Shae Lifson

Rationale

Systems of Exploitation

Introduction

My individualized major, Systems of Exploitation, focuses on the enduring institutions and cultural hierarchies that shape the modern capitalist world. I am especially invested in a critical examination of the ever-present legacies of Western imperialism and racialization, which form the backbone of an exploitative mode of production that relies on the unending plunder of natural resources and of the bodies and lives of people in lower economic classes worldwide. My concentration also addresses how one might imagine this global capitalist system in the future, as climate change reshapes the world and the movement of some people becomes increasingly restricted. Generally, I have come to understand these global inequalities and power dynamics through a geographical division—one that can be traced back to narratives of the American-European (Western) modernity and progress as opposed to the “backwardness” of the “other,” understood as a part of the European colonial project and later with newly independent nations, the segregation of what becomes known as the “Third World”, developing nations, and/or the Global South. I understand such terminology to be inherently problematic, but still useful to make broader claims about the complex relationship between colonized and colonizers. The dichotomy produced in the separation between a wealthy nation and a developing one is reproduced within the nations themselves, again utilizing racial and ethnic complexity to produce class divisions. These schisms between people have laid the foundations for centuries of violence and exploitation which continues to the present day. My rationale examines these historical, structural, and material dynamics of power and inequality through an economic and racial lens while exploring the value of utopian imaginations of potential alternatives to the maintenance of the status quo.

 

Extractivist Capitalism: Looking Towards the Future

Capitalism is a system predicated on limitless growth and expansion. The discussion of capitalism here is not a critique of the capitalist mode of production, but rather an exploration of how modern capitalist ideology has been mobilized to reproduce various forms of exploitation. Modern capitalism, according to economic philosopher Karl Marx, writing in the mid- to late- 1800s, originated with a violent process of primitive accumulation in England which was later replicated during the process of colonization (Marx, Capital Chapters 26 and 27). This process involved the privatization of communal property known as the commons and of the violent expropriation of individuals known as peasants from the land they used to sustain themselves. With no way to survive besides selling their own bodies to be transformed into labor power in exchange for a wage, the former peasant—now known as a member of the proletariat—was born. From this initial exploitation, the Industrial Revolution slowly developed in England and processes somewhat similar to primitive accumulation occurred globally through extractive colonization. Corporations such as the East India Company, which operated between 1600 and 1874 in Britain, saw an economic opportunity to expand the availability of various raw materials that could be procured from colonies, and British and other European governments supported these corporations through legislation, funding, and even military assistance. By expanding access to raw materials, industrial factories were able to produce more manufactured goods than ever before. This initial growth shaped the nature of the modern capitalist economy by demonstrating that expansion and colonization allows the capitalists, or bourgeoisie, to accrue more capital. While former empires, such as the ancient Roman Empire, also engaged in extractivist expansion, the scale of these endeavors was somewhat limited by the technologies available in that historic moment which sets them apart from the modern Industrial Revolutionary age and the particular version of capitalism which Marx was engaging.

Today, with the advent of the stock market and credit purchasing power, there must be an assumption of more growth through new means, such as financialization. Stagnation is cause for concern, if not outright panic, if daily stock market news analysts are to be believed. This is very different from pre-capitalist economics which posited that there was only one pie and that if one person or group was getting a larger slice it meant that another was getting a smaller one. Today, there must always be more capital and more commodities to sell with more surplus value to extract from workers, the natural environment, and even consumers. It is under this ideology that humans have extracted untold quantities of nonrenewable resources from the Earth, polluted air, water, and soil, and blasted thousands of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In the contemporary world, even laypeople know that the resources of the Earth are not infinite, but capitalists have a solution: certain facets of humanity will soon have the capacity to move outside the boundaries of their home planet and into the unending expanse of the cosmos, where infinite unfamiliar raw materials await extraction. If climate change and other circumstances allow for it, it is feasible to imagine an intergalactic capitalism where the extractive colonization process is reproduced on other planets—something more realistic than science fiction would have us believe, with several wealthy capitalists such as Elon Musk already in the beginning stages of planning to colonize Mars.

The future of the Earth is somehow more alarming: as global temperatures rise, natural disasters will become larger, more common, and more widespread. Famine and drought will grip vast swaths of the globe, displacing millions of people already in vulnerable positions. With the increased restriction of the movement of people, where will they go? Certain scholars predict that civilization will collapse (Franzen, “What if We Stopped Pretending?”). All this, because the executives of some large corporations thirty years ago launched an incredibly successful international climate change denial media and lobbying campaign. Their misinformation spread like a disease and we sit now paralyzed in the face of a virtual inevitable slow catastrophe that will reshape the entire planet (Klein; “Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not ‘Human Nature’”).

The life-cycle of mass produced commodities exemplifies a fraught cycle of production and resource extraction that disenfranchises workers and expedites the erosion of the planet. Increasingly, these problems of capitalism are also seen when dealing with waste, recyclables, and the quickened life-cycle of commodities. After a plastic product has fulfilled its typically single-use purpose, it may be shipped to a small plastic waste processing plant in rural China where a poor family rakes through the colorful shreds and inhales toxic smoke. This, the end of the lifespan of a plastic item, is shown through the eyes of eleven-year-old Yi-Jie in the documentary film Plastic China. In the film, those working directly with the plastic waste are aware that they have no choice but to continue to perform this dangerous and backbreaking labor. With no available mode of transportation but their foreman’s truck, and with such limited monetary income that Yi-Jie’s father cannot afford to send her to school, the future for this family appears grim (Plastic China). Similarly, in the United States, private waste workers in New York City are among the most disenfranchised. The risk of injury a waste worker faces at a private corporation is far greater than they would face if they had been able to secure employment with the city, and the disposability of these workers and the precarity of their employment is often exacerbated by their racial backgrounds, engagement with the criminal justice system, and proximity to poverty (Sze, Julie. “The Racial Geography of New York City Garbage: Local and Global Trash Politics” and Feldman, Kiera, “Trashed: Inside the Deadly World of Private Garbage Collection”). Through the labor of both plastic processing workers in China and waste workers in New York City, the true mass of global consumption is hidden from view. These jobs are integral to the functioning of the global system, and yet those who perform them face physically dangerous conditions and low pay. 

Geographical distance is one way through which global capitalism and consumption obscure themselves from view. Even in the Internet age, barriers such as distance, language, and access to knowledge can prevent the general public from learning about the impact their beliefs and consumption habits are having globally, but they also shield privileged consumers from the uncomfortable reality that their lifestyles are unsustainable and rely on violent exploitation. The fact that most people are unaware of these realities is an intentional function of the system which depends on the tacit approval and compliance of the general populace. It also depends on their inability to conceive of alternative options that could be better, and uses the fear of change as a tool to maintain these systems.

Colonization and the Racialized Other

Unlike potential interplanetary colonies, colonies on Earth were generally founded in places that were already populated with other human beings. In order for settler colonialism and extractive colonialism to take place, colonizers and the people being colonized had to be distinguished from one another. This cognitive distinction was produced in myriad ways across time and with particularities for each context where it took place, but many tended to include racial hierarchies which marked the colonized people as inferior. The distinction between the Euro-American “West” and the “Orient” which made such violent colonization possible in South Asia in particular was famously identified by Edward Said and discussed at length in his groundbreaking manuscript, Orientalism. This text exposed the exploitative attitude Western institutions such as governments and universities held, created, and reproduced during colonization and beyond. While Said focuses on the cultural differences which European governments, universities, and colonists mobilized to assert their superiority, many of the claims made by these European agents had racial underpinnings, in particular by conceptualizing non-white people as “savage” or not modern. Racism in this context and many others was guided by notions of Western progress and benevolence, which, in particular, held together ideas of the “white man’s burden” to “civilize” non-Western lands and peoples, giving colonizers not only the right but also the obligation to expand their territory and impose their beliefs and institutions on foreign entities which had existed for thousands of years without their intervention.

Similar ideas are explored by Patrick Wolfe in Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native. As Wolfe points out, the project of settler-colonialism involves eliminating the Native and removing them from their land through racialized and ideological means. The racialization of Natives in the United States was intended to reduce their numbers, so, the racial category of the Native was highly restrictive: any racial mixing would lead to denial of Native identity. This racialization also served to divorce the Native from their indigeneity, at least on a cognitive level. By thinking of Native people as a “race” rather than as the indigenous inhabitants of the land, the other forms of elimination employed such as removal could be done to an inferior and racialized “other”. These categorizations furthered the settler’s ability to seize land from Native people, break contracts with them, and otherwise undermine their right to occupy their ancestral lands.

In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon expands on these concepts further by exploring how colonization impacts the colonized people. He discusses in particular the class of the colonized intellectual, with which he has personal experience: Fanon was an intellectual on the colonized island of Martinique, and also a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front. The colonizer teaches certain colonized people to view Western culture and institutions as superior and imprints damaging beliefs onto the “educated” class. Fanon also argues that this process can persist even after decolonization is achieved because the colonized intellectual will take a leadership role in the formation of the new state and would reproduce a similar Western government structure. The West uses the Orient, or the non-West at large, to set itself apart and draw distinctions between itself and lands occupied by people of color. This allows occupied lands to still be claimed by the West and utilized as Western governments or corporations see fit, without the input of the racialized Native.

As formal colonization became less acceptable and more tenuous due to anti-colonial uprisings lasting through the 1970s, Western nation-states devised new ways to maintain their economic and cultural domination through what is now referred to as neo-colonialism. Neo-colonialism involves the ways modern Western nation-states maintain informal colonies through economic and sometimes political means. For example, the United States has many “territories” whose inhabitants have no political power such as the U.S. Virgin Islands. Other United States entities that could be considered colonies, like Puerto Rico, were maintained largely as footholds for the American military. The United States also engages in economic colonialism through the global reach and expansion of many of its multinational corporations such as Apple and Coca Cola. These corporate entities hold slaves in other countries in the Global South and exploit their labor to provide products for privileged consumers (Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire).

 

 

The Movement of People

The movement of different people across spaces through colonization and slavery laid some of the groundwork for neo-colonialism. Particularly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the trans-Atlantic slave trade in particular moved over half a million individuals from Africa to North America as an enslaved labor force. Under the threat of torture or death, African slaves physically built a new nation, laying the foundation stones of myriad institutions which still exist today. In addition, their stolen labor formed the backbone of the early United States economy which produced raw materials that were shipped back to Europe in a process known as the Columbian Exchange. Raw materials from the Americas such as tobacco, cotton, and sugar, were shipped to Europe for consumption and processing, particularly in England’s growing industrial economic sector. After expropriating indigenous people from their lands, Europe provided the Americas with white settlers and investors and Africa provided a captive labor force in the form of slaves.

Today, labor exploitation and slavery still persist. Workers in the economic sectors of technology and textiles have recently made headlines that highlight the realities they face as multinational corporations export their manufacturing operations to burgeoning nation-states that lack stringent worker protections. A particularly shocking moment regarding this travesty took place in 2017 when consumers began to find notes containing pleas for help from unpaid laborers in Turkey in the clothing they purchased from Zara, a large Spanish clothing retail chain. Another recent claim of unethical labor exploitation has come out of Apple’s iPhone manufacturers, which are located in China and have been accused of using unsafe chemicals, hiring child laborers, and fostering a “militaristic” work environment which led to seventeen worker suicides in 2010 alone.

Like those working in the waste management sector, individuals laboring in these manufacturing economies are disenfranchised. Many belong to racialized minority groups and lack a viable path to upward mobility in their home region. Historically, a solution many individuals chose to employ to seek out other labor options was to immigrate to another nation-state. In the past fifty years, however, immigration has become an extremely politicized issue. Borders restrict the movement of bodies across and within nation-states, particularly racialized bodies (Frank, “Fantasies of Ethnic Unmixing: ‘Population Transfer’ and the End of Empire in Europe”). This restriction of movement plays a role in maintaining exploitative labor practices which allow privileged consumers globally to access products made affordable through these processes.

Conclusion

            For Fanon, the only way to decolonize one’s mind is to exist entirely outside of the colonized system. This involves experiencing extreme poverty and homelessness, having only one’s body and few possessions, and fighting for survival daily (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth). The systems that continually exploit human beings and the planet are ubiquitous, like the colonized system Fanon describes. Existing outside of them is almost impossible—there are few remaining groups of hunter-gatherers who subsist outside of global commodity chains. But for the vast majority of people, interactions with these systems are a necessary aspect of maintaining life: securing food, water, money, shelter, and clothing. Extractive capitalism and colonialism have produced many achievements, not the least of which is the ability to sustain the lives of over seven billion people at once, but they did so through the exploitation of a semi-permanent underclass and the Earth. If humans cannot disrupt these systems and bring them into equilibrium, the Earth itself will through its own natural cause-and-effect reaction—climate change. Regardless of human (in)action, there will be an intervention on these systems. It is our collective choice what kind of future is secured. Visions of utopia, or alternatives in general, will be of great value in imagining possible alternative futures to strive towards as the climate apocalypse clock runs out and existing governments demonstrate their inability to adapt to the challenges of the contemporary age. Conceptualizing possible solutions is the first step towards implementing them and gives hope to those who aim to secure a just and habitable future for the global system.

 

List of Works

q symbolizes a work that places issues in a cultural, political, or geographical context which explores how knowledge is shaped by place, power, and history

W symbolizes a work that historicizes

 

Premodern of Early Modern before 1650s

  1. The Bible, The Book of Exodus. Tanach the Stone Edition, 2001. org. published 600 BCE
  2. More, Thomas. Utopia. Somerset House. 2016. org. published 1516 CE
  3. W de Las Casas, Bartolome. A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. Penguin Books, 1992. org. published 1542 CE
  4. Popol Vuh. Milkweed Editions, 2018. org. published 1558 CE
  5. Hiro, Dilip. Babur Nama. Penguin Books, 2006. org. published 1494 CE
  6. The Republic. Penguin Books, 2007. org. published 380 BCE
  7. The Aeneid. Penguin Books, 2010. org. published 19 BCE

 

Humanities after 1600s CE

  1. q W Said, Edward. Vintage Books, 1979.
  2. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. A Harvest Book, 1973.
  3. W Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research, 8, no. 4, 2006, pp. 387-409.
  4. q Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press,1961.

 

Social and/or Natural Sciences after 1600s CE

  1. WMarx, Karl. Capital Volume I. Penguin Books, 1867.
  2. q Plastic China. Wang, Jiu-Liang. CNEX Studio, 2017; Sze, Julie. “The Racial Geography of New York City Garbage: Local and Global Trash Politics”, Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice, 109-142; Feldman, Kiera. “Trashed: Inside the Deadly World of Private Garbage Collection.” ProPublica.
  3. Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2014.
  4. q Vanderheiden, Steve. “Globalizing Responsibility for Climate Change.” Ethics & International Affairs, 25, no. 1, 2011, pp. 65-84.

 

Concentration Specific

  1. Ticktin, Miriam. “Thinking Beyond Humanitarian Borders”, Social Research, 83, no. 2, pp. 255-71; Frank, Matthew. “Fantasies of Ethnic Unmixing: ‘Population Transfer’ and the End of Empire in Europe”, Refugees and the End of Empire; Mezzadra, Sandra and Brett Neilson. “The Proliferation of Borders”, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor; Torpey, John. “Coming and Going: On the State Monopolization of the Legitimate ‘Means of Movement’”, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State, pp. 1-20.
  2. Adams, Richard. Watership Down. Simon & Schuster, 2005.
  3. Klein, Naomi. “Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not ‘Human Nature’”, The Intercept, 2018; Franzen, Johnathan. “What if we Stopped Pretending?”, The New Yorker, 2019; Blake. Mariah. “Welcome to Beautiful Parkersburg, West Virginia”, Huffington Post Highline,
  4. Immerwahr, Daniel. How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States. Vintage, 2020; Marichal, Carlos. “The Spanish American Silver Peso: Export Commodity and Global Money” From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy. Duke University Press, 2006; Cuba: An African Odyssey. El-Tahri, Jihan. Temps Noir, 2007.
  5. Isenberg, Nancy. White Trash: The 400 Year Untold History of Class in America. Penguin Books, 2007.