On the Borders of Solidarity: Race and Gender Contradictions in the "New Voice" Platform of the AFL-CIO.

• Date: 22 September 1999
• Author: Camacho, Alicia Schmidt
• Published date: 22 September 1999
• Author: Camacho, Alicia Schmidt

You work till your bones hurt. You work till your eyes hurt. The engineers make you work till you think you will drop. They really are...always watching and hovering, stopwatch and clipboard in hand. What I regret most is not the pain of working at something so degrading, so meaningless. It is instead the pain of knowing that we, the laborers, are capable of doing so much more, Of living and working in a more meaningful way. Of controlling our own lives, our own resources, our own destinies. That is what I struggle for then. For a job to make full use of my imagination. And to change the world. To make it more just. I dream of a world that lives within its own means. Within limits, free of excesses. The maquilas? Well, you know it's crazy to work so fast all year round to make so many useless things. But I guess as long as americanos want cheap TVs, then there will always be maquilas. But you know at the same time we are exhausting Mexico's resources, especially its workers. We are wasting human lives. I say this is too high a price to pay for a job, food, and shelter.

-- Juana Ortega, RCA plant, Ciudad Juarez, 1982 (Pena, 1997)

What is now the object of contempt -- and in turn fuels fears -- is no longer manual labor pure and simple...but mechanized physical work which has become the "appendage of the machine" and therefore subject to a violence that is both physical and symbolic without immediate precedent.... This process modifies the status of the human body (the human status of the body): it creates body-men, men whose body is a machine-body that is fragmented and dominated, and used to perform one isolable function or gesture, being both destroyed in its integrity and fetishized, atrophied, and hypertrophied in its "useful" organs.

-- Etienne Balibar, "Class Racism" (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991: 211)

The current phase of neocolonial capitalism is characterized as a regime of flexible accumulation empowered to move unhindered around the globe, to organize the extraction of surplus by coordinating highly differentiated modes of production and rigorously segmented labor markets. These characteristics have forced a reconceptualization of the traditional terrain of class struggle and its privileged subjects. Rather than imagine a labor movement predicated on a solidarity born out of the homogenizing tendencies of capitalist expansion, we are compelled to consider the hyper-differentiating effects of globalization -- the dispersal and fragmentation of sites of production and markets -- as the ground for new forms of political action, rather than as the occasion of their foreclosure. At the heart of this project of re-visioning labor politics is a category of worker historically situated at the margins of development and of "the political": the subaltern workers whose staggering rates of productivity on the glo bal assembly line defy their prior constitution as a "relative surplus population" (Marx, 1990: 786). This category itself masks the history of their colonization and racialization as captive labor, a history haunting the "new" division of labor.

As the traditional compact between organized labor and industrialized welfare states has given way, current global restructuring places ever greater burdens on this class of workers. Ironically, the workers who have historically been accorded few claims to rights as citizens or as beneficiaries of industrialization (women, racial minorities, Third World subalterns, migrants) now occupy the fastest growing sectors of the post-Fordist labor force and have been targeted as the new clients of development. [1] Depictions of subaltern omen of color as the "nimble fingers" generating the hyper-profits of globalized capitalism are now a commonplace in representations of its logic of commodification. The discourse of the fragmented laboring body constructs Third World women workers as uniquely equipped by biological and historical conditioning to withstand the monotony and repetition of high-speed production. (This construct is present both in managerial and development discourses and in the Michael Moore [1996, 1998 ] brand of anti-Nikeism.) As the testimony of Juana Ortega illustrates, this construct naturalizes racial and gender differences that are the effects of capitalist discipline on subaltern women's bodies. The discourse of the fragmented laboring body thus repeats what Gayatri Spivak justly terms the "epistemic violence" that casts "third world women" as the "cultural and composite Other of western modernity" (Spivak, 1988; Mohanty, 1991).

This article examines trade-unionist counter-discourses that have emerged in opposition to the current order of globalized capitalism. First, I present a framework for understanding the forms of labor and labor control utilized by globalized capitalism. Then I trace the history of a recent attempt to forge cross-border solidarity between San Diego affiliates of the AFL-CIO and striking workers in the Han Young plant in Tijuana, Mexico. [2] This effort offers a case study of the contradictions inherent in the AFL-CIO's "New Voice" of solidarity in a globalized industrial capitalist system. Finally, what interests me is the way transnational solidarity projects lay claim to the energies of the new class subject, the racialized and feminized subaltern worker. Insofar as the AFL-CIO's "New Voice" platform mirrors globalized capitalism's investment in Third World workers, especially women, as a repository of surplus value, I will argue that it is unable to sufficiently break with its reification of gender and rac ial difference. This failure inevitably allows development's teleology of progress to reassert itself -- as in every crisis -- by recasting subaltern workers in the Third World as development's outside, the passive objects of capitalist expansion.

1. Development's Economies of Difference

   i. Development's Subjects

   "Development," the "historically produced discourse" that according to Escobar (1995: 6) emerged in the latter half of this century as "an extremely efficient apparatus for producing knowledge about, and the exercise of power over...subject peoples," continues to exert its disciplinary force in regulating "the economies of difference" driving globalized capitalism. The hyper-differentiated forms of labor and labor control constitutive of the late capitalist economy both rely on and produce racial, gender, and sexual differences in the accumulation and distribution of profit. Difference becomes legible in the management of class stratification and in the exercise of class struggle through the controlling lens of Western developmentalism. It is thus necessary to review the concept of development, its capacity to "coloniz[e] reality," in order to understand the logic of globalized capitalism and its opposition (Ibid.: 5).

   In 1949, President Truman declared "the old imperialism -- exploitation for foreign profit" dead and called for a new scientific "program of development based on the concepts of democratic fair dealing" to take its place (Esteva, 1992: 6). "Development" referred to a quantifiable state of social advancement, according to predetermined indices of prosperity, democracy, and technological and cultural achievement. [3] The imposition of this neo-imperial order required at the same time the implicit understanding that "development" was an ideal available to subject peoples only through mimesis -- never to be fully embodied or owned by them. Gustavo Esteva contends that development remained a vague and ill-defined concept precisely because of its function as a mechanism of ideological control: for those outside its magical community "the positive meaning of the word...its social construction," he writes, "is a reminder of what they are not" (Ibid.: 10). Thus, a notion of difference as a sign for backwardness resid es at the center of the intransitive form of the verb "to develop," to grow, to progress, to advance.

   At the heart of progress lay capitalist production: "Greater production is the key to prosperity," Truman announced. The creation of markets, the integration of economies, and the commodification of labor and culture preceded social welfare. "Our subject matter is growth, and not distribution," stated W. Arthur Lewis in 1955, outlining a set of principles in which economic growth served as the alibi for Cold War policies of containment (Lewis, 1955). The poor, the indigenous, and the oppressed were thus interpolated within a grand narrative of progress as subjects of development in order to be transformed into agents of economic growth -- the central, ineluctable imperative of modernization.

   Development's subjects perform their labors within a commodity system in which economic value reconstitutes the racial and gender formations of prior colonial and imperialist orders as a problem. Racial and gender differences rooted in histories of colonial subjection are thus doubly marked: to be remade as a new source of (surplus) value, and its negation, since the promise of development always contains within it the specter of maldevelopment, scarcity, lack. Difference thus serves developmentalism as a tremendous economic resource and as a disciplinary apparatus for bringing subaltern subjects into projects of capitalist expansion. Still, difference remains problematic for developmentalism, which must simultaneously disavow that part of difference that may serve as the ground for resistance and insurgency. This contradiction is readily apparent in development's "discovery" of Third World women in the 1970s and 1980s, as development sought to answer to its critics amid the global economic crises of the ear ly 1970s (Beneria, 1992).

   The category called "Third World women," located between tradition and modernity, gained significatory power both as a figure of acquiescence and contestation in the interwoven systems of representation and systems of production forging the new international...