The term “middleman” elicits a moral judgment. For some, middlemen are parasites that leach vitality from deals to which they contributed little to nothing. For others, middlemen are the exact opposite: the crucial conduits of deals that would not happen without them. Perhaps, as the term implies, they are instead something in between, simultaneously superfluous and essential. Attention to the middleman character, tasked with mediating overlapping yet conflicting interests, captures the contradictions of the state in capitalist society. Situated at the bridge between the state, economy, and the public, these figures and their attendant class identities complicate our understanding of state logics and the decisions the state makes in regulating or promoting business. Interrogating the aggregation of state actors affords greater nuance to the study of government regulation, state-business symbiosis, and capture.
This panel examines the complex and contradictory roles of “middlemen” to develop a better understanding of the state, capitalism, and the relationship between the two. Chris Choe asks what squabbling administrators in the US-controlled Panama Canal Zone reveal about class formation of state managers in an imperialist project. Studying the negotiations between railroad-sponsored “immigration agents” and Italian diplomats, Lauren Braun-Strumfels explains how corporations, landowners, and the Italian government simultaneously hoped to remake the New South and solve the United States’s “immigration problem.” Lastly, Bryant Barnes looks at how the efforts of railroad regulators to “fairly” arbitrate between railroads, investors, and the public paradoxically compelled them to perpetuate the very problem they meant to solve: discrimination. All of these middlemen—imperial administrators, colonization agents, and railroad regulators—operated to varying extents between capital and labor, between capital and the state, and between capitalists. Serving all partially and none fully, they simultaneously challenged and perpetuated capitalism. In short, they were the middlemen of capital.