Alienation : a Conceptual Framework for Understanding Immigrant Women S Work Experience
Shahrzad Mojab
‘Alienation’: a conceptual framework for understanding immigrant women’s work experience
Shahrzad Mojab
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, Canada
Paper presented at the 36th Annual SCUTREA Conference, 4-6 July 2006, Trinity and All Saints College, Leeds
This paper is an attempt to develop a new theoretical framework for the study of immigrant women and work. In this theorisation process, I will work through concepts such as essence and appearance, necessity and freedom, and fetishization in order to depart from current theoretical positions, which fail to move beyond the imperatives of capitalism. I will draw mainly on Marxist dialectical conceptualisations of capital-labour relations. This paper is, at the same time, a critique of the conformist politics of current literature on the topic.
Research on immigrant women and work has produced a credible body of knowledge crossing disciplinary boundaries and encompassing contending theoretical and methodological perspectives. The emerging themes, nationally and globally, remain to be access/accommodation, training/skilling, or work ghettoisation, that is, the prevalence of immigrant women in service work, contingent work, and home-based work. In this paper, I will argue that we have exhausted this topic within the spectrum of divergent theoretical perspectives. I will also claim that studying different work settings, diverse immigrant communities, or a different region of the world will not significantly add to our knowledge in understanding what constitutes the fundamental contradictions in exclusion, discrimination, or marginalisation of immigrant women in market economy. The dominant discourse has been no more than a liberal-capitalist mystification of what is known, in Marxist theory, as exploitationof labour. Indeed, concepts such as ‘access,’ ‘accommodation,’ ‘marginalisation,’ ‘discrimination,’ or ‘exclusion’ only reduces exploitation to legal, administrative, managerial, moral, or cultural preferences, and avoids locating exploitation within the capitalist social and economic formation. Therefore, the central question in this paper is: Isn’t it about time that we reconsider the process of ‘alienation,’ in its dialectical sense in conceptualising immigrant women’s work experience?
In the context of Canada, the last two decades have been pivotal in creating a body of credible knowledge which crosses different disciplinary boundaries as to explaining, analysing, and proposing change in order to improve access, accommodation, inclusion, work condition, and work status of women of colour and immigrant women in workplaces, and labour market. Immigrant women’s work has been the focus of this flourishing knowledge production. In the past decade at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto (OISE/UT) alone, 24 MA theses and 12 PhD dissertations have taken immigrant women as their object of study. We have analysed how and why immigrant women come to Canada, how they get the jobs that they do and the processes that determine which ones they get. We have examined the prior experience and learning competency of these women as well as assessing what kind of skills they acquire. We have also examined the cultural processes that keep them in certain sectors of the labour market, and we have studied the needs imposed upon them by their social placement.
The literature has also developed a set of terms that enables us to name various trends, structures, and social relations. For instance, marginalisation access/accommodation, discrimination and exclusion, racism and sexism allow us to critically examine the conditions under which labour of a certain kind remains labour of a certain kind.
Some scholarship and research has used a framework that assesses immigrant women in marginalized sectors against an ideal type of immigrant women, the professionals, and determines the former’s needs by proposing how we can make them more like the latter group. I argue that issues of ‘professionalisation,’ and ‘accreditation’, more than any other issues arising from this literature, has captured the imagination of policy makers and politicians. The response has been funding organisations, sometimes ethnic-specific or a more effective organisation of PROMPT, Policy Roundtable Mobilizing Professions and Trades.
In tracing my own intellectual, epistemological trajectory of understanding this social phenomenon, I argue that, so far, we have been able, at best, to provide a partial explanation and reveal an appearance of a complex social phenomenon but not its essence. In recent decades with the acceleration of global neo-liberal agenda, comprising of war, militarisation, displacement, increasing population movement, and change in immigration policy, a series of important change has taken place in the labour force. One, in particular, is further hierarchisation of labour force. This complex process is happening through, first, the creation of a highly specialised workforce to serve the demands of ‘knowledge economy’ and second, through the creation of ‘service work’ sector to absorb the contingent, flexible, dispensable, and disposable workforce. To explain where immigrant women are located in this hierarchy, I contributed to the debate on ‘skilling,’ ‘de-skilling,’ and ‘re-skilling’ of immigrant women (Mojab 2000). I concluded, based on an extensive fieldwork among more than 80 immigrant women, that the waste of the skilled labour force is endemic to the dynamics of capitalist economy. I have argued that capitalism is a powerful mode of production, which simultaneously overproduces and underconsumes, creates and destroys jobs, and depends on both the skilling and deskilling of the labour force. These contradictions are not effects of policy but, rather, its causes. The conflict and coexistence of deskilling and skilling may be, more appropriately, located in the engine that drives the system, that is, the maximisation of profit, which is pursued in a production system characterised by “anarchy.” Under the state of anarchy, goods and services are produced by individual firms in an unorganised market where uncertainty, competition and risk reign. Here, profit alone decides the participation of the population in the labour force and the job market. As a social relation, however, capital is constrained in its operation by many forces such as organised labour, and relations of gender, race, nationality, politics, and culture. The skilled immigrant women in the study were undergoing a process of deskilling not only due to the requirements of the market but also because of the ways in which cleavages of gender, national origin, race, and language were used to underemploy, unemploy and underpay a section of the labour force.
After this long intellectual journey, I have reached the conclusion that in this process I have missed a series of interrelated social relations; I have seen the relations between the state, market, capitalism, globalization, global labour displacement and mobility, but have not worked out their interconnectedness, nor have I seriously revealed their inner dynamics. This is what I mean by partial explanation, or seeing the appearance but not essence. Just to clarify, by ‘essence’ I do not mean ‘essentials’ or ‘essentialism.’ This is an important Marxist dialectical concept, which means there is an essence to everything, but dialectically every essence is composed of or is a product of a set of contradictions. Dialectical thinking rejects essentialism, because essence changes all the time (for an excellent articulation of this philosophical category see Helen Colley 2002). In dialectics, change is absolute and rest is relative.
Over the course of the development of immigrant women and work literature, we have abandoned certain concepts that informed previous studies in order to develop new frameworks. These concepts included, among others, capitalism as a social relation not a thing; the dialectics of 'matter' and 'consciousness,' dialectical approach to 'agency' and 'structure,' and lastly, the dialectics of 'necessity and freedom.' We have studied marginalized labour by assuming that this condition was contingent and surmountable; we have assumed that a move from the periphery to the margin is possible. In fact, we have taken the term ‘marginalized’ too literally. We have assumed that ‘marginal’ (materially undesirable) labour is in fact peripheral to the system of production. Perhaps it is time that we consider this sector as fundamental to the reproduction of capitalist system. What would happen if we were to re-introduce a mode of analysis at this juncture that, instead of isolating a particular labour sector from its wider social formation, took on the task of studying immigrant women’s labour within the social formation as a whole? We produce scholarship on immigrant women because they are marginalized, but in doing so we have tended to conceive their location in marginalized labour sectors as something that is symptomatic of their race and gender. What if we were to assert instead that class, race and gender reciprocally condition each other; that they produce and re-produce each other, along with the very subjectivities of immigrant women?
Dialectics of alienation
Our understanding of work, especially women’s work, continues to be obscured by conceptual and theoretical frameworks, which present the capitalist organisation of society as a natural order that can be perfected but never replaced. As argued above, indeed the rather vast literature on the topic is filled with concepts, which seem to provide radical insights into the dynamics of work. For instance, concepts such as marginalisation, discrimination, or exclusion give a critical direction to our understanding. However, these concepts veil rather than unveil one crucial social relationship between capital and labour, that is, ‘exploitation.’ Concepts such as ‘access,’ ‘accommodation,’ and ‘inclusion’ provide alternatives to the more dehumanising aspects of the relationship but fail to envision a systemic alternative to it.
Social theory, especially since the proclamation of the ‘end of history,’ shuns system-changing concepts and ideas. In the current academic environment, it is appropriate to conceptualise the relationship between labour and capital in any imaginable way except in terms of exploitation, alienation, fetishisation, and conceptual frameworks, which direct our thinking to the domain of alternatives to capitalism. Theorisation often fetishises both capital and labour. Governments, mass media and popular culture attribute to capital the power to give life to people. Capital is the source of prosperity for the entire nation and the world. We are led to believe that capitalist prosperity is created independent of labour, and even in conflict with it. Indeed, it is generally believed that labour disrupts the smooth course of life when it goes on strike. The powers attributed to capital are quite magical, much like the primitive fetishism, which conferred on objects magical powers leading to a culture in which objects controlled human life.
In current academic fetishisation, capitalism is not a consequence of human effort. Even when it is seen as a product of history, its powers are fetishised to the extent that it is beyond serious challenge. For instance, the market is the source, the lifeline, and condition for democracy and freedom of the individual. Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ of the market is the fetish of (neo-) liberal theory and politics. Any opposition to market rule is treated as authoritarianism or totalitarianism.
Contemporary fetishisation, like its early counterparts, inverts the relationship between the subject and object. Human beings are not conscious and active players, who are capable of controlling capital and its market. Capital operates much like the object or the thing, which was fetishised in pre-capitalist societies, and allowed to control human life. Workers are there to perform the functions of the market, and to allow it to give life to all.
The conformist nature of current theorisation denies human beings the ability to confront capitalism. This is no doubt the most powerful economic system human beings have created, and is at the same time the most vulnerable and fragile. However, mainstream knowledge denies the role of consciousness in dismantling a system that has brought the planet to the verge of total collapse.
What I would like to propose is a retreat to Marxist dialectical analysis. Just a few words about dialectics: Richard Gibson states (1993):
Dialectical materialists create a series of axioms and postulates that are helpful in analysing a given object, person or situation. Keep in mind that these convenient principles and categories are themselves interrelated and contradictory... Moreover, each law or category is composed of internal contradictions in itself.
However, as Bertell Ollman and Tony Smith (1998) point out, ‘[D]ialectics... doesn’t itself explain capitalism. Rather, it helps us see and investigate the capitalist relations and processes, of which we ourselves are part, as they have unfolded, are now unfolding, and have yet to unfold. Using dialectics – and with a lot of hard empirical research – we can develop a theory that can explain capitalism in its becoming.’
A review of the literature on alienation produces an odd set. On the one hand, the topic falls within the disciplinary regime of psychiatry and psychoanalysis; on the other, Marxist scholars have posited it as the fundamental problem of individual existence in the modern era. Both approaches have obscured the path of a critical analysis that uses alienation as its grounding. My frame of analysis is based on a theory of alienation that is formulated by Marx in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In the article entitled “Estranged Labour,” Marx begins by asserting that the foundational condition of capitalism is the estrangement of labour, which is to say that the relation of a wage-labourer to her own life is a condition of estrangement, insofar as the product of her labour (which is a being that is necessarily total) does not produce anything for the wage-labourer. This Marxist dialectical conception of alienation, therefore, is the most productive mode of analysis for analysing immigrant women’ work. It allows us to re-introduce labour as a determining factor without abandoning gender, race, and class. I will come back to this point shortly.
Concepts such as alienation express relationships between labour and capital which are crucial for a non-economistic and non-fetishistic understanding of the work experience of immigrant women. Marx used it in relation to the contradictions of capitalist society, especially labour and class. He emphasised the unprecedented socialisation of production in capitalism, a system in which wealth is produced by all who work, but the product of labour is privately appropriated. He noted in 1844 Manuscripts, that "[t]he object that labour produces, its product, stands opposed to it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer." Workers are not, under this system, in control of what they produce. Labour is not meant to satisfy the need of labourers; it satisfies the need of those who own, hire, control, and buy labour power in order to create surplus value. In such a relationship, labour appears as “forced labour”; workers work in order to survive.
A dialectical conception of alienation begins with the concept of estrangement. In the capitalist mode of production, the product of labour is estranged from labour itself; that is to say, the result of labour is not the purpose of labour, but a by-product. The purpose of labour is subsistence, which can only be achieved by consuming commodities, all of which are always already products of estranged labour. Thus, labour is twice estranged from its product. Firstly, the direct result of work is abstracted into a market economy. Shoes, for example, are not shoes-in-themselves, but are a value. By the same token, labour itself is abstracted into a commodity. Labour is not labour-in-itself, but labour-power, and is exchangeable like any other commodity; it is alienated from its subject. This is the source of wages. By the same process, however, capital is produced and reproduced by wage-labour: ‘[t]hus capital presupposes wage-labour; wage labour-presupposes capital. They reciprocally condition the existence of each other; they reciprocally bring forth each other.’ Each is both an effect and a cause of the other, and produce and re-produce not only each other, but people, subjects, workers themselves. A properly dialectical approach understands that the relation between capital and labour is both constituted and constitutive of all people. Labour and capital not only make each other, but also make us.
Thus we come back to immigrant women. Employing our dialectical conception of alienation, we can see that it is not simply their class, race, or gender that is determined by the economic system, but their total subjectivity. They are gendered by capital, raced by capital; to borrow post-structural terminology, they are ‘embodied’ by this relation between labour and capital. Himani Bannerji writes (1998:13):
Even forms of extraction of surplus value involve the location of certain people in the working class, and in sub-classes of the working class. And this involves the organisation of patriarchy. And in Canada it involves the organisation of how to read the body, the skin. In order to find your most exploitable worker you would rely on whoever is socially least valued. How else can concrete exploitation occur?
Immigrant women are ‘marginalized’ by capital, and we can now see that their ‘marginalisation’ is not a product of contingent structures, but constitutive and necessary to the capitalist relation. We study women and come to know what particular groups of marginalized women of colour experience or lack training and we may even develop methods and programs that facilitate the movement of particular women from peripheral work into professional work, but we cannot ameliorate or improve the peripheral sector itself.