Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the moral language of laziness, hard work, autonomy and dependence of the long-term unemployed poor in South Africa. In linking jobs to fairness, hope and citizenship, my informants insist on a work-based moral economy of contemporary capitalism, despite its inaccessibility.

Paper long abstract:

Why do discourses of laziness and welfare dependence and the language of autonomy and hard work remain prevalent in countries like South Africa, which has some of the world's highest rates of unemployment and inequality? This paper explores this question through fieldwork with the long-term unemployed poor in inner-city Johannesburg. My informants use a specific moral language to link accessing cash via wage work with moral goods, including justice, fairness, hope, and agency, and money without labor or labor without money to moral bads such as laziness, lack of autonomy and even lack of national solidarity. These associations are prevalent despite a distinct lack of opportunities for formal wage labor, and despite a sense of injustice and discontent with current political and economic elites.

Such language illuminates an integrated collective of socially-held values around the ways that the economy should function, even if it no longer does so, and perhaps never did -- in other words, a cohesive moral economy. I argue that the moral language of my informants marks their resistance to relinquishing the work-based membership norms of market capitalism, despite the systemic impossibilities of actually meeting such norms in South Africa -- and indeed, in much of the rest of the world. This shared moral discourse around work and distribution illuminates the means though which deeply embedded norms of fairness, deservingness and aspiration underpin attitudes about redistribution, cash and labor, and thus influence both support and resistance to particular political agendas around redistribution or economic reform.