[...] Marx and Polanyi among others have amply shown how the conditions for proletarianisation emerged, notably through the enclosure of the commons. In the wake of that act of the most complete, organised immiseration, people were left with only one option, the sale of their undifferentiated labour-power.

It is tedious to have to repeat such trivial and obvious facts, yet necessary inasmuch as contemporary fictions, built on ‘work enrichment’, ‘participative management’, ‘employee empowerment’ and other programmes of ‘self-realisation’ are successfully erasing the memory of that original truth about the employment relation: that it is a relation of dependence, a relation between agents in which one holds the conditions for the material reproduction of the other, and that this is the permanent backdrop and the immoveable foundation for anything that unfolds on top of it. [...] all the incentives that the capitalist employment relation successively put on stage in order to enrich its scenery and elicit more refined interests in the workplace – interests such as advancement, socialising, ‘fulfilment’ – can collapse at any moment, leaving only the indestructible foundation of material dependence, a stark backdrop of menace hanging over life newly made bare.