Making

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 4 shows why the right to work was crucial to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in its objective of countering expulsion. The right to work is contextualized via two extended considerations of work as a mode of belonging, from Arendt’s Human Condition and in Charles Olson’s poetics of labour. Contemporary commentators on Arendt, notably Jacques Rancière and Ayten Gündoğdu, are drawn on to show how the right to work is an expression of agency necessary to the politics of rights. The chapter concludes by addressing the arguments for work as human relation expressed in Fanon and Lefebvre. To understand mid-century regimes of expulsion and contemporary hostile environments, the chapter argues, it is necessary to understand the prohibition of work in terms of Lefebvre’s account of alienation. To be denied the right to work is to be denied the agency of making that constitutes participation in the human commons.