This paper calls for renewed consideration within liberation theologies of one of (in the words of the CFP) 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, since their beginnings, 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. Therefore, 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.
The paper is thus especially relevant to “imagining futures free from borders, oppressions, hierarchies” as well as to “freedom not as a right but as a responsibility” — insofar as freedom from compulsory waged labor can only be achieved through the realization of a societal responsibility to ensure that everyone has access to an equitably sufficient standard of living. At the same time, given that compulsory waged labor is part of the very foundations of the nation-state, the violence it sponsors, and the colonial structures in which it is enmeshed, the paper is also relevant several other points in CFP.
By “compulsory waged labor,” I am referring to the fact that, in capitalist societies — and societies aspiring or colonized to be capitalist — the vast majority of people have access to the necessities for both living and social participation only through and to the degree that they perform waged labor for an employer. That is, one cannot live at all unless one performs waged labor for an employer, most often a for-profit corporation (or a not-for-profit corporation or government agency that enables profit-maximization to continue). Access to food, clothing, housing, health care, child care, education, transportation, and every other good and service required for basic living is premised on one’s performance of waged labor: hence, it is compulsory if one wants to survive, much less thrive. Moreover, those who do not perform waged labor are compelled to be a “dependent” (in the legal usage) on someone who does, while those who are societally disabled from performing waged labor are compelled to survive on public support and services that diminish dignity and self-determination.
While most waged labor in the Global North is structured as formal employment but the majority of labor in the Global South occurs in what is known as the informal sector — without legal recognition or protections — most informal labor is nonetheless compulsory waged labor: labor that people are compelled to do in order to get wages to afford necessities for living. The compulsion to perform waged labor is thus inherently tied to systemic inequalities on the basis of gender, race, disability, citizenship status, carcerality, and coloniality. It both entrenches each of these inequalities (and others) and is socially reproduced by them.
The paper draws its critique of compulsory waged labor from feminist anti-capitalist theory, in particular Kathi Weeks (The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries), Nancy Fraser (Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do About It), and most recently Alyssa Battistoni (Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature). Indeed, the paper is also an invitation for liberation theologies to be in conversation with this strand of critical theory. Among other insights, these feminist scholars demonstrate that the compulsion of waged labor is an inherent feature of capitalism as such, not a side-effect of an incomplete version of capitalism. More importantly for liberation theologies, they turn the whole conceptualization of capitalism on its head by foregrounding relations of care among humans and with the planet: they posit such care as the indispensable aspect of human life, thereby interrogating why any of us should accede to capitalism’s demand that all relations of care be subsumed to the maximization of profit.
Because access to the necessities for living and social participation is, for most people across the world, premised on performing waged labor (or depending on someone who does), it then limits freedom in so many other areas. Consider how many profoundly meaningful things would fill the following blanks for billions of people: “I would really love to _____, except I need to keep this job so that I can afford _____.” Or the more sinister version, familiar to so many intersectionally targeted people: “I hate having to put up with _____, but I need to keep this job so that I can afford _____.” These kinds of material and spiritual unfreedoms imposed by compulsory waged labor are so commonly heard in everyday life yet we so rarely interrogate them as theological matters. What would it mean, for example, to say that one of the central tasks of liberation theologies is the complete abolition of compulsory waged labor? Or that compulsory waged labor is intrinsically incompatible with human liberation? My point is not that ideas similar to this haven’t been proposed in liberation theologies, but that they are almost never framed in terms of, and against, the system of compulsory waged labor as such. And by not naming and confronting head-on that system as one of the fundamental problems — of both thought and practice — liberation theologies are unable to propose adequate alternatives, in concrete policy terms, necessarily to secure the “material conditions that render freedom possible.”
Thus, the paper will conclude with a vision of a global “infrastructure of care” that would break the compulsion to waged labor. Against capitalist pieties that hard work is the index of moral goodness, such an infrastructure vindicates the moral worth of every person regardless of whether or how much waged labor they (are able to) perform.
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.