Conclusion: Bodies in Labor, Bodies As Revolt

CONCLUSION: BODIES IN LABOR, BODIES AS REVOLT As Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects demonstrates, the colonized worker of Britain’s colonies in India, Jamaica, and Ireland resisted the transformation into a laboring subject for decades as industrial capital continued its incursion into the British Empire. While this attempted transformation began immediately before the 1850s, resulting in rebellions in those aforementioned colonies during the 1850s and 1860s, it continued well into the twentieth century, which witnessed continued resistance in the form of labor strikes in Ireland during the 1910s, in India during the 1920s, and in Jamaica during the 1930s. The deployment of biopower under industrial capitalism attempted to produce laboring subjects through the management of populations and the disciplining of the individual body. It gradually did produce more “docile” workers, increasingly adaptable and receptive to modern industrial laboring conditions, as those conditions became normalized and as material benefts (such as a rise in the standard of living) sometimes accrued, even if the complete transformation into laboring subjectivity remains incomplete. Indeed, workers continue to resist their identifcation solely as laboring subjects. Of course, capitalism has been radically transfgured since the nineteenth century. In the last few decades the increasing fnancialization of the market has led to what has been commonly termed “neoliberalism,” or the return to nineteenth-century economic liberal models of laissez- faire. This has led to the privatization of previously state-owned enter- prises and services, as well as the severe curtailment of state-sponsored © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 213 S. Reddy, British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57663-3 214 CONCLUSION: BODIES IN LABOR, BODIES AS REVOLT social programs in education, health care, and housing. Aihwa Ong has characterized neoliberalism itself as a form of biopolitics or a new mode of governance that does not merely limit the state, but reconsti- tutes it so that “governing activities are recast as nonpolitical and non- ideological problems that need technical solutions.”1Neoliberalism has marked itself unevenly both across and even within nation-states, with global south nations (in particular, former colonies) and particular pock- ets of the racialized poor within global north nations largely bearing the brunt of neoliberal reform through the imposition of an economics of austerity. In focusing specifcally on debt and austerity, this Conclusion tracks the deployment of this particular biopolitical tool in India, Jamaica, and Ireland. Austerity measures have been forced upon all three postcolonial nations in the wake of restructuring programs imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in an increasingly fnancialized “global” market. Austerity measures were put in place in Ireland in 2010 following the fnancial crisis; in the 1990s in India, as will be discussed in greater detail below; and over the last 40 years in Jamaica on the heels of the 1980s oil crisis and rising interest rates. If understood as a regime of biopower, neoliberalism can also be understood to produce and depend upon the production of gendered and racialized subjects who are unevenly affected by austerity measures. Flexible and adaptive in its ability to deploy existing conditions, capitalism has reconfgured its extraction of surplus labor in radical ways since the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. While the ideal laborer during the heyday of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the white male of the global north metro- pole, the most exploited worker of our neoliberal times is the racialized woman from the peripheries of the global south. As the poorest and most desperate, usually unprotected by state regulations and sidelined from discussions of education and health, she is the most easily exploit- able and most readily disposable. Although this worker remains periph- eral to discussions of labor and labor rights, she produces perhaps the greatest surplus value for capital. Melissa Wright’s trenchant compara- tive study of female factory workers in Mexico and China explores what she terms the “myth of the disposable third world woman,” the woman whose labor power generates capitalist wealth, especially for “global frms that require dexterous, patient, and attentive workers,” but who herself is seen as “a living form of human waste” even while she produces great CONCLUSION: BODIES IN LABOR, BODIES AS REVOLT 215 value.2 For example, the textile industry, often requiring nimble hands able to maneuver cloth through a sewing machine, relies upon the female worker in global south nations such as Bangladesh and the Philippines, among other places, for the production of garments such as dresses and T-shirts sold largely in retail stores located in the global north. The myth of this worker’s disposability, however, both justifes corporate and con- sumer treatment of her in the form of low wages and horrifc working conditions, and serves as a disciplinary tool, ensuring her dependability, deftness, and compliance. The worker who fears her own disposability is a “good” worker, especially if her wages support not only her but also her family, and especially if her only other recourse is the informal econ- omy or sex work.3 Placing the previous three chapters in direct conversation, this Conclusion briefy tracks the historical and cultural shift of those late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourses on the transformation of the revolting body into a laboring subject, as explored in Chaps. 1–3, into the late twentieth century postcolonial rise of neoliberalism, which began in the 1970s. I do so through the concept-metaphor of the “disposable re/productive woman.” While metaphors in general are both already implicitly gendered and produce gender, the explicitly gendered concept- metaphor explored in this coda allows for an exploration of women’s bodies and labor as both produced and appropriated differently than men’s labor under neoliberal capitalism. In the words of Silvia Federici: if “femininity” has been constituted in capitalist society as a work-function masking the production of the work-force under the cover of a biological destiny, then “women’s history” is “class history,” and the question that has to be asked is whether the sexual division of labor that has produced that particular concept has been transcended. If the answer is a negative one (as it must be when we consider the present organization of repro- ductive labor), then “women” is a legitimate category of analysis, and the activities associated with “reproduction” remain a crucial ground of struggle for women.4 In its construction of “femininity” as a set of characteristics essential to women, including such qualities as the capacity for nurture, capitalism masks the appropriation of women’s labor. Women are seen as more naturally inclined and able to perform tasks associated with “nurture,” such as the care of children and the elderly and the feeding and clothing 216 CONCLUSION: BODIES IN LABOR, BODIES AS REVOLT of members of the household. Insofar as these tasks are seen as “natural” to women, the performance of such domestic labor is seen not as labor, but as part of being a proper woman. Domestic labor is thereby disre- garded as labor, since women are expected to perform this work without compensation due to a supposedly natural proclivity for such work. As Federici notes, however, insofar as household labor is necessary to the reproduction (whether in daily maintenance of family members or in biological reproduction) of workers under capitalism, such labor is part of class relations and thus constitutes “class history.” It follows, then, that women’s history is class history, since the labor of women is part of class relations and the category of “woman” is a category of analysis for class struggle. Such an analysis is even more crucial in our present time as female workers, especially from the global south, are increasingly con- scripted into providing both surplus populations and surplus labor for capital. Such conscription of women and their re/productive and biological labor takes place within our contemporary neoliberal regimes of biopower. While Foucault’s analysis of biopower has been attentive to sexuality and reproduction, it has been relatively inattentive to how it produces specifcally gendered subjects and operates within and upon women’s labor.5 Many of the most cited theorists of biopolitics, including Agamben and Mbembe, posit an asexual, universalized human subject as their object of inquiry. Others, such as Esposito, discuss women but, as Penelope Deutscher points out, “women’s role in his work is reduced to maternity.”6 Recent feminist theorists such as Melinda Cooper, Catherine Mills, and Catherine Waldby, to name a few, have explored the ways in which new technologies of biological reproduction have transformed biopolitics.7 For example, Cooper and Waldby argue that the embodied clinical labor usually performed by poor, mar- ginalized, and often female human subjects who provide tissue samples, undergo drug trials, and act as surrogates for the life sciences indus- tries has been a crucial source of recent (biological) capitalist accumula- tion, and has been especially proftable because it outsources risk onto the individual clinical

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