ILPC 2026

It is the contention of the presentation that the widespread treatment of the subject conditional cash transfers in either social policy or development economics conceive the issue in income distribution terms, and thus is prone to miss the role they play in ordering social relations in capitalist labour process. This mishandling of the issue goes hand in hand, and in part is caused by another misapprehension: that of the poor and under- or unemployed as not being a part of the working class. In this study, Marx's concepts of surplus population and reserve army of labour are utilised in reconceptualizing poverty and unemployment in contemporary developing country context, reminding their necessity in the reproduction of capitalist social relations. Conditional cash transfers, in their turn, are analysed as a means to ensure the reproduction of the surplus population as the reserve army of labour. Said reproduction is analytically separated as two interrelated processes, namely, the reproduction of labour power on the one hand and reproduction of the wage labour relation. As the role of CCT's in the former is apparent, it remains to show how they reproduce the wage labour relation by serving as a compulsion to work in the conditions determined by the logic of capital. The application of social risk mitigation project in Turkey and Asignación Universal Por Hijo in Argentina are the country case studies which will be considered in pursuing the above summarised reconceptualizations.