The Politics of Global Competitiveness, Oxford University Press, 2022.

Marx predicted in Capital (1867) that as capitalism became global, patterns of work would be transformed, and workers would need to develop versatility, flexibility, and mobility in order to find employment. This "general law of social production", as he called it, is now in evidence all around us, in global value chains, "zero hours" contracts, and contract work organised through digital platforms. It results from competition between capitalists, scientific and technological revolutions in production, and incessant advances in the division of labour as production processes are broken down into ever smaller steps. Even as secure full-time employment threatens to become a thing of the past in highly developed capitalist economies, the process of the proletarianisation of the world's population as a whole remains far from complete. The book documents the efforts of the Paris-based OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) and the Washington-based World Bank, increasingly in close cooperation with the European Commission, to drive the competitiveness of global labour markets forward by maximising the labour power available to and exploitable by capital on a global scale. New short essays written since the book was submitted develop the argument further and illustrate its contemporary relevance.