Remaking labour imaginaries: social reproduction and the internationalising project of welfare reform

Abstract

Abstract This paper examines an increasingly international, work-centred process of welfare restructuring through its effects on ideas and practices of social reproduction. The effects of intensified welfare restructuring on social reproduction are argued to be a neglected aspect of globalisation debates, connected to a posited ‘labour metaphysic’ within mainstream leftist politics. Analysis of relations between welfare restructuring and neoliberal globalisation suggests a crisis of support for practices of social reproduction, exemplified in US welfare-to-work programmes. The need for leftist politics to reconstruct ‘labour imaginaries’ in relation to issues of social reproduction is argued through an examination of welfare reform programmes in Texas. Welfare-to-workers are shown to live their class through painful and shameful ‘classifying practices’, which deny the class basis of their poverty, negate the value of their motherhood, and aim to construct individualised, psychologised and evangelised subjectivities for labour market participation. The struggle of programme participants for material and psychological survival is argued to be a class struggle, which presents a major challenge to the thinking and practice of leftist politics.