Feudal Relics or Capitalist Monuments? Notes on the Sociology of Unfree Labour

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Abstract
Through examining bonded service relations in Britain; slavery and neo-slavery in the U.S.A., Tsarist Russia, and Southern Africa; and what is normally perceived as `migration', it is shown that ascriptive constraint and non-wage coercion increases with the expansion of capitalism and, moreover, that this is not a feature of `early stages' but crucial to such `high technology' areas as the European motor car industry. Closes by arguing for the recognition of `migration' as the circulation of a commodity (labour power) and for the primacy of relations of production, in the combination of relations and forces which define particular production modes.