In the twentieth century, ‘fictitious’ labour decommodification took place through the construction of enterprise and state benefits supposed to cover what economists call contingency risks, those that arise from what one is doing. These were wrongly depicted as labour ‘rights’. They were acquired for specific groups who struggled to secure them, but they were never universal or unconditional.

the precariat has an interest in recapturing a progressive vision of ‘freedom from labour’, so establishing a meaningful right to work.

Whereas the proletarian norm was habituation to stable labour, the precariat is being habituated to unstable labour.

All labour and communist parties, social democrats and unions subscribed to this agenda, calling for ‘more labour’ and ‘full employment’, by which was meant all men in full-time jobs. Besides being sexist, this neglected all forms of work that were not labour (including repro-ductive work in the home, caring for others, work in the community, and other self-chosen activities). It also erased a vision of freedom from labour that had figured powerfully in radical thinking in previous ages.

In the globalization era, while the rhetoric of rights gained force and popularity, the reality has been the conversion of more people into denizens, denied certain rights or prevented from obtaining or retaining them. This does not affect only migrants. If Hannah Arendt’s idea of citizenship is ‘the right to have rights’ (Arendt [1951] 1986), today it would be better to think of citizenship as a continuum, with many people having a more limited range of rights than others, without any simple dichotomy of citizen and non-citizen.