Class Struggle and De-exceptionalizing the Gulf

This chapter presents a class-struggle perspective to the question of labor exploitation in the Arabian Peninsula, focusing on the figure of the foreign worker. Both liberal and neocolonial Western representations of the working-class migrant have been central to exceptionalizing discourses. In the popular imagination of many in the Global North/West, the Gulf region is almost automatically associated with hyperexploited, abused workers, primarily from South Asia. While these discourses are not entirely a fabrication—massive exploitation based on the racialization and patriarchal gendering of labor in the Gulf is very real—there is at the same time a disavowal in these Orientalist discourses that is either duplicitous or naive. Seen from a feminist and Marxist class-struggle perspective, the racialized exploitation of foreign workers is perhaps the aspect of Gulf societies that is most similar to the neoliberal societies of the North. The Gulf is least exceptional with respect to its regimes of labor exploitation.