Precariat

= derived from precarious + proletariat – ie workers without security.

See also our treatment of: Precarious Labour

As a concept

Alex Foti on the Precariat

"It's not yet an identity but it's in the process of becoming at least a social subject aware of its potential, if an organization finally emerges addressing precarity from a generational angle (the European precariat is mostly a conflation of generation and class). Let's talk about part-time workers. Usually these workers have no control on their work time (they're supposed to do say 20 hours per week, but have to work 40 with no notice if managers require them to do so), and are paid per hour less than correspondent full-time workers. So clearly there are structural elements of precarity in part-time work. Also, since you work part-time you earn a partial income, and so the likelihood of moonlighting increases sharply. But there's no doubt that while involuntary part-time is the norm, there's a number of people that find flexible work schedules a plus for their individual freedom. In fact, we don't want to abolish flexibility even if we could. We want to impose social regulation on it through labor conflict, social agitation, media hacktivism. Most especially (and this is where we disagree with commie parties and unions) we want to fight for a new European welfare system (call it "commonfare") that provides the young, women, immigrants with basic income and universal access to health care, paid maternity leave and paid vacations, cheap housing and education, free, ubiquitous broadband and peer-managed culture. If such a new welfare system were to be built, then people could actually choose the level of flexibility they're comfortable with." (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/4/14/193155/440)

Towards a demoradical strategy for organizing the precariat

Alex Foti at http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=06/06/22/1650208&mode=nested&tid=14

"In three words, it should be green, wobbly, pink, in order to be effective. It should lay out a cogent ecological program to reform society, a creative wobbly strategy to organize and unionize the weak and the excluded, a pink emphasis on non-violent action and gender equality, so to project a queer outlook on the world. It would have to speak to the young, women, immigrants. It would have to address the grievances of the service class, and put to good use the networking talents of the creative class. It would be transnationalist in orientation and multiethnic in composition, for a truly mongrel and mulatto Europe. It would be defiant with (but tolerant of) all forms of organized religion. It would be an obvious antagonist of the securitarian state favored by bushist tendencies. And it would challenge and confront without timidity, but also with cold-mindedness, either fascist, nationalist, xenophobic forces that are resurfacing in many corners of Europe.

The mayday network has to found a wobbly-like european organization federating all the exploited, recruiting from all gender/ethnic groups and organizing all net/temp/flex workers in one big SYNDICATE OF PRECARIOUS EUROPE. It would be a card-carrying organization with its own funds and subsidized agitators, but a very flat structure, with regional nodes and cross-national hubs. It would have an explicitly formalized internal democracy, which would appoint (and remove) people in executive functions. Yes, members would have to vote on important issues and strategic decisions, with regular online and face2face consultations. I believe global movements won't progress until they adopt the democratic criteria of public discussion and majority voting. If you say liberal democracy is a fraud, you have to show a radical democracy can actually function. The first transeuropean syndicate would be open to all jobs ranging from cleaners and programmers, to documented and undocumented people, to the flexibly employed and the permanently unemployed, to anybody believing that the best form of social solidarity is supporting labor conflict and opposing the interests of employers and the investing class. It would be unashamedly syndicalist and anticapitalist in its orientation, by supporting and organizing pickets, blockades, and wildcat strikes. The recent huge social rebellions in France and Denmark against precarity and workfare should remind the mayday network that the time to establish a networked organization is now.

On the party front, the issue of producing a recognizable radical political identity embodying a sense of historical urgency is a lot more complex and still immature at the moment. But it cannot wait any longer being discussed. As far as I am concerned, I see the need for reaping a distinctive political fruit out of the Seattle-Genova tree. My reasoning is this. If the radical left of 1968 and hippyism gave rise to modern political environmentalism, then the ebullience should similarly produce a brand-new political label in the longer term. Greens were born out the turmoil of the 60s and 70s. And what new political constellation will soon appear on the sky, following the travails of the early XXI century? The PINK CONSPIRACY. In a larger context, women's emancipation and the end of the patriarchal family with its unequal gender roles, feminist movements, gay mobilizations, queer politics, full civil rights for GLBTs, the assertion of reproductive rights against papist reaction, and equality of access to political representation for women represent an epochal earthquake for western politics. In a movement context, the pink carnival of rebellion was the major innovative form of political expression emerging from the Prague-Goteborg-Genoa cauldron, next to, but separate from, the white overalls and black blocs, the two other distinctive youth expressions of the anti-globalization movement. Pink collars are the present of social work and pink movements are the future of social progress. Let's do a pink alliance of heretic dissenters in Europe! Who knows? It could be the answer to the generalized disaffection with existing political parties and the institutional representation they're supposed to carry out. In Copenhagen's municipal elections, a pink list got a percentage of votes in the two digits. As early political test, it sure is promising. Barroso and Trichet are in bad need of a pink slip: they must be fired and their policies overhauled in the face of widespread social opposition and unrest." (http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=06/06/22/1650208&mode=nested&tid=14)

More Information

See the article on Precarity

Interview with Alex Foti at http://lipmagazine.org/ccarlsson/archives/2006/06/alex_foti_inter.html

His seminal essay on Demoradicalism is here at http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=06/06/22/1650208&mode=nested&tid=14

Book

* Book: Guy Standing, The Precariat. The new dangerous class (Bloomsbury Academic 2011), viii, 198p

Review by Elaine Graham-Leigh:

(the review also refers to: Owen Jones, Chavs. The demonization of the working class Verso 2011)

"Standing, similarly, sees the position of the working class now as one of defeat, so much so that the structure of the class itself has been changed. The core of his argument is that insecure workers cannot be regarded as part of the proletariat, which he defines in relation to secure employment and trade-union rights, but represent a new class, the precariat, with particular dangers because they are difficult for traditional working-class organisation to reach and vulnerable to co-option by far right groups. Jones also notes this potential for channelling working-class discontent for parties like the BNP.

Reading these two books together provides a striking example of how writers can observe essentially the same phenomena and come to opposite conclusions about them. For Jones, the solution lies in a new working-class politics, including a response by trade unions to the new working conditions, since the decline of trade unions ‘lies at the heart of many of the problems of the working class’ (p.266), but which would go beyond workplace-based struggles to initiate, for example, a campaign for good jobs, incorporating many of the elements of theGreen New Deal. For Standing, this sort of argument is part of the problem, as he reveals in a telling passage in the preface:

‘In the early stages of writing the book, a presentation of the themes was made to what turned out to be a largely ageing group of academics of a social democratic persuasion. Most greeted the ideas with scorn and said there was nothing new. For them, the answer today was the same as it was when they were young. More jobs were needed, more decent jobs. All I will say to those respected figures is that I think the precariat would have been unimpressed’ (p.vii).

The notion that insecure employment and precarious living conditions could be relieved by secure employment is here revealed to be, most damningly, old-fashioned. The concept of the precariat has its origins in Italian autonomist thinking in the 1990s, and is very much in opposition to what is seen as the traditional left’s doomed attempts to turn the clock back to mid-twentieth century, Fordist employment patterns. Rather, the solution here to the consequences of insecure employment is to replace employment as the source of security. Standing, in common with other proponents of the existence of a precariat class, calls for a basic guaranteed income, paid to everyone regardless of behaviour, supplying stability to the class who currently have none.

A common criticism of the basic income as an idea is that it would be ameliorating the effects of capitalism, rather than attacking the problem at the source. In the same way that working tax credits are a state subsidy for companies’ decisions to increase their profits by paying low wages, so in paying a basic income, the state would be picking up the tab for globalised labour policies, and freeing up companies to continue the requirement that their workers assume more and more of the costs of reproducing their labour themselves. Standing would clearly not agree with a suggestion that he is capitulating to capitalism; indeed, in his view, restoring security to the precariat is on a level with seizing control of the means of production.

For Standing, the key struggle in every era is over the ‘key assets’, which do not have to be the means of production themselves. They were in industrial capitalism, when the struggle was over control of ‘factories, estates and mines’. Now, however, in ‘today’s tertiary society’, the progressive struggle will be over ‘economic security, time, quality space, knowledge and financial capital’ (p.171). By supplying economic security, time and the opportunity to gain the other elements, the basic income in Standing’s view would be a major step forward in the class struggle: for him it is a revolutionary idea.

There are, nevertheless, considerable problems with it. While it might be a tempting idea that all we need to do is get a greater share of security for us as individuals, it is difficult to see how a revolution could succeed without seizing control of the means of production, however antediluvian a concept that might appear. Standing could be read here to be arguing that the decline of industrial production in the West has ushered in a post-capitalist age of immaterial production, to which none of the previous rules apply. This is certainly the implication of his used of the term ‘tertiary’, presumably to differentiate us from the ‘primary’, agricultural, and ‘secondary’, industrial ages. It seems a little odd, to say the least, that at the time at which confident proclamations from the ruling class of the new frictionless, weightless economy, immune from the previous problems of capitalism, have been shown to be so much hot air, that Standing appears to be embracing them. Is this really what he means? It is not entirely clear, which highlights a major difficulty of this work: that it discusses, and takes issue with, some of the central concepts of Marxism, without admitting that that is what it is doing, or addressing them explicitly.

The idea that the proletariat has been superseded by the precariat is similarly problematic. Standing appears to view the proletariat as the collective embodiment of the ‘Fordist’ era of full, secure, unionised employment; a rather eccentric definition, since trade unions were hardly widespread when Marx wrote and precarious working conditions have been the reality for most of the proletariat for most of its history. In Marxist terms, there is no reason why we should have to define insecurely employed, or indeed unemployed workers as no longer proletarian: the flat-capped factory-working proletarian is a stereotype, not a definition. That more and more working-class people have to endure precarious working and living conditions is clearly a reality, but Standing does not present a convincing argument for why this means we should regard them as no longer proletarian. The existence of the precariat as a separate class is more assumed than established here, and it is not a safe assumption.

This is more than an argument about terminology, because of the historic nature of the proletariat as the revolutionary class. It is not clear whether Standing thinks that the precariat is now the revolutionary class, or whether for him a concomitant of his view that large numbers of people have fallen out of the proletariat is indeed that the ability to build the revolution has fallen with them. The precariat certainly appears in this book as the class at the centre of struggle, but given the strong identification here of working-class organisation with the outmoded proletariat, it is certainly a possible reading that revolutionary organisation is similarly supposed to be so-last-century. It is indisputable that the reality of insecure employment patterns, in the private sector often in non-union workplaces, presents a challenge for a trade-union model of organisation based exclusively on workplace struggle, but the conclusion that these factors represent the formation of a new class seems neither convincing nor helpful in building the resistance to the effects of the economic crisis." (http://www.thenewsignificance.com/2011/07/22/elaine-graham-leigh-the-new-condition-of-the-working-class/)