Introduction: labour exploitation and the crisis of imperialism

Previous chapters argued that the migration crisis and crises of state welfare should be understood in relation to the capitalist crisis. Ideological representations of these crises are facilitating changes to the state in order to shift the costs of the capitalist crisis onto the working class by material and discursive means, and to foreclose possibilities for revolutionary transformation. Increasing restrictions on migration and on state welfare are part of the same process in which the movement of workers is placed under increasingly strict discipline through differential regimes that fraction the working class in order to increase exploitation and contain the contradictions of the imperialist crisis.

This chapter examines the implications of these processes for the exploitation of labour within Britain. To reiterate a point first made in Chapter 1, the extraction of surplus value relies on control over human movement. Capital, labour and commodities must all move to function, but, more fundamentally, the transformative capacity of humans can only be realised through dynamic activity. Directing human activity to the production and capture of value requires control over its dynamism. Taylorism represented a formalisation of this control within the labour process through studies of efficiency that aimed for the elimination of ‘unproductive’ bodily movements (Braverman, 1998 [1974]: 62). In some types of work, this form of control continues, now enhanced through digital technologies such as the wristbands developed by Amazon that track the precise movements of warehouse employees, down to the placement of their hands, and use vibrations to nudge them in the desired direction (De Lara, 2018). Amazon workers report that those judged to be more ‘productive’ are given more shifts. The ‘gig economy’, based on tasks allocated through digital platforms, gives an appearance of workers’ autonomy while implementing control and monitoring through digitised systems, and reducing workers’ control over their time and mobility by extending the working day indefinitely (Drahokoupil and Jepsen, 2017). Informalised employment and self-employment makes the worker responsible for their own self-control, with material pressure to exercise this in ways that maximise surplus value for the employer/client so that they continue to receive tasks; thus, precarity enforces ‘voluntary’ compliance.