The post-socialist posted worker : social reproduction and the geography of class struggles

The chapter engages with posted work in the European Union as a form of post-socialist migration, which exemplifies an increased reliance on displaced models of social reproduction as a way to revitalize one's life. We analyze the concept of transitional justice and argue that its ideological justification has produced an elastic labour power that has no other means to sustain itself than by moving. In this constellation, the figure of the Eastern European posted worker needs to be understood as embodying the historical processes of de-socialization of the means of social reproduction from the public sphere and the effects these processes have on the formation of migratory patterns and relationships. We bring forward the concept of the geography of class struggles in order to think of the ways in which anti-communist conceptions of justice have generated numerous injustices that affect, first, post-socialist labour and then reverberate and expand beyond the former “Eastern Bloc”.