Sample Essay: Anthropology

Kathryn Marie Dudley in The End of the Line–lost jobs, New Lives in Postindustrial America depicts in graphic details the sense of tragedy when a worker loses a job, and the devastation that comes when a factory employing thousands of workers closes down. “When the closing of a local machine tool factory forced my grand father into early retirement, I saw in his loneliness why the loss of an industrial job can be so devastating”(Dudley.xi). Kenosha autoworkers have undergone a similar tragedy, when Chrysler stopped building cars in Kenosha. Kenosha witnessed a dramatic transformation from early 1900 onwards, and claimed 7.2 percent of domestic car market, especially after American Car Corporation (AMC) came into existence. During 1960, Kenosha became the largest hub of employment in Wisconsin with almost 15,000 labor force constituting 40 percent of the city’s labor force. The working class transformed into blue collar workers. They had aspirations, hopes and dreams. They believed in work ethic of success. They believed in American dream. However, since their displacement and closure of factory their world came to an end. At the macro level, the American society was also changing structurally. Dudley writes, “A growing ethnography of plant closings show us that displaced workers often develop biting critiques of American industry in the aftermath of a shutdown. Yet virtually no attention has been paid to the other side of these cultural conversations: the side that does not mourn the loss of old line-manufacturing and is, in fact glad to see it go” (p.xxiv).

A Aneesh in Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization “contrasts the account of embodied migration with the fast growing but little researched virtual migration that doesn’t require workers to move in physical space”(A.Aneesh.1) This is in fact migration without the hassles of body shopping, visa requirements, alien status and every thing else that goes in the discourse on migration. However, the impact of this phenomenon on society and economy need to be investigated, because today we are in the age of programming that defines current mode of capital-labor relationship. Speaking of the concerns of labor unions and other anti-globalists Aneesh writes, “… the concerns are minor revolts against continuous of the social to the economic. Job displacements, endless demands for retraining, perceived job insecurity, and the demand for continuous flexibility by a growing “flexible” economic system have escalated disruptions in the social realm” (p.16).

David Harvey has explored the neo-realist agenda that originated in the eighties when Volcker, Reagan, Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping revived the minority arguments and turned them majoritarian. (p.2). A deeper examination reveals the perspective that defined neo-realism agenda. It was in fact the global capitalism hegemony that was lurking in the background, even as a number of factors catapulted the agenda to the mainstream. “The restructuring of state-forms and of international relations after the Second World War was designed to prevent a return to the catastrophic conditions that had so threatened the capitalist order in the great slump of 1930s. It was also supposed to prevent the re-emergence of inter-state geopolitical rivalries that has led to the war. To ensure domestic peace and tranquility, some sort of class compromise between capital and labour had to be constructed” (p.9-10). This idea is best expressed in an influential text written by eminent social scientists Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom in 1953 who argued in favor of a right blend of state, market and democratic institutions to guarantee peace, inclusion, well being and stability as according to him both capitalism and communism had failed in their raw form. (p.10)

The neo-realism impact appears neo-capitalism in its latest avatar, only more rigorous than ever before. New forms of labor and the labor markets have been discovered via new technologies that makes physical migration redundant. Cross border trade restrictions and other restrictions too have been made redundant with global trade regime in force. The north and south divide is today even more acute as the world has become unipolar regime after the breakdown of Soviet Union. The USA has mandated a policing role for itself to let the icons of capitalism prosper unhindered.

The capital has accumulated in fewer hands since the 1980s. “Almost certainly, with the Bush administration’s tax reform now taking effect, the concentration of income and wealth in the upper echelons of society is continuing apace because the estate tax (a tax on wealth) is being phased out and taxation on income from investments and capital gains is being diminished, while taxation on wages and salaries is maintained” (p.16-17) We find the same pattern of concentration of wealth and capital in fewer hands. The top one per cent of income earners in Britain has doubled their income from 6.5 percent to 13 percent since 1982. A small and powerful oligarchy arose in Russia after neo-liberal shock therapy was administered to it in 1990s. In China too extraordinary wealth and income disparity has occurred since its liberalization. People like Carlos Slim in Mexico discovered themselves in the fortune list of wealthiest overnight.(p.17)

The new form of global capitalism has culturally and morally displaced as well as impacted hundreds of thousands of workers across the globe, whether it is Kenosha automobile industry or the Silicon Valley. Displacement causes permanent dislocation from place and emotional ties with friends and neighborhood that can only be expressed through wry humor of Kenosha workers. The class concept that defined work sphere has vanished over night. The virtual immigrants, skilled and educated that have taken up routine and repetitive jobs have yet to face the overwhelming challenges of their job structure. It is in fact a new form of mechanization that is taking its toll. The call center industry has perhaps the highest rate of employee turn over. Suicides among these workers are frequent.

The workers in neo-liberal phase of capitalism are torn between a unique ambivalence resulting from uprooted loyalties. The tensions created by global capitalism between national interest and market interest, and between community stability and individual freedom can best be resolved only in the psychological shelters of religious icon. They could also fight out their ennui and alienation through philanthropy, flexible citizenship or any other means that strengthens their self worth.

Conclusion: Capitalism has since beginning depended for its existence on labor. Migrants and slaves came in large number to work in plantations. The process has continued since then. Functionalists celebrated the rise of blue collar workers in 1950s but the process was mediated by joblessness, cultural loss and uprootment. With changes in society and newer forms of technology the structure of work has changed but the capitalist paradigm based on neo-liberal approaches to society and economy remains rooted in profit ideology enabled by a global apparatus and refined modes of production. Transnational trade and capital regime has led to transnational workers, virtual workers and workers with flexible citizenship even as the relations of production has brought about greater disparity, and greater alienation  without the class consciousness.