Empire & Exodus
Erald exposes how Western imperialism has engineered global migration flows – from US-backed coups in Latin America to colonial land grabs – migration crisis isn’t a bug of capitalism but a feature.
** We’ll discuss this episode on Tuesday, March 10th (8 pm ET/5 pm PT) in our online community gathering, Macro ‘n Chill. We’ve invited Erald Kolasi to join us. So bring your questions. Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/hvkv5uyKQkG8DvgUMCckcw
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 “reserve army of labor” and the power of capital to discipline workers.
Erald Kolasi is a writer and researcher focusing on the nexus between energy, technology, economics, complex systems, and ecological dynamics. His book, The Physics of Capitalism, came out from Monthly Review Press in February 2025. He received his PhD in Physics from George Mason University in 2016. You can find out more about Erald and his work on his website, www.eraldkolasi.com.
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When you see folks vehemently against "illegals", then you need to shake the humanity back into them and educate how global migration flows stem from the cruelty of empire.
Capitalism always creates migration crises around the world through imperialist wars for profit and destabilization of countries which choose to be independent of the imperialist sphere of influence. As a physicist, Erald Kolasi has provided fantastic insights on every Macro N Cheese episode he appears on.