Unfree labour on the Amazonian frontier: the problems and politics of post rescue solidarity

This paper addresses the deepening vulnerability of both domestic and international migrant workers to unfree labour and the challenges for its eradication in the Brazilian Amazonian state of Mato Grosso. Brazil's programme to combat unfree or slave-like labour has increasingly been framed within a distinctly liberal understanding of labour exploitation that tends to apportion responsibility to the ignorance of migrant workers. This problematic rationale, alongside the repetitive experiences of exploitation by subjects, evokes a consideration of solidarity most notable by its very absence from the conventional epistemology of unfree labour. This interdisciplinary study thus critically interprets the experiences of forty workers subject to unfree labour in Mato Grosso between 2018 and 2019 to illustrate how the absence of solidarity is a structure and a process inherent to dominant social relations in Brazil’s past and present, and how its reimagining and reawakening is vital to eradicate slave-like labour and its legacy.