Self-and-Other Determination and the Invention of Whiteness: A Comment on Democracy and Empire

Democracy and Empire: Labor, Nature, and the Reproduction of Capitalism makes an important and timely contribution to democratic theory and debates about racial capitalism.Valdez retheorizes popular sovereignty and democratic self-determination by attending to their entanglements with imperial histories and racial capitalism (Valdez, 2023, 7).She argues that Western democracies have, historically, laid claim to an "excessive form of [] self-determination" by demanding to rule not only themselves but also to govern, exploit, and expropriate racialized others (ibid., 23).Valdez coins the term self-and-other determination for this claim to self-rule that depends on appropriating the land, resources, and labor of racialized others.As Valdez puts it, "popular sovereignty and self-determination are underpinned by popular claims that demand[..] collective access to wealth obtained by imperial means" (ibid., 2).Valdez's concept of self-and-other determination draws explicitly on Du Bois' concept of democratic despotism.In his analyses of the origins of the first world war, Du Bois developed critique of the class compromise between capital and the white working class in Europe and North America (Du Bois, 2022 [1915], 26-27; cf.2022, 42 [1917]; 1933).Du Bois argued that the 'white' working class had struck a tragic bargain with capital to ensure access to the spoils of an imperialist world order.Valdez reconstructs and builds on Du Bois' theorization of "democratic despotism as a proper type of political regime [] which depends on a collective attachment to the wealth extracted through imperial rule" (ibid., 34).Valdez argues that the rightward trend that we are currently witnessing in the US, the UK, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, France, and Italy, to mention but a few must be understood in the context of a colonial and imperial history that has shaped the political expectations and affective attachments of citizens in Western democracies (ibid.54-60).