Political imaginaries and the moral grammars of work: Demands on the state in an age of surplus populations

This paper examines the ways in which popular economic and political demands on the state are shaped by social imaginaries around wage labour. 

In particular, I build on the literature around popular protests in South Africa as well as my own qualitative research with the long term unemployed to demonstrate the ways in which such demands focus on the provision of jobs, housing and land, rather than cash-based redistribution. I argue that such demands are defined by a moral grammar which continues to link labour and a capitalist work ethic with income, mobility and prosperity — both in its promises to the poor and its justification of wealth accumulation. 

This moral grammar nostalgically invokes the assurances of Fordist capitalism that moral rewards of hard work will lead to stability and middle-classness (Muehlebach & Shoshan 2012) — even in an age of precarity and unemployment. A truly new 'politics of distribution' (Ferguson 2015) thus remains curtailed by this moral grammar of work, even among the unemployed. This paper ends with a series of utopian-oriented claims around the reframing of distribution in a moral language of rights rather than poverty-reduction or welfare, which holds the promise of decentering work from our political and economic imaginaries.

About the speaker

Dr Liz Fouksman is a Lecturer/Assistant Professor in Social Justice at the Centre for Public Policy Research at King's College London. Liz's research focuses on understanding moral, social and cultural attachments to work and working, and the impediment such attachments pose to new imaginaries of the future of labour and distribution in an increasingly automated world. 

In particular, Liz focuses on the ways the long-term unemployed in countries with high inequality and unemployment rates think about links between time-use, work, and income. The research project looks to fieldwork in South Africa and Namibia to ask how such links challenge both proposals to expand social protection through means such as unconditional cash transfers, as well as more radical calls for the decommodification of labour via mechanisms such as a universal basic income guarantee and/or shorter working hours. 

Liz's recent work has been published in Economy and Society, Development and Change, World Development, and Africa.

Image by Jacques Nel via Unsplash