Redeeming the ‘ordinary working class’

Abstract

Critical responses to the rise of right-wing populism in the Western world have done much to draw attention to the racialization of moral economies. However, it is not only remarkable that class has returned to the grammar of politics as an intractably racialized category – the white-working-class; it is just as remarkable that the racialized moral opprobrium of the underclass has given way rhetorically and ideologically to a racialized moral commitment to social justice for the ordinary working class. More critical reflection is needed to understand the way in which the imagined constituency of populist lore is worthy of redemption not just by virtue of their whiteness but of their white-ordinary-working-classness. This article presents a series of key comparative moments in debates over social security and welfare provision – past and present – that demonstrate the centrality of labour’s ‘cooperative spirit’ for political-philosophical debates over social security and welfare. To this end, the author methodologically sketches out a set of political ‘grammars’ that through these debates frame ethical quandaries and policy prescriptions. The author argues that such political grammars have variously apprehended the orderly or disorderly nature of labour’s cooperative spirit by reference to patriarchal and eugenic filiations. While the debates interrogated here have no doubt utilized different terms and categories, their grammars resonate strongly. This gives cause to consider that the redemption of the ‘ordinary’ working class requires the segregation of that class along imperial – and postimperial – lines of heredity.