Readings:
- Manu Karuka, Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (Oakland, 2019), Chapters 3-5 (chapters 6 and 7 now “optional”)
- For Chapter 3, read the first half closely and skim the rest of the chapter. Don’t get bogged down in the particulars.
- For all three chapters, think about these questions:
- What is the relationship between the state (government) and capitalism/markets?
- What are the origins of private property?
- Rudi Batzell, “Free Labour, Capitalism, and the Anti-Slavery Origins of Chinese Exclusion in California in the 1870s,” Past and Present, Vol. 255 (November 2014), pp. 143-186.
- For this article, think about these questions:
- What, from the Workingmen’s Party’s perspective, does it mean for labor to be free?
- Why did Chinese workers migrate?
- How was mining and farm labor transformed in the late 19th century?
- For this article, think about these questions:
- (Optional) Emma Teitelman, “Properties of Capitalism: Industrial Enclosures in the South and West After the American Civil War,” The Journal of American History (March 2020), pp. 879-900.
In Empire’s Tracks, Manu Karuka lays out a history of the transcontinental railroad as the nexus of colonialism and capitalism in an westwardly expanding United States. This “Railway Imperialism” runs from the early 19th Century to the mid 20th, spanning the globe as part of a process in which the development of railways shifted from “entrepreneurial pretense and toward active colonial state planning” (41). This process required new, more violent means through which land could be expropriated and labor exploited. Fittingly, the railways would become sites of anti-colonial struggle throughout the world. Though Manuka casts the US transcontinental railway as part of an international movement, the core of the thesis (especially chapters 3-5) focusses on the perspectives of the Lakota, whose land was taken for the construction of the railways and the Chinese migrants whose labor built them and how these communities interacted with what Karuka calls “war finance nexus,” in which the U.S. interior was produced through the development of industrial and financial capital through an “imperial process materializing as military occupation” (168). Additionally, Karaku describes the colonial counterinsurgency required to protect expropriated land as “countersovereignty,” in which the native land was stolen and protected by replacing the existing modes of relationship to the land with new ones that gave colonizers financial and military control.
Through these chapters, Karuka constructs a convincing history that reveals how the relationship between the state and the corporation led to the privatization of land in the American west. In particular, I found Karuka’s argument of how these interested compounded one another very compelling. The state would give legal rights to corporations to construct railways, and in pursuit of profit, those corporations would “manifest imperial sovereignty” (68). Just as the state relied on private interests for the expansion of its boundaries, the rail companies relied on the state for protected against attacks from the Native people whose land they were expropriating. The state would then rely on the railways to improve military strength to push deeper into native territory, and so on. The end result is that expansion of the railways becomes a key mode through which native land became expropriated by private interests.
Additionally, Chapter 5 lays out Chinese labor in California as an important moment in the history of American capitalism. That Chinese workers were brought in for such a specific project meant that they were working towards their own obsolescence. Karuka presents a really unique lens through which to view the commodification of labor and its relationship to race. The very specific way through which a labor hour (or week) was priced and what happened when that labor market quickly lost its value is, I think, an important step towards American capital’s relationship to labor in the 20th century.
I agree with Chris’s discussion about the mutually constitutive imperialist relationship between the state and the corporation described in *Empire’s Tracks*. I was also convinced of Kaurka’s argument that “from the late 1850s through the early 1870s, corporate management began to cohere from military origins, to oversee the movement and containment of people in colonized space.” (45) The very central idea of “railroad colonialism” is a significant historiographical contribution because it centers political economy in the analysis of how, why, and for whom continental imperialism was carried out. The historical evidence of this was rather compelling, and the through-line of this history, from the early technical labor pipeline from army engineers to U.S. railroad companies to the first governor of California being the president of Central Pacific at the same time, was thoroughly disturbing. Karuka sums up these interconnections with a powerful thesis: “In the law, the imperial state chartered the corporation, while on the ground, the corporation would manifest the terms of imperial sovereignty. Capital accumulation and countersovereignty each constituted the other, seeking to expropriate Lakotas of their expansive relations.” (68)
Questions:
1. What is the importance of the war-finance nexus today?
2. Why do you think Karuka chose to emphasize, on multiple occasions, that Chinese workers were seen as “constant capital” as opposed to “variable capital”? I found this to be an interesting and intentional framing (According to the Encyclopedia of Marxism: “Constant capital is the value of goods and materials required to produce a commodity, while variable capital is the wages paid for the production of a commodity.” https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/v/a.htm#:~:text=Constant%20capital%20is%20the%20value,power%20which%20creates%20new%20value.&text=Thus%20constant%20capital%20includes%20both%20fixed%20and%20unit%20costs. )
I really agree with Chris Watkin’s analysis of the Karuka reading. I found it fascinating how Karuka’s book further challenges the “free market” ideology by showing how markets and industry have historically been deeply intertwined with state-led imperial development. Karuka’s text also challenges many of the ideas regarding Westward expansion. Commonly, in U.S. history, this is portrayed as the settling of the frontier and implies that America was a blank canvass for settler colonialism. Karuka’s history challenges this myth by showing how Native people both had agency and had sovereignty. I found it very interesting how Karuka highlighted the existing modes of relationship to the land and how colonizers corrupted this relationship through financial and military power.
Ultimately, I thought it was fascinating how all of these built up to Karuka’s conclusion to his book. Karuka reflects on modern U.S. imperialism and teases out what modern anti-colonialist struggle should look like. This, to me, was one of the major strong points of the book. Many of Karuka’s thoughts clicked into place for me in the final chapter and it left me reflecting and reconsidering the themes of the book long after I had finished reading the book. What does it mean to be anti-colonialist in America today? How do we unlearn colonialist perspectives on the relationship between people and land? These, and many more, are very interesting questions that I’ve been reflecting on not only for this class, but for my own personal political development and consciousness.
I also think the reading from Rudi Batzell is an excellent compliment to Karuka’s chapter on Chinese labor. Batzell built on the political ideology of the Workingmen’s Party and focused more on their politics in California. Many of Batzell’s arguments dovetail back into the main themes we’ve been discussing in class on the meaning of free labor as an ideology and as an expression of republicanism. As Batzell argues, the Workingmen were primarily concerned with “fundamental changes in the capitalist order, a radical restructuring of work, power and property” (Batzell 182). Looking back, we absolutely should not accept the Workingmen’s racist and xenophobic views. However, I do think it is also crucial to understand their alienation in the capitalist economic system while also emphasizing how the Chinese laborers were also victims of this same system. The liberation of the working class has to be for everyone and cannot be divided up based on racial, ethnic, and gender lines. Understanding this history is crucial for today as we navigate similar issues. The failures of past labor movements are extremely crucial to understand in order to overcome modern divisions.
Questions:
1. Where can we see “countersovereignty” present today in U.S. political economy?
2. Based on the Batzell reading, do you think there are redeemable aspects of the Workingmen’s Party? What lessons can we learn from their exclusionary politics?
3. The Workingmen argued that “markets must function within, rather than above, the political order” (Batzell 182). Are markets still embedded within the political order or do you believe they have grown so powerful as to subsume the political order? Did markets even function within the political order to begin with?
Jay talked about a lot of really interesting things here, but I’m going to grab onto his last paragraph because the Rudi Batzell article animated me the most. He is right in that the piece expands on the idea of free and unfree labor and how it built our country, and that context (especially with economics and labor) is absolutely crucial when considering political strategy. Taking it a step further, Batzell shows that the terms and frameworks that people in the nineteenth century understood them were not the same as we would understand them today. We think about legislation like the Chinese Exclusion Act or the fatal attacks on Chinese immigrants during the Riots of 1877 as knee jerk expressions of a racist, stratified society, which in ways they are, but the Workingmen believed that their exclusion of Chinese workers was a political strategy. To sum up their ideology, “Just as African slaves had provided the basis for an anti-democratic class of planters, so too, in California, Chinese ‘coolies’ allowed corporate ‘aristocrats’ to transform society by concentrating wealth and power at the top, thereby undermining democratic institutions and destroying the dignity of labour.” (146) Reading some of the other parts of the Workingmen’s political platform (progressive taxation, democratic control of financial institutions, worker representation of corporations) it is so hard to believe that the same political group believed in a systematic marginalization of Chinese people who were merely trying to survive, when their platform would be considered progressive even today.
It is tempting to call this period a missed opportunity in which solidarity along ethnic lines would have served the Workingmen better, but the same ideology of working within capitalism to lift up your own group’s standard of living exists today. Though less overtly racialized today, many trade unions have operated within these parameters only to see union density of the larger working class decline and standards of living fall. To complicate matters further, the Workingmen even had an incisive critique of capitalism to justify their racial prejudice against Chinese workers as “an attempt to give rhetorical expression to immediate dimensions of coercion and inequality within the formally free contracts of capitalism as they confronted it in California at the time” (148) and Batzell admits that their racism was more layered in that it was “not simply hostility to a threatening other, but was also a rejection of proletarian wage labour in what seemed to be its most essential, unmediated forms.” (148) With all that in mind, one cannot simply write off their racism as “not being class conscious” as usually is the response to racism and prejudice amongst the working class. They knew what they were doing, and they knew why. It’s just that racism can never be a viable long-term strategy for the emancipation of the working class.
Questions
1. How is racial hostility used as a political strategy today in labor struggles? How is specifically anti-Chinese sentiment wielded?
2. What are contemporary examples of labor placement services like that of the Six Companies meant to serve a particular ethnic group? Are they exploitative or not?
While I agree with both Chris and Jay that Karuka’s book gave a very interesting and specific insight on the way American westward colonialism and railroad building subjugated both Native Americans and Chinese Workers, I have to say I found the reading incredibly redundant. It is clear that the writing is well researched and thorough but the repetition of the same analysis and conclusion over and over again with different sources was somewhat draining.
That said the points Karuka made were very enlightening. The way in which it was deftly illustrated how early Americans would learn the bare minimum about Native Cultures in order to steal their land and then use that land for profit over and over again. I especially found the definitions of the Lakota’s “expansive relations” with the land versus the American “expansionist practices’ very interesting and it helped me get a full picture of how the west was colonized. I couldn’t help but think about the Lakota’s relationship to the land in terms of our current climate crisis. That is, if we were able to have a more expansive understanding of our country and its resources and a less strictly capitalist one we might have a healthier planet.
I found myself thinking about the different modes of violence the US government has practiced on different groups. From the overt violence of slavery, the trail of tears, Chinese exclusion, to the more psychological violence practiced on minorities and the poor today. To me, Karuka’s war-finance nexus really clearly illustrates the ways threats of violence, turned into actual violence and how that is how we colonized the United States. Karuka’s characterization of the Chinese Workers strike 1867 as a fight over control resonated with me. The Chinese workers seemingly did not have much control over their labor, certainly not in the way a factory worker in the northeast would, in some ways Karuka’s writing makes me think they were treated more like slaves than workers, but this moment attempted to change that. And though the strike led to railroads just importing more labor as opposed to responding to the strike it shows the power of organized labor clearly.
Questions:
1) Chinese workers in California were clearly subject to racism in their wages and accommodations. Would the 1867 strike have been more successful coming from white railroad workers? If no, what was it about railroad labor that made it immune to organized labor/labor revolution?
And a big one:
2) How do we as “Americans” in 2020 atone for the sins of colonialism on this continent especially in regards to Native Americans?
I found the atrocities documented by Karuka towards the native people of the Plains, as well as the U.S governments role in supporting the interests of rail investment, entirely consistent with both attitudes and actions towards the indigenous people in what is America from the time of the conquistadors. As capitalism took hold in our country, it should have been no surprise that the military was used to steal land for wealthy investors. Since before our nation’s founding, it has been a race to exploit the country’s land and resources. (Washington bought huge tracts of land populated by natives as he began his military career fighting Iroquois, for example.) It is telling that the approaches attempted by the Lakota, Pawnee, and Cheyenne (negotiation, assimilation, and rebellion) led to very similar fates for their people. With the rise of Federalism, labor became treated as simply another resource.That Chinese labor was used to undermine white workers has it’s parallels with the exploitation of other migrant and/or immigrant labor throughout U.S. history. That the Workingmen’s Party chose to blame the Chinese rather than their employers shows a familiar trend by organized labor to embrace hate. In doing so, they do the bidding of the industrialists, who understand the necessity of separating the masses in order to keep control. I would have liked to get a better understanding of the lives of the Chinese workers this week. There are other books for that.
Batzell’s and Tieitelman’s essays read better than the Karuka readings, and have a different focus; how the encroachment of large scale investment in mining, agriculture, and lumber effected industries that had previously been done on a smaller, independent, scale. The industrialization examined by these articles clearly shows how capitalism destroyed the lives, society, and futures of the workers in concert with the destruction of the land and treated both worker and environment as equally disposable. Tietelman’s depiction of Dodge, Georgia Land and Lumber, as well as their political buddies, was a fun read.
-I did a quick Google search of the Polanyan economics that Batzell references. Is there a definition of the term that simplifies it?
=Slaves, mill workers, and other oppressed workers tended to be romanticised by those who profited off their exploitation. Was this done to Chinese railway workers and miners at all?
The United States was transformed from an agricultural to industrial society post war and emancipation. Factors contributing to this change included the availability of massive supplies of raw materials, such as timber, iron ore, oil and other resources. Emma Teitelman details this diversification in “Properties of Capitalism: Industrial Enclosures in the South and West after the American Civil War, “with the narrative of capitalist, William E. Dodge and his efforts to lead the nation in the direction of prosperity following the economic impact suffered postbellum. A path he believed would literally be attained by running through the South and the West with the purpose of procuring natural resources and precious metals which were unattainable prior to emancipation.
While Dodge and his associates predicted cohesion across national territories, the imposition of industrial capitalism created interregional discord fueled by political struggles and the differences in property relations in the south and west.
Investments in western mining revealed antebellum political conditions that enabled minors to organize their own property codes with disregard for federal law or native possession while farmers in the south who already had common rights to timberlands antebellum, maintained said rights because they were only relatively regulated by post war institutions.
Although northern capitalist worked to transform regional property relations by reorganizing economic space to overcome sectionalism and succeeded at the privatization of land creating capitalistic profit, Teitelman also highlights the way industrial development and political consolidation intersected. Although profitable, the new economic development was contradictory in that it renewed racism with the excursion of power shifting from slaveholders to federal authorities.
The United States was transformed from an agricultural to industrial society post war and emancipation. Factors contributing to this change included the availability of massive supplies of raw materials, such as timber, iron ore, oil and other resources. Emma Teitelman details this diversification in “Properties of Capitalism: Industrial Enclosures in the South and West after the American Civil War, “with the narrative of capitalist, William E. Dodge and his efforts to lead the nation in the direction of prosperity following the economic impact suffered postbellum. A path he believed would literally be attained by running through the South and the West with the purpose of procuring natural resources and precious metals which were unattainable prior to emancipation.
While Dodge and his associates predicted cohesion across national territories, the imposition of industrial capitalism created interregional discord fueled by political struggles and the differences in property relations in the south and west.
Investments in western mining revealed antebellum political conditions that enabled minors to organize their own property codes with disregard for federal law or native possession while farmers in the south who already had common rights to timberlands antebellum, maintained said rights because they were only relatively regulated by post war institutions.
Although northern capitalist worked to transform regional property relations by reorganizing economic space to overcome sectionalism and succeeded at the privatization of land creating capitalistic profit, Teitelman also highlights the way industrial development and political consolidation intersected. Although profitable, the new economic development was contradictory in that it renewed racism with the excursion of power shifting from slaveholders to federal authorities.
I agree with Christopher’s analysis of Manu Karuka’s chapters, this was the first time I read about the transcontinental railroad and it was fascinating. I agree and am also convinced by what Manu has presented. I didn’t know government and corporations were working as a team in building the railroad, and how the militarized the whole operation was. Manu writes, ” This relationship between the state and the corporation provides a window into the dual faces of colonization and accumulation, the war-finance nexus. In the law, imperial state charted the corporation, while on the ground, the corporation would manifest the terms of imperial sovereignty.” The causalities of this merger of colonialism and capitalism were the Native Americans and the Chinese laborers. I tried finding videos about this and watched a short documentary by the history channel and it did not once mention Chinese laborer, despite being 90% of the workforce they were left out of history therefore, I really appreciated learning about the conditions of the Chinese laborers, and the Lakotas.
Questions:
1) The tactics used by capitalists looking at why and how the Chinese laborers brought in and exploited has continued throughout history and to exist today as well for example we see this with guest workers, labor trafficking and I always wonder what strategies people in the labor movement can use to address this.
2) I found the question Jay brought up in his discussion very intriguing, what it means to be an anti-colonialist today? Is being anti-capitalist enough?
All readings and P. Choy’s interview were intriguing, they were incompatible to make a coherent synthesis: Karuka in his book, “Empire’s Tracks” exposes how railroad building has a vital role in colonialism while the ownership of the railroad work excluded Chinese workers. The exclusion was not limited to Chinese workers’ labour. The mainstream historians rarely mention -if any- about the destiny of Indigenous people and their reaction during the construction. Karuka quotes a Cheyenne man’s talk at New York’s Cooper Union, “… What use have we for railroads through our country? … What have we to transport to other nations?”
Unquestionable, capitalist development “is profoundly unexceptional” wherever it is being implemented. In the North American railroad case, the local people are pushed out of their native soil, the land and its resources are being exploited, and the ownership was quickly shifted to the capitalist hands. The dilemma is how can we build a united front end while the workers, the powerless hands are being instrumentalized for the elite to destroy the homes of other powerless groups? Moving fast-forward, today, especially in East Harlem/El Barrio, mostly Latino construction workers are hired to demolish the old one-family houses which are -mostly- owned by Latino to build high rising buildings.
These chapters are interesting in the way they break down the development of the American empire and the links shared with the construction of railroads. America’s claims to domestic territory coincided with railroad building. In doing so, the author demonstrates how the construction of railroads helped to further the settler-colonial project to develop the country economically and create national unity. “Railroad promoters anticipated the exchange value of Indigenous lands, even before the onset of colonial jurisdiction.” Just like settler colonialism, the building of railroads was a structure to secure economic, social, and political power. I think Karuka is effective in demonstrating how capitalism, the state, and militarism came together to carry out this project. Even more so he conveys well how it depended on an exclusionary gendered and racialize body politic. A political that excluded black workers in the South, Chinese workers in the West, and indigenous tribes like the Lakota. I think this is interesting because the legitimacy of settler-colonial societies is but into question, which is something that is rarely done. Instead of being accepted as a given the history of settler colonialism is demystified in the U.S, and the process of settler colonialism is presented as a complex negotiation between capital, labor, and the modern representative state. I think this is valuable because in understanding the origins of those relationships there are hopes to right the wrongs. It’s not the products of events but a structure that continues to deem certain bodies as disposable and disposable. I agree with Hollis that the reading comes as redundant sometimes, but the reading is very valuable in understanding the complexities and nuances of an emerging settler colonial project, the formation of a state and a racialized body politic.
Questions:
How does the author demonstrate the relationship between capital, militarism and the state in the process of constructing railroads? How did this contribute to settler colonialism?
What are the effects of a racialize and gendered politics in constructing railroads? How did this contribute to exclusion of certain peoples in American society?
I appreciated Batzell’s scholarship about the Workingmen in California, enlightening me to a political struggle I had never learned about. Their grievances included a wholesale critique of the rapid industrialization of California in the form of land-monopolization, the corporatization and mechanization of farming, and large agribusiness resembling the manufacturing sector with regards to its relationship with labor. The Workingmen promoted a form of Jeffersonian agrarian (or placer mining) self-governance. However, Batzell’s thesis posited that they were primarily concerned with society-building and political economy rather than race, and i kept waiting for the evidence to support that, but it never fully did. The examples he gave of Workingmen discourse were classic examples of racism and xenophobia, under the guise of protecting a notion of citizenship which excluded Chinese workers. Even as the Workingmen displayed their awareness that Chinese workers were an exploited labor force and that the corporate bosses were using them to divide the power of the labor force, they still showed outright racial animus. Batzell, at least in my view, waved away the binding forces of racism. Karuka focused more on how Central Pacific railroad company colluded with state and federal government to exploit those racial grievances. I appreciate Jordan’s analysis, I think racism in the contemporary labor movement is too often attributed to ignorance or a lack of consciousness, but here we see a history of a deliberately racist anti-corporatism.
Questions:
We read much about how the state colluded with Central pacific (literally Leland Stanford was Governor of CA and chairman of CP at the same time) to reduce the power of labor, and increase the supply of labor to lower costs for the company. How does this happen in contemporary USA, specifically with regards to immigration policy?
What are some other examples of “anti-slavery” rhetoric being coopted for nefarious ends?
I like Chris Watkins’ interpretation of “Empire’s Tracks” and I see a strong parallel between Manu Karuka’s book and Emma Teitelman’s essay. Focusing on the relationship between private companies and government, violence plays a unique role in overcoming “obstacles” to capitalist success and expanding the control of a dominant culture. Though Karuka mainly focuses on the West and Teitelman focuses on the South, both explain in detail how governing structures aid private expansion which then aids the United States’ expansion. In the West, as Chris W mentioned, the railroads transported military forces who would then suppress Native Americans, disregarding their relationships to the land, so the railroad could keep chugging along. (The military forces also kept workers in fear, as seen through instances like the Ludlow Massacre.) In the South, northern based corporations undermined southern culture after the Civil War by disregarding what they viewed as confusing land ownership/usage practices. By taking their issues to federal court, the corporations escaped the institutional understandings of the South and instead stated their cases in a culture they were familiar with and knew how to navigate. State violence, disregard for standing land practices, and dominating culture were all prevalent themes in these works.
A quick note on dominating culture, because conquest and “development” occur through the process of not only physical expansion and submission, but also through ideological and cultural expansion and submission. It comes with the creation of racial hierarchies, where people are stereotyped and pigeonholed into certain labor. It comes with the confusion of not understanding the terrain you’re moving into, so instead of figuring it out, you push your own structures and understandings onto the terrain. (Northern corporations in the South using northern strategies to obtain land and enforce domain. Americans refusing to learn other languages to the common refrain, “why don’t you learn English?” Etc.)
1. Why was the federal government viewed by Southerners as Northern? (Teitelman)
2. Today we see the effects of slavery/reconstruction/segregation in the perception of Black men and women residing in America. How do we see the effects of racialization and unfree free labor reflected in the perception of Chinese men and women residing in America?
This week’s readings left me shocked. Capitalist used the Civil War as a means to get richer. I was knowing slavery was in the best interest of capitalism but I was not aware it was of better interest to end slavery for even more profit. Capitalist took ownership over former slave owner’s land and used the profits to gain even more wealth giving nothing to the former enslaved. The term “40 acres and a Mule” for the former enslaved was really just a joke to the U.S. as it was today. I was also completely amazed about the Chinese immigrants who came to this country to build the railroads but were ostracized by laborers. There are no boundaries to capitalist greed. I was confused by who landowners had to go to court to stop capitalist from invading their property.
My questions have been answered in the sense that the former enslaved were never going to get a fair chance or start in this country. Free or cheap labor is only part of capitalist success. Taking and not affording other’s opportunities to grow in this country is another means to keep the oppressed oppressed.