Neferti Tadiar,
"If Not Mere Metaphor . . . Sexual Economies Reconsidered"
(page 5 of 6)
Labor and Life
The concept of labor is an extremely important one for understanding
the workings of capitalism, and in particular the structure of
exploitation under capital inherent in the production of profit or
surplus value and the social divisions comprising a class society. Labor
exploitation refers to the theft of surplus labor-time, and therefore of
surplus value, through what appears to be a practice of fair exchange
(the laborer is paid less than the worth of the product he makes, which
the capitalist sells to realize profit). Much of the thinking about this
process of the production of value and capitalist accumulation had been
confined to the labor process within industrial production (the factory)
or what is known in the West as Fordist production. Long before thinking
about post-Fordist production, and postindustrial capitalism, many
feminists had interrogated this theory and criticized it for its
marginalization of the sphere of reproduction, embodied by what used to
be called "women's work," now known as domestic work. As I mentioned
earlier, feminists pointed out that what appeared to be a site of mere
reproduction of the worker (the household subsistence activities to
sustain the life of labor) was in fact another site for the
expropriation of surplus value. While women's work appears, from the
point of view of capital, to have no role in the production of surplus
value or profit, by being a force of production not only of the worker's
basic life but also of the very subsistence of the laboring class as a
whole (by growing food, clothes and seeing to other needs of the
workers, including psychic, emotional, sexual needs, as well as
producing future workers), women's work contributes hidden surplus
values to the formal capitalist process (in the form of the extension of
the wage, thus enabling capital to continuously "cheapen" labor, that
is, to reduce the value of workers and their labor).
The so-called feminization of labor—which is nowhere better
exemplified than in the Philippine economy, which has relied on female
workers in its export manufacturing and domestic service as well as
tourism and sex industries since the 1970s, and is now completely
dependent on a largely female overseas labor force for its dollar
remittances—this worldwide phenomenon, the feminization of labor, has in
part spurred the belated rethinking of the concept of labor that is
currently taking place in the West (along with the financialization of
capital and the practices of production in the New Economy, comprised of
IT industries and speculation). What is now acknowledged is that what
used to be considered merely reproductive activities (in contrast to
productive labor) are in fact productive of value. Indeed, housework,
sex work, affective work, and care work are now profitable global
industries, which demonstrates that what used to be hidden sources of
value or invisible labor (hidden in the guise of natural forces, such as
the maternal and sexual "natures" of women, or couched in racist
categories, such as slave and colonial labor) and thereby freely
appropriated, are now directly subsumed by capitalist industries. Work
that appears to have no material product in the form of a tangible
commodity nevertheless produces surplus values that can be accumulated
as forms of wealth (economic capital) as well as forms of symbolic,
social, and cultural value. Left thinkers such as Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri, and other Italian Marxists, drawing on this longstanding
feminist work, view this phenomenon of what they call "immaterial labor"
("labor that produces an immaterial good such as service, knowledge, or
communication") as characteristic of contemporary global capitalism. And
they see this evidenced in the rise of the care and service-oriented
industries as well as the knowledge, information, and communication
industries in the so-called postmodern global economy. The burgeoning
call-center industry attests to this subscription of Philippine labor as
"immaterial labor," combining affective and cognitive labor in the
production of profit for multinational corporations, but also—as in the
hospitality industries of the past and in the current domestic and
luxury-care services of the present (including hotels, restaurants,
hospitals, spas, nail and beauty salons, etc.)—in the production of
bodily well-being and life values for a privileged class.
Feminists are skeptical about calling this form of labor
"immaterial," as their own analyses of the longstanding work of women
have shown us the corporeal costs and consequences of domestic and care
work, as well as the very material conditions of violence in which women
workers now find themselves as formal labor in the global service
industries.[27]
In my own work, I've written about the violent conditions
of overseas Filipina domestic workers, in which racial difference is
inscribed on their bodies, not as a matter of mere prejudice, but as a
matter of creating differences in personhood or humanity, which at once
results from and enables their objectification as natural resources to
be exploited by labor recruiters, the Philippine state, and employers.
Racially and sexually devalued through this difference, which is
inscribed on their bodies through many kinds of violence (and epitomized
by women's so-called vulnerability to rape and other acts of sexual
violation and coercive possession, as well as supported by state and
church control of women's sexual reproductive capacities),
disenfranchised Filipina women perform the reproductive labor necessary
for the well-being and maintenance of their employers, thereby
contributing to their employers' surplus "value" (which is economic and
social) for capital, over and above their own apparent cheap, disposable
value or non-value (as reflected in their wages and in their treatment
as less than human).
While there are many theoretical issues to disentangle and elaborate
upon here (including no less than a rethinking of the category of labor,
which is part of the focus of my new book), I want to focus on a few
issues that have particular salience for feminist cultural and political
analysis. The first is the issue of "labor-time" as the conventional
substance of value, that which is stolen from the worker as surplus
value. In the model of exploitation in industrial capital, labor-time
that is productive of value is confined to the time spent in the
production of the commodity. What the condition of domestic labor shows,
however, is that it is not any specific amount or quantity of labor-time
that is appropriated from the domestic worker; rather, it is her whole
bodily being, as a being-for-others, that is appropriated to maintain
and enhance the lives of others. Equated with the naturalized forms of
reproductive work she embodies (this gendered labor inseparable from her
gendered body), she is appropriated as bodily life, as "life-time" spent
in the serving and servicing of others.
I would like to propose this concept of "life-time," which draws on
but also expands the concept of "labor-time" beyond its masculine,
industrial parameters to include gendered forms of labor (women's
reproductive work, but also serf or peasant work, or non-modern labor
subject to non-economic expropriation), as a useful concept for
reckoning with the diverse, unrecognized life-producing capacities that
people exercise in the creation of value as wealth and power, which only
a small minority of the world's population is able to accumulate and
enjoy. Just as women produce themselves as forms of normative femininity
to meet the requirements of the industries that exploit their gendered
creative capacities (whether as light-manufacturing workers, department
store ladies, nurses, maids, or sex workers), people engage in a whole
range of socially organized subjective, bodily, cognitive, psychic, and
affective practices (that we sometimes refer to as "culture") in the
very production of their own lives and beings as particular kinds of
labor, and in the production of their material conditions, including
their social relations, which are the very conditions of capitalist
exploitation. The notion of "life-times" refers to these social and
cultural capacities and practices, and the heterogeneous temporalities
within which these concretely operate from the standpoint of people's
lifeworlds, rather than those activities contained within the
homogeneous temporality of abstract labor from the standpoint of
capital.
We might think of "life-times" as "living labor," a concept Marx used
to denote "labor which is still objectifying itself, labor as
subjectivity." For Marx, this "living labor" exists "not as an object,
but as activity; not itself value, but as the living
source of value." The political relevance of this concept lies in
Marx's understanding of this aspect of labor as precisely constitutive
of its revolutionary potential. We cannot, however, fully recognize the
"living labor" of people's practices, much less the political potential
of such practices, if we do not understand them from the perspectives of
the lifeworlds within which they concretely operate. Here, subalternist
critiques of the categories of labor and value, as exemplified in the
work of Gayatri Spivak and Dipesh Chakrabarty, are quite enabling for
thinking about the heterogeneity of the cultural systems of value and
meaning at work within universal capitalist processes, cultural systems
that might appear to be "outmoded" or mere "superstructural" ways of
life within a capitalist mode of production, and yet are in fact
intrinsic to its process of accumulation—indeed, that serve as
unrecognized forces of production.
As I've already suggested, social differences regulated by categories
of gender, race, sexuality, culture, and nationality are essential to
the process of capitalist accumulation to the extent that they serve as
technologies of devaluation, necessary to the expropriation of people's
creative powers. These differences structure the division in humanity
between disposable, consumable life and privileged, valued life (what
Giorgio Agamben has called "bare life" or zoe vs. good life or
bios), a division on the basis of which both sovereign power and
capitalist value are founded and which, like the traditional category of
labor, rests on the distinction between the reproductive, non-political
sphere and the sphere of productive, political life. Attempts to abide
by the forms of equivalence based on the capitalist value system will
necessarily depend on the active and often violent production of
differences as differences of value, and therefore on the devaluation of
whole ways and modes of life that are not valorized by this order.
My forthcoming book, Things Fall Away, builds on the set of
concepts I've outlined (life, labor, value) to develop a theory of
social experience as a form of creative or living labor that is subject
to expropriation.[28]
As I've said, expropriation does not refer to the
theft of any specific quantity of surplus labor-time. Rather, it refers
to the subsumption of the immeasurable time of social cooperation, which
feminists and third world intellectuals have shown to be indispensable
to the productivity of labor and therefore to the creation of wealth and
power. What Marx understood about land and other natural resources—that
they are the fundamental means of people's life production and
self-production, which, through processes of force as well as capitalist
development, both social and technological, they are continually
dispossessed of—Marxist feminists have understood to be true of culture,
social cooperation, subjectivities, and sexual/affective and
reproductive women's work. Demonstrating that capitalist accumulation
has historically and continuously depended on the "primitive
accumulation" of "non-capitalist" resources and work, embodied in the
naturalized forces comprised of the activities and personhoods of women,
colonized natives, and slaves, this thinking builds on Rosa Luxemburg's
insight about how in the phases of late-nineteenth and
early-twentieth-century imperialism, capital needed non-capitalist
strata in order to reproduce and expand beyond the phases of simple
profit. What was beyond Luxemburg's purview is the fact that
"non-capitalist strata" continue to be created in, and as, outmoded,
backward, or traditional forms of personhood, cultural capacities,
practices of social cooperation, and ways of life through new and
renewed structures of dispossession and exclusion. That is to say, these
seemingly non-economic spheres of life and forms of social experience
have become continuing sources of appropriable value. They are in effect
productive forces.
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