Structural domination in the labor market

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a wide-ranging debate about the neo-republican principle of non-domination. Neo-republicans argue that domination is a capacity for one to intentionally use arbitrary power to interfere in someone’s life. Critics of neo-republicanism argue that this definition of freedom as non-domination precludes a structural analysis of domination, which would explain and critique the ways in which societies produce structural domination unintentionally. The article focuses on capitalism’s labor process and its labor markets. It argues that critics are correct to think that the neo-republican principle of non-domination has an insufficient scope, but that an alternative account of structural domination should still support the neo-republican idea that agency must be involved. Otherwise, we might simply fail to explain the social processes that reproduce structural domination. What is needed is to explain how the labor process creates incentives for agents to intentionally produce structures that have unintended, yet dominating effects, and in turn, how the intentions of agents are conditioned by their social positions. Domination is thus agential and structural.