(From CounterPunch)
A while back I was told that the workers in some slaughterhouse in Kansas were all laid off when management decided to close up shop and decamp to other parts. My reaction was: Well, finally some good news! Only after a few seconds of awkwardness did I realize that the proper reaction was one of somber bemoaning of the state of the economy, the absence of job security in our precarious age, etc. But honestly, if it comes down to minimizing the disgrace of the factory-farming industry versus preserving the jobs of slaughterers, I know where I stand, and it is not with the working class. From my point of view, the dignity of animal lives trumps the need for human jobs as an absolute good to be fought for, and to be preferred wherever the two are in conflict with one another. The same goes, and even more so, for any conflict between the interests of indigenous peoples and the interests of any other constituency, of any class, that encroaches upon them.
It often seems as if the Left is still stuck in a moment of the not too distant past in which it made sense to glorify a certain kind of labor (of a certain species)-- namely, industrial labor. This is a kind of labor that was new in the 19th century, and that inspired many statues and public murals in the early-to-mid-20th century. It is the kind of labor that gave rise to the labor movement, and to all of that movement's laudable gains. For a while, it seemed like such a world-changing form of life that many people took it to be one of only two social classes that mattered, and a good portion of the world was consequently transformed on the presumption that it was the historical destiny of this class to govern the affairs of all men.
But rather than simply assuming that all varieties of industrial --or, somewhat more broadly, of blue-collar-- labor are worthy of equal valorization simply in view of the class membership of the laborer, I would much prefer a perspective on labor that takes into consideration what is being labored towards. And where the telos is indefensible, I would rather not feel obligated to defend labor simply because it is labor. After all, is it not a gross perversion of the laudable aims that brought labor unions into existence to see employees of the American prison industry gaining job security for themselves through collective bargaining? Can anyone honestly say that a victory for prison guards in a state like California --where 27 times more money is spent on juvenile detainees in the criminal justice system than on students in the public school system-- is a victory for oppressed peoples?
The industrial proletariat and other blue-collar laborers, I mean to say, have no particular grip on my sense of justice, when right alongside them --frequently as a condition of their thriving-- we find millions of disenfranchised prisoners, and billions of domesticated animals, all of whose lives consist in unmitigated suffering from beginning to end. Moving from the American to the global context, we find labor --the labor of blue-collar oil industry workers, logging-industry workers, miners, ranch-hands, and so on-- coming up against the interests of people who have never yet had so much as the opportunity to enter the working class. They've never worked at all! They are the people Marx thought were beyond the pale of history, the people who can't even be cast as extras in the grand play of class conflict. Again, here, I know which side I'm on.
There is nothing worse for members of pre-labor communities, particularly indigenous and nomadic peoples, than to be forced by dint of circumstance into a social world that recognizes only the working class and the various gradations of the upper class: management, ownership, and so on. Forced to enter a social world that recognizes only these distinctions, they of course come in at the sub-basement level, and they are despised for being so unable to get their acts together that they can't even make it as common laborers.
They are the drunk Inuit on the streets of Montreal, the Roma in France, the Indian slum-dwellers in urban Mexico. With their hand-me-down Salvation Army clothing, their knock-off sports garb and vestimentary advertisements for products and wrestlers they likely know nothing about, these people can easily appear as very poor representatives of the working class, as low-end proletariat.
But this is an illusion: in fact, where they come from a class designation like this means nothing, and they only get assimilated to the lowest of the lower class of the class-stratified society because they have to be placed somewhere or other, and clearly are not going to be permitted to be absorbed directly into, say, the middle-management class. A homeless, alcoholic, urban Inuit sports some of the symbols beloved of members of the working class, but these symbols are no more accurate a measure of his class background than a knock-off Versailles fountain in a Jersey Shore suburb is a reliable indicator of aristocracy. They are not Lumpenproletariat, or sorry excuses for workers, but something entirely different. In fact, they are frequently the first to be harmed by the promotion of the interests of those with gainful employment. It is my belief that these are the people most in need of protection and of defense, and indeed glorification in the old sense that once caused statues to be commissioned, both because they are themselves the most exposed and defenseless, and also because they offer a valuable model for the construction of a society beyond the boring and plainly inadequate choice between the glorification of factory workers and the glorification of bankers.
When revolutionary ideology was extended to parts of the world, such as Southeast Asia, that lacked an industrial proletariat, the role of the peasantry in revolutionary change was correspondingly elevated in order to compensate for the absence of one of the members of the desired 'worker-peasant alliance'. But from Romania to Cambodia the fundamental precondition of transforming the peasantry into a usefully revolutionary class was that they be fully sedentarized, counted, registered, and in various other ways made 'legible', to use James C. Scott's felicitous term, by the state. Revolutionary ideology has, then, generally held up the industrial worker as the key player in social transformation, but has dipped down where necessary to have the peasantry play the transformative role, while stipulating conditions on how the peasants must first themselves be transformed in order to be ready to do this. No revolutionary thinker has ever contended that there is a transformative force to be harnessed in the form of social life of entirely nomadic and document-less pastoralists, let alone the social life of forest-dwelling hunter-gatherers. Curiously, while Marx thought the final stage of history would amount to a sort of return to humanity's initial state ('primitive communism'), Marx and his successors never supposed that our own era's 'primitive communists' had any place in the transformations about to take place. You can't be an agent of history, the presumption went, if your form of life places you outside of history altogether.
I believe that much of the ongoing neglect of indigenous rights throughout the world has to do with a widespread perception among people at all points on the political spectrum, inherited from the Enlightenment view of history accepted by Marx and many others, that people who are not (at least) workers cannot be significant actors in the making of history and in the modeling of society. But there are many things we now know, in the age of ecological crisis, that remained occluded from the view of high Enlightenment thinkers. For one thing, we know that there is far too much work being done in the world. There is in fact very little labor that does not chip away at the delicate balance of the ecosystem, as anyone who has tried to secure an environmentally friendly mutual fund can affirm.
It seems odd, given this brute fact, to continue supposing that labor can show the way forward for world history. Under the circumstances, it seems that it is precisely the people who have managed to stay outside of history, in a certain admirable sense, who should be held up, if not as a vanguard of active transformation of the world, at least as an exemplar of how others might transform themselves. Indigenous peoples then --the ones without papers, without fixed addresses, and most importantly without jobs-- need to be defended not only because they are the most vulnerable members of our global society, and not only because we owe it to them, but also because they provide a possible model for how to get out of the dismal situation we've created for ourselves with all this hard work and history-making.
*
For further reading:
Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, London, 1974.
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale University Press, 2009.
Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, University of California Press, 1982.
Will there be no end to this tiresome "national conversation" as to whether
a black man trumps a white woman, or vice versa, on our nation's list
of the wronged? One possible end might arrive, of course,
when another white man is elected in November and American politics
returns to business as usual. In the meantime, I would
like to join the conversation, if only in order to bring to light the
inanity of the relevant comparison, based as it is on a presumption of
analogy between two social groups that are distinguished, conceptually
and in reality, from the dominant group for entirely different reasons:
in the one case, the distinction is based on a relatively short,
500-year history of economic subordination; in the other, it is a consequence of an evidently universal structural feature of human societies.
Execution by lethal injection is these days commonly described in the
media as 'putting to death' (e.g., an AP article of June 28, 2006
announces: "'Railroad Killer' Put to Death in Texas"). This phrase,
along with the more overtly veterinary 'putting down', seems to suggest
that the creature in question is only being relieved of its misery,
that it is a being morally and biologically ready for death, and that
the operation performed upon it is really just a facilitation of the
inevitable. The moral acceptability, even the necessity, of the act is
built into the term used to describe it. And the result of this
semantic legerdemain is a passive assumption on the part of the public
that lethal injection agrees with our sense of the sanctity of life and
of the importance of compassionate death for all, while hangings,
firing-squads, electric chairs, guillotines, and gas chambers are, in
contrast, distant memories from our barbaric past.
A few years back, when I was teaching at an American university in one
of the more remote corners of the Midwest, David Horowitz came to give
one of his usual talks to the campus Republicans castigating university
faculties for their 'liberal' bias. A group of my students,
likable-enough Adbusters types, told me they intended to descend upon
the event dressed in monkey-suits and giant foam cowboy hats, sit in
the front row, and pose questions, at the appropriate moment, such as
'What's the average surface temperature on Mercury?' and 'Give it to us
straight, David: Thriller, or Off the Wall?' Ordinarily, I would deem a
Dadaist stunt like this ill-advised, but for this particular master of
the non sequitur, it somehow seemed just the thing.
Earlier in this space I have argued that rational, progressive
Americans should be no less concerned about anti-evolutionism than
about the so-called pro-life movement. The former issue may appear
easier to neglect, as debates about it have an air of intellectualism
and irrelevance, while as for the latter women's rights are at stake,
and clinics are bombed. At bottom, though, both are but fronts in the
same ugly war, for in each case the Christian right makes an ungrounded
claim to the sanctity of some class of entities -- human beings among
animals in the one case, fetuses among human beings in the other --
argues that as a result of their sanctity these entities are
effectively off-limits to scientific investigation, and portrays itself
as a persecuted minority in view of the broader society's refusal to
play along. 
I would like to explain why I think the war on evolution in the United States is one about which all progressives should be concerned.
I was interviewed a few months back on Michael Slate's radio program at KPFK in Los Angeles. He had read a piece I wrote for Counterpunch defending the use of the admittedly overused label 'fascist' in reference to the Bush administration, and he invited me on the air to expatiate.
In previous articles in this space, I have argued that American prisons lack a clearly defined mission. They are caught between correctionalism and retributivism. They are not supported by any coherent philosophy of punishment. This makes them particularly susceptible to influence by those individuals within the criminal justice system who do have a philosophy, of any sort. For the most part, their philosophy, over the past thirty years, has been clear and straightforward: prisons are the site of warranted retribution against people guilty of moral transgression.
Michel Foucault's account of the emergence of the modern penal system, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, is already hopelessly outdated. Not, however, because it has been superceded by a sharper analysis employing a more fruitful method, but because the penal system, at least in the United States and Great Britain, has fundamentally changed as an institution since Foucault's study was first published in 1975. Foucault had been critical of the humanistic veneer with which we once made the urge to punish more palatable to our bourgeois consciences, since punishment, revenge, cruelty were at the end of the day hardwired into our wills-to-power and so, offensive to bourgeois sensibilities or not, ineradicable. Feel-good humanism had led to the proliferation of institutions ostensibly dedicated not to physical unpleasantness, but to the correction of these inmates' wayward natures. The science of deviance, as distinct from the moralistic judgment of deviants, flourished. Foucault plausibly maintained that, as a consequence of the humanizing drive in Western penal systems, the cruelty only became more subtle: the punishers quit torturing the body and went to work instead on the soul. But no matter. They meant well.
