Coercion and Consent under Techno-Economic Despotism: Workers' Alienation and 'Liberation' in the Amazon Warehouse

Abstract

This article explores the role of subjectivity in workers' control in warehouses. Relying on Marx's theory of the alienated subject under capitalism, we analyse the narratives of Polish Amazon workers to understand how alienating work produces a contradictory consenting subject. Workers are both estranged from the labour process, commodities, social relations and themselves, and simultaneously reconstituted as agents with new potentialities. Reflecting Marx's 'civilising' dimension of capitalism, they are reconstituted as sellers of labour, consumers, individuals deserving respect and holders of legal rights. This transformation elicits workers' consent to alienating work conditions because these new possibilities depend on such conditions. Our study advances discussions of control in global warehousing by highlighting how workers' consent operates alongside coercion. It also advances our understanding of consent by showing that it is not merely a coping mechanism for meaningless work but rather emerges from workers' integration into capitalist relations.