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America's New Working Class:

Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in a Biopolitical Age

ISBN-13: 9780271032771
Publisher: PENN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Imprint: PENN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
By Kathleen R. Arnold
Price: AUD $67.99
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Local release date: 14/05/2009
Format: Paperback 256 pages Weight: 0g
Categories: Cultural studies [JFC]

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Today’s political controversy over immigration highlights the plight of the working class in this country as perhaps no other issue has recently done. The political status of immigrants exposes the power dynamics of the “new working class,” which includes the former labor aristocracy, women, and people of color. This new working class suffers exploitation in advanced industrial countries as the social cost of capitalism’s success in a neoliberal and globalized political economy. Paradoxically, as borders become more open, they are also increasingly fortified, subjecting many workers to the suspension of law.

In this book, Kathleen Arnold analyzes the role of the state’s “prerogative power” in creating and sustaining this condition of severe inequality for the most marginalized sectors of our population in the United States. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical literature from Locke to Marx and Agamben (whose notion of “bare life” features prominently in her construal of this as a “biopolitical” era), she focuses attention especially on the values of asceticism derived from the Protestant work ethic to explain how they function as ideological justification for the exercise of prerogative power by the state.

As a counter to this repressive set of values, she develops the notion of “authentic love” borrowed from Simone de Beauvoir as a possible approach for dealing with the complex issues of exploitation in liberal democracy today.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Globalization, Prerogative Power, and the New Working Class

1. Asceticism, Biopower, and the Poor

2. Domestic War: Locke’s Concept of Prerogative

3. Exploitation and the New Working Class

4. Antagonism and Exploitation: The Importance of Biopower

5. War and “Love”

Index

“This ambitious book successfully weaves together labor studies, political philosophy, and the literature on globalization. It is therefore accessible to Americanists as much as to those in political theory and international relations.”

—Margaret Gray, Political Science Quarterly

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America's New Working Class:

Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in a Biopolitical Age