Dramaturgy and the Barricade: Charisma, Debt, and the Politics of Labor Control

• In Event: Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 9: Tactics & Repertoires: Invention, Legitimization, Radicalization

Abstract

As New York City and Seoul confronted a shared wave of market fundamentalism and austerity that drained state coffers from the 1980s through the early 2000s, subway strikes emerged as critical junctures in which labor, finance, and their governance were reconfigured. The legitimacy of public-sector labor, the moral authority of debt, and the boundaries of managerial control were contested. While sharing parallel structural conditions of declining national subsidies for public transit, and escalating capital costs that translated into financialized debt, outcomes of their respective transit strikes diverged. In New York City, the 2005 transit strike, lasting only three days and waged by a comparatively bureaucratized union, succeeded in blocking the consolidation of labor discipline tied to financialized governance. While the union suffered severe legal and financial penalties, the strike nonetheless disrupted attempts to further tether debt servicing to intensified labor control. In Seoul, by contrast, the 1999 transit strike unfolded over eight days with extraordinary militancy, mass participation, and movement-wide solidarity. Yet this strike invited heightened repression, the reinforcement of managerial authority, and the continued coupling of labor discipline to debt obligations. Existing theories of labor contention would predict the opposite result. Higher levels of militancy, organizational density, and collective identification are typically understood to enhance labor’s capacity to resist managerial control. The inversion of expectations presented by these cases invites a different explanatory perspective.
This chapter foregrounds charisma as an interactional mechanism through which the relationship between debt and labor control is stabilized or disrupted. Drawing on Weber’s concept of charisma, Goffman’s dramaturgical sociology, and eventful temporality, I complicate the de-facto relationship between debt and labor control. Finance capital’s disciplinary mechanism is legitimated in eventful situations. By tracing the trajectories of transit financing, labor relations, and transit strikes in New York and Seoul, this chapter analytically separates debt servicing and labor control, demonstrating that their linkage is historically contingent. Second, it shows how charismatic mobilization operates with temporal variation reshaping interactional expectations among interactants. Third, it contributes to a political economy attentive to micro-interactional processes, revealing how financialized infrastructure regimes shift through rituals of recognition.

Author

• Youbin Kang, City College of New York