Ezgi Sertler and Thomas Bretz, “Who’s afraid of Freeloaders? Notes on an imaginative institutional attitude“
This paper describes and analyzes an imaginative institutional attitude widespread in various political contexts, namely the fear of freeloaders. An institutional attitude is a pervasive tendency to look at and understand certain aspects of the world in a certain way that guides the creation, operation, and adjustment of an institution. This attitude is imaginative insofar as it is rooted not in empirical observation of the phenomenon in question and of its consequences, but rather in a robust figure of people’s imagination.
One important concept at work in the fear of freeloading is a certain conception of just desert and the idea that people should not get or take what they do not “deserve.” This attitude is effective and dominant in the administration of many existing institutions. Thus, many administrative systems today are primarily about making sure that people who are undeserving do not get something, rather than making sure that people who are deserving get something. What we suggest here is that the common ways in which we think about freeloading – although it often seems entirely reasonable – is, in fact, thoroughly muddled and requires a rethinking of freeloading as a central and important feature of socio-political relations.
Specifically, we want to rethink this issue in three ways, all of which are linked to the political function of this fear. First, we want to show what this fear of freeloading does and how it can often render institutions effectively dysfunctional from the perspective of those it is supposed to serve. Thus, this fear facilitates certain political impacts on institutions.
Second, we want to show how this fear reflects power structures. We can see this when we trace the ways in which the fear of freeloading is applied inconsistently based on certain colonial and otherwise oppressive frameworks of who is ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving,’ and how the people who are usually targeted based on this fear, i.e. various marginalized groups, are not only not the biggest freeloaders, but are often those who are the targets rather than the agents of extraction from the commonwealth. Relatedly, the fear of freeloading is tied to a very specific idea of productive action and of being a worthy member of society. It sustains a very specific ideas – often capitalist and colonial – of what counts as contributing to the commons (or failing to do so), of what it means to rely on the commons, of who owes what to whom, and of parasitism and reciprocity.
Finally, we want to outline the ways in which the fear of freeloading is based on a very minimalist and indeed simplistic idea of what political communities are and what they are for. If, for instance, we cannot rely on our political communities whenever we are not able to care of ourselves, then this tells us something very important about how we conceive of political community only in a classical liberal way as a voluntary association of autonomous agents rather than, say, an inherited, quasi-ecological set of mutually constitutive relations.