Abstract

Migrant labour has been a feature of global capitalism since the latter’s beginning. Capitalism needed labour from colonies and semi-colonies, also from other parts of the world. Thus, while Atlantic slavery was supplying labour across the ocean, there was an increase in the mobility of labour in post-manumission age, when capital became global and global trade became a defining feature of global capitalism. While discussing primitive accumulation Marx wrote that labour was like an army in encampment waiting to move on to wherever ordered. He also said that much of the capital had no birth-ticket attached to it. Migration, economy, and force were invariably the blood brothers of an earlier age, as they are now. Reflecting on the two times referred to in this essay—the colonial era of migration and the postcolonial age of migration, this essay also points to the need to revisit the history of Marxian thought on the question of migrant labour, colonialism, and the incessant wars associated with the bourgeois age.