Their understanding of ‘freedom’ via employment valorizes neoliberal markets.
Francesco Laruffa ’22; PhD, visiting scholar at the Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy of the University of Bremen with a Postdoc Mobility Fellowship of the Swiss National Science Foundation; “Re-thinking Work and Welfare for the Social-Ecological Transformation“; 5/19/22; language edited; https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/11784; NT-ML
This conceptualization breaks with the neoliberal understanding of freedom, potentially valorising the non-economic uses of positive freedom and the republican (political-democratic) dimension of freedom. However, in order to use the capability approach as a normative framework for a post-neoliberal eco-social politics, it is necessary to overcome some of its limitations. Indeed, one of the most important critiques of the capability approach is, for the purpose of this paper, Hartley Dean’s argument that the capability approach neglects the exploitative nature of capitalism, especially with respect to the relationship between work and freedom. As Dean (2009, p. 272) puts it: “although wage labour is preferable to slave labour, a contract for labour cannot be wholly free entered so long as one party depends upon the sale of her labour power in order to obtain the means of subsistence.” On this basis, a post-neoliberal interpretation of the capability approach needs to problematize the relationship between employment and capability-freedom. Emancipation and empowerment should thus not be conceived of as inclusion in the (labour) market: the goal is to enhance “human richness,” reframing development as the expansion of potentialities for human flourishing in its multidimensionality both within and beyond work (Giovanola, 2005, 2009b). This requires emphasizing both “freedom from work” and “freedom at work” (Laruffa, 2020; Bueno, 2021).