The anatomy of social dismemberment

Ines Valdez’s theses in Democracy and Empire on the material bases of popular sovereignty and the internal mechanisms of imperialism represent hermeneutical breakthroughs for understanding the historical evolution of modern imperialism and contemporary democracies. According to Valdez, the material bases of popular sovereignty at the heart of demands for democratization, which have marked the history and configuration of modern political bodies, rest fundamentally on the logic of social, racialized and gendered exclusion. This commentary focuses on Chapter 3, entitled ‘The Brown Family and Social Reproduction in US Capitalism.’ The chapter takes a closer look at how the social reproduction of white privilege, centered on the social reproduction of the white heteropatriarchal family, is intrinsically dependent on the exploitation of non-white immigration and, as a corollary, the social dismemberment of the non-white family unit. The last section shows that in the face of contemporary events unfolding on a tragic scale in the Middle East, Valdez’s theses resonate with great force regarding the new faces of imperialism and liberal democracy in the international sphere. The total devastation of Gaza illustrates the mechanisms of social dismemberment of which Valdez speaks.