelled forward by the capitalist drive for accumulation and advances through the racialization of brown families and the destruction of their intimate and community spaces. The garnering of their bodily energies to serve other families’ needs disorders brown families, depleting their emotional spaces and regenerative abilities, recruiting their young into adult roles due to family separation, and/or subjecting members to the constant anxiety of losing their loved ones to detention and deportation.

This chapter focuses on one population central for this function in the United States – Mexicanos, Mexican Americans, and Latino migrants – to conceptualize how separate institutional formations have served the continuous function of securing cheap bodily labor devoted to the care of others. By centering capitalism and its operation through the manipulation and leveraging of racial hierarchies, I expose that the territoriality, jurisdiction, and differentiated functions of political institutions obscure the continuity in the goal of subjection with the aim of accumulation. This focus also allows me to theorize how the unequal relation between countries (in this case, Mexico and the United States) contributes to racial capitalist processes of subjection. Most importantly, this chapter shows how race works in “structural and agential ways” to organize the political economy of social reproduction, and how, in this process, capitalist exploitation and racialization constitute each other.¹

Historically, conquest, settlement, and foreign investment in Mexican labor-expelling projects of modernization produced an exploitable supply of brown labor. The groups displaced from Mexico that migrated into the United States were met with few protections when arriving through the Bracero Program and, later, with militarized systems of enforcement, all of which secured a workforce to sustain the social reproduction and care of the privileged. This genealogy confirms migration as a crucial component of empire and the vulnerable position of migrants as a purposive aspect of racial capitalism. This account revises presentist accounts of the political theory of migration and grounds post-9/11 immigration politics and the crisis of family separation in the longer genealogy of empire and its role facilitating the expropriation of brown families’ social reproductive capacities to reproduce capitalism.² In so doing, it complements critical theory accounts by conceptualizing the central role of immigration enforcement and anti-immigrant sentiment in facilitating social reproduction through expropriation.³

This account also illustrates how racial immigration regimes – which depend on global inequality and state-backed violence – shape and help solve capitalism’s contradiction between its dependence on racialized labor and its destructive modes of accumulation by continuously conscripting new brown laborers into reproductive functions.⁴ Thus, here, I extend the previous chapter’s claim that migration is a world historical force, that is, an event that entails the mobility of subjects and their bodily energy at the global scale in order to address capitalist needs that result from crises, bottlenecks, and the partial liberation of other subjects. Here, unequal power between poor/sending and rich/host countries, is a key factor in facilitating accumulation through labor exploitation. This makes contemporary migration and its regulation a neo-imperial arrangement that racially partitions labor conditions and access to well-being for profit, rather than merely exogenous flows that provoke “backlash.” This chapter’s account, finally, shows the payoffs of extending the study of empire forward and into the present, demonstrating that (neo-)imperial regimes emerge not as well-structured wholes but as the result of the accommodation, re-organization, and adjustment of a variety of state institutions that respond to the political pressures and imperatives of accumulation.

Via Indigenous, Black, and Latinx feminist thought, I show that racial violence degraded brown subjects and made them readily exploitable to facilitate the social reproduction of white workers, while destroying the intimate family spaces of the former and preventing them from fulfilling their own social reproduction.⁵ This account expands on current understandings of social reproduction by, first, extending feminist theorizations of kinship, property, and race to consider the site occupied by the brown family in this scheme; and, second, by expanding on the understanding of social reproductive work to encompass productive work that is strenuous and dangerous and serves to shelter and protect privileged groups.

The degradation of the abject brown family occurs through the destruction or corrosion of family spaces of nurturing and regeneration for brown workers and the decimation of community realms that could support reflection and resistance. I show later that the degradation of brown families and communities was facilitated by subsequent coercive regimes, including the annexation of northwestern Mexican territory; white settlement in these areas; guest labor; and undocumented migration, coupled with the criminalization of border crossing, surveillance, and mass deportations. In each of these regimes, the separation of families was a prime controlling mechanism, either through transnational migration, forceful family separation at the border, detention, or deportation. The effects on immigrant families exceed the instance of separation, however, because immigrant families who are intact nonetheless remain precarious because immigration policing and the multiple statuses of family members make the enjoyment of a fulfilling and caring family life unattainable. I tie this systematic separation and degradation of brown families to a cruel and resentful backlash against these families’ assertion of their integrity and their demand to take up residence where brown bodies are granted only temporary stays. Family integrity is a radical move because it opposes the destruction of an intimate nurturing sphere that resignifies brown bodies as more than just laboring tools, even if it does not deny the persistence of patriarchal arrangements and women’s disproportionate shouldering of reproductive work within most families, regardless of race.

In the rest of this chapter, I first introduce and develop a framework to explain how the brown family becomes a site of degradation and how this serves the social reproduction of US capitalism. Second, I use this framework to argue that conquest, settlement, and immigration surveillance secured social reproduction and capitalist profit, while depleting the capacity of brown families to sustain nurturing relationships, health and well-being. Third, I extend the analysis to consider the post-9/11 regime of immigration enforcement and how it targets family integrity.

3.1 Social Reproduction: From Gender to Race, from Women to Families

Racial capitalism approaches highlight that a variety of gradations of labor exploitation co-exist, acting in a complementary and/or supplementary, rather than competitive, fashion.⁶ Labor may be waged, unwaged, approaching conditions of slavery, informal, and/or intermittent.⁷ This follows from the historical drive of capital to set labor power “free” from noncapitalist social contexts and relations and incorporate it into the capitalist system.⁸ Yet this drive does not imply homogeneity, because different groups are assigned positions that range from serfdom to waged labor based on their different circumstances, including race, access to citizenship status, and historical influences, which nonetheless lead to a coherent regime that can be scrutinized as such.⁹ This chapter focuses on one such gradation of exploitation, which historically produced informal, temporary, and vulnerable labor pools of brown subjects that facilitated a durable regime of brown labor that provided for the social reproduction of US white waged labor.

In feminist accounts, social reproduction encompasses the realm and work that guarantees the production and reproduction of the worker, which is disavowed by capitalism despite being a socio-economic activity required for capital accumulation.¹⁰ This means that the presentation of female labor as a natural resource or a personal service, and thus unwaged, is central to capitalist profit.¹¹ These approaches reframe the question of power differentials between men and women as neither cultural nor natural, but as associated with the dependence of capitalism on women’s unpaid labor.¹² I expand this approach by building upon frameworks of race and capitalism to conceptualize social reproduction as thoroughly racialized, and to implicate the family as an important unit of analysis; in particular, I argue that brown families are systematically degraded and effectively relegated to an exploitative and badly paid realm of informal labor to guarantee the social reproduction of relatively more privileged, predominantly white labor.

Moreover, I expand the realm of social reproduction to encompass brown men’s nominally productive activities in the areas of farm work, construction, and landscaping, and generally strenuous jobs in, for example, mining, agriculture, and construction. In the case of farm work, the work of harvesting performed by brown men and women, whose exploitation allows produce to reach consumers at lower prices, straightforwardly contributes to the nurturing of wage laborers, and thus their social reproduction. Work in construction, on the other hand, produces affordable housing for these workers and their families, again contributing to the shelter necessary for their social reproduction. The landscaping performed by brown workers, yet again, beautifies the private or public environment that wage laborers and professionals enjoy during their leisure time, in segregated white spaces with generous access to green areas and clean air, which is lacking in underserved Black and brown neighborhoods. Finally, the historically purposeful segregation of brown workers in physically strenuous professions protects white male bodies from extreme weather, injuries, and wearisome activities, yet again contributing to an easier work of reproduction.¹³ The more broadly researched caring work of nurses, nannies, home aids, and cleaners – jobs fulfilled predominantly by brown women – completes the picture of social reproduction by fulfilling the often dirty work of bodily care, distinguished from the more nurturing and supervisory aspects reserved to white women in households and public realms.

My goal here is not to homogenize the trajectory of the diverse sectors that I bring together under a single umbrella. Capital’s needs for accumulation drove deep transformations in, for example, the meatpacking and dairy farming industries, which became concentrated and responded to price pressures by corporate buyers by segmenting labor markets and recruiting immigration labor for the worst paid and least safe jobs.¹⁴ These processes played out earlier and differently in the case of agriculture. In the case of the increased demand for badly paid care work inside and outside the home, the drivers were a lack of a social state infrastructure and transformations that made a single-breadwinner household a relic while continuing to underpay women for their work.¹⁵ While recognizing these heterogeneous dynamics, I bracket them to focus on the groups that, through the coming together of a variety of social, political, and economic factors, left their countries and were conscripted into the strenuous bodily jobs needed to maintain the social reproduction of privileged workers.

My argument is that this group – brown families made up of the brown laborers conscripted into strenuous jobs that sustain the social reproduction of relatively privileged white workers – sits at the intersection of reproductive labor and primitive accumulation identified by Marxist feminists as labor that is not traditionally remunerated through a formal wage but belongs squarely in capitalist arrangements. These scholars assimilate the workers who sit at this intersection to the “housewives of the world,” by which they mean female and male peasants engaged in subsistence production and occupying marginalized positions, predominantly in the Third World.¹⁶ The historical reconstruction in this chapter theorizes the systems of coercion that ensure the vulnerability of these workers, regimes that were historically and continue to be part and parcel of western political economies.

Historically, care and reproductive work in the United States depended on systems of coercion such as racial and gendered labor segregation and discrimination, welfare regulations that pushed single mothers into badly paid work, and prison labor programs that placed Black women to work in private homes.¹⁷ The provision for the needs of the social reproduction of white families by brown and Black labor operated historically alongside nineteenth-century narratives of the heterosexual, white, male-breadwinner family. The family remains at the center of politics, now as a site of neoconservative and neoliberal anxiety around racialized families, negotiated through punitive legislation of migration, crime, and welfare. From concerns about marriage immigration fraud, which made migrant spouses more vulnerable in the 1980s, to DNA collection from asylum seekers to detect fraudulent families at the border in 2020, attacks on the brown family highlight its political significance.

To theorize the racialized/gendered constructions of Latino families, I turn to Black feminist scholars’ sophisticated accounts of social reproduction.¹⁸ Because of the particular forms of subjection that affected them, the formation of gender and Black womanhood in particular has to be understood in the context of property relations, slavery and its sexual economy, and calculated injury.¹⁹ This is also true for the Black family, a support structure that was shaped and modified by a dominant symbolic order aimed at maintaining white supremacy and capitalist accumulation.²⁰ During slavery, notably, Black kinship was limited to making genetic reproduction an opportunity to extend the boundaries of property, through what Angela Davis called “a rigidified disorganization in family life” which proscribed all social structures within which Black people could forge a collective and conscious experience.²¹ These theoretical insights on the destruction of kinship and the loss of natural motherhood associated with slavery indicate that the state and capitalism centrally shaped the realm of the Black family, whose status as a “private realm” was accordingly denied.²²

The destruction of intimate spaces is a more generalized trait of colonization, notably as part of the process of land dispossession of Indigenous peoples, their aggressive assimilation into settler society, and the destruction of their culture and communities. Questions of family and marriage were tightly regulated by British law or rules enacted in the settler colonies, and they all relied on an account of nonnuclear Indigenous kinship structures as lacking a privatized, intimate sphere, and thus as uncivilized and faring poorly compared with the family-making practices of white settlers.²³ Settler colonial interventions upset familial formations and the place of women in Indigenous communities, whose arrangements had not previously resembled western patriarchal structures.²⁴ These policies included the forced removal of Indigenous children from their families and their education under white women’s supervision in residential schools. These regimes of confinement included programs of forced labor for girls (who joined white families as servants) and a variety of calculatedly cruel behavior, including medical experiments, sexual abuse, and outright violence, which resulted in thousands of deaths among the kidnapped children, and thus contributed at once to the cultural and biological elimination of Indigenous peoples.²⁵ This targeting and destruction of Indigenous kinship structures was central to further projects of land dispossession and for asserting settlers’ claims of sovereignty.²⁶

Hence, Black and Indigenous families were sites of public intervention, shaped by capitalist priorities of land appropriation, property creation, and the availability of unfree or vulnerable labor. The interventions are dissimilar, in that they aim at maximizing the reproduction of slaves in one case, and at elimination or violent assimilation in the other. Yet they confirm that race, sexuality, and family are mediating categories for capitalist accumulation that need examining to properly theorize expropriation and dispossession. The analysis that follows builds upon this tradition and existing accounts by Latino thinkers to analyze interventions that target the brown family. In so doing, I do not claim these experiences are equivalent to the experiences of oppression of Black and Indigenous peoples through slavery and settler colonialism. Instead, the analysis illuminates how the kinship structures of Mexican Indigenous groups – inferiorized by the Mexican project of mestizaje and state formation as well as by the US annexation and labor regime – were also targeted. This contribution thus locates US Latinos within the messy encounters of different racial groups with each other and the state, that is, the entwinement between settlement and forced migration that demands the “careful spatialization of positionalities within ongoing Indigenous dispossession.”²⁷

The kinship structures of Latinos, including Mexican Americans, Mexican migrants, and Central American migrants and refugees, was subsequently shaped by the conquest of the Mexican northwest by the US state and the transfer of its land and skilled labor to agricultural businesses and European settlers, the establishment of guest worker programs, and past and present regimes of immigration enforcement. These groups, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, filled the ranks of workers in low-skilled and physically strenuous jobs that fulfilled tasks of social reproduction. It needs highlighting that the shifting populations that carried out this labor were central to the continuity of the regime of exploitation. This is because exploitation depended on the continuous availability of subjects who were either recently dispossessed of land by the conquest or recently arrived migrants, who were the most susceptible to exploitation. During the Bracero period, in fact, local Mexican Americans constituted communities that were largely separate from Mexican guest workers and recent migrants, and older arrivals with more secure standing tended to move north in search of better jobs, leaving undesirable jobs for new arrivals.²⁸ In this picture, the intimate lives of Mexican Americans, and of Mexican and Central American migrants, became sites of absorption of public rhetoric, ideology,²⁹ and exploitative practices that sustained capitalist profit. The capitalist imperative to guarantee social reproduction at the lowest possible expense, thus, formed and deformed brown families. In this framework, the family separations produced by guest worker programs, seasonal work, and intensified detention and deportation are the dramatic and intimate personalized effects of this regime and the immigration policing that accompanies it.

3.2 Settlers, Guests, and Migrants

In positing the question of migration as continuous with conquest and settlement, my point is to associate these regimes as contributing parts of evolving racialized and gradated labor regimes that facilitate US social reproduction and continued capital accumulation. In other words, both the conquest and white settlement of the Mexican northwest and the recruitment of vulnerable migrants through legal or informal ways contributed, through coercion, to putting white and brown workers on opposite trajectories of economic mobility: access to consumption and family formation for the former, and expropriative labor and immobility for the latter. The case of Mexican annexation and Mexican and, later, Central American migration, moreover, illustrates the transnational aspects of subjection, by relating migration to international hierarchy and to displacement through modernization, including the roles granted to brown/Indigenous workers and families in the Mexican national project.

Mexicanos

It is well established that the status of Mexican Americans in Texas and the US Southwest declined precipitously after annexation. The inflow into the area of white groups varied by state and region and even preceded the Mexican–American war in the case of Texas (where US landowners could access “empresario” grants offered by the Mexican government, and land speculators had secured private ownership over land even before white settlement took place).³⁰ This process, jointly with generous land grants, the first homestead law in the United States, and squatter rights, meant that it was “virtually impossible … for a [white] Texas family to be landless” in the second half of the nineteenth century.³¹ More generally, intimidation and gradual or accelerated settlement dispossessed Mexican American ranchers of land, wealth, and power, a process quickened by the arrival of the railway later that century, which made land desirable for irrigation companies and subject to speculation.³² The shift was equally drastic for nonlandowning Mexicans; a pastoral economy was turned into a capitalist one, transforming the masses into a source of unskilled labor.³³ The gradual replacement of ranching by mechanized agriculture, and the parallel introduction of technology into mining, similarly transformed the occupations filled by Mexican Americans, who went from serving as cowboys and sheepherders or miners to low-skilled farmworkers and mining wage workers.³⁴ In other words, mid- to high-skilled positions formerly occupied by Mexican Americans went to Anglos, and the former were also excluded from new positions operating agricultural machinery.³⁵ Capitalist logics of private property and gradated realms of exploitation thus proceeded via racialization, creating the menial Mexican laborer through land dispossession (legally – through new taxation regimes or laws encouraging homesteading – or through fraud or force) and disruption of non-capitalist forms of production,³⁶ which created a mass of laborers that could only access meagerly compensated and strenuous jobs, without the opportunities for upward mobility that awaited unskilled white migrants arriving in the United States.

These socio-political and economic processes made cheap and strenuous work “Mexicans’ work.”³⁷ Hence, the devaluation of this work depended on the concentration of a “succession of dispossessed persons of myriad races,” in these sectors,³⁸ including, in time, immigrants from Mexico, whose influxes gathered speed in the 1920s and 1930s owing to revolutionary turmoil in Mexico and increased demands from US growers for cheap agricultural, mining, and railway labor (these demands could no longer be filled by Chinese workers, who were banned). The inflows took place in the context of multiple nativist demands to restrict Mexican migration, demands that were countered from within nativist circles by reframing Mexican influxes as a problem to be controlled so that their labor could be extracted and their permanence prevented. While considered “an inferior race,” or “at least … different,” Mexicans were assumed well fitted for the work of “picking cotton and grubbing land” and the wages that these jobs would secure, as they produced more and charged less than white and Black workers alike.³⁹ Thus, in the context of a congressional debate, it was assured by Texas Representative Garner that “80 percent of that labor would return to Mexico” and that no more than 2 percent of the remaining laborers “would ever get out of Texas.”⁴⁰ The temporary character of labor migration thus ensured that the inflow of migrants would not “deteriorate the American citizenship, as you and I understand it” and the particular origin of the laborers (“peon labor”) ensured in turn that they would not hold “any of this evil philosophy against capital and property that … a good many Mexicans have.”⁴¹

The same narrative dominated the debate of an ultimately unsuccessful 1926 bill to limit Mexican migration to the United States. Growers conceded that Mexican workers presented a “racial problem” for the Southwest akin to that the “old South [created] when it imported slave labor from Africa,” but insisted that, in California, “they can handle the social problem.” This was echoed by a Texan agribusinessman: “If we could not control the Mexicans and they would take this country it would be better to keep them out, but we can and do control them.”⁴² In addition to their manageability, growers favored Mexican labor vis-à-vis ethnic whites, as emerges from an exchange between US Representatives William P. Holaday and Czech-born Adolph Sabath from Illinois, on the one hand, and Nebraskan beet grower J. T. Whitehead. According to Whitehead’s testimony, German-Russians would soon “endeavor to try to secure farms of their own” rather than remain laborers.⁴³ Here the argument hinged on the differential access to land by racialized groups, and their assimilability; German-Russians, it was argued, were wont to become “very decent citizens” after a few years, while “the Mexican does not become a neighbor.”⁴⁴ Mexicans, instead, were like children, some of whom needed a good deal of discipline, but ultimately made no trouble once growers were “able to talk to them in their own language and explain things to them in a way that they are used to have things explained to them.”⁴⁵

The corporeal focus of racist discourse about brown and migrant labor is notable for how it serves to legitimize the kind of work assigned to them. Race, moreover, is important to determine the differential gendering of white and brown women, which organized the care hierarchy between the nurturing work of white women and the dirty work of the women of color under their supervision.⁴⁶ This corporeality also looms large in the racist discourses of labor competition discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, according to which the ability to perform toilsome work and subsist in degraded conditions distinguished nonwhite from white migrants. It was this racist construction of Mexican workers as adept to toilsome work and requiring only scant compensation for their labor that, in turn, made them into a threat. When objections to the threat of Mexican labor were raised, they entailed further racialization, which attributed to Mexicans a natural reluctance to move away from their laborer position. Moreover, the supposed superior strength and resistance to extreme climate of Black and brown subjects overdetermined their fitness for strenuous bodily work. The associated derogatory accounts of their intellectual capacities additionally marked them as unfit for laboring with machinery, relegating them to the harsh labor that machinery could not execute and “native white men generally will not do.”⁴⁷

However natural these attributes were considered, these corporeal attributes were constructed though the political economy of settlement and migration in the Southwest. In other words, the violent land dispossession that followed Anglo settlement created a pliable labor force, violent social segregation prevented Mexicans from accessing the jobs they had fulfilled before the conquest, and coercive labor and controlled mobility led to the avowed reluctance of peons to abandon the status of laborer. In other words, here capitalism can be seen leveraging race to increase accumulation, in a process that both relies upon racial hierarchy and reinforces it further, because the successful labor segregation marks these bodies as belonging to certain jobs and as particularly adept at toilsome work. Accumulation is facilitated by the racialized understanding of bodily capacities because it follows that fewer protections on the job and only pitiable compensation are required. Accumulation, in other words, proceeds through racialization. Family structures are also shaped by racializing capitalism, both because they are restructured according to profit motives and because racialized accounts of their degraded status is posited to legitimize claims that their nurturing is not worth supporting via higher wages.⁴⁸ In fact, the hardships Mexican American families suffered after Anglo annexation and settlement in the Southwest forced women to exit the private realm to work in laundering and caring for white families, a process prompted by land dispossession and the destruction of noncommercial agriculture in the Southwest.⁴⁹ This process of racialization made the family wage a racial construct, one meant to facilitate white women’s dedication to nurturing their families. Moves to limit women’s working hours to protect the time they could devote to mothering was contested by business interests, but the concern never applied to Black and brown families, where wives’ employment was a given.

These racialized dynamics were at play in the exclusion of farmworkers and domestic workers from California’s 1911 Eight-Hour legislation for women. The debates motivated by the constitutional challenge of this law in 1915 reveal its racialized and gendered dimensions, but also the particular place assigned to nonwhite families. In defending the law, California Attorney General Ulysses S. Webb argued that “the limitation of the number of hours women must work … has a direct relationship to women’s health and, hence, to the health of the race as a whole, as well as the safety and health of those she serves.”⁵⁰ Limiting women’s working hours, Webb continued, “may check the rapid decline in reproduction of the older American stocks” by expanding the amount of time women can devote to “wifehood and motherhood,” which strengthens the race by “the shaping of the child mind [sic], the directing of his habits and the development of his character.”⁵¹ In other words, the exclusion from protection of women workers in agricultural and domestic labor was a claim about which female bodies needed protection and whose families needed nurturing. The wifehood and motherhood functions of brown women did not concern the California Attorney General, nor did the nurturing of the mind and character of brown children. In fact, in the Supreme Court decision, Justice Charles Evan Hughes affirmed the ability of the law to “recognize degrees of harm” and limit restrictions to sectors in which the need is clearest.⁵² Here he was countering the claim of hoteliers that the measure was discriminatory toward their business, but the statement also conveys that the more strenuous and less protected conditions to which women farmworkers and domestic workers were subjected did not constitute harm worth protecting them from. This again confirmed the racialized corporeality of brown women, who disproportionately filled these jobs in California, as objects to be deployed to increase accumulation through unregulated and unprotected hours of toil.

Indigeneity in Mexico

These dynamics of exclusion in which the creation of vulnerability is a precondition to recruiting certain workers into exploitative work are widely recognizable in the Bracero period, as is the strain put on brown families by this program. Yet before turning to this, it is important to understand the parallel processes of dispossession and family construction operating in Mexico. Mexican revolutionary and nation-building projects considered the emigrant subject a central actor in the development of the country, although not without ambivalence. Mexican anthropologist and sociologist Manuel Gamio, who studied under anthropologist Franz Boas at Columbia University and served in the Mexican education portfolio in the 1920s and 1930s, was well known and respected on both sides of the border and wrote extensively on the question of Mexican migration.⁵³ He would eventually compose a report on the topic for the Social Science Research Council. Gamio strongly objected to the racist arguments against Mexican migration that circulated in the United States at the time, and couched his response in cultural/developmentalist arguments that positioned most of Mexican Indigenous groups as holding valuable cultural traits. This, however, did not detract Gamio from judging certain Indigenous traits as backward with respect to the modern civilization of the United States, Europe, and Mexican elites. Gamio’s notion of development stemmed from a Larmarckian view that tied the biological and cultural development of individuals to environmental factors.⁵⁴ Given this, Gamio positioned migrants who returned from the United States as an important input in the evolution of Mexican culture in more civilized (i.e., capitalist and consumerist) directions, which would also fuel economic development. Gamio’s account of emigration echoes the place that Edward Gibbon Wakefield gave British emigration within his theory of colonization.⁵⁵ Gamio, like Wakefield, conceived of temporary Mexican emigration as an important “safety valve” for the Mexican economy, whose uneven development and chronic unemployment problem could otherwise lead only to starvation or rebellion.⁵⁶ Yet, unlike Wakefield, who envisioned British emigrants as permanent settlers, Gamio realistically conceived of Mexican emigration as temporary,⁵⁷ and counted on these journeys to teach the poor and unschooled classes to live “on a higher scale.”⁵⁸ Gamio deemed this project more realistic than aiming for the permanent settlement of migrants, given the cultural differences between Mexicans and European Americans, as well as the prevalence of “race prejudice” among whites in the United States, which made for “an intellectual, emotional, and traditional disparity too great to be bridged rapidly and perhaps never completely.”⁵⁹ But racialized cultural assessments were not absent from Gamio’s account of the backwardness of the predominant demographic of migrants, Indigenous groups that were “incomparably the inferior of the Toltec, Aztec, and Maya,” as well as of Mexicans of European descent.⁶⁰ Despite these unbridgeable differences, Gamio still trusted the US “schooling” that Mexican emigrants received – including access to better “furniture and clothing,” their use of “machinery and modern tools,” and their acquaintance with “sports and hygienic practices” – to contribute to the progress of Mexico upon their return.⁶¹

This expectation stood in contrast with the actual conditions of exploitation faced by Mexican migrants and their exclusion from work using technological equipment, conditions that were, incidentally, often justified by US discourses akin to Gamio’s own acknowledgment that the needs of Mexican natives were less complex than those of Europeans, as well as to other Mexican racial thinkers of mestizaje that praised the “Indian[’s] … superior organism” and “resistance.”⁶² In other words, there was relatively little debate about the racial undesirability of Mexican migrants of Indigenous extraction on either side of the border. Rather, their admission to the United States was vocally justified by, first, the economic need in the context of the ban placed on Chinese migrants, and, second, their relative “advantage” vis-à-vis other racially devalued groups in the United States, such as Puerto Ricans, Filipinos, and African Americans, given that they were able to repatriate during economic depressions, or could be forced to do so given their lack of status.⁶³

This means that the migrant leaving Mexico for the United States was subjected in multiple ways by racial capitalist projects developing on both sides of the border. The land dispossession and displacement in occupied Mexican territory was matched by Indigenous land dispossession and the decline of collective land holdings in the territory that remained under Mexican control. These transformations were fueled by legal changes, informal takeovers, land speculation driven by the railway construction in Mexico, and foreign investment that led to a boom in agricultural exports.⁶⁴ Their location at the intersection of Mexican and US projects of modernization and state-building meant that Mexican migrant laborers were sent to the United States by a domestic project of modernization that positioned them as uncivilized subjects whose worth would be increased by contact with US culture and their transformation toward the “Western type” of Mexican elites.⁶⁵ This expectation contrasted with their admission into the United States as peons expected to live in barracks, perform only the most basic work, and move only between employment locations to perform their required tasks.

Braceros

Discourses of cultural inferiority and transformation through and for modernization persisted during the Bracero period, both in terms of how the Mexican state’s project aimed to reform extended family structures predominant among peasants, and the hope that the guest worker program would provide the impetus for “Indians” to abandon primitive customs and nonmodern familial arrangements.⁶⁶ The glowing portrayal of the Bracero program as an opportunity for modernization by the Mexican government was complicated by memories of abuses suffered by Mexican workers on US soil and the experience of mass deportation in the 1930s.⁶⁷ Only the entry of the United States into the Second World War, and the Mexican support for the Allied Powers announced in 1942, provided the basis for more reciprocal cooperation, couched in terms of a democratic partnership against authoritarianism, a situation that did in fact strengthen Mexico’s bargaining position, allowing it to negotiate strong protections enforced by the US state rather than growers.⁶⁸ Yet the end of the war and the unending numbers of Mexican workers willing to sidestep the program and head north to work quickly weakened Mexico’s position.⁶⁹ This translated into worsening conditions of exploitation for Braceros and resurgent racial narratives of inferiority that served to justify and produce harsh labor conditions. Among these narratives, US authorities highlighted the “superiority” of the Bracero work ethic, connected to their “animal vitality,” which allowed the “Mexican worker” to overcome crushing illness and injury, and “literally [work] himself to death.”⁷⁰ The shaping of the Mexican family by the Bracero program followed the logic of racialized capitalist accumulation. In particular, the desire to keep Bracero labor cheap and the racial undesirability of settlement dictated that the pool of recruited workers was kept all male. It was acknowledged by the authorities that recruiting women would have required “separate and expensive forms of housing” and that “marrying or entering into extended family arrangements” would result in a “combined wage-earning potential” that would encourage Braceros to skip their contracts or settle permanently.⁷¹ In other words, it was explicitly the cost of a fulfilled domesticity and family life for Mexican workers that was excised from the Bracero program and expropriated for the reproduction of US capitalism and its waged workers. The exclusively male and temporary character of the Bracero program also fit tightly with the settler colonial project, which reserved opportunities for upward mobility and fulfilled domesticity for white families. This puts into perspective the nonsensical expectation that the program would facilitate “family advancement and modernization of familial economics” for Mexican migrants, positing a respectable masculinity tied to the nuclear family that Braceros could not possibly practice given their separation from their families and the exploitative conditions offered.⁷²

The other side of the coin of this capitalist vision were the female-headed households left behind in Mexico (the program privileged married men, whose sacrifice would pay for the advance of their families).⁷³ For many families in Mexico, the promised remittances never came, and even when they did, they had to be complemented by the wages earned by the women, who were also single-parenting their children – who, in turn, often took up informal jobs – and taking up functions previously performed by their husbands.⁷⁴ When Braceros returned, with or without savings, it was often only for a few months before they renewed their contracts or decided to cross the border irregularly instead.⁷⁵ These processes relativized the meaning of “return” and “home” for workers who spent their lives migrating, as well as for the young who were socialized into a tradition of “norteños,” whose career path was to go north in search for work.⁷⁶ The needs of these families and the emotional and financial hardship the program often implied were signs that value was being produced and appropriated by employers north of the border and Mexico’s project of modernization. Vocal complaints, however, were rare because they could have been seen as backward and selfish attempts to derail the government’s project.⁷⁷ This meant that reproductive and care labor performed by women left behind by Braceros was made invisible and denied recognition, the optimal form that this work takes in capitalist economies.⁷⁸ The male labor that this reproductive work made possible in the United States, moreover, was also kept out of sight of privileged US citizens by housing workers in barracks near their place of work and significantly restricting their mobility. This hidden labor, supported by the unpaid care networks left behind, ensured war and postwar social reproduction, and guaranteed the continuity of food provision, which had been threatened by the war effort. Later, with the reduced negotiating clout and protections of the postwar period, the costs of feeding, sheltering, and transporting laborers were kept to a minimum and even more labor was extracted from the Braceros.

The Bracero program thus remained a political project to produce vulnerable labor at the intersection of US and Mexican capitalist regimes entangled with their respective racial systems, which were both in need of social reproduction facilitated through uncompensated care work and barely compensated work in commercial agriculture, roadwork, and railway maintenance.⁷⁹ Mexican and US landed interests fought to control the flows of migrants, the former to prevent the outflow from pushing farmworkers’ wages upward and the latter to prevent limitations on inflows and state protections on incoming migrants to keep wages low and conditions exploitative.⁸⁰ Both Mexican and US growers pressured their states to regulate these flows in their favor, at first with US growers coordinating laxer border control with local Border Patrol units. Later, they pressured the Departments of Labor, State, and Justice in 1954 to force Mexico to accept scaled-down protections for Braceros in the renegotiation of the program.⁸¹ The higher relative wages in the United States was a boon for US growers, who could count on an unlimited supply of fresh labor arriving from south of the border. Despite the heavy-handed negotiation tactics and the exploitative conditions that the lack of negotiating clout facilitated, US commercial farmers saw their use of Braceros as “a contribution to Mexican economic uplift,” emphasizing that Bracero wages were higher than the wages paid to native US workers (an accounting trick that calculated the prevailing wage before deductions for “food, transportation, insurance, etc.,” some of which went back to the farmers).⁸² As Texas Representative Ted Regan concluded: “Mexicans … need North American dollars and we need their labor. [Migration] is an aid to the Mexican economy and to ours.”⁸³ Yet the labor needed had to be actively made vulnerable against the demands of the Mexican government, as is evident in the tone of 1953 Senate hearings regarding the renegotiation of the program. At the time, the majority of the chamber demanded the abandonment of the program altogether, as eloquently put by Iowa Senator Bomke Hickelooper: “Come on, boys, there is work here, come in under your own power and go back under your own power.”⁸⁴

This account shows that social reproduction is a transnational endeavor facilitated by various racialized hierarchies operating at the level of family, country, and the differential status of sending and receiving states. This account corrects the dominant approach in immigration scholarship, whose focus is exclusively on the conditions of migrants in the receiving territory. In contrast, I show that the hierarchical relation between the United States and Mexico, and the victimization of Mexican workers in the United States, requires an examination of the place that Mexican capitalism grants to racialized workers/emigrants-to-be. In fact, US exploitation of migrant labor depended and depends on hierarchies operating both between the United States and Mexico (and, increasingly, the Northern Triangle) and within sending countries, which makes the exploitative conditions relatively attractive to would-be migrants. Finally, the claim by US businessmen that they “contribute to Mexican development” by exploiting its citizens is continuous with other aid discourses proper to an unequal world, such as corporations bragging that export-oriented assembly plants offer higher wages than would otherwise be available to the natives of the receiving countries. There is a baseline problem here: The hierarchical world system determines that certain countries can only aim to employ their citizens at home or abroad under expropriative labor conditions attached, which may ease the capital accounts of the country in question but provides only temporary jobs with grueling labor conditions to subjects expelled from their land or subsistence communities by commercial agriculture, infrastructural projects, or war.⁸⁵ Rather than contributing to development, these projects show how racialized hierarchy domestically and international are themselves sources of accumulation when joined with the skewed structure of value that organizes an imperial world (see Chapter 4).

This complex picture of overlapping hierarchies and transnationally enabled vulnerability is the proper background against which to assess the role that brown families are called to occupy in the contemporary US regime of social reproduction.

3.3 The Brown Family, Social Reproduction, and Immigration Enforcement

The end of the Bracero Program in 1965 generalized undocumented work as the predominant status for the workforce in low-skilled and physically strenuous jobs in the United States. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act unified quotas for all countries and ended immigration bans for Asian countries whose entry requirements had not already been relaxed. This meant the imposition of the first-ever immigration quota for the western hemisphere, which was not proportionate to the heavy reliance of the US political economy and its social reproduction on migrant labor from this area. Therefore, by putting a ceiling on legal entry, the measure produced illegality, a vulnerable status for workers preferred by employers interested in exploitable labor.⁸⁶

The vulnerability of this status would only worsen as border fortification increased in the 1980s, initially in association with the war on drugs. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act allowance for the regularization of undocumented status provided some respite, but ultimately just shifted the demand for exploitable workers to new arrivals, as had been the practice historically. In the decades since the Immigration Reform and Control Act, and up to the time of writing, there has been no bipartisan consensus for new regularizations. The period leading up to and following these reforms also coincides with transformations on both sides of the border, including the increase in foreign direct investment in developing countries – associated with disrupted labor markets and the familiarization of workers with Western products in export-oriented industries with high turnover – creating a pool of emigrants.⁸⁷ Other trends include weakening union power in several sectors in the United States – notably meatpacking – which led to the replacement of unionized workers with migrant labor. The destabilization of Mexico’s agriculture due to the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement further displaced workers and filled the ranks of would-be emigrants.⁸⁸ The state apparatus that these migrants encountered deepened the level of vulnerability for undocumented workers systematically through border fortification and the expansion of internal immigration policing. Border fortification made immigrants reluctant to risk returning and attempting new crossings, thus encouraging a settled immigrant population and, eventually, the desire to reunite with their families on US territory.⁸⁹ These families – unable to rely on the benefits for unification of immediate family members of legal residents or citizens included in the 1965 law – would be targeted and further degraded through tough crime, welfare, and immigration legislation in the 1990s, which restricted access to welfare for regular and undocumented migrants and increased both the criminalization of brown and Black populations and, symbiotically, the range of legal offenses that triggered deportation, even for permanent residents.⁹⁰ At once, these laws restricted judicial discretion to consider staying orders of deportations based on the existence of strong community and family ties.⁹¹ This regime systematically forced separations through lone migration, long working hours of draining work, detention, and deportation. The families targeted by these regimes are the same that would – through their work – make possible the aspirational features of the white family, now increasingly featuring highly educated women working outside the home. This arrangement exceeded the reliance of professional couples on badly paid work by brown women (and the displacement of the contestation of the division of labor within white families) and came to include more broadly the dependence of these families on brown labor for accessing affordable fresh produce, packed meat, and prepared food;⁹² for construction, renovation, and landscaping work to shelter families and beautify their environment; and for filling the lower rungs of the food service and hospitality industry.

Constructing and Reproducing the White Family

The historical trajectory outlined earlier, complete with the coercive structures that mobilized brown labor, had the outcome of valorizing white families and their well-being while degrading nonwhite families. The normative white family enabled by undocumented work entailed and entails participation in a “collection of isolated family units,” rather than a real community.⁹³ Brown migrant subjects are conscripted to sustain this white, patriarchal, and atomized family life, through the cheap contracting-out of social reproduction services and the elimination of community exchanges and mutual aid, a structure intensified by white women’s entry into the labor force. This was the product of a branch of the feminist movement that questioned the isolation of women in the private sphere and their lack of access to the labor market, but not the primacy of capitalism over communal forms of organization that could reduce dependence on wage labor and the cash economy.

The vulnerability to surveillance and policing brown migrants face, the exploitative labor conditions this regime enables, and their exclusion from social services makes them ineligible for the society of privatized citizenship, that is, social membership re-defined as acts and values directed toward the privatized family sphere.⁹⁴ Going full circle, this family is what the moralizing discourse and tough policies of welfare and national security protect. In other words, just as the state apparatus separates brown families and pushes them into impossible choices, the resulting “disordered” families are judged abject through discourses of political membership that find them wanting vis-à-vis properly lived private worlds.⁹⁵ These disordered families emerge from the negation of self-care and a nurturing space for social reproduction for brown families whose members perform the essential work of social reproduction for well-ordered families. Several aspects of the contemporary legal and material configuration of immigration enforcement contribute to this degradation, as I now explain.

Disordering the Brown Family

Families shape subjects’ orientation toward the world: it is where their self-identity is cultivated, their children are socialized, strong social ties develop, and culture is transmitted. Family spaces are thus central sites where workers can access a value system that is an alternative to the racist and capitalist ideologies used to justify their subordination.⁹⁶ In other words, by grounding individuals in place and providing emotional and material resources that nurture them and allow them to thrive, families and social networks strengthen the symbolic and material resources available for political action and resistance.⁹⁷ For undocumented workers, domestic spaces also provide respite from the stress and fear associated with public spaces and the possibility of an encounter with law enforcement. These virtuous connections are destroyed by assaults on brown families, which destabilize them and deprive racialized workers of spaces of refugee from the competitive logic of the market and the exploitation and dehumanization faced in their everyday public lives, furthering their vulnerability to exploitation. Yet the degradation of brown families does not affect all of its members homogeneously. The historical denial of a family wage to workers of color, for instance, “intensifie[s] and extend[s] women’s reproductive labor” by creating tensions and strains in family relationships and requiring women to compensate for poor and unsanitary housing conditions, labor that they perform in addition to subsistence labor outside the family.⁹⁸

These strains have been widely documented in the case of migrants leaving families behind, including the phenomenon of transnational motherhood,⁹⁹ but the legal and material reach of immigration enforcement also creates vulnerabilities among families who are formally together. Their togetherness is relativized by the continuous anxiety created by the threat of involuntary and forceful parting following the detention and/or deportation of family members who are undocumented. Moreover, the constructed vulnerability and uncertainty for undocumented or mixed-status families that live together in the United States produce emotional burdens that are worth examining. The children of undocumented parents, in particular, carry the emotional weight of knowing that their parents may at any time be picked up by law enforcement or federal immigration enforcement and separated from them, first within the country and potentially across the southern border.¹⁰⁰ Parents, in turn, face the reality of parenting children from whom they might be separated.¹⁰¹ Given the growing reach of enforcement, separation is not an extreme, hypothetical situation for Latinx communities. A recent survey found that 66 percent of Latina/os “worry [some or a lot] that they, a family friend, or a close friend could be deported,” a figure that decreases to a still high 43 percent for United States-born Latina/os.¹⁰² Moreover, According to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data, in the six months between January and June of 2011, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) removed 46,846 parents of US citizens, compared to 180,000 removals of parents of US citizens in the nine years spanning 1998 and 2007. Many of the children left behind were sent by ICE to Child Protective Services (CPS), and some were subsequently put in foster care.¹⁰³ These children face higher barriers to reuniting with their parents because no mechanism exists to connect parents in immigration detention to children in CPS custody and because CPS is unlikely to allow undocumented family members to take the children. Moreover, CPS is biased against children rejoining parents abroad and seldom coordinates with foreign consulates about family reunification, despite this being the single most effective means of reunification.¹⁰⁴

The separations may be unexpected and follow from chance encounters with law enforcement or they might be the result of equally unexpected but spectacular and orchestrated mass raids conducted by hundreds of immigration officers targeting hundreds of undocumented workers at their place of work. These operations were legally enabled by the turn to employer-focused enforcement instituted in 1986, which, in combination with the 1998 identity theft law, other criminalized immigration violations (such as “illegal re-entry”), and high bonds, are used to pressure migrants into plea deals, quick deportation, and thus family separation.¹⁰⁵ Raids operate in the tradition of the mass roundups and deportations of the 1930s and mid-1950s, but they also have affinities with counter-insurgency operations, at play in the secrecy that surrounds the operations until their implementation, their militarized character, the targeting of hundreds of individuals at a time, the collective court appearances of shackled detainees (in the Postville case), and the deeply traumatic effects on the small rural communities where they take place.¹⁰⁶ In these raids, schools and other social services organizations are not always contacted ahead of time, and the former, alongside faith leaders, have to scramble to ensure the safety of children and their placement with family; this was particularly the case in the pre-2007 and 2019 raids which did not release primary caregivers, departing from ICE 2007 guidance requiring them to do so.¹⁰⁷ Communities also had to deal with the aftermath of the raids, the depressed economic activity for community businesses, the need to organize politically to press for releases, and the trauma for children and partners left behind, which requires the mobilization of therapeutic services to help children and adults process the loss.¹⁰⁸ Increased enforcement, detention, and deportation means that these same outcomes apply in Latina/o communities around the country in less spectacular form. It is these detentions that initiate the majority of the 3.1 million migrant deportations from the US interior since 9/11. These have slowly but surely decimated families and communities, and led to the loss of loved ones for an estimated 1.6 million people.¹⁰⁹

Today, just as during the Bracero program, the loss of the primary breadwinner heavily disrupts family dynamics, leading older youth to take one or two jobs, in addition to shouldering the caregiving of younger siblings.¹¹⁰ This disruption, moreover, can follow from enforcement that does not separate families. For example, the Obama administration conducted thousands of “silent raids,” which audited companies’ employment records and mandated mass firings of undocumented workers. Measures such as this contribute to the systematic instability of employment for undocumented workers, which not only confirms their disposability as individuals, as Raymond Rocco notes,¹¹¹ but also cements their vulnerability as families. Even in the absence of raids or unemployment, migrant families’ internal dynamics are heavily shaped by the legal and material environment that they face. Notably, children of undocumented parents who are fluent in English, have access to citizenship, or have status through Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) take on roles as language and culture brokers, tutors, and advocates in the interactions between their parents and a variety of institutions.¹¹² Older children of undocumented parents who are US citizens, in particular, step in to mitigate the legal vulnerability of their parents through access to financial services and by assuming legal guardianship of their minor siblings.¹¹³ The same is true, though to a lesser extent in accordance with their lesser legal privileges, of youth who are DACAmented.¹¹⁴ Even during childhood, children with access to citizenship are often overwhelmed by guilt and high expectations, which may lead them either to resist their legal privileges or to self-imposed efforts to defy the odds, despite the many obstacles to the progress of Latinx children in US society.¹¹⁵

Thus, in parallel to the production of illegality, there is a production of disordered families through a racializing process that extricates labor from noncapitalist social relations for the purpose of accumulation.¹¹⁶ A key tool in this double production is the regime of immigration enforcement and the attendant anxiety, vulnerability, and uncertainty created among immigrant families, requiring its members to take up more reproductive work and forcing children to assume formal and informal roles to mitigate the vulnerability of their parents and families. The regime positions brown families in impossible situations, such as deciding whether to leave their children behind in the event of a deportation or to uproot them, or deciding whether to stay apart or entrust their unaccompanied children to strangers who will get them across the border. These families are deemed abject vis-à-vis the white, heterosexual, commodified model of family, even if they are produced by a regime of immigration enforcement that places families in these tragic situations, only to deem these behaviors deviant and in need of deterrence.¹¹⁷ The variety of discourses of the supposedly irresponsible mores of migrant families is extensive and targets reproductive practices that are supposedly excessive, welfare-seeking, or strategic and devoted to obtaining residency through “anchor babies.”¹¹⁸ The same narrative of shame and bad parenting operates vis-à-vis Dreamers, whose innocence is compared with the reckless law-breaking behavior of their parents, who imposed the condition of illegality on their own children.

In other words, the historical and contemporary process of racialization and degradation I describe produces the social condition of brown families, whose degraded state is cited as an argument against their inclusion. Moreover, the denial of family stability through separation, unsteady, and informal work, and the threat of detection when appearing in public depletes spaces of social reproduction where emotional lives and physical bodies can be nurtured. Mass deportation, moreover, decimates communities and weakens ties that are central to a collective understanding of the conditions of oppression and resistance against these structures. In sum, immigration enforcement should be understood as a regime that coercively creates and racializes vulnerable labor to allow for capitalist accumulation, a process that entails systematic attacks on families, their stability and ability to reproduce physically and emotionally, their integrity, and the integrity of their communities of belonging and ability to engage in resistance struggle.

Family Activism

The dramatic decisions that migrant families face because of their lack of regular status and the attacks on families by today’s regime of immigration enforcement has shaped contemporary activism. The family has become salient in migrant-organizing discourse through the strategic use of family ties by pro-immigration activists in anti-deportation campaigns and through the emergence of the family as a key collective source of identification in debates between immigrant rights and their opponents.¹¹⁹

However, the invocation of families, in general, and family separation, in particular, can be fraught when considered in isolation from the capitalist priorities and coercive racialization that disorder and separate families. This is not to deny that some family-centered activism disrupts strict separations between citizens and migrants and between migrants with and without documents, makes visible alternative family formations, and is led by subjects who take up spaces not given to them.¹²⁰ Yet, as long as they employ genres of melodrama and humanitarianism detached from the political economy conditions that motivate subjection, there are two risks. First, narratives based on the tragic and – for most white audiences – extreme character of the forceful separation of families and detention of children both highlights the spectacular nature of their suffering and dissimulates it by portraying state crimes as melodrama, transforming extreme instances of state coercion into a vehicle for white enjoyment.¹²¹ This activism exploits the spectacle of migrant suffering, which confirms the abject character of the brown family and converges with anti-immigrant accounts that derive enjoyment from immigrants’ suffering, which they attribute to their unruly behavior and irresponsible parenting.

The second risk of making the domestic realm of the family the central axis of activism without scrutinizing the structural conditions of its fashioning is that it misrepresents and thus narrows the character of politics in two ways. First, by positing the harmed brown family as an outrageous overreach of state action, activists both reproduce an illusory strict separation between private life and collective life, and also mark nonfamilial forms of political identification as dangerous.¹²² In an example of the imaginary strict separation between private and collective life, US Congresswoman from Washington State Pramila Jayapal identified “kids in cages … and moms being separated from breastfeeding children” as “beyond politics … really … just about right and wrong.”¹²³ Yet racialized families have consistently been the terrain of politics and state intervention. From sanctioning the heterosexual family and the attendant unpaid women’s labor of social reproduction to sacrificing enslaved women’s maternal kinship for the sake of the slave owner’s property, the state has shaped the family, elevated some families over others, sanctioned an internal pecking order, and relied on these divisions to fulfill different roles within capitalism.

Second, family-centered activism sanitizes political engagement and contributes to marking nonfamilial forms of political association as dangerous by privileging political action that can be safely grounded in empathy and the defense of the family. During the family separation crisis, white women, in particular, claimed to relate to the suffering of migrants through their experience as mothers (“if it was my child, I would want someone to do something”).¹²⁴ Activist Jess Morales Rocketto from the National Domestic Worker’s Alliance noted that she was “blown away” by the unusually high turnout for the marches against family separations compared to other instances of immigrant activism. A white woman and new mother at the Washington march further illustrates this empathic mindset, saying that she had stayed away from the news because she could not bear the stories of family separation but she realized it was time to “come out.”¹²⁵ Yet the mobilization of white women through the scenario of “shared feeling” only confirms the fungibility of the bodies toward which empathy is being extended, whose sentience is confirmed once the pain is felt – through identification – by the white witness.¹²⁶ Such an identification, moreover, mischaracterizes the structure of injustice because white families are in fact protected, in part by the exploitation of the very same families targeted for separation with whom the claim to empathize. This approach to activism also means that alternative forms of organizing, including those that center the dependence of white families on exploited racialized workers and the functionality of this regime for the minimization of the social reproduction costs of capitalism, are rendered unsafe because they may alienate the wide support that familial scripts can garner.

In other words, truly emancipatory activism needs to highlight how families are conscripted to provide social reproduction for white groups and capitalist accumulation and are thus public spaces of intervention. This is the reason for the sacrifice of their intimate spaces through the uprooting of members of the family suddenly and with little recourse, through the migration of one or two parents, detention, deportation, or separation at the border. Immigrant families living together, moreover, remain subjected to backbreaking work, economic precarity, and emotional vulnerability due to fears of separation, extensive surveillance, and the multiple statuses of family members (undocumented, DACAmented, with Temporary Protected Status, parolee, resident, or citizen). Activism focused on migrant families that fails to engage with these features misdirects energies toward a supposedly outrageous instance of family separation rather than the systematic and routine production of abject brown families by the coercive regime of mass policing at the border and in the interior, which works alongside US racial capitalism.

In a regime of racial capitalism, what is outrageous – in the sense of disruptive or nonnormative – is the attempt by brown families to privilege their integrity and pursue joint settlement in a polity that aims to extract their labor while blocking their own social reproduction. In this context, the reclaiming of a space where bodies used for disciplined labor production and the care of others could rest and replenish physically and emotionally is nothing short of revolutionary.¹²⁷

3.4 Racial Capitalism and the 2018 Crisis of Family Separations

The racial capitalist regime of social reproduction theorized in this chapter is the proper context in which to assess the 2018 crisis of family separation affecting migrants and asylum seekers from the Northern Triangle. The arrival of families had already been met with state coercion in the form of family detention during the Obama administration and evolved into the policy of family separations in the subsequent administration. Their arrival as family units conveyed a will to maintain family integrity despite migration, which represents a departure from the historical mode of lone and uprooted labor migration to the United States and explains the violent state response that met them at the border. This is because they counter the logic of social extrication and anti-relationality that relegates these groups to realms of vulnerable labor and propels capitalist accumulation forward. The violent response of the US state is in keeping with its historical record of coercive intervention in intimate family realms and its destruction of kinship among brown, Black, and Indigenous groups.

The search for asylum by Central American migrants fleeing US-supported post- or currently authoritarian regimes at home is reminiscent of the location of Mexican migrants at the intersection of programs of modernization in Mexico and the United States. The structures of subjection causing asylum seekers’ exile and those expecting them in the United States are entwined, this time by neoliberal reforms in Central America and the transformation of civil conflict through the economy of drug trafficking and US-led, anti-drug, military doctrine. This updated transnational nexus behind contemporary migrant and refugee flows from the region remains to be theorized.¹²⁸

The genealogy offered earlier posits migration regulation as a structure of racial capitalism that is entangled with racialized labor control resulting from conquest and continuous with the subjection of other racial groups in its effects over kinship. Scholars have noted the connection of the last wave of migration to the contemporary crisis of care and social reproduction, whereas women of color increasingly meet the urgent demand for externalized care following from the increased hours of paid work required to support a family, which sent women into waged work just as the public provision of care diminished.¹²⁹ The racialized migrant women who took up these responsibilities had to transfer their own care duties to their families and communities to other, poorer caregivers, further squeezing social reproductive capacities.¹³⁰

This chapter shows, however, that a pre-existing regime of racialized labor mobility, one already materially supporting the US polity, provided the background for these new and feminized migratory flows. Moreover, by analyzing social reproduction alongside the regime of migration control, the proposed account illuminates the role of state coercion over the brown family as a key mediating factor in delaying the breaking point of social reproduction. In so doing, this analysis specifies, redirects attention, and recategorizes migration regulation as operating at the intersection of systems of racialization and capitalism. This extends Raymond Rocco’s work on disposability as a form of political containment by nesting it in a longer historical genealogy that centers the family and locates it at the intersection of the racialized labor regimes of the United States and Mexico.¹³¹

The transnational focus in this chapter illuminates the background location of these peoples as subaltern subjects within the settler Mexican state, expelled by modernizing projects and delivered into exploitative work in the United States, work performed on the lands stolen from Indigenous peoples by the Spanish before they were annexed by the United States.¹³² Like Chapter 2, this chapter makes clear that racial capitalist regimes of forced labor and migration abide by the settler logic. This is because they welcome into settler societies white foreigners, who make their way into “the people” and jointly enjoy access to the land and sanction the carving out of spaces of expropriative labor for nonwhite arrivals, including Indigenous peoples from Meso and North America. In so doing, this project contributes to outlining a colonialism that has settled on Indigenous land but is never static. Instead, this colonialism is a site of the “simultaneous dispossession of Indigenous peoples and racialized, gendered, and casted labour formations,” which relies on “conscription, constraint, forced diasporas, and slavery.”¹³³ This vulnerable labor in turn cuts the costs of the white privatized family described in this chapter, whose wages become the means through which the value of the products of forced labor is realized.¹³⁴

Chapter 4 complements this picture by focusing on another case of simultaneous oppression that characterizes the extraction of nature and racialized labor in the colonies. Returning to Du Bois, this chapter reveals how race and technology facilitate the alienation of wealthy peoples from the natural world and the racialized manual labor that sustains them. In addition to theorizing racialization and technology as mediating mechanisms in the devastation of nature, the chapter expands the theorization of the unacknowledged and expropriative material conditions that underpin popular sovereign demands for well-being among privileged groups.

4 Techno-Racism, Manual Labor, and Du Bois’s Ecological Critique

This chapter continues the exploration of the material conditions that sustain white democracies, whose popularly supported claims entail affective attachments to material wealth, secured through racial capitalist arrangements dependent on empire. Here I turn to the question of ecology, which extends Chapter 3’s engagement with racialized labor to show that capitalism, in its quest for accumulation, appropriates labor alongside nature in colonial or postcolonial regions, a process facilitated by the technology-mediated devaluation of these two constructs. Beliefs in technological superiority and an attendant exaggeration of technology’s value vis-à-vis manual labor and nature alienate white polities from their dependence on land and labor, further cementing an imperial popular sovereignty, now fully defined as also an ecologically destructive one. I make these claims via an ecological reading of W. E. B. Du Bois’s writings on development, which track the racialized valuation of technology, manual labor, and nature, and reveal it to be political construction key for imperial racial capitalism to extract labor and natural resources from the colonies and the Global South.

The proposed reading of W. E. B. Du Bois has two aims, one theoretical and one political. Theoretically, it expands on the affective attachments that underpin popular sovereignty by examining the racialized meaning and ordering of manual labor, nature, and technology in modernity. This sheds critical light on the question of technology in advanced societies and its connection to underdevelopment in the Global South. Politically, it shows that imperial popular sovereignty depends on privileged citizens’ attachments to technology and alienation from nature and the hard manual work that happens in proximity to nature that sustains them. This shows that imperial popular sovereignty is also ecologically destructive.

In addition to tying imperial popular sovereignty to the question of ecology, the proposed account corrects or augments recent ecological political theory that focuses on humans’ alienation from nature. It shows that the destruction of nature is not indiscriminate but organized through racial hierarchies and is a core component of imperialist projects that selectively and radically disrupt ecological and sociopolitical formations abroad. This global and racial division of labor and nature is connected to the divide between nature and technology that took shape alongside European industrialization and its growing need for raw materials. The construction of nature as obsolete and alienated from western societies proceeded along with ideologies of techno-racism, which facilitated the domination of colonial societies to secure sources of labor and raw material to sustain these societies’ well-being. The alienation from nature among citizens from wealthy societies cements colonial constructions of backwardness and underdevelopment and hides the dependency of western standards of living and sustainable environments on the devastation of subjects, communities, and nature overseas. Thus, alienation from nature is an internally heterogeneous and racialized process, one which differently positions western and colonial peoples vis-à-vis nature. In particular, western alienation from nature depends on the racialized dehumanization of those who work the land’s surface and mine its underground resources; this dehumanization allows for the more intense exploitation of their bodies and the natural environment they inhabit, a feat that, in turn, alienates colonial peoples from inwardly determined social and political projects. Ultimately, this account shows that imperial popular sovereignty and the racial capitalism it enables are inevitably entwined with our present ecological crisis, a crisis that cannot be solved without the dismantling of racism.

In the rest of the chapter, I first engage with recent ecological political theory, which deals with the politics of exploitation of nature and humans’ alienation from it, to note the need to further specify how alienation from nature is racialized and structurally embedded within imperial capitalist regimes. To make this claim, I draw from the writings of Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg on land rent and imperialism, respectively, complementing Marx’s writings on the joint robbery of the soil and the worker with Luxemburg’s political account of imperialism, which exposes the alienation from nature of colonial subjects whose land and labor produce the raw materials needed to fuel industry and the well-being of the metropole. In a third step, through an ecological reading of Du Bois, I explain how racial hierarchy underpins these processes. In particular, the devaluation and intensified exploitation of racialized subjects and nature follows from the alienation of technologized societies from nature, facilitating the careless exhaustion of nature overseas, and the disruption of a metabolism with nature oriented toward human needs rather than capitalist accumulation. Du Bois’s account of techno-racism turns upside down claims about whiteness and technological advances, contests the inferiorization of manual labor relative to technological work, criticizes capitalist-oriented development, and champions a vision of society oriented to satisfy societal needs rather than profit, wealth, and luxury.

4.1 Alienation: How and From What?

Human societies’ material dependence on and destructive relation with nature has been examined by ecological political theorists. For example, Sharon Krause diagnoses the problem of the domination of nature as emerging from an excessive exercise of power over nature, which imperils its existence and its functioning. Such a regime, Krause argues, affects poor and marginalized groups in particular, but ultimately affects us all by involving us in the degradation of the earth.¹ Alyssa Battistoni addresses the related problem of how to account for nature as part of our political relations, and criticizes the conceptualization of nature as capital, an economistic response to its past classification as a free resource.² Battistoni’s answer is to consider nature as labor, or, rather, as an aspect of hybrid labor or work of nature understood as a “collective, distributed undertakings of humans and nonhumans acting to reproduce, regenerate, and renew a common world.”³ Jane Bennett, finally, contests an instrumentalist view of matter, which she contrasts with a vitalist and political account of ecosystems.⁴ The instrumentalization of matter, she argues, feeds earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption, preventing “greener forms of human culture and more attentive encounters between people-materialities and thing-materialities.”⁵

These approaches can be unified as attempts to grapple with the problem of alienation from nature, understood as estrangement (being cut off from something) and/or reification (the reduction of processes that involve human action to mere things).⁶ Alienation prevents us from understanding ourselves as responsible in the degradation of nature, considering nature as part of political and work relations, or allowing for a less dualistic understanding of matter. Alienation from nature, in Simon Hailwood’s account, follows from the reification of and estrangement from landscape, understood as nature modified, interpreted, and ultimately “appropriated” for anthropocentric purposes, a construct which other thinkers term “Land” or land.⁷ If we do not recognize land or landscape as the result of social processes entwined with matter, we become estranged from it and fail to take responsibility for our participation in its creation and modification.⁸ Estrangement can take a variety of forms, notably the estrangement involved in the willful misrecognition of landscape as terra nullius, which opened the way for colonization and Indigenous dispossession.⁹ Alienation is also operative in the commodification of nature and the disregard for the impact of economic activity on landscape, which predominantly concerns Krause and Battistoni.¹⁰ While the understanding of nature as inert matter that Bennett criticizes is not considered by Hailwood, one can think of this problem in terms of alienation as well, as entailing the disregard of the potential agentic assemblages that human and nonhuman matter form together.¹¹

The framework put forward in this book provides a constructive corrective to this literature because it points out that both the dependence on material sustenance of wealthy states and their citizens and its disavowal are racialized. In particular, this chapter complicates the question of alienation from nature by showing that it is mediated by techno-racism, thus completing the conceptualization of imperial popular sovereignty by noting its ecological consequences.

The more nuanced notion of alienation from nature that I conceptualize via Du Bois encompasses the racialized subjects who work closely with land. Race and racism, entangled with technology, organize estrangement from and reification of nature in ways that allow formally democratic collectives to satisfy their possessive attachments while disregarding the destructive effects of their wellbeing on human and nonhuman nature. Privileged subjects are alienated both from nature and from the racialized workers who engage with it, despite the dependence of their wealth on their twin exhaustion. This equation, moreover, forcefully alienates from nature the native peoples whose social and political structures are disrupted and redirected toward capitalist accumulation and the well-being of the privileged.

To capture these racial dynamics, it is necessary to first conceptualize more systematically how land is connected to labor, and why racialized groups align themselves or are forcefully aligned with nature and technology in particular ways. For this, before turning to Du Bois’s account, I conceptualize the joint appropriation of nature and labor in the colonial world via Marx and Luxemburg.

4.2 Land with Labor

The more a country proceeds from large-scale industry as the background of its development, as in the case of the United States, the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degrees of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original source of all wealth—the soil and the worker.

Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, 638, my emphasis

Imperialist appropriation of nature only makes sense along with the appropriation of another form of energy that comes attached to seized foreign land: racialized labor. The surface of the land and the riches underground are worthless without labor. Thus, the appropriation of the former does not make sense without the social and political relations that force the availability of the latter.¹² Marx’s writings on land and its enclosure, and the recent attention given to the rift in land regeneration caused by capitalism, alert us to the displacement toward cities of workers who are free to sell their own labor (because they are neither serfs nor in possession of means of production).¹³ Yet this quick turn toward the proletariat created by the enclosures and the cities that emerge around industry obscures other ramifications of private ownership of the earth, which become more salient as industrialization in the core leads to a scramble for raw materials elsewhere in the world. In the colonies, the exclusion of workers “from the very earth itself” is vital not to displace them toward industrial centers but to make sure their waged work is available to produce the raw materials required by European industry. This process chains labor to the land in order to produce rent; it amounts to a tribute for “the very right to live on the earth.”¹⁴

The lack of access to land for the nonpropertied, in other words, permits the accumulation of land rent through the simple addition of a certain amount of unpaid labor to the soil that is now privately owned.¹⁵ Marx’s eloquent language reveals the exploitative conditions behind the commonsensical appearance of landed property and shows that nature can be conscripted into capital’s project of accumulation only when subjected to the proper social relations and fully entwined with labor. Importantly, the private ownership of land and the channeling of profits toward accumulation upsets labor understood as a process occurring between “man” and nature, set in motion by man’s own natural forces to appropriate the materials of nature to serve human needs.

While man’s actions mediate, regulate, and control “the metabolism between himself and nature,”¹⁶ capitalism can and does introduce an antagonistic rift in this self-directed appropriation devoted to serve human needs.¹⁷ Differently put, the metabolism between man and nature that is constitutive of labor is shaped by the social relations that determine land ownership and labor conditions. Capitalism drastically transforms society and, in so doing, redirects the forces of men away from the appropriation of nature to serve individual and social needs and toward appropriation for accumulation. All along, capitalist agriculture progresses through “the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil.”¹⁸ Both worker and soil are, moreover, exhausted in the process through the extraction of labor’s surplus and the land’s nutrients.¹⁹ Here Marx’s language explicitly echoes and expands organic chemist Justus von Liebig’s notion of “robbery agriculture,” that is, processes by which soil minerals in the countryside are diverted to cities, preventing the replenishment of the soil.²⁰ Marx adds labor to this metabolic process, and considers its exploitation alongside that of soil exhaustion as entailing the redirection of its bodily energies – combined with nature – away from the fulfillments of its needs and toward accumulation.²¹ The exhaustion of nature in turn sets up barriers to its reproduction, subsequently overcome through expansion into further areas not yet deployed in the service of capitalism,²² a process masterfully described by Rosa Luxemburg.

4.3 Imperialism and the Destruction of the Natural Economy

The demand for the highest possible profit, the quickest possible timeline, the cheapest possible operation, seems to translate eventually into the understanding … that the troublemaker must go. The blame rarely if ever makes its way back up to a corporation’s HQ. But it should.… [T]he people who inhabit these places never really share in the riches produced there: colonialism is still running strong.

Bill McKibben, “Climate activists are being killed for trying to save our planet. There’s a way to help,” The Guardian, September 13, 2021

Luxemburg’s work on the reproduction of capitalism is helpful to conceptualize the specificities of the global rift in metabolic relation between man and nature brought about by imperialism. Luxemburg connects the health of the soil and the broader viability of ecosystems, water sources, and biodiversity to the social and political dynamics of colonized and postcolonial societies. Luxemburg’s account of imperialism distinguishes between the “natural economy” and the regimes shaped by capitalist interests that emerge after its destruction. “Natural economies” are social formations that have no inclination or ability to exchange commodities due to their property structures.²³ Imperialism upends these social formations and subjects societies to capitalist logics, which alienate them from nature and from the ability to direct their engagement with nature toward communal needs. This is a twin alienation: from nature and from self-directed development, a break akin to a “political rift.” This rift is caused by capitalism’s expansionary hubris and need to appropriate land, including its rich resources underneath (minerals) and on the surface (pastures, forests, waterways, and livestock raised by natives), which necessarily clash with and destroy self-directed relationships with nature and societal arrangements.²⁴

This framework conveys the deep interconnections of humans, political regimes, and ecosystems, as well as the frictions, tensions, and harms to these systems produced by imperialism and the capitalist drive to accumulate.²⁵ Moreover, judging from the vastly unequal patterns of land use between western peoples and the Global South,²⁶ surprisingly little seems to have changed in terms of capitalism’s targets of expropriation. But re-reading Luxemburg’s texts is striking because the resources she focuses on not only continue to drive capitalism’s land- and resource-grab, but can also be re-cognized as leading causes of global warming and biodiversity loss via fossil fuel use, deforestation, and cattle raising.

This structure of expansion, conflict, and appropriation, for Luxemburg, makes the idea of restricting capitalism to “peaceful competition” an illusion. Despite it still being the animating assumption behind many liberal cosmopolitan accounts and the field of international political economy, Luxemburg makes clear that the drive to appropriate natural resources violently clashes with the “social bonds of the indigenous inhabitants,” which Luxemburg sees as the strongest bulwark of their society and its material basis. Because the incorporation of new territories into the realm of accumulation of European capitalism threatens the very existence of native peoples, Luxemburg predicts they will resist until they are exhausted or exterminated. Capitalism’s response to this resistance is the “systematic, planned destruction and annihilation of any non-capitalist social formation.”²⁷ The need to quash resistance to the colonial appropriation of land and labor requires colonial powers to establish permanent military occupation in the colonies to repress Indigenous uprisings that constrain accumulation.²⁸ Via militarized colonial rule, capitalist accumulation can appropriate foreign productive forces, after forcefully integrating native property structures into the global markets for commodity exchange. This turn also redirects societies’ organization for subsistence toward exchange, including through the creation of nonsubsistence consumption satisfied by international trade. Therefore, these processes – in contrast with older forms of trade – entail a radical transformation of societies that cannot proceed without the deployment of force to expand the sphere of accumulation.²⁹

Luxemburg anticipates contemporary conceptualizations of the colonial attitude toward nature, that is, “the ruthless exploitation of natural resources and the arbitrary transformation of the environment without regard for regional traditions and experiences.”³⁰ Luxemburg, moreover, centers political and social struggles as important determinants of the particular forms of capitalist use and abuse of nature and labor.³¹ Indeed, her work highlights the intensity of capitalist exploitation, and the speed with which imperial capitalism radically transforms noncapitalist societies in order to integrate them into its conduits of accumulation: “In its drive to appropriate these productive forces for the purposes of exploitation, capital ransacks the whole planet, procuring means of production from every crevice of the Earth, snatching up or acquiring them from civilizations of all stages and all forms of society.”³²

This voraciousness is both about spatial reach (“every crevice,” “all stages and all forms of society”) and speed. Regarding the latter, Luxemburg argues that for capital to await the disintegration of the non-capitalist social formations that possess the minerals and lands that it covets “would be tantamount to forgoing the productive forces of these territories altogether.”³³ A parallel taste for speed and intensity characterizes capitalism’s refusal to “wait for the natural increase in the working population” when it requires labor in excess of that available in Europe.³⁴ Capitalism, in other words, always opts for the method that is most expedient (in terms of both rapidity and intensity, and thus profitability), regardless of the violence and destruction that it entails.³⁵

Yet Luxemburg’s account falls short of theorizing what is behind the belligerence with which capitalism attacks peripheral societies. When she addresses this point, Luxemburg suggests that “the precapitalist soil of more primitive social relations” is particularly fertile for “develop[ing] such a power of command over the material and human forces of production” and for conjuring amazing transformations in brief periods of time.³⁶ While she is aware of the role of “myth” in facilitating many of these transformations,³⁷ her framework does not develop further how ideologies of white superiority make these distant lands populated by nonwhite subjects the target of a particularly destructive exploitation of human and nonhuman nature. She does not, in other words, consider how race intersects with the imperial exploitation of nature and destruction of social relations she describes, i.e., how racialization results in capitalist accumulation.

4.4 Nature, Technology, and Racial Oppression

Du Bois’s essays on development and imperialism are indebted to the writings of Marx and Luxemburg on land and imperialism, but he substantively amends their frameworks by incorporating race and technology into the analysis. Du Bois makes two diagnostic and two critical normative points. Diagnostically, Du Bois first argues that the intensification of racism follows western technological needs, turning upside down then-prevalent techno-racist claims that equated whiteness to the ability to devise technological objects and operate them.³⁸ Second, Du Bois contests the inferior place given to manual labor by this ordering. On the critical side, Du Bois first contests the desirability of speedy “development” and integration into the global economy. Second, Du Bois claims that the technological mindset is a poor standard by which to measure the progress of humanity.

Technology and Race

Du Bois intervened in an intellectual arena that coupled racial and technological superiority. In the nineteenth century, accounts of science and mastery of nature and scientific racism had proceeded separately, but by the end of that century they converged to tie racial superiority to the belief in the greater ability of westerners to develop technology and regimes of social cooperation that positioned them above nature.³⁹ This convergence connected Baconian ideas of control over nature with modified accounts of Darwin’s theory of evolution and/or Alfred Wallace’s evolutionary account to argue that the white race’s scientific achievements were evidence of its superior morality and intellect, which allowed it to dominate and displace the “lower and more degraded [races].”⁴⁰ These beliefs have affinities to long-standing accounts of the separation of physical labor and intellectual/political work dating back to ancient Athens that even Luxemburg accepted without much skepticism.⁴¹ When joined with technology and race, however, accounts that posited that human progress depended on science and the mastery of nature also marked nonwhite races as incapable of advancing.⁴² The global division of labor completed in the nineteenth century, which turned Europe into a “pre-eminently industrial field” and converted the other part of the globe into a “chiefly agricultural field for supplying the other part,”⁴³ facilitated these racial beliefs. Du Bois saw this division as not simply about the kinds of labor performed, but about race:

The interesting thing about modern commercial organizations is that white Europe and white America have organized industry and commerce so as to employ raw materials from colored countries and colored labor for the raising of these materials. The low wages of these workers and the high selling price of manufactured articles represent the immense profit which modern civilization is making at the expense of colored folk.⁴⁴

This global division of labor and its racialization alienated raw materials/nature from technology, identifying the modern west with the latter and disavowing that the “deep base of technological progress” was biophysical resources.⁴⁵ Here Du Bois’s account anticipates critiques of alienating views of nature as an input to the productive process, that is, “a passive set of assets to be scientifically assessed, used and valued in commercial (money) terms.”⁴⁶ When nature is quantified and explicated in mathematical terms, scientific narratives separate reality from normative ends and make the exploitation of both nature and humans a scientific and rational affair.⁴⁷ Yet references to “nature” and “humans” incorrectly specify that it is particular portions of nature and the treatment of certain humans that are more systematically detached from normative ends. This is facilitated by the equivalence between whiteness and technology, an equivalence facilitated by the re-mapping of the world through the industrialization of Europe and the global division of labor it necessitated, which attached the fetish of the machine to the white race.⁴⁸ By the end of the nineteenth century, the estrangement from the natural basis of western modernity and its disavowed reliance on the destruction of social and political structures in the racialized periphery was complete, and Du Bois saw it as such:

[I]n the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Color Line was drawn as at least a partial substitute for [social hierarchy in Europe]. Granting that all white men were born free and equal, was it not manifest—ostensibly after Gobineau and Darwin, but in reality after James Watt, Eli Whitney, Warren Hastings and Cecil Rhodes—that Africans and Asiatics were born slaves, serfs or inferiors? The real necessity of this fantastic rationalization was supplied by the demands of modern colonial imperialism.⁴⁹

Thus, while conventional wisdom indicated that the inferiority of nonwhites was dictated by the scientific racism of Gobineau and neo-Darwinian theories of natural selection, which provided legitimate grounds to subject nonwhites even after social hierarchy among whites was waning, Du Bois suggests otherwise. For him, technological change and the drive to feed machines with raw materials explained racism as well as the political subjection entailed by empire. Du Bois posits the steam engine (Watt) and the cotton gin (Whitney) – which respectively allowed for the more efficient operation of coal-fueled machinery and vast productivity increases in the mechanized separation of cotton fibers from their seeds – as what requires racist ideologies, which facilitate a stronger political hold over the colonies (Hastings) to allow capital to secure the raw materials that its machinery requires (Rhodes).⁵⁰ Thus, Du Bois reveals that the identification of the west with scientific and technological superiority, which provides legitimacy for its political dominion, omits that technology would simply not be without the ability to appropriate cheap racialized labor alongside land and raw materials, which were the main attractions Africa offered to an increasingly technologized west. In this regard, Du Bois’s singled out Germany, whose demand for raw materials such as “vegetable oils, fibres and foods from Africa in equal terms,” he argued, became its main motivation to enter the First World War.⁵¹

The geographical spread of imperialism and the appropriation of land and labor abroad was itself the result of technological change. The introduction and expansion of machinery and the relative exhaustion of natural resources in Europe, as well as the limited domestic demand for products, started to confine the growth of “large-scale industry.”⁵² These barriers were and are eliminated by developing and deploying technology to overcome natural limitations and by conscripting the subjects and lands of the colonial world, where natives and settlers alike labor in “fields for the production of [Europe’s] raw materials,” whose supply is also increased by technology (e.g., cotton and the cotton gin).⁵³

The rift in the regenerative metabolism of nature, then, is magnified by a technology-enabled temporal rift between natural time and capital’s time, that is, the inability of natural processes of soil renewal and forest culture to keep up with the continuous acceleration of capitalism’s turnover time.⁵⁴ The geographic division of labor between town and country, first, and then between Europe and the rest of the world adds a spatial dimension to this rift, because the soil’s nutrients are transported away from the countryside, or even the countries of origin, preventing the natural cycle of regeneration that otherwise returns nutrients to the soil.⁵⁵ It is important to note the twofold work of technology in creating the temporal and spatial rifts in nature’s metabolism, respectively. First, technological advancement shifts the production and labor profile of European countries toward manufacturing, requiring industry and workers to be supplied with raw materials and nourishment, respectively, that depend on the conscription of racialized labor and nature from abroad. Second, by developing scientific tools to overcome the limits to accumulation set by nature (through the cotton gin, fertilizers, and industrial modes of cattle raising and feeding, among other technological fixes), technology accelerates the pace at which capitalist production and accumulation demand foreign raw materials and the labor that can extract them.

The increasingly tight mapping of technology onto Europe and of nature onto the periphery creates the conditions of possibility for Europeans’ estrangement from nature as an essential component of their well-being and a disavowal of responsibility for the destructive effects of the extraction of raw materials, whose speed is magnified by technology. Racial hierarchy magnifies this estrangement, moreover, fastening the identification between whiteness and technology. The accumulation of wealth by the metropole, however, is not due to technology, as Du Bois makes clear:

Coal gave England during the nineteenth century an immense industrial advantage. She trained her working classes and became a manufacturer of iron, steel, cotton and woolen goods and other commodities on a world scale. She sold these all over the world to pay for the food and raw material which she imported. But imports were cheap, because they were raised largely by primitive, undeveloped countries, with low wages and slave labor; and goods were dear because England set the price according to her skill and wants, and she wanted wealth and leisure.⁵⁶

England accumulated wealth through, first, an advantage built upon a natural resource: coal.⁵⁷ This advantage (in industry and warfare) made possible colonial domination which allowed for “low wages and slave labor,” which depended, in turn, on political dominion, that is, the control of supply and the arbitrary setting of prices of manufactured goods to fulfill England’s normative account of the good society, one that catered to wealth and leisure for the privileged. Du Bois finds this reactionary program still active in “sinister” 1940s narratives about Africa in the United States, which emphasize “‘free access to raw materials’ and partitioning of Africa among white owner nations” without explanation to natives.⁵⁸ Here the lack of concern for natives, which opens the way for capitalist accumulation, depends on the successful construction of racial hierarchy – that is, racialization – meaning that as capital is accumulated, so is whiteness and its other.⁵⁹ In this sense, imperialism is a “race-making project.”⁶⁰ To the extent that this structure depends on any particular “skill,” it is the skillful application of violence, which facilitates the monopoly of “finance, capital and technique” that allows imperial countries to set wages and prices, which Du Bois contrasts to the wiser program of making property common and educating “all classes and nations in modern technique.”⁶¹

With this framework in mind, it is possible to re-read the extreme violence of imperialism as having to do with the geographic partition of the world and the organization of human mobility with the goal of accomplishing the right combination of labor and nature to maximize profit unhindered by moral qualms and local political projects, which would have continued or emerged in the absence of hierarchical racial ideologies and colonial political control, respectively. Racial ideologies, in Du Bois’s terms, were designed to “ease [the] consciences and increase [the] incomes” of those who championed them.⁶² Thus, the slave trade was deemed an appropriate solution to solve the labor scarcity produced by the genocide and dispossession of Indigenous peoples in conquered lands in the American continent.⁶³ Indentured servitude was seen as a similar solution after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire; this involved the transportation of Indian and Chinese labor to plantations, mines, and railroad-building sites to set up the transport of raw materials extracted from overseas. Throughout this period, European migrants circulated and settled around the nonEuropean world alongside these racialized groups but accessed vastly different conditions owing to their heterogeneous but nonetheless credible claim to whiteness (Chapter 2). The late nineteenth-century “scramble for Africa,” yet again, secured control of both land and labor, this time in African territory.⁶⁴ While Indian and Chinese indentured labor was transported to several regions of Africa, a host of other measures, including land enclosure, taxation, and force, was used to ensure that native African labor abandoned subsistence activities and made itself available to work the land, whose surface or undersoil would be exploited by colonial powers in monopolistic conditions.⁶⁵

This means that the rift in the relationship between natives and land, through their forced conscription into the production of raw materials for the benefit of colonial powers, is central to the “irreparable rift” in the natural and social metabolism that Marx associates with the separation of nutrients from the soil and their transport “far beyond the bounds of a single country.”⁶⁶ The rift, and the wealth produced thereby, does not result from technology, but from politics, that is, the coercion involved in the colonial control of nature and labor and the monopolistic conditions of both the extraction and sale of manufactures. This means that the project of African development, in combination with free trade considered during the brief interlude between abolition and territorial colonialism, could not possibly produce the drastic societal transformations required for accumulation.⁶⁷ This explains the quick transition toward imperialism, with the support of abolitionists – who saw colonial power as necessary to stop the slave trade and abolish slavery – and English capital, which “saw that transporting material could be made to pay better than transporting black men.”⁶⁸

Du Bois is keenly attentive to how nature and labor are jointly required to cheaply and quickly extract raw materials from the land and sell them dearly.⁶⁹ Free trade on its own does not provide the needed societal control to expropriate the land, and land expropriation does not deliver rent without human labor, which must be tied to the land and forced to work beyond what is required to satisfy its own needs.⁷⁰ The capture of both nature and racialized labor and their intensified exploitation creates a political rift that destroys local political projects, which would have otherwise kept these societies away from the pliant and accelerated provision of raw materials for European machinery. This political alienation, which serves to make nature available for western societies, moreover, coexists with the alienation from nature in the core, that is, the belief that that these societies have overcome their dependence on nature, a step facilitated by the mythical identification of whiteness with technology.

Soil, Sweat, and Status

Du Bois’s insistence in putting nature at the center of his critique of imperialism counters the avowed separation between nature and a technologized modernity. This separation is accomplished through geographical spread and the racial division of labor domestically and worldwide proper of racial capitalism. Racial hierarchy, and the reification of wealth as a moral accomplishment that marks western civilization as separate from and superior to others, obscures the fact that the metropole remains intrinsically dependent on nature.

Central to Du Bois’s project of highlighting this dependence is his recasting of “humble work,” the manual toil performed in proximity with nature, as the core of “modern marvels,” in opposition to prevailing devalued accounts of this labor as dirty work fit only for racialized workers. Du Bois makes this argument in a series of columns in the New York Amsterdam News that counter the “economic illiteracy” that underlies the devaluation of manual labor. He proposes an “honest and intelligent” framework of property as a social creation to consider the value of work and wages.⁷¹ He acknowledges the diversity of tasks involved in production, noting that some work is of inestimable value, while the contribution of other forms of work is very small, only to turn upside down the common values assigned to each of the steps. Thus, the work he considers most valuable includes “mothers in a household,” employers in “science and geography,” and “most of the work of most artists.” He similarly asserts that some profitable work is evil, like stock market gambling on “land values … and much of the profit in the distribution of food and raw materials.”⁷² An elimination of the profit motive, he argues, would mean “more valuable work and work better paid.”⁷³ Such a world would provide an alternative way of distributing “toil and wealth and enjoyment,” which, rather than apportioning labor as has long been the norm, would acknowledge that most “wealth, most well-being, depends on labor and sacrifice.”⁷⁴ The products we enjoy, he argues, emerge from an intricate cooperative process, where engineers who plan the machines that are built out of metal depend both on the “miners [who] dug the metals,” the “teachers [who] taught the engineers,” and the laborers who raised food to feed those workers who “made the road bed” for the railways which transported these materials.⁷⁵

The badly paid tasks within the production chain are seldom acknowledged, not because of manufacturing’s essential or self-sufficient character, but because racial prejudice organizes the vastly unequal distribution of wealth and care attached to different groups of laborers and variously located nature. Thus, although industry and the capitalist system were built “on the backs of Negro slaves,” and manual toil is inescapable for modern life and its marvels, manual labor is badly paid and disrespected and its contribution to modernity mostly ignored through its construction as backward and too close to nature.⁷⁶ Here Du Bois re-politicizes wages, and, more generally, value, as a problem of political judgement within the economy.⁷⁷ Rather than accepting the strict separation between economic and normative value judgments, he unveils the thick background social formations that determine economic value. By questioning the devaluation of manual labor and the disproportionate wealth that accrues to investors and highly skilled work, Du Bois reveals that economic determinations are always value-ridden, that there is no objective, rational rule that distributes resources. Instead, there is a political determination to elevate the judgment of a few, whose wealth and leisure depends on the domination of poorly remunerated workers and extracted natural resources from abroad, to the level of objective economic law.⁷⁸

This account by Du Bois reverses the racist logic by showing that racism naturalizes the exploitation on nonwhite workers; he uncovers the performative contradiction of basing technological prowess and wealth on forced labor and nature while allocating these inputs the lowest value. Two distinct debates about the labor imports of nonwhite populations in South Africa and the United States, respectively, show the prevalence of this logic: the parallel work of acknowledgment and disavowal of the centrality to modern commerce needed to devalue work performed under strenuous conditions by racialized subjects and in close contact with nature.

Documents from the colonial administration of post–Boer War South Africa record a variety of rationalizations of the differential ability of whites and nonwhites to perform different types of work. For example, an analysis of an unusual experiment with white labor in unskilled mining work claims that “white labourers cannot successfully compete with blacks in the lower fields of manual industry,” because their wages are simply uneconomical for particular jobs and that these laborers are anyway “unwilling to do more ‘dirty work’.”⁷⁹ If mining in South Africa attempts to fill unskilled positions with white workers, the argument continues, “it would mean the cessation of profitable work in most of the mines of the Witwatersrand.”⁸⁰ Reliance on white labor would mean leaving undone the most bodily strenuous activities that white workers refused to perform, such as the sorting of rocks and breaking rocks manually rather than by drilling.⁸¹ The need to limit “white labour to the performance of skilled work” traditionally associated with detachment from nature and the machinery-led processing of minerals follows from their “insuperable objection … to put forth his best endeavours as a wage earner by manual labour in the presence of a black man,” a trait common to the “southern States of America.”⁸² This racialized organization of labor is taken to be traditional custom in South Africa, where labor is strictly distributed between “the sphere of the white man and that … of the native,” to which Chinese imported labor is assimilated.⁸³

The differential assignment of value and rewards is implicit in the economic impossibility of enlisting white labor, understood as neither affordable nor exploitable enough to fit the cost requirements of mining.⁸⁴ This economic assessment presumes that racialized workers can be gotten for cheap, for “climatic and physical reasons.” The claim, moreover, is that Chinese workers’ performance of the unskilled labor “which white men could not do” provides the “necessary basis for white man’s labour – skilled labour.”⁸⁵ Thus, racialized labor emerges as essential, the sine qua non of both white labor and – as noted later – commercial riches, a conclusion that is both in tension with and dependent on its economic devaluation and violent treatment. Such treatment is assured by minority rule over a native majority, which in turn requires maintaining the status and prestige of white workers in the eyes of African natives.⁸⁶ Racism is a central mediating mechanism in a circular logic in which the priority of accumulation requires the construction of a population at once endowed with hyper-resistant bodies and the ability to live at or below subsistence levels to get production off the ground. The work of processing and manufacturing made possible by the hyper-exploited group, in turn, is performed by white workers, whose dignity and higher standards of living prevent them from engaging in strenuous jobs.⁸⁷ These divisions are enabled by a political regime that sanctions racial hierarchies and authorizes the hyper-exploitation that makes possible the further processing of raw materials – by dignified white workers – and the industrial machinery that depends on these resources.

In other words, however “natural” this division of labor appears, its operation requires violent coercion sustained by white rule, whose stability must be ensured partly by rigidly excluding white workers from undignified work and nonwhite workers from skilled professions or the territory altogether.⁸⁸ Through these and other measures, “brain toil” is kept as “the province of the white,” while “brawn or spade work that of the black or some coloured race,” a necessity for the “salvation of South Africa” as a white settler colony.⁸⁹ Thus the manual and strenuous work of nonwhites (African natives and Chinese alike) sustain the skilled employment and dignity of whites, but also continues to feed technologically enabled manufacturing in England.⁹⁰ In fact, the Transvaal mining industry was considered “vast[ly] importan[t]” to the mother country by the vice president of the Manchester Geographic Society, J. Howard Reed. This is because the demand for foodstuffs, clothing, and general stores by the “populous hive of busy workers – white, black, and yellow – employed in the mines,” but also for the “large quantities of machinery and continuous supply of stores” for the mining industry.⁹¹ Reed concludes that if the progress of the mining industry were to be interrupted, it would “cause a baneful disturbance of our commercial life.”⁹² Hence, the mining industry, which gets off the ground through racialized exploited labor, enable more comfortable jobs for white workers in South Africa and also realizes commercial gains for producers of foodstuff and machinery.

A similar paradoxical combination of devaluation and need for nonwhite labor appears in the 1920 US congressional debate on waiving the entry tax for illiterate Mexican labor to address farm labor scarcity (attributed to the emigration of Black farmworkers toward cities). Proponents highlight the superior adaptability of Mexican peons to the strenuous tasks of “prepar[ing] [the land] for the plow” by grubbing from the roots a “scrubby growth of timber” and harvesting cotton.⁹³ Texas congressmen argued that the Mexican laborer is “specially fitted for the burdensome task of bending his back to picking the cotton and the burdensome task of grubbing the fields,” labor that is beneath the “raised dignity of the [white] laborer.”⁹⁴ In addition to highlighting the higher efficiency of Mexican laborers at this task, proponents stress that the technologically enabled processing of the cotton fiber cannot proceed without securing enough labor at the lower wages that illiterate Mexicans are paid.⁹⁵ Texas Congressman Carlos Bee predicts that up to half of the cotton crop that contributes to the “material prosperity of this country will lie rotting in the field” without the Mexican labor to pick it.⁹⁶ Thus, Mexican labor is the single, essential, initiating step for prosperity, even though the laborers themselves are devalued. In fact, there is no disagreement between proponents and opponents of this measure regarding the undesirability of Mexican peons as citizens; proponents assured their peers that about 80 percent of migrant laborers will return to Mexico, not least because of the biology and adaptability to climate of “the Mexican,” who is a “hot-weather plant” that avoids the cold and returns to his tropical climate when he is done with his labor.⁹⁷

These vignettes show that Du Bois’s writings on manual work capture a widespread narrative that both acknowledges and obscures its centrality to technology and commercial wealth, and further shows that the securing of this labor depends on coercive white rule. Given these constructions, Du Bois is not surprised that everyone seeks frantically to escape the burdens of manual toil, but responds by turning upside down the devaluation of manual labor. He argues that this labor, alongside nature and the raw materials produced by the combination of both, supports the entire edifice of industry, an arrangement that only an entrenched racialized hierarchy can obscure.⁹⁸ That labor can be procured to work in contact with nature more intensively and for lesser pay is a consequence of coercive social and political forms. Thus, the burdensome character of manual toil and its meager pay is by no means a logical necessity: “higher labor costs and less docile labor might have forced a less spectacular but more humane development.”⁹⁹

Speed, Ecology, and Development Critique

Du Bois’s nod toward “less spectacular but more humane development” is an example of his advocacy for slower but more sustainable change in the colonial world. He writes in 1946 that the Gold Coast could have become a wealthy community of peasant farmers engaged in the production and processing of raw materials. Gradually, Du Bois argues, this country could have achieved autonomous status within the Commonwealth, like Australia or South Africa did as providers of wool and minerals, respectively.¹⁰⁰ But because the Gold Coast was not a “white colony,” instead of such “swift and direct” development, every penny was extracted from the farmers and they were denied participation in government. Racialization and racism here allowed for a more intense exploitation of labor and nature, the curtailment of the development of manufactures associated with extracted crops, and for the denial of native subjects’ political voice, all factors contributing to capitalist accumulation.¹⁰¹

Du Bois connects the more ruthless exploitation of colonial areas to the lack of interest in the conditions of these regions in the metropole. This, he notes, is not necessarily “conscious discrimination based on race” but sheer disinterest, which allowed for exploitation in the service of selfishness to proceed.¹⁰² Development discourse conceals these actions by claiming to operate on behalf of natives, but the practices are one-sided: while the west relies on colonial areas such as the West Indies for “vital necessities as rubber, hemp, quinine and palm oil,” it does not try “good wages, civilized conditions or work, and democratic forms of government.”¹⁰³

These statements contain a normative critique of the colonial integration into the global capitalist economy and capitalist development as a whole. Regarding the former, it contains Du Bois’s account of colonial alienation or “political rift,” that is, the political re-redirection of raw materials and racialized labor away from local needs and desires and toward accumulation, that is, the estrangement of natives from relations with nature that could fulfill community goals while regenerating nature. Against the ruthless exploitation of land and labor which politically reorganizes colonies “for business,” Du Bois advocates gradual development in Africa through the recognition of native ownership of “land and natural resources,” and development based on fair taxation over higher local wages.¹⁰⁴ His 1925 essay on Liberia and the rubber trade expands on these points. Liberia’s troubles, he argues, are not about climate, scarcity of skilled labor, transportation, or markets – even though these factors pose challenges. Instead, the problem is that “world public opinion” will not let a small country “develop simply and slowly,” not if it can produce large quantities of world commodities, such as “palm oil, rubber, coffee, sugar [and] piassava,” in high demand in world markets. Western desire for raw materials drives small countries such as Liberia to produce these crops “quickly and cheaply,” and makes foreign interference fair game if these products are not forthcoming.¹⁰⁵

Thus, Du Bois identifies the speed and intensity of capitalist development as sources of harm and dehumanization. These features, moreover, produce a political rift that alienates native peoples from alternative social and political forms that could be pursued in the absence of their forceful integration into the global economy. Were it not for the accelerated capitalist extraction typical of empire, countries would also not be inserted into networks of trade and would not demand “modern comforts” before they were ready to afford them.¹⁰⁶ This dual process forces these countries “into the turbulent currents of world commerce” from without and within.¹⁰⁷

The alienation from domestic collective goals imposed by imperial relations that is proper of the political rift reappears in Du Bois’s comments on United States–Mexico relations. In 1940, he argues that Mexican soil, oil, and minerals were “filched” at an enormous profit by the United States, an exploitative exchange that was only slowed down by the revolution, which educated and provided land to “peons.”¹⁰⁸ The revolutionary transformations that Du Bois highlights are congruent with his social understanding of property; they are tied as well to his vision of development as slower and more rational, guided by free peoples.¹⁰⁹ Du Bois is after an understanding of property where owners are responsible to the social good: “It is not, of course, easy to think of this Social Public as the real owner and spender; but unless we become socialized we cannot become human; and unless we become human we cannot end war.”¹¹⁰

Violence and imperial war, in other words, result from a racial capitalist system where private property rules and racial difference are leveraged to expand imperial domains and over-exploit nonwhite labor and nature, regardless of its social effects. The imperialist pursuit of territory, cheap racialized labor, and raw materials that feeds racial capitalism both covets these goods and declares them objectively worthless compared to the technological societies they feed. This alienation from nature in wealthy countries results in the forceful alienation of colonial peoples, whose societal arrangements are turned into regimes that guarantee accelerated development through intensified exploitation of human and nonhuman nature and ecologically destructive and destabilizing integration into global markets. Such speed of development is far from humane because it is geared toward ever-accelerating capitalist drives for profit and accumulation. This drive, therefore, necessarily produces a rift in the social and political organization of colonial countries conscripted into this structure, away from democratic aims of education and access to land by the masses.

Overall, Du Bois reveals that what ecosocialists call the “general law of environmental degradation” of capitalism is not general at all, but racialized.¹¹¹ The exertion demanded of white labor and the intensity of land and mineral extraction do not match the levels of exploitation of human and nonhuman nature at play vis-à-vis racialized labor and (post)colonial regions. In metabolic terms: there are qualitative and quantitative differences in how the labor of different groups “mediates, regulates, and controls the metabolism between himself and nature” and the degree to which this mediation exhausts labor and departs from sustainable forms that allow for the replenishment of the soil and its natural fertility.¹¹² In the colonies, and in sectors where nonwhite labor can be put to work, the energy that is extracted from humans and nature is several times higher than that which is obtained from “protected” labor and nature. This quantitative bonus is made possible by imposed political arrangements that alienate natives from nature by re-directing their labor and their land’s use away from public needs. Instead, colonial arrangements conscript natives as unfree laborers who aid the unrestrained exploitation of nature. This scheme sustains the well-being of white privileged subjects, who are alienated from the natural resources and manual labor that sustain their lifestyles. These two disjunctures are made possible by the color line.

Technology, Humanity, and Critique

When Nishnaabeg are historicized by settler colonial thought as “less technologically developed,” there is an assumption that we weren’t capitalists because we couldn’t be—we didn’t have the wisdom or the technology to accumulate capital, until the Europeans arrived and the fur trade happened. This is incorrect. We certainly had the technology and the wisdom to develop this kind of economy, or rather we had the ethics and knowledge within grounded normativity to not develop this system, because to do so would have violated our fundamental values and ethics regarding how we relate to each other and the natural world. We chose not to, repeatedly, over our history.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done, 78

It is important not to lose sight of the connections between Du Bois’s critique of dehumanizing and ecologically destructive development and his critique of technology, and the relation between both and the account of the modern self that he develops in the aftermath of his dispute with Booker T. Washington. Years after Washington’s death, Du Bois’s thinking perceptively returns to that debate in an effort to dis-alienate both Black subjects, whose education ill-prepares them for understanding their position vis-à-vis a racist capitalist system, and, more universally, white Anglo-Europeans, whose faith in technology and the disproportionate rewards they appropriate orients them toward unthinkingly participating in existing imperial structures. These writings, moreover, reveal Du Bois’s broader critique of capitalism, which focuses not only on its destructive effects over (post)colonial countries, but also over the wealthy societies that most benefit from it.

In a speech to Howard University graduates delivered in 1930, Du Bois faults both technical and liberal arts education for their lack of a “disposition to study or solve our economic problem.”¹¹³ Liberal arts education, he argues, fails if it does not come with “first-hand knowledge of real every-day life and ordinary human beings” and instead seeks professional advancement and wealth that despises work and toil.¹¹⁴ This route is taken by college graduates who take after “the white undergraduate,” who unthinkingly participate in the industrial machine in which they were born.¹¹⁵ Instead, both colleges and vocational institutions must prepare students to understand the business organization of the modern world and acquaint them “with human beings and their possibilities.”¹¹⁶ Rather than becoming cogs in the machine, where the machine is a merciless mechanism of enslavement, Black graduates must critically understand how to use the machine as an instrument to improve their well-being.¹¹⁷ Here, Du Bois centers the question of technology and industry to distinguish a world that pursues advancement and discovery without guiding ideals from one that devotes knowledge, that is, “critically tested and laboriously gathered fact martialed under scientific law,” to the goal of feeding (rather than choking) fancy and imagination that can orient us to create new worlds.¹¹⁸

This is a severe critique of the technological subject, characterized as a dehumanized being unable to lead a self-shaped life outside of the machine. This is not what Du Bois envisioned for emancipated Blacks. Instead, he argued, the South and, in particular, Black groups needed not just land but “to learn the meaning of life,” through gifted teachers that would work not to make “men carpenters, but to make carpenters men.”¹¹⁹ This requires not simply “reading, writing, and counting,” but “knowledge of this world.”¹²⁰ Such is the kind of education that prepares subjects to grow into citizens, and their voices to guide political development and contribute to the “reformation of the present social conditions.”¹²¹

This connection between education, political subjecthood, and the ability to politically steer societies is at play in his analysis of British West Africa, where he depicts educated Black leaders as “a thorn in the flesh of the new English industrialists.”¹²² White colonial officials, Du Bois argued, were interested in the development of Africans as long as they remained “primitive,” and prevented any union of forces between the masses and the educated group.¹²³ Colonial officials feared this latter group because their criticisms of the colonial system of domination revealed it to be an anomaly and disadvantageous for West Africans. Moreover, this group demanded an effective voice for the people in their affairs and attempted to steer countries toward forms of development more responsive to their population. In the terms of this chapter, the aim of anticolonial actors was to repair the rift in the politics of these regions, including by redirecting the use of raw materials for the benefit of African peoples, and thus removing a threat to European access to these resources.

That Du Bois’s interventions moved seamlessly between domestic and colonial affairs is no surprise given the continuity in discourses of development and education between these realms, including the welcome reception of Washington’s Tuskegee model in German and British Africa as a way to keep “the African true to his own best nature.”¹²⁴ These debates also eventually led to a shift in French colonies, from assimilationist education emphasizing literature and the sciences toward “technical and vocational training” and the “most modest” level of training in the sciences.¹²⁵

Understanding Du Bois’s writings about education as applying to the operation of the color line domestically and globally allows for a broader reading of his critique and the political imagination that fuels it. It expands on existing accounts that focus on Du Bois’s condemnation of the myth of the competitive society and the exposure of its racialized character.¹²⁶ As Andrew Douglas notes, Du Bois viewed the Black college as a crucial site of critique, from which a new notion of universality could emerge.¹²⁷ The current reading reveals this critique to be richer, because it engaged centrally with questions of nature and capitalist accumulation, extended its notion of racism to account for its entanglement with technology, and applied to the global colonial condition.

The critique of the technological mindset rejected both imperialism and domestic visions of greatness based on “mechanical horsepower … electric power, manufacture, and [the] army.”¹²⁸ Du Bois wanted to rid Africa of colonial powers, but also – through knowledge and liberal and radical thought coupled with self-denial – to help rescue the “terrible” United States from itself, and in the process redirect Black Americans away from “aimlessly imitat[ing]” the desire to be “big and powerful and all-conquering.”¹²⁹ Du Bois’s repurposes his criticisms of the British Empire, which built its success on coal, low wages, and slave labor, to engage with the newfound world power status of the United States.¹³⁰ He hoped that greatness and power could be used to invest in “human intelligence for the masses” and “humanitarian ends for all sorts of people.”¹³¹ In other words, US culture and its accomplishments were wrong not just because of racial injustice, but wrong in themselves because they followed no clear program of “rightness in religion or in morals” and its technological superiority was used for wealth accumulation and caused poverty all over the world.¹³² Du Bois’s normative critique demanded a radical reorientation of the US project and its citizens from a “wealth-worshipping plutocracy” toward the leadership of a “real missionary effort for the uplift of the world.”¹³³

4.5 Popular Sovereignty, Racial Capitalism, and Ecology

Never once in their arrogance did they stumble upon the single fact that in subsuming the wilderness and the Indian within their synthesis they were irrevocably cutting themselves off from the very substance of the new life they were forging in North America.

Winona LaDuke (White Earth, Ojibwe), “Natural to Synthetic and Back Again”¹³⁴

This chapter reconstructs how the melding between ideas of racial superiority and technology mediates capitalist accumulation by allowing the destructive exploitation of racialized manual labor and nature. This critique is grounded in an ecological reading of Du Bois that makes two diagnostic and two normative critical claims. Diagnostically, Du Bois first turns upside down the claim that technological superiority stems from racial superiority, a claim that dictates the confinement of nonwhites to manual work better adapted to their nature. Instead, he notes, racism makes possible technologically advanced societies because it allows the violent exploitation of human and nonhuman nature that would otherwise be found outrageous and unacceptable. Racial ideology and the violent extraction of resources that it allows sustain technologically enabled superiority. Second, Du Bois exposes the primacy of nature and “humble work” in making modern life and its technologically enabled comforts possible: there is no modern life without soil and sweat. Normatively, Du Bois first denounces the breakneck speed of the development required by global capitalism’s conscription of land in the colonies and, in particular, its prioritization of private property over socialization and the good of society. Second, Du Bois condemns the technological mindset as a poor measure of human achievement and a deviation from the good life. Technology, in other words, reflects a peculiar and not particularly admirable western obsession with speed, efficiency, and the mastery of nature.

This account adds to the picture of imperial popular sovereignty and excessive self-and-other-determination painted in this book so far. It illuminates that imperial popular sovereignty, which rules other societies despotically, operates over both human and nonhuman nature. On the one hand, techno-racist popular sovereignty alienates wealthy publics from their dependence on nature and manual labor. On the other hand, their “other-determination” coercively alienates colonial peoples and peoples in the Global South from their own projects of economic cooperation and socialization, which would require a slow and humane approach to nature and economic development, creating a political rift.

Wealthy societies’ alienation from nature and racialized manual labor not only illuminates a crucial mechanism for racial capitalism to access nature and labor on the cheap, but also reveals the mechanism by which formally democratic collectives embrace it. The alienation from nature of these collectives stems from an identification or integration of whiteness with technology as indicative of modernity/superiority and a concomitant identification of Blackness/brownness with bodily exertion and strenuous work in contact with nature. This alienation from “nature” does not apply to humans in general but to the group racialized as white and is more precisely a double alienation from both nature and the nonwhite humans who work the land. This alienation depends on the disavowal of the intimate dependence of the technologically enabled comforts on this manual labor and nature Differently put, alienation from nature cannot be understood without the racialized mapping of the nature/technology divide, which results in indifference toward the destruction of nature implemented through a variety of unfree labor forms. Consequently, the undoing of an ecologically destructive capitalism cannot proceed without the dismantling of racism.

It follows that the problem of environmental injustice is not just about the disproportionate impact of environmental degradation over racialized people but about how capitalist accumulation occurs through hierarchically produced vulnerabilities, making inequalities and dispossession drivers of environmental destruction.¹³⁵ In other words, racialized political formations are entwined with our present ecological crisis because they facilitate both the more intense devastation of nature overseas and its disavowal.

By adding an ecological substratum to the material underpinnings of white democracies, this chapter completes the critical account of popular sovereignty and excessive self-determination, making clear that labor exploitation and the destruction of nature are entailed in political regimes that are brought together by possessive attachments. Racial hierarchy is required for these groups to demand and enjoy riches that are made possible by a regime of accumulation that depends on the destruction of racialized families, communities, and their natural environment.

Having spelled out an imperial popular sovereignty and its material presuppositions, Democracy and Empire turns now to exploring the emancipatory possibilities that remain in this concept and practice. Such an exploration, conducted in Chapter 5, grapples with the transnational aspects of racial capitalism and the structures of imperial and post-imperial domination that enable it, and contests the cooptation of democratic discourse for the legitimization of societal models dependent on destructive forms of capital accumulation.