The Everyday Civil War: Migrant Working Men, Within and Against Capital

TY - JOUR

T1 - The Everyday Civil War

T2 - Migrant Working Men, Within and Against Capital

AU - De Genova, Nicholas

PY - 2006/6

Y1 - 2006/6

N2 - In an industrial workplace distinguished by flagrant health and safety violations and a fairly explicit antagonism between the virtually all-male workforce and the plant management, many of the male Mexican/migrant workers' postures of fearlessness and stoic perseverance evinced a sometimes deadly complicity between the compulsions of their masculinity with their own exploitation. While these male workers participated in their own effective subordination to the mandates of their employers, as labor for capital, this article contends that the constitutive role of antagonism and struggle between labor and capital nonetheless defines some of the decisive parameters of everyday life, and thus ought to be central to all critical social inquiry. It becomes crucial then for ethnography in particular to account for the ethnographer's own institutionally mediated social situation and practice. The article therefore examines some of the material and practical conditions of possibility of its own research endeavor, in order to critically and self-reflexively consider the often-agonistic relationship of the ethnographer to the wider politics of workplace ‘training’, managerial surveillance, labor discipline and subordination.

AB - In an industrial workplace distinguished by flagrant health and safety violations and a fairly explicit antagonism between the virtually all-male workforce and the plant management, many of the male Mexican/migrant workers' postures of fearlessness and stoic perseverance evinced a sometimes deadly complicity between the compulsions of their masculinity with their own exploitation. While these male workers participated in their own effective subordination to the mandates of their employers, as labor for capital, this article contends that the constitutive role of antagonism and struggle between labor and capital nonetheless defines some of the decisive parameters of everyday life, and thus ought to be central to all critical social inquiry. It becomes crucial then for ethnography in particular to account for the ethnographer's own institutionally mediated social situation and practice. The article therefore examines some of the material and practical conditions of possibility of its own research endeavor, in order to critically and self-reflexively consider the often-agonistic relationship of the ethnographer to the wider politics of workplace ‘training’, managerial surveillance, labor discipline and subordination.

U2 - 10.1177/1466138106067055

DO - 10.1177/1466138106067055

M3 - Article

VL - 7

SP - 243

EP - 267

JO - Ethnography

JF - Ethnography

IS - 2

ER -