Coercion and Consent under Techno-Economic Despotism: Workers’ Alienation and ‘Liberation’ in the Amazon Warehouse
基于马克思的异化理论，分析波兰亚马逊工人的叙事，揭示异化劳动如何同时产生强制与同意，以及工人如何被整合进资本主义关系而成为矛盾的同意主体。
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.