“The perpetual penality that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institutions compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes.” 

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment

The 17^th and 18^th centuries in Western Europe marked the open of a long series of revolutions in the political economy of the body. In the school, disciplinary practice became increasingly rigorous and standardized. The student was to sit straight, keep their arms above their desk, raise their hands before speaking, walk in single-file, and exercise strict obedience to their instructor in all matters. The greatest minds of Western Europe, on the eve of the industrial revolution, dreamed of a precisely calculated and regimented military society. The schoolhouse was to resemble the barracks, which was to resemble the monastery, which was to resemble the prison, which was—soon enough—to resemble the factory.

In 1858, Marx wrote on the development of the factory: “The workers activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the other way around.” The artificial limbs of the mechanized factory discipline the body of the working class. They inscribe new marks on the surface of the body: diseases of the lungs from chemical exposure, anxious compulsions, dirt and oil and burn marks, repetitive movements reminiscent of gears turning, hearing loss from exposure to loud machinery, chronic joint and back pain from constant strain, and so on. They train the body to adopt a new rigidity, a new automaticity, a deeply instinctual obedience to a new authority—the authority of the automated motions of capital, signified by the machine. The body of the working class, normalized according to the disciplinary impositions of capital.

The great colonial powers soon began exporting this new political economy of the body by violent means. Forceful installation of capitalist power structures in colonized territories invested itself in the bodies of the colonized. Presently, neo-colonial power functions in much the same way—mining sites, sweatshops, and other exploitative spaces define the contours of the body for the global working class. And while we in the imperial core have exported many of the worst horrors of industrial production, our bodies are still normalized by capital in schools, prisons, military camps, office computers, modern mass-production facilities, and so on and so forth. Even the most mundane jobs, such as the work of cashiers in grocery stores, are subject to disciplinary measures modeled after the factory. Cashiers are ordered to stand for hours straight, to mechanically repeat rote phrases devoid of meaning, and to obey the customer’s dictates without question. Why? We must interrogate and combat the ways in which our bodies are conditioned and disciplined by the interventions of modern capitalism and remain vigilant in challenging the pervasive influence of capitalism on our bodies as we strive for a more humane system of labor.