Progressive Responses to Populism: A Polanyian Critique of Liberal Discourse

This article explores the recent rise of populist politics from the perspective of Karl Polanyi's theory of the ‘double movement’. It firstly introduces Polanyi's understanding of interwar populism, and relates this to his broader critique of liberal economic thought. This framework is then used to analyse three prominent explanations for populism which emerged in the wake of the UK's 2016 EU referendum: globalisation; cultural reaction; and social media. I show how each of these explanations exogenises contemporary populist movements, narrating them as something external to the liberal economic restructuring pursued globally since the 1980s. Failing to diagnose adequately the causes of contemporary populist movements, which lie in this utopian attempt to treat labour as a commodity, they cannot support an intellectually coherent progressive response to Brexit. Finally, I outline a political agenda centred on labour de‐commodification, which could directly address populist grievances and reclaim the discourse of ‘taking back control’ for the left.     

Demonising ‘the other’: British Government complicity in the exploitation,social exclusion and vilification of new migrant workers

This article demonstrates the close and complex connection between the demonisation, exploitation and exclusion of new migrant workers. In so doing, it testifies to the blurred boundaries between the categories of severe labour exploitation, forced labour and slavery. This study highlights the absence of citizenship rights as crucial to understanding the vulnerability to demonisation, exploitation and exclusion that characterises the embodied experience of such workers. It also highlights the key role of citizenship as a means for such workers to make rights claims. In the UK, new migrant workers, particularly those arriving from Eastern Europe since 2004, have been increasingly designated by government and media as interlopers in a tight labour marketplace. Whilst their collective economic contribution is sometimes welcomed, they are regarded as ‘external’ to UK society and citizenship, a potential threat to indigenous values and culture, and in competition with British workers. Rarely are migrants afforded the space in public and private spheres to express their individual needs, wants, cares or perspectives. UK migrants have variously been portrayed by the tabloid media and irresponsible politicians as rapacious opportunists, as benefit scroungers, criminals and potential terrorists. The predominant discourse around new migrant workers in the UK is that they are not citizens, but temporary residents who are expected to work industriously and to remain otherwise unseen and unheard until they return to their country of origin. No further contribution to social and political life is required or expected. It is within such an unsupportive environment that new migrant workers in general, and undocumented migrants in particular, have become highly susceptible to employer and gangmaster abuse and exploitation.     

Social citizenship and ethnicity around a public sector steel plant in Orissa,India

This article is about a modern public sector steel plant in the state of Orissa and its promise to set standards for post-colonial India's citizenry at large. These steel plants were to provide their workforces with superior social and economic citizenship rights, which in turn were to serve as exemplary industrial relations for the industrialising nation. The steel plants were also intended to forge multi-ethnic workforces into exemplary Indian citizens by transcending their manifold ethnic differences. The trajectory of the public sector steel plant in the town of Rourkela confirms that enhanced social and economic citizenship rights detached public sector steel workforces from labour at large and produced a ‘labour aristocracy’. The trajectory, furthermore, reveals how in Rourkela policies designed to accommodate ethnic differences constantly recreated these differences and hampered the access of large sections of the local population to these enhanced social and economic citizenship rights.     

On the promise and perils of citizenship: heuristic concepts,Zimbabwean example

Increasingly, struggles in the name of citizenship inspire and catch the imagination and support of individuals and groups found in a variety of locales within a nation as well as transnational spaces. At the same time, their consequences may be quite different from the assumptions and dreams of those involved in perpetuating and imagining these struggles. To analyse how new social citizenship claims can embolden and channel struggles in particular directions with varied results – the promise and perils of citizenship more broadly – I suggest that one should pay attention to the promulgators of such visions of citizenship, the techniques of promoting their claims and the cultural politics and political economies of belonging in the locales of mobilization. Drawing on an ethnographic example of a farm labour struggle in the late 1990s in Zimbabwe, I explore the importance of attending to wider shifts in the political importance of citizenship as well as its entanglement in particular localities. Through examining how farm workers are situated through such struggles, I show the promise and limits of citizenship in addressing social justice concerns of a group historically marginalized through racialized, classed and gendered processes.     

Child Workers in India: Context and Complexities

This paper portrays the nature of child workers in India and seeks to understand its many complexities. It looks at the definition of child labour, the extent of its prevalence, the reasons why children work, and the occupations they are engaged in. It outlines India’s position on international obligations, its expanding domestic laws, and the tardy implementation of these laws. It examines some of the inherent cultural constraints and the role of values and beliefs in perpetuating child labour. It analyses the relationship between education and child workers, and a possible solution in the form of compulsory education. The paper emphasises that child workers in India are from the marginalized sections and do not work out of choice. It stresses that this phenomenon is, above all, a problem for the children. The paper concludes by advocating the need to discard attitudes that are discriminatory or rationalise abuse, and the need to adopt a rights-based, child-centred approach to counter the increasing number of child workers.

‘They come here to work’: an evaluation of the economic argument in favor of immigrant rights

Advocates commonly highlight the exploitation that hard-working undocumented immigrants commonly suffer at the hands of employers, the important contribution they make to the US economy, and the fiscal folly of border militarization and enhanced immigration enforcement policies. In this paper, I unpack these economic rationales for expanding immigrant rights, and examine the nuanced ways in which advocates deploy this frame. To do so, I rely on statements issued by publicly present immigrant rights groups in six places: California, Florida, Illinois, New York, Texas, and Washington, DC. I also draw on interviews with immigrant advocates in San Jose, CA and Houston, TX, press releases from two alternative national immigrant rights organizations, and an ethnographic photo-documentation of immigrant rights mobilizations in 2012–2014. Economic rationales, I emphasize, can be found in each of these contexts, but are not mutually exclusive to other justifications, including narratives about civil, human, and family rights for immigrants. However, I argue that an economic framing of immigrant rights nonetheless runs the risk reifying work over conventional understandings of criminality, often relies on a narrow definition of economic worth, and could have negative consequences for coalition building.     

‘I can't even buy a bed because I don't know if I'll have to leave tomorrow’: temporal orientations among Mexican precarious status migrants in Toronto

This paper analyzes the links between migrant illegalization and precarious status migrants' temporal orientations. I begin by evaluating research on three research orientations in this area: (1) research that focuses on temporal contingency versus temporal teleology; (2) research about immigration status, illegalization, and time; and (3) research on the link between precarious immigration status and precarious work. I then draw on interviews with 13 Mexican migrants with precarious immigration status to discuss how immigration status affects migrants' ability to make plans, secure decent work, and experience a sense of belonging in the context of reception (Toronto, Canada). I conclude by arguing for a framework of temporal contingency when analyzing precarious status migrants' narratives of temporal orientations.     

‘Flexicurity’ as a policy strategy: the implications for gender equality

Abstract

The ‘flexicurity’ strategy reached the top of the European Union's policy agenda in the mid-2000s. The strategy assumes an adult worker model family and aims to promote better, as well as more, jobs and to ensure that policies should further both flexibility in the labour market and security for workers. The article explores, first, the meaning of internal and external flexibility, and of employment-based security and the different implications for men and women. While the policy documents assume that flexicurity will increase gender equality, the mechanisms have not been specified. In fact, as the article shows, women are often more ‘flexible’ workers than men, particularly regarding their contractual arrangements and hours of employment. However, they tend not to be economically autonomous and, we argue, the supply-side policies advocated on the security side of the flexicurity matrix are insufficient to improve their position, which is strongly related to the gendered divisions of paid and unpaid work.     

Gender Inequality,Social Reproduction and the Universal Basic Income

Despite extensive attention being paid to the effects of the Universal Basic Income (UBI) on society at large, there has been little analysis on the relationship between gender inequality and UBI. The purpose of this article is first to reflect on the feminist arguments in favour of UBI and then to examine some of these points by also considering other available policies. By looking into the role of women’s work in both productive and reproductive activities, it is argued that UBI should not be disregarded as a social policy. However, its transformative capacity to empower women and to strengthen their role in society should not be overestimated. In order to address this gap, policy makers should address misconceptions around gender norms and acknowledge the multiple forms of women’s work across the social relations of production and reproduction.     

Citizenship on paper or at heart? a closer look into the dual citizenship debate in Europe

This article seeks to promote an integrated approach to the study of citizenship policies, which pays due attention to their potential impact on migrants whose self-recognition are formally delimited by legal definitions. Through a novel approach that makes use of naturalisation processes as an empirical entry point into the narratives of citizenship embraced by Turkish migrants, this article investigates the role of dual citizenship policies in three European countries: Spain, the Netherlands and the UK. The evidence from the sample group displays a process of ‘self-bargaining’ prior to the naturalisation decision, which calls into question the link established between legal and emotional bonds of citizenship. The Dutch example demonstrates how Turkish migrants cope with the ban on dual citizenship by downplaying the identity-conferring role of citizenship status. This leads to a decoupling of legal and emotional aspects of citizenship and thereby to the adoption of a thin sense of citizenship. While Spain represents an in-between case that has a tolerant implementation despite a de jure ban, the British example shows how the process of ‘self-bargaining’ can result in the widening of emotional landscape, when dual citizenship is allowed. A thick sense of citizenship is therefore not only preserved but it can also be extended to the citizenship of the country of residence.     

The citizen of empire

In this paper, the authors imagine a Citizen of Empire. This is a conceptualization of global citizenship as it might appear in Hardt and Negri's global social order of Empire. The article draws on Hardt and Negri's Empire as the model of global society to imagine what citizenship might look like on a global scale. Hardt and Negri's conceptualization of Empire offers a palette of new and emerging social relationships from which a vibrant conceptualization of citizen and citizenship can be imagined and new democratic politics practiced. First, the authors examine the concept of Empire to unearth foundational concepts upon which a notion of Citizen of Empire can be built. Second, the authors imagine a citizen who ‘calls Empire into being' rather than participating in the ready-made political, cultural, and economic institutions of the nation-state. Without institutional support, citizenship in Empire must be highly generative and creative, and it will operate on a virtual and poetic terrain by enacting mechanisms of deterritorialization, networking, and communication.     

Designing safe citizens

Modern liberal citizenship is a failing design, and this is nowhere more apparent than in the contemporary US. Currently there is a frenzy around US citizenship – who has it but shouldn't have it, who should have it but doesn't have it, who had it but renounced it. The sheer volume of ideas, images, and events and their mass circulation makes it almost impossible not to notice how unsettled and unsettling contemporary US citizenship has become. If, as designer Bruce Mau suggests, the success of a design is its invisibility, then it seems that the design of contemporary US citizenship is anything but a success. Taking seriously the claim that modern liberal citizenship is a failing design, this article focuses on how citizenship is designed and redesigned through history. Its central research question is: what are the design principles of modern liberal citizenship, and how are they experienced in the contemporary US? Noting that modern liberal citizenship emerged from state security debates and that security concerns preoccupy those in the contemporary US, this article investigates not only how citizenship is designed but how safe citizenship is designed. As such, it is less concerned with the legal definition of citizenship than with the practical packaging of citizenship as part of a design for safe living.