Desperate Responsibility: Precarity and Right-Wing Populism

This essay explores the mutual reinforcements between socioeconomic precarity and right-wing populism, then envisions a politics that contests Trumpism through workers’ organizations create alternatives to predominant patterns of subject formation work. I first revisit my recent critique precarity, which initiates new method critical theory informed by Paulo Freire’s political pedagogy popular education. Reading migrant day laborers’ commentaries on their work experiences alongside accounts today’s general culture, this “critical-popular” procedure yields conception with two defining characteristics. First, is socially bivalent: it singles out specific groups for especially harsh treatment even as pervades society. Second, constitutes subjects contradictory time in everyday work-life, exacerbated insoluble dilemmas moral responsibility. Antonio Vásquez-Arroyo’s “political literacy” Bridget Anderson’s notion “migrantizing citizen,” turn, help us understand how precaritization blocks workers from developing dispositions toward needed democratic citizenship. analysis makes possible elucidate, dialogue Daniel Martinez-HoSang Joseph Lowndes, precaritized worker-citizenship facilitates cross-class multiracial appeal Trumpism’s white supremacist discourse national economic decline resurgence, while normalizing temporal affects shock violence characteristic Trumpism, theorized Lia Haro Romand Coles. Day worker centers, argue, refunction time, regenerate literacy, migrantize citizen. A large-scale alternative populism thus could emerge if center network were expanded throughout economy.