Mobility Power and Labour Power in the Crisis of Imperialism

This chapter draws together the discussion in the previous chapters, by arguing that 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, to increase exploitation and contain the contradictions of the imperialist crisis. Marx’s concept of the ‘reserve army of labour’ is reinterpreted, together with insights from the autonomy of migration tradition, as a way of exploring differential forms of movement under constraint that are not necessarily limited to particular individuals. This analysis is tested and developed drawing on empirical research with new migrants in North East England, to conceptualise three ‘dynamics of precarity’.