Desperate Responsibility: Precarity and Right-Wing Populism

• Published date: 01 February 2022
• Author: Paul Apostolidis
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591720985770
• Date: 01 February 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591720985770

Political Theory

2022, Vol. 50(1) 114 –141

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591720985770

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Article

Desperate Responsibility:

Precarity and Right-Wing

Populism

Paul Apostolidis1

Abstract

This essay explores the mutual reinforcements between socioeconomic

precarity and right-wing populism, and then envisions a politics that

contests Trumpism through workers’ organizations that create alternatives

to predominant patterns of subject formation through work. I first revisit

my recent critique of precarity, which initiates a new method of critical

theory informed by Paulo Freire’s political pedagogy of popular education.

Reading migrant day laborers’ commentaries on their work experiences

alongside critical accounts of today’s general work culture, this “critical-

popular” procedure yields a conception of precarity with two defining

characteristics. First, precarity is socially bivalent: it singles out specific groups

for especially harsh treatment even as it pervades society. Second, precarity

constitutes subjects through contradictory experiences of time in everyday

work-life, exacerbated by insoluble dilemmas of moral responsibility.

Antonio Vásquez-Arroyo’s conception of “political literacy” and Bridget

Anderson’s notion of “migrantizing the citizen,” in turn, help us understand

how precaritization blocks workers from developing the critical dispositions

toward time needed for democratic citizenship. This analysis then makes it

possible to elucidate, in dialogue with Daniel Martinez-HoSang and Joseph

Lowndes, how precaritized worker-citizenship facilitates the cross-class and

multiracial appeal of Trumpism’s white supremacist discourse of national

economic decline and resurgence, while normalizing the temporal affects

1London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK

Corresponding Author:

Paul Apostolidis, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street,

London, WC2A 2AE, UK.

Email: p.apostolidis@lse.ac.uk

985770PTXXXX10.1177/0090591720985770Political TheoryApostolidis

research-article2021

Apostolidis 115

of shock and violence characteristic of Trumpism, as theorized by Lia Haro

and Romand Coles. Day laborers’ worker centers, I argue, refunction

precaritized time, regenerate political literacy, and migrantize the citizen.

A large-scale alternative to right-wing populism thus could emerge if the

worker center network were expanded throughout the economy.

Keywords

precarity, populism, time, day labor, citizenship, migration

Introduction

A loose consensus exists among academic political analysts and journalists

that intensified socioeconomic precarity has driven the worldwide expansion

of right-wing populism. The common perspective holds that especially in the

United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe, parties and civil society

organizations with belligerently nationalist, openly racist, and staunchly cap-

italist policies and rhetoric have enhanced their political fortunes by both

stirring and responding to popular feelings of insecurity and anger as institu-

tional supports for mass economic well-being have been steadily withdrawn.

Many writers have issued dire warnings about long-simmering discontent in

economically depressed, rural, white working-class American communities

to explain the rise of Trumpism and its antecedents. Widespread political

disaffection from neoliberalized party cadres of the center-right and center-

left, others add, has opened opportunities for Trump and authoritarians across

the Atlantic to remold classic right-populist themes to fit the present moment.

Despite the prevalent certainty that socioeconomic decline and political

neglect have bolstered right-wing politics in recent times, a dearth of writing

explores how precarity and right-wing populism relate in ways that treat both

elements with sufficient care and critical sensibility.1 This essay excavates

the mutual reinforcements between precarity and right-wing populism at sub-

stantial depth and with attention to the inter-animating specificities within

each component of this dyad. I first review the critical account of contempo-

rary precarity proposed in my recent research, which reads US Latino migrant

day laborers’ commentaries on their difficult work-lives in conjunction with

recent critical theory on more general circumstances of precarity.2 This exer-

cise in what I call “critical-popular analysis” draws on Paulo Freire’s theory

of popular education to stage an experimental innovation in critical-theoreti-

cal method. The result is a conception of precarity aptly designated by day

laborers as a syndrome of “desperate responsibility,” with two defining