Labor Activism, Sweatshops, Slavery, and the Categories of Class Analysis (I)

S. Charusheela

Marxists may feel pleased to hear the terms "exploitation" and "slavery" gain wider currency in discussions about globalization. But I want to argue that we should be cautious about the implications of recent popular discourses of slavery and exploitation of third world workers, particularly women, under globalization.

I am not basing my argument on the grounds of analytical purity (i.e., this is not about whether people use 'our' definitions of exploitation, slavery, class, capitalism). Jack (Amariglio) is right to suggest that even if the people using this discourse have differing definitions of exploitation, we cannot simply dismiss such perspectives. We would still need to do the work of thinking through the effects/implications of these discourses for making political assessments. My argument is not simply that these discourses use the wrong definitions, but that the effects/implications of this discourse are problematic. (Thus, my argument is closer to the one made by Kenan Erçel in "Orientalization of Exploitation: A Class-Analytical Critique of the Sweatshop Discourse" [Rethinking Marxism, 2008, Vol. 18, no. 2]).

There are two specific examples/encounters with this discourse that I have had over the years that have made me decide this is a dangerous type of discourse.

The first is in the arena of export zones and labor rights. I spent many years doing pro bono work for an NGO that does social audits of labor practices in export zones. I had all types of differences with their approach, including their lack of a systematic class analysis. But I found, to my surprise, that I preferred their slightly pro-business slant to the approach used by the stronger opponents of export zones as a site for the intensified exploitation - indeed the implicit slavery - of third world workers under globalization.

Here is why: The folks who insisted on the slavery/exploitation metaphor did so without attention to the broader class landscape within which these new labor practices were emerging. The result was, as Kenan rightly called it in his RM article, "Orientalization of Exploitation" - a showcase of horrors of non-Western labor experience which enabled (deeply strengthened) a self-imagination in which labor practices and rights in the 'West' are 'good,' and can be presumed to be free of exploitation. Kenan does a superb job of explaining what is wrong with an approach that leaves us assuming that wage labor in the West is 'free' of exploitation.

At the political level, the story of what the consequences of this perspective are is hardly new(s): This perspective enabled a set of approaches that prioritized policies which (surprise!) placed promotion of‘good' labor areas, which just so happened (even greater surprise!!) to coincide with keeping jobs in First World (and, as a corollary, eliminating competition from jobs in Third World). The ‘race to the bottom' analysis conveniently elided the global distributional implications of the fact that the bottom was in the Third World, so that not racing to the bottom meant keeping the jobs away from the Third World and in the First World. And yes, I know, they are crappy, exploitative, jobs -but anybody who thinks the Marxist perspective on the horrors of wage labor means that not having wage labor is better needs to remember Joan Robinson's quip on that.

Those who work on anti-globalization movements know that this way of framing the issue proved to be enough of a problem that many Third World groups insisted that they craft an anti-globalization/alternates-to-globalization agenda which they did not see as a global coming together,which they deliberately separate from and keep distinct from First World efforts. This is/was not a good result. It took, as folks familiar with the movement know, a really strong effort to rethink the ways the anti-globalization perspective was articulated, to begin overcoming this type of problem. At the political level, popular discourses and the actual policy agendas on the table from ‘pro-worker' politicians and political parties in the First World remain wedded to a nationalist policy of promoting First World jobs and removing ‘unfair' competition from the Third World (the number of people who raise ‘fair trade' but are willing to raise the unfairness of, say, agricultural subsidies and patent rights at the political/policy level seem thin, the invariable focus of ‘fair' trade is ‘unfairness' toward the First World workers, never the other way around).

The second example is more recent. Since coming to Las Vegas, I have come to realize the nasty impact of the ‘sexual exploitation of women, female sexual slavery, trafficking' discourses. To put this in context - for the past decade and more, I have been teaching global feminism or some variant of that. And everytime there was at least 1 student, usually more like 2-3, who wanted to do their project on female sexual slavery in Thailand. It was always sexual slavery, and always Thailand. Nothing else apparently happened in Thailand, and sexual slavery apparently never happened in households, marriages, etc., only in Thailand or some similarly imagined country. The rise of this discourse, much of it promoted by women's studies and (some dominant strands of) feminism, has lead to a global anti-trafficking movement that calls itself the new abolitionists.

I've never worked on sex industries. But within two weeks of my coming here, Melissa Farley released her report Prostitution and Trafficking in Nevada: Making the Connections, and Bob Herbert did a 3-op-ed writeup based on that in the New York Times. And feminist groups were up in arms about the horrors, and soon after [December 2007] the TVPA (Trafficking Victims Protection Act) was reauthorized. I won't go into the Farley report (there is a rich scholarship from folks working on sexuality studies on what is problematic about its approach and methodology), or into the deeper problems with how the conditions for getting federal funding for research under the anti-trafficking provisions skews outcomes (there is similarly rich literature on the problems with this).

What I want to highlight instead is what I began to see as the fallout of all this since I came here. We have cops, we have a sex panic, and we have a back door shut down of immigration routes (FYI, there are no separate organized routes for the ‘traffickers' versus the routes used by ‘garden variety' non-documented immigrants). The women who have to face the brunt of this protest, and then we have lockups, and also suggestions for (often-enforced by courts) psychological counseling to ‘help' them overcome their internalized patriarchal slave mentalities. It is not funny. This is a global phenomenon of policing undocumented immigrants and sex industry workers in the name of protection - bar girls in India and sex workers in Dhaka and Kolkata have been victims of crackdowns that are frightening. Nevada is using the Trafficking Victims Protection Act to crack down on the sex industry. In India this is adding fuel to the fire about immigrants from Bangladesh and the movement of women from Nepal and the hill tribes of East India.

As scholars like Kamala Kempadoo and Laura Agustin note, anti-trafficking legislation becomes a way to clamp down on immigration. At stake is women's right to mobility, as well as the overall ability to use migration as a response to economic catastrophe. Not to mention the racialization of the whole debate - in the name of minority women, minority men are rounded up, specific racial subgroups are seen as sexually perverted men who act as pimps or use trafficked girls, etc. And while all this is happening in the name of exploited women, the provisions for addressing the deeper structural problems that lead to the need for migration or leave women economically and socially vulnerable, are left unaddressed and indeed, worsened in contexts of immigration crackdowns.

I've never been one of the pro-sex persons within Women's Studies, at least not in anything more than a weak freedom-of-choice kind of way (not that I was clearly ‘anti,' I simply did not have my own intellectual or political stakes in that debate). It may be because I had no personal stakes one way or the other - my own sexual persona has been personally conservative, and remains so, which is not news to folks who've known me all these years. But what I see here within six months of coming to Las Vegas, and what I have learnt about the issues as I follow this stuff, has radically and profoundly changed my mind.

It has also convinced me that I (we) need to think a lot more about the relationship between Foucauldian governmentality/biopolitics and Marxist class analysis, since the Foucauldian queer theorists and folks looking at the issue from the angle of biopolitics were ‘on' to this discourse and what it was doing long before I with my class analysis: I suspect that is because the language of slavery and exploitation was seen by me as an opening from my Marxist entry point, and indeed resonated with the language I use in my own research on labor rights and the informal economy. Several interventions in local media events, in addition to classrooms etc. and going, I have come to see that the hold of the current imagination of exploitation and slavery around the trafficking discourse, bolstered by movies like Born into Brothels and New York Times pictures of sad eyed girls, along with snippets about such-and-such woman oh-so-grateful to be rescued, while the other side is painted as slave holders, mentally damaged women, etc. is dangerous.

The primary response available for the alternate approach is the ‘free choice of women to work here' discourse coming from the libertarian sexual freedom groups. I believe that the reason this is the alternative they offer is because, as the conceptualization and ground for the language of exploitation and work has been hijacked by the anti-trafficking mainstream discourse, this is the only discursive option available. They are forced to respond via statements about how this is about freedom of choice, how they do too show rationality and agency, etc. (that is, via a neoliberal/libertarian discourse), even though there is a substantial subset of the sex worker rights advocates do not actually think in those terms, but want to present agendas in terms of work rights, citizenship rights, and structural changes in economic policy. But whatever the political desire of these sex-worker advocates, in the public discourse, to open up the idea of the need for worker rights and protections against exploitation and coercion is to play into the discourse on ‘trafficking' as it is currently deployed. This makes taking up exploitation difficult, and backs sex-worker rights advocates into a libertarian corner.

So, my assessment: Culture is a moving target. Back in the day, I was right up there among the folks who were drawing on the horrors of labor violations and yes, the frisson of horror generated particularly by images of commercial sex and prostitution, to articulate my critique. But the field has changed, the discourse has spread, and we don't control its use. We need to now reassess our use of that discourse, lest it becomes the Marxist equivalent of the ‘FGM/honor killings/dowry murder' nexus of horrors within feminism. I like to think that we are ready for our own "Teaching for the Times," (reprinted in McClintock, Mufti & Shohat's Dangerous Liaisons) the talk in which Gayatri Spivak disavowed the multiculturalist politics of teaching literature that she herself had an instrumental role in helping to create at one point. In other words, I think that we do indeed need to see the rise of popular discourses of exploitation as an opening, but not one to feel pleased about. Rather, this is a conjuncture that calls for a serious reclamation of the concepts of forced labor, slavery and exploitation in direct opposition to their current use. Indeed, if anybody is positioned to do this, it is precisely those of us who work in a Marxian tradition and have a sound sense of what exploitation is, where it comes from,and what it actually takes to end it.