International order and racial capitalism: The standardization of ‘free labour’ exploitation in international law

Abstract The ‘question of labour’ and its exploitation in the Third World has not been given ample consideration by contemporary international legal scholars in their historical examinations of the making of the international order. This article revisits the history of the interwar institutions of the League of Nations, particularly the International Labour Organization (ILO), to argue that international law reformulated imperialism through its re-articulation of labour relations, beginning with its quest to suppress slavery and ultimately regulate forced labour in Africa. International institutions contributed to the valorization of ‘free wage labour’ in Africa and the Third World through its international ‘native labour’ policies, the development of international labour standards, and especially the passing of the 1930 Forced Labour Convention. The article argues that international institutions safeguarded the processes of capitalist racial/colonial accumulation and labour exploitation by ideologically dis-embedding the violence of slavery and forced labour from ‘free wage labour’, veiling the structural unity and totality of the international legal order with racial capitalism. Drawing on the ‘Black radical/internationalist tradition’, I propose an expansive critique of the international order as a form of ‘enslavement’ to the structures of capitalism, so as to adequately expose international law’s structural embeddedness with labour exploitation, white supremacy, and racial capitalism.