Fragmented Cooperation

This chapter investigates how and what physical skills market workers learn to enact cooperation under the conditions of fierce competition and atomisation. The chapter adjusts Richard Sennett’s (1998, 2008, 2012) sociology on modernity, labour and subjectivity to postcircadian capitalism, urban conditions and migration patterns. This chapter hones on one discovery that I neither anticipated nor constructed, which was that, rather infrequently, workers who mastered physical labour skills engaged in interpersonal cooperation outside the market. Although weak and weakened signs of cooperation emerge during brief moments of disruptions in the labour processes, the chapter proposes a sobering account of how capitalism nurtures competition rather than cooperation. More, the chapter posits that an understanding of how the systematic learning and practising of cooperation becomes embodied through physical labour, it should be possible for us to explain the intricate work-based relations among manual labourers. At New Spitalfields night market, labourers are so caught up in the physical demands of work that any form of cooperation becomes fragile and secondary to the purpose of surviving the workplace. In short, migrant nightshift workers do something together, but not with one another.