Conclusion

The core arguments presented in the preceding chapters can be summarized as follows:

Precarity and violence are endemic under capitalism. Their incidence is, no doubt, historically and geographically uneven, but if we look from a global perspective there is arguably no point in the past 500 years where supposedly irregular forms of labour have not been widespread.

The differentiation of normalized, acceptable forms of exploitation from these persistent forms of precarity and coercion is both political and contingent on the one hand and vital to ongoing processes of primitive accumulation and proletarianization on the other. There is no abstract or a priori dividing line between ‘free’ and ‘forced’ labour, ‘informal’ and ‘formal’, ‘precarious’ and ‘standard’ working relations – rather, such binaries are artefacts of ongoing political struggles. Governing irregular labour is in this sense intimately linked to the political management of ‘normal’ labour relations.

These processes of differentiation, in practice, are carried out simultaneously across multiple scales of action and mediated by broader patterns of political relations of force, including patterns of global governance, state-building, and over the political mobilization of subaltern populations more broadly.

I won’t repeat the empirical claims that have been laid out in Chapters 2–6 here. The kinds of struggles with which this book has concerned itself have clearly played out in different ways at different points in time, conditioned by colonial and postcolonial hegemonic projects, shifting patterns of production, and changing patterns of global governance and world order. The variable emphases and understandings through which the ILO and others have approached ‘forced labour’, ‘informal’ economies, and rural-urban migration in sub-Saharan Africa underline the arguments made about the contingency and political character of the governance of irregular labour.