Everyday refusal of racial capitalism: Unsettling logistics forced migration and labour in Germany

An ethnographic analysis of refugees’ negotiations of labour mediation and racialised infrastructures in Germany, showing how everyday practices of resistance illuminate the operations and contradictions of contemporary racial capitalism and its logistical regimes. Autonomy, rooted in the radical refusal of racial capitalism, confronts the logistical enclosures that attempt to contain it today.This book conveys how newly arrived refugees experience and navigate the confining infrastructures of asylum and workfare that shape their trajectories as racialised workers’ in Germany’s labour market. It analyses their movement and mediation into racialised divisions of labour while foregrounding the moments in which coercion, exploitation and precarity are refused. Drawing on ethnographic analysis, the book situates these dynamics within a particular conjuncture of racial capitalism characterised by the unsettling transformations of a German and European asylum regime around the 2015 ‘summer of migration’. Grounded in empirical research, the book develops key concepts including expropriation, extraction, contingency, and fugitivity. Bringing the Black radical tradition into dialogue with recent debates on supply chains and logistics, it advances autonomous approaches to migration and arrival while offering a compelling account of how everyday struggles contest the racialised organisation of labour and assert solidarities. Germany’s racial capitalism has entered a renewed and increasingly repressive conjuncture, marked by intensified institutional, economic and infrastructural pressures. This book considers these developments through the transformations set in motion after the autonomous arrival of refugees in 2015, examining how labour mediation, workfare structures and infrastructural racism shape contingent and uneven labour relations. It analyses how racialised workers negotiate logistical constraints designed to confine, categorise and circulate their labour. By foregrounding refugees’ everyday infrapolitics and labour struggles, it shows how their decisions, mobilities and refusals contest these racialised formations while asserting alternative relations of solidarity. Drawing on critical migration studies, racial capitalism research and ethnographic inquiry, it offers an empirically grounded account of resistance within contemporary logistical orders.

Pagina's: 288, Hardcover, Manchester University Press (P648)