Categorizations, or: ‘Divide and Conquer’

by Lucy S.

This is adapted from a couple of pages from drafts of my final project. Because of length constraints, I finally let it go from that essay, but I will share it here in case it is of interest.  

Silvia Federici reminds us that “capitalism must justify and mystify the contradictions built into its social-economic system – the promise of freedom vs. the reality of widespread coercion, the promise of prosperity vs. the reality of widespread penury – by denigrating the ‘nature’ of those it exploits,” (17) and, I would add, the nature of people’s labor and acquired knowledge.

Education narratives (stories of people who ‘rise’ through education) and their protagonists resist confining categorizations, they are, after all, accounts of people breaking through boundaries between these categories. At the same time, however, they emerge from the societal categorizations upon which capitalism – especially the liberal 'democratic' version of capitalism – depends. Constructed categories determine who is included and excluded from circles of care, human rights, and participation in governance; who is most egregiously exploited; and who is omitted even from active exploitation to constitute instead a particularly destitute and devastated group of ‘surplus’ humanity.  The latter are the growing numbers of the chronically homeless on what Mike Davis calls this “planet of slums”; they are the group Georgio Agamben refers to as “bare life” which can be killed without consequence, 

These categories, acting as filtering mechanisms, shift in response to the fluidity of capitalism’s changing nature, yet at any given time, they are largely experienced as ‘common sense’ while determining inclusions and exclusions and kinds of exploitations.

Over the course of capitalism’s development in the U.S., categories have included: religion; race /ethnicity; gender; family status (including notions such as ‘coming from good or bad stock’); nation of residency and/or origin; citizenship status; immigrant status; abidance by or deviations from mores regarding proper ‘behavior’ (including sexuality, uses of substances, and other rule-following); and  level of education / ‘culture.’ Thus, in the mid-1800s U.S. of Frederick Douglass’s time, asking why this person cannot vote or makes lower wages might very well be answered by a respondent exclaiming, “Because he’s black!” or “Because she’s a woman!” In Martin Luther King’s U.S., many political and material realities both preceding and perpetuated by those responses persisted.  But ‘common sense’ notions about them had been and were being challenged, calling into greater question their legitimacy as sorting mechanisms.  In the decades since, those categories’ legitimacy as a basis for exclusion has waned in an overt sense (though racism and sexism remain rampant). Other categories, already utilized to varying extents before then, have increasingly taken their place.

Thus, in the early 21^st century, these kinds of statements still abound, delivered with the same dumbfounded or outraged confidence as those given by their exclusionary predecessors. Concerning those who lack documents authorizing residency or citizenship rights yet nonetheless have immigrated to find work and meet their material needs, there is the ubiquitous: “They’re ILLEGAL, period.”  For those denied rights touted in the U.S. constitution or minimal economic protections: “They aren’t AMERICANS. They aren’t our problem.” And at the suggestion that people doing the bulk of the work to sustain humanity’s existence be paid livable wages even in a capitalist context (leaving aside revolutionary aspirations), the response is often: “Do you expect some farm worker or fast food worker or janitor to be paid anywhere nearly the same as someone with a degree?!”

Capitalism, at least in its liberal ‘democratic’ instantiation, needs sorting categories, and it needs them to be utterly normalized, while those who seek to challenge both its ideology and lived practices must draw attention to the constructed quality of these categories and the uses which they serve. The question is not whether some or all of someone’s ancestors came from Africa or someone is biologically female, but whether this is in any way a valid category for determining exclusions and inclusions of rights and care, including full political participation or equal wages for one’s labor in a money-dependent society. In the past, the U.S. answered yes; these were valid categories.

And in the present, the U.S. nation-state insists that the documents which its politicians and bureaucrats do not issue to some people create legitimate categories of excluded and extra-exploited personhood. Thus, actions, processes, and situations are reified into constructed categories of personhood: ‘illegals’; unskilled workers; the uneducated – and likewise: American citizens or legal residents; responsible law abiders; the skilled; the educated.

In a multitude of ways, the non-elite are separated from one another, with the recognition of their common interests distorted as they jockey for improved position against rather than with each other, both individually and as members of constructed categories. I am wondering what other people think about these categories used to sort us and divide us from one another.

Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004. Print.