Labour's Migration and Capital's Empire: A Political Economy of Migration in Australia

Abstract

This thesis develops a classical Marxist account of migration as a social relation. It seeks to understand the contradictions of a global system increasingly shaped by brutal exclusion of migrants and reliance on their labour-power, through an investigation of Australia. It rejects attempts to explain migration through static categories of so-called ‘cheap labour’, ‘settlers’, or outsiders added to an internally coherent nation-state. Rather, it develops a processual account of migration in Australian history as part of the inner dynamics of capitalist accumulation. It does so through an explanation of shifts in the longue durée of migration from 1830 to 2025: Systematic Colonisation, White Australia, Post-War Boom, and Neo-Liberalism.

The thesis explains processes of migration through four categories of analysis: imperialism, settler colonialism, labour market regimes, and nationalism. Historical treatments of these dynamics in Australian migration history are interwoven with the interrogation and intellectual reconstruction of these categories grounded in Marxist political economy. It theorises migration as arising from relations within: (1) the circulation, concentration and accumulation of capital; (2) the reproduction of imperialism and colonialism; and (3) the ideological mediation of class formation by nationalism. By centring labour, it situates migration within an imperialist world economy that is dynamic, contested, and capable of being overturned.