Orientalization of Exploitation: A Class-Analytical Critique of the Sweatshop Discourse

Having long been confined to the lexicon of labor historians, the term ‘sweatshop’ is back in common parlance. Conjuring up an image of squalid premises where a host of dreadful working conditions and abusive labor practices prevail, the term has been instrumental in galvanizing great numbers of Western consumers against world-renowned brand names and retailers for mercilessly exploiting Third World workers. Commendable as its agenda is, the enchantment of the antisweatshop movement with the appalling labor practices and dismal working circumstances overseas is problematic insofar as it normalizes and thus lends justification to production relations at home, which might very well prove to be as exploitative as their counterparts in the developing countries, if and when viewed through the lens of Marxian class analysis. In addition to rendering visible a different form of (class) exploitation that cuts across the West-East/North-South axes, a Marxian critique of the orientalist underpinnings of the sweatshop discourse also calls into question the widely held conviction that Third World labor is ‘exploited’ by Western capital. By shifting the focus of attention from unequal exchange—whereby the Third World is understood to be short-changed by Western-based multinationals—to exploitative relations within the Third World, a class-analytical approach puts on the map a level of analysis that is typically short-circuited in the sweatshop literature.