Top Dog
Well-Known Member
Following the bitching on the Libcom thread that has spilled over to return to the slagging of the Mayday Tesco’s action in London, I’m interested to know why people feel so strongly about the emergence of any discussion of precarity: the condition. Ive been involved myself in the Precarity Assembly for a while now (no, im not a womble) and it's clear that willingness to engage in discussion about new tendencies within the capitalist organisation of work (precarity) outside of the PA has been pish poor - bar a bit of lip service.
So here’s a half-arsed attempt at at least getting a page of sensible points before the trolling/derailing abates it. Before beginning though I want to dispel a few assumptions, challenge a few lazy parodies and burn down some strawmen about what the debate on precarity is (in UK and Europe) and look at the terrain where debate on precarity is actually taking place (apologies in advance for any jargonese, but i make no apologies for the uk-centric position). So firstly:
Is precarity ‘new’?
Course not. A precarious existence within capitalism has always been the situation since the ‘creation’ of the working class. The ‘blip’ if there was one, has been the 50 years of the welfare state, where we have ‘enjoyed’ social democracy and the protections that it affords the working class: upholding of rights, conditions, bargaining, health service, comprehensive education etc. etc. However you may have noticed that for the last 25+ years social democracy has been in retreat. So where does that leave struggles today that would previously have been mediated by its working class representations: the trade union movement? We are faced with the question of how and where class struggle will re-emerge? What forms will it take, which sectors will it encompass (or stated more controversially) which ‘subjectivities’ will be created? Some of the unions have begun to awaken and see the writing on the wall for their futures and have been attempting recently to reinvent themselves to address these changes.
Capital has recomposed the working class twice over since the war and this coming as a large part of the working class asserting itself and rupturing the logic of the social contact, demanding a better life and for lots of people, attempting to escape its shitty existence. The final moves from manufacturing to a finance base in the UK sealed the fate of the post war working class and has recomposed its sons and daughters – us – into a world where once again we’re left to fight the bare teeth of unfettered capital accumulation. But fight it with less weapons at our disposal it would seem, than our parents. And we have leftists handing out the blunt weapons of a bygone age. Rather like trying to fight heat seeking missiles with Mauser rifles!
Is there a ‘Precariat’?
This is the thorny one and one that is at heart I think of a lot of the controversy. Let me nail my colours to the post first… I think that trying to invent a new social category of ‘precariat’ is a doomed misson. It’s flawed both in concept and in strategy… The attempt in some quarters(particularly in Italy) to reinvent operaismo (the workerist tradition) by creating another new social subject, imbued with particular ‘revolutionary’ characteristics, is, in my view, a wrong headed approach and only repeats some of the errors made by certain currents of Italian autonomism.
We end up being faced then with the question that; if there is a ‘precariat’ what is it in relation to the ‘proletariat’? And, following the operaist schema through, crucially: who does it encompass? So we get problems such as: do creative media workers have the same social experience as minimum wage cleaners? well, on one level it is possible to say they do (its all wage slavery after all), but it would be absurd to extrapolate that out and flatten the experience to a 2-dimensional reality and deny that there might be problems with such a wide conception.
But on this subject, it is probably worth also pointing out thats there is no one line on this debate within the european precarity networks, rather, there seems to be a fairly healthy and robust debate on the category (and whether it is indeed a category), in fact.
And what is it we are fighting for?
Again, another thorny issue… As subjects whose lives are increasingly impinged on by preacarity, where there is no such thing as clocking in and out of work, what is it we want? Who is the ‘we’? Are we fighting for more work or less work? Is the fight about making ‘demands’ on a decaying social democracy for the re-establishment of workers’ ‘rights’ or fighting to abolish work and create new realities, new social relationships?
And following that, does the erosion of social democracy create new possibilities further down the line or should we be fighting to reinvent social democracy for a modern world a return of those safeguards and certainties? These are some of the questions that are being discussed and considered currently within the precarity assembly, with the aim of a better understanding of what exactly the condition means and how as subjects we engage ourselves with our own lives and with collective struggles.
So why has discussion of the condition been trivialised or even discounted here? Can anyone seriously argue that the means that we used to fight capital with can still be used today?
So here’s a half-arsed attempt at at least getting a page of sensible points before the trolling/derailing abates it. Before beginning though I want to dispel a few assumptions, challenge a few lazy parodies and burn down some strawmen about what the debate on precarity is (in UK and Europe) and look at the terrain where debate on precarity is actually taking place (apologies in advance for any jargonese, but i make no apologies for the uk-centric position). So firstly:
Is precarity ‘new’?
Course not. A precarious existence within capitalism has always been the situation since the ‘creation’ of the working class. The ‘blip’ if there was one, has been the 50 years of the welfare state, where we have ‘enjoyed’ social democracy and the protections that it affords the working class: upholding of rights, conditions, bargaining, health service, comprehensive education etc. etc. However you may have noticed that for the last 25+ years social democracy has been in retreat. So where does that leave struggles today that would previously have been mediated by its working class representations: the trade union movement? We are faced with the question of how and where class struggle will re-emerge? What forms will it take, which sectors will it encompass (or stated more controversially) which ‘subjectivities’ will be created? Some of the unions have begun to awaken and see the writing on the wall for their futures and have been attempting recently to reinvent themselves to address these changes.
Capital has recomposed the working class twice over since the war and this coming as a large part of the working class asserting itself and rupturing the logic of the social contact, demanding a better life and for lots of people, attempting to escape its shitty existence. The final moves from manufacturing to a finance base in the UK sealed the fate of the post war working class and has recomposed its sons and daughters – us – into a world where once again we’re left to fight the bare teeth of unfettered capital accumulation. But fight it with less weapons at our disposal it would seem, than our parents. And we have leftists handing out the blunt weapons of a bygone age. Rather like trying to fight heat seeking missiles with Mauser rifles!
Is there a ‘Precariat’?
This is the thorny one and one that is at heart I think of a lot of the controversy. Let me nail my colours to the post first… I think that trying to invent a new social category of ‘precariat’ is a doomed misson. It’s flawed both in concept and in strategy… The attempt in some quarters(particularly in Italy) to reinvent operaismo (the workerist tradition) by creating another new social subject, imbued with particular ‘revolutionary’ characteristics, is, in my view, a wrong headed approach and only repeats some of the errors made by certain currents of Italian autonomism.
We end up being faced then with the question that; if there is a ‘precariat’ what is it in relation to the ‘proletariat’? And, following the operaist schema through, crucially: who does it encompass? So we get problems such as: do creative media workers have the same social experience as minimum wage cleaners? well, on one level it is possible to say they do (its all wage slavery after all), but it would be absurd to extrapolate that out and flatten the experience to a 2-dimensional reality and deny that there might be problems with such a wide conception.
But on this subject, it is probably worth also pointing out thats there is no one line on this debate within the european precarity networks, rather, there seems to be a fairly healthy and robust debate on the category (and whether it is indeed a category), in fact.
And what is it we are fighting for?
Again, another thorny issue… As subjects whose lives are increasingly impinged on by preacarity, where there is no such thing as clocking in and out of work, what is it we want? Who is the ‘we’? Are we fighting for more work or less work? Is the fight about making ‘demands’ on a decaying social democracy for the re-establishment of workers’ ‘rights’ or fighting to abolish work and create new realities, new social relationships?
And following that, does the erosion of social democracy create new possibilities further down the line or should we be fighting to reinvent social democracy for a modern world a return of those safeguards and certainties? These are some of the questions that are being discussed and considered currently within the precarity assembly, with the aim of a better understanding of what exactly the condition means and how as subjects we engage ourselves with our own lives and with collective struggles.
So why has discussion of the condition been trivialised or even discounted here? Can anyone seriously argue that the means that we used to fight capital with can still be used today?
ffs
If only it was a simple as replacing 'precarity' for 'casualisation', but the trends in late capitalism are far wider than simply the casualisation of work
