Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor

by Kalindi Vora

From call centers, overseas domestic labor, and customer care to human organ selling, gestational surrogacy, and knowledge work, such as software programming, life itself is channeled across the globe from one population to another. In Life Support , Kalindi Vora demonstrates how biological bodies have become a new kind of global biocapital. Vora examines how forms of labor serve to support life in the United States at the expense of the lives of people in India. She exposes the ways in which even seemingly inalienable aspects of human life such as care, love, and trust—as well as biological bodies and organs—are not only commodifiable entities but also components essential to contemporary capitalism. As with earlier modes of accumulation, this new global economy has come to rely on the reproduction of life for expansion. Human bodies and subjects are playing a role similar to that of land and natural resource dispossession in the period of capitalist growth during European territorial colonialism. Indeed, the rapid pace at which scientific knowledge of biology and genetics has accelerated has opened up the human body as an extended site for annexation, harvest, dispossession, and production.

Genres: Nonfiction, Academic

192 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2015

Reviews

[Lucy]

Interesting and creative study of labor bringing together call centers, IT outsourcing, and gestational surrogacy. The concept of vital energy is useful. These disparate fields can be brought together by considering the location and gendered/racialized embodiment of the accumulation of vital energy. The literature review of reproductive labor is a helpful resource.

[Justin Cheung]

Vora's "biocapital" concept became a core thread in my understanding of the modern state of the Global North's exploitation of the Global South. Topics as seemingly separate as gestational surrogacy and the division of labor in IT across the world become so clearly part of one traceable, unilateral, and ultimately unfair movement of biocapital. Vora's highlight of the role of technology in facilitating this dynamic has shaped my goals and daily actions in my career as an engineer in a more socially considered direction. This was a profoundly impactful read for me.

[Lette Hass]

La "energía vital" como mercancía evidencia cómo las estrategias de acumulación capitalista, siguen las lógicas antecedentes de la división del trabajo colonial que extrae no solo “fuentes de valor económico (monetario), o materias primas y fuerza de trabajo"… sino extrae "la vida misma."

Muy bueno