cross the border have been pushed deeper into
the mountains and desert. And even further from
the field, economic restructuring in Mexico
pushes migrants – mostly male – out of their
home villages and north to the California fields,
at the costs of seasonally and permanently dis-
rupted families, disintegrating social networks,
and greater class divisions (Rothenberg, 1998).
As we have already seen, living conditions in the
fields of California – and in the strawberry fields
in particular – are, at best, deplorable. Tubercu-
losis is common, and poor housing conditions
lead to outbreaks of communicable diseases
(such as measles, which killed 33 children in two
California agricultural counties in 1989–90) to
which the larger population is now relatively
immune (Bugarin and Lopez, 1998: 26). Lack of
sanitary facilities both in the fields and in (formal
and informal) labor camps leads to high rates of
occupational skin diseases (Mobed et al., 1992:
370), and concerns about the safety of fruits and
vegetables as they reach consumers.
So what then werethose strawberries I was
preparing? Like the knife I was using, the kitchen
counter I was working at, and the newspaper I
had left lying in the backyard, they were, simply,
commodities. Or not so simply. As commodities
they were the embodimentboth of labor power
and of the social relations that made the applica-
tion of labor power to fruit growing in the fields
of California possible in the first place. That
labor power, however, and those social relations,
are exceedingly complex. The labor power
embodied in strawberries includes the labor of
researchers at the University of California over
the course of the twentieth century, as well as the
immediate labor of the man or woman who
picked the basket I purchased; it includes the
labor of chemical workers who produced the
pesticides sprayed on the strawberries (and,
before them, the workers who constructed the
chemical plant and its components) as well as the
labor of the person who placed the berry plant in
the ground the previous July or October; it
includes, to some degree, the work of marketers,
border patrol agents, buyers’ agents, and (a very
few) inspectors from the California Occupational
Health and Safety Administration and the
Department of Industrial Relations. The social
relationsembodied in strawberries include the
international border that acts as a revolving door
that both allows migrants in and pushes them
back out again when their labor is no longer
needed (Nevins, 2001; Robinson, 1999), the
relative immiseration of strawberry workers (real
wages have declined perhaps 40 per cent in the
1980s and 1990s), the adoption of sharecropping
systems that shift risk from financiers andlandowners to impoverished small-time growers
(like Francisco Bugarin), the lack of decent and
affordable housing and sanitary facilities in and
around the fields, the ‘structural adjustment’ of
the Mexican economy, the successes and failures
of farmworker unions in their struggles to organize
the fields, and the uneven distribution of power
that makes all this possible.
What is crucial, then, are the conditionsunder
which labor power is applied, all so that I am
able to eat cheap strawberries. My strawberries
and Francisco Bugarin’s impending jail term
were intimately connected. The strawberries inter-
nalizedor reifiedthe social relations that made
their cultivation and harvesting possible, turning
them from a set of ongoing, struggled-over
processes into a socially comprehensible (and
very tasty) thing, a thing with a definite shape
and structure, a morphology.
To put that another way, while produced by
very much living labor, the commodity is itself
dead labor, that is, labor ossified, concretized,
materialized into a definite thing with a definite
shape and a definable structure (which for straw-
berries would have something to do with the
molecular structure of fructose and the cellular
structure of the skin, flesh, and seeds). The ques-
tion, therefore, is always one of how labor is
made dead, and to what end. Marx argued that in
the process of commodity production under capi-
talism ‘dead labor’ absorbs ‘living labor’ (1987:
293–4). The dead labor that is a commodity
‘consumes’ living labor ‘as the ferment necessary
for [its] own life-process, and the life-process of
capital consists only in its movement as value
constantly expanding’. In order for capital to
constantly expand through commodity production
the equation of surplus value extraction must be
regulated so that, over the long haul, and under all
manner of unpredictable and contingent historical
exigencies, the return of unpaid labor to capital
continues to expand (1987: 545–51). In this
regard, when a worker in capitalism confronts the
world (the world she or he has made) as a world
defined by ‘an immense accumulation of com-
modities’ (1987: 43), she or he is confronting a
world of dead laborin which her or his own
exploitation is manifest – but also highly mysti-
fied. For in the world of commodities, ‘a definite
social relation between men [and women] ...
assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a
relation between things’ (1987: 77): not relation-
ships between living laborers, but relationships
between labor now dead and, in fact, all but
erased. The materialityof the commodity is a
product of the ‘mystical’ transformation of living
social relations into a tangible thing. Materiality
in the world of commodities is‘dead labor’.DEAD LABOR AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY 2373029-ch11.qxd 03-10-02 10:51 AM Page 237