The Thirst for Industrialization: The Allure of Labor Review

In 1953, Mao Zedong famously proclaimed industrialization as a “greater benevolence” of policy (大仁政). He says that knowing full well the brutal history of Stalinist industrialization in the 1930s, a model China is to selectively adopt, yet convinced it’s for the greater good. The Peruvians proclaimed much earlier in 1915 that “…without industry there is no nation” (p.249). Regardless of ideologies, third-world elites of the 20th century are united by a thirst for industrialization, undeniably the institutional (Anthony Gidden’s term) basis in the pursuit of modernity. The present book is an anatomy of such “thirst” in the case of 1920-30s Peru, which brings out the complete picture of the “dark side” in the pursuit of development and “civilization”. Penetrating, sober yet deeply unsettling, the author presents a convincing case of indictment to the racially exclusionary nature of Peru’s nation-building history. 

Drinot’s central claim is powerful in its simplicity. The Peruvian nation-building project is a “quest for civilization and progress” based on industrialization, at the center of which is the making of industrial labor itself (“modern homo faber”), or “self-regulating subjects” that symbolizes modernity, progress, and productivity (p.10). These “modern” agents must be incorporated into a system of Foucault’s “governmentality” that “regulates” the population in a rational manner. This “labor state”, however, has been highly racialized from its inception. Non-white Indigenous people, perceived as “obstacles of progress,” were excluded from this project of governmentality, and the very notion of progress and modernity is based on the “overcoming” of indigeneity (p.236). The convergence, then, is a racial-labor-state that retains its forms of exclusions throughout the 20th century. 

How should we account for the ideological origin of such an outlook? In Chapter 1, “Racializing Labor”, Drinot tells us it combines colonial inheritance and 19th-century racial positivism. Indians, or indigeneity in general, are defined as “incommensurable” with “labor” and “progress” right from the 1920 constitution (p.13). Populations of different races, then, were subjected to different patterns of governmentalization: “Whereas workers were governmentalized…to enhance their contribution to the industrial nation, Indians were governmentalized … to reduce or eliminate the obstacle that they represented to the industrial nation” (p.14). Another “epistemological shift”of the role of the state is crucial: states are not merely responsive or simply to govern; instead, it must actively pursue the project of industrial modernity(p.8). Industrialization and the labor state thus assume an almost mythical power to simultaneously tackle the “labor question” (poor conditions of workers leads inevitably to the spread of subversive ideologies and social unrest) and the “Indian question” (e.g. transforming “backward” indigenous into civilized and productive white/mestizo industrial workers) (p.49). This, then, is the titled “allure of labor”, a crucial metaphor that explains the disproportionate influence of “labor” in early 20th century Peru in the eyes of elites. Labor is to be desired as an “agent of progress”; therefore, it must be harnessed, protected, and improved by states. The thirst for industrialization thus manifested in the desire of labor states and overcoming indigeneity. The figure below captured these assumptions of Peruvian industrialization, in its stark binary contrast between white vs. Indian, and progress vs. backwardness. 

  (From p.3)

A word on the organization of this book. Drinot charted out Peru’s construction of a “labor state” in six brisk chapters that each deal with a phase (or dimension) of labor being governmentalized: “Racializing,” “Constituting,” “Disciplining” “Domesticating,” “Feeding,” and “Healing.” Each chapter is accompanied by a brief introduction and conclusion that succinctly, if sometimes redundantly, reinstates the main argument. Chapters 1-3 deal with the construction of racialized labor states and laborers as agents of progress in the 1920s, while Chapters 4-6 move into the 1930s, when labor is “seen as in need of civilizing” and improvements (p.124). The elites view states as responsible for protecting and improving labor. Housing projects (“barrios obreros”) are attempts to domesticate workers by instilling them with gendered values of settling down with a family and protecting them from disease or landlord exploitations, all hallmarks of “modern” industrial life. Chapter 5 surveys the “restaurantes populares” (people’s restaurants) funded by the Peruvian state to improve workers’ nutrition, while Chapter 6 analyzed the 1936 inaugurated “Seguro Social” health program, highlighting the considerations of who is worth treating/covering is linked to which social group is deemed worthy of incorporation into the industrial order. True to its Foucauldian influence, Drinot mainly interprets governmental documents to explicate the subtle change of governing attitudes from above. With a considerably thick description of the worker’s life in these later chapters, it’s understandable that Drinot feels his work is akin to anthropology (p.5). Running through those chapters is Drinot’s persistent challenge to the orthodox interpretation of government programmes being merely attempts to neutralize revolutionary sentiment. He demonstrates their “diverse social forces and ideologies”, mostly stemming from the new and active conception of the role of states and the developing “technology of government” (p.194-96). Another theme, of course, is detailing how racial exclusions persisted in those housing, food, and health insurance. 

Drinot’s contribution lies as much historical as it is theoretical regarding its potential to universalize the Peruvian case. Above all, he successfully (if quite uncritically) charted out the empirical evidence for Foucault’s theory of governmentality and biopolitics, which were quite Eurocentric in Foucault’s original formulation. In its desire to industrialize, the Peruvian labor state developed the institutional technology to regulate, protect, and improve the population, above all labor. For example, Drinot’s interpretation of Sección del Trabajo and “state agencies” indicates power as being productive, challenging the hitherto view of Peruvian labor policies as passive response to the “labor question” This is parallel to Foucault’s refutation of the “repressive hypothesis” in History of Sexuality Vol.1. The discourse surrounding sexuality in its recognizably modern form developed from the supposed “repression” of early modern Europe, just as the very category of industrial “labor” and the desire of co-opting it was a twin birth in early 20th century Peru. He provided a convincing example for Foucault’s analysis of the inherent racism of biopolitics in modern nation-states, based on the supposed improvement and cleansing of the population (p.12). Third-world countries are often said to condense centuries of European development and its challenges into a few decades. In Peru, we find a harrowing case in which Drinot weaved into an intricate map between labor, state, and race that sheds light on the reflection of industrialization and development itself. 

To be sure, the Peruvian modernization project, as designed by the elites, ultimately failed (p.10). But the racial exclusions that accompanied it persisted. The Peruvian Indigenous, after decades of perpetuating symbolic connotations of “nonproductive” or “obstacles to progress” shared by all political factions (p.236), effectively became what Agamben called Homo Sacer: life “devoid of value” that can be sacrificed or killed without consequences (e.g.: for the greater good of industrialization/modernity) (p.235). Indeed, in a striking quote from a human rights report, Peru today is “a country where exclusion is so absolute that tens of thousands of citizens can disappear without anyone in integrated society, in the society of the non excluded, noticing a thing” (p.237). This, as the book demonstrates, is not only about culture or ideology; therefore, it cannot be countered by a mere critique of “racism.” Rather, these are concrete, material processes rooted in Peruvian nation-building history and their subsequent policies that are extremely difficult to untangle. 

Such a book, then, cannot fail to stimulate readers to reflect on the Peruvian case on their own. When did China, for example, construct systematic “governmentality” that regulates the population not in an ideological direction but simply for “improvements” in productivity? My instinct would be post-1989, yet the efforts of improving/glorifying labor and productivity (and indeed the creation of labor) are at the heart of Maoist policies and ideologies, so in China’s case, the two are more temporally distinct compared to Peru. But perhaps more unsettling is the realization that every successfully industrialized nation (needs defining, of course) has its phases of horrendous primitive accumulation of some sort: colonial extractions (Western Europe and the United States), military aggression (Japan), or authoritarian repression (South Korea, Soviet Union, China), not to mention the common denominators: brutal exploitation of labor and the mass uprooting of people. Capitalist modernity has yet to reconcile the pursuit of “civilization” with the material basis that enables it. 

This piece was written by Yukinoshita Yukino, and edited by Tooba Abid

Expand for Citations & Further Reading

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Drinot, Paulo. The Allure of Labor: Workers, Race, and the Making of the Peruvian State. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011.

Foucault, Michel  The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books, 1976.

Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.