In this lecture, I present how digital technologies are changing not only the nature of work and supervision, as is often claimed, but also the role sociodemographic traits play in the social and material organization of work. Based on extensive data from warehousing in Belgium and Poland (Amazon), I show how such technologies partially disembed work from social relations and cultural categories of differences, with contradictory effects. While they can be deployed to increase the access to wage work of historically subordinated groups and thus reduce inequalities, they also intensify competition among workers, facilitating higher rates of exploitation of labour as a whole. I reflect on how these technologies paradoxically at once foster workers’ sense of emancipation despite particularly harsh working conditions.

In this lecture, I advance a critical infrastructural perspective on precarized migrant labour by drawing on the case of Bulgarian workers in Limburg. I argue that, to understand how these migrants are integrated in the process of capital accumulation, we should attend to the infrastructure that allows for their circulation at certain conditions. This infrastructure includes multiple actors (e.g., the employers and temporary agencies, members of the local community with a migrant background, local administrations, regulatory authorities, and actors providing accommodations), as well as regulations (e.g., residence rules, employment legislation) and material infrastructure (e.g., accommodations, transport). I show how value is extracted from this workforce by employers through a double arbitrage: 1) the cost of their social reproduction in Belgium and Bulgaria, and 2) the differential cost of their employment and accommodations across the Belgian/Dutch border. I reflect on what this entails for improving their protection.   

The last lecture examines the role of alternative organizations in the transition towards a more socially and ecologically sustainable economy and society. I present the organizational literature on less hierarchical, co-owned organizations (e.g., cooperatives, the democratization of the firm), hybrid organizations and grassroots solidarity initiatives. This literature pays some attention to historically subordinated groups (e.g., women, migrants), but does so merely from a broad ethical commitment to inclusion. Drawing from feminist and ecological Marxism, I show how post-capitalist alternatives can be rethought from the position of materially and epistemically marginalized subjects and how taking their stance helps expand traditional understandings of class struggle beyond wage work in the sphere of capitalist production.