Populism and Empire: Labor, Racial Capitalism, and the Global Regulation of Movement

• In Event: Exploring Democratic Mobilizations Against Right-Wing Populism: Tapping, Historical, Contemporary and Global Reservoirs of Opposition Mini-Conference: Populism and Affect

Abstract

The global (i.e., migration, refugee flows, trade, and other forms of international integration) has emerged as a central site of affective attachments that have, in turn, sustained the growth and currency of right-wing populist agendas in Western democracies. Aware of this problem, responses have put forward nostalgic accounts that either return to New Deal social democracy or a golden age of Western internationalism to counter to this trend. These accounts, however, do not consider the racialized character of the nostalgic projects that they put forward, i.e., the racially exclusionary character of socially progressive projects in the first half of the twentieth century, and the imperial origins of Western internationalism. I put forward a genealogy of the joint development of increasingly democratic and social enfranchisement and imperial endeavors through W. E. B. Du Bois’s writings on democratic and global affect. These essays, written during the First World War and the interwar period, theorize a racial capitalism that is at the root of both social democracy and internationalism in the West. Racism and capitalism structure exclusionary democracies who operate despotically toward external racialized others in ways that redefine the meaning of popular sovereignty. This popular sovereignty is "excessive" in the sense that it includes a claim to self-government but also a claim to govern others, or what I call "self-and-other-determination." This form of government relies on global affective attachments that mediate inwardly democratic relationships with outwardly despotic ones in ways that still structure relationships of Western countries with the rest of the world. Based on these insights, I argue that the present crisis can be understood as a crisis of global justice. This is not because the project of global justice was successful and currently faces a crisis, but because the populist response to neoliberalism shows the continuity of certain affective attachments that are resistant to global projects of a democratic and egalitarian kind.

Author

• Ines Valdez, Ohio State University