Britain’s ‘Dark Factories’: Specters of Racial Capitalism Today

Abstract

Recent revelations about illegally low wages and abject working conditions in Leicester’s “dark” garment factories—endured by its vulnerable mainly global majority and migrant workforce—have once again highlighted British fashion’s benighted “other” and its reliance on cheapened and “expendable” “racialized” sweated labor. Forced to work on through the Covid pandemic to produce fast fashion for e-commerce brands, “British” fashion manufacture now reflects the wider plight of the global CMT (Cut, Make and Trim) army, who at considerable personal risk and cost, manufacture most of our fashion. Drawing on a set of theoretical innovations in Marxist and post-Marxist theory, notably Smith and Suwandi theory of labor “super-exploitation,” De Genova’s work on the disciplining of migrants through “border regimes and spectacles” and Gargi Bhattacharyya’s critical reading of Cedric Robinson’s thesis of “Racial Capitalism” (1983), this article explains how and why its specter still castes such a deep and troubling shadow over the production of fashion.