Group 4: Katharina Poblotzki Paola Sartoretto Maria Shusharina Hui Zhao
Referring to Marx, Spivak states that ”small peasant cannot represent himself, he must be represented. Their representative must appear simulteneously as their master, as an authority over them…a power that power that protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine” (P. 273).
Just like the “small peasant” the Third World is represeented by the First World. “Third Worl can enter the resistence program of an alliance politics directed against a “unified oppression” only when it is confined to th third-world groups that are directly accessible to the First World. This benevolent first-world appropriation and reinscription of th Third world as an Other is the founding characteristic of much third-worldism” (P. 289).
Spivak takes Marx concept of division of labour to the global context in which there are exploiters and exploited. According to Spivak the global logic of production is responsible for the creation of areas/countries that own the means of production and areas/countries that represent the proletariat and produce goods that are then consumed by those owner countries. Such process creates a global working class that, different than what was predicted by Marx, is not capable of transform its struggle into revolution and subvert the actual context.
The contemporary international division of labour is a displacement of the divided field of nineteenth-century territorial imperialism. Put simply, a group of countries, generally third-world provide the field for investment, both through the comprador indigenous capitalists and through their ill-protected and shifting labour force. In the interest of maintaining the circulation and growth of industrial capital (and of the concomitant task of administration within nineteenth century industrial capitalism), transportation, law, and standardized education systems were developed – even as local industries were destroyed, land distribution was rearranged and raw material was transferred to the colonizing country. (p. 287)
The physical and territorial dissociation of bourgeoisie and proletariat that is observed by Spivak, took place during the colonialism. Such process of distancing the antagonist classes allied with the mechanisms of exploitation and social apparatus affected the class consciousness in the Third-World. It is not possible anymore to talk about organization of the proletariat and its rising to the power when this class does not have the consciousness of its position in the society. Spivak reminds us of Lenin, who associated consciousness to a “knowledge of the interrelationships between different classes and groups”.
If the global working class is destitute of its consciousness, Spivak argues that the female worker is “doubly in shadow” because “the subject of exploitation cannot know and speak the text of female exploitation”. Even if we recognize the existence of the exploited, or subaltern, their imagery is usually the male figure. By transferring the division of labour to the global level, Spivak acknowledges the dichotomy between us-the other, exploiter-exploited, developed-under developed, First-World-Third-World.
The issue of the international division of labour (considering Spivak’s twist to the concept) has been represented in the media through “naming and shaming” degrading practices such as contemporary slavery, exploitation of workers, human traffic and the global producers/consumers dichotomy. Nevertheless, the representation of these practices in the media usually serves to legitimize the superiority of the West. Usually Western media deposits in the Western Society the solution for the problems of the underdeveloped countries.
