Sadie Inman
September 30th, 2020
Critical Geography
Response Paper 5
Cheap work is a combination of cheap nature and cheap lives. It has some of the most devastating and inhumane examples attached to it. The ideology that supported this concept was not produced on the fly but was carefully reviewed and debated. It was then decided that indigenous people were not a part of society and instead were a part of nature. The divide of these two concepts set up a scary power play and an understood job of society to understand and possess nature. Therefore putting indigenous peoples in the nature category wasn’t a slight at their position in the social hierarchy “it was an order to die by work’.
The ideas of division of labor and specialization that the Marx reading introduced at the beginning of the class is extremely strong here. Those that do manual labor are not thinking beings they are extended beings. A strong theme throughout the cheapening of work is the altruistic ring that it has when the ruling class speaks. They are rescuing the indigenous peoples and taking on the burden of introducing them to religion and society in the only way possible: through work. The close association between work and being a real human is interesting. Only those at the low ends of society work, but there is admitted merit in working. Perhaps it only holds merit for those outside of society, because it is better to be at the bottom of Society than in Nature.
The major cause of the shift in labor is something we are all at the mercy of every day. The clock. It began as a tool to measure labor productivity, but today it shapes everything. Many people who go on vacation don’t put their phone away, they take their watch off as the true burden of deadlines and expectations falls away along with the time. This is the true sign of capitalism and it’s one that’s truly felt. It changes space everywhere. Nowhere is my space because I am controlled by time and by deadlines. The idea of the lazy native is not just someone who doesn’t work but someone who is not accepting the mode of production, he is a burden on society. There was such a thing as “time theft” and it was a crime not to “consume” the time.
Sadie I'm glad you bring attention to 'time' in your response. It is the subject that gnaws at me a lot when brought up in our discussions and readings. Maybe slightly because I have feelings of conviction, and maybe slightly because I struggle so hard in wrapping my mind around it's creation for consumption. I often feel quite controlled by time, whether it's how I sort my day or how I feel about it. I sometimes wonder if, in our Capitalocene context here, how much variability there is in these strategies like time across demographics.
ReplyDeleteExcellent connection to the Marx reading, Sadie. The division of labor that organizes the social relationships of capital end up creating knowledge (a point we saw extend by Foucault and his study of the discipline mechanisms). But that knowledge is also an ideology that affirms and normalizes its own practices. We have seen that the exact goal of critical geography is to put these disassociated fragments back together. Marx's point of course is that they are already connected, capital is the process that makes the connection between all scales in all places, it its ideology that works at separating and disconnecting its pieces at every instance. This is a contradiction that is at work in each chapter of Patel and Moore--as we continued keep an eye on how they make connections and how ideology (Nature/Culture) works to create disconnections, hierarchies, dominations.
ReplyDeleteThe point about time is crucial and we will recall that this was also Schivelbusch's interest in that essay Railroad Space and Railroad Time. It might be worth going back to examine his study of how standardized time, just like that standardized Mercator map, becomes a crucial strategy for private property systems.