Are you a professional pillow fighter, or a 95 low-cost time travel agent, or maybe real estate sales on Mars is your profession? It doesn't matter. Whatever it is you do, however complex or intricate, Monday.com can help you organize, work a straight, and make it more efficient. Monday.com is the one centralized platform for everything work-related. And with Monday.com, work is just easier. Monday.com, for whatever you run, go to Monday.com to learn more. Welcome to the new books network. Hello everyone, welcome to the new books network. My name is Jeffrey Gordon, and today I'm talking to Enes Valdez about her book, Democracy in Empire, Labor, Nature, and the Reproduction of Capitalism, which came out from Cambridge University Press in 2023. In scholarly and popular discourse, popular sovereignty and self-determination are typically conceived of as the antithesis of imperialism. While histories of the emergence of democracy in Western Europe and its cellular offshoots ignore the imperial setting of struggles for suffrage expansion and institutional change altogether. Democracy in Empire cast it out on both of these tendencies. My guest, Enes Valdez, argues that popular sovereignty in the global north contains an affective attachment to wealth that is secured through collective agreements to dominate others. A phenomenon she calls "self and other determination." The book details how social reproduction in the US and Western Europe is enabled by the exploitation of racialized others, who sacrifice their families and communities to perform arduous and poorly paid menial jobs, only to be derided and oppressed by the populations who depend on their labor, and also shows how the political alienation from nature and wealthy countries is mediated by technology and enabled by a joint devaluation of nature and manual labor performed by racialized others. The book concludes with a theorization of anti-imperial popular sovereignty grounded in transnational movements and political relations that encompass nature. Enes Valdez is associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. She is also the author of transnational cosmopolitanism, Kant Du Bois in Justice as a political craft, which came out from Cambridge University Press in 2019. Hello, Enes. Hi, Jeffrey. It's great to be here. Thank you for inviting me to this podcast. It's my pleasure. I really enjoyed the book, and I'm excited to talk about it. First of all, as is customary on the new books in the work, I would like you to tell us a little bit about yourself. What led you to write this book and how does it fit in with your earlier work? Sure. Yeah, so the book follows quite directly, I guess, from the first book, which is Transnational Cosmopolitanism, Kant Du Bois and Justice as a political craft. And it does because that book really addresses the literature on cosmopolitanism and makes a case to think about transnationalism as a more political way to think about the global. So cosmopolitanism, the idea of a global quality or a global community has been the way in which drawing from Kant, the literature has thought about questions of global justice. And what I argue is that this account that does not really depart very much from states and individuals. I mean, the question of migration and the question of movements sort of figures there, but it's ultimately really states that gradually are going to kind of join a community that will become this global community. I argue that looking at states and their potential gradual convergence into a cosmopolitan community misses that there are already forms of commonality and political reciprocity that exists between groups that are marginalized, both in the Western world in the global north, and I'm thinking particular since I draw from Du Bois about slaves and the descendants of slaves in the United States, and subjects of colonialism or subject at the receiving end of colonialism. And so I draw from Du Bois's writings on this particular problem, the way in which the question of black oppression in the US cannot be understood if not as a global colonial situation, but many people refer to as the global democracy, but I really specify right how Du Bois comes to see the problem of racial injustice as not simply impossible to comprehend by only looking at American democracy. And so in doing this, I really try to think seriously about how do we think about transnational politics, what are these coalitions and this establishment of solidarities aiming for, and in particular what kinds of authorities they are addressing and think about Du Bois operating on behalf of colonial countries in, for instance, a San Francisco conference, but also about, you know, the pan-African conference. All of these political moments and political claims are issued for opposition that is not a position of the citizen and the state, but rather a community that is in coalition with others abroad. So I say that it follows quite directly because as I just kind of, I just told you, this is very much a story of resistance to global regimes of domination associated with imperialism and capitalism. The second book does is really look at these structures that go largely and theorize in the first book, because it is the politics of resistance and transnational coalition making that is my focus. And the other way in which the project sort of draws from previous work is that I've been doing work on the political theory of migration, particularly focusing on questions of enforcement and surveillance and racialized violence. And in the second book migration figures quite strongly, particularly in chapters two and three. And so this is in a way this book really for me was figuring out theoretically and historically how migration fits within an imperial genealogy. And I think that one of the things that I really like about your work is that it starts from global theorizations of racism and capitalism and see how the US state and the US political order is shaped by these structures that are much better global scope, rather than thinking of racism in capitalism as something that starts out on the national scale, whereas national by default, and then extends out to the rest of the world through some kind of diffusion process that's usually poorly specified. And I think that that provides a really useful way of theorizing and thinking about popular sovereignty and resistance to forms of imperialism, but also, as you say, and as this book really rigorously theorizes the popular foundations of imperialism and the concept of social imperialism is very much in my mind as I read this book, but that's something that I thought about a lot. So, the first question, so I come up this as a comparative politics specialist and I'm well grounded in the literature on historical democratization, the basically how Western European countries in the US became democracies to begin with debates about whether it was bottom up or top down which specific cleavages were the most important, but one of the really notable things about it is that the imperial setting of transitions to democracy and the expansion of suffrage to first to working class men, working class white men in the US and then subsequently to women, white women in the US, is taking place in the imperial context, and this is totally something that the literature on historical democratization has been silent about. And so, one of the things that I am thinking about as I read your book is how can we think about how the imperial setting and the colonial setting affected the sorts of political identities, articulations of interest and coalitions that emerged in the so-called global north in the metropolitan spaces during this period to be in struggle and contestation over the expansion of suffrage and different directions and institutional changes that gave electoral officials more voice vis-a-vis bureaucrats and larks. So, all that being said, how did the imperial context shape demands for popular sovereignty in the US and Western Europe during these periods of expansion of suffrage and in greater voice for working class people and women? This is a great question and it's really kind of what opens the book is this first part that really conceptualizes this problem. And, you know, I'm familiar, I did train, did my training in comparative politics as well, and so I am familiar with them with the literature that you mentioned and the way in which it's kind of tied to methodological nationalism in the sense that it's things of particular states, I mean, war might figure in the state formation and so on, and it's really kind of a national story. And before turning, go ahead. When I'm going to jump in, there is a book out there called Post-Imperial Democracy is that it includes as one of its cases the French Third Republic, which was super duper imperial. One of the notable things about it is the expansion of French colonialism during the French Third Republic, and instead of looking at how that interplay goes on with, you know, Francis returned an expansion of democracy taking place at the same time as the expansion of colonialism and exploring how these two things might be connected, it's called Post-Imperial Democracy, so I just don't get that, but yeah. No, absolutely, I mean the blind spots are impressive, and then they are not only affecting the theorization of democracy in France, as you mentioned, but also, you know, once this first wave of democratization has been completed, then, you know, these are standard sides towards the rest of the world, and they're like, okay, so how are these going to follow up on these footsteps, as if these policies had not already been fully embedded into this world and not in a particular comfortable position, but rather at the receiving end of these empires, right, and so, but there's a planks laid, established, and now all the difficulties that might emerge are, again, attributed to these particular countries, where they've been democratized, why it's authoritarianism, and so on and so forth, so yeah, so I think that it is a corrective to that literature, but it's also corrective to the way in which political theory theorizes popular sovereignty, which is, again, kind of a domestic affair, right, it's, there might be groups that are excluded and, you know, they're demanding enfranchisement, but this is nonetheless a national affair, it's, you know, it's bordered, and there is no conception that a key demand of enfranchisement is a demand for well-being, and what you could call economic rights, social and economic rights, and that there are, there's a key problem in democracy, which is where these resources come from, and we tend to think about this as a problem of taxation, right, and we should, we should touch each, in order to redistribute and so on, but it is, of course, a global problem in a world of empires where the resources available, the common wealth, as I call it in the book, does come from imperial locales, an imperial, imperial controlled territories, and so if enfranchisement is taking place in politics that our empires, I think we cannot avoid theorizing that this common wealth is not only common, but also this politically extracted to be then kind of be declared common, and then, you know, the struggle for enfranchisement happens around this resources that have been impurely appropriate, right, so that is kind of the key insight, if we are going to think about democratization or questions of popular sovereignty, we ought to think about the common wealth that is at the core of this demands, and this wealth is impurely obtained, and so for understanding this chapter one introduces the concept of self and other determination, which is an extension of self determination, and adds the other, and this is because self determination as self-contained forgets that because there's imperial wealth being extracted, there is other peoples being determined by this particular group, and this determination is, of course, despotically, the other also exemplifies the question of that the other one that's confirmed, the one that is ruled despotically is racialized, right, it's declared different, and other, so self and other determination I think is the term for understanding what happened during this process of enfranchisement in empires, the demand was to join a particular nation and to join in imperial domination, and so that leads me to think about the question of, and this I draw here from Du Bois, in particular his essay "The African Roots of War", the question of national feeling is also a possessive feeling, right, and again, you know, this is the effort here is to think about what the language that I use is the material basis of popular sovereignty, right, and so how can we think about national feeling associated with an imperial demand to appropriate resources from others, and so this is what I call possessive attachments, and these possessive attachments, you know, can be found in different texts and can be found in unions and labor activists and so on and so forth, that take for granted that there is a right to rule others and incorporate this wealth, but then the second chapter kind of expands that to in order to think about how it's not only the enfranchisement of a settled community, political status, so to speak, but it also incorporates those who arrive as migrants in order to become settlers, right, and so yeah, I think your next question perhaps gets a little bit more at that, but yeah, I mean the core insights I think or contributions are first to say that historically enfranchisement takes place during a moment in which these countries are empires, as a consequence, we need to consider how this wealth has been obtained, and a third point there is to consider how national attachments really are possessive attachments, and we need to theorize them as such Yeah, and I think that I've also been reading a lot of theories of imperialism for some writing that I'm doing right now, and going back to Hobson really there's this perception that imperialism is driven by like a cabal of monopolists and financiers and the goal is simply to plunder the rest of the world from their benefit and to use the blood of working class people to form the militaries of these advanced countries, these imperial states to you know, they're almost, it's conceived of like almost like the working classes that these imperial states are also losers from imperialism, but I think that you make this quite, and I think that other recent work in the historical sociology of empires is in, and for example, german, they're bomborous work connecting welfare states and colonial empires, you know, imperialism had a lot of popular support because they had a lot of popular material benefits and in a lot of different ways for different imperial states, most notably the US where imperialism opened up all this land that allowed people to form their own settlements and see becoming parts of the wage working class in cities so I think that that's also an important contribution of the book is kind of refraining imperialism and refraining political, the politics of imperialism basically as you alluded to migration is an important theme in this book as well and the effects of migration on voting behavior, party systems and political economies has been a major focus of empirical research and popular media discussion in comparative politics and American politics and the recent years, yet as you know migration has been a world historical event with large scale historical consequences in, you know, we can, in US history, we can point to backlashes against southern European immigrants, Asian immigrants on the west coast, Mexican immigrants in the south west, I think it's partially because the sources of immigration in the flavor of the anti-immigrant rhetoric took on these different forms in different parts of the country that this is kind of like not theorized very well as something that affected American American political development as a whole but, you know, migration has been something that has structured American political institutions for a very long time now. My question for you is how did migration in the imperial scripts that marked non white workers as threats, sheep, white labor and gradchetsment demands in the US and the British seller colonies. Thank you. So this is a great question because it ties to labor and franchisement and I think labor is a key part of what I'm trying to do with migration and trying to connect migration to regimes of labor control, because I mean there has been some work in American political development that mean, and the work work of historians like main guy, impossible subjects, but this is, I mean, and this goes back to the work of Stuart Hall and you know his reconstruction of like the economic, you know, the Marxist accounts of racial oppression, particularly in the South African School of racial capitalism and then the sociological account of race, right, and the sociological account of race reconstructs racism as a social phenomenon and how it organizes and, you know, in particular hierarchical ways, groups of people, but then on itself, it really begs the question, right, why is this organization based on constructed notions of race attached to inferiority and superiority, right. And so what I think racial capitalism does is tell us, well, what it does is create laboring bodies that can be exploited in a more in a more intense way, right. So to return to your question, I understand the role of migration. I want to talk about mobility, right, I understand mobility leading to the 1920s, like 1910s to 20s as an imperial project of labor control, right, and so you have populations expelled from Europe because of poverty because of fear of unrest. There are a series of programs that allow kind of localities to contribute to the migration to a set of colonies of some of its poorest members. And so you have the expulsion of labor from Europe, and then you have in the aftermath of the abolition of labor in the British Empire, the need to complement or to create a new source of controllable labor and that gives rise to indenture labor from India. And with that gets married in conflict and the denunciations of abuse and national is really kind of taking up the cause of indenture laborers. It's open up to Chinese labor migrants, right, and sorry, denture laborers. And so, as this is the background of labor control. The key difference here is that when each of these populations that I just mentioned set food in the Anglo settler colonies and the US that is of course by then its own state. When they set food, a subgroup does become a settler, or they become settlers, and others become this threat. And so that's why, you know, and now we get to the labor and franchise in your question, right. And so the demands of labor and franchise men are demands for white labor, labor. This is a white labor, both foreign and domestic. So both new arrivals from this labor expulsion that I was just talking about. Demanding enfranchisement, by differentiating themselves, and declaring the threatening character of this, you know, laborers that can toil under the sand or that I can, you know, do labor for labor for for less money and live in this conditions that are not, that are beneath the dignity of white labels and so on and so forth, right. And so, I think then the labor enfranchisement is a demand both to become settlers, and to prevent or exclude or create particularly secluded yams of vulnerable labor for non-white arrivals, right. And so, and so then ultimately then the label migrant doesn't really help us because it doesn't distinguish between these different groups. So, if you bring in labor control and then you make an argument that labor has always been racialized and there has been different sorts of labor performed by different racial groups. And that then racialization works quite effectively to create certain groups that can be more readily and intensively exploited, then that is the particular kind of conceptual scheme that allows you to understand these struggles for labor enfranchisement. So, the second kind of, I think, key argument that I want to make is that if this is the case, then the way in which we think about migration, including this religion, public opinion that you just mentioned, which is like, well, you're a citizen and then you get asked. So what do you think about migrants? Should we let in more migrants or less migrants? Should we let in migrants that are highly skilled or not. And this question presumes this settler position, right, presumes that migration is simply a question that turns out that there were states and the states were democratic, and one of the attributes of this democracy is that they can decide where to let in migrants or not. As opposed to mobility as a system of imperial labor control, and a claim from white workers to settle and determine who can get in or not right so this is a very different framing but even in the political view of migration, the framing which democratic citizens of democracy have the right to control their borders is, is not heavily contested. So, so I think this is a key, a key move for me, it is a world historical force. So mobility has to do with labor control, and it is raised the real distinction for us to understand the particular access and the particular conditions under which people can take residence either in any regular way and as a victim of mass regime so surveillance or claiming to be a settler citizen that can in turn determine who gets it. Yeah, and this goes back to our discussion about methodological and nationalism just a moment ago right because if you're starting with a social on college that is a set of assumptions about what are the basic building blocks of social reality you think those building blocks are these things called nations that have a talkfulness, you know relationships with their the territories that they live in and they have these state apparatuses that reflect in some way their collective interests you're going to think about migration a lot differently than if you think of mobility as one of the core features of social reality and historically mobility has been on it. Every bit is important to settlement in terms of the human story and in terms of life on human life on our planet and yet mobility is kind of relegated to the status of exception or deviation from the norm in our in our political theory because it's so like grounded in this 19th century romantic world view of like, you know, these nations and they literally grow out of their own soil there's no account of how they get there. Yeah, and if I can add to that, I guess I mean the way I put it in the book is that this global imperial regime of labor control gets absorbed by states. But, but the global function function remains the same so it's a racialized system that restricts mobility according to to race and really organizes surveillance and enforcement in a way that creates spaces of vulnerability to exploitation right, so I think I like this, this idea of, you know, it's a global regime of labor control, we can say it super clearly when the British Empire is in charge. And what we do is simply to have states absorb it, right? Right. Yeah. Yeah. And that also makes me think of a ridiculous mungi as work on how migration control all the control of who comes into the country or not. This thing that we think is of us foundational to state sovereignty was an outcome was, in fact, these global migrant flows that were organized by the British Empire, the exact kind of thing that you're talking about. Yeah. So, moving on, you, you argue that white Americans pursue a historical historically evolving models of heteropatriarchal family depends on nurturing and care by disposable brown workers. How does the devalued social reproductive labor of Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Latino immigrants perpetuate imperial popular sovereignty and racial capitalism? And what are the effects of this labor regime on these workers and their families? Yeah, thank you for that question. So, that's chapter three where I deal with the portion of social reproduction and so just to kind of situate that chapter in the organization of the book, chapters. One and two that we just discussed, set up the notion of imperial popular sovereignty and chapters three and four really kind of bring you down in one case to the realm of social reproduction. And in the other case, the realm of manual labor and nature to really see the particular modes of accumulation of really of capitalist accumulation. And so in that context, the claim about social reproduction and its relation to imperial popular sovereignty really focuses on the question of what I call brown families, right? So Mexican American indigenous and working class families that across the border and fulfill a series of functions. Now, let me go back a little bit and say how I started the chapter and how I started writing the chapter, which was thinking about the 2008 so-called crisis of family separations at the border, where the Trump administration decided to prosecute parents for crossing the border and as a consequence by sending the parents to be prosecuted in fact separated them from their children. And so the chapter was motivated by witnessing the reaction, which was one of horror and how can this happen. These are families and so on and so forth. And there's no question that it was horrific, but I think I took issue with the how exceptional it was thought to be. Right, and so then what that chapter does is really examine how conquest, the conquest of the Mexican Northwest that became the American Southwest, the regime of irregular migration, the Brazil program, and finally our contemporary system of mass surveillance of irregular migrants, how you can find a common threat going through all of these events, in which all of them involved is wrapped in family relations and conscripting these families or, you know, depending on the period. There's some more emphasis on, you know, male labor, definitely the Brazil program was exclusively recruiting men as workers, but then, you know, we have the more recent period where service labor and care labor, that's kind of shift the demographics of migrant labor toward women. But in any case, so the separation of the Brazil program, the disruption of, so I let me go chronologically, the disruption of families when Anglo settlement after the conquest meant that the better jobs were taken by Anglo settlers and there was a place of this killing of Mexican labor. Women had to leave and work outside the house so that's the first kind of the first account of family disruption and that is attached to conquest. But then, you know, let's move to the to the Brazil program, but entails his family separation so male migration and families left behind, usually attached to children either taken either working outside the home or taking adult function, something that actually, you know, is still a prominent feature of families of migrants today, particularly when this is a deported parent. So that's the Brazil program and then transnational migration again turning a more feminized migration process again international separation. And so, so then the problem of family separations in reality, follow from this quite radical attempt of these families to travel together. Right. So, and that and that is really disruptive because it was the idea that you could just, you know, do and then do these families in order to, you know, plug the labor that you needed. But then, you know, once, in addition to kind of what prompts the 2018 separations, which is the fact that families are moving together, what you have is the families that are in the US and who's some of its members are one of the approximately 11 to 12 million undocumented migrants, right. And so these are mixed families, families that may have one or two parents deported. And so this disordering of families, I think, was what I was really finding as quite common. And the disordering of families and now, you know, coming to your question, what's the relationship with imperial popular sovereignty is again kind of this claim to be able to have access to to labor, cheap labor, you know, doing work, excuse me, doing work, either in the home, you know, as cook as a nanny, or work doing construction work, all kinds of, you know, think about, you know, kitchen workers in restaurants, and so on and so forth. Right. So this claim to be able to conscript particularly racialized groups to particular badly paid and exploitative labor results in disrupted families, and the destruction of both these families either so very physical separation. They're simply, you know, one is deported or one must leave, leaving the family behind. And also in the sense of, you know, the exhaustion of long hours of work, and, and, and the strains that this puts, this puts on families and communities right. So then the idea is that imperial popular sovereignty includes relations of role, and this relations of role includes conscripting labor for different things without regard of the consequences over this, these communities. Absolutely. And, you know, when you think about how important cheap food is to the US political economy in terms of making people okay with stagnant wages and facilitating a certain standard of living for white middle class. People in white working class people are people don't ask well how has food stayed so cheap for so long it's because the entire agricultural sector runs on the labor of migrant workers who don't have rights and don't have the ability to collectively mobilize for higher wages, except in exceptional places. But for the most part, you know, the point of these programs is to make it so that you're just, you're just getting the labor power and nothing else of the human as much as possible in these situations, including the parts that can resist it. And, you know, people don't quite appreciate just how central that is to the US political economy. And again, when you think about how important homeownership is to the US political economy and the affective strategies of people for middle class homeownership again, that's only possible because of migrant labor in the construction sector, like sure we're having housing price spirals right now, but like to the extent that it's affordable at all for people to build the alms. It's partially because you have cheap labor to build the homes. And I think that, and you know, there are a lot of similar things going on in Europe where you have, there's been research on the so-called black Mediterranean and the migrant workers from Africa who come to places like Italy, Southern France, Spain to work in the agricultural sector and they be cheap, the provision of cheap food possible there as well. And, you know, I think that that's something that is just not visible in our economic commentary or unless some state like Alabama or something just like has a street code in law that they're going to crack down on all the legal immigrants and then all the agro food companies are like, "Our food is going to rot in the fields." That's a bad idea. But aside from those exceptional moments, like this stuff is really invisible to people and the effects of these regimes of migrant labor and so-called guest worker programs on the families and on the people in their emotional lives is also something that's rendered invisible. You know, guest worker, that sounds like such a nice thing compared to just altogether expelling them and keeping them out with like really draconian border enforcement, but it's actually a really crappy system and really in the community. Yeah, and I wanted to, I mean, to echo, I mean, your focus on cheap food because, and I mean, these are what you know what you would call wage goods, right? So as you say, the reason why we can keep wages, you know, stagnant is because labor is cheap. I mean, farm labor is kind of, you know, harvesting the food that, to make it more affordable. But then I think you mentioned, I mean, you, yeah, you hinted in your question, the way with the heteropatriarchal family is transforming, right? And so this is why I chose it to think about it through a framework of social reproduction. I mean, and then drawing from, you know, from feminist political theories and feminist theories of color. Because it is the appropriate, well, social reproduction concerns itself with the appropriation of unpaid labor by women in the household. What we have seen as a heteropatriarchal family has increasingly seen kind of both parents go out on the labor force. And so the condition of possibility for this is that, well, this labor is no longer unpaid, but it's very badly paid and exploited. Whereas the food preparation and, you know, on the cleaning and the caring, right? This can be offloaded to this particular vulnerable labor force. And this is what kind of racial capitalism as a framework is really key, right? I mean, to understand how this transformations that, you know, what used to be a normal form of accumulation and appropriation of women's labor is transformed into an appropriation of racialized labor that requires state surveillance and enforcement to stay exploited and cheap. And again, you know, it is the bottom line. It is the wage goods that need to remain cheap for. Yeah. Yeah. And I also think about elder care in this country, which is increasingly being shifted onto families for this is something that's going on in my life, both for myself and my wife. You know, we have elderly parents and families have to shoulder so much of the financial burden and we're not able to, but to the extent that there's even any possibility of getting some elder, some care for elderly parents who can't clean up after themselves or look after themselves because of their physical frailty is it's because there are migrant, usually women, usually racialized, poorly, extremely poorly paid, help care workers who can go into the homes and look after our parents because we live in different states and we have jobs and we can physically and economically cannot do it ourselves. And it's like migrant labor is, in this case, substituting extremely poorly for an adequately funded welfare state as well. But yeah, it's like you may strap under the surface and you see a migrant labor just propping up the American political economy by making certain policy compromises or efforts to voice a state of aiding paying adequately for social reproductive tasks investment by using racialized value. Absolutely. And there you see also the contradictions of capitalism in the sense that capitalism is six to overloading to the state and the welfare state, some of the social reproduction of its workforce, but then it pushes further, you know, against the state to read large, you know, against taxation and you know, reduction and infringement. And so then you see this racialized population coming to take over a deeply insufficient and inadequate system of elder care. So I want to talk about your the last chapter, Bonnie chapter of your book, as we're getting a little tight on time, because one of the things that I really valued about your book is that you try to provide some kind of way forward. I think that I've been reading a lot of books that have an extremely negative view of the status quo, which I agree with, but then they say, well, we don't have to give any kind of affirmative or positive kind of action plan and they just leave it accurate. And I'm like, all right, this is really disabling, but what I value is that you actually do try to think about what what does anti imperial popular sovereignty look like, how can we pre movements for popular sovereignty and self determination that do not depend on exploitation of racialized others and imperial relations. So yeah, what does anti imperial popular sovereignty look like? The idea of chapter five that sort of continues evident to the conclusion is to devise a mode of rule that doesn't subject others, but also one that doesn't enthusiastically join into imperial projects. I mean, I think this should be emphasized and I had a note at the beginning, but I didn't end up mentioning that, that much of this joining the imperial sort of enterprise is aspirational for, you know, for many sectors of working class, it's aspirational. But the problem is that even if it's aspirational, it informs the kind of politics that emerge, right? And so I'll finish this aside very quickly. Now, this, to extend that there is this possessive attachment, however aspirational it is, what we observe as, you know, the backlash against globalization and migration and so on. It retains this possessive key, right? So the demand is not against capitalism, against corporations, against the concentration of wealth. The demand is to shun migrants to close borders. And so it's important, I think, to note, to what extent, even when, of course, there remain, you know, worker exploitation was a constant and not just affecting racialized groups, to the extent that these groups would would join a project of resistance that was racist and an anti-immigrant, which still should be concerned with that. But, and so the opposite of that was to think about a mode of rule that really targets these elite actors that are, well, ripping the benefits of first these divisions and the super expectation of racialized groups. And so that chapter reads together Martin Luther King, in particular his essay on the war on Vietnam and France Fanon, who also sees the moment of Vietnam as a moment of opening or colonized countries. And what I think is key is that both of these thinkers are exposing the Vietnam War first as an imperial war. In fact, you know, King very clearly denounces and kind of traces the chronology of US support for France first and then once France is defeated, they're taken up of the imperial test by themselves. But what King is that is really keen on emphasizing is that these are oligarchy projects, oligarchy projects that conscript, working classes and white and black soldiers going to war together in what he calls some sort of brutal solidarity. And on the side of Fanon is to think about the co-opted post-colonial elites that continue the most of extraction of colonialism now and also as a historian, but domestic kind of authority, right? And so, an anti-imperial popular sovereignty is one that departs from diagnosing these particular structures of empire and directing its forces or its against these modes of global governance. And I think what's important here is to think of these projects as projects that are not simply conservative projects, and this is something that I do also in chapter two. And I have recently written a piece in Albania's Manova's blog post-neoliberalism, but also projects that are left projects, right? Because I mean, if you think about the left, there is an issue in the world of the left, there is, of course, a differentiated account of domestic politics, which the aim is to protect, at least, you know, in theory, or at least, you know, in terms of their narrative against the citizens against the ills of capitalism, right? But also notice that, you know, foreign policy is about protecting corporate interest abroad, right? And so this is precisely what Marx, when he's talking about British and Irish labor, is thinking about his chastising British labor for filling a sense of superiority and refusing to come together with Irish labor. And what Marx is saying is what you're doing is simply kind of, it's simply making the task of the landowners, both in Britain and Ireland, easier, right? So you are strengthening this actor that is eventually going to come back and, you know, and hurt you. And so, and so I think there's a key, a key, you know, frustration and a key sort of critique of left politics in the global north, which is that their left, their leftism is limited to the domestic sphere. And so, for these projects to become anti-imperial popular projects and to actually preempt, I mean, the enrichment of corporations that then will be the actors that they will be facing domestically is really to think about a mode of rule that does take into account empire as a global force and anti-imperial politics as a dismantling of this system. So, I don't think that I articulated, this was, let me say, a bit more of what I do in the conclusion, and what I do in the conclusion is really try to think about anti-imperial popular sovereignty as following, I guess, it's difficult and I've been having a few kind of exchanges about, you know, popular sovereignty and where to retain popular sovereignty. And the reason why I want to retain it is that once we are able to conceptualize its material basis, and once we're able to critique the base of popular sovereignty on these extractive imperial relations, then once that critique is there, we still need to have the capacity to rule in order precisely to preempt these exploitative relationships and extractive relationships from being established. And so what the conclusion does is try to think, continue to think with King and Fanon, but also incorporate indigenous political theory to think about what kinds of forms of rule that are aimed at, you know, improving the well-being of communities without falling into first destructive relationships, but also without falling in most of production that are simply producing for accumulation, right? So, I mean, it's a radical shift, but it is the shift that is called for once you uncover the imperial basis of democracy, right? Yeah. Right. So I know we're running out of time now. It's customary in these interviews to ask for the last question to be about, what are you working on now? What's coming up in the pipeline for you? So I'm working on a project on dependencies theory, and this book is very much like a dependency theory in reverse. That's how I described it to one of my friends. I can definitely see that in Florence. Yes, exactly. And so what I'm trying to do, there's been a fair amount of writing on anti-colonial political theory, but I think because this tradition has centered predominantly on the British Empire, and English-speaking theorists, it has really neglected a tradition, such as the tradition of dependency theory, which on the other hand, I mean, something else that kind of detaches these two groups is that dependency theory used to be a part of comparative politics, right? And it was never engaged in political theory. But now that the anti-colonial, I mean, work like Nazmos Sultan, or Tejas Parrasher, Adam Gattachu, so they've enlisted Indian and African political thinkers. Once this literature has been developed, it's really almost calling for dependency theory in the sense that the kinds of arguments are the same. You have in Fanon, in one of the papers that I'm writing, you have several, you know, in the rich of the earth, Latin America appears at least three or four times, because Fanon says Latin America is a warning sign that independence may not mean anything if capitalism and co-opted elites stay in place. So the goal is to bring dependency theory as an anti-colonial theory to think first about democracy and authoritarianism in post-colonial countries. And the second, there's just two papers at this point in that project, is to think about the new international economic order, which has made a comeback. So the work of Tam Moyne and Adam Gattachu very much looks at the new international economic order as this, I think Moyne's words are, is the high tide of anti-colonialism. But there is a Marxist dependency theory critique. I think there's such a zone in our Marini and the Antonio dos Santos and Vania Bembira, that critique, Raoul Prevej is the architect, both of Cepal, the mentalist thought, and of the new international economic order. He's the founding secretary general of the UN of the UN mission for trade and development. And so I think this critique has not been being recovered at the second intervention. Yeah, both of those are really important because right now there is a little bit of a dependency theory regrowth or resuscitation in development economics and in development studies journals. Ingrid Von Reben has written a lot about kind of bringing dependency theory back in as a major field of thought in the field of development economics. But why I think it's really important for political theorists and political scientists to talk about it too, because I think that that discussion can be a little economic stick and its exclusive focus on the relations of production in the workplace and the maldistribution of global resources and malappropriation resources and transfer of surplus. What you don't get as much of is the critique of the political forms that arise out of dependency and keep dependency in place. And I think that that's a really important place where political theorists can contribute to the discussion. Yes, absolutely. Ingrid Von Reben's work is one and then there's a recent book by Felipe Antunez de Oliveira on the pink tide and brown tide in Brazil and Argentina. They've partnered for a paper. They're both in London. There was a lot of Samir Amin in Ingrid's dissertation and I think the work with Felipe has really brought the mostly translated tradition of much dependency theory into the mix. There's a lot going on. It's an exciting moment for that and I think there's a lot to be done in political theory with that tradition. Okay, thank you so much for joining me today and as I really enjoyed our conversation and thank you all for listening to us on the New Books Network. (gentle music) (gentle music)
