The Public Spheres of Unprotected Workers

Abstract

The previous chapters highlighted how ‘work-empty’ discourses produce thin and problematic concepts and analyses in the fields of international political economy and international relations. In Chapter 1 Amoore demonstrated how work and the restructuring of work are political processes that need to be taken up by these fields. Harrod (Chapter 2) outlined and extended the approach that he (Harrod, 1987) and Robert Cox (1987) introduced in their linked but free-standing volumes on power and production, and carried forward the arguments in Chapter 1 by presenting a ‘neomaterialist’ analysis of the nexus between power and production. In Chapter 3 Ryner deepened the critique of the ‘work-empty’ discourses of the fields and provided an analysis of the ‘economic corporate moment’ in the formation of the poor as social subjects. Together these chapters have put firmly before us the question of the political capacity of dominated people to challenge their status and influence global politics.

This chapter is a modified and shortened version of an article that appeared in Global Society, vol. 19, no. 2. The permission granted by the editors of the journal to reproduce the article here is gratefully acknowledged. The chapter has been through numerous drafts and has benefited from criticisms and comments by many people. In particular I wish to thank Magnus Ryner and Jeffrey Harrod for their careful readings and insightful criticisms. I also thank Isabella Bakker, Véronique Bertrand-Bourget, Silvia Federici, Stephen Gill, Gigi Herbert and David McNally for their thoughtful responses to earlier efforts as well as the present one. I am, of course, responsible for any faults that remain.