From the factory floor to the retail aisle: Reconstructing Burawoy’s labor politics in the age of merchant capital

Labor-process theory has long treated production as the privileged site of capitalist accumulation. Yet in an era defined by global retail chains, logistics networks, and platform capitalism, value is secured not only in production but also in circulation. This article argues that contemporary capitalism depends upon realization labor: the labor that transforms commodities into sales. Drawing on ethnographic research in Walmart stores in China, I reconstruct Michael Burawoy’s analysis of labor politics for an age of merchant power. I show that realization is not an inevitable market event but a labor process organized through distinct forms of consent, coercion, and worker agency. The article advances four reconstructions. It extends labor-process theory from production to circulation, reconceptualizes the internal state as a differentiated formation as it articulates through the labor regimes of an internal supply chain, incorporates feminist insights regarding gendered identities and labor control and revisits the relationship between legitimation and mystification in a postsocialist context. Walmart’s stores reveal how workers animate commodities through stocking, selling, and cashiering labor, and how these activities are governed through varied combinations of surveillance, autonomy, entrepreneurship, and corporate ideology. By bringing circulation into the center of labor-process analysis, the article demonstrates how merchant capital organizes labor at the point where value is realized and highlights the continuing centrality of labor in an economy increasingly structured by retail and digital platforms.