The Class Politics of Law by Judy Fudge

Author:Judy Fudge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
Published: 2019-04-28T22:57:58+00:00

CHAPTER 7

HOW DO I DISCIPLINE THEE: LET ME COUNT THE WAYS…

or Tightening the Screws on the 99%

Laureen Snider

This chapter examines the myriad ways in which key tools of modernity — from the invention of time to the Internet, the Cloud, and the digital highway — have been transformed into tools that oppress, discipline, and/or replace both salaried and hourly waged employees. It focuses on how knowledge from the social sciences, applied sciences (particularly technologies of surveillance), and law has been developed and applied in ways that primarily empower and enrich economic, political, and cultural elites.

Each of these uses of knowledge to oppress also, and simultaneously, can become tools of resistance. Each consists of a specific, contingent alliance of discipline/power/knowledge, rooted in and shaped by particular actors and institutions over time and space. Each has its own origins and history of struggles, its own champions and innovators, its own pivotal texts and discourses, and, of course, its own specific and contingent resistance stories. These discipline/power/knowledge triads have, to varying degrees, the potential to be used in ways that promote equality and enrich human lives — but the vast majority of the resulting inventions, thus far, have been taken up, adapted, and applied in ways that primarily serve dominant capitalist elites.

Understanding why this has happened requires an examination of how particular truth claims relate to dominant relations of power. This chapter will argue that the truth claims that “have legs” and become hegemonic “common sense” in a particular culture and time are disproportionately those that are most consonant with the interests and perspectives of prevailing economic and political elites (Snider 2000). The political economy of capital(ism) shapes, though it does not determine, which knowledge and scientific claims are accepted and adopted as truths, ideologies, devices, and laws and which claims languish in obscure, critical journals and in corners of the social and natural sciences and law.

DISCIPLINING THROUGH THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

The history of the social sciences is replete with ideas that have been turned into strategies to discipline workers and maximize production, usually in the name of “efficiency.” The links between power, knowledge, and the process of disciplining particular subjects, usually credited to Foucault (1979), have often been noted. We begin with the invention of the concept of time itself.1 While the division of time into the hour, minute, and second predates the Industrial Revolution, its emergence as a measurable commodity to which value could be assigned was swiftly taken up to control and punish the lower orders, the rabble so feared by eighteenth and nineteenth century elites. The newly mobile proletariat, forced off the land and away from rural villages by clearances and enclosures of formerly common space (Hay et al. 1975; Thompson 1975), were spilling into London and the cities of the English Midlands, bringing misery, disease, robbery, and mayhem in their wake. The comfortable and established bourgeoisie saw riots and plagues as a constant threat. Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, therefore, fell on fertile ground. The Panopticon was an architectural design for

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