Much political economy, Marxist and non-Marxist, maintains that unfree labour is incompatible with a fully-functioning capitalism, and that employers always seek to replace unfree workers with free equivalents. In keeping with this, cases of unfree labour encountered currently are categorised as instances of primitive accumulation. Against this view, it is argued here that the centrality of class struggle to the shaping of the accumulation process leads to the opposite conclusion. Labour-power is unfree not because capitalism is in its early or ‘primitive’ stage — but rather because it is mature. The importance of this distinction is that the characterisation of unfree labour as acceptable or unacceptable to capitalism in turn affects what kind of systemic transition is on the political agenda.
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