Tensions of Mock-Labour: (Un)productivity and the social question in post-industrial serbia

Ivan Rajković’s current research project looks at the conflicting valuations of productivity and the transformations of the ‘social question’ in postsocialist Serbia. In 2000s, it was commonly believed that work had shifted from the busy rhythms of Yugoslav socialist production, to informal economy and improvisation under Milošević’s regime in the 1990s, to mere “simulation” of work during the market reforms of the early 2000s. The automobile industry in the form of Zastava Cars became the most iconic representation of this, and it served as a justification for popular austerity measures. Based on seventeen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the town of Kragujevac and ongoing archival research and study of oral histories, Rajković’s research investigates how different conceptions of valuable and valueless work have emerged since the late 1980s, and how they became moralised tropes that governed the shrinking worlds of the post-socialist welfare state.

The wider theme motivating Rajković’s research concerns the paradoxes of wage labour after industrialism – its simultaneous depletion, questioning, and moralization in contemporary economies. Central to this development is a rearticulation of the work-welfare connection, and this project looks at how these were decoupled in the longue durée of industrial slowdown. Serbia faced not simply neoliberalization, but increasing state financing of unproductive firms after socialism. Comparing their work with the past, Zastava Cars workers began to see their activity as simulation of productive labour. At the same time, however, new forms of making do in a depleted factory setting also developed. These bricoleur improvisations reintroduced manual labour and craft into what had previously been spaces of automated manufacturing, creating new forms of ‘skill’, ‘toil’, and ‘sacrifice’ with contested value. Rajković uses ‘mock-labour’ to describe this wavering value of labour between simulation and improvisation, both more and less than ‘proper’ work. In Zastava’s firms, it became increasingly hard to discern the two. This led to new forms of claims of deservingness that departs from work ethics, but also to chronic self-devaluation of workers as people who “receive wages for no work”. Following the idea that long-term unproductivity in post-socialist Eastern Europe led to not only economic, but also moral dispossession (Hann 2011), Rajković explores how a sense of demoralization and longing for eventful work ultimately led to embracing authoritarian neoliberal governance as a supposedly just and moral solution for the ‘lazy’ Balkan working class.
Currently being developed into a book manuscript, this project contributes to a renewed focus on studying the moral economy of contemporary capitalism. It unravels the ways the inherited industrialist work ethos is affecting post-industrial transformations, and it traces the uneasy, contingent articulations of the “social contract” after socialism. The book critically responds to the burning questions of the new “politics of distribution” after Fordism (Ferguson 2015), while simultaneously chronicling enduring attachment to work as value – in terms of its centrality for both the policies of the welfare state and for the moral and political universe of the working class.