Introduction

Few years after I completed my research on post-socialist migrants’ imaginaries of the ‘West’, I came across Ariana, a long-time acquaintance and a discussion partner who always engaged critically with my explorations of migration as materiality and aspiration, as an attempt to construe the dilemmas marking her own decade-long journey as a domestic carer in Italy. It was an emotional first meeting after few years of no sight, during which our lives had changed direction once again. While I was struggling to find my place in an extremely casualised academic environment, Ariana was determined to break away from her entrapment in migrant work and set a fresh start back home. She has always been a hopeful dreamer (see Schielke, 2020), even during the most traumatising conundrums that care work exposed her to: she dreamt of opening her painting atelier on the lungomare or setting up a tourist agency and bringing Italians to her historic hometown, and if worst comes to worst, marrying an aristocrat and living in his family villa as a wife and not as a servant. Her migration was certainly a response to the socio-economic duress brought by post-socialist neoliberalisation, when many women professionals found themselves squeezed out of a marketplace that did not valorise previously acquired occupational skills and allowed no possibility for secure income. Pressured by the urgent need to repay her mounting debts and led by the anxieties of securing a dignified old age, she left her public sector job and departed for Italy. Yet, migration was also an activation mechanism driving her imaginative capacity in a way that made all the post-1989 promises of Western modelled democracy and well-being seem an objective reality within reach. I must admit I had always struggled with her inability to let go of her illusionary projections, although these clearly transpired as self-justification strategies rather than actual beliefs. This time, however, her appraisal of the last 10 years took me by surprise. ‘It was all one big lie’, she said, hers was a badante’s life all along, and Italians would have never accepted her as an equal. She went further and compared her Italian experience to a prison that she had voluntarily condemned herself to in the name of some nebulous ideals.

Ariana’ prospects for building a future for herself in Bulgaria were fastly shrinking; without a job and with almost depleted savings, her return to the circular trajectories of the migrant existence was almost inevitable. There seemed to be a fundamental reason for this suffering, she claimed, something that went beyond individual responsibility and squared directly on the politico-economic system in which one had to make do. Not quite able to put her finger on the political parameters of change, one thing was for certain, states should be doing more ‘for the people’ (za horata), everyone should be guaranteed a ‘decent living’ (da zhiveyat dostoyno), and it is not money that should make life worthwhile in contemporary societies but mutual care (zagrizhenost). With no prompting from my side, she proclaimed pre-1989 bureaucratic socialism a fairer social ‘system’ that cared for ‘its people’ and defended the lofty principles of equality and justice, not just on paper but by grounding them in the concreteness of the everyday that everyone could attest to. Such views, coming from the mouth of a self-proclaimed supporter of free market ideas and an active participant in the post-1989 ‘democratic revolution’ who clung to her beliefs with desperate resistance while the catastrophic human costs of Bulgarian ‘transition’ became her own reality, can certainly produce a puzzling effect.

Ariana was not the only one, many of the Bulgarian-origin labour migrants in London and other British locales were growing increasingly disillusioned with the ‘West’ as a locus of individual becoming and have consistently disassociated themselves from the values and meaning that this highly mythologised concept stood for. The harsh conditions of low-skilled work and the daily experiences of abjection stood in remarkable contrast to the widely adopted political and cultural values of freedom, human rights and self-determination that filled the ideological essence of the capitalist transformations in Eastern Europe and that many saw as realistically attainable only in the ‘West’. And while internalised market practices and values have indeed borne fruits for a well-endowed and internationally connected minority of West-bound professionals, the ordinary workers that this article sets its focus on had started to reject an ideology that justified poverty and unequal existence across the region with a new-found fervour. The concrete question that one needs to pose here is: what are the ideological registers through which this popular disillusionment is articulated, and can it enfold into a more definite and emancipatory political critique?

This article examines how post-socialist subjects relate to dominant imaginaries of the ‘West’ through the materiality and practice of labour migration. It sets out two main goals. The first is to problematise the assumption shared by much of the literature on the imaginary-migration nexus, namely, that (semi-)peripheral imaginations tend to uncritically reproduce the ideologically powerful symbols of Western modernity, in the process breeding disillusionment and deceit. Gaining insight from Cornelius Castoriadis’ conceptualisation of the imaginary as a radical praxis (1994), my goal is to disentangle the complex potentialities of the imaginative capacity of those commanding only limited amounts of power and often ill-positioned to challenge the hegemony of dominant interpretative schemas. Rather than a medium for enacting hegemonic Western-centred worldviews, this article takes migration as a particular embodied condition of powerlessness that can animate subjects’ capacity to re-articulate radically different visions of the desirable and possible. The second goal is to trace the concrete repertoires that give shape and texture to the radical imaginary in the routinised praxis of post-socialist migration. The politicisation of the socialist past as a historical context of shared experiences and a symbolic resource of forgotten ideals opens up a space for critical engagement with the capitalist policies producing despair and suffering in the present. Invoking meaning and value from previously existing ideals of solidarity, justice and freedom as they relate to the realms of work, self-hood and socio-political organisation, my interlocutors counter-mapped the trauma of the present to the stability and fullness of what was before, in the process hinting at a possible moment of ‘rupture’ and ‘re-institution’.

Migratory Imaginaries as Radical Politics of the Ordinary

Growing set of works discuss the imaginary aspects of migration, especially with reference to the culturally informed visions of particular places that forge anticipations for life and opportunities that exceed the drudgery of the familiar and the available (see Schielke, 2020; Manolova, 2019; Chambers, 2018; Benson, 2012; Vigh, 2009). The migratory imaginary has come under well-founded criticism for its empty gesturing towards individual autonomy and its culturally essentialist reading as an abstracted but powerful driving force behind contemporary cross-border movements. For Aihwa Ong (1999), the methodological mistake of reifying individual agency via the imaginary conceals the unequal dynamics of capitalist development and the oppressive border regimes that govern contemporary movements. Reminding of Bourdieu’s insistence on the imminently social genesis of the imaginary, Andrew Smith (2006) notes how the imaginative capacity of individuals is a function of class, both when it comes to the subjective predispositions that determine the parameters of the possible (understandings of need) and one’s ability to actualise the imaginative potential in practice (access to opportunity). As such, the analytical utility of the imaginary has been sought in its conceptualisation as a terrain of tension, between individual desires, conventional social models and the historical materialist frameworks within which subjective modes of being and acting unfold and accrue meaning (see Schielke, 2020; Chambers, 2018; Ong, 1999).

The intertwining of the material and the imaginative is most often foregrounded in pre-migratory temporalities and contexts of departure in which the imagination is active in shaping expectations, paths of action and strategies for success. Reversely, the ways in which the materiality of migration itself, in terms of labour regimes, regulatory frames and unequal exchanges, acts to transform or rupture the imaginative have been insufficiently explored. Taking seriously such objections, Samuli Schielke introduces the notion of ‘inevitable dreams’, to signal the reframing effects of material engagements that ‘reduce the range of imagined possibilities that one can reasonably pursue’ (2020: 36) and delimit migrant aspirations. Thomas Chambers’ concern with the cyclic production of the migratory imaginary goes into a similar vein, reminding us to think of it as an ‘ongoing process’ that is simultaneously prone to co-optation to ‘meet the demands of labour markets’ and the formation of ‘new forms of consciousness’ (2018: 1424). In any case, the prevailing depictions of migrant dreams as predicated upon the oppressive structures of labour exploitation and symbolic marginalisation continue to denote a sense of futility and deceit.

This has been especially the case with subjects whose horizons of possibility have been circumscribed by their spatio-temporal existence in the periphery of the metropolitan order. In that respect, migratory imaginaries across the post-socialist space have often appeared as void of complex meaning. This has commonly resulted in the reduction of rich migration-related articulations to a crude economistic logic and instrumentalist interest. In more sophisticated and historically grounded frameworks, the ideational component of East–West movements is largely seen as a function of the powerful (and disempowering) symbols of Western modernity and their reproduction in the materialist and epistemological structures of Eurocentric global coloniality (Krivonos & Näre, 2019; Manolova, 2019; Samaluk, 2016). Consequently, post-socialist subjects are analysed as either economic agents, moved by the logics of rationality rather than dreams, or a (quasi-)subalterns caught in the horizon of the utopian and non-viable that condemns whole societies to a disorientating and disempowering position of ideological subjugation. The following questions emerge: are (semi-)peripheral subjects endowed with an autonomous imaginative capacity, or are they forever bound to reproduce the representational logics of Western coloniality? How do the oppressive materialities of migration figure in the (re-)formation of peripheral visions? And if these amount to anything beyond (self-)prescribed ‘false consciousness’, do they transpire any political potential for disrupting the very order that limits the horizon of the possible and supplants it with hollowed out but enticing hopes?

To answer these questions, this article draws on Cornelius Castoriadis’ concept of the ‘radical imaginary’ (1975), as well as more recent theoretical activist engagements that search to articulate its political productivity in transformative struggles and collective movements. Rooted in a variety of theoretical traditions, the concept of the imaginary as ‘enabling but not fully explicable symbolic matrix within which a people imagine and act as world-making collective agents’ (Gaonkar, 2002) has gained traction for its double function: on the one hand, stabilising, and on the other contesting the instituted social order. Situated at the interplay between dominant ideologies and habitus-grounded understandings, the imaginary foregrounds the moral order in which subjective ideas, practices and dispositions receive their normative endorsement and acceptance as meaningful. While sharing the preoccupation with the social roots of the imaginative practice, Castoridadis is more inclined to see the socio-historical process of world-making as a chain of unordered ‘ruptures’ or ‘discontinuities’ through which the imaginative releases its ex nihilo transformative charge and self-creates society anew (1994). For him, imagination and autonomy form the fundamental basis for re-thinking the ‘ontology of creation’ away from the crude materialist determinism of Marxist thought. Rejecting the classical standpoint of the imaginary as a force of reproduction, he captures its irreducible foundation in human creativity as ‘original investment’ in meanings that ‘attribute…importance’ to the social processes and political institutions (1987: 128). There have been concerns with Castoriadis’s ability to theorise the exact prerequisites that activate the re-articulation of alternative imaginary significations. These have been partly related to his insistence on the subjectivist and self-enclosed nature of the imaginary (Elliot 2002). From the perspective of the subject, the radical imaginary requires the establishment of critical reflexivity through which the ‘real’ is seen as detached from the ‘horizon of potential otherness’ and the capacity to disrupt and re-create anew is appropriated as inherently human (Carlisle, 2017 cited in Asara, 2020:4). For Taylor (2002), the crack in the fragile dialectics between convergence and divergence opens up at instances when individuals are no longer able to experientially verify the credibility of the dominant symbolic framework in their daily lives and when what appears as ‘obvious’ stops being accessible from a first-person perspective.

The catalysing forces behind the radical imaginary have been further tackled in the epistemic communities of scholar activists and social movement thinkers who have discerned its essential anti-systemic and anti-individualist potentiality in collective forms of organising and community practices (see Asara, 2020; Centemeri, 2018; Haiven, 2014; Haiven & Khasnabish, 2014). In terms of self-making and authenticity, claims to freedom and justice and the building of solidarity alliances, the imaginary becomes a precondition for any collectively conceived political practice that aims at resisting the determinacy of the status quo. In this sense, the radical politics of the imaginative is cultivated in the awareness of a shared predicament of subjugation and the purposeful pursuit of a defined common vision of action against it. Where my interest falls, however, is in the less-explored workings of the radical imagination as an everyday and inconspicuous social practice that is carried out individually but under the premise of some definable ‘we’ and which has the potential to uncover that which has been kept out of sight without falling into delusional and fantasy traps. The central goal is to contour the collective imaginary horizons of postosocialist subjects as they emerge within and around the materiality of their labour migration. Symbolising simultaneously a shared pursuit of aspiration and fall into disillusionment, strive for emancipation and loss of autonomy (Manolova, 2021b; Pine, 2014), migration forces one into a shifting ground that requires constant negotiation and re-positioning vis-à-vis different models of being, temporalities and regimes of value.

Regimes of Mobility and Shifting Ideologies

It is in times of socio-historical turmoil and rapid political change that the ideational trajectories of collective visions of social life, practices and futures are re-drawn and re-asserted with new conviction (Pelkmans, 2017). As observed by anthropologists, the post-1989 transformations in Eastern Europe, euphemistically dubbed ‘transition’, have constituted precisely such a process, in which the symbolic matrix guiding a whole generation — concepts of social order, value, personhood, etc. — were re-defined and re-instituted in line with the newly imposed politico-economic model of neoliberal development (Verdery, 1996).

In the post-1989 period, the notion of the so-called West gained popularity in cultural and political narratives across the region and soon became the dominant social imaginary through which collective horizons of political and socio-economic change were defined and interpreted. The ‘imaginary West’ (Yurchak, 2006) functioned as ideological framework organised around a Eurocentric ontological paradigm and transpired developmentalist technologies of governance and subjectivation characteristic for (post)colonial contexts (Baysha, 2014). Consolidated on the basis of essentialist binaries where the ‘West’ stood for ‘civilisation’, ‘progress’ and ‘democracy’ and the ‘East’/Bulgaria for ‘backwardness’, ‘totalitarianism’ and ‘underdevelopment’, the imaginary functioned primarily as a political tool for ideological persuasion: a sort of a ‘myth of modernity’ that posited neoliberal transformation as a common-sense project for social development (see Traykov, 2019). This is not to say that the imaginary consolidated a homogenised interpretation or assumed total power over individual interpretations and longings. Numerous strategies of resistance against and contestation of the post-1989 economic and symbolic order were documented — in relation to work processes and organisation (Dunn, 2004; Morris, 2016), class subjectivities (Morris, 2012; Satybaldieva, 2017) and market exchange (Kaneff, 2002) — in the process formulating alternative concepts of value and visions for social organisation. The fact is, however, that despite its contradictions, in popular consciousness, the ‘West’ started functioning as a composite of collective aspirations and a directive principle of hope for a future, oriented around expectations of a certain ‘normalcy’ and ‘betterment’ (Manolova, 2020, 2019; Samaluk, 2016; Fehérváry, 2013).

I have suggested elsewhere that it is precisely this strong utopian appeal of the imaginary West — as a context-less and undefined telos of social change — that turned migration into the most popular individual praxis for its realisation in the post-socialist period. While the pursuit of the Western ideal materialised for a privileged minority of Bulgarians, for the rest the persuasion of ‘free market’ and ‘democracy’ mantras weakened under the pressure of market forces and neoliberal restructuring with devastating material effects. Apart from a hopeful pursuit of a qualitatively different future, for the majority, migration was primarily a matter of urgency for coping with the socio-economic uncertainty and personal hardships that permeated all aspects of life.

In terms of periodisation, Bulgarian migration trails the trajectories of East–West movements characteristic of other post-socialist contexts where the model of dispersed, ‘back-and-forth’ labour mobility consolidated as a main life-sustaining practice and a pressure valve from the onset of ‘democratic’ reforms. The period up until 2001 when visa requirements for Schengen zone countries were scrapped was marked by illegal crossings and clandestine existence for a large number of workers who were trying to make ends meet. Bulgaria’s EU accession in 2007 marked the further liberalisation of the restrictive travel and residence regimes, followed by the granting of full access to Western labour markets in 2014. The newly acquired status opened up routes for regularisation that, at least on paper, guaranteed access to formal labour markets and inclusion in the associated social, economic and institutional spaces surrounding a work-related status, such as welfare and residential rights. In reality and despite their full EU citizen status, for many low-skilled Bulgarian (and Romanian) workers, the social and economic aspects of living remained unchanged. Many continued to exist in the ‘shadow’ economy, doing undeclared or semi-formal jobs, under the highly precarious forms of self-employment, agency and posted work, or casual recruitment within particular sectors that are well-known for the poor observance of labour regulations and conditions of over-exploitation — agriculture, construction, hospitality, food production etc. (Bogoeski, 2022; Alberti & Danaj, 2017). At the same time, the restructuring of the British welfare regime, both at judicial and policy levels, along the principle of combating ‘benefit fraud’ has tied EU migrants’ social rights to the retainment of formal work status, thus practically leaving a large pool of workers in irregular employment with no recourse to an institutionalised social safety net (Alberti, 2014). Critical migration scholars, like Burrell and Schweyher (2019), have paralleled the social impact of this restrictive approach to the harshness of policies like those of the ‘hostile environment’ that disproportionately affected non-EU migrants in the UK. Arguing against the continuous treatment of EU migrants as a privileged status category, in these and other accounts, the combined and complexly interrelated dynamics of labour deregulation, restriction of welfare access (in relation to both contributory and non-contributory benefits) and the severe encroachment of residence rights are pointed as key indicators for the ‘migrantisation’ of ‘free mobility’ (Riedner, 2018; Lafleur & Mescoli, 2018), especially for certain categories of EU nationals such as EU-2 migrants who have been treated in uneven and discriminatory ways. Characteristic of the process of migrantisation, in its governing perspective, is the deliberate irregularisation of migrant workers through the hardening of administrative procedures related to the activation of EU statuses in the early arrival stage (Manolova, 2021a) and the rescaling of bordering practices in the everyday interaction with state and local institutions, schools and landlords (Burrell & Schweyher, 2019). Without denying the relative protection that EU citizenship extends to those endowed with it, such findings have necessitated a more complicated account of the current positioning of EU migrants and the commonalities in treatment vis-à-vis their non-EU counterparts, particularly in relation to transformations in citizenship and welfare regimes and their multi-scaled and differentiated impact on producing socio-legal vulnerability. These particularities of the intra-EU migration regime need to be taken into account when discussing the pressing materialities of post-2014 Bulgarian migration.

My analysis draws on my doctoral fieldwork within locations in Britain, Bulgaria and in-between conducted between 2014 and 2016 and multiple sporadic engagements till the present day. The research includes informal conversations and semi-structured interviews with labour migrants and their families, as well as participant observation in work and home settings, spaces of urban encounter, state agencies and transport vehicles traversing the space between Bulgaria and Britain. All participants had a long history of back-and-forth mobility and at one point entertained the dream of permanent settlement in the ‘West’ where they hoped to achieve imagined ‘normal life’. Theirs was a strenuous and transformative experience in which migration oscillated between a source of hope and a force of necessity that simultaneously brought them closer and further away from the desired yet ever unrealisable future.

The selected sample consists of fifteen participants who can be identified as ‘working class’ on the basis of their unstable economic predicament which was additionally aggravated by the effects of the 2009 global financial crisis and which resulted in their indebtedness — eight were repaying consumer credits, five owned money to family and friends, and the other two were repaying bank mortgages. In all cases, accumulated debts, for covering healthcare expenses for sick family members, children-related costs, house renovations and basic spending for household bills, created the immediate pressure for migration. In 2010, two third of Bulgarians were classified as severely affected by the crisis, 30% of the overall population was repaying credits, of whom 40% were struggling with severe indebtedness and inability to cover monthly instalments (Vladimirova et al., 2011).

In terms of employment activities, all participants were subjected to different degrees of precarisation in both public and private sector occupations. Four worked in the public sector and state enterprises where wages were meagre, but jobs were valued for their social security contributions and the opportunity of taking unpaid leaves which allowed for long periods of work abroad; five were on full-time contracts with private employers for above minimal wages (and often additional cash-in-hand payments); three were petit entrepreneurs and traders whose businesses were hit hard by the financial crisis and were barely making ends meet. Half of the people in the sample reported supplementing their income with occasional ‘shadow’ jobs or informal services that they performed on demand; e.g. a worker in the state railways was putting kitchen tiles on the weekends, a cleaner in a public building was cleaning private homes after work, etc. All were highly dependent on kin support for sharing household expenses, covering caregiver duties and assuring financial help in cases of emergency. As identified, the socio-economic costs of the global recession were unevenly afflicted on populations in ‘transitioning’ East European countries and especially on those of them who occupied the bottom of the income and educational structure (Ghodsee & Orenstein, 2021). Already struggling to keep their heads above the water, many unskilled and low-skilled workers were positioned in a state of chronic (multiple) precariousness due to decrease of average salaries and worsening labour protection, while the small business owners were engulfed in a process of ‘proletarisation’ as severe decrease in demand, stagnating markets and tight consumer budgets forced many into a social descent.

‘The West is a Workcamp with Better Meal Options’

It could be argued without exaggeration that for all precarious workers that I met, the 2014 liberalisation of West European labour markets signalled a much-awaited opportunity for overcoming work-related insecurities. These expectations, expressed in the oft-cited notions of ‘stable’ (stabilna) and ‘regular’ (redovna) work (rabota), invoked ideas of contracted, full-time and permanent employment that could open up paths for formal inclusion in social security and protection systems and thus create conditions for long-term incorporation. What many low-skilled workers came to realise, however, was that formal rights offered little protection from pre-2014 patterns of informality and exploitation and that the vulnerabilities of temporary work and other types of atypical employment relations were to remain a persistent reality.

Such is the story of Assen (51) who was toiling away as a construction worker for a temp agency for a month and a half. His most urgent distress was the fact that there were no guaranteed working hours and the risk of being forced into further indebtedness and an eventual impossibility to sustain his survival in London. This was his third attempt to set himself and his family up in the UK, this time arriving with the belief that his new fully-fledged status would prevent him from falling into unpleasant and unwaged jobs like car washing or leaflet distribution that he had performed for long periods of time in 2009 and 2011. After having worked for just 10 days in the first month of arrival, he was despondent with the insecurities provoked by agency work: ‘This waiting is killing me. Will they call? Will I make enough hours this week? The rent, the bills, they pile up without a break. I cannot miss another payment.’

Similar was the experience of Miro (42) who worked as self-employed for a Bulgarian cleaning firm in South London 4 months since his decision to re-migrate. Recruited as a ‘manager’ because of his previous experience as small company owner in Bulgaria, Miro was on the call 24/7 and was constantly required to fill in for his colleagues, as a driver, a loader of equipment and as a cleaner. When I met him one Friday evening in a shopping centre next to his place, he was extremely afflicted with his persistent dependence on a bogus self-employment status:

  • The biggest fraud [self-employment]. They [company owners] kill you with work, you are on a standby even on weekends. At the same time, you need to pick up the pieces in case something goes wrong, or there is an accident [he had just suffered a serious back injury after being asked to unload some heavy machinery]. You work like a dog you get paid the minimum and on top of this you cover expenses, for accounting, etc. It comes down to one needing to subsidise their own employment.

During my fieldwork, I met hundreds of workers who bore the material and psychological burdens stemming from self-employment and zero-hour contracting in construction, cleaning, food processing and hospitality sectors. The low pay (and often the non-payment of wages), unfixed hours, demanding working conditions and the pressure to constantly adapt to changing workloads created a general context of insecurity in which what was on stake was not only issues around working conditions and income but also workers’ ability to plan and assert control over their future. While the proliferation of such precarious forms of labour, especially in economies that prioritise subcontracting as the paradigmatic recruitment strategy, such as the British one, has been primarily assigned as a problem for non-EU migrants, we can see that these are continuously endured by EU citizens who are not subjected to restrictions.

Migrant workers tended to position self-employment within coercive structures of labour exploitation and economic necessity, thus effectively denouncing prevailing neoliberal notions of entrepreneurship and self-interest that envisage it as a preferred alternative to waged work. The 32-year-old Yulia, a maid in a large hotel chain, regarded critically the fact that it was mostly foreigners who were ‘made self-employed’, while locals had better chances for getting on more conventional, ‘on the contract’ jobs. Almost a year after arriving, she changed four different jobs, two of these were informal and paid cash-in-hand, and two were on a self-employed basis. She noted that almost all of her Bulgarian (and Romanian) co-workers in the hotel were self-employed, while the British managers and supervisors were contractually employed. To her, this differentiation clearly signalled the unfavourable position that self-employment ascribed in terms of minimum security but also the lack of awareness on behalf of workers, most of whom were unfamiliar with such forms of hiring:

  • In the beginning many didn’t understand how self-employment works, they thought it was prestigious, they would go back home and say, ‘I have a company there’. We all have companies here [laughing], but in effect we are ordinary workers, with the difference that that we take upon ourselves all the risks.

Experiences of casual labour and fragmentation of work statuses were often set in relation to, and criticism against them launched in counter-reference to, both normative understanding and experience of the formal, full-time and ‘for life’ employment in socialist Bulgaria and its fundamentally different approach to work and personal development. The observed conversation between a group of day labourers who gathered in front of a small Bulgarian food shop in one of the most impoverished areas of London, waiting to be picked up by a potential employer, exemplifies this comparison. While their conversations rarely touched upon topics outside their immediate job-related concerns, this day was unlike others as it marked the toppling of a scandalous coalition government after a year in which thousands of Bulgarians marched the streets on a daily basis. The event was not met with hope; rather, it sparked a conversation about the past 30 years of economic suffering and successive governments’ betrayal of people’s needs. Ivan, now in his mid-60 s, recounted his experience as a technician in a canned-food factory, a job that he held for over 20 years and that he valued for the stability and economic security it provided for his family. His migration career started 3 years after he lost his job and oscillated between Germany, the UK, Spain and Greece where he spent between 2 months and a year on low-waged and mostly irregular jobs. The others chimed in with similar experiences, measuring up their work-related achievements in the state-socialist regime and nodding in agreement with general statements of the sort: ‘There were jobs for everyone…you finish school and you would be put on a job’; ‘You have a job, you can feed your family’; ‘You didn’t need to worry about losing your job or paying your bills’; and ‘The job was for life’. These responses reflected a deep anger with the volatile and exploitative labour markets that could not provide a living wage, but they also asserted support for bygone principles of social justice that underlined the centrality of work in mediating the fundamental social contract upon which the socialist system gained its legitimacy.

In reciprocity for their labour, socialist workers received job security, living wage and social welfare which set the ground for equal and effective participation in the larger society structures and relations. In socialist regimes in the region, work had fundamental significance in the structuring of individuals’ embeddedness in multiple sites of ‘communal sociability’ (Ashwin, 1998) and togetherness (Yurchak, 2006), leisure, social reproduction and socialised services, in the process of shaping a specific experience and conception of what being a ‘person’ meant. Thus, as argued by Matejskova (2013), state-socialist practice conceived of work as a socially embedded activity which exceeded the mere transactional understanding of labour and instead constituted it as part of the enactment of personhood through shared sociality. In stark contrast, experiences of work within Western neoliberal spaces of market fragmentation speak to the fundamental rupture between the social and the economic function of labour.

In a migration regime context, when the worker is to a large extent expunged from habitual institutions of social reproduction and their subsequent ‘re-integration’ is inhibited by control and regulation practices, the extraction of surplus labour takes place under even more punishing conditions of over-exploitation and objectification. This was pointed out in statements such as, ‘here, they want you to work (bachkash), no one cares about the rest’, or ‘for them we are bachkatori, not people’ which come to allude to migrant workers’ treatment as crude labour power and not as social beings that reproduce themselves and their families through the means of stable employment relations and guaranteed inclusion in social, welfare and employment rights. I return to this form of objectification through work and its racialising underpinnings in the final empirical section.

The economisation of personhood in ‘precarious work’ is reported to have a destructive impact on individual well-being and the maintenance of intersubjective and community relationships. The emic notion of ‘zombification’ (zombirane) that was voiced on numerous occasions directly problematises the effects of objective processes of alienation and over-exploitation that intensify in the particular constellation between migratory and employment regimes. The story of the 24-year-old Georgi circulated amongst my East London interlocutors and was always brought to the fore when questions of workers’ atomisation and the deterioration of social relationships was discussed. His low-waged job and the hospital bills that amounted after the death of his father forced Georgi and his mother to leave home and find a job in the West. For more than 3 years, he paralleled three different jobs, making more than 60 h a week, without any respite on weekends, holidays or evenings. He lost touch with his friends, his mother barely crossed paths with him, and many gave him warnings about the possible effects of this overexhaustion. He did not listen, he was like ‘possessed’, his friends said, it was only ‘money, money, money’ in his head and not even the repaid debts and his raising savings account could divert him from this self-destructive path. Eventually he suffered a nervous breakdown and developed a severe anxiety and panic attack disorder that prevented him from leaving the house. When I went to meet his good friend Delcho who sought my help in finding psychological support for Georgi, he told me the following:

  • This is not a place [London] where you can spend more than 3–5 months…otherwise you run the risk of being zombified or falling into the trap of self-zombification.

  • Author: What do you mean?

  • Delcho: No private life, no time to socialise outside of work. You become obsessed with making money, you live in fear, what if I don’t have money for the rent? What if I can’t pay my bills and have to return home? He [Georgi] exchanged his life for the money. As they say, ‘the West is a workcamp with better meal options’. Work-eat-sleep, repeat.

Delcho’s discourse rejected money-making as a main virtue in neoliberal conceptions of the self and condemned the structural pressures that compelled migrants to anti-social working hours, cost-cutting and estrangement and thus to a living locked in the endless cycle of work. He was too young to position these in a contextual contrast to the state-socialist times, but this was the exact frame of reference used by a group of elderly workers and their wives that I shared the story with on a later social occasion. Recollections of collegial spirit, factory canteens and other subsidised workers’ infrastructure and events, as well as other more informal forms of socialisation that diluted the boundary of work-related and personal identity, were recounted with a sense of loss but also indignation with job insecurity as a permanent prospect with devastating social effects. Grievances over temp jobs and the forms of control they exercised over one’s sense of being initiated appreciation of more ‘social’ and ‘just’ relationships between work and self. Counter to the neoliberal logic that objectifies people as bearers of labour power commodified for bare survival, my interlocutors assigned value to the socialist conception of work as a central mechanism for mediating one’s participation in the larger social and state collective. People with no personal memories or experiences of work before 1989 echoed concerns with practices of flexibility, entrepreneurship and self-management as fostered in Western imaginaries of work and subjecthood and were able to advance a counter-vision of a politico-economic system which gave care to stability, economic security and socialisation without explicitly referencing these to state socialism. Some used the past as a source of comparison and critique, while others instinctively recounted the values of labour in its socialist reading, in both cases driven by the fierce indignation with their assigned economic roles and as a signal to the loss of trust in a ‘West’ of economic abundance where hard work and dedication paid off.

‘Everyone is Free to Shovel Cow Shit’: Social Justice, Freedom and Mutuality

Most working-class migrants experienced the post-1989 market ‘transition’ as a prolonged period of struggle, in which keeping a sustainable livelihood and providing for the basic needs of one’s family was constantly jeopardised by crumbling social and economic structures. Concomitantly, they had to deal with their symbolic marginalisation in the new neoliberal order of worth which delegitimised their pains and needs and assigned them the responsibility for their alleged failure to adapt to a competitive economy. The need to deflect allegations of their ‘backwardness’ and lack of entrepreneurial ambition had led to the development of some form of critical awareness in many, who were able to articulate the systematic nature of social injustices and at the same time through a recourse to lay normativity (Satybaldieva, 2017) they depicted a social vision of justice and equality that drastically contrasted the free market present. Already before departure and drawing upon the experience of their earlier migrant careers, my interlocutors vehemently criticised the powerful myth of meritocracy and individualism that has been well documented as an enticing principle of the migratory imagination of the ‘cosmopolitan’ class of East Europeans (Eade et al., 2006; Rodriguez, 2010). Reni, a 36-year-old cleaner and seasonal migrant since her mid-20 s, ridiculed migrants’ gullible belief in market success and social becoming through migration:

  • They say, ‘Look at me, I am already here while you are still there in the mud’. But this is one big lie, Bulgarians love to lie. The truth is, you can never progress here [in the UK/West], you are always at the bottom, you are a servant (prisluga). It is an island made out of masters and servants.

Reni was sceptical of the idea that Britain (or to that matter any Western country) offers meritocratic opportunities for social advancement that could be achieved through hard work, or at least, she does not see meritocracy as working for people like herself, endowed with modest educational capital and economic resources. In contrast, she identified Britain as a society criss-crossed by sharp socio-economic divides with a small elite of proprietors and an impoverished majority serving the needs of those on top. She also rejected a pervasive ideology of individualism and the claim that one’s well-being depended on one’s perseverance and own effort and instead perceived social conflict through the grammars of class divisions and inequalities. Some study participants went as far as to challenge the legitimacy of meritocracy as an organising principle of social justice and fairness altogether and instead put forward ideas of socialist egalitarianism that they depicted as antithetical to the neoliberal present.

Consider the explanation of Rado, a 50-year food technologist who worked in a German-owned company in Bulgaria for the past 4 years but contemplated a stint as a seasonal worker in Britain to subsidise his meagre salary:

  • What is this competitiveness nowadays? You are told you need to push yourself to the limit, otherwise you won’t get anything, not even the basics. How could it be that only those who have the fancy professions can live normal lives – like ITs and managers, but we cannot all become ITs, we also need food producers and cleaners, otherwise we will starve to death [laughing].

Since our very first meeting in a migrant recruitment agency in Bulgaria, I felt that Rado’s politisation of structural inequalities comes from the position of someone who has internalised different principles of justice and who paid attention to egalitarianism as articulated in historical lineage of state socialism. This impression got confirmed on a subsequent conversation in a café next to his workplace on the day when he was supposed to submit his job resignation, a decision that filled him with a mixture of fear, excitement and nostalgia:

  • Before [pre-1989] was different, there was enough for everyone (imashe za vsichki). You won’t become rich but you will have enough. If you were honest and you had a job you didn’t need to fear for your bread. What did they say? From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs [laughing].

Here, Rado paraphrased Karl Marx’s famous postulate from Critique of the Gotha Programme (Marx, 2023 [1875]) turned into socialist era party slogans to be found in political programmes, directives and agitprop materials and referencing to one of the main tenets of socialist policy, namely, the egalitarian principle of redistribution of goods. On the one hand, Rado’s articulation evoked the neoliberal endorsement of Darwinian logics of market competition with a distinct hierarchy of professional occupations according to their supposed market value. On the other, he raised the counterpoint perspective of the socialist era system of just distribution in which the state was responsible to care and provide for all workers, not according to their achievements or productivity but addressing their most fundamental needs. State-socialist regimes placed great weight on material welfare and egalitarian redistribution as mediating the shared definition of social justice in which the people engaged in productive work and the state, in exchange, allocated goods and resources in everybody’s interest. Just distribution took place not only through wage incentives but also through the socialisation and free provision of services and social infrastructure (education, housing, healthcare, etc.), price controls and benefit packages largely regardless of one’s position or performance in the workplace (Cook, 1993). Commitment to the principles of universal social protection and egalitarianism remains strong more than 30 years after the end of socialism; according to a recent survey, more than 90% of Bulgarians find the levels of inequality in the country disturbingly high, whereas more than 80% advocate government measures for addressing these (Hallaert & Lee, 2020).

In other instances, when reflecting on the changing collective meaning and social function of migration, migrants contested the post-socialist conceptualisation of ‘justice’ as connoting notions of individual freedoms and human rights and instead tried to re-define it vis-à-vis ideas of socio-economic redistribution and collective prosperity. In Bulgaria, as elsewhere in the post-socialist/Soviet world, the dominant (geo)political project of ‘catching up’ with the ‘West’ entailed the implementation of two parallel processes — on the one hand, the restructuring of social, economic and political institutions according to a Western template and, on the other, the dismantling and political-legal extermination of all elements of a socialist past defined as ‘totalitarian’ and ‘undemocratic’ (Traykov, 2020). The operational logics of this process of ‘de-communisation’ followed closely the consolidation of the neoliberal fragmentation between the political and economic arena of human rights and freedoms that reduced claims for justice to the individually orientated and politically conditioned process of transformation. In the post-1989 transitional framework, the principle of freedom of movement (FoM) emerged as the quintessential marker of democratisation, liberating citizens from socialist ‘despotism’ and bringing them closer to the liberal consensus of the ‘free world’. But while the right to freely cross international borders remained one of the most cherished achievements of post-socialism (Standard Eurobarometer,  2015), its relationship to individual liberty continued to be problematised as contextually false and insincere. Take, for instance, the exchange between Krassi (48), an agency worker who struggled to support her two teenage sons, and Blago (53), a posted construction worker and bankrupted petit entrepreneur, who met for the first time at a dinner hosted in my Birmingham flat in November 2016:

  • Krassi: For some people migration is still like a dream, like freedom…They always say that we have been oppressed as society, during Communism we couldn’t get out (izlizame), so then they got crazy, everyone was determined to go abroad (kato nevideli), to be free [laughing]. I personally never felt oppressed, yes, it is true that travelling to the ‘West’ (na Zapad) was not easy but then why would you travel when you had everything that you need at home.

  • Blago: Don’t forget we could still travel in the Soviet space. I was in a male choir, just a provincial school choir but we toured the major Soviet cities – from Moscow to Yerevan, from Yerevan to Almaty and then we even went to East Germany once. And we travelled to present our music not to toil at construction sites and fields.

  • Krassi: … and now what? We are allegedly free to do as we want, we can travel the world, right? Well, at least on paper, but with what? Who has money for travels? We travel to work, this is our freedom.

  • Blago: Yes, now we are all free to shovel cow shit and pick up strawberries in the West.

Krassi and Blago destabilised the totalitarianism (meaning socialism) vs. freedom (meaning liberal capitalism) dichotomy which served to legitimise the domination of Western political agendas and unpopular economic reforms (Traykov, 2020) and instead re-asserted the notion of freedom in a materialistic framework that prioritises redistributive justice as a precondition for political rights and opportunities. They outlined one of the main contradictions defining the Western-led ‘transition’ in post-socialist societies, namely, the existence of a front stage of political justice (free speech, free movement, free self-expression) and the behind the scenes work of ‘shock therapy’ economics with their effects on the dissolution of socialist welfare provisions and public services, precarisation of previously stable livelihoods and unprecedented class polarisation. In their own understanding, access to the heralded democratic freedoms of the ‘transition’ was materially conditioned and dependent on one’s ability to navigate the new, gravely unjust socio-economic system. In this sense, the right to free movement that my interlocutors have been making excessive use of ever since the beginning of the market reforms, ceased to be an expression of individual freedom (if it ever was) but was rather experienced as a manifestation of economic coercion — an only available subsistence strategy in society’s fierce race to the bottom. The contested meaning and significance that liberal freedoms held for Bulgarian migrants are in line with majority attitudes in other post-socialist/Soviet countries (Lithuania, Ukraine, Russia) where 20 years after the start of ‘democratic’ changes, values of individualism, free enterprise and self-expression are subordinated to the needs for social security and state support (Ghodsee & Orenstein, 2021).

Rather than denoting a (re)turn to authoritarianism (see Ghodsee & Orenstein, 2021), such claims offer an alternative reading of freedom as arising through material satisfaction and, not least, meaningful social embedding. Take the words of Rada, a 55-year-old hotel maid who conceptualised freedom as the cultivation of social ties and a certain idea of interpersonal reciprocity: ‘I want my freedom. That freedom where we were all in solidarity, united and did not hate each other. We even loved each other.’ She evoked this in a conversation that revolved around a recent case at work at which she felt betrayed by another Bulgarian co-worker whom she considered a friend and who had recently turned against her allegedly seeing her as competition for a new job opening in the company.

Concerns with lost sense of solidarity and the undermining of the principles of cooperation were often evoked in reference to the market pressure of individualistic pursuit and the scare economic resources that migrants had to fight for. Similarly, Snezhana, a 51-year-old cleaner who struggled to bring her family to London, situated encounters of hostility with fellow Bulgarian and other East European migrants in normative views on the effects that neoliberal pressures of economic productivity and frugality put on the migrant-subject: ‘What they say “stay away from Bulgarians when abroad” is true. Most people here wouldn’t help you, instead they will pull you down. I don’t blame them…everyone is fighting for their bread. When you don’t have enough, and life is so hard you become embittered and suspicious’.

Social relationships of mistrust and suspicion, often documented within and amongst different groups of East European migrants in the West (Manolova, 2021a; Popivanov & Kovacheva, 2019), are usually interpreted as issues of national ‘mentality’ and in the Bulgarian case as a specific ethno-cultural self-identification with opportunism and greed as a legacy of specific historical conditions of foreign dependency and domination (Daskalov, 2001). In this case, however, the cut-throat individualism that was perceived as omnipresent in the everyday spaces where migrants interacted was assigned to the objective social relations of exploitation and the constant search for profit margins that reigned in the capitalist societies of the West.

The perceived dangers of pervasive individualism and dissolution of the values of solidarity that the hyper-competitive capitalist order imposed on migrants were contrasted to the social relations during the socialist period which were perceived as developing in the spirit of reciprocity and camaraderie. Rado lamented: ‘In school they used to teach us that we need to work and care about the others as we care about ourselves. Yes, you can say this was some party hogwash that no one took seriously, but it is true to an extent. People cared about each other, they helped each other out. When I was building my house, a whole ‘brigade’ came to help – neighbours, friends, relatives.’ On my prompting to delve into the reasons for this heightened sense of solidarity of the times, he replied: ‘I think ‘cause we were more equal then, you didn’t need to compete for stuff, whatever I had, my neighbour had. Everyone had a job, everyone could build a home, pay their bills, buy food, get education, what’s there to be envious of?’.

Rado’s narrative highlights an important moral dimension of the expression of mutuality under socialism that rested on commonly shared ideas of non-kin reciprocity as a duty towards co-workers, neighbours and friends and the collaborative mediation of needs related to the livelihood reproduction. The transformation of social relationships and ideas on self-hood remains one of the most painfully experienced acts of the ‘reordering’ of individual cosmologies (Matejskova, 2013; Verdery, 1996) brought about in post-socialism. The decline of cooperation within working-class groups, most often lamented in narratives of loss and disintegration of reciprocal sociality, has been explained as a direct effect of the imposition of market values in all spheres of life and corresponding factors such as mass migration and social polarisation which have considerably depleted and severely shrunken existing social circles (Hann, 2002; Morris, 2016; Tocheva, 2022).

The intuitive connection that Rado drew between changing practices of solidarity and larger socio-economic transformations was used to construct a normative hierarchy of value in which capitalism, typified in its most advanced form by the ‘West’, exemplified how a subjection of the self to neoliberal regimes could bring out the worst human qualities such as envy, competition and mistrust. In this case, the primacy of socialism rested in its commitment to equality and the nurturing of material environment in which the superior values of compassion and care could flourish, albeit not without problems as many noted in relation to the instrumental ‘connections’ (vruzki) that determined one’s access to goods and services. This is not to suggest that mutuality and care are considered as completely missing in present times or that actors do not strategically accommodate to more individualistic behavioural strategies. The competitive environment of the immigrant economy is a reference point for workers who always complained about the dissolution of old ties, the commodification of friendships and the fostering of exploitative intra-personal dependencies, which produced people ‘without hearts’ or ‘with a heart of a dog’. Many admitted to have adopted the imperatives of self-interest and individualism out of necessity and discussed in length the internal conflict between the internalised and acquired ideas of mutuality and support that this produced.

‘We are Bulgarians, so we have no rights’: Racialised Difference and Exploitation

As a ‘technology of the imagination’ (Vigh, 2009: 105), post-socialist migrations are often positioned within regimes of racialisation and the ‘colonial matrix of power’ (Mignolo, 2013) where subjects inferiorised as cultural and civilisational ‘others’ attempt a more favourable (re-)positioning vis-à-vis an idealised ‘West’ (Krivonos & Näre, 2019). For a particular group of middle-class aspirants, East–West migrations come to be seen as a spatio-temporal strategies of progressing onto the path to Eurocentric modernity and breaking out from ascriptions of belated development, as well as an effort to actualise individual distinction vis-à-vis less-deserving ‘others’(Manolova, 2020; Krivonos & Näre, 2019).

In contrast, the migrants that I spoke to and who defined themselves as ‘ordinary people’ (or ‘ordinary workers’) appeared acutely aware of their debased position in global regimes of power and domination and in fact took their migration practices as the material relationality that most clearly illuminated the unequal and exploitative nature of East–West exchange. Settling for their position of assigned inferiority and subordinated market inclusion (Manolova, 2021b), they put emphasis on their labour-related identities as mapped onto a global system of division of labour where certain nationalities were predisposed to high levels of exploitation and low added value as workers:

  • Such was the case with Mitko, a 25-year-old agricultural worker who discussed at length the treatment he expected to receive at his new workplace: ‘They don’t like us [Bulgarians] there [in the UK]. I see it on TV, they think we are trash (bokluk). It is because we are paid much less than the locals, so they don’t like us. We are Bulgarians and to them [the Westerners] we don’t have the right to exist.

Similar thoughts were shared by Yavor (54) who signed a contract as a chicken catcher in a North British farm: ‘What to expect? They take us for the lowest, dirties of jobs. I don’t expect them to smile at me and treat me well. We are cheap workers.’ In a similar vein, Krassi reflected on her experience as an agency worker: ‘They make you feel as a complete idiot…because you don’t speak the language and you are Bulgarian. They can throw you around like a rag – from one place to the next.’

Reflections on the bleak prospects awaiting them in the UK often resulted in a more general discussion of the unequal and exploitative mechanisms that sustained Bulgaria’s position in global geopolitics. Borko, a 52-year-old car mechanic who explored opportunities for working as a handyman in a British care home explained the following: ‘They only took us to close the border. It was clear to everyone that we cannot compete with them (EU accession). We cannot become a rich country because it is against their [the West’s] interest– they will have nowhere to go for a cheap holiday, also they need cheap labour.’ At the same time, and often in conflicting ways, many admitted to have expected that the formal equalisation of the status of Bulgarians and Romanians with that of other EU citizens would had finally brought an end to their labour market inferiorisation; as already pointed out, however, this expectation was short-lived.

Such narratives of subjugation can be contextualised within literature on post-socialist subjects’ contingent belonging to power regimes of whiteness and the racialisation of the ‘East European migrant’ in the West (Fox et al., 2012; Lewicki, 2023) Thinking intuitively, East European migrants’ shared whiteness suggests their favourable placement within the racial hierarchies guiding British and West European scales of worth and deservingness. However, as recent scholarship has pointed out, phenotypical whiteness rarely supersedes market pressures for productivity and anti-migrant hostility that assign migrants to disempowered roles in the cultural symbolic and material spheres of host societies (Krivonos & Näre, 2019; Lewicki, 2023; Zorko, 2018). Following the accessions of 2004 and 2007, East European migrants in the UK have been homogenised as racially inferior and a group category that does not pertain to European proper values of whiteness. This migrant position in internal value regimes should be considered in light with Eastern Europe’s historical integration as a semi-periphery in regimes of global capitalism and global coloniality (Kušić et al., 2019). Multiple works have discussed this semi-peripherality by referring to a proto-colonial treatment imposed on the region through processes of resource, labour and rent extraction, as well as systematic underdevelopment (Böröcz, 2016; Majstorovic, 2021).

My interlocutors’ perspectives articulated this geopolitical subjugation of the region in modern colonial capitalism and their own reduction to demonised but simultaneously much needed ‘naked labour’ — or their persistent treatment as market objects of exchange (Whyte, 2009). Analysis reveals how race and racialisation are constituent features of the global labour stratification and the imposition of certain forms of labour organisation (Jubany & Lázaro-Castellanos, 2021; Bonacich et al., 2008). On a global scale, the distinction of racialised identities has served to legitimise a differential system of labour exploitation where those placed outside of the Western ‘core’ are assigned occupations offering less formality, autonomy and protection. In their own words, it was precisely their disparaged nationality, constructed as ‘geopolitical relict’ or nothingness (Griznic, 2000) that relegated Bulgarians to a racialised surplus in the hands of employers that expected them to endure severe forms of exploitation. In this respect, it could be argued that their purposeful exposure to far more stringent policies of labour market integration (compared to other post-socialist EU subjects) and their socio-legal treatment as a dangerous class threatening welfare budgets have instituted Bulgarians (and Romanians) as a differentiated sub-group within the generic East European category. In this order, and as those inhabiting the margins of the EU periphery, they have been subjected to a post-2014 incorporation regime that jeopardised the social and economic rights conceived under FoM and made prospects of equal integration obsolete (Manolova, 2021a). On a conceptual level my interlocutors completely rejected the Western-made ideological rationales of freedom and justice, lamenting that the value of some ‘Europeans’ is highly contingent on their capacity to bear the hardship of labour precariousness and disposability.

The different racialising strategies and exploitation that Bulgarians are experiencing should be contextualised with view of the wider political economy of racialised capitalism as a relational context within which the forms and intensity of racial subjugation affects differently postcolonial and post-socialist subjects (Majstorovic, 2021). In this respect, Bulgarians are often conferred the nominal if incomplete status of whiteness that has never been accorded to people of colour living in hegemonically white spaces.

Although they find themselves pressed to accept their segmented location in the hierarchically organised British labour system, Bulgarians developed strategies to deflect their exploitative racialisation, in the process reflecting on the equal (sometimes superior) value of their position in social and geopolitical hierarchies. Scholars focus on the dynamics of ‘racial brokering’ through which migrants instrumentalise their putative whiteness and claim superior standing vis-à-vis minorities deemed ‘less white’ and hence ‘less deserving’ (Zorko, 2018; Gawlewicz, 2016; Fox et al., 2012). In this case, however, self-worth and claims for respectability were not referenced to personal phenotypical or cultural attributes but to a shared belonging to the progressive political project of state socialism. By recalling their participation in the socialism system and invoking its numerous achievements, migrants constructed themselves as bearers of the values of an alternative modernity that not only put them on a par with their contemporaries in Western Europe but in profound ways made them feel morally and politically superior. Most commonly, this socialist superiority transpired through ideas of socio-economic and technological development and various aspects of personal fulfilment.

Emil, a 56-year-old welder, praised the glory days of Bulgarian industrialisation, more than 30 years after its dissolution and trumped the morally superior basis upon which it was established and developed: ‘We had factories, we had mass production of what not…from milk and meat to electric drays and computers. We are smarter than them [British], we built our society (stroi) on innovations, high technological achievements and labour…to the British everything is offered on a plate, they plundered other lands for centuries.’

For Emil, what distinguished the Bulgarian pursuit of industrialisaiton, as part of the overarching Soviet model, from the one of ‘old’ Europe were its fundamentally different operational logics. While the latter was forged through colonial extraction and the suffering of non-white populations (Bhambra, 2020), the former was earned by the mobilisation of ‘own’ peoples’ committed labour for overall prosperity. Central to the Soviet model of modernisation was the achievement of material development without domination and the expansion of education, healthcare and social services that would provide opportunities for egalitarian participation and just society (Kalinovsky, 2018). The Bulgarian case clearly evidences the mass achievements of socialist industrialisation since 1945: high-speed electrification, urbanisation and mass scale education transformed a peasant country into a highly developed industrial nation with one of the most egalitarian socio-economic structures in Europe and the world (Vassilev, 2003).

The satisfaction of all material needs (freedom from necessity) was considered a precondition for personal development understood as the unleashing of human potential in its encompassing sense as creative, artistic, intellectual and political capacities. Thus, some research participants referred to their perceived intellectual superiority and educational achievement and contrasted it to British narrow mindedness. Vera, a 61-year-old worker in food packaging facility, lamented this distinction in individual modes of development as clearly consistent with the two different social systems, that of socialism and capitalism: ‘The British know how to make money, but outside the material world they have zero qualities. We have been brought up as complex individuals (kompleksi lichnosti), we had to know poetry, listen to opera…how is that for a simple factory worker?’.

Vera’s account brings forward two key components of the Bulgarian socialist legacy that continue to generate positive recollections and mark the everyday grievances against the neoliberal transformations of the self. The first relates to the socialist ideal of the ‘all-rounded individual’ (vsestranno razvita lichnost) that offered a concept for individual (self-)realisation that had to progress together with the goals of the developed socialist society and the transition to Communism. In essence, the new socialist individual posited the achievement of harmonious development of the different aspects that made up the human consciousness — emotional, creative, psychological, physical and political ones — and their internal synchronisation for reaching the full capacity of human creativity (Mihailova, 2012). This required the sustained engagement with diverse fields of knowledge and complete rejection of the idea of narrowly profiled training. Bringing high culture to the ‘masses’, the second theme that can be outlined in Vera’s account above resonates with the socialist understanding of the role of culture for human development and the consolidation of official state policies initiatives for making art accessible to all (Milev, 2018).

Post-socialist middle-class actors and educated youths adjusted to the logics of neoliberalism demarcate the socialist period as aberration on the path to western modernity the lasting legacies of which are held responsible for their continuous ascription as ‘backwards’ subjects (Manolova, 2020; Satybaldieva, 2017). In contrast, for the labour migrants that I met, socialist-style practices and models are transformed into individual and cultural resources through which they constructed their sense of worth as modern, educated and intellectually engaged individuals. To counter experiences of exploitative racialisation that in many cases reiterated historical frameworks of East Europeans’ cultural inferiority and ‘incomplete’ Europeanness, they drew on their participation in a model of alternative modernity that had its roots in progressive politics and followed the humanist logics of social progress, egalitarianism and holistic subjective development.

Again, and this time through the themes of development, culturendess and all-rounded individuality, they laid the grounds for alternative measuring of one’s worth that not only did not pertain to but actively rejected imaginaries of European racial and civilisational superiority. The extent to which such subjecthood models managed to achieve any positive repositioning is of course highly debatable as in most cases, they remained incomprehensible for the wider Western audiences.

Socialism as Radical Imaginary

Some readers may suggest that these emotionally charged narratives echo the familiar phenomenon of post-socialist nostalgia that has been observed across the very different post-1989/1991 contexts and that had usually served as a way of criticising the present through the past. In such accounts, the meaning of nostalgia generally connotes a depoliticised narrative of previous stability and security that individuals find virtually non-existent in their present and through the memories of which they negotiate their own adaptability to a disqualified but alternativeness capitalist present. Klumbyte (2008) and Satybaldieva (2017) add another nuance by arguing that nostalgia reflects first and foremost a project of normative positioning of the self in a way that reasserts the past as meaningful and still valid model of human flourishing. Kurtović and Sargsyan (2019) take this further by exploring the reflexive ways through which the mundane nostalgia for the forms of ‘good life’ that socialism afforded can serve as repertoires for the advancement of emancipatory projects in ways that do not legitimise socialism as a political system.

Although my interlocutors used nostalgic reasoning in criticising the present, the forms that their engagement with the past took went in a slightly different direction, advancing the above-mentioned interpretations in important ways. When voicing discontent with their current situation, migrants did not negate certain aspects of capitalism and affirmed others. Rather, they put forward a diagnosis of a political system that was irreparably unable to enhance individual well-being and collective progress. In this sense, the real capitalist system under which they lived in the post-socialist era was not seen as progressing to its ‘normal’ form and as such no longer necessitated ‘adjustment’ efforts as part of a meaningful strategy. Narrating the past and positing it as the ‘norm’ stemmed not from the ‘impossibility of restoration’ (Todorova & Gille, 2010) of (state) socialism, nor the inevitability of the free market, but rather from sustained belief in the world-making potential of the former and the broken hope in the promises of the latter. While nostalgia involves regret, despair and loss, it was the general atmosphere of irreconcilability and determination that framed my conversations in(-between) Bulgaria and the UK.

To capture what happens after nostalgia, or how nostalgia can harness the longings for the past and the grievances of the present in a conscious albeit quotidian work of the political, I return to the Castoriadian notion of the ‘radical imaginary’. As opposed to nostalgia, the imaginary is always forward-looking and transformative. In its heart is the autonomous capacity to rupture and re-create rather than adapt and maintain the existing order. For Castoriadis (1994), the emancipatory undertones of the imaginary are ultimately instantiated in praxis, which he relates to conscious activity that brings tectonic shifts in the social and political organisation of reality. Still, he allows for the ‘radical’ to emerge in less sweeping and spectacular ruptures that can still retain a world-changing potentiality. I have tried to uncover the wider purchase of the imaginary in the material realm of labour migration, as a routinised praxis that organises the social reproduction of ‘ordinary’ individuals and that from a vehicle of hope had come to serve as vehicle for voicing failure and despair. Structured under the conditions of punishing labour regimes and regulatory frames, for contemporary moving subjects, migration had become a catalyst for unleashing the potentiality of imagination, in a way that threatened the conditions that produced its own structural raison d’être. Thus, somehow paradoxically, when individual ambitions are largely given up and collective visions of betterment exhausted, migration can turn into an empowering reality emptying out the present from mystical ideological notions and resurrecting with new confidence imaginaries that hold subversive possibilities.

Post-socialist Bulgaria and present-day Britain served as metonymic ‘frames of reference’ through which people talked about their frustration with the general capitalist context and launched alternative articulations of redistribution, freedom and justice. The normalisation of socialism as an experiential reality and as a ‘system’ built on much missed values such as solidarity, social justice and freedom of need made capitalist Britain (and Bulgaria) appear as obsolete, inhumane and predatory, societies which were cynical to the ‘true’ meaning of the self and social relations and could absorb all fundamental virtues and basic ethics into its omnivorous economic rationality. It can be argued that the despondency produced by experiences of economic hardship and alienation was directed towards the rejection of the ideological hegemony of neoliberalism and the imagining of a better model of social organisation in which not meritocracy but equality emerges as the ‘correct’ and moral way for structuring individual behaviour and achievement.

Traykov (2020) shows how the neoliberalising reforms in Bulgaria, highly unpopular for the majority, were successfully enforced through the ideological smokescreen of anti-communism and its multi-faceted development as a legal-institutional, educational and cultural-intellectual ideological apparatus. Largely interpreted within totalitarian and repressive frameworks, the socialist past lost its historical and social complexity and was reduced to ‘anathema’ (Lampland, 2002: 32), the legacies and achievements of which had to be deligitimised and subjected to collective misrecognition. Efforts were directed towards the building of new interpretative schema in which voices for workers’ rights, economic equality and social justice were treated as relics of the past and dangerously counterproductive to the process of ‘democratisation’ (Traykov, 2020). The imaginary visions presented here demonstrate that working-class people, at least some of those who have been forced into survival through migration, continue (or revert back) to stand up for left-leaning and anti-capitalist values that resonate better with their daily struggles and with their hope for future possibilities. For some, it was a matter of re-creating a system around some of the lost understandings of self-worth, work and the state that the legacy of socialism stood for; for others, the imaginary was carried in a clear restorative discourse that sought to de-throne capitalism and re-instate socialism as a political system and a modernisation project. And this is hardly surprising if we consider the fact that poverty rates in the country continue to surpass their pre-1989 levels (Ghodsee & Orenstein, 2021). Since 2016 Bulgaria heads the rank of income inequality in the EU (Gini coefficient 40) (Eurostat, 2022) and support for free markets plummeted from 73 per cents in 1991 to 55 in 2019 (Pew Research Center, 2009). Recent study reveals that 58% of the population consider their life worst off or the same as that of the previous generation (Gallup International, 2023), and when asked how they evaluate state socialism in 2017, 44% replied that at that period the country was on the right path of development, while 41% would have chosen to still live in socialist Bulgaria (Trend, 2017).

For Castoriadis (1994), the given meaning of the social world is always to be struggled over and a field which is established on the fragile balance between the significations of the normative order and the acts of self-institution that re-draw the contours of the possible. The openings for the articulation of the radical imaginary are contained in the ruptures between the scripts of the what is capitalist reality and working-class praxis of migration, the materiality and ideological conditions of which can no longer be meaningfully incorporated into the post-socialist terrain of dissonance. As a form of ‘routinised’ doing, migration creates the necessary distance between the instituted world and the what if possibilities, which in this case amounted to individual practices of creative interpretation through political critique. It could be argued that the practice of imaginative subversion which Bulgarian-origin migrants engaged in advocated for an opportunity for re-creation and re-alignment with available but delegitimised significations of the socialist past through which ‘the new meaning can emerge’ (Castoriadis, 1987: 137).

Coda

‘Look at what happens in the world today, everything is upside down, nothing is as it should be. When everyone was coming here [Britain] after the war [WW2], we had it best, we didn’t need to go anywhere, we were with bai ToshoFootnote 1. We should have this back’, said Ivan while putting out his cigarette on the pavement. In their moments of frustration and suffering, ‘ordinary’ migrants felt morally entitled to criticise the dysfunctionality of what they conceived as an omnipresent (global) economic system and at the same time with enough confidence argued for its possible alternatives. Such alternatives, especially when coming from the former ‘Second World’ rarely make an item on the political agendas for progressive politics. The questions that trouble contemporary voices for change revolve around the omnipresence of ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher, 2009) that has captured the collective imagination and the futility of politics of resistance, doomed to follow the self-fulfilling prophecy cycle of despair–reflexivity–despair. At the same time, the widespread belief that the novel cannot come from the past and its fatal abstractions (Badiou, 2001), as well as the general scepticism of alternative imagining that sit uncomfortably with the ‘generic liberalism’ guiding the critical academic consensus (Mazzarella, 2019), has worked to dismiss lay socialist world-viewing and world-making efforts as ‘populist’, ‘nostalgic’ or reactionary provocations. East European socialism is habitually omitted as a historical political legacy, situated knowledge and embodied experience that can bring anything of value to effectively interpret and oppose the neoliberal capitalism of today. The arguments presented here make a case for a respectful and critical engagement with ‘socialist mentalities’ and their normativities, especially as they re-surface in popular imaginations of those most affected by the cruelty of the present system. This novel engagement with the continuous relevance of state socialism and its common-sense invocations, despite complicated legacies, can be a crucial step for approaching the possibilities for politics of equality, collectiveness and working-class dignity.