Slavery: Exception or Rule?

Globalization in many ways represents the culmination of capitalism’s spread across the world, and a deepening of the rules of the marketplace throughout all spheres of social life. In terms of the possible emergence of a global labour market, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that the effective global labour force has risen fourfold over the last two decades (IMF, 2007: 161). Is this growing labour force ‘free’ in the double sense that these workers can dispose of their labour power as their own commodity and that they own no other commodities? What should we make of the growing evidence that increasing globalization seems to be increasing the clearly un free labour of children and those trafficked for forced labour? In brief, does unfree labour in this era of globalization represent an unfortunate anomaly, soon to be overcome, or is it, in some sense, the new normality? These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.