Labor and the Political Economy of Big Works

This panel examines economic activities performed by and in collaboration with the U.S. government. Exploring histories of exploitation and restitution in the Panama Canal zone, labor management in the U.S. Army, and capitalist coordination in the U.S. Freedmen’s Bureau, our papers shed light on the ambiguous historical lines between the state and economy. These social histories of the federal government make clear that the U.S. state has never been a coherent entity acting upon the economy, nor is it a neutral terrain of competition and conflict. As an ensemble of institutions, it has been embedded in complex relationships – cooperative and antagonistic – to diverse social worlds, from West Indian canal workers and scientific labor managers in the twentieth century to the cotton merchants of New York City in the nineteenth. Rather than debate the relative strength or weakness of this federal ensemble, our panel illustrates how these social relationships of federal authorities have shaped practices of governance, labor, and business in the United States and its empire. By understanding federal authorities in their roles as employers, managers, and business partners, this panel ultimately sheds light on the state as an active, albeit contradictory, participant in the reproduction of economic processes and class power, both in the U.S. and the world.