Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement economy undergoing new processes of reintegration’. 18 Ultimately, Gordon finds that slavery and slave-like conditions are a result of related phenomena. The global pursuit of finance capital eliminates measures that were historically put in place to protect collective labour and democratic practices. 19 Everywhere, collective bargaining and protections are being eroded, and pay and safety requirements are limited — conditions which she argues resemble those of enslavement. As an example, she threads the needle between the need for temporary labour that guestworker programs fill and tendencies towards enslavement. These programs: shore up an illusion that the state can effectively manage global human migration through the imposition of law and order, this is a clear example of a government, through policy, creating particular exceptional jurisdictions within which people labor in conditions that, even if actively sought out, resemble those of enslavement. 20 In using this example, she shows how slavery continues to be profitable, as it enables profiteers to transfer business risks onto the people who can do nothing about these risks and must absorb them if they want the ‘job’. Gordon argues this is one of the crucial reasons why slavery persists today and in the form that it does. She ends the second chapter on two ideas: that enslavement is anti-political and that an abolitionist democracy can potentially show us the way forward. Gordon points out that slavery severs all political relations. Enslavement is anti-political because slaves are denied complete entry into politics and the public domain. Relatedly, those who espouse abolitionist democracy view democracy and slavery as two sides of the same coin. The point is that democratic institutions can be wielded to ‘interject a counterweight to tendencies toward oligarchy that would undo the public terrain as a distinctive sphere in which we wage ever incomplete struggles against unfreedom’. 21 Chapter three treats consent. By returning to the Western classics of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Plato and Aristotle, and then later in the chapter turning to authors such as Walzer, Howard, Butler, Schwartz and Alcoff, Gordon spiritedly encourages us to reconsider and reinvigorate the concept of consent because it inspires us to reject the ‘radically anti-political spirit of the now’. 22 The concept of consent also compels us to think about alternatives to our current political economic circumstances — circumstances that lead to statelessness and enslavement. Statelessness and enslavement are vacuums; the opportunity for consent is largely or entirely absent under both conditions. For Gordon, failing to discuss or entertain the notion of consent means that we are, perhaps unwittingly, nurturing ‘an anti-political ethos that does not need and should not receive our support. 23 By looking at consent (and/or its absence), we can expose ‘how contemporary forms of power are undemocratic, why resources for effectual expression remain unequally distributed, and why a “free market” is not synonymous with a free society’. 24 We must consider consent, because with it, we are able to look to alternative practices and make genuine departures from our 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 ibid 73. ibid 60. ibid 72. ibid 79. ibid 101. ibid 82. ibid 97, quoting Joseph Schwartz, The Future of Democratic Equality: Rebuilding Social Solidarity in a Fragmented America (Routledge 2008) 71. 357