Why are broad-based, unconditional forms of redistribution often unpopular, even among the long-term unemployed and the poor? Why are fears of laziness and welfare dependence and the narratives of autonomy and deservingness through hard work or entrepreneurship prevalent in countries like South Africa, which has some of the world’s highest rates of unemployment and inequality?
This paper uses data from ongoing qualitative fieldwork with the residents of Jeppestown, an impoverished area of inner-city Johannesburg, South Africa, to examine the forms and contours of such puzzling resistance to broad-based, direct redistribution. In particular, this article focuses on the categorical moral discourses of the long-term unemployed poor, discourses that insist on a necessary moral linkage between jobs and income. My informants 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.
To make sense of such moral logics and discourses, this paper analyses them as part of a cohesive moral economy: an integrated collective of socially-held values, expectations, norms around the ways that the economy should function. The moral economy concept is particularly useful in understanding the resistance to transitions from one set of economic realities (and their accompanying norms, values and expectations) to another. Looking at such transitions through the lens of moral economy allows us to understand the normative and social shifts that must happen alongside the economic and structural ones, and the way such shifts are resisted. While much of the classic moral economy literature focuses on such class relationships within transitions from pre-capitalist economies to various forms and manifestations of market capitalism, this paper upends the approach by arguing that the moral assumptions of my informants mark their resistance to relinquishing the work-based membership norms of market capitalism, despite the systemic impossibilities of actually meeting such expectations in South Africa -- and indeed, in much of the rest of the world.
At the same time, the moral economy framework also allows this paper to understand and complicate relationships of class and economic power within which my informants are embedded. It moves us away from reductionist views of hegemony and false consciousness, or 'the dichotomy of domination and confrontation', and instead illuminates the way class and authority can function through delicate balance of legitimacy forged through obligation, contestation and deference. If examining moral economies underscores the way 'traditional' norms and economic expectations are 'inventively remembered' (Lonsdale, 1992) and invoked as a form of resistance, then this work chooses to look at resistance to shifts away from an economy where wage employment is the key distributary mechanism. This, I argue, is the 'tradition' that is being 'inventively remembered', not just in South Africa but beyond: that the legitimacy of state authority rests on its ability to provide not provision itself, but rather jobs.
This paper thus examines how people's economic expectations are embedded in their moral beliefs -- beliefs that equate effort and labor with deservingness and income -- and the way such beliefs then influence what is expected and demanded in political and public policy arenas. I argue that broad-based resistance to redistribution divorced from labor illuminates what can be understood as a shared moral economy. Piecing together this moral economy shows us 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. This paper examines the way people link economic structures, expectations and outcomes to moral and social logics, norms and values. Widely-held moral beliefs linking income and labor thus illuminates a critical aspect of the moral economy -- and the political expectations and demands -- of contemporary capitalism.