Thinking Coloniality with Hua and Ray

As I read this text, I am distracted by preparations for yet another round of strikes called by the University and College Union (UCU). The UCU represents academic and professional services staff in higher education across the United Kingdom, and we are preparing for action against deep pension cuts (or wage theft) and deteriorating working conditions (the Four Fights against pay degradation, pay gaps, workload intensification, and increasing casualization).1

These disputes have been escalating since 2018, with employers becoming progressively intransigent in their approach and virulent in their discourse against the union. Their actions have caused widespread disillusionment and ill will—inflicting intentional damage upon a sector they tout as “world-class.” How, I find myself wondering, do we make sense of this exercise of naked power?

I am reminded, then, of Los Angeles driver James, who describes the “long slow slaughter” of taxi driving that is, as Julietta Hua and Kasturi Ray note, “the premise enabling accumulation for the taxi company.”2 Outlining the astonishing case of taxi-leasing companies in New York City that took legal action against the creation of a driver-managed health insurance pool, despite it having no financial implication for the companies themselves, Hua and Ray write, “[this] makes sense only if what the leasing companies are trying to protect is their complete control over driver lives” (50).

What is most amazing and productive about Spent behind the Wheel is its offering, even if implicitly so, of a framework to understand the degradation of labor in general—even that not (yet) coded as “unskilled.” For those of us that work in areas coded as “professional”—e.g., academia, imagined through vectors of middle classness, whiteness, abledness, and maleness—it provides a jarring insight into the logic upon which management practices proceed to produce extant, and escalating, conditions of precarity.

The authors do this by inviting readers to consider two important conditions of labor under capital: first, that “[value] accumulation has always needed to distinguish between lives given intrinsic value (life made valuable for itself) versus lives valued only insofar as they sustain other lives (reproductive lives)” (4). In the context of taxi driving, this distinction is instituted between passengers (those with needs that require attention) and drivers (those who attend to these needs). It is this distinction that enables companies like Uber and Lyft to play upon public sentiment to legitimize worker dispossession. This is achieved by echoing consumer desires for comfort, safety, and affordability while simultaneous trading on racial and gendered threats to access—e.g., the difficulties racially minoritized people encounter in hailing taxis and the unsafety faced by women on public transport. Never mind that the operations of Uber and Lyft continue to degrade reproductive (feminized and racialized) labor performed predominantly by racially minoritized people.

This leads to the second condition of contemporary labor under capital: the displacement of antagonism between worker and management to between worker and consumer. This is evidenced most starkly in Hua and Ray’s analysis of legal suits against Uber and Lyft following incidents of sexual assault (chap. 3) and disability discrimination (chap. 4) wherein Uber’s and Lyft’s management of the deviance and malpractice of individual drivers becomes the object of adjudication. This elides the structural harms perpetrated by these corporations wherein “passenger and driver are interdependently entwined in mutual precarity by an industry designed to extract the vitalities of drivers” (78). Indeed, not only does the corporations’ imperative to deplete driver lives pose a threat to passengers—as drivers must persist with work even while ill, tired, etc.—but also the colonial logic that renders racial, gendered, and disabled Others as collaterally damageable in the service of capital (as manifest in Uber’s and Lyft’s shifting of liability for discrimination, assault, violence, etc.) is precisely that which legitimizes the wearing away of driver lives, the extraction of their “liveliness” (88).

While Hua and Ray explicate this degradation of driving as an effect of its reproductive nature, implicit in their analysis is a demonstration of how, given the historical shift from a producer to a consumer economy, wherein the function of capital is to manufacture consumer subjectivities as ideal, the degradation of all labor—and hence value accumulation—can proceed only through its rendering as reproductive (i.e., as “in service of” the consumer). Here, capital makes itself appear as the benevolent facilitator of consumer desires and subjectivities, and in positing workers as threats to this subjectivity—due to their refusal to attend to these desires—it disappears itself from the scene of economic antagonisms.

It is scarcely surprising, then, that “professions” such as teaching and medicine are the new frontier for (consumer) capital. It is not only the underlying reproductive quality of such work that makes it vulnerable to degradation. Rather, the rendering of students and patients as “consumers”—those whose needs must be protected and attended to—legitimizes capital’s attempt at the complete takeover of workers’ lives in service of the flourishing of other lives. Of course, as Hua and Ray note, whether in the context of driving or teaching, the operation of racial power is evidenced not because of a difference in the racial identities of those who serve (workers) and those who are served (consumers). Instead, racial power “refer[s] to an apparatus of tools that mark some lives as valuable only insofar as they enable other, independently valuable lives to flourish” (76).

More broadly, then, the text opens toward a consideration of capital as the instrument par excellence of coloniality. The logic of coloniality helps reveal how economic and social relations are structured through the “human” imperative for domination and mastery upon the world (and oneself), in accordance with (rational) understanding and desire. Capital, as both the effect of and the instrument of this domination and mastery, reinvents itself through establishing new lines of distinction between the dominators/masters and those that are to be dominated/mastered.

Coloniality also helps reveal these distinctions as an effect of the separation between mind and body/affect, such that life/activity associated with the former must be allowed to flourish while expunging life/activity associated with the latter. It is as such that capital affirms colonial logic through the advancement of consumer lives—of lives concerned with acting upon and mastering the self—while extracting value for itself through the increased collapsing of work and vitality.

Author Profile

rashné limki is currently employed as a senior lecturer in work and organisation studies at the University of Edinburgh, where she is also coconvenor of the Edinburgh Race Equality Network and a migrant officer for the Edinburgh University and College Union. Her academic thinking and writing focus mainly on the role of coloniality in the world as is and the possibilities for a decolonial future. Further information about her work can be found at rashne.me.