The alternative is to reconceptualize work as the practice of caring for the world---that requires democratization of what constitutes social welfare and political imaginaries beyond neoliberal subjectivities.

Combining the argument on meaningful work with the “ethics of care” and the capability approach, work could be redefined as the “practice of taking care of the world” and this capability for caring could be placed at the heart of capability-oriented public action (Laruffa, 2021). Indeed, this allows reformulating the capability approach in line with the feminist and ecological concerns discussed in the previous section: rather than accepting the capitalist interpretation of work as a marketable commodity, the capability approach would thus embrace a broader and deeper understanding of work, including all meaningful and life-sustaining activities undertaken to care for people and the planet and shifting the focus of public action from economic production to social reproduction. Moreover, the capability to take care of the world presupposes the freedom to participate in the democratic debate on what is worthy of care, i.e. what is meaningful and valuable. In this way, re-defining work as “the practice of taking care of the world” includes both the subjective and the objective dimension of meaningfulness. Moreover, this broad definition of work encompasses important activities beyond employment, thereby pluralizing the possible forms of valuable work and thus increasing individuals’ freedom to flourish and to choose the activities they value most. In doing so, this conceptualization also encourages individuals to engage in meaningful activities that are urgently needed from the societal and environmental viewpoint and that are in shortage under neoliberal capitalism. Thus, the goal of public policies should be to align, as far as possible, the objective and the subjective dimensions of meaningful work, creating “opportunities for personally capability-enhancing labour that is also socially capability-enhancing” (Bueno 2021, p. 14). Finally, this re-conceptualization of work requires a democratic debate on the precise meaning of “caring for the world,” thereby encouraging processes of democratization and becoming itself a source of democratic renewal.

In the context of this democratic debate on the nature of social wellbeing, a capability- oriented social citizenship assigns a key role to progressive intellectuals and academics. Social policy scholars in mainstream “positivistic” approaches often act as “experts,” prescribing policy solutions and welfare reform proposals in a top-down and technocratic manner based on “scientific evidence.” In contrast, the capability approach calls for the democratization of the production of the knowledge informing public action (Bifulco, 2017; Borghi, 2018; de Leonardis et al., 2012; Salais, 2009). In this vein, the approach developed in this paper recognizes the social construction of possible futures and argues for democratizing the debate on the future of society. In acknowledging that this process of social construction, which establishes what counts as a realistic or desirable future, is marked by deep inequalities in the power of aspiring, planning and effectively realizing those possible futures (de Leonardis & Deriu, 2012), progressive social policy scholars act less as experts and more like Gramsci’s “organic intellectuals” who engage with various groups and associations within civil society to promote transformative and emancipatory social change. In particular, building on Gramsci’s work, Sen (2009) argues that progressive intellectuals are called to adhere to established and anchored ideas of justice within the population while at the same time reconstructing and reconfiguring them, with the aim of promoting solidarity. Thus, even if the goal is to change “people’s thinking and priorities” — as it was the case for Gramsci — this still requires “an engagement with the shared mode of thinking and acting” (Sen, 2009, p. 121). This is “a kind of a dual task, using language and imagery that communicate efficiently and well through the use of conformist rules, while trying to make this language express nonconformist proposals” (Sen, 2009, p. 122).

From this perspective, re-defining work as the practice of caring for the world allows combining the “conformist” value of meritocracy — for which a person’s earnings should reflect his or her [their] contribution to society — with the “nonconformist proposal” of overcoming the ideology that sees capitalist markets as the best mechanisms for enabling and evaluating individuals’ contributions to society. Hence, while meritocracy is linked with the crisis of solidarity and the widespread “preference for inequality” within the population (Dubet, 2014), social scientists can highlight how within contemporary patrimonial capitalism, “much of the wealth of many rich people is actually due to inheritance and other forms of unearned wealth” (Rowling- son & Connor, 2011, p. 440) and how, even within the labour market, people’s earnings are unrelated to their contribution to social welfare, working hours or effort, degree of unpleasant-ness or danger at work (usually highest in low-paid manual jobs), productivity skills or human capital (see also Franzini et al., 2014). The meritocratic ideal for which individuals’ position in society should reflect their contribution to social welfare is a fundamental pillar of modernity and can help to re-build solidarity and democracy once the definitions of “merit,” “work” and “social contribution” are politicized instead of equating them with “spontaneous” market outcomes, which actually reflect the preferences of the powerful.

Moreover, I shall stress that adopting the capability approach implies a global understanding of social justice, oriented towards the promotion of human rights (Sen, 2009), thereby challenging the contemporary emergence of “welfare chauvinism.” Thus, a capability-informed social citizenship is to be realized through international solidarity and cooperation, abandoning the “competitiveness paradigm” that characterizes neoliberalism. This global perspective is reflected in the redefinition of work as the practice of taking care of the world — an under- standing of work that may provide a political concept for re-imagining the workers movements’ original ambitions of international solidarity and global justice.

Finally, redefining work as the practice of taking care of the world may contribute to reimagining the labour movement, fundamentally renewing trade unions with a view to making them representatives of the interests of both the “environment” and “society” — including of those “workers” not involved in the labour market. Indeed, with respect to the environmental question, trade unions have ambiguous positions (on the role of the labour movement in the ecological transition, see e.g. Felli, 2014; Stevis et al., 2018; Brand & Niedermoser, 2019): they often ally with business against environmental interests with a view to protecting workers’ jobs and/or they support the green growth approach — where priority is given to production and jobs, and eco-compatibility is enhanced through technological innovations. However, trade unions may also become environmental actors that represent the interests of the whole community, rejecting the “jobs-environment trade-off”: they can then assert the priority of “social reproduction” and the “value of life” over profits-led production, politicizing and re-framing the economy “from below” — i.e. declaring that citizens should be the ones who decide about “what, how, when, how much, where to produce” (Barca & Leonardi, 2018; see also Pusceddu, 2020). Such a renewal of the labour movement, which connects labour and environmental struggles with the fight for democratization (see also Ferreras et al., 2020), may be inspired by the reconceptualization of work as the “practice of taking care of the world.”

Table 1 summarizes the main elements of the capability-oriented vision of eco-social citizenship and its main differences with the post-war welfare state and the neoliberal competition state.

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Hence, the approach developed here requires going beyond both contemporary neoliberalism and traditional social democracy. Indeed, both neoliberalism and social democracy share the desirability of economic growth either as an end in itself or as a solution to the class conflict and as a way to create jobs and improve people’s living standard (even if the latter is defined rather narrowly in terms of material wellbeing and access to mass consumption). Moreover, both neoliberalism and social democracy share the emphasis on paid employment as the gateway to social inclusion and democratic citizenship. In contrast, a capability-oriented social-ecological transformation aimed at subordinating the economy to social and ecological needs entails an understanding of work as the practice of taking care of the world — where the precise meaning of the latter should be democratically defined. This requires reducing the room given to the market in society, instead increasing the space accorded to participatory-deliberative practice.2