CRITIQUE Dialogue – Book Forum on Inés Valdez’ Democracy and Empire: Labor, Nature, and the Reproduction of Capitalism
Last year, CRITIQUE and RACE.ED came together to host a discussion of Inés Valdez’ new book Democracy and Empire: Labor, Nature, and the Reproduction of Capitalism. In this book forum, Michael Albert and Emile Chabal engage the book’s main arguments and Valdez offers a response in the final post.
Reflections on Democracy and Empire
** This book is an impressive synthesis of many different strands of political theory, and it is very persuasive in its core argument that we need to attend to the material and too-often imperial conditions of possibility for projects of popular democratic sovereignty. And the relevance of its argument for popular struggles today is very clearly apparent. I read the book as someone who is sympathetic Chantal Mouffe’s work on left populism, and I have to some extent been engaged in efforts to think about what a progressive, populist climate politics should look like today. And so I found the book highly illuminating in the way it shows how invocations of “the people” – whether for left or rightwing political projects – are inevitably entangled in complex histories of empire, racialization, and exclusion. Thus it made me reflect a lot on how leftwing populist projects need to reckon with these histories and challenge the tendencies toward what you call “imperial popular sovereignty” that are present even in certain leftwing discourses. I thought about this particularly in relation to Green New Deal discourses, like those of Matthew Huber, which tend to disavow the forms of imperial extractivism and uneven development that would shadow efforts in the global north to decarbonize while sustaining our imperial mode of living. So overall I think this book is highly relevant to contemporary climate debates and an important contribution to the field.
I also appreciated the efforts at the end of the book to sketch out what an alternative, anti-imperialist and ecological conception of popular sovereignty might look like. In particular, I loved the part where you write that “Declaring loyalty to one another and gratitude to the Earth, water, animals, wind, plans, and other nonhuman forms of life is a political stance preferable to pledging alllegiance to the US flag”. I think this is an excellent policy proposal that should be immediately in all public schools in the US!
Now I’ll shift to raising a couple of small critiques a posing some questions that the book raised for me.
First, a small point, I’d like to hear you elaborate a bit on how you understand the difference between the political and economic. One of your critiques of other approaches is that they do not theorize the political dimensions of empire and racial capitalism. E.g. you say, building on Nancy Fraser, that we need to attend to the political conditions of possibility of capitalisms’ cannibalization of nature and social reproduction. I’d like to hear you elaborate a bit on what you mean, since in my reading Fraser is very much concerned with these political conditions of possibility – e.g. she talks about capitalism as an institutionalized social order, not merely an economic order, and shows how the line between the political and the economic has been redrawn over the course of capitalism’s history. I think you mean something different than she does by the political conditions of possibility for cannibal capitalism, so I’d like to hear you say more on that.
Second, I think you provide some valuable insights on how the technology/nature distinction tends to be racialized, and how this has historically disavowed the biophysical resources and extractive processes on which modern technology depends. We often see this kind of discourse repeated today in ecomodernist claims about decoupling economic growth from nature, or how rich countries are supposedly “dematerializing” our economies by shifting from manufacturing to services and developing seemingly weightless high-tech goods like iphones, laptops, AI, etc, while poor countries in the south are seen as more polluting and inefficient.
However, I think your claim about the articulation between blackness/browness and forms of labor that engage with nature could use more nuance. Following Du Bois, you say that “western alienation of nature depends on the racialized dehumanization of those who work the land’s surface and mine its underground resources.” In other words, that blackness or browness has historically under racial capitalism been identified with bodily exertion and strenuous work in contact with nature, while whiteness has been associated with technology and intellectual labor. Clearly this has often been the case in modern history, as your book clearly shows. But I also worry that you don’t give enough attention to very important exceptions to this pattern. Of course, the point is not simply that white people also work in agriculture and extractive industries. More importantly, the point is that there has also often been, especially today in the context of the climate culture wars, a deep articulation between whiteness and labor in extractive industries. I think we see this especially in coal mining in the US and the cultural resonance it has for white working class communities in West Virginia, Pennslyvania, Kentucky, and other former coal mining regions. Trump’s repeated claims that he “digs coal” is a case in point. I think we make a similar point for oil workers in the US and Canada, and for the mining industry in Australia. Also, as we’re seeing today with the farmer protests across Europe, rightwing populists have often framed farmers, those who work the land, as the ‘real people’ or authentic people who represent the nation. So clearly it is not always the case that those who work the land and mine its resources are racialized as non-white, and in fact the opposite has often been the case. You cite Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective a few times in your chapter, but I think their arguments on the articulations between fossil fuel extraction and whiteness could have brought more nuance to your approach. Of course this does not challenge your overall argument about the dependence of imperial popular sovereignty on racialized ecocidal violence. But it could maybe bring more nuance to how this relationship is theorized. Bringing both your approach together with Malm and the Zetkin collective, I think we should ask: why are certain forms of labor that engage with nature racialized as non-white in particular contexts, and why have others been articulated with whiteness in other contexts? And how has this changed over time?
Third, On the question of dismantling imperial forms of popular sovereignty: how do we do it? You often discuss the deep affective attachments that are associated with imperial popular sovereignty, particularly to material wealth and racial status. How do you think your project can help us challenge that? I know this question is a bit unfair, since this is a book of political theory and not a manifesto on strategy. And I’m not sure anyone has a particularly great answer to the question of how we challenge affective attachments to racism and imperial modes of living. But since your book hopes to contribute to this broader project – you say the reconstruction of this form of sovereignty is necessary for undoing it – I’d like to hear you elaborate.
Finally, related to this last question, on page 204 you mention the need for what you call a “democratic politics of species and a declaration of allegiance of the natural sources of life, rather than a possessive attachment and demand for wealth”. Could you elaborate what you mean by a democratic politics of species? Are you calling for something similar to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call for a species level thinking for the Anthropocene? Chakraborty’s claims here are of course very controversial and have been widely criticized for downplaying the fact that humans are not all in the same boat when it comes to the climate crisis. Thus when you call for a democratic politics of species are you calling for something different?
Thanks again for the book and I look forward to the discussion.
- Dr. Michael Albert is Lecturer in Global Environmental Politics at the University of Edinburgh.
Comment on Democracy and Empire: Labor, Nature and the Reproduction of Capitalism
By Emile Chabal
** I would like to start my comment with an old historian’s trick: the illuminating anecdote.
Back in the summer of 2005, I had just arrived in Houston, Texas as an exchange student at Rice University. I had never lived in the US before, so I thought it wise to take as much helpful advice from people as possible about administrative matters. One of the recommendations the international office had for international students was that they should get a Texas state ID, which would prove my age and residence, and would generally be easier to carry around than a passport.
Houston is not a car-friendly city, so the international office organised a small minibus to take a dozen or so of us to the nearest Texas Department of Public Safety offices. Like everyone else, I filled out some forms, stood in the queue for a long time, and finally got to the front, where my application was to be processed by a large and very disinterested African-American woman.
She took the form and started to scan through it in an absent-minded way. Suddenly she stopped and said, “I’m sorry, that’s incorrect”. I asked what was wrong, and she said, “I’m sorry, brown is not an ethnicity, you need to choose another option”.
I was confused. Like many Europeans – who struggle with the America’s rigid racial politics – I had taken the question on “race/ethnicity” on the form to be an open-ended one. It was not. There were set categories that were acceptable – black, white, Hispanic, Asian etc. And brown was not one of them.
Chastened, I went to the back of the line and filled the form in again. This time, it passed without incident because I had selected white. This felt all wrong to me but seemed like the only viable option. At the same time, I recorded my height as 5 foot 11 on the form. This was just as inaccurate as the ethnicity I had chosen, but it did not matter. Apparently, no-one was interested in denying me my chosen height.
***
What has this amusing anecdote got to do with Inés’s stimulating and hugely ambitious book?
The simplest answer is that this book provides some of the tools needed to decode and conceptualise this encounter between me – a relatively privileged European student on a temporary non-immigrant visa seeking some form of official recognition through an ID card – and this woman – an African-American woman, presumably from Texas or thereabouts, working as a lower-level administrator in a public office, and whose job it was to assign me to unstable racial and demographic categories.
Our encounter was one between the imperial formations that make up part of my own lifestory and the racial formations that made up hers. As an immigrant, I was a citizen on the move – and mobility is a big theme of Inés’s book. As a Black American citizen, the woman I dealt with laboured under the transgenerational and historic structures of oppression, violence, and dispossession that mark the history of African Americans since their arrival in the Western Hemisphere. This history, too, is a big theme in Inés’s book.
Stepping back a bit from the encounter itself does even more to highlight the power of Inés’s argument about the imperial roots of notions of popular sovereignty. Both of us – me the student immigrant, she the employee of the state of Texas – were trying to leverage different “rights” that have accrued to us under the modern regime of popular sovereignty. I was trying to claim my rights as an immigrant – a right to recognition as a legitimate foreigner; she was claiming her rights as a public employee, perhaps even a unionised public employee, whose employment is governed by hard-fought labour laws.
Yet neither of us would have thought that these regimes and rights were predicated on the exclusion and appropriation of others. I did not reflect on the fact that my request for a state ID would be a transgressive or even illegal act for an undocumented migrant. And she probably did not think that her labour rights were born out of a complex and highly racialised labour regime, in which trade unions fought to protect the rights of “their” members against other kinds of marginal or transient labour populations. Nevertheless, as Inés reminds us, these rights are intimately associated with precisely the racial and exploitative formations of which we were not (or only dimly) aware.
There is another, final way in which our interaction connects to Inés’s work, and that has to do with the specifics of the place we were in. The Department of Public Safety in Texas is where people go to get their driving licences. This is a fundamental public service in a state (rightly) famed for its size and its obsession with the motor vehicle.
But, as we know, the motor vehicle is one of the world’s great polluters, nowhere more so than in the US, which has higher carbon emissions per head than anywhere else in the world. Seen this way – and Inés encourages us to think through the umbilical connection between capitalism and nature – the administrators who manage the issuing of driving licences enable our pathological and destructive relationship to the land we live on. They make it possible for us to continue to destroy land and natural resources.
***
It is a testimony to the depth of Inés’s analysis that I have been able to revisit my amusing anecdote in quite so much detail, but that is because this is a book that makes you think about your relationship to the world around you in imaginative ways. Precisely because of this, however, I feel I need to highlight an important blindspot in Inés’s analysis, one which will be apparent to almost anyone who lives in the 21st century.
If we take Inés’s book as an interpretation of modernity – of the political, mental, and ecological structures of modernity, and their underpinnings – there is one glaring omission: the nation-state. For historians of the modern world, the idea of the nation and the institution of the state are probably the most important political structures of the twentieth century, but they made only a sporadic appearance in the book.
Let us begin with the state. Inés’s analysis rests on the entanglement of racial capitalism and imperialism, but, to my mind, these have been entirely mediated by the state. And the state is not a mere conglomeration of capitalist interests. It is – and has increasingly become – a complex, variegated and inconsistent entity, with a powerful and profound impact on people’s lives. The analysis of migration in the book, for instance, leaves to one side the role of different kinds of state actors in pushing forward or forestalling policies and practices, even though this is central to any history of migration policy.
As for the nation, here there was explicit analytical pushback since Inés’s book is designed to get us to think beyond the nation. As a theoretical or strategic position, this is entirely defensible – internationalism has a long and venerable tradition on the left! – but as a historical position, it does not always make sense. The history of Europe’s twentieth century, of imperial expansion, and of decolonisation – to name but a few – is incomprehensible without the nation as an ideational reference point.
The centrality of the nation-state can be amply demonstrated by returning to my opening anecdote about my encounter with the Texan administration. Think about it: I was submitting my papers to a branch of public administration – ie. the state – and I was doing so as someone who was defined out of the national community as a foreigner – ie. the nation. Moreover, the administration that dealt with me made simple mistakes. They made me change my ethnicity according to pre-defined nationally set criteria, but they ignored the fact that I was clearly not the height I said I was. In this case, the nation-state as idea and institution defined almost every aspect of this encounter.
My point is that any history of modernity needs a theory of the state to bring it to life. It needs the texture and the uncertainty of the institution of the state to give it a human dimension – and I am not even referring here to the importance of the state within communist regimes, which I think would complicate some of the claims made here about popular sovereignty, exploitation and race.
Alongside this, the book would benefit from a greater recognition of the different kinds of nationalism that operate and determine the parameters of such key concepts in the book as “imperialism” and “democracy”, both of which rest on specific national contexts.
These criticisms do not, of course, undermine the book’s penetrating arguments, but they could certainly enrich them. If nothing else, I look forward to seeing where Inés goes next – and I am tremendously grateful that one of my rare opportunities to read political theory yielded so many thoughts and ideas.
- Dr. Emile Chabal is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Edinburgh
**
Capitalism, Imperial States, and the Possibility of Labor-led Democratic Politics
By Inés Valdez
** Thank you for the opportunity to respond to Emile and Michael’s engagement with my book. Together, they address one implicit and one explicit dimension of Democracy and Empire: the state and the forms of attachment or detachment that allow the persistence of environmental destruction brought about by capitalism and push me to clarify the inter-relation between capitalism, race, and politics.
Emile opens by reminiscing of an encounter with a Black woman in a state office in Houston, which, as he suggests, occurred at the intersection of a series of imperial entanglements outlined in Democracy and Empire that I outline next. The claim to license drivers and vehicles, after all, presumes jurisdiction over a space. This space was usurped by settlers and conscripted to host political projects that departed from the relationships with and uses of land by Indigenous communities. This included the building of highways to facilitate integration into capitalist circuits of communication and commerce, where motor vehicles circulated and mastered space in the absence of sociality and/or relations of reciprocity (Chapter 4 and Conclusion). Highways transformed the landscape to facilitate extraction and environmental destruction, a distinctive mark of capitalist empire and key to its hierarchical ordering between technologized and manual labor (Chapter 4). Manual labor is entailed in the building and repairing of the highway, but its functioning obscures these processes. The access that Emile had to an ID card as a migrant on a student visa granted him a right to the smooth circulation made possible by U.S. highways – smooth also in the sense of being protected from arbitrary state power, denied to the un-documented that may have built those roads by the growing bureaucracy of the Department of Homeland Security, founded only three years prior to Emile’s visit (Chapter 3). The massive increase in interior policing facilitated by the frenetic channeling of resources toward “homeland security” in the context of the “War on Terror” targeted brown Mexican and Central American undocumented migrants, whose vulnerability made them targets to labor exploitation (Chapter 3). Earlier generations of Mexican migrants had gradually replaced Black farmworkers and domestics, who left the South for the industrial North or accessed public employment, like the Department of Public Safety employee Emile encountered.
Emile’s encounter was also an encounter with the state, which he brings up, alongside the nation, as an omission in the book despite being “probably the most important political structure of the twentieth century.” He guesses correctly that my analytical goal is to think beyond the nation but insists on the state and a theory thereof as crucial to the history of modernity and the associated accounts of empire and decolonization that concern Democracy and Empire.
I agree with Emile that the state and the nation mediate racial capitalism and imperialism, but the focus on the state has the effect of hiding from view the latter phenomena despite their twin centrality in bringing modernity to life. Below I show how this game of shadows takes place by remarking on the appearances of the state in the book and re-inserting it in places where other global processes that presuppose it but exceed it take center stage.
Chapter 1 engages the most with the state and the nation by recasting them as not at all limited by territorial borders or narrowly concerned with familiar accounts of national feeling. Instead, I theorize the “imagined communities” that the nation presupposes via Du Bois’s “The African Roots of War” as grounded on possessive attachments as much as on joint national feeling:
Such nations it is that rule the modern world. Their national bond is no mere sentimental patriotism, loyalty, or ancestor worship. It is the increased wealth, power, and luxury for all classes on a scale the world never saw before (Du Bois 1915, 709).
Otherwise put, national feeling is also about the material sustenance of the masses newly imagined as a (racialized and exclusionary) collective. The material focus further reveals national feeling as laying claim to the state’s imperial project thus inaugurating imperial democracy – or what I call “self-and-other-determination.” In other words, national feeling was not narrowly national, but, because it sought the appropriation of imperial spoils, can be more properly understood as a state project of empire.
If Chapter 1 expands national feeling to encompass the material demands on the racialized world they entail, Chapter 2 disrupts the narrowly national character of that feeling in a second sense. By engaging with socialist and liberal thinkers, documents from the imperial bureaucracy, and working-class activism, the second chapter reveals that the masses expelled from Europe to labor in the settler colonies saw themselves as part of a transnational force. While their demands were directed and contributed to shaping modern states as instruments of global extraction and domestic distribution, these demands were shared by other white workers in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
These transnationally connected collectives, however, invoked the state but not because of its centrality, or its “first mover” character when it came to regulating migration. Rather, the state’s racial regulation of migration and labor merely took over from empires, who had until the early twentieth century sponsored European emigration to prevent unrest in the metropole, slavery to replace Indigenous groups decimated through forced labor, genocide, or displacement in Latin and North America, and Indian and Chinese indenture to discipline freedmen and women in the aftermath of slavery. The emergence of state-based migration regulation was a gradual absorption of these functions by states.
The nation-state reappears in Chapter 3, as the U.S. army annexing Mexican territory after the war, and the U.S. and Mexican states in an unequal bilateral relation sanctioning the Bracero Program. Chapters 2 and 3 together show that, as Emile notes, nation-states cannot be reduced to capitalist interests, which were on the losing side as the Asian exclusion laws were passed, but resisted and defeated the opposition to its replacement by Mexican labor, which was ultimately wholly exempted from the racial quotas established in the 1920s. Similarly, the Mexican state had to mediate between labor shortages for its own planters and the demands for cheap migrant labor by Anglo planters in U.S. territory. The Mexican state, moreover, saw in the migration of its nationals to the North not only economic gains, but a path to nation-building through the access to civilized consumer goods and hygiene practices by its own Indigenous workers. Thus the U.S. and the Mexican state (as well as their capitalist classes) were involved in setting up the conditions for the circulation of cheap labor post-Chinese exclusion and into the 1940s Bracero Program, and only a transnational reading of these flows reveals the complete constellation of state power and its conscription of vulnerable workers to fulfill crucial roles that aided capitalist accumulation and social reproduction.
Chapters 4 and 5 again revolve around an imperial state that is decentered. First to understand how its sanctioning of labor and land exploitation abroad is propped up by techno-racist beliefs that alienate its citizens from the centrality of nature and manual labor to their subsistence. Second, the U.S. state appears waging war in Vietnam, propping up and then taking over another state army to prevent anti-capitalist revolutionaries from taking power. Chapter 4 thus expands on the texture of “imagined communities” in the western world, noting the pull of a technologized identity that equates technological ability with racial superiority. This equation, which one could call “techno-nationalism,” underpinned the devaluation of racialized nature and manual labor and facilitated the ecological devastation and physical depletion of racialized bodies in the colonies. The joint reading of the Vietnam moment by Martin Luther King and Frantz Fanon demystifies claims of national unity that underpin war and development. Instead, they show the French and U.S. American common investment in keeping Vietname subjected, and the alliances among western elites and its minor associates in the Global South to ensure the proper access of foreign capital to colonial and postcolonial areas.
When re-read through the lens of the state, then, Democracy and Empire does not deny the centrality of the state as a mediating actor in global capitalism and empire, but notes how historically the nation-state, its actions, and their meaning can be better understood as embedded within imperial capitalism, and to argue for the foregrounding of these processes, lest we remain captives of accounts of migration control, war, and popular politics that operate as if the domestic realm of state policy and nation-building have not always been global and imperial through and through. But even if the state is not taking center stage in Democracy and Empire, domestic politics is ever present. The grounding claim of the first part of the book, is, indeed, that we ought to think about democratic collectives not as innocent bystanders in the operation of capitalism, but as collectively accepting a bargain that will give them access to globally extracted resources appropriated by corporations with the coercive backing of states.
This is the sense in which my account differs from that of Nancy Fraser, which Michael Albert brings up. Fraser decries the “political contradiction of capitalist society – in the fact that its economy simultaneously relies on and tends to destabilize public powers” (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018, 39). This leads to “boundary struggles” between the realm of the economy and that of the polity, a notion she takes from Polanyi but is also reminiscent of Habermas’s (1975 [1973]) account of legitimation crisis (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018, 69). Rather than focusing on a line or presuming a purified politics invaded by economic logics, I better specify economic and political entanglements by reconstructing how the democratic grammar and practices are already imbued with economic logics but via citizens’ possessive attachments, augmented by racialized attachments. Because legitimacy (i.e., the wellbeing of citizens) is now fulfilled by imperial capitalism, the legitimation crisis is fended off, at least among white citizens and at least for a while. My account also complicates Fraser’s expropriated or superexploited work, which emerges from the “entwinement of economic predation with political subjection” (2018, 105). Her political account posits a state that subjects racialized workers, while I trace the racialization as well as the superexploitation to popular processes, implicating the people and its “democratic” claims in this subjection (Chapters 1 and 2). This allows me to consider the contemporary far-right “backlash” in very different terms. Fraser attributes the growth of “ethnonationalist movements” to the weakness or compromised status of “left-wing vehicles for expressing protest” inquiring: “Could it be that fear of immigrants expresses the not-so-far-fetched anxiety that things are out of control?” (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018, 197). Not according to my account, which more precisely ties anti-immigration sentiment and repressive action to the imperial origins of white working-class mobilization and social democracy, which in Fraser instead functions as the horizon (Chapter 2, Fraser and Jaeggi 2018, 199). In other words, it might be a response to anxiety but the direction of the response needs to be explicated historically.
My historical explication shows that white workers’ demand is not simply for wellbeing, but the maintenance of an imperial regime that guarantees their wellbeing while securing its conditions of possibility: i.e., the oppression of racialized others. Without historicizing the racialized and possessive mode of democratic discourse and practice, Fraser positions social democracy and an alliance with “manufacturing-sector workers rural communities who are reeling from financialization” as desirable paths forward (199-200) and presumes that this path forward will follow from “anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist” interpretations of the present crisis that are currently lacking (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018, 199-200). While such left proposals are indeed necessary and lacking, they require grappling with how workers’ movements responses to capitalist exploitation were neither anti-capitalist nor anti-imperial, but opted instead to throw their political fortunes in with capitalist imperialism to extract some gains while participating in and benefitting from the oppression of racialized workers and the extraction of resources from racialized lands (D&E, 12, 56, 86). So, for an anti-capitalist and anti-imperial political path to open, the emancipatory orientations must turn away from those that historically resorted to imperial solutions to grievances that further solidify global capitalism.
Michael also points out that my account of technoracism, by focusing on the racialized dehumanization of those who “work the land’s surface and mine its underground resources” leaves out white farmers and white working classes in coal mining regions, who are sometimes posited as most authentically “the people,” in far-right populist discourses. It is true that an engagement with nature or extractive activities “can be articulated with whiteness” differently depending on the context. Yet again, the figure of the “farmer” is different to that of the peasant, or, in today’s speak, the undocumented or temporary worker who works the land or in precarious manual occupations directly. Thus, the valuing of the white farmer is compatible with the devaluing of the racialized farmworker because of the hierarchy of the occupations (vulnerable and dirty versus farmers who own the land) and how technology mediates the working of the land (as evident in farmers’ staging of tractor demonstrations (Meyers 2025; Corbet 2024; Kent 2025)). In this sense, the attachments of white farmers and settlers to land remains within the logic of techno-racism, in the sense that their appropriation of land is grounded on their abilities to work the land efficiently (as opposed to performing hard manual work under the sun). These claims are partly based on racialized accounts of technological superiority and bodily adaptability to hard work and omit, but also depend on, the racialized labor required for the everyday functioning of farms.
Regarding the politicized attachment of white communities to coal and mining in the white settler colonies of Canada, the United States, and Australia, I wholeheartedly second Michael’s suggestion to bring in Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective’s claim about the association of whiteness and fossil fuels to account for the varied forms of entanglement between race and technology. In Malm and the Zetkin Collective’s account (2021, 343-63), this entwinement develops via the reliance on coal to fuel technology (the steam engine) to be utilized both in warships and industry. It is worth reproducing a quote they cite, by the British explorers who mapped the Niger’s course:
By [Watt’s] invention every river is laid open to us, time and distance are shortened… This power … has rendered rivers truly “the highway of nations,” and made easy what would have been difficult… We are the chief repository of it: our mineral wealth [i.e., the coal reserves of Britain] and the mechanical habits of our people, give us a superiority over all others in the application of it (Lander and Lander 1839, 310; cited in Malm and the Zetkin Collective 2021, 349, Malm and ZC’s emphasis).
This quote conveys Malm and the Zetkin’s collective view that whiteness and the mastery of nature through technology stood atop non-white groups, who were seen as “residues from earlier stages of evolution … [and] deserved to be ruled (351). The question is then what attachment to technology and what relationship with racialized others is established by white workers who are mining that “mineral wealth.” The attachment of whiteness to fossil fuels can be an attachment to what that product enables, that is, technology, of war and industry alike. The fact that, today, coal miners’ politics align with political groups that deny or minimize the effect of fossil fuels’ emissions on climate change suggests the possibility of folding this group of manual laborers into technologized whiteness and its orientation toward the mastering of nature – thus confirming that the whiteness of manual workers mediates their relationship to nature and technology, and alienates them from land as a means of subsistence and needs fulfillment. Instead, these groups make themselves available for projects that approach nature as a resource and underpin environmental destruction. This alienation might be thought of as dehumanizing to the extent that it enlists poor communities in extractivist projects. But this alienated political stance creates a sense of belonging to a polity and an attached imperial engine that disregards nature as a source of reciprocal exchange and instead “takes” without worrying about regeneration. This is the form of belonging that Democracy and Empire characterizes as both democratic and imperial.
In terms of the democratic politics of the species I suggest as a counter to imperial democracy, I do not mean calling for the species-level thinking that underlie “anthropocene” accounts, which, as Michael notes, have been criticized. These accounts downplay the role imperial capitalism has played in environmental destruction and the climate crisis. This is why the project of declaring “allegiance to natural sources of life,” which I borrow from Robin Kimmerer, comes in the Conclusion of the book, after the theorization of imperial capitalism as a system that carefully delineates the lines of political responsibility and complicity with capitalist processes of environmental destruction. This account also complements retorts that attribute responsibility simply to “capitalism.” I add to ”capitalocene” accounts by delineating the contribution of the dark side of “popular” politics in the west: its despotic orientation toward everyone else (what I call “self-and-other-determination”) and toward nature. The possessive attachments that turned “the people” into a supportive coalition of imperial capitalism ought to be replaced by an allegiance to natural sources of life for a different popular politics to emerge, which can more effectively identify and bring to task capitalist actors who are behind the destruction. In contrast to the democratic despotism complicit with empire, the democratic politics of species is the political formation that establishes the right attachments, longings, and coalitional visions that will result in popular power against both capitalism and the imperial formations that allow for its destructive expansion of racialized labor and land. It is not humans but capitalists who have been destructive. But it is humans as political actors who can bring the institutions and political actors to task and construct alternative institutions that are anti-capitalist, i.e., that depart from private property arrangements and orient production toward needs. Thus the democracy of species or ecological popular sovereignty builds upon the anti-oligarchic politics that I sketch out in Chapter 5 and, which are necessary to diagnose, oppose, and counter the destructive effects of capitalism over the people and the planet.
This brief excursus into anti-oligarchic and ecological popular sovereignty brings me to Michael’s last question about dismantling imperial forms of popular sovereignty and the associated attachments and forms of living: “how do we do it?” and how can Democracy and Empire “help us challenge that?” As Michael recognizes, the book is not a manifesto on strategy, but it does contribute in two ways. First, it diagnoses the problem of possessive attachments to imperial formations and their spoils, and in so doing illuminates our current predicament, where the crisis of neoliberalism has so far enabled the far right, which doubles down on climate denialism, regressive economic measures, and unapologetically looks at the world with an extractive orientation. Second, it illuminates migration and environmental issues as questions that have to do with labor, i.e., the control of mobile and vulnerable labor for the purposes of joining it with land and natural materials for extractive purposes. This, in turn, reveals that left projects that continue to think about their agenda as being the protection of the domestic working class and the sustenance of their corporations abroad, should think twice. As I argue in the book and specify for contemporary politics in a recent essay, the left’s imperial pact only strengthens the hand of capitalism, which has reneged of the democratic bargain and its welfarist accoutrements. The ravages of capitalism have destabilized imperial democracies in wealthy countries, and they also have a hand in the population expulsions that sustain migratory flows. The lack of a global anti-capitalist discourse and a universal pro-labor approach in left circles has meant that they can respond forcefully to neither the precarization of labor nor the question of migration. Without this, the slightly more powerful actors ravaged by capitalism (white labor) eagerly respond to the far-right agenda of punishing the less powerful groups ravaged by capitalism (racialized citizens and migrants), while the left declines to critique the ravages of capitalism themselves. The question of migration is a question of labor exploitation and the need to find fitting workers for ever more precarious jobs. Thus, only a left project with a strong and universalistic policy of minimum wages and labor protections and without migrant detention sites and a deportation police force can undo the threatening construction of migrants and turn them into a coalition partner of a multi-racial, worker-led anti-capitalist force. Whether the possessive attachments will be mollified by such a decidedly anti-capitalist left project, and redirected toward anti-capitalism is an open question, but one that cannot be answered without trying.
References
Corbet, Sylvie. 2024. “Angry French farmers protest with their tractors again in the streets of Paris.” In PBS News.
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