Whose precariousness? Wage labour, racial governance, and African refusal of work
In mainstream sociological analyses of the transformations of work, âprecariousnessâ has emerged as a distinct pathology, which has not only degraded, on the wake of the global neoliberal onslaught of the late twentieth century, employment conditions and benefits, but also determined harmful consequences for social compacts supposedly premised, at least in older industrial countries, on fair rewards and security for labour. Yet a look at the history of work in colonial and postcolonial Africa offers a substantially different picture, one in which progressive social compacts have never counterbalanced, for the majority of the continentâs proletariats, capitalist exploitation, and work has rather been experienced in peculiarly despotic forms. From Africaâs history, precariousness comes therefore into sharp relief as persistently and paradigmatically constituting labour and its experiences as such. The ordinary precariousness of wage labour was defined and strengthened not only by economic forces such as the continentâs continuous dependence on international markets for mineral and agricultural raw materials, which stifled the emergence of domestic accumulation and the expansion of wage labour; powerful extra-economic factors were also at work, namely colonial modalities of racialized subjugation with which, even when exploited as workers, the domination of Africans and their positioning as hyper-exploitable labour forces were primarily justified on account of their blackness. In the postcolonial reality, the dehumanization of African producers has found a parallel in the way in which vast numbers seeking avenues for survival in the circuits of self-employment and the âinformalâ economy have remained the target of state predation and repression.
Despite the limited benefits that specific groups of African workers could contingently claim in various times and locales, an African working class was never conceptualized, from a governmental standpoint, as an autonomous counterpart in negotiated productivity and redistributive deals. Although of colonial origins, such modalities of domination were confirmed by postcolonial rulers, which, despite enforcing a formally deracialized equal citizenship, largely embraced the labour regimes and forms of state discipline of their colonial predecessors. Yet, this chapter also argues, the typicality of precariousness in colonial and postcolonial Africa was not confined to labour exploitation and control, but also characterized African workersâ responses to waged employment. Far from relating to precariousness as a condition of powerlessness and subordination, African commodity producers have historically opted for contingent and casual labour relations or self-employment as ways to subvert capitalist work routines and thus implicitly criticize wage labour, which has consequently been heavily questioned as a pathway and signifier of human fulfilment and social inclusion. The precariousness of work in Africa thus undermines working for wages as a putatively progressive norm as well as a social condition through which capital reproduces itself.
During the past decade the concept of âprecarityâ has gained prominence, not only in labour studies but also within broader theoretical efforts at understanding the changing place of work in political and social orders writ large. Debates on precarity have in fact foregrounded the predicament of insecure, unprotected, poorly remunerated, and highly exploited jobs as a key dimension of collective existential conditions in dire times of global austerity and persistent capitalist crisis. Thus Guy Standing (2011) invokes âthe precariatâ as the possible harbinger of new social compacts, requiring a departure from the obsessive productivism underlying older generationsâ experiments with full-employment welfarism. Without such a shift, he warns, precarious and restless youth would remain a âdangerous classâ, fodder for all sorts of right-wing political adventures. Others are more optimistic as to the political possibilities of precarity sans official institutionalization through the stateâs discourse of social rights and deals. Neilson and Rossiter (2008) regard precarity as a concept that defines the politicization, most evident in southern European social movements during the 2000s and now resurfacing in anti-austerity mobilizations, of precarious employment. The condition of precariousness thus transcends the realms of sociology of work and industrial relations, embracing an entire existential reality, requiring new political concepts. For Neilson and Rossiter, precarity as a political concept indicates that Fordist and Keynesian experiments were temporary and now bygone exceptions, products of a political imagination, including ideas of work-based social inclusion and organized labour itself, anchored to the past. Judith Butler (2004) identifies in vulnerability, rather than stability, the promise of a new and critical political community resting on a collective opening up, which she terms âecstaticâ, to each otherâs precariousness, rather than on the ultimately illusory quest for individual integrity and security, to which, I would add, employment has provided a crucial vehicle throughout the twentieth century.
Precarity is juxtaposed, across these debates, to a past, or at least an âelsewhereâ â be it understood as a temporary historical episode, a progressive yet defunct phase, or a nostalgically evoked but now superseded ânormalâ some still deem worth fighting for â in which commodity-producing work supposedly provided rights, community cohesion, subjective selfhood, and social integration. Even scholars of Africa, as a continent that hardly witnessed the type of full-employment social-democratic strategies of older industrialized capitalism, have recursively commented on the devastation wrought by forty years of structural adjustment programmes and neoliberal policymaking by focusing on their making the world of work more precarious, thus invalidating earlier developmentalist dreams of job creation and the âpostcolonial social contractâ (Carmody 2002: 53). Loyalty to the ethics of waged work and an employment-centred representation of the social order are what, on the other hand, motivate the intervention in the postcolonial space of international bodies, especially the âdecent workâ agenda of the International Labour Organization, and the plethora of non-governmental organizations intent on âformalizingâ informal economies. As a critical counterpoint, Ronnie Munck (2013) invokes a âview from the Southâ on precarious labour, which would require a departure from Eurocentric understandings of âregularâ waged work as a social norm and notions of the precariat, Ă la Standing, as a potentially dangerous class, an image that would pathologize precarious workers, thereby blocking their political possibilities.
Among such possibilities, I contend in this chapter, is the radical critique of wage labour allowed by a focus on precarious work throughout Africaâs history of insertion in global capitalism, colonial white rule, and postcolonial turn to neoliberalism. Wage labour as such appears across the continent during the twentieth and early twenty-first century as a reality constitutively characterized by instability, violence, and suffering while remaining, at the same time, hollow, fragile, and uniquely contested. Experiences of working for wages also problematize the continental predicament of blackness and how, during the almost two centuries that follow transatlantic emancipation, black bodies have continued to be put to work through coercive modalities that belie their juridically âfreeâ status, hence exploitable by capital, in the wake of the abolition of slavery and colonial conquest. Emancipation and colonialism were closely inter-related, as European powers drew from abolition ethical justifications for the subjugation of Africa (Hall 2002; Blackburn 2011). Such ideological modalities have, on the other hand, continued to operate in the ways in which international financial institutions subjected the continent to the violence of structural adjustment under pretences of fostering the productive virtues and budgetary discipline of its inhabitants, assumed to be in need of perpetual external guidance. The representation of African labour as an indistinct black aggregate also underpins, in most dramatic forms, the socioeconomic violence through which the lives of countless migrants are made utterly disposable as they face the lethality of aiming for the southern borders of the European Union (Saucier and Woods 2014). Anti-blackness has crucially determined the precariousness of wage labour in Africa, yet it remains a largely neglected aspect in need of deep investigation (Barchiesi 2015). A look at precariousness as persistently and essentially constitutive of wage labour in Africa outlines, nonetheless, the continent in the specific terms of a space where precarious employment is not merely occasioned by the productive functions it historically performs, being rather indexical of racialized modalities of rule fortified by a global and paradigmatic dehumanization of blackness.
The unique tangle of racialized subjugation and economic exploitation African workers confront means that the analysis of labour relations has to take place, in this case, without the comfort of comparison with pasts in which work has originated anything but existential precariousness. Even at times, such as the post-war welfarist parenthesis, when employment seemed to deliver to Western proletariats opportunities of social mobility and recognition, in Africa waged employment has been unavailable as a building block of possible social compacts. Working for wages itself, with the limited stability it occasionally allowed, has been mostly limited to urban areas, transportation nodes, government employment, portions of commercial agriculture, specific plantation-type economies â especially in âsettlerâ colonies â mining areas, and scattered industrial pockets, notably at the continentâs northern and southern edges (Freund 1988; Ferguson 1999; Austin 2005). Following decolonization, the political elites of newly independent nation states committed themselves to projects of socioeconomic development, which remained nonetheless predicated upon the supply of primary commodities to world markets. African rural producers could mostly satisfy such requirements through complex articulations of commodified and non-capitalist production relations, especially centred in local lineages and communities, which, under the authority of elders and notables, retained nominal control of the land (Berry 1993; Bernstein 2010).
Large numbers of those who were unable or unwilling to eke out their subsistence in rural economies subject to the volatility of international markets, coercive surplus extraction by the state, and the patriarchal rule of professedly âtraditionalâ local African authorities moved to the urban areas where, faced with a general context of stifled industrialization and lack of economic diversification, wage labour remained volatile and uneven. As a result, many found avenues for survival in self-employment, casual jobs, and in what by the early 1970s came to be represented as the âinformal economyâ (Hart 1973; Agier et al. 1987; Meagher 1995). The phase of structural adjustment programmes, inaugurated by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the late 1970s, exacerbated such trends while international financial institutions fostered policies of economic liberalization geared at reinforcing Africaâs position as a supplier of primary exports. Already limited contingents of workers for wages, primarily in government jobs and limited service or manufacturing sectors, were dealt heavy blows by public spending cutbacks, the erosion of public safety nets, and the opening of markets to foreign competition. Off-the-books and âinformalâ economies, often emerging through the decentralization and outsourcing of productions on a local as well as global scale, partially counterbalanced the shrinking wage-earning populations, while leaving many in a state of persistent joblessness and generally forcing the participation of women and often children in widely unregulated and usually exploitative urban economies (De Miras 1987; Lourenço-Lindell 2010).
The trajectory of wage labour in Africa invites us to an analysis focused on historical continuities, which greatly complicates the meaning of âpostâ colonialism. The precariousness of African work is âpostâ colonial to the extent that it has challenged imaginaries of rule â emerged in the colonial context and transmitted to independent nation states â geared at positing wage labour as a condition to make Africans governable and productive. To challenge that paradigm of governance was not only the limited penetration of waged work itself. More importantly, as they were enforced among non-white populations in oppressive and unrewarding forms, wage labour and capitalist work ethics were resisted by Africans in ways that turned precariousness from a condition of vulnerability into a weapon against capitalist discipline. African workersâ use of contingent, casual, and intermittent jobs as modes of refusal of work and resistance to full proletarianization also questioned anti-colonial imagination in places where wage labour was most deeply entrenched. Thus in South Africa, for example, the development of African nationalist, socialist, or trade unionist opposition to racial segregation was predicated upon grounding social transformation agendas onto the putatively modern subjectivities, self-consciousness, and respectability generated by commodity production for the market (Barchiesi 2012.) Black escape from or avoidance of full-time waged employment was therefore simultaneously perceived as a threat by the colonial state and by African elites striving to mould the ânativeâ into a political actor worthy of popular sovereignty.
Left historia...
