Global capital frontiers have now drawn most people into networks of extractive and commercial market work, and produced a climate disaster that threatens these structures. At the market’s edge, people currently work either to extract resources from and securitise these markets, or to live outside them, surviving on self-production among cyclical disasters and weak old models of development. This project explores models and ideas of good, safe and useful work defined by people working in South Sudan, one of the last frontiers of capitalism and enclosure, where farmers balance mutuality and markets, artisan miners barter gold for fuel, and pastoralist collectives sing songs against the cash economy. These workers are organising their lives within one of the most rapid climate change environments in the world and have a close understanding of the limits of technocratic ‘skill’-based and market-focused ’entrepreneurial’ development programmes. The project draws on colonial and postcolonial paperwork, songs, poems and conversations from across South Sudan’s working terrain to present, working from the University of Juba. It seeks new ideas of how to work for a safe self and society beyond bare life within climate collapse.