In the third stage of his identity transformation, Johnny becomes involved in a small-enterprise empire built by Omar and his uncle Nasser. As a result, his identity becomes related to that of a trinitized structure of late capitalism, with deviant subcultures, postcoloniality and capitalism as the mainstream mode of production.
While the working class subculture in Kureishi’s screenplay is against immigrant entrepreneurs, and as the capitalist mode of production is accused of imperial exploitation of non-white colonies and countries, subjects of these three categories seem to be ever-conflicting with one another. However, they are still articulated together in many respects so that the audience does not find it strange as the plot moves on. Exploited most greatly in industrial capitalism, the working class is a productive unit usually getting along well with the capitalist. Despite the fact that many the ex-colonials in postcolonial Britain are disadvantaged laborers, discontented with a domestic colonialism in tandem with global capitalism, they choose to stay in the hope that economic and cultural superiority of the imperial centre helps reverse their economic and political inferiority. Having once been colonized by the British Empire, and participating in the capitalist mode of production, the colonized internalize Britain’s capitalism as their perception of economic life. It only awaits enough funding for them to demonstrate their ability to manage a modern business.
Working class subculturists and the domestically-colonized in Britain are both
marginalized by mainstream culture. Despite this, the former may be articulated with dominant white ideologies of the privileged class, attributing their unemployment to immigrant workers. The social marginality of both may create another articulation (and hence disarticulate a racist youth from a far right ideology) where different marginalized groups in a capitalist mode of production can rid themselves of social categories like “wog” or welfare parasite.
In other words, with profitable work the underprivileged are articulated into an ideological practice that endows them with a positive image. This brings a work paradigm still manifest in consumer society:
The essential characteristic of work-based society then, is that a particularly robust and resilient work paradigm has become the primary and principle object of people’s activity. . . . this paradigm is
hegemonic in the sense that it articulates a set of shared ideas and
beliefs about what work is and what its purposes are. In terms of its own function within the social structure, the productivist work ethic aides hegemony by uniting in the mind what is already united in action.If people willingly act together in the same labour process, and if, as we have argued, work is a means to an end, then the work ethic provides a means of articulating in an intellectual or ideational way, the shared purposes of work. In this sense, the work ethic is part of what Durkheim called the ‘collective or common consciousness’, ‘the totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average citizens of the same society [having] specific characteristics that make it a distinctive reality’ (Durkheim, 1933: 79-80). (Ransome 26-27, my emphasis)
The ideology of work, as an unconscious construct, is “uniting in the mind what is already united in action.” With practices in a certain apparatus, the material existence of work “hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects” (Althusser,
Lenin 115). As a result, belief in a capitalist mode of production as a must-do way of
life, like ideology, “represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their realconditions of existence" (Althusser, Lenin 109). Not just exercised by an Althusserian
ideological state apparatus (ISA), communal groups like family, church, or school, are practices of work where Foucauldian bio-power is transmitted through various forms of discourse in different spheres, endowing the subject with subjectivities that keep a capitalist mechanism in work. From these discursive and bodily practices emerges the hegemony of work. As an ethic of capitalism, it participates in interpersonal relationships and jointly redefines national and class antagonisms. Therefore Johnny, despite his whiteness and former fascism, receives Nasser’s patrimonial beneficence and seeks his future in Omar’s marketable launderette. Nasser, Omar and Johnny are united in a mutually beneficial relationship, reflecting how deviant subculture, postcolonial enterprise and the capitalist mode of production are entangled with one another. The overlap between work and private relationship is the rule of survival for Nasser’s small business among large-scale corporations. Favored and preached by mainstream society, work ethic solidifies and defines Johnny and Omar’s long-term love. Nasser and Johnny’s quasi father-and-son relationship, on the other hand, is a private affinity not as conspicuous as that between the lovers, yet of equal importance in this Asian enterprise. Johnny cannot bring his ability, physical or intellectual, to full display without the trust and endorsement of Nasser.Postcoloniality, reflected in the British experience of Omar’s father Hussein and Nasser, illuminates a love-hate relationship between the colonized and colonial capitalism. Modern capitalism and counter-capitalism, both stemming from Britain, attract Nasser, Hussein and other Pakistani elites into the imperial center, and then disillusion them with colonial sediments. To stimulate the British economy, the government imported cheap labor from its former colonies that seemed to tolerate all sorts of dirty jobs white youth took less and less interest in. As Anver Jeevanjee asserts:
[i]n the early fifties, rural workers from India and Pakistan came to work in the UK. The greed for cheap labour was so great that there was complete disregard of the social consequences of transferring large, orthodox, non-English speaking, rural communities into a hostile white urban atmosphere.
Together with this cheap labor is the native elite class of the subcontinent. These upper-class Indo-Pakistanis, with the 1948 British Nationality Act that allows Commonwealth and colonized people receiving citizenships, head toward the Imperial center for an upgraded life in the first world.23 In doing so, they seldom think of, or just ignore, any possible racism they may encounter in British society. In their homeland, Nasser belongs to the elite class of businesspeople and his brother Hussein, Omar’s Papa, is an intellectual and journalist. Under colonial education, which focuses on British culture and socio-economic training, they gained paradigmatic knowledge of capitalism and anti-capitalism. Capitalism in South Asia was introduced by the British Empire for its own benefit. Anti-capitalism originating from Marx’s observation of labor and production in Britain, proliferated when it reached the subcontinent via English translations of Marx’s works. Britain’s relatively sound environment of investment is the major factor keeping Nasser there. As he laments,
“[Pakistan] has been sodomized by religion. It is beginning to interfere with the making of money. Compared with everywhere, it [Britain] is a little heaven there”
(Laundrette 66). Writing My Beautiful Laundrette in Karachi in February 1985, Kureishi clearly knew about how a rigid Islamic regime might mar the free
23 The British Nationality Act of 1948, following the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947 was the most liberal. “The status of ‘British subject’, previously shared by all citizens of the Empire, was divided into two categories. ‘Citizens of the UK and Colonies’ included both British born and bred and the populations of dependent territories, ‘Citizens of newly independent Commonwealth countries’
were recognized as such, but given freedom of entry to the UK, full civil rights on arrival, and the right to register as a citizen of the UK and Colonies after four years” (Sarre 133).
functioning of capitalism. In his non-fictional work, My Ear at his Heart published in 2004, Kureishi takes his cousin Nusrat as an example in depicting a stay-or-go dilemma puzzling the Pakistani higher class:
If you’re the dissenting type, or just want ordinary freedoms, you might have to make the difficult decision about whether to stay or leave. Both have their disadvantages. My cousin says he’s afraid of working as a waiter or taxi-driver in the West. Not all Pakistani doctors, businessmen, computer gurus and accountants who leave are able to make it abroad. (56)
Nusrat had recognized racial discrimination in the British employment market, because various forms of discrimination and conflicts were well known in his era. Yet an early generation of Commonwealth immigrants, after 1948, thought little about this.
Socialist theories Papa learned in India gave him no advantage in his attempts to secure job equality in the Imperial centre. The more he opposes the capitalistic system, the more he is crushed by it, especially when his ethnic background is much more a disadvantage than his class identity. As Nasser poignantly questions, “[w]hat chance would the Englishman give a leftist communist socialist” Laundrette 21)? Nasser, who has no “chronic laziness that runs in [his] family” (12), knows quite clearly what Salim says: “[Pakistani immigrants are] nothing in England without money”
(Laundrette 48). Since becoming rich is the only way to maintain his status as a respectable person, Nasser has to be a better capitalist than “native” Britons in the birthplace of modern capitalism. Running the small business empire he created becomes a model not only for his clansmen but also for Johnny, a white labor-rookie not knowing well how capitalism works.
Lacking enough capital to compete with local British industry and transnational corporations, Nasser chooses the small service industry as his career path. When
demands differ in late capitalistic society, providers divvy up the market via price and quality services. Having no fixed capital to provide luxurious services, Nasser makes necessities of the social life his means of accumulating money. As his motto goes,
“[i]n this damn country which we hate and love you can get anything you want. It’s all spread out and available. That’s why I believe in England. You just have to know how to squeeze the tits of the system” (Laundrette 17). Though white Britons may be the source of racism that irritates Nasser, they can however be lured by the low prices offered by Nasser’s business, willingly pulling out their wallets, and fueling his economic tank. Services mentioned in Nasser’s business empire include a parking garage, apartments for rent, and a laundrette where Johnny is an employee. What is common among each of these businesses is that Nasser owns the land they sit on, saving him money on the cost of operation. Parking, housing and laundering are daily necessities for urban people. Along with his garage, Nasser provides his customers
“clean-the-car” service (Laundrette 14), an attractive plus leaving similar parking lots at a competitive disadvantage. For his real estate business, Nasser obtains cheep apartments to rent to students, poor immigrants and other lower class people who cannot pay too much. The laundrette, though it is the only failure under Nasser’s management, is rented out to his nephew Omar for a minimal fee. After its renovation, the laundrette begins to pull in money, for low-class residents around it find its lavishness consoles their material insufficiencies. Nasser’s business craft, in this sense, bears witness to a formless global capitalism where excellence in management and marketing is no longer delimited by Imperial hierarchies.
On the managerial end of Nasser’s empire, Asian entrepreneurs consolidate their business apparatus through a correspondence between private and public interpersonal relations. Though immigrants often suffer from alienation and discrimination at the hands of white Britons, they find a sense of security in their clanship. This sort of
group is quite different from Johnny’s former gang. While gang members are busy seeking amusement and consuming dole and drugs, Asian immigrants are diligently making themselves small-scale capitalists so they can survive in such a hostile society.24 This alternative way to success, in contrast with working in a white-dominated British company and trying to climb the social ladder, is explained by Philip Sarre in his “Race and the Class Structure:” “The growth in numbers of Asian businesses [in Britain] is both an expression of a desire for upward mobility and an indication that there are problems with the ‘normal’ route to upward mobility via education and a better job” (Hamnett et al. 152). The racial barrier is not only for Omar, who does not accept his father’s suggestion of social climbing via education, but also for Salim and Nasser, whose ages and ethnicities cannot allow them to be employed as cheap labour. Therefore, “small business” provides these Asians “an avenue to independence and possible self-advancement.” Also, “[s]elf-employment allows the owner to avoid exploitation by an employer and to enjoy some ownership of the means of production” (Hamnett et al. 152). Nasser’s little kingdom is mainly composed of his clan. Salim and Zaki help consolidate his business boundary, while his nephew Omar is trained up to be his successor since he has no son. Nasser’s paternalism for Omar is vital for Johnny. By providing the laundrette and a car for Omar, Nasser becomes his father and chief at the same time, empowering him to hire Johnny for all the dirty work. As long as whites do not endanger them, like the deviant youths damaging Omar’s launderette, Asian entrepreneurs will not reject them as laborers or coworkers. Moreover, they are able to further develop affiliative bonds
24 Whether the hostility of some “native” Britons stimulates the productivity or baffles the immigrants’
motive power to join the job market depends case by case. It varies with the immigrant’s economic and cultural capital, as well as his or her personal disposition. Though Nasser’s success in the screenplay does not tell the whole story of South Asian immigrants in Britain, his business evinces that “the Asians have shown every sign of being an irresistible force while British racism has proved very close to an
across the national-ethnic boundary. When the audience first sees Nasser “[i]n the middle of the room like a fat king,” an unnamed Englishman and an American called Dick O’Donnel are around his bed, “shouting and hooting and boozing and listening to Nasser’s stories” (Laundrette 20). This blending of private and public, white and colored, also occurs in Nasser’s relationship with Johnny. Satisfied with “Johnny [having done] all the physical work on it [the laundrette],” Nasser’s charitable paternalism illustrates how he incorporates the private into the public through the logic of late capitalism, revitalizing an emotional facet of the work environment: “I wish I could do something more to help the other deadbeat children like him. They hang about the road like pigeons, making a mess, doing nothing” (Laundrette 44).
Having experienced various ethnic hindrances as a minority, Nasser is willing to promote Johnny from another marginal space. This quasi-filiation is a micro-political variation of Omar’s love, elevating work from a realm of business to a duty embedded in tightly-bound human relations, which further upgrades the quality of labor. On the other hand, members allowed into Nasser’s grand family have to fit in with his working attitude. Youths who are “doing nothing” violate Nasser’s ethic in organizing an industry composed of his chosen familial members. Nasser’s influence on Johnny doubles as he is both his sponsor and boss.
Nasser’s task for Johnny is nicknamed “unscrew,” which means to unscrew the doors of tenets unable to pay their rent. This work involves several pivotal components of capitalism. First, despite new technologies that save human labor, there are always dirty jobs awaiting the working class. Finding Johnny “[looking] like a tough chap,” Nasser assigns him physical work in his business empire: “I’ve got some bastard tenants in one of my houses I can’t get rid of” (Laundrette 37). Delay of rent payments violates Nasser’s turnover and accumulation of capital. To keep his real estate profitable, Nasser cannot wait for time-consuming legal processes and instead
employs Johnny to boost productivity of the space. Nasser’s apartment exemplifies well the intimacy between space and capitalism. In addition to bringing in rent payments, a rental apartment also produces tenants as labor power (or labor power in reserve, like students) in the capitalist mode of production. While earning a salary to reside in a space of their own, tenants are reproduced as labor power in the private space, regaining energy to keep a standard performance at work. Legal order protects the rights of both landlord and tenet. As the latter pays rent periodically, the landlord has to limit his or her rights of ownership to keep the rented place in proper working order for the tenet. If a tenet violates their contract, i.e., their lease, the landlord is able to take back the rented space, even with force. This right is called “self-help” in private law, and its rationale in capitalism is to keep the contested space in productive condition that not only earns the landlord capital, but also provides a space for legal tenets to sustain their living condition for further production. Squatters hamper the free circulation of capital in that rentals and space as commodities are just variant forms of capital guarded under the logic of law. Salim’s description of the squatters on his newly-bought real estate neatly represents this logic: “There are no people living here. There are only squatters” (Laundrette 9). The squatters, as impediments of legal personal property, are non-existent in the legal contract by which Salim buys his house. In the logic of capitalism, they are no longer human beings, but stumbling stones along the chain of supply.
Johnny’s unscrewing of a Pakistani poet according to the commands of Nasser vividly illustrates how Asian entrepreneurs invoke the Western idea of professionalism. Nasser’s private industry incorporates the postcolonial/immigrant mode and the mainstream mode of production in that it sufficiently employs a racially blind ethic in a capitalistic society. Based upon this, Nasser collects the widest range of customers on the same level of consumption, attracting both white and ethnic
clients with lower class background. The former are attracted by low prices, while the latter, except for their limited budgets, may choose Nasser’s apartment for a similar diasporic background. While Johnny is disturbed by his rough removal of a tenet with the same skin color as his boss, Nasser tells him: “But we’re professional businessmen. Not professional Pakistanis. There’s no race question in the new enterprise culture” (Laundrette 41). This ironical statement ruthlessly exposes the myth of nation as an imagined community.25 Neither white Britons nor Pakistan immigrants respectively form their group with members that would never have conflicts with one another. It is only when group or individual benefit is in danger that one seeks to stand with so-called “my people.” The becoming of a community is also that of an ideology, always finding the boundary of itself up against a collective oppositional Other. In most cases, it is the ideology of private property that speaks louder than a stranger who claims a right to use your house because of similar ethnicity. Just imagine why it is ridiculous in the common sense if this case occurs in Pakistan, without white Britons to be an ideological enemy to relate Nasser with his tenet. To sustain the law of private property, Nasser and Johnny, as employer and employee, have to expel the “nonhuman” squatter, otherwise they will not only lose rent payments from the squatted room, but may suffer more costs as other tenets copy
clients with lower class background. The former are attracted by low prices, while the latter, except for their limited budgets, may choose Nasser’s apartment for a similar diasporic background. While Johnny is disturbed by his rough removal of a tenet with the same skin color as his boss, Nasser tells him: “But we’re professional businessmen. Not professional Pakistanis. There’s no race question in the new enterprise culture” (Laundrette 41). This ironical statement ruthlessly exposes the myth of nation as an imagined community.25 Neither white Britons nor Pakistan immigrants respectively form their group with members that would never have conflicts with one another. It is only when group or individual benefit is in danger that one seeks to stand with so-called “my people.” The becoming of a community is also that of an ideology, always finding the boundary of itself up against a collective oppositional Other. In most cases, it is the ideology of private property that speaks louder than a stranger who claims a right to use your house because of similar ethnicity. Just imagine why it is ridiculous in the common sense if this case occurs in Pakistan, without white Britons to be an ideological enemy to relate Nasser with his tenet. To sustain the law of private property, Nasser and Johnny, as employer and employee, have to expel the “nonhuman” squatter, otherwise they will not only lose rent payments from the squatted room, but may suffer more costs as other tenets copy