“But One Needs to Work!”: Neoliberal Citizenship, Work-Based Immigrant Integration, and Post-Socialist Subjectivities in Berlin-Marzahn

This is the accepted version of the following article: MATEJSKOVA, T., 2012. "But One Needs to Work!": neoliberal citizenship, work-based immigrant integration, and post-socialist subjectivities in Berlin-Marzahn. Antipode, 45 (4), pp.984-1004, which has been published in final form at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2012.01050.xThis paper examines how middle-aged and older post-Soviet immigrants in eastern Berlin navigate the neoliberalized landscape of work-based integration in face of their long-term unemployment. I first show how these immigrants’ own insistence on the centrality of paid work for their feeling integrated contributes to their experience of collective despondency and enrollment in exploitative quasi-markets, including workfare. Focusing on this insistence, I examine how it draws strength primarily from their continued subscription to the conceptions of self as deeply socially embedded, and of work as a practice of such an embedding, adopted through their Soviet-era socialization into the culture of dispersed personhood and obligation to work, rather than from their adoption of neoliberal concepts of citizenship in Germany. Contributing to geographies of post-socialist experience of neoliberalized regimes of citizenship and immigrant integration this paper thus highlights how some of the aspects of post-socialist subjectivities dovetail unexpectedly with the neoliberal project