Introduction for Capitalist Colonial

INTRODUCTION

DOMINATION ACROSS DIFFERENCE

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT domination—the power people exercise over others—and its relationship with the forms of difference that are often called “cultural.” It examines a relationship of domination across such difference, that between the residents of an agricultural settlement in Israel’s desert Arabah region and the migrants from northeast Thailand who work their farms. Each of these two sets of people has a long and very different history of dealing with domination, and the grossly unequal encounter between them is at once rather new—no more than a generation old—as well as dependent on the sediments left in each group’s accustomed approach to such hierarchical relationships by much deeper histories. Despite this gap—in part thanks to it—the relationship seemed to be working out when I was in the field, in 2015–16. Bell peppers were grown; profits were made from their sale; the Israeli settler community retained its cohesion; and transnational migrant families survived. Instead of eroding the difference between the two groups, moreover, these successes reinforced it. How do domination and difference become interdependent in this way?

Though the question seems local, the answer is not. The vegetable farms of the Arabah are integrated into a structure that is at once planetary and intimate: capitalist coloniality. The encounter between Israeli employers and laborers from northeast Thailand, or Isaan, is historically contingent, but also determined by the workings of a world-system in which the production of commodities for profit depends on a dynamically racialized division of labor.¹ Reactions to the encounter, which range from the embodied and visceral to the deliberate and codified, are marked by particular trajectories of integration into that system.² Following previous scholars who have sought to combine the critiques of capitalism and colonialism, I show how cultural heterogeneity—at once real and reified—fits into this system’s “combined and uneven” development, as well as how it points toward possible avenues of escape from that system’s destructive tendencies.

My investigation of domination across difference joins historical methods, which trace these trajectories of integration into the system, with those of the ethnography, which explores interactions through “close-up, on-the-ground observation of people and institutions in real time and space.”³ This research began in the autumn of 2015 with fieldwork on the Sadot family farm, in a moshav, or cooperative settlement, in the Central Arabah. After spending a full growing season working for the Sadots, I traveled to Isaan to meet former co-workers and family members of one who was still in Israel.⁴ I also conducted research in local and national archives in Israel and interviewed Thai and Israeli actors who had been involved in the development of the migration regime.

Why did Israeli farmers decide to recruit an agrarian workforce to replace their rebellious Palestinian employees in Thailand, of all places? I trace the roots of this linkage to the period immediately following World War II, when integration into the world-system through commodity agriculture spread together with the projection of colonial state power in both countries. In the Israeli case this was a matter of replacing the indigenous agrarian and pastoral economy of Palestinian Arabs with a collectivist settler agriculture. In Isaan, a hotbed of regionalist and left-wing opposition to the Bangkok-centered monarchic order, the spread of commodity agriculture into previously wooded areas was explicitly conceived as a counterinsurgency measure. A common understanding of commodity-producing “frontier settlement” as a useful strategy for the pacification of border zones thus enabled the elites of the two countries—connected by their shared participation in the Cold War on the “Western” side—to lay the groundwork for a migration circuit in the late 1980s. Though the developmentalist strategy of agrarian “frontier settlement” was fast becoming obsolete as the Cold War wound down and countrysides the world over emptied out, this discourse remained comprehensible to both state elites, forming a crucial ideological bridge into a new era.

The resonances and the differences between previous histories of capitalist coloniality in the two countries became evident in the encounter that began as large groups of migrants arrived in Israel in in the early 1990s. The settlers of the Arabah were second- and third-generation children of the erstwhile vanguard of Zionism, the “labor settlement movement” (LSM). Focused on extending control over territory through the establishment of exclusionary but egalitarian agrarian settlements (kibbutzim and moshavim), the LSM inculcated members with a deep anxiety about the exploitation of non-Jewish wage labor, as well as a suspicious attitude toward circumspection and politesse in interpersonal interaction. In Isaan, the peasantry’s experience of steeply inegalitarian and repressive integration into the Thai polity brought home the importance of sensitivity to one’s place in the hierarchically constituted “social body.” In the initially anomic encounter between the settlers and their new employees, it was the latter who provided the paternalistic ground rules for relationships within the “private” yet economically productive unit of the family farm, and a public culture acknowledging, even celebrating, the Thai presence briefly sprang up around them.

These paternalistic norms of behavior were still in effect on the Sadot farm when I arrived. An intimate but hierarchical reciprocity continued to define the relationship between workers on one hand, and the boss and his family on the other, both at work and off. But though Thai workers were as crucial to the settlement’s economic survival as ever before, by the time I started my fieldwork, there was no room for them in its public sphere. The migrants—ever conscious of subtle social cues—had carefully removed themselves from the moshav’s “face”; meanwhile, changes in the migration regime, intended to cut out middlemen, took away much of the incentive to sustain paternalistic relations on both sides. Nevertheless, emotionally laden ties of moral responsibility continued to connect migrants’ female kin back in Isaan not only to their breadwinning emissaries in Ein Amal, but to the boss as well.

However, agriculture’s role in Israeli society cannot be understood simply through the lens of its contemporary economic marginality. The Zionist colonial project has historically been invested in agricultural settlement for strategic and ideological reasons, developing the ideology of “Hebrew labor” during the push for land purchase before 1948. In practice, the windfall of confiscated farmland it received following the Nakba and Israeli independence led the farm sector to abandon this ideology and recruit large numbers of wage laborers—Palestinians as well as Mizrahi Jews—but its activities remained closely connected to national developmentalist policy. Beginning in the 1970s, shifts in military strategy, ideological hegemony, and economic policy rendered farming increasingly marginal, and after the breakout of the First Intifada in 1987 the sector’s Palestinian workforce became marked as a security liability and a political danger. Nevertheless, the sector’s survival was regarded as a national priority.

The solution to Israeli agriculture’s compounding problems was found in the form of migrant “guestworkers” from Thailand, whose numbers reached 20,000 by the mid-1990s. As integration into global markets brought lower unit prices and pressure to step up production, farmers’ hunger for land and water and the pressure they put on fragile ecosystems increased greatly. Competition with European producers, who employ the cheap labor of migrants from North Africa and Eastern Europe, also fueled Israeli employers’ drive to keep down labor costs. Thus, while in theory migrants are protected by the same labor laws as Israeli workers, in reality their earnings amount to about 70 percent of the Israeli minimum wage, and regulations meant to guarantee health, safety, and decent housing are flouted. These workers, today almost all male, are only allowed to stay in the country for five years and three months, and their freedoms of movement and association are curtailed in an effort to prevent their permanent settlement. Thais are prohibited from working in any sector other than agriculture, and their right to change employers within that sector, though enshrined on paper, is heavily restricted in practice. Their hyper-exploitation—extreme not only in comparison to Israeli workers, but to other non-Jewish migrants in the Israeli labor market—is directly tied to their geographic, social, and linguistic isolation. This isolation also serves the interest of the farm sector in protecting its image as a pillar of the Zionist project by keeping migrant labor out of the public eye and rendering it politically innocuous. Employers and their representatives have a vested interest in maintaining that isolation, although the rigidity of the labor supply also has negative consequences for their bottom line.

Employees, for their part, hail overwhelmingly from Isaan, Thailand’s poorest region, exposed for several generations to ecological despoliation, racial discrimination, and methods of political repression ranging from coercive indoctrination, through assassination, to all-out counterinsurgency and economic underdevelopment. Consequently, Isaan has become an exporter of migrant labor, sending millions of sons and daughters to the Bangkok metropolis and hundreds of thousands abroad to work in construction, consumer services, industry, and (less often) agriculture. In a rural economy already heavily dependent on remittances, migration is often the only way to keep a family’s head above the rising waters of debt and poverty. Work in Israel is not particularly coveted, no one gets rich off it, and for many migrants, Israel is only one station in the chain of peregrinations making up a “laborious life.”⁶ And though it has become normative, long-term separation continues to extract a heavy emotional price from migrants and their families and to apply severe pressure to their family bonds.

Random as it may seem at first glance, the newly forged link between Isaan and the Arabah continues a deep history of connections between residents of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, who have made use of the monsoon winds to sail around the “Indian Ocean world” for thousands of years.⁷ Though peripheral to this world, both the Arabah and Isaan have long been scenes of mobility, the former connecting the Mediterranean and Red Sea basins and the latter linking the valleys of the Chao Phraya and Mekong Rivers, at the western and eastern ends of this world.⁸ Beginning in the late fifteenth century, the Indian Ocean littoral was gradually subsumed under a new, European-dominated world-system.⁹ By the nineteenth century, when imperialism condemned millions of Asians to death by starvation and disease and millions of others to indentured labor on plantations within the region and far abroad,¹⁰ a tripartite global racial schema had begun to emerge, opposing the figure of the European not only to the African or American savage, who “embodied untamed liberty that vitiated the orderliness necessary for material advancement,” but also to the Oriental, who “emblematized customary submission to despotic authority. . . . The savage was free but uncivilized, whereas the Oriental was civilized but unfree.”¹¹ This image of the servile Asian, juxtaposed to both the free Westerner and the savage native, is one of the deepest templates for the racialization of Thais in Israel today.

At the end of World War I, the British Empire exercised hegemony over most of the Indian Ocean littoral, including both Palestine (taken from the Ottoman Empire) and the Kingdom of Siam (which retained formal independence). But fast on the heels of the next world war came the collapse of the old empires, and ruling elites throughout the non-European world faced the need to accumulate the capital needed for development while extending control over peripheral zones and populations. The result was a rapid extension of commodity relations over huge territories where subsistence had previously held sway, accompanied by enormous and often forced population movements.¹² In many cases, the polities enforcing the new “rule of difference” had themselves recently emerged from under the boot of European imperialism, a formal shift that did not prevent critical observers from analyzing their strategies—usually supported if not instigated by the old imperial actors—as “neo-colonialism,” “internal colonialism,” or “colonialism without a metropolitan home-base.”¹³

As the strength of communism and the Non-Aligned Movement grew across Asia, the Western bloc—now headed by the United States—lent support to trustworthy allies, including the Kingdom of Thailand and the new settler State of Israel. In the 1950s and ’60s, both states dedicated resources originating in the capitalist core—German reparations and American philanthropic funds in Israel, US military aid in Thailand—to extending commodity production into frontier zones that had become strategic theaters of the Cold War, as a method for both territorial control and economic development. The history of the Arabah and Isaan in this period was strongly marked by their role as Cold War agricultural frontiers. In 1949, in one of the last acts of the Nakba, the indigenous Bedouin of the Arabah were chased over the Jordanian border. A decade and a half later, agricultural settlements were established in the valley, with the goal of fortifying control of the frontier against Palestinian “infiltration” through the production of vegetables for a national market. In Isaan, consolidation of the conservative militarist regime, a Bangkok-centric development policy, and growing involvement in the Vietnam War all accelerated the region’s “opening” to the extraction of forest resources and pulled its natives into labor migration to the booming capital as well as farther abroad, while social movements based in the region were methodically put down.

As the global economy entered secular stagnation in the 1970s, underdeveloped countries were increasingly burdened with “surplus populations” that could not be profitably integrated into capitalist production.¹⁴ The export of parts of these populations to countries of the capitalist core, whose own working classes had come to resist hard labor at low wages, became an alternative avenue to wealth for southern elites. Actors ranging from the village middleman to the state itself emerged to facilitate migration and siphon off remittances through fees, interest on loans, and taxation. In many parts of the world, the new migration circuits reversed the paths of former imperial dominion: from North Africa to France, Latin America to the US, and the Caribbean to the UK, for example.¹⁵ In the Indian Ocean, however, migration revived trajectories that had been suppressed by Western imperialism, as masses began to move from South Asia, East Africa, and Southeast Asia to oil-wealthy Arab countries, to the region’s financial center in Lebanon, and later to Israel.¹⁶

Coloniality—the “rule of difference” between populations, often divided into “native” and “foreign” along racial lines—has been a fundamental characteristic of the capitalist world-system from its emergence.¹⁷ For Marx, the imbrication of capitalist exploitation with colonial rule and violent racialization was clear: he considered the “chief moments” of capital’s “primitive accumulation,” besides the enclosure movements in the British Isles, to be the “extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of [the Americas], the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins.”¹⁸ Every subsequent stage of the spread of capitalism has been marked by the extension of political control from cores into peripheries, almost always accompanied by a racialization of the inhabitants of these newly incorporated zones, and often by their relocation, more or less forced, to zones of intensive commodity production. Writers working within Marxism and adjacent traditions such as black radicalism, social-reproduction feminism, and radical political ecology have advanced the theorization of this link in various ways.¹⁹

“Extra-economic” categories such as race and gender, then, have been essential to the construction of a globally integrated, capitalist world-system.²⁰ In many cases, colonial rule has deprived the colonized of the resources necessary to produce for their own subsistence while also denying them the juridical status and employment opportunities necessary to undertake wage labor “freely.”²¹ What Marx called the “general law of capitalist accumulation,” the generation of an unemployable “surplus population” due to technological advances and a lack of adequate effective demand, has always hit racialized populations, those hired last and fired first, with the cruelest effect.²² While in theory capitalism may be possible without a colonial rule of difference, in historical reality this has never been the case.

The reality of capitalist coloniality powerfully structures relationships between in the Arabah, and not only at work, where Thai migrants are obliged to do backbreaking labor for long hours and little pay, but also outside it, through their brutal exclusion from the public sphere and all political claims. It is possible to separate out these forms of domination—economic (class) and political (citizenship, race)—and then examine how they “intersect.” Such analyses present the situation’s contradictory features—such as how state regulation intended to prevent migrants’ permanent settlement in Israel makes it harder to lay them off—as resulting from a clash between employers’ economic interests and the state’s political priorities.²³ Useful as such analyses are in some respects—as for lobbying the state to curb employers’ excesses—they make little sense from the perspective that encompasses these actors as participants in a unitary, capitalist-colonial system of domination. More to the point, the state of affairs in Ein Amal itself militates against such a separation. Here domination, though not homogeneous, is certainly continuous, and exercised in closely interdependent ways on and off the clock.

Reproduction is relevant to the case at hand in all these senses. Thai migrants reproduce the settlements of the Arabah by working hard for low wages, thus securing the profits that provide livelihoods to farmers, their families, and the other Israeli inhabitants of the region. The unpaid reproductive labor performed by migrants in Ein Amal and by their wives, mothers, and other kin back in Isaan plays an indispensable role in keeping the migrant workforce available for the hard labor of producing vegetables. Natural systems such as the hydrological cycle are exploited without recompense through the unsustainable withdrawal of water from ancient aquifers and the destruction of desert ecosystems, endangering the settlements’ reproduction in the long term.²⁷ Finally, Thais’ deferential behavior and willingness to erase their own presence from the settlement’s public “face” are necessary to the community’s ideological reproduction.

However, the relationship between reproduction and ideology is much more intimate than this list of topics might suggest. Building on use of the term in linguistic anthropology as well as in Marxism, I use “ideology” to refer not only to ideas consciously upheld by individuals and the institutions that inculcate them, but more generally to patterns of meaningful behavior structured by social context, which generally serve the interests and needs of one social actor or another.²⁸ In this broader sense, ideology is everywhere, in texts read and rituals performed, but also in everyday conversations and even in mute gestures. It is as active at the greenhouse, the factory floor, or the office as it is in the classroom, the temple, or the parade ground.

Treating capitalist coloniality as a unitary mode of domination makes it possible to understand the role of ideology in the exercise of domination across difference in Ein Amal. The capitalist wage-labor relation posits employer and employee as equal, autonomous, self-ruling juridical subjects—quintessential “Western” individuals on a secularized Protestant model—and, at the same time, as parties to a self-evidently legitimate (because voluntary) relationship of domination. The various forms of coercion that force workers to accept this bargain are obscured by an ideological “violence of abstraction,” as Derek Sayer terms it, whose effects arise from the very form of the exchange, even in the absence of any deliberate propagandization by interested parties.²⁹ However, insofar as workers are deemed to belong to racialized groups separated from employers by a colonial rule of difference, their domination also depends on modes of justification that treat the hierarchical distinction between the two parties as prior to their economic encounter—even if the distinction is partly a product of the encounter itself.³⁰ Beyond the violence of abstraction, then, capitalist coloniality also creates and depends on what one might call, following Alfred Whitehead, a “violence of (misplaced) concretion.”³¹ This is, at least in part, how race becomes the modality through which class is lived, in Stuart Hall’s famous formulation.³²

The two forms of ideological violence work in this insidious way throughout the world-system: it is not that fully enfranchised citizen-workers are only subjected to the dialectical violence of abstraction, while the racialized masses are pure victims of the violence of concretion. Anyone who participates in wage-labor relations and possesses some conception of a fair wage or a good boss, as migrants certainly do, is in practice endorsing the possibility of an equitable relationship of domination. Conversely, “fear of falling” into the depths of the abject surplus population haunts even the most privileged members of the global working class.³³ Without taking account of these forms of ideology, both of which are internal to capitalist coloniality, it would be difficult to explain either why Thai migrants expect to be included under the minimum wage protections of Israeli law, or why Israelis are so indifferent and even hostile to this demand.

The reproduction of domination depends heavily on the action of such everyday ideological orientations, especially insofar as they prescribe manners of dealing with hierarchical relationships. What I propose to call “interaction ideologies” are norms, morally charged but not always formally articulated, that apply to verbal and nonverbal interactions between persons, especially where relations of domination apply. Because such ideologies do not subsist solely in the mind or habits of any individual, but also in the interactions between them, they are never entirely arbitrary, but take part in what Webb Keane calls a “material semiotic,” in which nonlinguistic signals clump together in “bundles” of meaning.³⁴ Keane’s conceptualization is ripe with potential for an anthropological theorization of the links between domination and the modes of its legitimation, since such links are neither naturally given nor arbitrary, but echo previous histories of domination and resistance.³⁵ As long as they are shared by the parties to the relationship, such ideologies are often taken for granted. But in places like Ein Amal, divergent ideologies of interaction are thrown into relief—not on equal terms, but across the gradient of domination.

For this reason, the interaction ideologies that distinguish settlers and migrants from one another and draw them together play a central part in this book. The dugri attitude and karmic reciprocity, in particular, contrast with one another, while paternalism serves as a sort of rickety bridge between them. The dugri attitude, first analyzed by Tamar Katriel, is an ideology upheld by many Israelis, valorizing forthright and even blunt conduct over tact, subtlety, and deference.³⁶ Within the settler community, such forthrightness is valued as producing cohesion and trust, while overly deferential behavior is read as duplicitous, marking the interlocutor as a suspicious outsider. My analysis relates this ideology to the LSM’s historical ethos of exclusionary egalitarianism, in which the substantive equality of all community members depends on the strict policing of its boundaries. During the LSM’s struggle for hegemony within Zionism, these virtues were inculcated quite deliberately in the movement’s membership. Forged in the fires of successive rounds of violence against indigenous Palestinians, valorization of the dugri attitude is closely related to the LSM’s ideological anxiety vis-à-vis the direct economic domination of those who do not belong to the collective, especially if they are Arab.

Conversely, “karmic reciprocity” is my term for the interaction ideology pithily summated in the Thai adage tham dii day dii, or “do good, get good.” As discussed throughout the book, beginning in chapter 2, this approach is closely related to the vernacular Buddhist concept of karma.³⁷ Karmic reciprocity enjoins participants in social interaction to respect the hierarchical constitution of the “social body” and to refrain from making direct demands, instead expecting interlocutors to recognize one’s respectful attitude and to reciprocate of their own accord.³⁸ But though this ideology relies in part on ancient religious notions—as the labor settlement ethos also does—it owes at least as much to recent projects of ideological indoctrination like the one revealed in Katherine Bowie’s study of the social-engineering Village Scouts movement in 1970s Thailand.³⁹ Like dugriyut, karmic reciprocity is a palimpsest of a long history of domination, resistance, and accommodation.

The ideological reproduction of domination is always a risky business of gathering together preexisting orientations, a process of the kind sometimes called “bricolage” or “assemblage.”⁴⁰ But even people as different as Isaanite peasants and Israeli settlers do not emerge from entirely incommensurable histories; they share not only the contemporary predicament of capitalist coloniality but much older forms of domination that subtend it—most prominently patriarchy, the rule of fathers over women and the young. The interaction ideology that stipulates that superordinates and subalterns should treat one another like members of one patriarchal family, with unequal but undeniable responsibilities toward one another—that is, like fathers and children—is called paternalism. Affirmed, even assumed, by interaction ideologies prevalent in Thailand, paternalism is frowned upon in the LSM’s foundational ideology, which makes ample room for fraternity but not so much for parentage. Here as elsewhere, though, settler disavowal only goes so far, and especially in the sphere defined as domestic—which includes the scene of agricultural production—paternalism provides the glue that sticks Israelis and Thais together.

The ideological success of domination across difference is far from guaranteed. True, the encounter between settlers and migrants in the Arabah has produced a structural misunderstanding that, in the immediate term, is very conducive to the farmers’ goal of making profits while protecting their community’s face (see chapter 5). But the plastic nature of interaction ideologies like dugriyut and karmic reciprocity makes them potentially unreliable parts of the assemblage that reproduces capitalist-colonial relations. After all, neither the idea that people should be approached honestly as equals nor the notion that kind and respectful behavior brings its own reward is itself conservative. In fact, both contain kernels of a liberating understanding of social life—and thus may have a part to play in its transformation. If a political project that aims to disrupt and dismantle domination is to have any hope of success, it must take these ideas into serious consideration and attempt to cast its critiques immanently, in their terms. This is a task that I begin to take up in the book’s conclusion, in which I briefly discuss several sparks of utopian possibility embedded in these ideologies.

At the Ashdod warehouse I quickly became aware of the effect of ethnic and gender differences, which stranded middle-aged immigrant women from the former Soviet Union permanently in “temporary” positions, while young men of more diverse origins cycled in and out of the workplace rapidly. Such complex effects are everywhere, but as I was to learn when comparing the situation of the Ashdod workers to that of Thai migrants in the Arabah, the state’s reifications of difference have a strongly reinforcing effect. By being de facto denied the very minimum wage that caused my coworkers in Ashdod to devalue their own labor, migrants are effectively cast as “below the minimum” of legitimate concern to state authorities, and thus definitively removed from the political community.⁴⁴

Influential as state policy is in determining consciousness, then, the relevance of difference cannot be reduced to administrative fiat. As I have mentioned, the conception of the human subject as a partible individual capable of withholding consent and of expressing choice sincerely is closely related to the “violence of abstraction” inherent in capitalist relations. The “largely Protestant cultures of Western capitalism,” as Rosalind Morris writes, “have assumed and demanded a relationship of transparency between inner truth and outward appearance, between value and its sign.”⁴⁵ One might suggest that this is precisely because the capitalist-colonial world-system has racialized the working men of these societies as white, and thus fully capable of consenting to domination. Concomitantly, other ways of understanding subjectivity—as collective, ambivalent, or guileful, for instance—are devalued and associated with the racialized Oriental other. This is especially true of the people of Thailand, who have long been associated in anthropological discourse with a “regime of images” in which appearance trumps essence and acquiescence can never be judged sincere.⁴⁶ In contexts wherein cultural difference is not only reified but instrumentalized to facilitate domination, as when the quasi-nongovernmental organization CIMI advises employers on “effective work in a multicultural environment” with Thai migrants, trying to hold both domination and difference in focus becomes a serious epistemological challenge for the ethnographer—especially one belonging to the superordinate category and embodying its ideologies of interaction, like me.

I did not approach the encounter between Israeli settler employers and Thai migrant workers from a neutral position, by any means. Like many middle-class Ashkenazi Israelis, I have kinship and social ties to the erstwhile service elite of the labor settlement movement.⁴⁷ Both my parents were born on kibbutzim, and though both sides of the family broke with LSM orthodoxy—my father’s parents were expelled from their kibbutz for communist sympathies when he was an infant, and my mother left hers in her twenties to join the urban student left—this project has brought home the extent to which its exclusionary egalitarian ideology survives in me. Family social capital (including that of my in-laws, who also have strong LSM connections) was indispensable in opening doors for me in the Arabah. My inherited radical background also played a role in determining my approach to the Arabah, as well as the tone of my public interventions on the topic, which have since caused some of those doors to shut.⁴⁸ Finally, I was interested in Buddhist meditation, and though at first I saw little connection between my practice and vernacular Thai Buddhism,⁴⁹ and did not speak much about the latter with my coworkers, I doubt that I could have reached an understanding of their interaction ideologies without having studied and practiced dharma myself.

Innocent at first of many of these complexities, I approached fieldwork in the Arabah in keeping with my previous experience in Ashdod, looking to get a paid job on a farm. This might have been possible, but while Israelis of my background and age (thirty-two at the time) do work on farms in the region, the positions they hold are usually of a kind from which Thai migrants are excluded, in management and marketing. I was not naïve enough to try to simulate the migrants’ experience, but I wanted to do the same work as them, both so I could build rapport and in order to learn firsthand about their experience of the job. It was important to me to be paid for my work, not so much because I needed the money (although this was a consideration, as I had no funding for the first year of fieldwork), but because this was the only way to gain intimate experience of the employer-employee relationship: when someone is paying you, they try to get their money’s worth back.

I thus went about looking to work “as a taylandi”—not my phrasing but that of potential employers when they realized what I was asking for. I started about a year in advance, and quickly got an affirmative response from Gadi, one of the last of the first generation of Ein Amal to still be running a farm. “You’ll work like a taylandi and get paid like one,” he promised gruffly, to my satisfaction. But as the beginning of my fieldwork came near, Gadi began to hesitate and eventually decided against hiring me. I can only speculate as to the reasons, but it may have been the second part of the promise that eventually gave him cold feet: paying me “like a taylandi” would have been illegal, after all, and while migrants are helpless to defend themselves against violations of labor law, I could have made a stink. The legal alternative—to pay more than the prevailing wage for undoubtedly subpar labor—would not have been worth his trouble.

I did not have long to ponder Gadi’s reasons, because within a week I had found another job. My new boss, Udi, was managing a farm belonging to another moshav member while working a second job and strapped for time. He agreed to let me do the same work as the Thais most of the time, and the additional tasks he gave me, like monitoring irrigation systems and filling fertilizer tanks, were not supervisory ones. But it became apparent that Udi wanted me to perform a disciplinary function after all when, a few days into my employment, he asked me to spend the morning in a greenhouse with the farm’s Thai workers, but without working, explaining that he preferred me not to do the farm’s avoda shhora—literally “black work.” So I did nothing that morning, fiddling with my phone while the Thais worked. But Udi didn’t like me to be loafing in this manner either; it “sets a bad example,” he said afterward. If I was not supposed to work or to zone out, it seemed that the only option was to supervise the workers, but this was exactly what I had told Udi I didn’t want to do. “This will continue to be a front line,” I wrote in my field notes. “I have to make sure I handle it carefully.”

Apparently I failed, since about two months into my employment Udi found a pretext to fire me. To fulfil my tasks, I had been provided with a small all-terrain vehicle. I was allowed to park it near the apartment I was renting, but only when I was home. When away from the moshav, I was supposed to leave it in the farm’s parking lot. Running late to catch a bus one day, I left the ATV in the public lot at the entrance to the moshav. When Udi called to confront me, I confessed and apologized, but he was adamant that I had violated his trust and would not take me back. I don’t know why Udi reacted so harshly to this minor infraction; whatever the reason, I found myself without a job or an alternative plan in the middle of the growing season, with no openings on any farm in the moshav. After a few weeks, through family connections, I was able to secure a spot on the Sadot farm, where I ended up staying on for six months. However, I had to give up my aspiration to a paid position: now I was a volunteer.

On the Sadot farm I made my own schedule: five days a week, eight hours a day, usually beginning together with Ya’ir and the Thais at the break of dawn and taking off in the early afternoon, but sometimes beginning later and working until the end of the day, which usually lasted ten or eleven hours. At first the boss insisted on asking me what I preferred to do, though eventually he agreed to allocate me to whatever jobs needed to be done. Some of the time this meant that I was assigned tasks the Thais could not do, like taking orders from clients, but most of the time I did what they did alongside them, took breaks with them, shared their meals, and occasionally spent evenings with them as well. The six months I spent on the Sadot farm in 2015 and 2016 in this manner are the heart of this book. It was there that I was able to gain a close understanding of the labor process as well as to find a vantage point from which to make observations about communal life on the moshav.

As the season drew to a close and the temperatures outside crept up to insufferable levels, I was glad to get out of the fields and to start doing interview and archival work. Interviews with coworkers took place in an unusual setting: on one hand, my interlocutors had already known me for six months or so, and some degree of mutual affection obtained. However, the interviews were short (between an hour and two), rather formal in tone, and held on the farm, where the boss’s authority loomed large despite his physical absence and my assurances of privacy. Interpreter Supang Lamphutha navigated this difficult territory with aplomb, and we nevertheless managed to learn quite a bit. In the archive of the region’s oldest moshav, Ein Yahav, I found a wealth of documentation that I was later able to supplement with papers from the Israel State Archives, interviews with Israeli players in the migration regime, and secondary sources. The relationships I forged on the Sadot farm also laid the foundation for my 2017 fieldwork in Thailand. With the crucial support of my charming and indefatigable research coordinator, Vorachai Piata (aka P. Mee), I was able to establish some real rapport with Daeng, whom I had met in Ein Amal, as well as with Moon, whose husband, Boy, was still on the farm at the time, and with Song, who had worked for the Sadots years before I met them.

Like most novice ethnographers, I longed to become close friends with my interlocutors and fantasized about spending hours in deep conversation with them. This didn’t happen, probably primarily because I never became fluent in Isaan or Central Thai. Though I studied both languages and was certified advanced in the latter, I never became confident in my abilities, and my limited conversations with coworkers were held in farm pidgin, with its simplified grammar and mix of English, Hebrew, Isaan, and Central Thai vocabulary. However, language was not the only issue; as I was to learn, interaction ideologies prevalent in Isaan discourage the expression of negative emotions in front of strangers, in contrast to Israel, where griping (kitur) is a common way to forge intimacy with new acquaintances.⁵⁰ Moreover, despite the politically inflected sympathy I tried to communicate, my coworkers surely saw me as an Israeli first, a coworker second, and a comrade probably not at all. Despite my protestations (and the ethical duties formalized in the University of Michigan’s IRB stipulations), I imagine they suspected that any criticism of their working and living conditions might eventually reach the employer. Thus, even though I solicited criticism in what I hoped were gentle ways, interviewees supplied it in very small doses. It was only after I left the farm, during the production of the informational web series Cheewit Nay Israel, that I became exposed to a more critical discourse on their part.

*   *   *

This book attempts a risky gambit, trying to speak to both anthropologists and activists. At a time when many radicals trained in anthropology are asking what the discipline is even for, and some even flirt with calls for its immolation,⁵¹Capitalist Colonial hopes to make the case that much of the seemingly apolitical theory that anthropologists produce can become an instrument in the struggle against domination. This is not only a matter of employing the ethnographic method, which forces the activist/researcher to test her ideas and concepts against those thrown up by the everyday life of the people she wishes to work with; militant researchers of various kinds have already appropriated this method, either under the influence of anthropology or independently.⁵² The move I am trying to make is a trickier one, having to do with anthropology’s traditional interest—what some might call its unhealthy obsession—with cultural difference. Since focusing on such difference all too often leads anthropologists to bracket out domination, radicals’ impatience toward too much harping on about culture is certainly understandable. But capitalist-colonial domination has not culturally homogenized the globe; for good and for ill—and there are plenty of both—different groups of people still see the world in very different ways, ones directly relevant to struggles against domination.

Let me then assure the radical reader that I leave the field as I entered it, convinced that migrant workers in Israel suffer unconscionable exploitation. However, my ethnographic experience and my theoretical formation in anthropology have forced me to rethink the role I had automatically assigned them. In many important senses, I learned, Thai migrants in the Arabah—and even their kin back in Isaan—participate in setting the terms of their exploitation. This is not because they desire such exploitation, but because under current circumstances, in which it is unavoidable, there are ways to make it more bearable. The interaction ideologies that enable them to do so, just like those that Israelis employ to ignore their suffering, are malleable, and I suspect that they can be used not only to ameliorate this exploitation, but to challenge it, and perhaps even to abolish it altogether.

Notes

1. The concept of the capitalist world-system, introduced by Immanuel Wallerstein, has been subjected to productive and wide-ranging critiques. Though I take inspiration from “world-system theory” in Wallerstein’s sense, my argument does not hinge on the particularities of his analysis. See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), and World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Matan Kaminer, “Connections Yet Unmade: The Reception of Balibar and Wallerstein’s Race, Nation, Class in Israel,” in “Race, Nation, Class”: Rereading a Dialogue for Our Times, ed. Manuela Bojadzijev and Katrin Klingan (Berlin: Argument-Verlag, 2018), 107–20.

2. Ramón Grosfoguel and Ana Margarita Cervantes-Rodríguez, eds., The Modern/Colonial/Capitalist World-System in the Twentieth Century: Global Processes, Antisystemic Movements, and the Geopolitics of Knowledge (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002). My use of “subaltern” and “superordinate” as generic terms for the two parties to a relationship of domination is taken from the Subaltern Studies literature, and specifically from Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

3. Loïc Wacquant, “Ethnografeast: A Progress Report on the Practice and Promise of Ethnography,” Ethnography 4, no. 1 (2003): 5.

4. On multi-sited ethnography as a method for studying the world-system, see George E. Marcus, “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 95–117.

5. Pedro Pedreño, “Sustainability, Resilience, and Agency in Intensive Agricultural Enclaves,” Ager: Revista de Estudios Sobre Despoblación y Desarrollo Rural, no. 18 (April 15, 2015): 139–60.

6. See Pattana Kitiarsa, “The Lyrics of Laborious Life: Popular Music and the Reassertion of Migrant Manhood in Northeastern Thailand,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 10, no. 3 (September 1, 2009): 381–98.

7. Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Abdul Sheriff and Engseng Ho, eds., The Indian Ocean: Oceanic Connections and the Creation of New Societies (London: Hurst, 2014).

8. Donald Whitcomb, “Land behind Aqaba: The Wadi Arabah during the Early Islamic Period,” in Crossing the Rift: Resources, Routes, Settlement Patterns, and Interaction in the Wadi Arabah, ed. Piotr Bienkowski and Katharina Galor (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2006), 239–42; Porphant Ouyyanont, “Thailand’s Northeast ‘Problem’ in Historical Perspective,” ed. Daljit Singh and Malcolm Cook, Southeast Asian Affairs, 2017, 367–84.

9. Engseng Ho, “Empire through Diasporic Eyes: A View from the Other Boat,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 46, no. 2 (April 2004): 210–46.

10. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001); Jan Breman, Taming the Coolie Beast: Plantation Society and the Colonial Order in Southeast Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

11. Onur Ulaș Ince, “Deprovincializing Racial Capitalism: John Crawfurd and Settler Colonialism in India,” American Political Science Review 116, no. 1 (2022): 5.

12. Harriet Friedmann, “The Political Economy of Food: The Rise and Fall of the Postwar International Food Order,” American Journal of Sociology 88 (January 1982): S248–86; E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 288–92.

13. Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (New York: International, 1966); Pablo Gonzalez Casanova, “Internal Colonialism and National Development,” Studies in Comparative International Development 1, no. 4 (April 1, 1965): 27–37; Fayez A. Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (Beirut: Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center, 1965), 1.

14. Kalyan Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality & Post-Colonial Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2014).

15. Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, “The Coloniality of Migration and the ‘Refugee Crisis’: On the Asylum-Migration Nexus, the Transatlantic White European Settler Colonialism-Migration and Racial Capitalism,” Refuge 34, no. 1 (June 18, 2018): 23–24.

16. Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006); Sarah S. Willen, Transnational Migration to Israel in Global Comparative Context (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007); Crystal A. Ennis and Nicolas Blarel, eds., The South Asia to Gulf Migration Governance Complex (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022).

17. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America,” International Sociology 15, no. 2 (June 1, 2000): 215–32; Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

18. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Middlesex: Penguin, 1990), 915.

19. For overviews, see Robinson, Black Marxism; Tithi Bhattacharya and Liselotte Vogel, eds., Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (London: Pluto Press, 2017); Hadas Weiss, “Social Reproduction,” in Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Sam Ashman, “Combined and Uneven Development,” in The Elgar Companion to Marxist Economics, ed. Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad-Filho (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2012), 60–65; Max Ajl, “Theories of Political Ecology: Monopoly Capital Against People and the Planet,” Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 12, no. 1 (March 1, 2023): 12–50.

20. See, e. g., Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010); Jairus Banaji, “The Fictions of Free Labour: Contract, Coercion, and So-Called Unfree Labour,” Historical Materialism 11 (2003): 69–95; Sanyal, Rethinking; Lowe, Intimacies.

21. Jairus Banaji, Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation (Leiden: Brill, 2010).

22. Marx, Capital vol. 1, chap. 25; Edna Bonacich, “A Theory of Ethnic Antagonism: The Split Labor Market,” American Sociological Review 37, no. 5 (October 1, 1972): 547–59.

23. This is the approach often taken by Israel’s most prominent migration researchers, Adriana Kemp and Rebeca Raijman. For an example, see their “Bringing in State Regulations, Private Brokers, and Local Employers: A Meso-Level Analysis of Labor Trafficking in Israel,” International Migration Review 48, no. 3 (2014): 604–42.

24. For ideological reproduction, see Louis Althusser, On Reproduction (London: Verso, 2014). This has also been the approach of radical researchers inspired by Bourdieu, e.g., Paul E. Willis, Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).

25. The literature is voluminous and constantly growing, but for an authoritative introduction, see Bhattacharya and Vogel, Social Reproduction Theory. For a review of anthropological approaches, see Weiss, “Social Reproduction.”

26. John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). For links between social reproduction and political ecology, see Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (London: Zed Books, 2014); Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2016).

27. See Liron Shani, “Of Trees and People: The Changing Entanglement in the Israeli Desert,” Ethnos 83, no. 4 (March 30, 2017): 1–19; Matan Kaminer, “The Agricultural Settlement of the Arabah and the Political Ecology of Zionism,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 54, no. 1 (February 2022): 40–56.

28. The influence of Marxism on theories of ideology in linguistic anthropology is very much recognized, so there is nothing original in the links I draw between them. See Judith Irvine and Susan Gal, “Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation,” in Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities (Santa Fe: School of American Research, 2000), 25–84.

29. Derek Sayer, The Violence of Abstraction: The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).

30. For the role played by the labor process in the racialization of migrant and citizen workers in Israel, see Matan Kaminer, “At the Zero Degree/Below the Minimum: Wage as Sign in Israel’s Split Labor Market,” Dialectical Anthropology 43, no. 3 (September 2019): 317–32.

31. Anne Pomeroy, Marx and Whitehead: Process, Dialectics, and the Critique of Capitalism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004).

32. Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. Houston A Baker, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 16–60.

33. See Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: Twelve, 2020).

34. Webb Keane, “Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things,” Language & Communication 23, no. 3–4 (July 2003): 409–25.

35. Deeply internalized and partially opaque to conscious reflection, interaction ideologies are similar to the “structuring structures” identified by Pierre Bourdieu under the rubric of habitus. However, Bourdieu understood habitus as arising spontaneously over many generations and under relatively unchanging social circumstances, while many aspects of interaction ideology are not only inculcated intentionally, including in adults, but are also amenable to rapid change and, to some extent, to self-reflexive adjustment. See his Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

36. Tamar Katriel, Talking Straight: Dugri Speech in Israeli Sabra Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

37. Felicity Aulino, “Perceiving the Social Body: A Phenomenological Perspective on Ethical Practice in Buddhist Thailand,” Journal of Religious Ethics 42, no. 3 (September 1, 2014): 415–41.

38. See Julia Cassaniti, Living Buddhism: Mind, Self, and Emotion in a Thai Community (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); Felicity Aulino, Rituals of Care: Karmic Politics in an Aging Thailand (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019); Scott Stonington, “Karma Masters: The Ethical Wound, Hauntological Choreography, and Complex Personhood in Thailand,” American Anthropologist 122, no. 4 (2020): 759–70.

39. Rituals of National Loyalty: An Anthropology of the State and the Village Scout Movement in Thailand (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

40. Althusser, On Reproduction, 254; see also Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Continuum International, 2004).

41. Matan Kaminer, “Avoda be-darga efes: Subyektiviyut po’alit be-mahsan ashdodi” (Zero degree labor: Worker subjectivity in an Ashdod warehouse) (MA thesis, Tel Aviv University, 2011).

42. Matan Kaminer, “The Oksana Affair: Ambiguous Resistance in an Israeli Warehouse,” Ethnography 19, no. 1 (March 2018): 25–43.

43. Timothy Mitchell, “Everyday Metaphors of Power,” Theory and Society 19, no. 5 (October 1, 1990): 545–77; Susan Gal, “Language and the ‘Arts of Resistance,’” Cultural Anthropology 10, no. 3 (August 1, 1995): 407–24.

44. Kaminer, “Zero Degree.”

45. Rosalind C. Morris, “Failures of Domestication: Speculations on Globality, Economy, and the Sex of Excess in Thailand,” Differences 13, no. 1 (May 1, 2002): 53.

46. Peter A. Jackson, “The Thai Regime of Images,” Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 19, no. 2 (2004): 181–218.

47. Jonathan Shapira, Ilit lelo mamshichim: Dorot manhigim ba-hevra ha-yisre’elit (An Elite without Successors: Generations of Political Leaders in Israel) (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Po’alim, 1984).

48. See Matan Kaminer, “Mabatim musatim ba-arava” (Averted Gazes in the Arabah), Hazman Hazeh, October 23, 2019, hazmanhazeh.org.il/thaiworkers/; Shahar Samooha, “Ben Ha-Moshavnikim Ba-Arava La-Ovdim Ha-Zarim She-Hem Ma’asikim Hitpatha Ma’rekhet Yahasim Murkevet. Doktor Matan Kaminer Hakar et Ha-Tofa’a” (A Complex Relationship Has Developed between the Moshavniks of the Arabah and the Foreign Workers They Employ. Dr. Matan Kaminer Has Researched the Phenomenon), Globes, March 14, 2020, tinyurl.com/samooha-globes.

49. This mistake, though common, is particularly egregious given the strong influence of the Isaan-centered forest monk tradition on the vipassana practices commonly taught in Israel. See Kamala Tiyavanich, Forest Recollections: Wandering Monks in Twentieth-Century Thailand (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997); Joseph Loss, “Buddha-Dhamma in Israel: Explicit Non-Religious and Implicit Non-Secular Localization of Religion,” Nova Religio 13, no. 4 (May 2010): 84–105.

50. Aulino, Rituals; Tamar Katriel, “Kiturim: Griping as a Verbal Ritual in Israeli Discourse,” in Communal Webs: Communication and Culture in Contemporary Israel (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012), 35–50.

51. Ryan Cecil Jobson, “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019,” American Anthropologist 122, no. 2 (2020): 259–71.

52. See Robert Ovetz, ed., Worker’s Inquiry and Global Class Struggle: Strategies, Tactics, Objectives (London: Pluto Press, 2020).