Nomad Labour

Abstract

The above quotation, taken as it is from Marx’s reference to 1864 England, authentically describes the reality of Arab labour in Israel in the late 1980s and early 1990; a reality of over 120,000 Palestinian workers commuting daily or weekly from their homes in the occupied territories to Israel’s employment centres. This army of workers constitutes about 6% of the Israeli work force, about 50% of the Gaza Strip employees and about 30% of the West Bank Palestinian employees. Beyond the anecdotal and analogical value of the above quotation, Marx here touches on one of the most important properties of what he defines as the industrial reserve army: this is the property of nomadism. The twin concepts of nomad labour versus spatially fixed labour are developed below as a basis for a discussion on the role of the industrial reserve army in modern industrial society and the implications thereof to the social meaning of Arab labour in Israel. More specifically the proposition is as follows:

• 1. Most theoretical considerations of the issue of Palestinian labour in Israel have followed social theory in that they have not fully appreciated the dominance of nationalism in modern society, its role in the emergence of the Western welfare state and consequently, in the phenomenon of labour market segmentation.

• 2. The emergence of nationalism as the generative order of modern society gave rise to the welfare nation-state, which in turn entailed the spatial fixation of national labour, the inefficiency of unemployment as a creator of an industrial reserve army, and consequently, the segmentation of the labour market between spatially fixed national workers and nomad foreign workers as an industrial reserve army.

• 3. The economic growth in Israel following the Six Day War in 1967 resulted in the spatial fixation of most of the Israeli labour force and consequently, in a lack of an industrial reserve army in the economy. This vacuum was filled by the Palestinian surplus population in the occupied territories, which has gradually been integrated into Israel’s spatial economy as nomad foreign labour.

• 4. The integration of the Palestinians in the Israeli spatial economy feeds back upon nationalism by strengthening Palestinian national identity and by transforming the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a national into a class-national conflict. This last point is prominent in the intifada — the current Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories. The reality of the labour market as analysed below has been central in the emergence of the uprising and plays an important role in its currert development.

We turn now to a class of people whose origin is agricultural, but whose occupation is in great part industrial. They are the light infantry of capital, thrown by it, according to its needs, now to this point, now to that. When they are not on the march, they “camp”. Nomad labour is used for various operations of building and draining, brick-making, lime-burning, railway-making, etc. In under-takings that involve much capital outlay such as railways etc., the contractor himself generally provides his army with wooden huts and the like, thus improvising villages without any sanitary provisions, outside the control of the local boards, very profitable to the contractor, who exploits the labourers in two-fold fashion — as soldiers of industry and as tenants (Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Part VII, Section 5c).