Imagining the Material Conditions of Liberation: The Abolition of Compulsory Waged Labor

This paper calls for renewed consideration within liberation theologies of one of the material conditions that render freedom possible in contemporary life: freedom from external compulsion to perform waged labor. Compulsory waged labor is a condition of fundamental unfreedom that significantly curtails many other forms of freedom. Yet while liberation theologies have long called for the abolition of poverty in both Global South and Global North contexts, in recent decades the field has offered very little discussion of compulsory waged labor as one of the systems that creates poverty in the first place nor to what it would take for all people to be able to live free from it. Thus, in conversation with feminist anti-capitalist theory, the paper proposes that compulsory waged labor is not only a sociological epiphenomenon to be acknowledged on the way to doing liberation theology, but a core topic of liberationist theological critique and re-construction.