Ep 370 - Empire & Exodus with Erald Kolasi

About this episode

Erald Kolasi discusses the material roots of migration and the impact of empire and capitalism on global migration flows.

Erald Kolasi is back to attack the bourgeois narrative on immigration, which reduces it to a series of individual choices. He and Steve dig into the material roots of migration, showing how empire, land theft, war, labor exploitation, and capitalist crisis have shaped global migration flows for centuries. They ground the discussion in Wallerstein's world-systems theory, defining an empire not by its internal politics but by its extractive external relations, and trace the concrete historical processes of this extraction. The "migration boomerang" from US destabilization in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador – driven by the needs of capital like the United Fruit Company – demonstrates the dialectic in action. The empire's domination creates the displaced peoples it then scapegoats to divide the working class. Erald connects this to the long arc of capitalist development, from the Atlantic slave system to the prison-industrial complex, showing how the ruling class has always used race and nationality to prevent united class consciousness. With the MMT lens, Steve explains that this is directly tied to how a Federal Job Guarantee would shatter this dynamic by eliminating the…

People in this episode

Host: Steven D Grumbine

Guest: Erald Kolasi

Topics covered

• immigration
• empire
• capitalism
• labor exploitation
• migration
• Wallerstein's world-systems theory
• class consciousness

Keywords

• migration
• empire
• capitalism
• labor
• Wallerstein
• class struggle
• race
• nationality
• Federal Job Guarantee
• reserve army of labor

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: United Fruit Company, Monthly Review Press

Books & works: The Physics of Capitalism

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