ABSTRACT
I appreciate Michael Tran’s careful and in-depth review of my book (Arnold, Kathleen R., 2008. America’s New Working Class: Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in a Biopolitical Age. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, $25.00, 256 pp. ISBN: 0-2710-3276-6/9-7802-7103-277-1) but I would like to record a few concerns, which I will keep brief. First, while Tran has assimilated the first two conceptual elements of my argument—asceticism (which he likens to ideology but which I would have viewed in terms of Foucault’s notion of discourse) and prerogative power—he has misunderstood my arguments about exploitation and capitalism as well as possibilities for change in the future. He argues that I do not see exploitation as inherent to capitalism but rather more closely linked to asceticism and prerogative power. This is a mistake. I devote an entire chapter to exploitation and attempt two things: one is to explore the notion of exploitation in a neoliberal economy—not to reject this term but to more fully elucidate it, and two, to link what is often viewed as “purely” economic (and therefore private or non-political) directly to the power dynamics of asceticism and prerogative power. This is not to reject the notion that capitalism is inherently exploitative but to more fully expand this notion, connecting it to a specific type of political oppression. I make these connections because of the persistence of the argument in the literature on globalization that the state is receding. My response was to argue that it is not receding, but rather that sovereignty has been strengthened to create a situation of hyper- or super-exploitation. I wanted therefore to tie the traditional Marxist terms to the Foucaultian notions of discipline and bio-power. Hence, my aim was the opposite of what Tran has argued. My final chapter is an exploration of these dynamics under the concept of “authentic love”—a concept that Tran doesn’t even mention. Rather, he picks out some arguments—like an allegedly unqualified endorsement of unions or hope for liberalism—to argue that my argument is binary and reductive. But I would say that this review has achieved the same thing in narrowing my terms in the first part of the book and ignoring important concepts in the second half. I appreciate Tran’s efforts in his well-written review and he has the right to his interpretation—but I think he dropped the ball midway through.
