Migration

A reconsideration of the crucial historical role of slavery in the consolidation of the global regime of capital accumulation provides a vital source of Marxian critique for our postcolonial present.  The Atlantic slave trade literally transformed African men and women into human commodities.  The reduction of human beings into human commodities, or ‘human capital’ — indeed, into labour and nothing but labour — which was the very essence of modern slavery, served as a necessary predicate for the consolidation and perfecting of what Marx called ‘labour in the abstract,’ and requires us to re-situate enslaved labour as the defining and constitutive limit for how we comprehend labour as such under capitalism.  The production of labour in the abstract, or labour ‘in general,’ depended nonetheless upon concrete productions of sociopolitical difference, particularly the branding of race.  The term ‘Black,’ which was devised to literally and figuratively brand the flesh of enslaved people, was also contrived to signify their particular sociopolitical condition of brutal degradation as the ultimate limit for the subjugation of labour.  Blackness names that limit.  Thus, Blackness is in fact necessary for apprehending labour as such under capitalism.  Marx’s scathing critique of wage labour is always haunted by the long shadow of slavery as its limit figure.  If we comprehend labour to be the antithesis of capital, then to the extent that Blackness names the ultimate condition of labour's subordination and subjection to capital, we need to recognize the tendency forall labour under capital to be pressed toward a sociopolitical condition of Blackness (or approximating Blackness), where Blackness does not name any kind of essential identity but the racialised sociopolitical condition of that subordination/subjection.  Consequently, the labour theory of value — which has always been in fact, more accurately, a value theory of labour — must be complemented with what we might posit to be a racial theory of labour.  Such an ostensibly historical perspective on the foundational role of slavery in the genesis of capitalism is no mere scholastic exercise in the historiography of ‘primitive accumulation,’ however, but rather must be re-purposed toward the ends of elaborating what has remained an as-yet underdeveloped Marxian theory of migrant labour. Extrapolating key insights from Marx’s corpus for the formulation of a racial theory of labour, this essay is ultimately concerned with the ways that slavery supplies capitalism with a defining horizon forall labour, and thus how this insight might instructively serve to comprehend the racialised subordination of migrant labour within our global/ postcolonial sociopolitical order.

This piece is being made available as a preprint edition of the Race and Capital special issue of Historical Materialism. The final published version of this text will be made available on the Brill website in the coming months, we ask that citations refer to the Brill edition.

Issue 32(2&3): Race and Capital

The proposition in this essay of a racial theory of labour inevitably seeks to situate labour under capitalism in the broad historical context that would permit for a theory of labour capacious enough to encompass the legacies of enslaved labour in the era of colonial capitalism as inextricable from the contemporary postcolonial regime of global capital accumulation, for which migration – human mobility on a global scale – is a crucial and indispensable feature. While modern slavery and other forms of coerced labour under colonialism were indisputably predicated upon the mass capture and immobilisation of labour in what were, in effect, de facto prison labour camps, such as slave plantations, it is nonetheless also indisputable that such enterprises required the unprecedented mobilisation of human labour on a global scale. The trans-Atlantic slave trade is perhaps the most obvious instantiation of this world historic phenomenon, but colonisation itself similarly entailed a variety of mass-scale human mobilities across the planet, including indentured labour, the transportation of convict labour, settler colonialism, as well as the more heterogeneous dynamics of installing and enforcing colonial rule, administratively and militarily. The present task is not, however, an exercise in historiography, but rather an exercise in theory. Thus, the empirical demonstration or validation of this exercise must, of necessity, be considered beyond the scope of what is feasible within the remit of this short essay. Instead, in the interests of a rethinking of some of the elementary features of Marx’s theorisation of labour under capitalism, this essay will rely upon a method that is principally exegetical. In short, a re-reading of Marx is undertaken here in order to reveal and highlight some of the key components for understanding the racial underpinnings of capitalism that have always been hiding, so to speak, in plain sight.  

From the outset, let it be clear that what is at stake here is a reconsideration of Marx’s theory of labour. When Marx famously initiates his greater project in Volume One of Capital with the proposition that Political Economy ‘has never once asked the question … why labour is expressed in value, and why the measurement of labour by its duration is expressed in the magniutude of the value of the product,’[i] his solution to that puzzle is – tellingly, if perhaps counter-intuitively for some readers – that capitalism is ‘a social formation in which the process of production has mastery over man.’[ii] That is to say, his purpose is not merely a technical (economistic) investigation into the calculation of economic value, as expressed in wages and the prices of commodities. His emphasis on mastery is emphatically and explicitly political. Building on this crucial but much-neglected (or commonly mis-read) formulation, Diane Elson proposes the concept of ‘a value theory of labour.’ In other words, Elson contends, the labour theory of value has always been in fact, more accurately, a value theory of labour. This reversal of terms serves to underscore that what really mattered for Marx was indeed to producea theory of labour – a theory adequate to the specific ways in which labour is systematically understood and represented under capitalism, as if it were simply a matter of calculating and commensurating quantitatively different but qualitatively homogeneous and interchangeable exercises of labour (in the abstract). Elson explains: ‘My argument is that theobject of Marx’s theory of value was labour. It is not a matter of seeking an explanation of why prices are what they are and finding it in labour. But rather of seeking an understanding of why labour takes the forms it does, and what the political consequences are.’^[iii]

Marx was interested in why the substance of labour assumes the particular form that it does under capitalism – a form in which what is predominant is its abstraction as something reducible toquantity. His contention was that this socially and historically specific predominance of abstract labour under capitalism signaled a particular sociopolitical organisation of themastery of human life by production (as its own end), whereby the productive power and creative capacities of human life (refigured and perverted by capital as ‘labour’) is subordinated to a regime of production ‘for the sake of production.’[iv] The crucial role of abstract labour in Marx’s analysis has inadvertently but very regrettably contributed to misreadings that (re-)fetishise and (re-)reify labour as an abstraction, lending apparent credence to reductive notions of the analytical and political primacy of ‘class’ that have frequently been presumed to be fundamentally opposed and inimical to race, relegating race and gender and all other sociopolitical differences to the secondary or derivative status of epiphenomena. The tragedy of such misreadings is that they uncritically recapitulate one of the most egregious and defining premises of capitalist social relations, taking recourse to a notion of labour that is fundamentally abstract, denuded, and disembodied.

Therefore, I will argue in this essay, in a manner that is analogous to Marx’s formulation, that if the mastery of human life – and labour – under capitalism has pervasively assumed the particular form of racial domination, we must similarly demand to understand why. With Marx, we must ask: Why has this content assumed that particular form? And what are the political consequences? This is a matter of deepening our comprehension of the Marxian theory of labour, a theory for which labour is its epistemic object, and sharpening our appreciation of its political ramifications. Such a theory must be adequate to the specific ways in which labour is systematically understood and represented under capitalism as something homogeneous and abstract, yet which in the materiality of lived practice is always embodied, and therefore gendered – and, indeed, racialised. Hence, the necessity ofa racial theory of labour.

Global Capitalism, Racial Capitalism

An elementary predicate of Marx’s analysis of the regime of capital accumulation is its global scope and scale. Indeed, Marx establishes repeatedly that one must understand capital to have been effectively globalfrom its inception. In one of the most forceful articulations of this perspective, in his discussion of ‘the so-called primitive accumulation’ in Volume One ofCapital, Marx declares with a flourish:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterise the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. Hard on their heels follows the commercial war of the European nations, which hasthe globe as its battlefield.^[v]

Importantly, Marx’s critique identifies slavery, colonialism, genocide, and warfare as veritable preconditions for the very possibility of capital accumulation. Arguably, this historical analysis, so integral as it truly is for Marx’s understanding of capitalism as such, lends force to the contention that the Marxian critique of capitalism inherently, and of necessity, requires an appreciation that capitalism was always, from the outset, not only global but also racial.

Such a perspective, readily corroborated by Marx’s own analysis, could be taken to command the recognition that what we have come to know as the global regime of capital accumulation is inextricable from a (post)colonial sociopolitical order of white supremacy. Here, then, there is some justifiable grounds for retroactively discerning in the very foundations of the classic Marxian critique of capitalism an incipient conception (albeit insufficiently articulated) of what Cedric Robinson famously designated to be racial capitalism. As Robinson formulates his central argument inBlack Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition:

Racism, I maintain, was not simply a convention for ordering the relations of European to non-European peoples but has its genesis in the ‘internal’ relations of European peoples. As part of the inventory of Western civilisation it would reverberate within and without, transferring its toll from the past to the present. In contradistinction to Marx’s and Engels’s expectations that bourgeois society would rationalize social relations and demystify social consciousness, the obverse occurred. The development, organisation, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force, then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism.^[vi]

For Robinson, the intrinsically racial character of capitalism in fact derived from a constitutive and already racialised feature of social inequality and hierarchy in the composition and organisation of European social formations themselves. This was plainly not Marx’s perspective. Such historical inquiries and any ensuing disputes notwithstanding, however, it is plain that for Robinson the entrenchment of capitalist social relations on a global scale could only ever be ‘permeated’ by ‘racialism.’ Without allowing ourselves to get detoured by historiographic quibbles over origin stories, capitalist civilisation was inseparable from what Robinson memorably calls ‘the terrible culture of race’:  ‘Race was its epistemology, its ordering principle, its organizing structure, its moral authority, its economy of justice, commerce, and power.’^[vii] But could one realistically expect or reasonably conclude otherwise from Marx’s own depiction of ‘the dawn of the era of capitalist production’ as one ‘chiefly’ distinguished by such systemic phenomena as the mass ‘extirpation, enslavement and entombment’ and ‘conquest and plunder’ of indigenous peoples, worldwide, and the notorious ‘commercial hunting of blackskins’? Capitalism, for Marx, was indeed saturated from its inception, not merely ideologically but also materially and practically, with racialism (in Robinson’s phrase):  capitalism has never been other than racial capitalism. 

In light of this historical perspective, what has been insufficiently comprehended, furthermore, is that we are long overdue for a robust renovation of Marxist theory and radical anti-capitalist political practice in light of a more thoroughgoing and comprehensive reevaluation of the central and defining concepts and theoretical categories of Marxian analysis through the critical lens of race. As a contribution to such an endeavor, this essay proposes a reconsideration of the crucial historical role of slavery, especially with respect to advancing a rigorous analysis of labour — and hence, of labour subordination — within the larger configuration of capitalist social relations.  Not simply reducible to a scholastic exercise in the historiography of what Marx characterised as ‘the so-called primitive accumulation’ of capital, and therefore not merely a contribution to a more precise and more supple appreciation of the past, such an endeavor provides a vital source of Marxian critique for apprehending the mobility of labour (and its subordination as ‘migrant’ labour, in particular) within our global postcolonial present, and thus, for formulating any plausible politics that might aspire to a postcapitalist future.

Slavery, Labour, and Blackness

With specific reference to the disfigurement of the nascent struggles by the white working class in the United States because of the coeval existence of slavery, Marx famously proclaimed, ‘Labour in a white skin can never emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.’^[viii] This classic racial watchword of anti-capitalist struggle is no less pertinent today than in Marx’s era. ‘Labour in a white skin cannever emancipate itself,’ Marx notably insisted — never! — wherever whiteness is predicated upon the systemic denigration of Blackness. And where, or when, we may rightly demand, has whiteness evernot been so predicated?

For this, indeed, is the precise historical meaning of whiteness, its significance and salience.^[ix] Rather than an immutable, transhistorical, pre-political ‘biological’ essence, racial whiteness is truly ‘a very modern thing,’ as W.E.B. Du Bois memorably put it.^[x] Indeed, whiteness is an invention of colonial/racial capitalism, originating in the brutal sociopolitical processes that have come to be known as primitive accumulation.^[xi] Referring to this global history of conquest as a material necessity for jump-starting and sustaining the processes of capital accumulation, Marx contends, ‘The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement and murder flowed back to the mother-country and were turned into capital there.’^[xii] ‘In fact,’ Marx concludes poignantly, ‘the veiled slavery of the wage labourers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal.’^[xiii] This formulation’s meaning is unequivocal:  with the phrase ‘needed … as its pedestal,’ Marx plainly contends that slavery was necessary as the base or foundation that materially supported wage labour.[xiv]

Here, it is perhaps helpful to briefly address the substantive historical relationship between slavery and wage labour. To try to address the empirical question of the relative importance of slave labour and wage labour, or their comparative proportions in the production of surplus value during the early history of capitalism, is, in a strict sense, plainly unanswerable. Apart from the sheer paucity of any comprehensive body of data that might plausibly support such an econometric comparison, there is the more fundamental dilemma of truly apprehending capitalism as an effectively global socioeconomic formation, for which any recourse to the fiction of a ‘national’ economy is inherently fallacious and misleading.  ‘The political economy of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic,’ Walter Johnson argues cogently, ‘[was] a single space, its dimensions defined by flows of people, money, and goods, its nested temporalities set by interlocking (though clearly distinct) labour regimes, cyclical rhythms of cultivation and foreign exchange, and shared standards of calculability and measurement,’[xv] in which slave labour and wage labour were ‘two poles of [a] single Atlantic economy’ characterised by ‘dynamic simultaneity.’[xvi] Similarly advancing a ‘broad conception of totality,’ Dale Tomich argues, slave labour was ‘part of the organisation of social labour on the world scale … a specific form of commodity production that [was] related to other such forms through the world market and international division of labour,’ while it was precisely the world market and division of labour that supplied and sustained the conditions of possibility for the reproduction of slave labour.[xvii] ‘A materialist and historical analysis,’ Johnson clarifies, ‘begins from the premise that in actual historical fact there was no nineteenth-century capitalism without slavery. However else industrial capitalism might have developed in the absence of slave-produced cotton and Southern capital markets, it did not develop that way.’[xviii]

Cotton was indeed ‘the Industrial Revolution’s most essential commodity,’[xix] and cotton produced by enslaved labour in the southern United States became ‘the most widely traded commodity in the world.’[xx] As the world’s primary producer of cotton, the United States occupied ‘a distinctive position in the global economy.’[xxi] In 1860, on the eve of the U.S. Civil War, fully three-quarters of U.S. cotton was being produced for export, providing British industry in particular (the global epicenter of wage labour) no less than 70 percent of this vital raw material.[xxii] Consequently, slavery must be recognised to have been ‘indispensable to the economic development of the United States’ as evidenced by ‘some basic facts:  that slave-grown cotton was the most valuable export made in America, that the capital stored in slaves exceeded the combined value of all the nation’s railroads and factories, that foreign investment underwrote the expansion of plantation lands …that the highest concentration of steam power in the United States was to be found along the Mississippi [River],’ the waterway traversing the heartland of the expanded slave economy, rather than any site in the northeastern region where economic development was driven by industrial capitalism.[xxiii]Exceeding the total number of free migrants who moved to the United States between the time of the Revolution and 1850, and despite British and U.S. abolitions of the slave trade in1808, the fifty years that preceded the Civil War saw more than four million enslaved people forcibly imported into New World slavery’s most intensive zones of production and profit-making, with ‘the total number of enslaved people in the New World [increasing] dramatically, from about five million to about seven million.’[xxiv]  Comparatively, the population engaged in wage labour in the United States during this period remained quite small, especially in agriculture. ‘The wage labour market in the US was perennially plagued by labour shortages.… as late as 1860 there was only one wage labourer for every two farms in the North.’[xxv]Moreover, slavery was indispensable for the dramatic advances in industrial capitalism in Britain, and thus for the very creation of its wage-labour proletariat.[xxvi] ‘Neither Britain nor any other country that followed it down the path of textile-based industrialisation could have accomplished an economic transformation without the millions of acres of cotton fields of the expanding American South.’[xxvii] To substitute the cotton that British industry imported from U.S. slave labour camps with a comparable amount of wool, for instance, ‘Britain in 1830 would have had to devote 23 million acres to sheep pasture—more than the sum total of the island’s agricultural land.’[xxviii] Likewise, as Edward Baptist demonstrates, ‘The total gain in productivity per [enslaved] picker from 1800 to 1860 was almost 400 percent – precisely the same as ‘the increase in the efficiency of [wage] workers who tended spinning machines in Manchester cotton mills’ between 1819 and 1860, when the same figure for workers in weaving mills ‘improved by 600 to 1,000 percent.’ Therefore, Baptist argues, ‘even as textile factories harnessed increasingly complex machinery to more powerful non-human energy sources …[enslaved] cotton pickers produced gains in productivity similar to those of [wage labour in] cotton factories.’[xxix] Driving all of this world historic capitalist expansion, in a fundamental sense, was the feverish ever-rising productivity of slave labour, which was derived from what Baptist depicts as ‘a dynamically evolving technology’ predicated on measurement, forced innovation, and torture[xxx]:  ‘Whips rose and fell. And cotton-picking rates rose inexorably….  The whip made cotton.’[xxxi] ‘The scientific principle of every cotton labour camp [was] a metaphorical whipping-machine:  a technology for controlling and exploiting human beings, calibrating increments of torture to extract both efficient production of pounds of cotton and endless, dynamic improvements to that efficiency.’[xxxii] These continuous increases in the efficiency of slave labour meant ever-lower real prices for cotton, which then increased the surplus value that was reinvested as capital in still more efficient factory machinery, as well as bolstering the astounding profits of both industrial capitalists and slave owners, revenues for governments, and higher wages for the new industrial working class.[xxxiii]

In Marx’s invocation of slavery as the proverbial pedestal for the exploitation of wage labour, he identifies a particular condition for the actual historical genesis of capital, but provides no extended elaboration of the interrelation of slavery and wage labour. Instead, because Marx’s principal aim is to theoretically clarify the capital-wage labour relation, he prioritises the logical development of its form in a manner that, in effect, treats slavery as a kind of externality.[xxxiv] Nonetheless, contemporary historiography abundantly verifies what  Marx already plainly knew:  ‘historically, slavery was a key means of expanding commodity production, creating a world market, and providing the substantive conditions for the development of the capital-wage labour form.’[xxxv]However, as Dale Tomich notes, ‘the historical hierarchy among forms of labour is not, and cannot be, the same as the theoretical hierarchy.’[xxxvi] This conceptual autonomy of slavery and ‘capitalism’ has regrettably led many would-be Marxists astray, treating both terms as ahistorical, static, abstract categories presumed to be fundamentally inimical, and in this way recapitulating some of the elementary conceits of classical bourgeois political economy regarding the presumptively greater productivity and efficiency of wage labour over slave labour, and thus upholding the notion of their irreconcilability.[xxxvii] As James Oakes remarks tellingly, ‘Nowadays, the bourgeois critique of slavery is kept alive primarily by Marxist historians.’[xxxviii] Indeed, whereas for much of history wage labour was ‘perceived as something akin to slavery,’[xxxix] it was precisely one of the paramount ideological achievements of the advancing bourgeois ethos of industrial capitalist society during the early to mid-nineteenth century, particularly in the form of what is known as labour republicanism in the United States, that wage labour came to be pervasively coded as ‘free labour.’ The racialisation of ‘free’ labour as the proper station and comparatively virtuous status of white workers, in contradistinction with African American enslavement as well as the ‘slavish’ condition of myriad other categories of people of color, was utterly crucial and decisive.[xl]

Marx relies extensively on the heuristic utility of contrasts between slave labour and wage labour, precisely to underscore the affinities between the two. Furthermore, he does not shun depictions of ostensibly ‘free’ (waged) labour as a reconstructed form of servitude: ‘The starting-point of the development that gave rise both to the wage-labourer and to the capitalist was the enslavement of the worker.’[xli] The characterisation of wage labour as a ‘veiled’ form of slavery, notably, speaks directly to Marx’s preoccupation with why labour (and its mastery) systematically appears under capitalism in this particular form:  ‘the value and price of labour-power’ come to be expressed in the form of wages, and thus ‘makes the actual relation invisible, and indeed presents to the eye the precise opposite of that relation,’ thereby supplying the basis for ‘all the notions of justice held by both the worker and the capitalist … all capitalism’s illusions of freedom.’[xlii]  Nonetheless, Marx also discerned in the ‘unqualified slavery’ of colonial capitalism the production of commodities for the world market whereby ‘the civilised horrors of over-work are grafted onto the barbaric horrors of slavery.’[xliii] Hence, New World slavery was not only a material and practical prerequisite for that illusory freedom attributed to wage labour, but also a kind of exemplar of the raw unveiled truth of labour under capitalism. Thus, Marx’s analysis would seem to command a deeper interrogation of labour as such by way of a more frank encounter with labour in its proverbial Black ‘skin.’

The ‘trade in men’ (and women, and children), in Du Bois’s account, ‘came in time to be founded on racial caste, and this caste was made the foundation of a new industrial system.’^[xliv] As a result, the ‘doctrine of race’ arising from this primitive accumulation to justify and legitimate the subjugation of indigenous, colonised, and enslaved peoples thereafter had to be ‘frantically rationalised in every possible direction.’^[xlv] That racial whiteness has, since its inception, been an equivocal and treacherous fabrication, therefore, ought to be fairly evident. Nevertheless, the semblance of objectivity and purity customarily attributed to whiteness — its precisely un-natural yet terrifyingly naturalised social reality — has been forged and exalted only through a bloody history and a system of rule predicated on racial hierarchy in which whiteness has systematically been exclusively guarded as the most privileged status — which is to say, in short, white supremacy. As Du Bois memorably remarked, ‘there was but one unanimity’ among the various rivals for imperial prerogative – ‘the doctrine of the divine right of white people to steal.’^[xlvi] Du Bois eloquently if acerbically exposed what he called the ‘religion of whiteness,’^[xlvii] for which ‘whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!’^[xlviii]

White supremacy is a social and political order of domination and subordination that systemically generates and upholds inequalities of wealth, power, and prestige by privileging racialised whiteness over and above all other categories of ‘racial’ identity. Foundational racialised distinctions and meanings, such as ‘white’ or ‘Black,’ were literally invented, imposed, and enforced through various iterations of the global regime of European/colonial supremacy, retroactively. They appear as the transparent and self-evident (‘natural’) names for differences that only came to have significance and gravity because the particular forms of exploitation and domination that created them required and relied upon their naturalisation. Whiteness, like Blackness, is however no mere fact of nature; it is fact of white supremacy.

To adequately adapt Marx’s critique of the racial coordinates of capitalism and the perplexities of labour in one or another racial ‘skin,’ we must conceive of Blackness as more capacious than a mere synonym for African origin or ancestry alone. We need recourse to a conception of Blackness that corresponds to the full range of racialised categories that white supremacy has orchestrated under the sign of negation. In other words, I refer here not to any supposedly ‘objective’ or ‘natural’ sort of (phenotypic, quasi-’biological’) racial Blackness that might be more conventionally attributed to people of African origin or descent in particular, but rather to the pronouncedly heterogeneous spectrum of all those categories of humanity that European settler colonialism and imperialism unrelentingly produced as colonised and enslaved ‘natives,’ and thus as expressly not-’white.’ Indeed, this was never merely a matter of racial ideology alone, but also of the material and practical transfer of plantation management personnel and ‘expertise’ across the colonial world, within and between empires, whereby the practices of racialised labour subordination were inextricable from the racial subjugation and denigration of subject peoples.[xlix] Hence, in the annals of colonial white supremacy, the compendium of heterogeneous terms and epithets devoted to racial Blackness has often been deployed rather promiscuously to name or denigrate a quite variegated array of phenotypically diverse colonised subjects. What has always been paramount, however, is their relegation to a subordinated status denied and expelled from whiteness.

Moreover, we may instructively apprehend ‘Blackness’ not primarily (or not exclusively) as a literal attribute of the ‘skin’ per se, but rather as the preeminent figure of racialised subordination within a global regime of white supremacy. The people of Africa — who were hunted, captured, kidnapped, commodified, trafficked, shackled, deported, tortured, raped, mutilated, and killed, all in order to subject them to a permanent regime of brutally coerced labour — were the only category of humanity in the modern world order, as Achille Mbembe argues, ‘whose skin has been transformed into the form and spirit of merchandise — the living crypt of capital.’^[l] Indeed, if the Atlantic slave trade literally transformed African persons into ‘human-objects, human-commodities, human-money,’^[li] the term ‘Black’ that was devised to brand their particular flesh nonetheless ‘was invented to signify exclusion, brutalisation, and degradation, to point to a limit constantly conjured and abhorred.’^[lii] Consequently, and above all else, Blackness names that limit.

Inasmuch as the objectification of human productive power and creative capacity is precisely what is at stake in Marx’s critique of the capital-labour relation, predicated as it is upon the commodification of the capacity for work (labour-power), the reduction of human beings into ‘human-objects, human-commodities, human-money’ — indeed, ‘human capital’ — which was the very essence of modern slavery, requires us to re-situate enslaved labour as the defining and constitutive limit for how we comprehend labour itself under capitalism.[liii] This, after all, is precisely what Marx describes in his analysis of the struggle over the working day.  From the standpoint of capital, Marx clarifies, even for ostensibly ‘free’ (waged) labour:

The working-day contains the full 24 hours.… Hence it is self-evident that the labourer is nothing other than labour-power for the duration of his whole life, and that therefore all his disposable time is by nature and by right labour-time, to be devoted to the self-valorisation of capital, to be devoted to the self-expansion of capital…. But in its blind measureless drive, its insatiable appetite for surplus labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical limits of the working-day…. It is not the normal maintenance of the labour-power which determines the limits of the working-day here, but rather the greatest possible daily expenditure of labour-power, no matter how diseased, compulsory and painful it may be, which determines the limits of the workers’ period of rest. Capital asks no questions about the length of life of labour-power. What interests it is purely and simply the maximum of labour-power that can be set in motion in a working day. It attains this objective by shortening the life of labour-power….^[liv]

Marx’s scathing critique of wage labour is always haunted by the long shadow of slavery as its limit figure.[lv] Insofar as Blackness is inextricable from the historical experience of modern slavery as a kind of name, indeed a racialised branding, for that historically specific limit of human objectification and commodification, we may begin to recognise that all labour under capitalism may itself be understood to be at leasttendentially encompassed under this racialised sign as the antithesis of capital. This, indeed, is what ensures that labour ‘in a white skin’ – labour identified with racial whiteness, and thus invested in the treacherous material and practical benefits of white supremacy – cannever emancipate itself. Such an investment in whiteness obfuscates what Marx decried as ‘the enslavement of the worker’ to capital, and very reliably renders ‘white’ workers as labour-for-capital. This, furthermore, is why capitalism requires white supremacy and will always sustain the advantages that accrue to those who have come to be racialised as white, which Du Bois famously recognised to be the symbolic and psychological ‘wages’ of whiteness.[lvi] Marx underscores the centuries-long incubation and development of capitalist social relations ‘required before the ‘free’ worker … makes a voluntary agreement, i.e. is compelled by social conditions to sell the whole of his active life, his very capacity for labour, in return for the price of his customary means of subsistence, to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage.’[lvii] This same historical process was substantially concurrent with the genesis of a global (colonial capitalist) regime of white supremacy, which similarly compelled those putatively ‘free’ workers racialised as white to trade their human birthright for the disfigurement of whiteness, and to accommodate themselves to capitals’ mastery over them in exchange for the paltry benefits of their sociopolitical alignment with the master race – a mess of racial pottage.  

If we comprehend labour to be the antithesis of capital, then to the extent that Blackness names the ultimate condition of labour’s subordination and subjection to capital, we need to recognise the tendency for all labour under capital to be pressed toward a sociopolitical condition of Blackness (or approximating Blackness), where Blackness does not name any kind of essential identity but the racialised sociopolitical condition of that subordination/subjection. This may be taken to be a corollary to the proposition that enslavement is the limit figure for all labour under capitalism, and that there is a tendency to press all labour toward that limit. Inasmuch as this dynamic is relational and tendential, and thus signals the larger workings of a system, we have an analytic that can encompass the full range of sociopolitical differences and contradictions (racialised or otherwise) along an unstable and contingent continuum of relative freedom/unfreedom.

While never denying or disregarding the historical specificity of African experiences of white supremacy and the particularity for Africans and all people of African ancestry of being racialised as Black,^[lviii] we nonetheless require a more expansive and capacious understanding of Blackness as a sociopolitical category that, likewise, tendentially encompasses the whole spectrum of racialised social identities produced as non-white within our global postcolonial regime of white supremacy. Here, we may recall that in his landmark text,The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois proposes aglobal conceptual framework for apprehending his subject: ‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line –– the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.’^[lix] In the aftermath of the era of decolonisation that defined the latter half of the twentieth century, the problem of the color line has become widely synonymous with borders. Contemporary postcolonial migration and refugee movements may therefore be recognised as providing crucial sites for what Mbembe has tellingly depicted as ‘the Becoming Black of the world,’^[lx] whereby ‘the systematic risks experienced specifically by Black slaves during early capitalism have now become the norm for, or at least the lot of, all of subaltern humanity,’^[lxi] in which ‘the term ‘Black’ has been generalised,’^[lxii] and there is a ‘tendency to universalize the Black condition.’^[lxiii]

Race, Difference, and the Abstraction of Labour

If I am emphasizing race (and specifically, Blackness) as a decisive analytical tool for ultimately unpacking the global question of labour within our postcolonial condition, generally (and for the question of migrant labour, in particular) it is because Blackness is in fact necessary for apprehending labour as such under capitalism. When he proclaimed, ‘Labour in a white skin can never emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin,’ Marx chose his words well. By evoking thebranding of the flesh of enslaved African/American labour, Marx tersely but precisely named the visceral corporeality and sheer cruelty of slavery’s dehumanizing violence, while yet naming a more diffuse process of racialisation whereby Blackness itself could be inferred to be both the result of a kind of sociopolitical branding as well as that very physical process of branding itself. In other words, the production of racial distinctions in the modern capitalist world has itself been a continuous and ever unfinished process of branding. Blackness (and race, more generally) has been an elemental and foundational figure for theoretically interrogating the sociopolitical production ofdifference within our capitalist modernity.

The theoretical stakes of this intervention revolve around what is necessarily a mutually constitutive engagement in my scholarly work with both race and migration; they are not reducible, however, to any ostensibly delimited question of ‘identity.’ In other words, the stakes here are emphatically not to apprehend ‘difference’ as if it were merely an unfortunate or cumbersome, pre-political (quasi-natural) pretext for various properly political tactics of labour subordination and strategies of divide-and-rule, serving to undermine the unity of a presumptively unitary ‘working class.’ Rather, I am proposing that we cannot adequately comprehend Marx’s theory of labour under capitalism, as such, without further pursuing this inquiry into the puzzle of ‘labour in a white skin’ and, concomitantly, labour branded as Black.

Capital can never extract from labour the abstract (eminently social) substance that is ‘value’ except with recourse to the abstraction of labour-power, which however can only be derived from the palpable vital energies of living labour. As an operative, indeed decisive, category of capital accumulation, labour-power (abstract labour) never ceases to pertain to real flesh-and-blood (embodied, and hence, racialised) working people (concrete labour). As Marx explains:

With the disappearance of the useful character of the products of labour, the useful character of the kinds of labour embodied in them also disappears; this in turn entails the disappearance of the different concrete forms of labour. They can no longer be distinguished, but are all together reduced to the same kind of labour, human labour in the abstract.… There is nothing left of them in each case but the same phantom-like objectivity; they are merely congealed quantities of homogenous human labour, i.e. of human labour-power.… As crystals of this social substance, which is common to them all, they are values — commodity values.^[lxiv]

Marx affiliated concrete (variegated) labour with the use-value of the distinct products of that labour, and therefore with the whole heterogeneous panoply of positive, determinate, qualitative specificities — in short, with difference as such, and therefore with the historically specific and socially distinctive aspects of human life. In contrast, it was the systemic requirement for abstract labour as a generic form that served to elucidate the historically specific but global character of alienation, exploitation, and fetishism under capitalism.

Notably, Marx discerned these global capitalist socioeconomic processes to be uneven in their development, and therefore, to be most abundantly evidenced in the United States.

Indifference toward specific labours conforms to a form of society in which individuals can with ease transfer from one labour to another, and where the specific kind is a matter of chance for them, hence of indifference…. Such a state of affairs is at its most developed in the most modern form of existence of bourgeois society — in the United States. Here, then, for the first time, the point of departure of modern economics, namely the abstraction of the category ‘labour,’ ‘labour as such,’ labour pure and simple, becomes true in practice. The simplest abstraction, then, which modern economics places at the head of its discussions, and which expresses an immeasurably ancient relation valid in all forms of society, nevertheless achieves practical truth as an abstraction only as a category of the most modern society.^[lxv]

Remarkably, what for Marx was the epitome of ‘the most modern society,’ or more precisely, ‘the most modern form of existence of bourgeois society’ (as a virtually ‘pure’ form of capitalist society) — the United States — was, we may recall, precisely a social formation that had been materially and practically built upon large-scale plantation slavery, and a sociopolitical order of white supremacy. And it was here, where the branding of labour in the racialised ‘skin’ of Blackness was likewise exceedingly advanced, that there emerged the most pure form of the abstraction of ‘labour’ as such, of labour ‘in general.’

In his account of the formation of capital, Marx establishes an analytical opposition between ‘two very different kinds of commodity owners; on the one hand, the owners of money, means of production, means of subsistence, who are eager to valorise the sum of values they have appropriated by buying the labour-power of others; on the other hand, free workers, the sellers of their own labour-power, and therefore the sellers of labour. Free workers, in the double sense that they neither form part of the means of production themselves, as would be the case with slaves, serfs, etc., nor do they own the means of production.’^[lxvi] In this regard, there is an emphatic heuristic contrast drawn between the figures of ‘free workers’ (or ‘free labour’) and ‘slaves.’ It is precisely this figure of ‘free’ labour that serves to underscore the historically specific character of the emergence of labour-power as the commodified objectification of the human capacity to work (labour in the abstract), which distinguishes the ostensibly contractual and purely voluntary transaction that is understood to transpire in the capitalist labour market between owners of the means of production and wage labourers – as if they were the mere sellers of just another commodity like any other. Nonetheless, these putatively ‘free’ workers are scathingly depicted by Marx as those ‘who have nothing to sell except their own skins.’^[lxvii] Moreover, Marx explains, referring specifically to the historical dissolution of feudalism, ‘these newly freed men became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.’^[lxviii] This indeed is one of the premier formulations by which we understand the concept of (‘the so-called’) primitive accumulation: ‘So-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as ‘primitive’ because it forms the pre-history of capital, and of the mode of production corresponding to capital.’^[lxix] Nevertheless, these processes of expropriation and dispossession, we know, just as Marx knew, were — and continue to be — coterminous with the generalisation of the wage-labour relation. Their character as ‘prior’ to capitalism proper is strictly apparent and is presented in this manner by Marx for analytical purposes. In fact, they were not only constitutive, historically, of capital and indeed necessary preconditions for the formation of a regime of capital accumulation, but they have co-existed with the more pure ideal type of capitalist (wage-)labour relations throughout the ongoing history of ‘actually existing’ capitalism, which has never ceased to be written in blood and fire.^[lxx] In this respect, centuries of New World slavery cannot be reduced to a mere residual of some putative pre-history of ‘true’ capitalist relations.

The racial branding of labour that Marx identifies in the context of New World slavery was a necessary and truly definitive feature of the brutality required for the subjugation of enslaved African/American labour but also for the elaborate sociopolitical and sociolegal machinations devised to produce the global/colonial fact of Blackness. Importantly, I contend, it was likewise this same branding, this same production of racialised difference, that served as a necessary predicate for the consolidation and perfecting of what Marx called ‘labour in the abstract.’ Labour in the abstract — a figure of labour literally shorn of its humanity and stripped of all qualitative specificities — was possible historically only through the real stripping and degradation of the actual human life of the enslaved and colonised into a form of life that could be classed as virtually sub-human.  And after all, as Gargi Bhattacharyya notes, ‘capitalism cannot function if we all are allowed to become fully human.’^[lxxi]

To be rendered as labour in the abstract is to be reduced to labour and nothing but labour. This was the precise project of modern slavery. This of course is not to suggest that such a project was ever successfully fulfilled or completed. Enslaved people were never reduced to a condition so abject as to be shorn of their distinctly human subtlety and suppleness. On the contrary, the irrepressibly human creative powers and potentialities of enslaved African/Americans were not only a veritable font of continuous insubordination and rebellion, but also a foundational source for the very notion of freedom and the unfinished work of emancipation in our modern world.^[lxxii] Nor is it to suggest, on the other hand, that enslaved people were the ostensible owners and sellers of that distinctly capitalist commodity that Marx designated as labour-power. However, there never could have emerged this social fiction of labour-power —whereby the capacity to work could be rendered as if it were simply one more commodity for sale in the market — without a pre-history in which the myriad forms of concrete labour became reduced and generalised (that is to say, abstracted) into a figure of labour in the abstract, labour ‘in general.’ For the historically specific emergence and consolidation of this peculiarly modern form of generic ‘labour,’ slavery was constitutive. There was simply no more perfect approximation of the elusive figure of labour in the abstract than the social condition inflicted on enslaved people by modern slavery — that distinctly capitalist sociopolitical regime that worked assiduously and unrelentingly to reduce a whole category of human life to labour and nothing but labour.

The production of labour in the abstract, or labour ‘in general,’ furthermore, depended upon concrete productions of sociopolitical difference, for which acts of physical, corporeal branding were merely a cruel punctuation to the more general branding of race. Once again, I hasten to clarify that this is in no sense an essentialist proposition about ‘race’ as any kind of ‘real’ (pseudo-natural, phenotypic, quasi-biological) category of difference among distinct varieties of human being, but rather an insistence on the eminently social and political reality of race as a defining and organizing principle for the historical production of difference, inequality, and hierarchy within the global labour regime of capitalism.

The homogenised abstraction of labour-power could be generated only under the aegis of the social production of real heterogeneity and inequality, such as that which Du Bois famously called ‘the problem of the color line,’^[lxxiii] or analogously, what Partha Chatterjee has designated as ‘the rule of colonial difference.’^[lxxiv] In other words, the capital-labour relation — which appears to be merely a matter of narrowly ‘economic’ relations — must always be understood in terms of its actual politics, which is to say, the power struggles at stake in the disputes over the historically specific social production of difference.^[lxxv] As Bhattacharyya incisively puts the question, alongside an ‘overarching instrumentalisation of human life, how are some deemed (even) less?’^[lxxvi] Capital’s apparent (economic) indifference to, or disregard for, the specificities of the terms of conditions for extracting the maximum surplus value has only ever been sustained in practice through the actual (political) struggles that differentiate living labour toward the very instrumental end of maximizing its subordination and exploitation. Such a politics of difference at work within the genesis of abstract labour has always been inextricable from the real history of racial subjugation, for which slavery remains a primal scene.

Labour Mobility, Migrant ‘Illegality,’ and Branding

In the remainder of this essay, I will re-purpose this ostensibly historical perspective on the foundational role of slavery in the genesis of colonial capitalism toward the ends of elaborating what has remained an as-yet underdeveloped Marxian theory of migrant labour within the contemporary postcolonial condition.^[lxxvii] My endeavor is not to identify and denounce the contemporary existence of diverse forms of ‘virtual’ or ‘new slavery,’ nor to subsume a discussion of migrant labour within a comparable exposé of the vicious and coercive features of human trafficking. While there is surely no shortage of truly horrific exploitation and oppression in the world today, including a whole sordid spectrum of forms of outright enslavement, I am reluctant to contribute to the sensationalisation of such spectacles of victimisation, both because they often serve, however inadvertently or unwittingly, to re-stabilise ‘normal’ exploitation as effectively legitimate and proper, and because they tend to conceal or suppress the subjective dimensions, however constrained and contradictory, of those who are thus objectified and subjugated by the cruelty of their exploiters.^[lxxviii] Rather, having extrapolated key insights from Marx’s corpus for the formulation of a racial theory of labour, I am concerned with the ways that slavery as a specific system of (colonial capitalist) labour subordination supplies capitalism with a defining horizon for all labour, and thus how this insight might instructively serve to comprehend the racialised subordination of migrant labour within our global/ postcolonial sociopolitical order.  A comprehensive Marxian theory of migration commands a critical attention to theorizing questions of the state, law, nationalism, borders, and citizenship, as well as race (among other social formations of ‘difference’). My focus here will continue to highlight questions of race and labour.

Migration provides a key site for contemplating the mobility of labour ‘as such’ — labour ‘in general,’ or labour in the abstract. Simply put, there could be ‘no capitalism without migration.’^[lxxix] Simultaneously, the global mobility of labour is in fact inexorably embroiled in the production of difference, particularly the spatialised difference that is produced by (‘national’) state borders.^[lxxx] Indeed, in a world social order that delegates the expressly political tasks of labour’s subordination and coercion to localised (territorially delimited) formations of more or less organised violence (customarily, ‘national’ state formations),^[lxxxi] borders and their enforcement become critical sites of labour subordination, mediating the global relation of capital and labour through various interventions that differentiate the mobility of labour according to the juridical categories that govern migration. Thus, if there were no borders, there would be no ‘migration’ as such – only mobility.[lxxxii]

As the veritable source of all value, it is not unreasonable to say that labour-power is the premier commodity in the global circuitry of capitalist exchange. Capital has made and relentlessly re-made the world in its own image, and according to its chaotic requirements — bursting asunder every apparent barrier in the creation of an ever more unobstructed global arena for profit-making and the continuous re-consolidation of a global division of labour.[lxxxiii] Likewise, necessarily and inevitably, there has also been a concomitant escalation in the mobility of labour-power – arguably, above and beyond that of any other commodity (except money capital itself). Whereas other commodities are generally transported in order to be exchanged and consumed, once and for all, capital’s continuous and unrelenting appetite for labour-power requires that living labour must be constantly replenished in order that it may be repeatedly ‘consumed’ anew.^[lxxxiv] Thus, the global movement of homogenised, abstract labour is finally embodied in the restless life and death of labour in a rather more ‘concrete’ form -- which is to say, actual migrant working men and women. While Marx restricted his use of the concept of ‘concrete labour’ to refer to the heterogenous variety of specific forms of work that produced distinct products or contributions to the larger labour process, I adapt this distinction between abstract and concrete labour here to insist on the ways in which labour in the abstract is never separable from its embodiment in living labour, replete with all the qualitative differences that may otherwise be assembled under the heading of ‘concrete’ labour. The accelerated mobility of labour-power is similarly inseparable, then, from the migration of actual (corporeal) human beings and all the concomitant differences that accrue to them through the mediation of border regimes and immigration law.

In the mass exodus of the Irish fleeing the potato famine of 1846, for instance, Marx notably recognised what he characterised as ‘a systematic process.’^[lxxxv] The Irish exodus entailed ‘a new way of spiriting a poor people thousands of miles away from the scene of its misery.’^[lxxxvi] It also served, in effect, as ‘one of the most lucrative branches of [Ireland’s] export trade.’^[lxxxvii] By exporting the labour-power of its surplus population while also mobilizing the migrants themselves as a source of remittances, Marx noted, the exodus not only subsidised those left behind but further fueled migration by financing the travel costs of subsequent generations of migrants. From the opposite vantage point of the United States, Marx discerned with respect to Irish labour migration a parallel process of importation — ‘the importation of paupers.’^[lxxxviii] As Michael Burawoy classically demonstrated, migrant labour likewise entails a systematic separation of the exploitation of labour-power from the sites (and costs) of its reproduction.^[lxxxix] As with the mobility of capital itself, which exudes a pronounced indifference toward the particular forms of the labour process where it invests in favor of a maximisation of surplus value, and is in this sense exceedingly versatile, so also with the human mobility of labour. Migrant labour mobility is a supreme instance of flexibility, commonly compelled to regard the particular content of one or another type of work with relative indifference, and to render up its labour-power wherever and however it may be required.

The inclination that Marx discerned with regard to the mobility of capital to surmount any ‘legal [or other] extra-economic impediments to its freedom of movement’ is yet another aspect of this versatility of migrant labour.^[xc] Nevertheless, depicting Ireland’s precisely colonial condition in terms of ‘a government … maintained only by bayonets and by a state of siege sometimes open and sometimes disguised,’^[xci] Marx also discerned how the ‘forced immigration of poor Irishmen’ into the industrial cities of England had enabled the capitalist class to cultivate ‘two hostile camps’ defined by the ‘profound antagonism between the Irish proletariat and the English proletariat,’ whereby ‘the average English worker hates the Irish worker … [and] regards him somewhat like thepoor whites of the Southern States of North America regard their black slaves.’^[xcii]  The ‘tendency to universalize the Black condition,’^[xciii] so provocatively articulated by Mbembe for the contemporary postcolonial subaltern condition on a global scale, was plainly evident already for Marx.  This is so, I am insisting, because slavery was already the inexorable limit figure for all forms of labour under capitalism, and consequently, Blackness always already supplied the racialised cipher for signaling the most extreme manifestations of modern exploitation.

For present purposes, it is likewise crucial to recall that even for those who come to be racialised as Black, we must guard against naturalizing what has always and everywhere been an historically specific sociopolitical process of producing them as ‘Black.’ In this regard, Stuart Hall’s reflections on his experience as a Black migrant are quite poignant: ‘I’d never called myself black ever in my life.... So it was a discovery for me, a rediscovery [in Britain] of the Caribbean in new terms ... and a rediscovery of the black subject.... I didn’t choose that. I had no alternative.’^[xciv] In other words, although the centuries-old racialisation of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the New World was indisputably a defining crucible for the global/colonial racial formation of Blackness, it was nonetheless the postcolonial migrant encounter with Europe that was, in Hall’s experience, tantamount to a migration into Blackness, a re-racialisation, a subordination and subjection that was inextricable from the ongoing and unfinished business of (re-)producing racial distinctions and meanings. His migration, and moreover, his migrant condition, required that he be socially and politically inscribed, and thus racially branded — as Black.

The ‘Blackness’ of racially subjugated migrants is therefore always something fundamentally new, to be continuously ‘discovered’ by migrants as they endure and confront the larger social forces working to produce them as racial objects and thereby also as (re-)racialised subjects, and thus compelling them to ‘re-discover’ themselves racially. It is necessary, then, that we recognize the fundamentally racial character of migration within and throughout the world capitalist system,[xcv] while also underscoring the contemporary salience of the figures of migration and refugee movements for destabilizing, de-naturalizing, and de-essentializing yet again the pernicious persistence of encrusted and ossified racial nomenclatures. The persistently racial salience of migration is as indisputable as is the pivotal importance of migration in demonstrating the profoundly unstable and historically mutable character of race as an eminently social construction, implicated always in unresolved sociopolitical struggles over its meanings and lived consequentiality.[xcvi] Thus, it is productive once more to insist on a conception of Blackness that exceeds the constrictions of the more rigid and conventional racial codifications that have been generated and sedimented historically.

The historical production of Blackness (and thereby, also of whiteness) required the literal branding of the flesh of enslaved Africans and their descendants across the Americas.  Furthermore, racialisation itself has operated as a kind of sociopolitical branding. Such sociopolitical processes of branding have always required multifarious and reiterative operations, including of course those of the law, to truly accomplish the task of allocating and resolutely attaching sociopolitical categories of difference to diverse varieties of human persons, and thus searing their racialised designations onto their bodies and identities. Analogously, we may begin to comprehend how other (ostensibly non-racial or race-neutral) forms of sociopolitical categorisation and regimentation, such as ostensibly ‘national’ differences come to operate as effectively racial categories of difference, and how generic figures of ‘foreignness,’ or indeed the durable designation of particular categories of migrants as ‘illegal,’ also bear a compelling resemblance to branding. Without effacing the irreducible historical specificity of Marx’s discussion of modern slavery, it has indeed become increasingly common today, given our global postcolonial condition, that labour ‘in a black skin’ presents itself also in a ‘foreign’ costume.

The putative ‘illegality’ of migrants or so-called ‘asylum-seekers’ (itself a derisive term predicated on suspicion) has become the single most prominent ‘problem’ for immigration and asylum law and policy on a global scale during recent decades. Seldom does public debate consider precisely where and how this ‘illegality’ came into being, however. Nonetheless, migrant and refugee ‘illegality’ always has a history within each particular juridical and border enforcement context. One of the central hypotheses of a critical analysis of what I call the legal production of migrant ‘illegality’^[xcvii] has been to recognize that a spectacle of border policing in fact systematically distracts us from discerning how migrant and refugee ‘illegality’ is truly generated elsewhere, through law and policy formulated and promulgated at a great remove from the actual physical/territorial borders of states.^[xcviii] Indeed, it is the law that brands particular migrations and categories of migrants as ‘illegal.’ Migrant illegalisation is a process of sociopolitical branding.

Furthermore, the ethnographic study of present-day border policing and immigration enforcement practices confirms that such histories (much like the histories of racialisation) are never finished. Rather than faits accomplis, established once and for all time, these diverse and historically specific productions of migrant and refugee ‘illegality’ must continue to be (re-) produced through border struggles and ongoing practices of (re-)bordering. The concepts of deportability^[xcix] and a global deportation regime,^[c] furthermore, help to elucidate how illegalised migrants’ and refugees’ susceptibility to deportation — the prospect of deportation, beyond the actual fact of deportation — contributes decisively to the production of migrant precarity in everyday life. In short, it is precisely deportability that plays a distinctly disciplinary role in the production of the conditions of possibility for migrant labour-power to serve as a highly desirable commodity for employers, often converting what Marx called the disposable ‘reserve army’[ci] of labour into an enthusiastically recruited (deportable) labour force of choice.

Capital requires a surplus population to both absorb displaced workers, but also to serve as a pool of potential workers when production expands.^[cii] The operation of the reserve army of labour serves to discipline labour at the same time that it meets the requirements of capital accumulation on an expanding scale. ‘The over-work of the employed part of the working class swells the ranks of its reserve, while, conversely, the greater pressure that the reserve by its competition exerts on the employed workers forces them to submit to over-work and subjects them to the dictates of capital.’^[ciii] The sociopolitical and legal branding of migrant labour as ‘foreign’ and especially as ‘illegal’ supplies a crucial disciplinary mechanism for managing all labour through a multiplication of the categories of difference that serve to decompose and fragment labour into competing rival factions riven by racialised and other essentialised antagonisms that are naturalised as ‘unpassable boundaries’ and ‘fictions of embodied otherness.’^[civ] Alternating mass deportations with a more or less permanent mass importation of illegalised and deportable labour has long ensured that the state’s mediation of migration through diverse tactics of border policing and immigration law enforcement provides capital with an exquisitely flexible, eminently disposable ‘reserve army’ of labour.^[cv]

Furthermore, the border-making and border-enforcing activities of immigration enforcement have been increasingly and pervasively relocated to sites within the ‘interior’ of migrant-receiving states, such that illegalised migrants and refugees are made, in effect, to carry borders on their very bodies^[cvi] as border enforcement and the prospect of deportation come to permeate the full spectrum of racialised everyday life activities and spaces. The global class politics of human mobility, which routinely transposes a transnational relation of capital and labour into the ostensibly insular ‘national’ politics of ‘immigration’ and border policing, continuously reinvigorates ‘unpassable boundaries’ and thus reinvents and reanimates racialised distinctions. Thus, the global class politics of human mobility (the mobility of labour) ever increasingly instigates the consolidation of what Étienne Balibar (among others) has depicted as ‘a world apartheid,’ which institutes a ‘color bar’ that now no longer merely separates the so-called ‘center’ from ‘periphery,’ or North from South, but effectively runs through all ‘national’ state formations.^[cvii] Thus, the branding processes of migrant illegalisation generate open-ended sites not only for border struggles and immigration and refugee politics, taken more narrowly, but also for unforeseen and expansive disputes over race, citizenship, and labour, more generally. As with the racial branding of Blackness that was a constitutive feature of the historical production of enslaved labour, so also does migrant ‘illegality’ today entail a sociolegal branding that is crucial for the creation and maintenance of migration as a reliable, eminently mobile, flexible, and ultimately disposable source of racially subjugated labour-power.

Finally, let us recall once more Marx’s poignant insight: ‘Labour in a white skin can never emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.’^[cviii] Hence, we may begin to recognise how the sociopolitical production of difference, and the branding of diverse categories of labouring humanity into racialised ‘skins,’ has operated as an absolutely central and constitutive feature of labour’s subordination to the requirements and mandates of capital accumulation, and thus the continuous (re-)production of labour-for-capital. Analogously, the sociopolitical and legal mediations of human mobility on a global scale — and thereby, the bordering of labour mobility as ‘migration’ — thus becomes apprehensible as a comparable production of difference that brands various particular categories of labour as ‘foreign,’ if not indeed as ‘illegal.’^[cix] If, as Marx and Engels famously proclaim in the closing lines of The Communist Manifesto, the working people ‘of all countries’ have ‘a world to win,’^[cx] it may be all the more vital and more relevant than ever to recall another decisive and conceptually more ambitious proposition that precedes that resounding battle cry, and which migration serves continuously to verify:  the working people of the world ‘have no country.’^[cxi] Hence, a contemporary corollary to Marx’s axiom would seem to be: Labour in the prison inmate’s uniform of citizenship can never emancipate itself where labour in the migrant’s garb of ‘foreignness’ is branded as ‘illegal.’

Acknowledgements

Some of the ideas developed in this essay initially began to take shape in the course of an extended dialogue with Nahum Chandler, to whom I owe a debt of deep gratitude and appreciation. I am also grateful for the enduring inspiration and encouragement of Dave Roediger and Howie Winant. Thanks are also due to Hannah Schling, whose questions pushed me to clarify various points. An earlier version of portions of this essay appeared in my essay “Migration and the Mobility of Labor” in Matt Vidal, Tony Smith, Tomás Rotta, and Paul Prew (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx. New York and London: Oxford University Press (published online: December 2018).

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De Genova, Nicholas and Nathalie Peutz, eds. 2010. The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Du Bois, W. E. B. [1903]1982. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Signet/ Penguin.

Du Bois, W. E. B. 1915. The Negro. New York: Holt; Project Gutenberg EBook available at:http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15359/15359-h/15359-h.htm

Du Bois, W.E.B. [1920]1971 ‘The Souls of White Folk.’ Pp. 29-52 in Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil. New York: AMS Press. Reprinted in Roediger, ed. 1998, pp. 184-99.

Du Bois, W.E.B. 1935. Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.

Du Bois, W.E.B. [1939]2014. Black Folk Then and Now: An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race. New York: Oxford University Press.

Elson, Diane. 1979. ‘The Value Theory of Labour.’ Pp. 115-80 in Diane Elson (ed.), Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism. London: CSE Books.

Federici, Silvia. 2003. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia.

Genovese, Eugene D. 1965. The Political Economy of Slavery. New York: Pantheon.

Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hall, Stuart & Les Back. 2009. ‘At Home and Not at Home: Stuart Hall in Conversation with Les Back.’ Cultural Studies 2(4):658-687.

Harris, Cheryl. 1993. ‘Whiteness as Property.’ Harvard Law Review 106(8):1707-91.

Harvey, David. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Holloway, John. 1994. ‘Global Capital and the National State.’ Capital and Class 52: 23-49.

Johnson, Walter. 2003. ‘Commentary on James Oakes, ‘The Peculiar Fate of the Bourgeois Critique of Slavery’.’ Pp. 48-55 in in Winthrop Jordan, ed. Slavery and the American South. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.

Johnson, Walter. 2004. ‘The Pedestal and the Veil: Rethinking the Capitalism/ Slavery Question.’ Journal of the Early Republic 24(2): 299-308.

Johnson, Walter. 2013.River of Dark Dreams : Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Khosravi, Shahram. 2010.‘Illegal’ Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Marx, Karl. [1845] 1920. The Poverty of Philosophy. Chicago: Charles Kerr.

Marx, Karl. [1858] 1973. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. New York: Vintage/ Random House.

Marx, Karl. [1867] 1976. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One. New York: Vintage/ Random House.

Marx, Karl. [1870] 1971. ‘From Confidential Communication.’ Pp. 252-55 in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels [1848] 1967. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Pluto Press.

Mbembe, Achille. 2017. Critique of Black Reason. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.

Mezzadra, Sandro. 2011a. ‘The Gaze of Autonomy: Capitalism, Migration, and Social Struggles.’ Pp. 121-42 in Vicki Squire, ed. The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity. London and New York: Routledge.

Mezzadra, Sandro. 2011b. ‘The Topicality of Prehistory: A New Reading of Marx’s Analysis of ‘So-called Primitive Accumulation.’ Rethinking Marxism 23(3): 302-321.

Midnight Notes Collective. 1990. ‘The New Enclosures.’ Midnight Notes No. 10; available at:www.midnightnotes.org/newenclos.html.

Ngai, Sianne. 2015. ‘Visceral Abstractions.’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21(1):33-63.

Oakes, James. 2003. ‘The Peculiar Fate of the Bourgeois Critique of Slavery.’ Pp. 29-48 in Winthrop Jordan, ed. Slavery and the American South. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.

Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. 1986/2015. Racial Formation in the United States. Third Edition. New York: Routledge.

Robinson, Cedric. 1983/2000. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Roediger, David R. 1991. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso.

Roediger, David R., ed. 1998. Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White. New York: Schocken Books.

Roediger, David R. and Elizabeth D. Esch. 2012. The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labour in U.S. History. New York: Oxford University Press.

Rosenthal, Caitlin. 2018. Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

Saxton, Alexander. 1990. The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Verso.

Sharma, Nandita. 2003. ‘Travel Agency: A Critique of Anti-trafficking Campaigns’.’ Refuge 21: 53–65.

Sharma, Nandita. 2020. Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Tomich, Dale W. 2004. Through the Prism of Slavery:Labour, Capital, and World Economy. New York: Rowman & Liittlefield.

Turner, Terence. 2008. ‘Marxian Value Theory: An Anthropological Perspective.’ Anthropological Theory 8(1):43-56.

van der Linden, Marcel. 2010. ‘Re-Constructing the Origins of Modern Labour Management.’ Labour History 51(4): 509-522.

[i] Marx 1867/1976, p.173.

[ii] Marx 1867/1976, p.174.

^[iii] Elson 1979, p. 123; see also Turner 2008.

[iv] Marx 1867/1976, p.1038.

^[v] Marx 1867/1976, p. 915; emphases added.

^[vi] Robinson 1983/2000, p. 2.

^[vii] Robinson 1983/2000, p. xxxi.

^[viii] Marx 1867/1976, p. 414.

^[ix] Du Bois 1920/1971. See also:  Allen 1994, and 1997; Cox 1959; Du Bois 1915; Harris 1993; Roediger 1991; Roediger, ed. 1998; Saxton 1990.

^[x] Du Bois 1920/1971, p. 30.

^[xi] Notably, the term ‘primitive accumulation’ — a phrase that originated in the works of bourgeois political economists, which Marx referenced with derision for its euphemistic and misleading character and depicted more precisely as ‘the so-called primitive accumulation’— has over time reverted to widespread (unproblematised) usage, and has come to serve as a shorthand in Marxist scholarship for the violent processes that Marx exposes in his critique; see Marx 1867/1976, pp. 873-74.

^[xii] Marx 1867/ 1976, p.918.

^[xiii] Marx 1867/ 1976, p. 925. For an extended reflection on this passage, see Johnson, 2004; while my reading of Marx’s discussion of this juxtaposition of slave labour and wage labour would reject Johnson’s contention (p.301) that Marx ‘evaded’ the question of slavery and purposefully provincialised the analysis of capitalism in a manner that was ‘Anglo-centric in its spatial parameters and teleological in its temporal framing’ (p.302), I concur with his argument against the methodological nationalism or Eurocentrism of many customary Marxist accounts, dedicated to simply and dogmatically upholding the tautological notion that ‘slavery was, like feudalism, ‘pre-capitalist,’ ‘archaic,’ and a ‘conservative’ residuum’ (p.303), and consequently inclined to interpret the pedestal metaphor as a temporal/ historical one rather than as ‘structural (or spatial)’ (p.305).   

[xiv] Less elegantly, in The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx notably proclaimed: ‘without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry’ (Marx, 1845/ 1920, p.121.

[xv] Johnson, 2004, p.304.

[xvi] Johnson, 2004, p.305.

[xvii] Tomich, 2004, p.30.

[xviii] Johnson, 2013, p.254; see also Baptist, 2014, pp.128.

[xix] Baptist, 2016, p.33; see also Beckert, 2014.

[xx] Baptist, 2016, p.53.

[xxi] Beckert and Rockman, 2016, p.5.

[xxii] Ashworth, 1995, p.89.

[xxiii] Beckert and Rockman, 2016, p.1

[xxiv] Baptist, 2016, pp.53-54.

[xxv] Ashworth, 1995, p.84.

[xxvi] Beckert, 2014, p.32, p.198.

[xxvii] Baptist, 2014, pp.128-129.

[xxviii] Baptist, 2014, p. 129.

[xxix] Baptist, 2014, p. 129. There wear analogously dramatic and persistent increases in the productivity of slave plantations for Cuban sugar and Brazilian coffee; Baptist, 2016, p.54-55.

[xxx] Baptist, 2016, p.57.

[xxxi] Baptist, 2016, p.52.

[xxxii] Baptist, 2016, p.57.

[xxxiii] Baptist, 2014, p. 129; see also Beckert, 2014, p.334; pp.621-622.

[xxxiv] Tomich, 2004, p.23.

[xxxv] Tomich, 2004, p.23.

[xxxvi] Tomich, 2004, p.31.

[xxxvii] For a classic example, see Genovese, 1965; see also Ashworth, 1995, for whom the ‘principal thesis’ is that it was ‘increasing difficult, and finally impossible, for slavery and capitalism to coexist’ (p.115). For relevant critiques, see Baptist, 2014; Beckert, 2014; Johnson, 2013, pp. 252-254; Oakes, 2003; Tomich, 2004, pp. 9-13.

[xxxviii] Oakes, 2003, p.47.

[xxxix] Ashworth, 1995, p.114.

[xl] Roediger, 1991.

[xli] Marx 1867/1976, p.875.

[xlii] Marx 1867/1976, p.680.

[xliii] Marx 1867/1976, p. 345.

^[xliv] Du Bois 1915, Chapter IX; see also Du Bois 1939/ 2014, p. 97.

^[xlv] Du Bois 1939/ 2014, p. 91.

^[xlvi] Du Bois 1920/1971, p. 48.

^[xlvii] Du Bois 1920/1971, p. 31.

^[xlviii] Du Bois 1920/1971, p. 30.

[xlix] Beckert, 2014; van der Linden, 2010; see also Roediger and Esch, 2012; Rosenthal 2018.

^[l] Mbembe 2017, p. 6.

^[li] Mbembe 2017, p. 2.

^[lii] Mbembe 2017, p. 6.

[liii] John Clegg makes a similar point: ‘There is something pristinely capitalist about the total commodification of labour under slavery. Slaves are doubly alienated, for they lack property in both the means of production and in themselves.’ Clegg, 2015, p.302.

^[liv] Marx 1867/1976, pp. 375-76.

[lv] Referring to a French slave code, Marx declares:  ‘This subject one must study in detail to see what the bourgeois makes of himself and of the worker when he can model the world according to his own image without any interference.’ Marx, 1867/1976, p.916 n.4.

[lvi] Du Bois 1935; see also Roediger 1991.

[lvii] Marx 1867/1976, p.382.

^[lviii] Cf. Chandler 2013, and 2014; Gilroy 1993; Mbembe 2017.

^[lix] Du Bois 1903/1982, p.15; see also Chandler 2006, and 2010.

^[lx] Mbembe 2017, p. 6.

^[lxi] Mbembe 2017, p. 4.

^[lxii] Mbembe 2017, p. 6.

^[lxiii] Mbembe 2017, p. 4.

^[lxiv] Marx 1867/1976, p. 128.

^[lxv] Marx 1858/1973, pp. 104-05.

^[lxvi] Marx 1867/1976, p. 874.

^[lxvii] Marx 1867/1976, p. 873.

^[lxviii] Marx 1867/1976, p. 875.

^[lxix] Marx 1867/1976, pp. 874-75.

^[lxx] There has been a robust Marxian debate around the contemporaneity of such violent processes of dispossession; see, e.g. Bonefeld 2001; De Angelis 2001; Federici 2003; Harvey 2003; Mezzadra 2011b; Midnight Notes Collective 1990.

^[lxxi] Bhattacharyya 2018, p. x.

^[lxxii] Du Bois famously depicted the general aims of the strivings of ‘the American Negro’ in a manner that anticipated that another world was possible: ‘to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to … use his best powers and his latent genius.’ Du Bois 1903/1982, p. 9; see also Chandler 2006, 2010, and 2013.

^[lxxiii] Du Bois 1903/1982, pp. 3, 15.

^[lxxiv] Chatterjee 1993.

^[lxxv] Roediger and Esch 2012.

^[lxxvi] Bhattacharyya 2018, p. xi.

^[lxxvii] See also De Genova 2012, 2016a, and 2016b.

^[lxxviii] Cf. Andrijasevic 2010; Aradau 2008; Chapkis 2003; Sharma 2003; see also De Genova 2013.

^[lxxix] Mezzadra  2011a, p. 125.

^[lxxx] De Genova 2016a; Ngai, 2015; Sharma 2020.

^[lxxxi] Holloway 1994.

[lxxxii] De Genova 2016a.

[lxxxiii] Marx1858/1973, p.524.

^[lxxxiv] De Genova 2010, 2012, and 2016b.

^[lxxxv] Marx 1867/1976, p. 862.

^[lxxxvi] Marx 1867/1976, p. 862.

^[lxxxvii] Marx 1867/1976, p. 862.

^[lxxxviii] Marx 1867/1976, p. 939.

^[lxxxix] Burawoy 1976.

^[xc] Marx 1867/1976, p. 1013.

^[xci] Marx 1867/1976, p. 863.

^[xcii] Marx 1870/ 1971, p. 254; emphases in original.

^[xciii] Mbembe 2017, p. 4.

^[xciv] Hall and Back 2009, p. 662.

[xcv] De Genova 2018.

[xcvi] Omi and Winant 1986/2015.

^[xcvii] De Genova 2002, 2004, and 2005.

^[xcviii] De Genova 2002, 2005, and 2013.

^[xcix] De Genova 2002, 2005, 2010, and 2013.

^[c] De Genova and Peutz 2010.

[ci] Marx 1867/1976, p.784.

^[cii] Marx 1867/1976, p. 784.

^[ciii] Marx 1867/1976, p. 789.

^[civ] Bhattacharyya 2018, p. 2.

^[cv] De Genova 2016a.

^[cvi] Khosravi 2010, pp. 97-120.

^[cvii] Balibar 1993/2002, p. 82; see also Besteman 2020.

^[cviii] Marx 1867/1976, p. 414.

^[cix] De Genova 2013, and 2018; Sharma 2020.

^[cx] Marx and Engels 1848/2008, p. 84.

^[cxi] Marx and Engels 1848/2008, p. 61.

This paper addresses the role of global migration and the nature of national borders within the co-constitution of class and race. We begin with Marx’s critique of the value-form – a critique that rests upon a distinction between the ‘essence’ of social reality and its immediate appearances. The paper elaborates how Marx’s understanding of the emergence of a society based upon generalised commodity production leads to a certain conception of the ‘political state’ and citizenship – and thus borders and national belonging. This reveals the distinctive territorial forms of capitalism vis-à-vis those found in pre-capitalist societies, and moves us away from transhistorical conceptions of borders and the nation-state.  In the second half, the paper turns to look at what this conception of borders and migration might mean concretely for how we think about the co-constitution of race and class today. Here the focus is on three crucial aspects of the contemporary world market: (1) the relationship between the cross-border movements of labour and processes of class formation (2) migration and the determination of the value of labour power, and (3) coercive and unfree labour.

This piece is being made available as a preprint edition of the Race and Capital special issue of Historical Materialism. The final published version of this text will be made available on the Brill website in the coming months, we ask that citations refer to the Brill edition.

Issue 32(2&3): Race and Capital

In recent decades, a rich current of Marxist literature has insisted that categories of race and class under capitalism cannot be separated from one another, in either a theoretical or historical sense.[1] The basic premise of this work is that processes of class formation are always racialised in specific, historically concrete ways; and that, likewise, racialised groups are necessarily marked by class inequalities and differences in social power.[2] While race and class are not identical they are simultaneous and co-constituted, and as such, positivist and crudely reductionist forms of Marxism that demote race to a ‘secondary contradiction’ or even a distraction from working class struggle need to be fully rejected.[3] The production (and exploitation) of difference needs to be considered as internal to the logic of capital[4] and thus, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor notes, “racism, capitalism, and class rule [are always] tangled together in such a way that it is impossible to imagine one without the other”.[5]

This insistence on the co-constitutive and entangled character of race and class builds upon an earlier generation of Marxist work that sought to unpack the enduring character and legacies of racism in the US, Britain, and elsewhere, as well as attempts to understand why the experience of class itself was typically expressed through racial categories.[6] Overlapping considerably with debates around gender, sexuality, and imperialism, these earlier theoretical contributions were largely generated from (and served to corroborate) the lived experience of anti-racist and communist movements throughout the 20^th century – including, most critically, the work of black feminists.[7] Activists and intellectuals involved in anti-colonial struggles examined and conceptualised the mutual ties of race, class, and imperialism, including the emergence of national bourgeoisies within their respective societies.[8] This connection with struggle is often omitted in the sanitised versions of social theory inherited from the past; for this reason, it is crucial to recognise that much of the recent debate on race and class is similarly rooted in the practical politics and theoretical challenges presented by movements such as Black Lives Matter.

All of this has proven exceptionally invigorating to Marxism, and our argument in this paper draws heavily upon many of the insights generated by this existing literature (both new and old). In what follows, however, we single out one dimension of this work that we feel needs to be explored much more systematically: the role of global migration and the nature of national borders within the co-constitution of class and race. By this, we are not at all suggesting that migration, the migrant experience, and the crossing of borders have not figured centrally within Marxist analyses of race and class. There is a strong tradition, particularly exemplified in the work of some British black writers[9], which has paid close attention to the intersection between racial formation, migration, and labour.[10] This work has opened up critical insights into the relationship between migration, class, and processes of racialisation, particularly through the post war period. However, in our opinion, this work often takes the national scale and its borders as an assumed given, and does not go far enough in problematizing and demystifying the particular place of migrant labour and borders in global capitalism. In what follows, we seek to challenge these common-sense perceptions of national borders, and ask what can be learnt about the interconnections of race and class through more systematically foregrounding migration within the circuit of capital accumulation.

In doing so, our intervention is also aimed as a contribution to recent critical scholarship on borders and migration. A key theme of this literature is an insistence that borders should not be viewed as fixed or immutable lines, but rather understood as sites of social and political contestation that are productive of what Novak describes as ‘socio-spatial criteria’.[11] By allowing the movement of some and denying that of others, borders act like filters that work to create difference and inequality, both inside and across the world market.[12] As such, “[a]ny definition of borders is in itself a representation of the social [while] any representation of the social rests on a conceptualisation of borders”.[13] Borders are thus deeply entwined with the making of modern bureaucratic and state power – evidenced, for example, through the securitisation of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers as a ‘threat’ to citizen populations, or the externalisation of border controls deep into migrant origin and transit countries. As numerous scholars have emphasised – particularly those associated with the Autonomy of Migration (AoM) approach – the movement of people across borders is a constitutive and untameable force, possessed of its own diverse sets of desires, aspirations, and needs that are not reducible to those of capital.^[14] The migrant’s battle against the border is thus part of what shapes the form of the border itself. This complex dialectic is inextricably bound up with the production of migrant (and non-migrant) subjectivities[15], including that of race.[16]

Nonetheless, despite a range of important insights that have helped explicate the role and nature of contemporary borders, much of this critical literature tends to adopt rather functionalist interpretations of border practices.[17] Borders are assumed to exist because they ‘do’ certain things for capital (or capitalist states) – they cheapen labour power, fragment populations, provide a national base for the projection of international power, and so forth. Without a doubt, all of these border ‘effects’ are indeed fundamental to how capitalism works, but the form itself – the ‘border-ness’ of the world as it appears in popular consciousness – is typically assumed as an unproblematic and a priori fact,an already-given backdrop that forms the canvas on which categories of race and class come to be inscribed. One of our goals in what follows is to interrogate this form in greater depth – to ask why, within everyday perception, global capitalism appears to take the territorial form of nationally-organised sovereign units, demarcated by borders, and regulated through border practices and different citizenship regimes. It is our contention that starting with this question not only helps to better understand the interplay of race and class across the world market today – it also points to the enduring relevance of Marxist work on race and class to the study of borders and migration.

Our approach to this question begins with Marx’s critique of the value-form – a critique that rests upon a distinction between the ‘essence’ of social reality and its immediate appearances. We elaborate how Marx’s understanding of the emergence of a society based upon generalised commodity production leads to a certain conception of the ‘political state’ and citizenship – and thus borders and national belonging. This approach reveals the distinctive territorial forms of capitalism vis-à-vis those found in pre-capitalist societies, and moves us away from transhistorical conceptions of borders and the nation-state. Crucially, however, Marx’s critique was a critique of form – an attempt to understand why the forms in which the world appears to us serve to misrepresent how social reality actually operates.In exploring this theme, we draw upon a certain Marxist tradition that has been somewhat overshadowed by a widespread interpretation of Marx’s work that insists on a sharp separation of the ‘material’ and the ‘ideal’ (frequently encapsulated in a vulgar reading of Marx’s ‘base-superstructure’ metaphor). This alternative tradition includes Derek Sayer’s powerful reframing of Marx’s critique of ideology, and the related ‘internal relations’ approach ably articulated by writers such as Bertell Ollman, Dorothy Smith, Himani Bannerji and others.[18] This work, we will argue, offers a useful way of conceptualising both the ‘form of appearance’ of borders, as well as a deeper understanding of what borders and migration do in relation to race and class.

In the second half of this paper, we turn to look at what this conception of borders and migration might mean concretely for how we think about the co-constitution of race and class. Here we focus on three core features of the contemporary world market: (1) the relationship between the cross-border movements of labour and processes of class formation (2) migration and the determination of the value of labour power, and (3) coercive and unfree labour. Each of these themes powerfully illustrates the centrality of borders – and, crucially, the misrepresentation of borders in our everyday consciousness – to processes of class formation and racialisation. Our discussion of these themes is not meant to be exhaustive and in no way fully encompasses the complexities of the issues involved. Rather, as we discuss in the conclusion, our goal is to more fully centre migration within discussions around race and class – challenging the dominant forms of left-nationalism and valorisation of national borders that mark much of Left political debate today. 

Borders and the Mystifications of the National Form

The deployment of race as a social category is closely bound up with the emergence of discrete national states enclosing putatively free individuals, each possessed with the rights of citizenship, located within sovereign and clearly bordered territories.[19] As one of the key markers of national ‘belonging’ and territorial attachment, notions of racial difference and racial superiority came to underpin the competitive aspirations of national states in their conquest of territory and resources from the 15^th century onwards.[20] A wide panoply of other social categories also emerged in complex interaction with these racialised notions of identity – sovereignty, citizenship, ethnicity, nationality, and so forth – all of which were fundamentally linked to the gradual development of a world that appeared to be ordered by and through national states. The existence of borders was crucial to this process – borders demarcated the boundaries of supposedly discrete national units, and thus all the various social categories that rested upon the national form necessarily presupposed and posited borders as their sine qua non.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to fully disentangle these social categories, their different manifestations across time and space, and their relationship to the national form. Instead, our focus here is on the form itself – the enduring everyday perception that we live in a world constituted by discrete national states delineated by national borders. What we hope to show in this initial section is two-fold: first, to demonstrate how this perception of the national form (i.e. the existence of borders) emerges directly out of the nature of capitalism as a society based upon generalized commodity production, and, second, to illustrate that this perception is ultimately a mystification, an ideological misrepresentation of social reality.[21] Thus framed, we will then be able to move in subsequent sections to understanding how the (mis)perception of borders is so closely tied to the ways that race and class are co-constituted.

Making these two arguments necessitates beginning with Marx’s value theory and his understanding of the commodity-form. As is well-known, a central objective of Marx’s theoretical project was an attempt to grasp what was distinctive about a society based upon the generalised exchange of commodities, rather than the incidental, or territorially limited use of exchange found in pre-capitalist societies.[22] Unlike pre-capitalist forms of human society where direct relations of coercion and compulsion regulate social life, in capitalist society we confront each other as independent and individual owners of commodities. At the same time, as in all human societies, our relationship with nature and the reproduction of ourselves must take place through society – we are gregarious social animals – and this demands the distribution of social labour in particular proportions.[23] Under generalised commodity production, the mechanism for this distribution takes place through the private exchange of the individual products of our labour (commodities). The paradox of capitalist society is that the decisions about what, when, and how to produce are made autonomously by independent private holders of commodities – yet society is somehow able to regulate the distribution of social labour in definite proportions that more or less guarantees its continued existence.[24] Marx’s key goal is to show how and why this is possible. Beginning with the ‘simplest cell’ in which this exchange takes place – the real commodity – Marx traces the two-fold nature of the commodity as a both an object of utility as well as a bearer of a certain proportion of abstract social labour. From this he draws out the existence of value as a means of regulating the distribution of abstract social labour time.

But for Marx, capitalism “is not simply an ‘exchange society’ but rather one built upon the exploitation of labour power”.[25] For the majority of us, the only commodity we are consistently able to bring to the market is this labour power, or our ability to work. Following from this, Marx describes the nature of human labour under capitalism as ‘doubly-free’: we are freed from the means of subsistence, yet simultaneously free to sell our labour power as we see fit.[26] The latter implies the removal of direct force outside of the moment of production – although, as we explore below, this does not mean that labour is actually free, or that various forms and different degrees of coerced labour are not present within capitalism. Likewise, the owners of the means of production relate to each other as free and equal commodity owners, and political power is no longer directly constituted through customary privilege. But this nonetheless remains a society of class domination. It is therefore dependent upon organised force and forms of social regulation that guarantee private property rights and the process of exchange. Political power must exist somewhere – and in capitalist society, it is uniquely constituted outside of the capital-labour relation as an autonomous sphere of politics. Thisappears to us as the separation of the political and economic spheres.[27]

Extending this argument, numerous authors have connected the generalisation of the commodity-form as the principal mechanism for mediating material and social exchange to the constitution of particular legal and juridical subjects and the capitalist state form.[28] For our purposes, the key point to emphasise here is the relationship between the commodity-form and the emergence of our personhoods as abstract citizens (i.e. without regard to the particular work we perform or any inherited or perceived status) who are located within territorially-delimited sovereign states.[29] The apparent separation of the political and economic spheres involves the positing of both the worker and the bourgeois as abstract figures who are formally equal bearers of rights within the territory controlled by the political state.[30]

It is this process that we perceive through various social categories – citizenship, race, ethnicity, nationality etc. –which ultimately carry within themselves a sense of national belonging and connection to territory (and thus state). The nation represented “the institutionalisation of the difference between citizen and foreigner, between 'us' and 'them'”.[31] I am from here, and others are not - this is my territory, and not that of others who exist outside of it.[32] At the same time, the nation was also a “destroyer of parochial divisions and ancient privileges and ... guarantor of the rights of citizenship”.[33] My fact of belonging brings with it a certain set of privileged rights (vis-à-vis those who exist outside of this space) and simultaneously establishes a formal (equal) relationship with other fellow citizens. These rights exist as law, guaranteed by an abstract force (the state) that exercises force over my sovereign territory and constitutes my personhood as a sovereign subject of this impersonal power. In other words, the social categories through which we perceive the world are necessarily bound (both logically and historically) to the everyday notion of the world as a patchwork of mutually-exclusive, discrete national territories, delimited by borders, and conceived in isolation from one another.

Of course, this territorialisation of the commodity-form within apparently distinct geographical units did not occur immediately and everywhere at once.[34] In Western Europe, the protracted crisis of the feudal system, numerous wars, and intense social conflict drove the emergence of the national form and the appearance of categories such as citizen and foreigner that came to mark national belonging. The temporal and spatial unevenness of this process meant that these social categories developed in very different ways across the world market. In all cases, however, the consolidation of the citizen/foreigner divide was deeply bound up with the racialisation of difference, which, as Malik has convincingly shown, involved the transformation of the concept of national belonging into identification with a particular ethnic, linguistic or racial identity.[35] The birth of this racialised worldview drew upon earlier logics of racism forged within Europe itself – notably the “racialized religious superiority” of Christian armies seeking to overcome Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula through the 13^th century.[36] With the building of colonial empires and the forceful imposition of national borders on subordinated areas of the world, racial classifications were generalised as part of marking certain populations as unfree.[37] This was closely associated with the reworking of a wide range of earlier forms of social categorisation within the newly constituted national borders of dominated states, including caste, ethnic and sectarian identities that continue to reverberate today.[38] In all cases, these processes indicated that the emergence of capitalist states was marked by a tendency “not to homogenise, but to differentiate – to exaggerate regional, subcultural and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones”.[39]

At this point, however, it is crucial to clarify a key aspect of Marx’s method that is often poorly understood: the relationship between the ideas and categories through which we think about the world, and the underlying social relations that mark capitalism as a social system of generalized commodity production. Marx’s key analytical thrust is not to establish some kind of economic determination by the ‘material’ over the ‘ideal’ in the ways sometimes thought to be implied by the base-superstructure metaphor, but rather to deny the very possibility of separating out the ‘ideal’ as a really existing order of reality that is distinct from the ‘material’ in the first place.[40] Derek Sayer makes this point persuasively, noting that Marx’s critique of idealism (articulated in the German Ideology and elsewhere) consists of a challenge:

[to] the very possibility of distinguishing the material and the ideal as separate spheres in the first place. The primacy of the ideal is not denied simpliciter; this denial is a consequence of one that is logically prior, that of the existence of the ideal as an independent entity. So whereas the idealists, according to Marx (and Engels in 1846), severed consciousness from the real individuals whose consciousness it was and were thus enabled to construct the fictitious subjects of their ideology,The German Ideology does not propose merely to turn the idealists right side up again. If the ideal as constituted by the philosophers is fictitious as a subject, it would be no less so as an object. Marx and Engels focus their attack on precisely theseparation of consciousness from 'the individuals who are its basis and from their actual conditions' … which makes idealism possible.[41]

Seen from this perspective, the categories through which we think about the world – state, law, citizenship, race, borders, national belonging etc. – are the forms through which the world appears to us in our thoughts. Their effects, in that sense, are real (because these categories belong to us as active, thinking human beings) – but we should not mistake these phenomenal forms as actually-existing things that are separate from ourselves as real, active human beings. They are “forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production”[42]; ideal forms through which the material relations that make up society are manifested to our consciousness.[43] To think otherwise is to reify these categories as a separable ‘really existing’ order of reality. Once again, Sayer puts this succinctly:

“Law, state, religion and so on can be conceived as independent, self-acting spheres only by virtue of a reification… they are not, as they immediately appear to be, levels of reality which are substantially separate … They are, rather ideological forms of appearance – Erscheinungsformen, to use [Marx’s] own concept – of the totality of social relations … and their ideologicality consists precisely in their appearance of real independence … They are the ‘social forms of consciousness’ in which the ‘essential relations’ of society are immediately grasped, and their analysis is coterminous with Marx’s critique of immediate appearances”.[44]

At the end of this paragraph, Sayer points to a further critical aspect to Marx’s perspective that must also be grasped: the “critique of immediate appearances”. Not only do the conceptual categories through which we perceive the world constitute the ‘forms of appearance” of the “totality of social relations”, they simultaneously serve to misrepresent this social reality. This was the overriding theme of Marx’scritique of political economy, and it is also precisely how Marx frames the emergence of the supposed equality of the ‘citizen’ alongside the generalization of the commodity form. For Marx, the double-freedom of labour and the apparent equality of commodity owners doesnot mean that the political and economic spheres areactually separated in capitalist society; rather, theyappear to us in this way as a result of the basic property relation, and the effect of that appearance is to obfuscate the real processes of exploitation embodied in the commodity-form and the social power that the bourgeoisie continues to hold within society. The ‘political emancipation’ implied in the notion of the juridically free and equal citizen acts to hide the reality of the state as “a form of class rule… the form in which the modern bourgeoisie publically organizes its social power”.[45] Or as Colletti puts it: “One obtains man as an equal of other men, man as a member of his species and of the human community, only by ignoring man as he is in really existing society and treating him as the citizen of an ethereal community. One obtains the citizen only by abstracting from the bourgeois”.[46]

Importantly, however, this argument should not be taken to imply that the categories through which we comprehend the world are false, in the sense that we err inhow we see reality. The world actually does appear to operate according to these concepts – we behave in accordance with them, they are regulated in particular ways through the laws and social institutions that we establish, and to the degree that we feel that the particular rights attached to concepts such as citizenship are infringed, we seek redress. But we must not mistake the appearance of reality, for reality itself (‘otherwise all science would be superfluous’, as Marx famously commented). These categories appear to us in a manner akin to a mirage – we really see them, but they obscure their status as forms of thought expressing the ‘essential relations’ of the commodity-form, and we invest in them explanatory and causal effects as independent powers separate from sensuous human beings. We thus fail to see how these forms of appearance serve to conceal the true substance of the basic property relation.[47] In this sense, Marx can write that the idea of citizenship “should read: domination of the bourgeoisie” and the citizen is an “imaginary member of an illusionary sovereignty” which, as Sayer contends, we should understand in a very literal sense.[48]

One of the consequences of this reification of the state and its associated categories of citizenship and sovereignty is a deeply-ingrained tendency to view the territories demarcated by national borders as discrete, separable units that contain within themselves neatly bounded sets of social relations.[49] Within the everyday popular imaginary, national units are thought of as isolatable fragments akin to pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, which are “ontologically prior to the whole; that is, the parts exist in isolation and come together to make wholes… the parts have intrinsic properties, which they possess inisolation and which they lend to the whole”.[50] In this manner, we see the parts (the national units) as existing first, and the social whole (the international) as emerging subsequently through the interactions of these individual parts (Paolucci 2011: 87). There are two separable orders of territorialisation at play in our minds – the national and the international – with the latter coming into being through the additive summation of the (pre-constituted) first. At the core of this spatial disjuncture is the presupposition of the ‘national’ as a reified, discrete unit – a mistaking of the surface appearances of reality, for reality itself. And as Paulucci notes, “When the researcher accepts the level of appearance, that is, when relations are grasped as things, the view of the whole is rendered less complete, even distorted” (2011: 89 italics in original).

A critique of this kind of atomistic ‘Cartesian reductionism’ (Levins and Lewontin 1985) can be found in Marx’s ‘internal relations’ approach (Ollman 1976, 2003; Sayer 1979, 1987; Smith 2004; Paolucci 2011). According to this perspective, the relations existing between objects (and concepts) should not be considered external to the objects themselves but as part of what actually constitutes them. Any object under study needs to be seen as “relations, containing in themselves, as integral elements of what they are, those parts with which we tend to see them externally tied” (Ollman 2003: 25). Objects, in other words, are not self-contained, preexisting, independent, or autonomous things but are actually made up through the relations they hold with one another. These relationships do not exist ‘outside’ these objects but are intrinsic to their very nature. As these relations change, so do the things themselves. The analytic method thus focuses on exploring the manifold relations that exist between things and the movement of these relations over time, rather than considering objects of study as discrete building blocks that can be compared or contrasted but remain understood, in an ontological sense, as existing a priori or separate from one another.

Such an approach helps move us away from methodologically nationalist perspectives that take “the nation-state as the self-evident container of political, cultural, and economic relations … [and] the organization of the inter-state system as a series of mutually exclusive, spatially bounded nation-states”.[51] Ultimately, these perspectives stem from taking the mystified appearance of the national form as actually existing social reality. Instead, we should understand these national spaces as internally-related elements of a broader totality – the world market – which “is global in content and national only inform”.[52] In other words, rather than a dichotomous view of the national and global, we need to consider both the unity and interdependencies of a single world market, which simultaneously recognizes the persistence of multiple states, and the sharp hierarchies and unevenness within the global.[53] As Dale Tomich, who employs a similar framework in his highly perceptive work on the development of colonial slavery, notes: “The whole [i.e. the global] is understood as being formed and reformed by the changing interactions among its constituent elements. Each particular element derives its analytical significance through its relation to the totality ... Each contains, encompasses and expresses the totality of world-economy while the totality expresses, unifies, and gives order to the relations among the particulars”.[54]

This account helps to explain both why we tend to see the world as a patchwork of discrete national territories and simultaneouslyhow this form of appearance is a fundamentally misleading and deceptive perception (because it denies the internally-related character of these spaces). Borders are essential to maintaining this perception in both its actual and illusory forms. As the apparently ‘hard’ edges of our national containers, they work to circumscribe and delimit discrete sets of social relations from one another. Things – money, people, goods, ideas etc. – ‘cross’ borders, and in doing so theyappear to leave one set of social relations and enter into another. This appearance is real, has substantial material effects, and is underpinned by human practice – most sharply felt by those trying to cross borders ‘illegally’ – but it is an appearance that ultimately rests upon a mistranslation of reality in our thoughts: a reification of the state as a discrete, pre-existing space that is externally-related to other national spaces.In truth, cross-border flows are internal to the social relations of these national spaces – they simultaneously exist in both the ‘here’ and ‘there’, and it is the fact of this simultaneity that feeds into how both the capital-labour relation and the value-form are constituted across the world market.

Borders, Migration and Class Formation

This demystification of borders and the national form can help us better understand the immense significance of cross-border migration to processes of class formation in any particular national context. Many authors have noted that we need to understand cross-border migration as a means through which a ‘global reserve army of labour’[55]  is accessed in any given country, particularly by capital located in wealthier zones of the global economy.[56] Surplus populations from across the world provide a ready pool of labour – “a mass of human material always ready for exploitation”[57] – that can be drawn upon depending upon the ebbs and flows of capital accumulation. Of course, the precise character of such flows is a historically determined question – with huge variability across different sectors and countries.[58] But the key point is that the international mobility of labour disrupts any assumed national-boundedness to where working classes come from and how they are continually made; migration is thus a process of class formation – an association of labour in one part of the world with capital from another.[59]

In this respect, scholars have long noted how migration has underpinned the making of class in capitalist states. In Britain, of course, we can see it in the successive waves of migration that were so closely tied to the contours of Empire and often targeted particular nationalities or displaced groups (e.g. Caribbean workers; Bangladeshi women workers in textiles; Jewish, and more recently, workers from the European Union).[60] All of these migrations express the movement of surplus populations from across the globe to Britain – which, as a result, have made the British working class what it is today.[61] Similar patterns are seen across other European states, as well as in all the settler-colonies.

Outside of Europe, the massive scale of cross-border displacement as a result of war or other crises also needs to be seen as part of the process generating new reserve armies and class configurations. Regardless of rights, status, or employment, such displaced populations make up a very significant proportion of labour in many countries today. Syrian refugees, for example, are currently the largest population of displaced peoples in the world, and many have sought refuge in neighbouring countries such as Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey (in addition to being internally displaced). In these ‘host’ countries, Syrians now constitute a very large proportion of the population itself (alongside earlier waves of displacement, e.g. Palestinian refugees) – currently more than 10% of Jordan’s population and 25% of Lebanon. As such, these displaced peoples now essentially constitute a significant component of the ‘reserve army’ in these countries (Hanieh 2018a). Cross-border displacement as a result of war and conflict, in other words, also needs to be viewed as a crucial dimension of contemporary class formation.

Framing migration as a process of class formation allows us to see the critical role of borders in shaping how various fractions of labour are demarcated, contained, and brought into relation with one another.[62] Capital needs to both keep labour ‘in place’ as well as allow it to move.[63] Through the differential constraints they place on various types of movement, borders act as constantly-shifting ‘filters’ that regulate the speed, volume, and type of migrants that can (or cannot) enter into any national territory.[64] They are, in this sense, polysemic – that is, they “never exist in the same way for different individuals belonging to different social groups”.[65] This filtering role is established through the exercise of state sovereignty as well as the agency of migrants themselves[66], and results in processes of ‘differential inclusion’, where a multiplicity of mobility routes and different forms of ‘status’ are regulated through border controls.[67] All of this acts to generate different subjects of labour.[68]

As James Anderson observed a decade ago, this means that “capitalism’s ‘reserve army of labor’ is now effectively globalized”.[69] But borders do not create this global reserve army, and analysis cannot stop at simply describing their functional effects. Rather – as with the processes that Marx discusses at the national scale – it is the capital-labour relation that posits particular populations as ‘surplus’. This is a dynamic process generated by the uneven consequences of capitalist accumulation at the global scale, and any historically specific account of this would need to incorporate a variety of aspects to this process: including histories of colonialism and imperialism, the international concentration and centralisation of capital, war, economic, political, and ecological crises, etc. In this context, borders mediate how the various aspects of a globally-constituted capitalism manifest themselves, concretelyfixing[70] the distribution of surplus populations – and the ways that they interlock – across various national spaces.

Such an understanding returns us to the mystifications of the national form that sit at the root of how we usually think about class in an everyday sense. Instead of considering borders as the ‘hard edges’ of territorial silos that enclose separately formed and distinct sets of social relations, we need to consider the ways that any ‘national’ class of labour actually comes into being through the relations that exist between different national spaces.[71] The relations between these different geographical spaces are internal (in the sense posited by Ollman and others), i.e. they are part of, and help to constitute, both spaces. This can be seen very clearly in the case of countries such as Britain. Sitting among the top ranks of the global hierarchy of states, British capitalism’s relationship with the rest of the world is an integral part of the processes that generate labour surpluses at the global scale; simultaneously, these very same labour surpluses help to constitute British capitalism itself. This relation has long been well-understood by migrants to Britain – it is elegantly captured in Sivanandan’s maxim “we are here because you were there”, or Stuart Hall’s famous aphorism, “I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea”.

This approach provides a powerful critique of the typical ‘push’/‘pull’ approaches that are so pervasive within the common-sense imaginary of cross-border movement. Migration is not a consequence of disparate, contingent, and unconnected factors –– it is ultimately a process of separation and dispossession (and hence class formation) that arises from the way that capitalism reproduces itself at the global scale. Concretely, this cannot be appreciated without taking into account the effects of imperialism – both in its contemporary forms and its historical development. What Britain, the US, and other imperialist states do overseas – not just through violent acts such as war and military intervention, but also through the multiple ways in which they superintend the financial and political structures of the world market in ‘peaceful’ times – lies at the core of how dispossession occurs. Marx commented (at the end of his discussion of the reserve army of labour) that the “accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole. i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital”[72] – this is precisely how we should understand the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ of cross-border movement today: internally related factors, mutually-conditioned by the accumulation of capital and the hierarchies of the global state system.

The role of borders in mediating these processes of class formation not only sets particular geographically-dispersed groups of labour in relation to one another, it is also critically tied to the construction of race and racial categories.[73] Here again, however, we should note that racism is one form of appearance of the misrepresentation of social reality noted above: the reification of citizenship and the nation-state is expressed through the projection of a racial identity to those from ‘over there’, while the abstract citizen of a distinct sovereign territory is simultaneously constructed as being ‘from here’. This may certainly occur through overt forms of direct racism, but it is similarly expressed in many Western states through liberal terms (e.g. multiculturalism, tolerance, respect for difference, and so forth) – all of which implicitly presume a primordial (typically white European) identity that serves as the innate, organic measure through which the fact of ‘difference’ is construed[74] and, as a result, working classes are always “reproduced as … racially structured and divided”.[75] This is not a new phenomenon. From the very birth of capitalism, the positing of racial difference to those living outside Western borders has been immutably linked to the emergence of the abstract citizen as one who belongs organically inside the preternatural borders of a distinct national territory.[76] As CLR James noted more than half a century ago: “the national state, every single national state, had and still has a racial doctrine. This doctrine is that the national race, the national stock, the national blood, is superior to all other national races, national stocks, and national bloods. This doctrine was sometimes stated, often hidden, but it was and is there, and over the last twenty years has grown stronger in every country in the world”.[77]

As such, Marx’s ‘imaginary member of an illusionary sovereignty’ is always saturated through-and-through in categories of race. Moreover, precisely because racial categories serve to express the reification of the nation and its borders, forms of racism are indubitably arrayed against the migrant as the consummate violator of national sovereignty. Of course, we should not deny the complex histories of race that vary irreducibly across both time and space – the forms taken in Europe are not the same as they are in the US, the settler-colonies of Australia, Israel, and South Africa, or places such as Saudi Arabia and Lebanon[78]– but nonetheless, the figure of the migrant necessarily looms large in the diverse forms that racism takes globally. Today, this is perhaps most sharply illustrated in the ways that racism is so often configured against the so-called illegal migrant, whose crime lies in the act of border ‘transgression’.[79] But it can also be seen in the ways that the sedimented populations of earlier waves of migration (both in its forced and voluntary variants) are racially constructed in on-going and ever-shifting forms – one never ceases to be from ‘somewhere else’, however differently that might look from generation to generation.[80]

In this manner, we can understand how the common-sense perception of borders – ultimately an ideological misrepresentation of social reality – actually makes possible the various functions of race and racism within processes of class formation. These functions have been thoroughly analysed in the literature, they include: the essential role of race in justifying imperialism, overseas settlement and colonisation[81] the ways that racial difference serves to accentuate and mark hierarchies among workers, thereby fragmenting and atomising working class struggle[82]; the function of race in creating relatively privileged layers of workers, in both a material and psychological sense[83]; and, of course, the centrality of race to settler colonialism, where the destruction of indigenous societies and the on-going growth of settler capitalism are so closely coupled with notions of racial supremacy.[84] As is widely acknowledged, these critical functions of race confirm that racial categories are neither biologically-determined nor static, but socially constructed. However, this well-established conclusion does not fully grasp the root of the issue: the misrepresentation of the border as an ideological form, which, to a considerable degree, actually enables and makes racial difference possible, and therefore underpins the functionality of race to capitalism.

Taken as a whole, all of this points to how the racial categories posited by borders are simultaneously part of the ways in which class in any given national space comes into being. Borders mediate both the distribution of surplus populations across various national spaces, as well as the forms of racialisation that arise as part of the reification of these territories. These two processes – class and racial formation – happen concurrently and as part of the same act. In this sense, while Stuart Hall is certainly correct to note that in national contexts such as Britain “the class relation … function as race relations” – it is also necessary to recognise the ways that this ‘co-articulation’ of race and class is ineludibly mediated through the reifying effects of the border. Class, as Satnam Virdee rightly notes, is “a representational form and material relation [that is] indelibly nationalized and racialized”[85] – the stress needs to be placed equally here on the nationalised as much as the racialised dimensions of class, both of whichcan only beposited through the border. The concrete ways in which this occurs may certainly vary immensely across time and space – but foregrounding borders and migration helps us understand race as fundamentallyinternal to the capital-labour relation in any given context.

Borders, Race, and the Value of Labour Power

Framing migration under capitalism as a process of always-racialised class formation opens up a whole set of questions around how borders and race play into the determination and mediation of the value of labour power. In general, Marx understands the value of labour-power to be “determined, as in the case of every other commodity, by the labour-time necessary for the production, and consequently also the reproduction, of this special commodity”.[86] This includes all of the various means of subsistence required for labour-power to be brought to the market and exchanged with the capitalist for wages, and thus the socially-necessary labour time required for the production of labour power is equivalent to that “necessary for the production of those means of subsistence; in other words, the value of labour-power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its owner”.[87] It follows from this that the value of labour power (as opposed to its price) can only change as a result of two factors: a change in the value of the means of subsistence, or a change in what makes up those means. It is due to the latter that Marx speaks of the “historical and moral element” that enters into the determination of the value of labour power – a factor that can differ due to a myriad of factors, including “the level of civilization attained by a country” and “the conditions in which, and consequently on the habits and expectations with which, the class of free workers has been formed”.[88]

On the surface, these and other comments by Marx on the value of labour power appear relatively straightforward, yet – as the subsequent vigour of the Marxist debates attests – this is not the case.[89] Numerous issues have been raised: including whether labour power can actually be considered a commodity (as it is produced outside of capitalist production relations); to what degree the class struggle ‘determines’ the value of labour power, and how autonomous this factor is from the materiality of the production process itself; how to conceptualise the reduction of ‘skilled’ to ‘simple’ labour that occurs at the moment of exchange; the relationship between productive and unproductive labour; and how to theorise the place of gendered social relations and the household in the production of labour power.[90]

It is beyond the scope of this paper to enter into these debates fully, but for our purposes, one aspect of Marx’s approach to the value of labour power remains under-explored: the effects of cross-border labour mobility on the determination of labour power’s value, and the interaction of this with the wider circuits of value production and realisation. Marx’s comments on the value of labour power (mostly elaborated in Chapter 6 of Capital Volume 1) are largely a-spatial, and put forward at a level of abstraction that assumes the determination and realisation of labour power’s value occurs within the single and same set of social relations. What happens if we break with this assumption (however valid it may be at a certain level of abstraction)? In other words, what happens to our conception of the value of labour power if we admit that the place where labour power is actually sold (i.e. where the valorisation of capital takes place) may be separated by borders from the place where labour power is produced (and reproduced), but that these two spaces are nonetheless internally-related to one another, and thus mutually-constituted?

Consider, for example, the socially-necessary labour time required to produce the labour power of a productive worker in their home country – Country A. This has undoubtedly involved a whole range of costs over the lifetime of the worker such as training and education, health, infrastructural expenditure, the costs of social reproduction, and so forth.[91] But when the worker migrates to Country B, none of this earlier socially-necessary labour time has been borne by capital in their new abode. When the migrant worker arrives in Country B, she arrives, in effect, as fully-formed; the value of her labour power is thus cheaper than the average value of equivalent labour power raised over a lifetime in Country B. In practice, this is a subsidy provided by Country A to capital located in Country B – “a direct transfer of wealth” as Cindi Katz has noted in regard to gendered migrant labour and social reproduction, which occurs “from generally poorer to richer countries … [that] is no less a capital transfer than the extraction of raw materials, debt servicing, and the like”.[92]

It should be stressed that these transfers apply to all forms of migrant labour (skilled and non-skilled, forced migrants, refugees, and so-called ‘economic migrants’) – it does not matter why and how people may have moved from one place to another. Such a value-theoretic approach can thus help us go beyond the rather sterile debates around ‘brain drain’ that typify contemporary migration discussions. The key question is not whether an individual migrant (or country) ‘wins’ or ‘loses’; more fundamentally, it is thefact of the border between where the production of labour power takes places and where it is exchanged that serves to increase the mass of surplus value appropriated by capital in Country B. This observation points to the critical significance of national borders in mediating such differentials in the value of labour power.

Once again, however, these national differences in the value of labour power are profoundly seeped in categories of race and processes of racialisation (and, of course, gender). Workers from ‘over there’ can be paid less than workers ‘from here’ because ‘after all, that’s all they expect to get paid’ – indeed, ‘they should count themselves lucky, at least they have a job’! Through such tropes, we can see how spatially constituted differences in the value of labour power take an ideological form, habitually expressed in racial categories. This form of appearance is real (we do tend to see the world in this way, and racedoes actually mark differences in the value of labour power), but this appearance is nonetheless an inverted – and thusideological – misrepresentation of reality (it ascribes causal powers to arbitrary genetic phenotypes rather than the social relations that actually determine the value of labour power). Most importantly, as is always the case when appearances are mistaken for essence, acceptance of such ideological forms ultimately serves to legitimate and naturalise the existing status quo.

The imbrications of racial categories, borders, and the value of labour power, can best be seen in the proliferation of ‘temporary labour migration’ (TLM) programmes – a situation where migrant workers are contracted for limited periods of time by employers in another country and are then expected to return to their country of origin. These programmes have a long historical pedigree irrevocably stamped in race and racism – from the indentured labour schemes utilised by the British Empire after the formal end to slavery in the mid-19th century[93], to the ‘guest worker’ programmes that brought workers from North Africa and Turkey to Western Europe in the post-war period.[94] In recent years there has been a considerable boom in these schemes, particularly in seasonal agricultural programmes such as Spain’s use of Moroccan women to pick strawberries, or Canada’s use of Mexican workers in Ontario fruit and vegetable crops.[95] Indeed, in the case of Canada, a dramatic rise of TLM in the early 21^st century actually saw the number of temporary migrants exceed those from permanent migration for the first time in history.[96]

Much of the academic and policy debates around TLM have been highly Eurocentric, largely focused on the North American and European experiences.[97] At a global level, however, the most important zone of TLM is actually found in the six Gulf Arab states of the Middle East, where the majority of the labour force is made up of temporary labour migrants.[98] Importantly, the case of the Gulf illustrates that the race-making and value-mediating role of borders is not simply a European or North American affair. In the Gulf states, as elsewhere, the category of citizen plays a pivotal role in this process – through the sharp demarcation of a tiny proportion of the resident population from the majority of the labour force in ways that are irrevocably racialised and gendered.[99] The subsequent production of racial difference both legitimates and embodies the diminished value of a Gulf migrant worker’s labour power. Here, the value of labour power is not only affected by the historical costs of producing the migrant worker, but the current measure of that worker’s labour power value is also largely established by the socially-necessary labour time required to produce and reproduce the worker in their home country (perhaps with a small difference that induces the worker to migrate). An Indian temporary migrant worker in Dubai, for example, receives a wage that is more or less proportional to the cost of reproducing the worker (and his/her family) in India – not in Dubai.[100] This is true not simply in relation to the value of the means of subsistence in India, but also in relation to the concrete use-values that may enter into these means of subsistence (i.e. the determination of the ‘historical and moral element’). Thus, not only do Indian workers constitute part of the Gulf’s reserve army of labour (in the sense argued above), the magnitude of surplus value extracted by, say, a construction firm in the Gulf, is also established through the ‘moral and historical’ value of labour power extant in India.

The materiality of these kinds of relations appears palpably in the global economy through the massive levels of cross-border remittances. Indeed, it is estimated that around 1 billion people today – a remarkable figure of one in seven people globally – are either senders or receivers of remittances.[101] Yet while these flows may be based on a physical move of the worker from their home, at the same time they express the ways in which sets of social relations across different territories are mutually-constituted (internally-related) with one another. In this manner, the valorisation of an individual labour power sits concurrently in both the migrant’s place of origin and their place of work. And once again, the category of race serves as one of the ideological forms of appearance through which this actual unity of the ‘here’ and ‘there’ is misconstrued in our consciousness as a relation of separation.

Migration, Coercion, and ‘Unfree’ Labour

At the root of these various value transfers is the physical separation of the migrant from a particular territory (and thus an associated set of social relations) and their imbrication with another. While a variety of different proximate reasons may appear as the cause of this separation – war, economic or political crises, ecological pressures, and so forth – we should avoid any dichotomous categorisation of migration as either ‘forced’ or ‘economic’. The movement of refugees, trafficked people, and other forms of displacement may certainly be linked to the immediate reality of violence – but those who migrate in the face of neoliberal restructuring or economic dispossession are also subject to forms of coercion.[102] Indeed, all of these various ‘causes’ inevitably intersect and reinforce one another; for this reason, separating out the ‘pushes’ of migration – much less locating these at the level of the individual or national scale – is an impossible task that can only be resolved in the tidy ontologies of Cartesian reductionism. In the same way that Jairus Banaji urges us to reject the ‘fictions of free labour’[103] – noting that Marx’s critique of wage-labour was ultimately based on demystifying its apparent voluntaristic form – so must we reject an understanding of cross-border labour flows as somehow the ‘free’ choice of rationally-acting individuals.

In this sense, there is an intimate connection between one of the ‘double-freedoms’ identified by Marx as foundational to the capital-labour relation – a worker’s separation from the means of subsistence/production – and a migrant’s separation from a specific territory. This is not simply true at an analogous or conceptual level – cross-border movement has often been the actual form through which labour is first ‘freed’ from the land and other means of independent survival, and then becomes inserted into capitalist commodity circuits. The transatlantic slave routes of the 15^th-19^th centuries, for example, were (particularly brutal) examples of the separation of the direct producers from their means of subsistence and their conversion into commodity producers for the world market[104] – indeed, the scale of this separation far exceeded coterminous movements of European peasants from the land into waged-labour markets. Following the formal end of slavery in 1833 the emergence of indentured labour replicated this pattern, with the removal of South Asian peasants from their land coming to underpin commodity production across the far-flung territories of the British Empire. As Radhika Mongia demonstrates in her fascinating history of this moment, the latter case saw the development of sophisticated means of classifying and filtering the movement of these indentured workers, many of which were to presage modern border technologies (including the passport).[105]

Clearly, all of these historical movements of people are overlaid by the creation of racial categories – indeed, to a considerable degree, the very idea of ‘race’ has its origins in these violent cross-border displacements that were constitutive to the early genesis of capitalism.[106] But here we can see a further way in which racialised migrant labour is bound up with the trajectory of the value-form.Most specifically, these earlier histories illustrate how physical separation from home can serve to accentuate greater vulnerability to coercive capital-labour relations. Indeed, the owners of colonial plantations explicitly identified the separation of enslaved peoples from their native territories as a productive factor in their ability to compel them to work – transplanted into new sets of social relations, they lacked the continuities of social and familial structures that made indigenous labour more resistant to capitalist modes of work.[107]

In the contemporary moment, beyond the obvious cases of ‘modern slavery’ and trafficked people, we can see the link between territorial separation and vulnerability to coercion (whether sanctioned by contract or not) throughout all forms of migration. In the case of TLM programmes, for example, migrant workers typically experience restrictions on where they are allowed to work and live, their ability to leave the country, and their access to political and labour rights.[108] These kinds of restrictions are usually legally codified in various laws and regulations, and always sharply gendered. They are further buttressed by ideologies of xenophobia and racism that configure migrant labour as ‘not from here’. The precariousness that migrants face –– which is as much about residing in a particular space as it is about economic marginalisation – works to accentuate vulnerability to coercion.[109] Increasingly, this precariousness is now a permanent fact of a migrant’s racialised existence; experienced even by those who have obtained citizenship but nonetheless remain vulnerable to the withdrawal of their right to live within a certain set of national borders.[110] Banaji (2010) is absolutely correct to argue (following Marx) that all forms of capitalist labour are marked by some degree of coercion; but migration needs to be understood as one way in which this fundamental element of the capital-labour relation is further intensified.

All these processes reduce the price of racialised migrant labour power (allowing it to be paid at below the value of non-migrant labour), and further serve to fragment and sharpen the divisions of how class is experienced in any particular national context. But in line with the arguments made above, we also need to consider the ways in which racialised migrant labour helps to constitute the value of labour power in general. At a global level, migrants working under varying degrees of coercion are deeply involved in the production of a significant number of commodities that we consume on a daily basis (including services).[111] Feminist scholarship has been crucial to mapping the gendered nature of these processes, including in global care chains.[112] The vulnerable nature of this labour – reinforced by all of the other factors outlined above – means that there is a tendency towards the overall cheapening in the value of the means of subsistence (and hence in the value of labour power) for all workers, including non-migrants and those in better conditions of employment.[113] Once again, this is not a new feature of capitalism – scholars of slavery have long noted the significant role that the cheaply produced commodities such as tobacco, sugar, coffee, and tea played in lowering the value of European waged-labour.[114] But in the contemporary world, the pervasive use of highly coerced – and always racialised – migrant labour is a key element to determining the value of labour power everywhere.

Conclusion: Border Politics Today

There can be little doubt that the issues of borders and migration have moved centre-stage in political debate over recent years. From the global resurgence of far-right and xenophobic movements that seek to mobilise popular support through racist tropes and physical violence directed against migrants and foreigners; to the ways in which parties of the ostensible left have also adapted themselves to concepts of national sovereignty and ‘responsible’ approaches to migration. The latter cohort of left-nationalists is particularly important to highlight in the current political moment – represented through leading figures in the DSA, Die Linke, and of course that long-standing bulwark of imperial sovereignty, the British Labour Party. In all these cases, defence of the national border is recast as a foundational corollary of ‘social democracy in one country’, with refugees and migrants depicted as potential fifth-columnists who – inadvertently or not – serve to undermine hard-won working conditions and the fast-diminishing accoutrements of a putative welfare state.

In this context, it is crucial to move beyond a view of racism as simply an opportunistic vehicle used by political elites to divide workers and cultivate a support base for far-right movements and capitalist restructuring. While these ideological explanations certainly capture a key element to how race operates at a functional or instrumental level, they do little to elucidate the origins of racial categories as modes of thought connected to the mystification of the national form. Here, Marx’s key insights into the emergence of bourgeois notions of citizenship, the modern political state, and the apparent separation of the political and economic spheres under capitalism are essential to understanding why we have come to see the world as one divided into a patchwork of discrete national territories to which we ‘naturally’ attach our identities and sense of belonging. This common-sense view of the world is at root a reification of the state and its borders – one that mistakes the appearance of reality for reality itself. Foregrounding cross-border migration helps to demystify this reification and the assumed national-boundedness of labour, but to do so we must situate the ‘flows’ of migrant labour within the internally-related nature of various national spaces. Migration certainly represents a physical movement, or uprooting from one set of social relations to another – but at the same time, it confirms and expresses the simultaneity and co-constitution of these social relations. In this manner, we can begin to think about categories such as class and race in ways that move us beyond the obfuscations arising from the reified categories in which the world immediately appears.

Throughout this discussion, the role of borders has repeatedly emerged as central to how these obfuscations take concrete form. While borders appear to us as hard ‘edges’ – a necessary corollary of the way we think of the world in distinct, separable national containers – in reality, they mediate the internally-related character of different national units. At one level, borders demarcate potential pools of relative surplus populations – attempting to contain them within particular territories and filtering their movement when needed. The relations between these geographically dispersed labour surpluses – even when they are stationary – are part of how class actually exists in any given national space. Additionally, by circumscribing particular sets of social relations, borders fix the customary living standard of workers – in both its ‘historical and moral’ as well as physical and technical components. As migrants move, the value of this labour power is realised in another national space through its exchange with capital, while the reproduction of the labourer and their family is simultaneously made dependent upon this act of valorisation. Borders act to condition the precise shape of this relation, giving concrete form to the magnitude, intensity, and direction of value transfers, and the distribution, selection, and movement of labour surpluses. The net effect of all these processes is that the social relations of both national spaces cannot be thought of in separation, they exist through their relation to the other.

Such an approach opens the way to a powerful critique of the dominant forms of migration politics. Precisely because we internalise the reifications of the state and its borders, our approach towards migration typically begins from a judgement of what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for our nation or (in supposedly left-wing versions)our nationally-bound class. This is not simply a discursive feature of the far-right racist tropes that posit migrants as an existential threat to jobs and living conditions, moral standards, or cultural values. It is just as evident within much of the language used to defend migrants from such racism. Attempts to support migration on the basis that it ‘creates jobs’ or is ‘good for business’ ultimately start from the same vantage point, a judgement framed around what is beneficial to ‘us’ (however nebulously that may be defined).[115] They thus frequently reinforce the distinction between the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ migrant, and, in the worst examples, end up valorising national sovereignty as a supposed path to socialism.

The approach we have outlined in this article also allows us to understand the significance of borders and migration to moments of capitalist crisis. As workers are expelled from production and capital confronts barriers to its self-valorisation, moments of crisis are both generative of surplus populations as well as symptomatic of the breakdown in the value-form. As a result, moments of crisis are also always moments about migration, in which capitalist states attempt to overcome crises through channelling their effects in ways propitious to capital itself.[116] To be clear, this is not at all about stopping migration; rather, states seek to ‘manage’ migration through a multiplicity of means, including the current proliferation of new techniques aimed at border securisation and externalisation. All of this is necessarily expressed in ideological forms such as anti-migrant racism and xenophobia, which help to configure and enact border techniques, and depend ultimately on the mystifications of the national form discussed above. For all these reasons, it is no accident that in a contemporary moment marked by multiple forms of crisis throughout the world system – a global health pandemic, overaccumulation and financial bubbles, widespread war and violence, the relative decline of US hegemony and the rise of new powers, the reality of ecological collapse, the breakdown of political legitimacy, and so forth – we see questions of migration, race, and borders emerge so centrally to the strategies of capitalist states. An analysis of these issues must therefore be placed central to Left politics today.

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[1] The authors would like to thank Sue Ferguson, Robert Knox, Paolo Novak, Parvathi Raman, Dale Tomich, and Jeffrey R. Webber for valuable criticisms and comments on earlier versions of this article. We dedicate this piece to the memories of Mary-Jo Nadeau and Aziz Choudry, dear friends whose writings and activism helped inspire many of the arguments herein.

[2] Bannerji 2005.

[3] Roediger 2017.

[4] Lowe 1996; Roediger and Esch 2012.

[5] Taylor 2016, p.217.

[6] Alexander 1979; Hall et al 1978; Roediger 1991; Ignatiev 1974.

[7] Davies 2007; Davis 1983; Bhandar and Ziadah 2020.

[8] Fanon 1963; Rodney 1972.

[9] David Roediger nots that debates in the US context – particularly those around theorising whiteness – have paid much less attention to “non-white immigrant labor” and thus have “contributed, even among its critics, to keeping left attention focused on Black and white” (2017).

[10] Brah 1996, Gilroy 1991, Sivanadan 1978, Virdee 2014.

[11] Novak 2016.

[12] Casas-Cortes et al 2015, p.57.

[13] Novak 2016, p.4.

[14] Mezzadra 2011; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Moulier-Boutang 2011; Rodriguez 1996; Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos 2008; De Genova 2017. Drawing inspiration from the Italian workerist tradition, the AoM framework considers migration through the lens of labour’s contradictory position as an “incorrigible subject” (De Genova 2017) – that is simultaneously both ‘for and against capital’. Despite heavy repression directed against those attempting to transgress borders, the AoM approach emphasises the migrant as an autonomous and insubordinate figure whose struggle against immobilisation cannot be fully controlled. This has important methodological and political implications, not least in how to view the border in relation to the making of labour itself (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013).

[15] Isin 2002.

[16] Tazzioli 2021.

[17] Novak 2016.

[18]Ollman 1976; Smith 1987; Bannerji 1995, 2005.

[19]Malik 1996; Nisanciglu 2019; Bhandar 2018.

[20]Knox 2016.

[21] To be clear, we are not suggesting that race and racism should primarily be understood in terms of ideology. Our concern here is to explore how the emergence of the value-form is connected to ways of perceiving borders, and what this might say about the relationship between processes of racialisation and class formation. Camfield (2016) presents an insightful critique of the racism-as-ideology approach that accords with many of our arguments here, although he does not explicitly theorise the place of borders and migration within his critique.

[22]Mandel 1975; Smith 2014.

[23]Rubin 1972; Pilling 1972.

[24]Rubin 1972; Smith 2014.

[25]Knox 2016, p.89.

[26]Banaji 2010.

[27]Sayer 1987; Anderson 2012.

[28]Clarke 1991; Sayer 1987; Pashukanis 1980; Meiville 2005; Knox 2016.

[29]Clarke 1991; Holloway and Picciotto 1978. Knox, following Pashukanis, notes the importance of sovereignty within this framework, tracing the commodity-form to the emergence of an international legal-form that is closely connected to imperialism: “The formal, abstract equality that Pashukanis ascribed to the legal form very closely resembles one of the key elements of international law: sovereignty. Pashukanis argued that ‘sovereign states co–exist and are counterposed to one another in exactly the same way as are individual property owners with equal rights’, since the territory of a state is functionally its private property and states engage directly in exchange. Since capitalism was only generalised through imperialism, international law is also intimately connected with imperialism.”

[30]Hirsch 1979.

[31] Malik 1996, p.136.

[32]Nyers 2009; Bhandar 2004.

[33] Malik 1996, p.136.

[34]Holloway and Picciotto 1978.

[35]Malik 1996, p.137.

[36]Virdee 2021.

[37]Lowe 2015.

[38]Shehabi 2020.

[39] Robinson 1983, p.27.

[40]Sayer 1979, 1987; Smith 2004; Camfield 2016.

[41] Sayer 1979, p.4.

[42]Marx 1990, p.169.

[43]Sayer 1987, p.84. Sayer presents a powerful critique of ‘traditional’ base-superstructure models of Marxism – most clearly embodied in the work of G.A Cohen – to argue that Marx’s critique of idealism was not, as it is traditionally conceived, an attempt to place ‘material’ factors in front of the various ideal categories proposed by Hegel and his subsequent followers (such as the Spirit, ‘the cunning of reason’ etc.) as primary drivers of history and social change. Rather, Marx’s much more fundamental point is “to deny the very ‘existence’ of the ideal as a separable entity … [Hegelian ideal categories] cannot for Marx be the subject of history for the simple reason that they do not exist. They are reifications: philosopher’s fictions, abstractions made flesh, speculative constructions” (p.85).

[44]Sayer 1987, p.91.

[45]Sayer 1987, p.103.

[46] Colletti 1975, pp. 35-36.

[47]Sayer 1987, p.110.

[48]Sayer 1987, p.104.

[49]To be clear, we are speaking here of ‘commonsense’ consciousness – not the work of scholars who foreground a critique of methodological nationalism and the socially-constructed nature of borders.

[50] Levins and Lewontin, 1985, p.269, italics added.

[51]Goswami 2002, p.794.

[52]Arboleda 2020, p.26, italics added.

[53]Gordon and Webber 2020.

[54]Tomich 2016, p.30–31.

[55] Foster and McChesney 2011; Anderson 2012; Battarchaya 2018.

[56] Castles and Kosack 1973; Miles 1986, Hanieh 2018a; Vickers 2019.

[57] Marx 1976, p.784.

[58] Ferguson and McNally 2015.

[59] Castles and Kosack 1973.

[60] Raman 2018.

[61] Gilroy 1991; Virdee 2014; Ramdin 2017; Battarchaya 2018.

[62]Hanieh 2018a.

[63]Harvey 1999, p.381.

[64]De Genova and Peutz, 2010.

[65]Balibar 2002, p.79.

[66]Papapodopoulos et al 2008; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013.

[67] Anderson 2012; Yuval-Davis 2018.

[68]Sharma and Wright 2008; Casas-Cortes et al 2015.

[69] Anderson 2012, p.149.

[70]We draw this formulation (i.e. the idea that borders mediate, or fix the form of, labour surpluses, but do not determine the content of these surpluses) from an analogous argument made by Starosta and Fitzsimons in respect to the role of class struggle and the value of labour power. They write: “the material conditions of the reproduction process of capital constitute the content of the determination of the value of labor power. They do so by determining the differentiated forms of productive subjectivity that compose the collective laborer and, as consequence, the quantity and kind of means of subsistence that workers need to consume to reproduce those variegated qualitative attributes (both technical and moral) of labor power. In turn, the class struggle becomes the necessaryform thatmediates the establishment of the material unity between the productive and consumptive requirements of the reproduction of the total social capital.” (Starosta and Fitzsimons 2017, p.110).

[71]Calavita 2005; Castles and Kosack 1973; De Genova 2005; Hanieh 2018b.

[72] Marx 1976, p.799.

[73] Balibar 1991.

[74] Balibar 1991; Bannerji 1995; Sharma and Wright 2008.

[75] Solomos et al 1982, p.46.

[76]Lowe 2015; Mongia 2018.

[77]James 1953, pp.10-11.

[78] Chit and Nayel 2013; Wolfe 2016; Alexander 1979.

[79] Walia 2021.

[80] Bannerji 1995, p.65.

[81] James 1963, Cesaire 1972, Fanon, 1963, Rodney 1972.

[82] Allen 1994, Hyslop 1999; Ignatiev 1979.

[83] Virdee 2014; Camfield 2016; Roediger 2017; Schilliam 2018; Battarchaya 2018.

[84]Byrd 2019; Coulthard 2014; Dunbar-Ortiz 2016.

[85] Virdee 2014, p.5.

[86] Marx 1976, p. 274.

[87] Marx 1976, p. 274.

[88]Marx 1976, p.275.

[89] Starosta and Fitzsimons 2017.

[90] Mies 2014; Arruzza 2016; Bhattacharya 2017; Ferguson 2019; Mezzadri 2020.

[91] Castles and Kosack 1973, pp. 409-411.

[92]Katz 2001, p.709.

[93] Lowe 2015; Mongia 2018.

[94] Castles and Kosack 1973.

[95] Choudry and Smith 2016.

[96] Choudry and Henaway 2012.

[97] Most of the academic and policy debate on TLM focuses on assessing the ‘success’ of these programs, i.e. whether migrants actually return to their country of origin at the end of their contract (in this respect, the post-war Western European schemes are generally viewed as a ‘failure’ due to the long-term settlement of ‘guest’ workers and their families in France, Germany and elsewhere).

[98] Khalaf et al 2014.

[99] Buckley 2014; Longva 2000.

[100] Workers in the Gulf’s construction sector, for example, are typically housed by the company in sub-standard dormitories and transported to work on company buses. In addition to paying off any debts accrued for work visas, the bulk of their actual wage is remitted to their family back home, not spent in Dubai.

[101] IFAD 2017, p.5.

[102]Hanieh 2018a.

[103] Banaji 2010, p.131.

[104] McNally 2020; Tomich 2004.

[105] Mongia 2018.

[106] Williams 2014; Roediger and Esch 2012; Allen 1994.

[107] Patterson 1982.

[108] Choudry and Smith 2016. More recently, in the case of the Gulf Arab states, the pronounced shift away from Arab to Asian workers through the 1990s and 2000s was likewise conceived as a means of discouraging workers from forming bonds of cultural and belonging, and was also organised through the spatial separation of these workers from local Gulf citizens (Hanieh 2018a).

[109] Calavita 2005; Anderson 2012.

[110] Kapoor and Narkowicz 2019.

[111]Chang 2015, Shelley 2007.

[112] Farris 2020.

[113] Of course, this is not an automatic outcome – it is possible, for example, that the changing bundle of the means of subsistence seen as necessary for the ‘average worker’ could mean an increase in the overall value of these commodities. This tendency may also be experienced differently for different groups of workers. It nonetheless appears to be an observable phenomenon, and the presence of coerced migrant labour throughout global value chains (particularly at its base) can be seen in many sectors of the world economy today.

[114]Blackburn 1997.

[115] They are also typically analytically incorrect – it is the tempo of capital accumulation that creates (or more frequently, destroys) jobs.

[116] Anderson 2012.