https://orcid.org/0009-0007-7631-6094
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ABSTRACT
Harder’s article investigates how changes in working and living conditions are experienced by workers and how these changes create the conditions of acceptability for right-wing politics. Drawing on qualitative interviews, mappings, questionnaires and fieldwork with workers in two retail workplaces in southern and eastern Germany, it outlines processes of logistification that impact workers’ routines of labour and social reproduction: that is, their everyday lives. Respondents testify to an intensification and isolation of labour as well as a general scarcity of resources for social reproduction and powerlessness to influence the changes. Their work environments demand continuous adaptation to new technologies and management strategies. These experiences are shaped by a metanarrative of societal decline that appears to lie beyond the workers’ control. Nostalgia—a romanticized imagination of the past—and reclusivity—a preference for privacy and suspicion of the public—emerge as responses to the perceived decline of their surroundings. They can constitute elements that far-right parties articulate against migration and towards authoritarian politics.
Notes
1 Translations from the German, unless otherwise stated, are by the author.
2 Oliver Decker, Johannes Kiess, Julia Schuler, Barbara Handke, Gert Pickel and Elmar Brähler, ‘Die Leipziger Autoritarismus Studie 2020: Methode, Ergebnisse und Langzeitverlauf‘, in Oliver Decker and Elmar Brähler (eds), Autoritäre Dynamiken: Alte Ressentiments—neue Radikalität (Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag 2020), 27–89 (16).
3 Cas Mudde, ‘The populist radical right: a pathological normalcy’, West European Politics, vol. 33, no. 6, 2010, 1167–86 (1179).
4 Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, trans. from the French by Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) 2007), 61.
5 Stuart Hall, ‘Popular-democratic vs authoritarian populism: two ways of “taking democracy seriously”’, in Alan Hunt (ed.), Marxism and Democracy (London: Lawrence and Wishart 1980), 157–85 (173–4).
6 John Clarke, ‘Conjunctures, crises, and cultures: valuing Stuart Hall’, Focaal, vol. 2014, no. 70, 2014, 113–22 (119).
7 Jesse LeCavalier, The Rule of Logistics: Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfillment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2016).
8 Cas Mudde, ‘The populist zeitgeist’, Government & Opposition, vol. 39, no. 4, 2004, 541–63.
9 Nancy Fraser, The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born: From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond (London and New York: Verso 2019); Wilhelm Heitmeyer, Autoritäre Versuchungen (Berlin: Suhrkamp 2018).
10 Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2019).
11 Susanne Rippl and Christian Seipel, ‘Modernisierungsverlierer, Cultural Backlash, Postdemokratie: Was erklärt rechtspopulistische Orientierungen?’, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, vol. 70, no. 2, 2018, 237–54.
12 Klaus Dörre, ‘In der Warteschlange: Rassismus, völkischer Populismus und die Arbeiterfrage’, in Karina Becker, Klaus Dörre und Peter Reif-Spirek (eds), Arbeiterbewegung von rechts? Ungleichheit—Verteilungskämpfe—populistische Revolte (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag 2018), 49–81 (52). See also Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: New Press 2016).
13 Klaus Dörre, In der Warteschlange: Arbeiter*innen und die radikale Rechte (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot 2020), 22.
14 Wolfgang Menz and Sarah Nies, ‘Marktautoritarismus und bedrohte Selbstverständnisse: Impulse der arbeitssoziologischen Bewusstseinsforschung zur Erklärung des Rechtspopulismus’, in Carina Book, Nikolai Huke, Sebastian Klauke and Olaf Tietje (eds), Alltägliche Grenzziehungen: Das Konzept der ‘imperialen Lebensweise’, Externalisierung und exklusive Solidarität (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot 2019), 207–27.
15 Julia Friedrichs, Working Class: warum wir Arbeit brauchen, von der wir leben können (Berlin: Berlin Verlag 2021).
16 Daniel Mullis and Paul Zschocke, Regressive Politiken und der Aufstieg der AfD: Ursachensuche im Dickicht einer kontroversen Debatte, PRIF Report 5 (Frankfurt: HSFK 2019), 19.
17 Emma Dowling, Silke van Dyk and Stefanie Graefe, ‘Rückkehr des Hauptwiderspruchs? Anmerkungen zur aktuellen Debatte um den Erfolg der Neuen Rechten und das Versagen der “Identitätspolitik”’, PROKLA: Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialwissenschaft, vol. 47, no. 188, 2017, 411–20 (413).
18 Dörre, In der Warteschlange, 24.
19 Julia Dück, ‘Mehr als Erschöpfungen im Hamsterrad—Soziale Reproduktion und ihre Krise(n)’, in Moritz Altenried, Julia Dück and Mira Wallis (eds), Plattformkapitalismus und die Krise der sozialen Reproduktion (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot 2021), 28–48 (33).
20 Stuart Hall, ‘The great moving right show’, Marxism Today, vol. 23, no.1, 1979, 14–20 (15) (emphasis in original).
21 Clarke, ‘Conjunctures, crises, and cultures’, 119.
22 Marco Revelli, The New Populism: Democracy Stares into the Abyss, trans. from the Italian by David Broder (London and New York: Verso 2019), 11.
23 Wolfgang Kaschuba, Einführung in die Europäische Ethnologie (Munich: C. H. Beck 1999), 195.
24 Specific locations and company names have been withheld in order to protect interlocutors’ anonymity.
25 Jan Kruse, Qualitative Interviewforschung: Ein integrativer Ansatz (Weinheim: Beltz Juventa 2015).
26 Michael Gassmann, ‘Dem deutschen Einzelhandel droht ein Massensterben’, Die Welt, 5 February 2017.
27 Nico Hornig, ‘Einzelhandel in der Krise: “50.000 geschlossene Geschäfte sind die Untergrenze”’, WirtschaftsWoche, 20 August 2017.
28 Gregor Holst and Franziska Scheier, Branchenanalyse Handel: Perspektiven und Ansatzpunkte einer arbeitsorientierten Branchenstrategie, Working Paper Forschungsförderung no. 161 (Düsseldorf: Hans-Böckler-Stiftung 2019).
29 Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain, ‘The world of the department store: distribution, culture and social change’, in Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain (eds), Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store: 1850–1939 (London: Routledge 2018), 1–45.
30 Ibid.
31 Detlef Briesen, ‘Die Debatte um das Warenhaus: Vom Deutschen Kaiserreich bis zur Bundesrepublik Deutschland’, in Godela Weiss-Sussex and Ulrike Zitzlsperger (eds), Das Berliner Warenhaus: Geschichte und Diskurse—The Berlin Department Store: History and Discourse (Frankfurt: Peter Lang 2013), 17–32 (30).
32 LeCavalier, The Rule of Logistics, 6.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., 152.
35 Gabriele Winker, Care Revolution: Schritte in eine solidarische Gesellschaft (Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag 2015), 61.
36 Ibid., 62.
37 Ibid., 64.
38 Ibid., 32.
39 Tomke König and Ulle Jäger, ‘Reproduktionsarbeit in der Krise und neue Momente der Geschlechterordnung: Alle nach ihren Fähigkeiten, alle nach ihren Bedürfnissen!’, in Alex Demirović, Julia Dück, Florian Becker and Pauline Bader (eds), VielfachKrise: Im finanzmarktdominierten Kapitalismus (Hamburg: VSA 2011), 147–64 (151).
40 Ines Roth and Astrid Schmidt, Arbeitszeit und Belastung: Eine Sonderauswertung auf Basis des DGB-Index Gute Arbeit 2014/15 für den Dienstleistungssektor (Berlin: Ver.di 2016), 72.
41 Pauline Bader, Florian Becker, Alex Demirović and Julia Dück, ‘Die multiple Krise—Krisendynamiken im neoliberalen Kapitalismus’, in Demirović, Dück, Becker and Bader (eds), VielfachKrise, 11–28 (19).
42 Mark Elchardus and Bram Spruyt, ‘Populism, persistent republicanism and declinism: an empirical analysis of populism as a thin ideology’, Government and Opposition, vol. 51, no. 1, 2016, 111–33 (117).
43 Angus Campbell, Gerald Gurin and Warren E. Miller, The Voter Decides (Oxford: Row, Peterson 1954), 187; Jennifer Shore, ‘How social policy impacts inequalities in political efficacy’, Sociology Compass, vol. 14, no. 5, 2020.
44 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books 2001), xiii.
45 Jan-Ocko Heuer, Thomas Lux, Steffen Mau and Katharina Zimmermann, ‘Legitimizing inequality: the moral repertoires of meritocracy in four countries’, Comparative Sociology, vol. 19, nos 4–5, 2020, 542–84 (556).
46 Zygmunt Bauman, Retrotopia (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity 2017), 8.
47 Markus Rheindorf and Ruth Wodak, ‘Borders, fences, and limits—protecting Austria from refugees: metadiscursive negotiation of meaning in the current refugee crisis’, Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, vol. 16, nos 1–2, 2018, 15–38.
48 Bauman, Retrotopia, 5.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Alexander Harder
Alexander Harder is a doctoral student and assistant researcher at the Department of European Ethnology at Humboldt University Berlin. He researches far-right ideologies and the sociocultural dimensions of digitization with a focus on perspectives from cultural and digital anthropology. Email: [email protected] ORCID http://orcid.org/0009-0007-7631-6094