Axel Honneth’s The Poverty of Our Freedom and The Working Sovereign argue that liberal de mocracies today overlook the salience of education and work for self-rule. These books continue a tradition dating back to the nineteenth century that views welfarist rights as essential elements of a rational constitutional order. G.W.F. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, for example, presents the welfarist institutions of compulsory schooling and organized work as constitutional rights that sup port political will formation. In this article, I appropriate Hegel and Honneth’s insights to analyze the ongoing process of “welfare de-constitutionalization” in the United States, where numerous states and the federal government are weakening the constitutional status of compulsory school ing and organized work. This process has compounded with the counter-majoritarian elements of the U.S. Constitution to create an authoritarian crisis in which the people can neither form nor express their democratic will. I propose that American public education is the most developed, most resilient, and most universal welfarist institution on which to reconstruct the extant constitu tional framework to support democratic will formation. By prioritizing public education above other welfarist institutions, I do not mean to suggest that its current form is flawless or even praisewor thy; I mean rather to emphasize the exceptional promise it holds within a constitutional framework that otherwise reserves scant space for social rights. Besides having more legal actuality than any other welfarist institution, public education can also fortify additional social rights that protect chil dren and adults from political-economic domination. Keywords: compulsory education; organized work; democracy; welfare; constitutional ism.
The social reproduction concept played a crucial role in feminist philosophy and critical theory. This paper proposes a three-phase account of Social Repro duction Theory (SRT), arguing that it now stands at an ecofeminist and posthu manist turning point: the recognition of the forced and formally unacknowl edged extraction of value from non-human agentivities. To support this thesis, three phases of the social reproduction framework in feminist political philoso phy will be analyzed: a) the phase of original accumulation and the expansion of Marxist analysis by socialist feminist theorists; b) the feminization of labour in post-Fordist feminism c) the new materialist phase that identifies forms of social reproduction carried out at the expense of the non-human. Against this background, the argument will entail 1) a diachronic exposition of the SRT turns (a), (b), and (c); 2) a synchronic overview of the first two turns in order to assess the validity of the proposed third turn, (c), the non-human reproduction turn, which has always been in nuce in SRT’s diverse theoretical trajectories. By in tegrating ecofeminist and post-anthropocentric perspectives, this paper con tends that SRT can account for non-human agency within the reproductive economy, offering a critical tool for understanding value extraction in the An thropocene. Keywords: social reproduction; hybrid work; non-human value; feminist theory; eco feminism.
In recent years, automation and digital platforms have profoundly transformed labor relations and the organization of work. Dominant normative frameworks—allocative theories focusing on dis tributive fairness and perfectionist approaches emphasizing meaningful work—fail to fully address the structural and relational injustices arising from these developments. This article develops an alternative normative framework, relational productive justice (RPJ), drawing upon critical theory, relational egalitarianism, and economic sociology. RPJ emphasizes the organization, valuation, and governance of work, shifting normative inquiry from individual entitlements and personal flour ishing toward the institutional structures and social relations through which labor is defined and valued. RPJ is applied to technological unemployment and platform labor to demonstrate its dis tinctive capacity to diagnose relational injustices. Keywords: Relational productive justice; technological unemployment; platform econ omy; relational egalitarianism; critical theory.
What if suffering were not a failure of the system, but its most sophisticated product? In the con temporary regime of labor, distress is no longer an anomaly to be corrected, nor merely a collateral consequence of exploitation. It has become something else – something altogether more insidi ous. Amid the exaltation of performance and the rhetoric of well-being, a paradox takes shape: the very structures that promise fulfillment may, in fact, rely on exhaustion. At the same time, alienation has ceased to appear as an external condition; it is now internalized, embedded in the worker’s very mode of subjectivity. What remains of the political significance of suffering when it is reframed as a private burden, a test of merit, or even a marker of success? This article does not presume to offer solutions but rather seeks to delineate the contours of a condition yet to be named – a pathology that is neither strictly economic nor merely psychological, but one embedded in the political fabric of contemporary labor and its discontents. Keywords: Labor; Neoliberalism; Corporate Welfare, Alienation.
In this article I aim to counter the increasing socio-political marginalization of labor and reaffirm the social centrality of this activity. My goal is to clarify the necessary conditions of possibility for the liberation of labor, outside and inside the enterprises where it is performed. The first part of the paper will reconstruct the historical interconnection between the processes of the political sub jectification of labor and the material and spiritual transformations of capital, as well as their impact on the most recent processes of “forced entrepreneurialization of the precariat.” After critically analyzing the process of the neoliberal exaltation of labor and the political reactions it has sparked across the ideological spectrum, the second part of my article will identify the main theoretical pillars of a neosocialist conception of labor and focus on its institutional and organizational pre conditions. These preconditions envisage forms of cooperation—distinct from mere coordina tion—that challenge the Aristotelian-Arendtian distinction between labor, work, and action and invalidate Habermas’s rigid demarcation between a life-world oriented by domination-free under standing and a system dominated by strategic rationality. The democratic liberation of labor would not only influence the internal conditions, content, and quality of workplaces, but, by expanding the realms of freedom at work, could also render democratic institutions themselves more politi cally productive. Keywords: Subjective Experience of Work; Eleutheric Potential of Work; Christophe Dejours; Emmanuel Renault; Jean Philippe Deranty.
