‘You make do with what you’ve got’: Makeshift structures and the moral economy of affective labour in post-industrial Manchester

Friedrich Engels once described Cheetham Hill, in North Manchester, as a “girdle” of working people’s quarters beyond which lay the comfort and clean air enjoyed by the bourgeoisie. The great transformations over the next 160 years presented the worker with streamlining of factory work, stronger trade unions, and the emergence of a support network with the welfare system. However, the ruination that Engels perceived in the urban landscape of industrial Manchester resurfaces in the post-industrial era with the demise of work. Drawing on ethnographic material produced in a community centre in Cheetham Hill, this chapter treats people’s involvement with constructing makeshift outbuildings, growing food, keeping animals, and creating spaces of mutual help as instances of “affective labour”, here understood as the production of relations rather than goods (Muehlebach 2011: 61). I argue for the subversive potential of affective labour and the do-it-yourself culture in enabling productivity in a post-work scenario. The resulting effect is an alternative form of economy guided by a moral duty of giving back what one receives freely. In the process, the precariat forges a moral economy based on makeshift and ‘make do’, and the rise of affective labour grants social recognition and personal accomplishment in an otherwise infertile terrain. In a landscape where jobs are scarce, the possibility of being productive reawakens a class consciousness, not based on political activism but on a shared experience of a precariousness that binds this social fabric in its making.