This research counters the longstanding development assumption that spaces without widespread wages simply need a modernization-inspired push for job creation. Drawing on anarchist insights about the here-and-now, I suggest post-wage spaces have distinctive cultural features emerging from cash grant economies and a shifting landscape of work. Understanding post-wage spaces beyond deficit (lacking jobs), allows us to locate prefigurations of more intentionally post-wage societies that can challenge the hegemony that secures wages as the default form of distribution.

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Recognizing that contemporary capitalism is structurally wage-expelling, I counter the popular idea that development requires employment and instead focus on how wages can be mourned and ultimately superseded. During fifteen months of fieldwork in rural northern Namibia, I conducted participant observation, interviewing, surveys, and mental sketch mapping with students, pensioners, and educated-but-unemployed youth. My findings detail how a persistent cultural lore about wages remains in post-wage space; in part, because schools instill wage-based ontologies even as graduates are deposited into wageless futures. However, the research also showed how pension market vendors and low-budget musicians engage in productive work beyond wages.

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The findings from this project will be published first as my dissertation, and secondly as an academic or trade monograph. The findings are grouped into  three primary categories:

1. Conceptualizing post-wage space

2. Understanding everyday prefigurations that might lead to post-wage ontologies

3. Exploring the persistent popular support for wage-based society and the resistance to acknowledging wagelessness

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