Mute Vol 2 #0 - Precarious Reader

Sometimes it’s hard to tell self-congratulation from self-abasement. Not a Proper Job, a temping directory for artists, was launched in London in October at a party advertised as follows:
If you live a creative lifestyle, you are by definition a member of the ‘Not a Proper Job’ club. So come join us and celebrate not having a Proper Job. Birds of a feather should flock together!

As Marina Vishmidt observes below in her article ‘Precarious Straits’, the ‘relative autonomy’ of ‘creative’ lifestyles ‘is underwritten by extreme dependence’: that of other, ‘uncreative’ casual workers, of everyone else still employed in the old-fashioned, inflexible way, and of the unwittingly wretched ‘creatives’ themselves. So any celebration of artworkers’ quasi-freedom is always also cheerleading for all three kinds of servitude. While no more could be expected from a neo-boosterist campaign backed by Greater London Enterprise, the EU and the European Social Forum, it’s strange to find a similar logic at work in a lot of critical discourse on ‘precariousness’. In the latest issue of Greenpepper (October, 2004), Alex Foti of Chainworkers declares that ‘the precariat is to postindustrialism as the proletariat was to industrialism.’ This suggests that the messianic historical mission of creative and technical ‘brainworkers’ somehow enobles and redeems the everyday misery of the hyperexploited ‘chainworkers’ with whom, in the term ‘precariat’, they are uncomfortably conflated. ‘How’, asks Angela Mitropoulos below in her article ‘Precari-us?’, does the fast-food ‘chainworker’, who is compelled to be affective, compliant and routinised, not assume such a role of relation to a software programming ‘brainworker’, whose habitual forms of exploitation oblige opinion, innovation and self-management? How is it possible for the latter to avoid assuming for themselves the specialised role of mediator?

The notion of artists / ‘virtuosi’ / ‘cognitaires’ etc. as the vanguard of the precariat is based on the equation of precariousness with irregular or casual working patterns. Yet it’s hard to imagine a group of workers better acquainted with their own precarious status than those on the regular assembly lines at Siemens and Volkswagen, recently forced to accept a longer working week for no extra money in order to save their jobs from ‘offshoring’ within Europe.

The idea of transversal social unity in shared precariousness is closely linked to the insight that ‘all life is work’, in the sense that value is transformed from labour into capital right across the social field, not just in jobs. But ‘all life is work’ doesn’t mean all work is the same. Far more value can be squeezed out of some kinds of labour than from others: hence the war on ‘economic inactivity’ waged by governments and employers, a desperate mobilisation to get as many people working (in the traditional sense) as many hours as possible. Pious identification between violently stratified social subjects does nothing whatsoever to undermine this war effort.

Does the term precariousness or 'precarity', as applied to the conditions of employment under neoliberalism, provide us with more than another trendy neologism? Angela Mitropoulos examines its use, misuse and associated political horizons

Few could be unaware that an increasing proportion of the workforce is engaged in intermittent or irregular work. But I'd like to set aside for the moment the weight and scope of the evidentiary, those well-rehearsed findings that confirm beyond doubt the discovery and currency of precariousness and which render the axiomatic terrain upon which such facts are discovered beyond reproach. Instead, I would like to explore something of the grammar at work in these discussions. As a noun, 'precariousness' is both more unwieldy and indeterminate than most. If it is possible to say anything for certain about precariousness, it is that it teeters. This is to begin by emphasising some of the tensions that shadow much of the discussion about precarious labour. Some of those tensions can be located under various, provisional headings which bracket the oscillation between regulation and deregulation, organisation and dissemination, homogenous and concrete time, work and life.

There are notable instances of this: consider recent research commissioned by Australia's foremost trade union body, the ACTU, into what they call 'non-standard' forms of work. As reported, most of those surveyed said they would like 'more work.' It is not clear to what extent that answer was shaped by the research, i.e.: by the ACTU's persistent arguments for a return to 'standard hours,' re-regulation, or their more general regard for Fordism as the golden age of social democracy and union organisation. 'Non-standard work' has mostly been viewed by unions as a threat, not only to working conditions but, principally, to the continuing existence of the unions themselves.

But what is clear is that the flight from 'standard hours' was not precipitated by employers but rather by workers seeking less time at work. This flight coincided with the first wave of an exit from unions. What the Italian Workerists dubbed 'the refusal of work' in the late 1970s had its anglophone counterpart in the figure of the 'slacker'. This predated the 'flexiblisation' of employment that took hold in the 1980s. The failure of this oppositional strategy nevertheless provoked what Andrew Ross has called the 'industrialisation of bohemia'. Given that capitalism persisted, the flight from Fordist regularity and full time work can be said to have necessitated the innovation and extension of capitalist exploitation ­ much like gentrification has followed university students around suburbs and de-industrialising areas since the 1970s.

The search for a life outside work tended to reduce into an escape from the factory and its particular forms of discipline. And so, perhaps paradoxically, this flight triggered an indistinction between work and life commensurate with the movement of exploitation into newer areas. This is why the answer of 'more work' now presents itself so often as the horizon of an imaginable solution to the problem of impoverishment and financial instability ­ not more money or more life outside work, but more work.

Take the distinction between work-time and leisure-time. These categories become formalised with Fordism, its temporal rhythm as measured out by the wage, clock and assembly line, and distinguished by a proportionality and particular division of times, as in the eight hour day and the five day week. Here, leisure-time bears a determined relationship to work ­ as the trade-off for the mind-numbing tedium of the assembly line, as rejuvenation, and as temporary respite from the mind-body split that line-work enforces. Yet leisure time was, still, substantively a time of not-work.

By comparison, while the perpetually irregular work of post-Fordism might, though not necessarily, decrease the actual amount of time spent doing paid work, it nevertheless enjoins the post-Fordist worker to be continually available for such work, to regard life outside waged work as a time of preparation for and readiness to work. Schematically put: whereas Fordism sought to cretinise, to sever the brains of workers from their bodies so as to assign thought, knowledge, planning and control to management, post-Fordist capitalism might by contrast be characterised ­ in Foucault's terms ­ as the imprisonment of the body by the soul. Hence the utility of desire, knowledge, and sociality in post-Fordism.

The long, Protestant history of assuming work as an ethical or moral imperative returns in the not-always secular injunction to treat one's self as a commodity both during and outside actual work time. One can always try to defer the ensuing panic and anxiety with pharmacology, as Franco Berardi argues. But something might also be said here about that other 'opiate,' the parallel rise of an enterprising, evangelical Christianity; not to mention attempts to freeze contingency in communitarianism, of one variant or another. The precariousness of life ­ experienced all the more insistently because life depends on paid work ­ tends to close the etymological distance between prayer (precor) and the precarious (precarius).

PRECARIOUS SUBJECTS

The term 'Precarity' might have replaced 'precariousness' with the advantage of a prompt neologism; yet both continue to be burdened by a normative bias which seeks guarantees in terms that are often neither plausible nor desirable. Precariousness is mostly rendered in negative terms, as the imperative to move from irregularity to regularity, or from abnormality to normality. That normative burden is conspicuous in the grammatical development from adjective to noun: precarious to precariousness, condition to name.

Yet, capitalism is perpetually in crisis. Capital is precarious, and normally so. Stability here has always entailed formalising relative advantages between workers, either displacing crises onto the less privileged, or deferring the effects of those crises through debt. Moreover, what becomes apparent in discussions on precariousness is that warranties are often sought, even by quite different approaches, in the juridical realm. The law becomes the secularised language of prayer against contingency. This assumes a distinction between law and economy that is certainly no longer, if it ever was, all that plausible. It is not clear, therefore, whether the motif of precariousness works to simply entice a desire for its opposite, security, regardless if this is presented as a return to a time in which security apparently reigned or as a future newly immunised against precariousness.

There are nationalist denominations. Precarity (or precarité), in its current expression, emerged in French sociology and its attempts to grasp the convergence of struggles by unemployed and intermittent workers in the late 1990s. Most prominently, Bourdieu was among those who raised the issue of a diffuse precarité as an argument for the strengthening of the Nation State against this, as well as the globalisation that was said to have produced it. In its far less nationalist versions, the discussion on precarity is marked ­ sometimes ambivalently and not always explicitly ­ by the presentation of a hoped-for means of resistance, if not revolution. A renewed focus on changing forms of class composition or new subjectivities may have brought with it an irreversible and overdue shift in perspective and vocabulary. But that shift has not in all cases disturbed the structural assumptions of an orthodox Marxism in the assertion of a newer, therefore more adequate, vanguard. Names confer identity as if positing an unconditional presupposition. Like all such assertions, it is not simply the declaration that one has discovered the path to a different future in an existing identity that remains questionable. More problematically, such declarations are invariably the expression and reproduction of a hierarchy of value in relation to others.

For instance, if Lenin's Party, defined as the figure of the 'revolutionary intellectual', paid homage to the mind-body split of Fordism and Taylorism (where others were either cast as a 'mass' or, where actively oppositional, 'counterrevolutionaries'), to what extent has the discussion on precarious labour avoided a similar duplication of segmentation and conformism? Or, to put the question in classical Marxist terms: to what extent can an identity which is immanent to capitalism (whether 'working class' or 'multitude') be expected to abolish capitalism, and therefore its very existence and identity? Does a politics which takes subjectivity as its question and answer reproduce a politics as the idealised image of such? A recourse to an Enlightenment Subject replete with the stratifications which presuppose it, and ledgered according to its current values (or valuations), not least among these being the distinction between paid and unpaid labour.

Let me put still this another way: the discussion of the precarious conditions of 'creative labour' and the 'industrialisation of bohemia' tends to restage a manoeuvre found in Puccini's opera La Boheme. Here, a bunch of guys (a poet, philosopher, artist and musician) suffer for their art in their garret. But it is the character of Mimi ­ the seamstress who talks of fripperies rather than art ­ who furnishes Puccini and our creative heroes with the final tragedy with which to exalt that art as suffering and through opera. The figure of the artist (or 'creative labourer') may well circulate, in some instances, as the exemplary figure of the post-Fordist worker ­ precarious, immaterial and so on ­ but this requires a moment in which the precarious conditions of others are declared to be a result of their 'invisibility' or 'exclusion'.

For what might turn out to have been the briefest of political moments, the exemplary figure of precariousness was that of undocumented migrant workers, without citizenship but nevertheless inside national economic space, and precarious in more senses than might be indicated by other uses of the word. And, far from arriving with the emergence of newer industries or subjectivities, precarious work has been a more or less constant feature of domestic work, retail, 'hospitality,' agriculture, sex work and the building industry, as well as sharply inflecting the temporal and financial arrangements which come into play in the navigation of child-rearing and paid work for many women. But rather than shaking assertions that the 'precariat' is a recent phenomenon, through the declaration that such work was previously 'invisible', the apprehension of migrant, 'Third World' and domestic labour seems to have become the pretext for calls for the reconstruction of the plane of visibility (of juridical recognition and mediation) and the eventual circulation and elevation of the cultural-artistic (and cognitive) worker as its paradigmatic expression. The strategy of exodus (of migration) has been translated into the thematics of inclusion, visibility and recognition.

On a global scale and in its privatised and/or unpaid versions, precarity is and has always been the standard experience of work in capitalism. When one has no other means to live than the ability to labour or ­ even more precariously, since it privatises a relation of dependency ­ to reproduce and 'humanise' the labour publicly tendered by another, life becomes contingent on capital and therefore precarious.

The experience of regular, full-time, long-term employment which characterised the most visible, mediated aspects of Fordism is an exception in capitalist history. That presupposed vast amounts of unpaid domestic labour by women and hyper-exploited labour in the colonies. This labour also underpinned the smooth distinction between work and leisure for the Fordist factory worker. The enclosures and looting of what was once contained as the Third World and the affective, unpaid labour of women allowed for the consumerist, affective 'humanisation' ­ and protectionism ­ of what was always a small part of the Fordist working class. A comparably privileged worker who was nonetheless elevated to the exemplary protagonist of class struggle by way of vanguardist reckonings. Those reckonings tended to parallel the valuations of bodies by capital, as reflected in the wage. The 'lower end' of the (global) labour market and divisions of labour ­ impoverishment, destitution or a privatised precariousness ­ were accounted for, as an inherent attribute of skin colour and sex, as natural. In many respects, then, what is registered as the recent rise of precarity is actually its discovery among those who had not expected it by virtue of the apparently inherent and eternal (perhaps biological) relation between the characteristics of their bodies and their possible monetary valuation ­ a sense of worth verified by the demarcations of the wage (paid and unpaid) and in the stratification of wage levels.

BIOPOLITICAL ARITHMETIC

To be sure, there are important reasons to continue a discussion of precarious labour and precarity, of how changes to work-time become diffused as a disposition. Precarity is a particularly useful way to open a discussion on the no longer punctual dimensions of the encounter between worker and employer, and how this gives rise to a generalised indistinction between the labour market, self, relationships and life.

The more interesting aspect of this discussion is the connection made between the uncertainty of making a living and therefore the uncertainty of life that is thereby produced in its grimly mundane as well as horrific aspects: impoverishment, as both persistent threat and circumstance; the 'war on terror'; the internment camps; 'humanitarian intervention', and so on. In this, the topic of biopolitics re-emerges with some urgency ­ or rather this urgency becomes more tangible for that privileged minority of workers (or 'professionals') who were previously unfamiliar with its full force. Impoverishment and war pronounce austere verdicts upon lives reckoned as interchangeable and therefore at risk of being declared superfluous. What does it means to insist here, against its capitalist calculations, on the 'value of life'?

This raises numerous questions. What are the intersections between economic and political-ethical values? Does value have a measure, a standard by which all values (lives) are calculated and related? Transformed into organisational questions: how feasible is it to use precarity as a means for alliances or coalition-building without effacing the differences between Mimi and the Philosopher, or indeed reproducing the hierarchy between them? Is it in the best interests for the maquiladora worker to ally herself with the fashion designer? Such questions cannot be answered abstractly. But there are two, perhaps difficult and irresolvable questions that might be still be posed.

First, what are the specific modes of exploitation of particular kinds of work? If the exploitation and circulation of 'cognitive' or 'creative labour' consists, as Maurizio Lazzarato argues, in the injunction to 'be active, to communicate, to relate to others' and to 'become subjects', then how does this shape their interactions with others, for better or worse? How does the fast food 'chainworker', who is compelled to be affective, compliant, and routinised not assume such a role in relation to a software programming 'brainworker', whose habitual forms of exploitation oblige opinion, innovation and self-management? How is it possible for the latter to avoid assuming for themselves the specialised role of mediator ­ let alone preening themselves in the cognitariat's mirror as the subject, actor or 'activist' of politics ­ in this relationship? To what extent do the performative imperatives of artistic-cultural exploitation (visibility, recognition, authorship) foreclose the option of clandestinity which remains an imperative for the survival of many undocumented migrants and workers in the informal economy?

Secondly, why exactly is it important to search for a device by which to unify workers ­ however plurally that unity is configured? Leaving aside the question of particular struggles ­ say, along specific production chains ­ it is not all that clear what the benefits might be of insisting that precarity can function as this device for recomposing what was in any case the fictitious ­ and highly contested ­ unity of 'the working class'. To be sure, that figure is being challenged by that of 'the multitude', but what is the specific nature of this challenge?

Ellen Rooney once noted that pluralism is a deeper form of conformism: while it allows for a diversity of content, conflict over the formal procedures which govern interaction are off-limits, as is the power of those in whose image and interest those rules of interaction are constituted. Often, this arises because the procedures established for interaction and the presentation of any resulting 'unity' are so habitual that they recede beyond view. Those who raise problems with them therefore tend to be regarded as the sources of conflict if not the architects of a fatal disunity of the class. A familiar, if receding, example: sexism is confined to being a 'women's issue', among a plurality of 'issues,' but it cannot disrupt the form of politics.

What then is the arithmetic of biopolitics emerging from the destitution of its Fordist forms? If Fordist political forms consecrated segmentations that were said to inhere, naturally, in the difference of bodies, then what is post-Fordism's arithmetic? Post-Fordism dreams of the global community of 'human capital', where differences are either marketable or reckoned as impediments to the free flow of 'humanity' as ­ or rather for ­ capital. In short, political pluralism is the idealised version of the post-Fordist market.

It might be useful here to specify that commodification does not consist in the acts of buying and selling ­ which obviously predate capitalism. Rather, commodification means the application of a universal standard of measure that relates and reduces qualitative differences ­ of bodies, actions, work ­ according to the abstract measure of money. Abstract equivalence, without its idyllic depictions, presupposes and produces hierarchy, exploitation and violence. Formally, which is to say juridically: neither poor nor rich are allowed to sleep under bridges.

What does it mean, then, to argue that the conditions of precarious workers might be served by a more adequate codification of rights? It does not, I think, mean that our conditions will improve or, rather, be guaranteed by such. Proposals for 'global citizenship' by Negri and Hardt are predated by the global reach of a militaristic humanitarianism that has already defined its meaning of the convergence between 'human rights' and supra-national force. Similarly, a 'basic income' has already been shown, in the places it exists such as Australia, to be contingent upon and constitutive of intermittent engagements with waged work, if not forced labour, as in work-for-the-dole schemes. The latter policy was applied to unemployed indigenous people before it became a recent measure against the unemployed generally. Basic incomes do not suspend the injunction to work often in low paid, casual or informal jobs; they are deliberately confined to levels which provide for a bare life but not for a livelihood. The introduction of work-for-the-dole schemes indicate that, where 'human capital' does not flow freely as such, policy (and pluralism) will resort to direct coercion, cancelling the formally voluntary contract of wage labour. The introduction of the work-for-the-dole scheme for indigenous people in Australia followed on the collapse in their employment rates after the introduction of 'equal pay' laws. Their 'failure to circulate' was explained as an inherent, often biological, attribute (chiefly as laziness) and, therefore, the resort to forced labour was rendered permissible by those politicians who most loudly proclaimed their commitment to multiculturalism and the reconciliation of indigenous and 'settler' Australians.

So, how might it be possible to disassociate the value of life from the values of capital? Or, with regard to the relation between a globalised nationalism and aspirations for supra-national arrangements: how to sever the various daily struggles against precariousness from the enticements of a global security-state? Rights are not something one possesses ­ even if many of us are reputed, by correlation, to possess our own labour in the form of an increasingly self-managed or self-employed exploitation. Rights, like power, are exercised, in practice and by bodies. As juridical codes, they are both bestowed and denied by the state, at its discretion. There are no guarantees and there will always be a struggle to exercise particular rights, irrespective of whether they are codified in law. But, as a strategy, the path of rights means praying that the law or state might distribute rights and entrusting it with the authority and force to deny them.

That said, precarity might well have us teetering, it might even do so evocatively, for better and often worse, praying for guarantees and, at times, shields that often turn out to be fortresses. But it is yet to dispense with, for all its normative expressions, a relationship to the adjective: to movement, however uncertain. 'Precarious' is as much a description of patterns of worktime as it is the description, experience, hopes and fears of a faltering movement ­ in more senses than one, and possibly since encountering the limits of the anti-summit protests. This raises the risk of movements that become trapped in communitarian fears or in dreams of a final end to risk in the supposedly secure embrace of global juridical recognition. Yet, it also makes clear that a different future, by definition, can only be constructed precariously, without firm grounds for doing so, without the measure of a general rule, and with questions that should, often, shake us ­ particularly what 'us' might mean.

Angela Mitropoulos <s0metim3s AT optusnet.com.au> sometimes produces websites http://antimedia.net/xborder http://woomera2002.antimedia.net http://flotilla2004.com, writes on border policing and class composition, and sometimes comes across a wage

The perilous and exploitative employment of economic migrants, despire the public outcry against it, is an essential component of capitalist productivity. Concentrating on the structural insecurity of Chinese workers both in the UK and mainland China, John Barker moves from the contextless media coverage of specific deaths to the macroeconomic picture that caused them

In June of 2000, 58 Chinese people died of mass suffocation in the container of a lorry that arrived on a ferry at Dover. They died trying to enter the UK illegally. The direct cause of these deaths was the blocking of the container's air vents by the driver, a Dutchman called Perry Wacker. He is the worst of criminals; a panicker lacking the basic nerve required and, in this case, cutting the air supply for fear of being caught. The reporting of the case by large sections of the British media was either downright callous or sympathetic in abstract terms only, the horror felt from putting ourselves in the shoes of those who died proved to be too much.

In early February 2004, 19 Chinese workers who had entered the UK illegally died by drowning on the dangerous shoreline of Morecombe Bay, Lancashire ­ sands rich in cockles. This time the reporting of what happened was more sympathetic. Once again the direct cause of their deaths was the reckless and incompetent greed of those employing them. It was reported that one of those who died, Guo Binlong, made a call on his mobile phone to his wife in the village of Zelang near Fuqing City not long before he drowned. He said, 'Maybe I'm going to die. It's a tiny mistake by my boss. He should have called us back an hour ago.'

Heartbreaking, twice over: the tiny mistake, that that's how Guo Binlong saw it, and the futility of the call. All the reporting implied that none of the 19 could read English or perhaps even speak it, and therefore would not have understood the sign up by the beach that said 'Fast rising tides and hidden channels. In emergency ring 999'. Perhaps if it had been read and understood, even as the danger became obvious, there would have been a reluctance to ring 999.

In another case involving a 40 year old Chinese man, Zhang Guo Hua, who entered the UK illegally and who died in Hartlepool after working a 24 hour shift in a plastics 'feeder' factory for Samsung, it was in no one's interests, as the reporter David Leigh put it, to make a fuss ­ neither employers nor fellow workers. He was cremated without an inquest. And for Guo Binlong the mobile phone, one of the technological wonders of the present era of globalisation, that allowed a phone call from the darkness of Morecombe Bay, with the cold water rising, to a village in China, was useless to him. In contrast, a young female Londoner was happily saved from sinking mud on the shore of the Thames by using her phone.

The reporting of these deaths though more sympathetic, quickly identified the ruthless and criminal gangmasters as being responsible. Though they have remained largely unnamed the condemnation has been far stronger than in the case of Perry Wacker. The broadsheet papers talked of these gangsters using stolen 4-wheel drives in the same horrified tones that they portray loan sharks, as if the billions made by the 'high-street' banks belonged to a different moral universe. No, these gangsters were 'tough Scousers with torn jeans' and mixed in with them Triads and Snakeheads.

In the same period as these horrific deaths two other types of Chinese people in the UK are becoming important to its economy: students and tourists. All the students pay full overseas fees of £10,000, and in 2003 there were estimated to be 25,000 students making £250 million for British universities ­ a fourfold increase in three years. In 2004, the estimate is of 35,000 students. The attractions for British universities is obvious. For the students it offers the chance of a university education when places are so limited in China, and when a British degree is said to look particularly good on CVs. What is certain is that the British government is not seeking to reduce their numbers, even when some also work in the black economy to help pay their way.

In October 2003, it was reported that the EU was expected to approve a new visa regime that will give Chinese people easier access to Europe. Chinese tour groups are expected to be given 'approved destination status'. This almost automatic visa granting would have an in-built safety clause from the EU's point of view in that Chinese tour operators would be heavily punished if any of their clients failed to return to China. This does not apply to the UK which is outside the Schengen Agreement but is equally keen to receive the money generated by such tourism. This is not negligible. Since 1998 the number of Chinese overseas travellers has almost doubled to 16.6 million. That is only a fraction of its 1.3 billion population, but the prediction is for 100 million overseas travellers by 2020, making them the world's biggest travellers. The UK does not want to be left behind but is seeking watertight agreements with the Chinese government to take back failed asylum seekers and issue new papers to those who deliberately destroy them, an issue the Blair government made much of after the Morecombe Bay horror.

These numbers, and prospective numbers, are another indication of the development of a middle-class in China; middle class in its consumption possibilities that is, or what might otherwise be called a nouveau riche. A copycat nouveau riche highlighted by the recent 'BMW case'. The wife of a rich property owner deliberately ran over the wife of a peasant, Liu Zhongxia, whose tractor she claimed, had scratched a wing mirror on her BMW in Harbin, Heliongjiang province, the heart of North East China's rust-belt, mimicking the Long Island heiress who recently maimed a few in similar fashion after a nightclub entry argument. The driver, Mrs Su, who had also paid someone to take her driving test, was acquitted as no witnesses dared to turn up. That such bad behaviour and the incomes and spending power that allow it now exist is hardly surprising given the dynamic growth of its industrial economy. It can be argued that it is only through the policies of the nationalist Communist Party, determined only to allow in Western capital on its own terms (however much that might be wishful thinking) that this growth has taken place. It is equally the case that it results from the shift of so much industrial production to China from the First World, to take advantage of a low wage workforce, one which is also producing this nouveau riche. The divisions of levels of income and possibilities in China are now so great that they might be called class divisions, and so obvious that the new Communist Party leadership of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao have referred to it and of the need to narrow the gap between rich and poor. Beyond the never-ending campaign to root out the corruption of officials and their parasitic relation to the peasantry, this sounds like wishful thinking.

There are not going to be 1.3 billion Chinese in the 'middle-class' level global consumer class. What would they be producing? Even in the 'First World' it is a bogus promise. In the case of China, with such an across-the-board global consumer class, the global environmental crisis would be obvious even to those who do not wish to see it. Instead the situation as it is, and as it is developing, is eminently suitable to the global investor class and its transnational corporations and companies. As Oscar Romero puts it with the ruthless clarity of 'Third World' analysts, what matters to them is that 'national markets become increasingly liberalised so that they can seek the thin strata with high income in the underdeveloped countries ... they do not aim to sell to the entire population, it would be sufficient for 300 million in the upper-income brackets out of the total Chinese population to become their customers, though this may create a dangerous gap between the two Chinas.' (Oscar Romero, The Myth of Development, Zed Books). To manage this dangerous gap, what better than a highly sophisticated one-party state which can maintain a low-wage industrial assembly class, itself privileged from an even larger and lower-waged rural class. 300 million is enough, it dwarfs the present US market.

Taken with similarly proportioned figures in India, this development is a godsend to the global investor class which, as the SE Asian 'financial crisis' showed, was faced with a problem of global overproduction. A financial analyst also trading in snappy one-liners, Ed Yardeni, talked of the world needing all the yuppies it can get. Looked at in this light, the Chinese one-party system may be the more reliable given the stunning defeat of the BJP party in India in the recent election; a party which as Arundhati Roy described so well in her essay about the Gujarat pogrom, had sought to manage the 'dangerous gap' with a mixture of neoliberalism and Hindu nationalism. However chimerical the promises of the Congress Party might be, the election did allow the poor at least to say 'No' to the gap and the way it was being managed.

The poor of Britain and Europe know the present importance of China in particular, life would be that much harder without its prices: a pair of jeans for a fiver or toys for a quid. Its coming importance was highlighted 100 years ago in J A Hobson's Imperialism, a book unfairly famous only for having been used and misused by Lenin.

'China seems to offer a unique opportunity to the Western business man. A population ... endowed with an extraordinary capacity of steady labour, with great intelligence and ingenuity, inured to a low standard of material comfort ... Few Europeans even profess to know the Chinese ... the only important fact upon which there is universal agreement is that the Chinese of all the "lower races" are most adaptable to purposes of industrial exploitation, yielding the largest surplus product of labour in proportion to their cost of keep.'

Western ignorance seems to have changed little: the Sinology department at Durham University is scheduled to close, and the UK government is to withdraw the small support it gave to those doing M.Phils in Chinese.

Hobson was in no position to anticipate a Communist Revolution or the developing class system of the present. He did however foresee those fears of this industrial development getting out of Western control, manifested in notions of the 'yellow peril' which crop up throughout the 20th century to cause havoc in the minds of the leftist American writers Jack London and John dos Passos. 'It is at least conceivable that China might so turn the tables upon the Western industrial nations, and, either by adopting their capital and organisers or, as is more probable, by substituting her own, might flood their markets with her cheaper manufacturers, and refusing their imports in exchange might take her payment in liens upon their capital, reversing the earlier process of investment until she gradually obtained financial control over her quondam patrons and civilisers.' Such speculation belongs elsewhere: I don't know, for example, how much Chinese capital is invested in US Treasury bonds, but presumably it figures prominently in the thinking of professional, militarised Western geopolitics. In their considerations presumably, oil figures a great deal. China's 'industrial revolution' depends on it. Last year alone its oil consumption rose by 10 percent, along with what The Times (11/6/04) calls the 'rampant demand' from not just China, but India and Brazil too; countries 'continuing to guzzle world supply'. Guzzle! It may well be that the spread of US military bases across the oil-producing world is a product of those considerations.

At the same time Hobson raises another possibility, that 'the pressure of working class movements in politics and industry in the West can be met by a flood of China goods, so as to keep down wages ... it is conceivable that the powerful industrial and financial classes of the West, in order better to keep the economic and political mastery ... may insist upon the free importation of yellow labour for domestic and industrial service in the West. This is a weapon which they hold in reserve, should they need to use it in order to keep the populace in safe subjection.' Hobson himself had seen the use of Chinese labour in the South African gold mines. Although, to our ears he sounds melodramatic and unwarrantably sweeping, nevertheless his considerations do overlap with yet another round of the 'Immigration Debate'. The disparity between the freedom of mobility for capital and non-freedom for labour is mentioned, if at all, and then forgotten as if these really do represent parallel worlds. Instead, the same yes-andnos go round the carousel. Yes we need some skilled workers; yes, we must rationally look at future demographics and who will be needed to do the work to pay our pensions; but at the same time watch out for bogus refugees who are really economic migrants; watch out for the illegal immigrant. But not too hard.

After the death of three Kurdish workers on a level crossing on their way to pick spring onions in the East of England, it was suddenly discovered there were 2000 Chinese in Kings Lynn as if they had never been seen before. In Kings Lynn! Their deaths were more sordid in the banality of the accident than the thriller-like narrative of Romanian ex-train workers fixing signals so that other migrants could leap onto the Eurostar at obscure spots. The reality of the immigration debate is also more sordid. While the Third World is raided for trained nurses whose training was a cost to those countries, immigration fears are regularly rehearsed. The net result is that so many immigrants live in fear, and this fear is as functional to capitalist economies in the present era as it has been in the past. Migrant workers in Fortress Europe, and especially illegally-entered migrants, are far more likely to accept wages and conditions that are essential to its needs, and which in turn have a knock-on effect on wages and working conditions generally. Racist politicians and professional opinionists have their own grisly agenda, but these are functional to capitalist economies and their household names. The focus of these opinionists on 'failed' asylum seekers who are not allowed to work and, more recently, on a 'flood' of Roma and other Eastern Europeans who can work legally as EU citizens, gives the game away Their spotlight is not on Kings Lynn, a national blind spot. 'Policies that claim to exclude undocumented workers,' says Stephen Castle, 'may often really be about allowing them through side doors and back doors so that they can be readily exploited.' Or, as he put it some 30 years ago, commenting on the repatriation demands of Enoch Powell and other racist politicians: 'Paradoxically their value for capital lies in their very failure to achieve their declared aims.'

Inside Fortress Europe, for the UK in particular with its avowedly American-style deregulation, this process is all too visible. It is the dirty secret of the UK's economic success under New Labour. And they are proud of it, these shadow social democrats; the UK's official trade and investment website boasts of it. 'Total wage costs in the UK are among the lowest in Europe,' it says. 'In the UK employees are used to working hard for their employers. In 2001 the average hours worked a week was 45.1 for males and 40.7 for females. The EU average was 40.9. ... UK law does not oblige employers to provide a written employment contract. ... Recruitment costs in the UK is low. ... The law governing conduct of employment agencies is less restrictive in the UK. The UK has the lowest corporation tax of any major industrialised country.' Recently, Jack Straw has 'defied Europe' as the papers would have it. In a speech to the CBI, he promised that the UK would insist that the charter of fundamental rights created no 'new rights under national law, so as not to upset the balance of Britain's industrial relations policy', that is the one established by previous Conservative governments. In Britain there is nowhere for the exploited to turn and almost no employers are prosecuted for using illegal migrants.

To the extent that media coverage of the horror of Morecambe Bay went beyond fingering tough Scouser gangmasters in stolen 4-wheel drives, it focused on the power of supermarkets in the agricultural sector and their relation to those who do the harvesting ­ a harvest which doesn't stop for a festival because the operation is non-stop, all year round. Migrant labour is up by 44 percent in the last seven years. Much of it is 'legal' via seasonal agricultural schemes, but of the 3-5000 'gangmasters' who organise this at least 1000 are illegal and give no protection to their workers. But then 'gangmasters' are in effect employment agencies and these, as New Labour like to boast, are the least restricted in the EU.

Despite Morecombe and the ensuing hand-wringing, nothing has changed. In September 2003 the House of Commons committee on the environment and food, chaired by Michael Jack MP, found that the agencies supposed to deal with 'illegal gangmasters' were making no real impact and set out the changes that would be needed. In mid-May 2004, a report by the same committee declared that the government had no clearer picture of the situation, and enforcement action against them had not increased. There had, it concluded, been 'no evidence of any change in the government's approach since last September. Indeed, in some respects, enforcement activity has diminished because of lack of resources.'

The beneficiaries of this, are the 'household' names of Tesco, Sainsbury and the rest, all profiting from this underclass. Andrew Simms describes a situation where 'Long chains of sub-contractors, commercial confidentiality and contractual obfuscation, allow household names to hide behind plausible denials ... we have evolved a system better at hiding, or distancing cause from effect.' This at a time when New Labour has never stopped talking of responsibilities in return for rights, exchange value-business. Those who died at Morecombe are believed to have moved on from Kings Lynn, in all likelihood taking a drop in pay from the vegetable picking rates of a market dominated by the 'high street' supermarkets.

The distancing of cause from consequence, the not-me-guv cry of the rich, the powerful and their portraitists, appear in all their colours in the Teeside Evening Gazette's report on a fire at the Woo One factory in the Sovereign Business Park, Hartlepool at the beginning of April this year. It mentioned the death of Zhang Guo Hua but only to emphasise that there was no proof of a connection between the haemorrhage that killed him and his working conditions. He had, it reported, been through the usual kind of work: cutting salads for Tesco suppliers in Sussex; fish-processing in Scotland; and packing flowers in Norfolk. Usual for whom?

The Queen had opened the nearby Samsung plant in 1996. It has a global turnover of $33 billion. When it opened the local MP, Peter Mandelson, wrote an article in praise of the company saying: 'some have the impression that the success of the tiger economies is based on sweatshop labour. This is a false picture.' The false picture is that sweatshop labour is exclusive to the 'tiger economies'. Zhang Guo Hua worked a 24-hour shift in Hartlepool. It was his decision of course, one can hear the not-me-guv voice saying. Woo One, the company Zhang Guo Hua worked for, was a 'feeder' factory for Samsung, its practices its own, as Samsung would have it. Zhang Guo Hua spent his last 24 hours stamping the word SAMSUNG onto plastic casings either for microwave oven doors or computer monitors, on his feet throughout. When he collapsed and went to hospital it was under another name. It was only when he was dead that a friend gave Zhang's real passport. So that even though he was cremated without an Inquest, it was in his own name.

An ex-worker at Woo One said that the minimum working week was 72 hours and the minimum shift 12 hours. Its managing director, Keith Boynton, agreed that English workers were not required to work these hours, but it wasn't him guv, the Chinese workers were technically employed by an outfit called Thames Oriental Manpower Management with offices in New Malden Surrey close to Samsung's corporate HQ. Thames Oriental Manpower Management ­ a name that could only have been dreamt up by its proprietor a Mr Lin, not a tough Scouser in ripped jeans but a man who had been granted asylum claiming, claiming that is, that he was a North Korean refugee. Mr Boynton of Woo One said that 'What he (Mr Lin) pays the workers is up to him.' Mr Lin, it was reported had also taken control from Woo One of the nearby three-to-a-room set of dormitories and presumably, because he is now the villain, charged what he liked.

At this time Samsung boasted of record UK factory profits through 'unit cost reduction.' To get some idea of the process whereby this might happen, two pieces of Marx's structural economic analysis come to mind. He had for one thing deconstructed the notion of productivity long before the era of productivity deals. The very notion is one which exactly distances cause from consequence, or rather, and all the more modern for that, muddies the cause. 'Productivity' smears together: the productiveness of labour, that is the improved technology which allows for greater production; intensity of labour, which is how hard people work per hour (and here much of the improved technology simply increases the intensity of labour); and the length of the working day. These latter two factors are characteristic of 'primitive accumulation', and boy was that going on in Samsung's Hartlepool circus. Marx's misnamed Equalisation of Profit Law describes the mechanism whereby this works. The surplus or profit engendered by companies like Woo One, does not all go to them; the size of Samsung, the concentration of capital involved, and its power in relation to both its suppliers and marketing, means that it takes the lion's share of what has truly been accumulated in primitive fashion by small dependent suppliers. This is not some one-off phenomenon; one study shows Toyota having some 47,000 small firms working for it in a hierarchical structure, with most of those in the lowest layer passing the surpluses of 'primitive accumulation' up the chain to transnational corporations like Toyota who benefit from that mystery called 'value-added'.

When the story emerged in The Guardian (13/01/04), local MP Peter Mandelson said that he had 'written to Samsung about allegations made against Woo One in this tragic case.' The question is then, did he ever receive a reply because two days afterwards Samsung announced, out of the blue it was said, that it was closing the factory involved ­ the Wynyard in Billingham. It blamed the high level of wages in NE England and said it was relocating to Slovakia where wages stood at £1 an hour. To which address did Mr Mandelson write? Was it passed on by a Post Office re-direction instruction. Has he received a reply? It seems unlikely given that Samsung's decision can hardly have been spur of the moment, or that a meeting with Woo One would have been a priority in the two days remaining. It transpired that Woo One themselves had already started to make its own move in the direction of Slovakia, and indeed announced some three weeks later that it was to close its computer casings plant in Hartlepool. On the news of Samsung's departure, Mr Mandelson, his letter still in the post somewhere, said that the price of their product had fallen worldwide, and that was 'the reason for its closure'. Prime Minister Tony Blair said he deeply regretted the loss of jobs involved but that 'It is part of the world economy we live in.'

There is of course much truth in what he says, but there is a complacency to that same voice which talks so much of our responsibilities that grates. If wages in Slovakia are £1 an hour, in China they are likely to be fifty pence, yet there is a need felt in the 'First World' to maintain low-cost mass production within its own frontiers even while its investor class shifts production to such countries. There is for one thing a structural limit to how many lawyers, journalists, IT specialists and bankers are required even in the First World, whatever might be said about education, education, education, while at the same time an increasing reluctance to cushion the circumstances of the excluded population. For another there is a fear at the psychic level of political economy that if so much industrial production is shifted to different parts of Asia, it will somehow weaken the West, be both sign and symptom of lazy decadence. More specifically than notions of decadence, there is a need for cheap labour in the First World, within its own frontiers, 'for it means that the South cannot extract monopoly rents for its cheap labour and bad working conditions' as Robert Biel puts it. There are sweatshops in London and Los Angeles even while automatic looms are capable of weaving 760 metres of denim per minute. As Hobson suggested, and the irony stands out in neon, this First World low-cost production requires migrant workers, workers made fearful by an unscrupulous media and political class.

Migrant workers are also essential to low-cost China and its 'economic miracle'. The numbers are hard to establish, 80 million is one estimate, 94 another, of recent migrants from the Chinese countryside, many of whom are also 'illegal'. Many Chinese cities require residency permits while it is these 'peasants' who do the jobs that Beijingers, for example, won't do themselves. And, just like anywhere else, for Albanians in Greece for example, they are accused of being thieves and dirty, while also exerting a downward pressure on local wages. Should there be a shrinkage of economic growth at a global level, these Chinese migrant workers will be the first to lose their jobs. For one thing 90 percent of them work without contracts, according to Li Jianfei, a law professor at the People's University. Even the state-run Trade Union estimates that they are owed over 100 million yen in back wages, but a campaign for repayment is for those with contracts only. Much of this is in the booming construction sector, where non-paying subcontractors blame large companies underpaying them, the Law of Equalisation of Profit in crude form.

In more classical form this law is also inherent in the condition of the coal mining industry. China's increasing oil dependence is well known, but it is also the world's largest coal producer. Chinese companies are making sizeable profits on legal and illegal mining operations, but at prices to industry which mean the real rates of profit of the consuming industries, often foreign-financed, are even greater. Exerting more pressure on the industry and its highly exploited workforce is central government's demand for more output. At the same time the industry has an appalling safety record; around 7000 miners were killed in 2003. There are promises of more inspectorates and the closing of illegal mines but, in the face of this 'energy crunch', this is likely to remain rhetorical. Safety investment is far less than the announced allocation. The grim reality is that with the retrenching of state-owned industries and the accompanying loss of benefits and pensions, the unemployed and the rural poor have entered the industry in huge numbers and are willing to work for cash in appalling and unsafe conditions, often assisting coal mine owners in avoiding safety procedures to ensure continued employment, as the China Labour Bulletin puts it. The death of one man in Hartlepool is hardly on the same scale, but the pressures for 'not making a fuss' are similar.

The wishful thinking of the new Communist Party leadership about reversing the dynamics of inequality looks like mere cynical rhetoric since it doesn't prevent it from maintaining a hard line against any independent worker protests over pay and conditions. A strike over pay at the part Taiwanese financed Xinxiong Shoe Factory in Dongguan city in April of this year resulted in several arrests. The Ferro-Alloy strike in Liaoyang province, involving 1600 workers, resulted in long prison sentences for Yao Fuxin and Xiao; meanwhile the workers are still without retrenchment compensation. In Hubei province, six workers have been arrested and are awaiting trial on charges of 'disturbing social order' after a peaceful demonstration at the Tieshu factory; this after 15 months of peaceful campaigning to recover more than 200 million Yuan in back wages, redundancy payments, workers shares and other moneys owed them by the bankrupt factory's management.

Other workers from the Tieshu factory have been sentenced to terms up to 21 months of 're-education through labour', a punishment which bypasses the criminal justice system. We do not know the extent of prison labour in China but it too is a component holding down general wages and conditions. There is nothing to get smug about, prison labour in the UK is being organised in a much more serious manner than before. The Woolworth's type chain in the North of England, Wilkinson's, is highly dependent on it for its products. A recent piece in The Economist (6/5/04) goes further, saying 'Hard-working immigrants transform the prison system'. It describes how Wormwood Scrubs (where a regime of extreme and racist staff violence is still being investigated) is full of cocaine drug mules from South America, and how the prison runs production lines for airline headsets and aluminium windows. The best jobs, it says, pay £25-40 a week 'depending on a prisoner's place on the ladder of privilege (as in all prisons, inmates are paid more for the same job if they behave themselves)'. It goes on to say that 'it is serious money for a third-worlder ... so a steady stream of remittances flows from Wormwood Scrubs to poor countries.' A grotesque conclusion might be that the poor victims of Morecombe Bay would have been better off there.

After the effective and international demonstrations against the World Trade Organisation in Seattle, the unity displayed there, the unity that was most unsettling to the global investor class, was quickly confronted with the sneers of professional opinionists. The many American trade unionists present, they said, had no global consciousness, they were just there to protect their jobs. Their demands for basic standards and rights for workers in the poor world were just a subtle form of protectionism, protecting their privileges. It is true that the Clinton administration would do almost anything to secure free trade deals in American interests, and also that Third World voices have been raised to say that such demands for minimum standards and conditions are aimed at cutting off the only way in which they can develop economically, that is with a monopoly on cheap labour, but it is reasonable to ask in return who and what these voices represent. The 'Third World' is not some homogeneous space and the class divisions in India and China are clear to see. Increasing inequality within countries rich and poor, is a global reality.

It is such a reality which gives us a nominally social-democratic and a nominally communist government, both spurning any effective protection of workers. Instead then, why not support those working for better wages, conditions and respect in China for example. Lawyers like Cho Li Tai and the Centre for Women's Law Studies and Legal Services at Beijing University; peasant activists like Li Changping; and most of all those imprisoned for demanding basic rights. For this to mean anything in the UK, a start would be mounting support for the Private Members Bill of Jim Sheridan MP and backed by the TGWU, for a thorough registration of 'gangmasters'. If it were to succeed it would at least remove one pillar of the government's boast of its cheap labour and lightly regulated employment agencies and go a step beyond cursory hand-wringing which was the extent of the response to the Morecombe tragedy. Six months later, in August, it was reported that rival 'gangs' of cockle-pickers had to be rescued from the same sands.

John Barker <harrier AT easynet.co.uk> was born in London and works as a book indexer. His prison memoir Bending the Bars was reviewed for Metamute by Stewart Home

Anthony Iles reviews Republicart's issue on precarious labour

Republicart is a multi-lingual online journal, publishing articles on the intersection of activist and artistic projects loosely theorised by its editorial as public art. The site is a container for a number of EU funded projects and research on fairly commonplace themes: cultural networking, public space, and social engagement. However, Republicart’s recent issue focusing on the ‘Precariat’ – a subject it proposes as the new proletariat of informal and casualised labour – arrives at a moment when discussion about the condition of human capital and its capacity for action comprises what the editorial rightly calls a ‘concatenation’ of theories and practices. ‘Precariousness’ and ‘precarious work’ have rapidly become terms for thinking through the collapse of the distinction between labour and non-labour and the expansion of capitalist forms of valorisation over all aspects of life. Precariousness names a situation in which, for an increasing number of workers, temporary, ‘atypical’, workfare or contract work are the bread and butter served on a plate of social insecurity.

Republicart’s precariat issue brings together recent material by, and reports on, groups and movements, which adopt the term ‘precarious’ to describe and theorise their struggle within and against contemporary capitalism. It forcefully advances the idea that the precariat consitutes an emerging social movement, but essentially evades a proper analysis of exactly who is precarious and why.

Precarias a la Deriva’s text on the Republicart site, ‘Adrift Through the Circuits of Feminised Precarious Work’, problematises the condition of precariousness as one in which the negative and positive poles of flexibility are inextricable, the conflict between commonality and singularity constant. Their situation bespeaks both a lack and an excess of ‘work’, a generalisation of instability combined with the ‘cognitisation’ of everyday tasks and jobs. They are the first to point to the difficulties of organising on the basis of ‘a precariousness which can do without a clear collective identity in which to simplify and defend itself.’

Elsewhere on the Republicart site, in his account of EuroMayday 2004, Gerald Raunig quickly shrugs off the difficulty of political organising per se for the atomised and time poor casual worker. Coordinated between Barcelona and Milan, various species of precarie – chainworkers, intermittents, flexworkers and scientific researchers – occupied the streets and the internet in actions ‘against the growing precariousness of life.’ In Barcelona, the protest developed out of converging struggles against The Forum, a kind of Neoliberal World’s Fair, which encountered formidable resistance from those whose lives it attempted to flatten under a dazzling vision of Barcelona as a city of culture. At the same time, in Milan, the Chainworkers, a group of media and labour activists supporting struggles of the non-unionised, blockaded department stores, employment agencies, malls and fast food chains to disrupt and contest the exploitation and flexibilisation of service, migrant and knowledge workers. The potential for organisation amongst chainstore workers in particular, as Raunig asserts, seems rich in opportunities, sharing as they do wage-levels, standardisation of tasks, and boredom. As the Chainworkers’ Alex Foti has pointed out, unlike workers in factories whose employers can shift production elsewhere (outsourcing overseas, etc), their employers are rooted to the site of consumption of the goods they sell, making them an easy target and an ideal point for the generalisation of this kind of action.

Also involved in EuroMayday 2004 and represented on the Republicart site by their text ‘The Spectacle Inside the State and Out’, the French entertainment workers participating in the Coordination des Intermittents et Precaires have combined the defence of their established legal rights (until recently they received annual unemployment benefits as occasional workers in the arts) with the assertion that they constitute part of a new class of flexible labour. Regarded by the major French unions as an undesirable anomaly, Les Intermittents’ challenge to economic determinism and the deregulation of social rights has led to a national debate on the very role of knowledge and culture in France. This debate continues to be elaborated by the research groups initiated across the Coordination des Intermittents. Whilst it remains to be seen whether their actions successfully restore their particular form of ‘dole autonomy’, more importantly they have continued to develop avenues of conflict outside of their initial confrontation with the state in a process Maurizio Lazzarato has called ‘a deregulation of conflict.’

Groups such as the Intermittents, Precarias a la Deriva and Chainworkers are working in situations where union support is not an option, but little space is given in Republicart as to why this is so, or how unions might respond to the growing pressure from sectors they have hitherto seen as marginal. Whilst the actions of the Chainworkers and Intermittents do go beyond the tradition of union activism there is little evidence for this here. The examples Republicart draws on are indications of a social movement in formation, but for the moment the figure of the precariat remains a contentious one. If Republicart is positing the precariat as a new kind of proletariat then where is the discussion of the composition of this new class? The site’s predilection for artistic examples of precariousness has led them to overlook the work of other groups such as Precari Nati and Kolinko (see Mute issue 28), whose analysis of contemporary labour conditions draws on a much more rigorous investigation of how capitalism contains and exploits the energies of the social body and the various forms of refusal it encounters. Casting the precariat’s struggle in terms of battles for better legislation misses the opportunity to investigate the tendency for self-organised (or ‘disorganised’) labour to develop a more generalised struggle than the demand for employment and social rights, breaking with the capitalist organisation of work altogether.

LINKS
Republicart
http://www.republicart.net

Barcelona Forum
http://www.forumbcn2004.org

and Counter-Forum http://barcelona.indymedia.org?catergory=forum_2004

Euromayday 2004
http://www.euromayday.org

Stop The Clock, Aufheben pamphlet, 2000, by Precari Nati, Wildcat, Aufheben et al http://www.geocities.com/aufheben2/stc_intro.html

‘L’intermittence et la puissance de métamorphose’, Maurizio Lazzarato, http://multitudes.samizdat.net/article.php3?id_article=1082

Unionising Workshop at Flaxman Lodge http://flaxmanlodge.omweb.org

Greenpepper Magazine
http://www.greenpeppermagazine.org/

Republicart Precarity issue
www.republicart.net/disc/precariat

Anthony Iles <Anthony_iles AT yahoo.com> is variously a writer, librarian, assistant editor of Mute and member of Gratipalis[t]a Sound System http://anomie.omweb.org

What is obscured by the identification of the cultural worker as exemplary flexibilised worker or 'precarian'? Marina Vishmidt interrogates the recent fashion for equating artists with other forms of insecure (service) workers who lack their accompanying cachet

In recent years, there have been myriad attempts in curatorial, critical and media sectors to index the characteristics of their fields to the wider structural transformations in the landscape of work. These have mainly been enunciated along the axes of 'creativity' and 'flexibility' once deemed endemic to the artist as constitutive exception to the law of value and now valorised as universally desirable attributes in neoliberal policy statements and their bio-economic implementations. Many of the current tendencies to formulate analyses through the prism of culture as labour have begun to discuss the generality of conditions across fields of social production under the rubric of 'precariousness'. 'Precariousness' as a term strives to evoke all the downsides of the institutional embrace of informality. This embrace occludes the gleeful despatch of Keynesian social contracts or other state mediations of capital's risk, the etiolation of organised labour, and the 'personalised domination' of the deregulated workplace that Paolo Virno discusses in his writing.[1] 'Precariousness' signals a common thread of instability and exposure in the new landscape of work, shadowing the otherwise disparate life prospects of everyone from illegal service workers to academics and web designers. The real subsumption of social life in 'cognitive' capitalism is granted, and this subsumption has a paradoxical face: the more life is work, the less is work guaranteed to assure the propagation of life. Therefore 'precariousness' marks the real and ideological poverty of capital's subjectification, and, hopefully, the site for a broadly-based contestation of its effects.

Angelo Rindone, Maternita, poster from the Chainworkers' campaign, which promotes the cult of San Precario > .........................................................................
As a diagnosis, 'precariousness' seems, well, remarkably flexible, mobile and adaptable. 'Precariousness' has surfaced in a number of recent interventions: at workshops in flagship institutions and in self-organised spaces, exhibitions, screenings and investigative, textual and audio-visual practices emanating from social centres.[2] It has scaled the agenda of European public art research initiative Republicart, which devoted a special issue of its web journal to the 'Precariat' in August 2004.[3] There have also been high profile national campaigns resisting the evisceration of legal statutes which recognise the tenuous economic bases of cultural work (Intermittents du Spectacle).[4] Some of these projects, particularly the Unionising Workshop at London's Flaxman Lodge held in June 2004, have moved the debate on from the production of an abstract parity between the reproduction of subjects in the 'social factory' or the threadbare equation of wildly dissimilar types of communication work as 'immaterial labour'. Those discussions also thematised the connection between the production of subjectivity in 'creative work', the refusal of work, and the recomposition of workers as a class autonomous from, if always immanent to, the capitalist social relation, inspired by readings from the 'Italian laboratory' of Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno. There have been some developments in a media activist milieu also, with Italy's Chainworkers [5] setting out to mobilise the plurality of the casualised workforce abandoned by traditional unions by providing legal advice and material facilities, coordinating actions and even the ordaining of a new saint who intercedes for the 'precariat'.

The account which would have cultural production as exemplary is valid insofar as cultural economies spawn the prototypes emulated in most labour regimes that rely on unremunerated and mystified work to ensure the lopsided distribution of profit and prestige, as well as the deployment of 'creativity' to soft-pedal submission to these regimes. In that light, the artist or information worker is a model precarian, traversed as she is by intangible demands to commodify the very routines of her survival and the very idiom of her critique. However, what may also be instructive in the uses of 'precariousness', especially those that try to critically appropriate the figure of the artist as the ideal pliant and omni-creative subject of capital, is the omission of the ordinary invisibility that always sustained the free movement of capital, Keynesian or networked: the flexible, informal, spontaneously value-adding sites of housework, personal care, seasonal and surreptitious labour ­ the disposable labour that was always at the core of the process if not the narrative of accumulation. The discernible eclipse of housework, care work, etc. in the cultural turn to 'precariousness', not only misses a whole swathe of the substance of 'relational' or 'affective' capitalism, but risks embedding itself precisely in the terms that it is interrogating ­ the dogma of 'creativity'. Whereas at one time domestic work was excluded from Marxian theory on the basis of its exclusion from the exchange of abstract labour power, as mere 'reproduction', nowadays it is excluded from critiques of emergent forms of labour not just because it is not considered 'creative', not just because it is unpaid, but because 'creativity' supplies an alibi to an ossification of social and productive relations which cannot admit, let alone imagine, the challenge posed by the destruction of housework as a discrete activity.

Certainly, there have been sociological forays into the resurgence of (under)paid domestic work,[6] and Precarias a la Deriva have allocated much of their research to the ongoing invisibility of care work as the motor of restructured and informationalised capital, with a focus on the preponderance of women in 'precarious' sectors such as housework, such as call centres. Nonetheless, the discursive emergence of the term 'precariousness' to denote a shift away from 'immaterial labour' as both too precise and too constraining a descriptor, has often entailed an emphasis of the cultural worker as the salient of precariousness. Yet we do not need to strain to see that 'precariousness' has more to do with a generalised seepage into the working world of the kind of informal and mundane degradation formerly confined to the corridors of labour without value, labour without sociality, labour without end ­ domestic labour.

We pose, then, as foremost, the need to break this role of housewife the chrysalis in the cocoon that imprisons itself by its own work, to die and leave silk for capital. Mariarosa Dalla Costa

In her 1971 text Women and the Subversion of the Community, Mariarosa Dalla Costa proposes that the marginalisation of women's labour in housework presupposes the division and organisation of labour in capitalism as a whole. The housewife is the archetypal privatised industry, providing services that could and should be socialised. If capital relies on the family to compensate for the psychic, social and economic antagonisms of paid work, if the family is the locus of reproduction of labour power and its discipline, then the refusal of capitalist family structures amounts to refusal of work tout court. Women are thus uniquely situated to contaminate the whole of society with their struggle for self-determination ­ a struggle that is irreducible to securing 'fulfilling' work outside the home. While it would be slightly tendentious to transplant this analysis unmodified into a present at least marginally inflected by the capillary action of 30-odd years of feminism, the articulation of invisible and naturalised exploitation inseparable from the production of surplus value still holds, in a social field both stratified and homogenised by such production. Housewives, yes, but also children, migrants, prisoners, welfare recipients, the elderly, the demented, the drivers and the passengers of buses. It is crucial to note here that production of value does not automatically translate into the site of conflict, otherwise Dalla Costa would be fêted as one of the pioneers of cultural studies. It is housework and childcare that, as neglected site of production of value, is also a neglected site of conflict, as it is pivotal to accumulation. In staunch biopolitical terms, the family as control centre of life is thereby the control centre of productive potential.

Dalla Costa's analysis may also be leveraged to expose another dissymmetry in the adequation of cultural life forms with precariousness: the function of discipline in the production of subjectivity specific to the social arena in question. The disciplinary function of the family is well-rehearsed; the disciplinary function of culture is perhaps a bit more esoteric, bracketing as it does the image of culture as emancipatory. But this is precisely what calls for scrutiny in the formulation of the artist as precarious worker. Culture/art is a tremendous disciplinary idiom in Western societies, and this is instantiated around us in ways as imperceptible as they are ubiquitous. The prominence of community art and cultural regeneration in rural and urban responses to deindustrialisation is relevant here. Community or socially engaged art tends to showcase the same defusion of antagonisms that the family once played host to, a safe space to be creative without reimbursement or real-world consequences of any kind (except for the art professionals of course). What discourses of precariousness in art worlds can alert us to, if at other times dissemble, is art's status as a commodity relation, and that its relative autonomy is underwritten by extreme dependence. In this sense any radicalisation of the art relation in the discourse of precariousness and becoming-precarious needs to concede its disutility as a paradigmatic case; at best it reflects or shares some of the earmarks of working life ­ isolation, anxiety, opportunism. The formula of the artist as a model precarian dissembles what is most at stake in the production of precariousness: the stratification of social production and the imposition of work. A more suggestive formula might be the artist or art worker as vanishing mediator of capital, vanishing precisely in their imaginary negation of its laws. Perhaps what is more interesting, and potentially challenging, than the projection of similarities between the insecurity of cultural work and the insecurity of shitwork is a complex awareness of incongruities between these. It is one thing to note that the reconfiguration of work has traumatic repercussions across social fields; but these repercussions are not haphazard. The problematic nature of much activist-inspired or 'engaged' art is that it wants to generalise the conditions of art-making to the social without realising that it is as inescapably caught in the social logic it wants to disrupt.

Perhaps a way around this would be to focus on the singularity of arts structures, stable and shifting, and the kind of critique this specificity engenders. What kind of singularity can impair functionality? The experimental features of art as an activity are always mitigating against its economic overdetermination as social field. The unrepresentability of contemporary configurations of work and politics, the readiness to spurn existing subjective dispositions in favour of not-yet existing or as-yet malformed techniques of thinking and becoming, may evoke this singularity. A purposeful engagement with uselessness characterises art in principle, and this also marks the potential of constituting other forms of life on the basis of the loss of measure theorised by some as the innovation of post-Fordist work. What a loss of measure could imply for cultural production is that culture can no longer be relied upon to supply an alibi to other forms of work. But since disparate kinds of work produce different kinds of value, all work cannot be subsumed into culture.

Like everything else nowadays, art doesn't produce anything. This uselessness can be mobilised constitutively; there is still a great schism between uselessness and irrelevance to be exploited. Against the instrumentalisation of art and the instrumentalisation of its critique in the discourse of creativity, how far can we go with grasping a specificity that can be resistant to this, the specificity of the already existing and not-yet at once? This might be what is really precarious about art; the oscillation between what it can do as social production and how it is deployed as 'social engagement'. Without this recognition, the appropriation of precariousness in art worlds risks becoming another bad-faith eulogy to the lost dream of bohemia, rendered in the muted palette of the service industries.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents, MIT, 2004
[2] Atelier EUROPA, a symposium and exhibition for the Munich Kunstverein, March 2004, http://www.ateliereuropa.com/; Unionising Workshop at Flaxman Lodge, a week of research, screenings, discussion and production, London, June 2004, http://flaxmanlodge.omweb.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topi c_id=23&forum=11; Precarias a la Deriva, an initiative between research and activism arising from the feminist social center La Eskalera Karakola in Madrid http://www.sindominio.net/karakola/precarias.htm; Producta, a series of events in Barcelona April 2003, http://www.yproductions.org/producta1_e.html and http://www.yproductions.org/proyectos/Producta1_sinopsis_ingles.pdf
[3] http://www.republicart.net
[4] http://www.intermittents-danger.fr.fm/ The literature of the Intermittents' campaign is full of references to the indispensability of healthy culture industries for European tourism and profitability in general. While this indicates a perhaps judicious pragmatism in their campaign, it does detract from the potential expansion of the campaign beyond cultural workers, and it also swerves from critiquing the whole concept of a 'cultural exception' and how such an exception is maintained
[5] http://www.chainworkers.org
[6] Publications include Servants of Globalization: Women, Migrants and Domestic Work by Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Doing the Dirty Work: The Global Politics of Domestic Labour by Bridget Anderson, and Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, eds. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild

Marina Vishmidt <maviss AT blueyonder.co.uk> is a writer, lapsed film-maker and researcher

This interview took place in July 2004 at the Mill Squat in Amsterdam, during the period it was liberated from the destiny of selling 'traditional' Dutch paraphernalia to tourists. Merijn Oudenampsen and Gavin Sullivan from the Greenpepper magazine spoke with Milan-based organiser Alex Foti - formerly of the Italian flexwork syndicate ChainWorkers [www.chainworkers.org] - about precarity, European labour conflict, and the spread of new syndicalist modes of subvertised collective action across Neuropa. Alex Foti is guest editor for the upcoming Precarity issue of the Greenpepper Magazine and will be part of the Precarity Ping Pong! launch and critical debate during the London ESF at Middlesex University, White Hart Lane Campus, Tottenham on 15 October 2004 between 3:0o - 5:00 pm. See www.greenpeppermagazine.org for details

GreenPepper: Alex, can you introduce yourself, and the ChainWorkers?

Alex Foti: I am a union and media activist from Milan, Italy and have been part of the ChainWorkers CreW since its inception in 1999 - 2000. Most noteworthy, we are associated with the MayDay parade - which this year reached its fourth edition, bringing around 100,000 temp workers, partimers freelancers and other types of non-standard workers onto the streets in a joyful (but angry) expression of dissent around sub-standard conditions of work and living. This year the MayDay parade took the form of a major picket line throughout the shopping arteries of Milan. In fact, within the city limits of Milan, no major chain store or retail outfit was open for trading - either because they had become scared by the campaign we had developed in the months prior to MayDay, or because of the flying pickets that 2000-3000 people did in the morning prior to the start of the MayDay parade. This year, the parade was a EuroMayDay parade because it was done together with sisters and brothers in Barcelona, and organised in assemblies that took place throughout Milan, Barcelona, Rome, and (most crucially) Paris - with the participation of the Intermittents: the temp stagehands and part-time actors that recently blocked the Cannes film festival.

GP: You have been organising around the theme of precarity. Yet here in the Netherlands we do not really know of this concept. The idea of precarious labour - i.e., dangerous working conditions - is somewhat popularly circulated, but the idea of precarity in itself and the precariousness of life has not yet reached northern Europe. Could you explain what is meant by the term precarity?

AF: In the radical left nowadays there are two major interpretations of the concept. One is existential precarity. That is, that life is precarious in times of global war. Either you are a body subject to bombs and military conflict or you are a prisoner whose habeas corpus is violated in Abu Ghraib or some other Western prison. Wherever there is total domination there is existential precarity.

Precarity is also, however, the condition of being unable to predict one's fate or having some degree of predictability on which to build social relations and feelings of affection. The diffusion of intermittent work and the attacks on the welfare state have resulted in a widespread increase of existential precarity across Europe - affecting increasing numbers of the population even in the wealthy countries like Holland. A clear example of this precarisation is witnessed by the incredible rise in the use of psycho-pharmaceuticals and anti-depressants. Work hours have increased all over the territories - in Europe, the USA and Japan. What is noteworthy is that in Europe, working times have increased. Working on Sunday, Saturday, ungodly hours and night shifts - which previously only involved a small percentage of the workforce - has now expanded and increased. This is precarity: being unable to plan one's time, being a worker on call where your life and time is determined by external forces. And, of course, if you have a sub-standard contract you do not have a full social citizenship. That is what MayDay is all about: claiming social rights for an emergent subject that is crucial to neoliberal production. Neoliberal production is postindustrial - it's service, information, and knowledge-based and we want to get into that. This is at the heart of the accumulation process that is taking place today in Europe and in all advanced capitalist countries. So wherever there are neoliberal chains of production in the five continents, there is going to be precarity - peripheral in terms of rights, but central in terms of the financial web of the creative value produced.

We have been concentrating on two types of workers: chainworkers (being workers in malls, shopping centres, hypermarkets, and in the myriad of jobs of logistics and selling in the metropolis) and what we call brainworkers (cognitive labourers; programmers; freelancers who possess individual value on the labour market but do not yet have a collective force or a subjectivity with social rights - that is, they might make above-standard wages but if they lose their job they are thrown into poverty). Chainworkers, on the other hand, are always on the verge of social exclusion. They are collectively unorganised, but they could organise. What we've been working on is establishing solidarity. That is where media activism comes into play - by supporting strikes, picket lines, sabotage, boycotts on the part of Taylorised proletariansed service workers, and at the same time agitating university researchers, teachers, workers in the information industries and advanced service sectors.

GP: The main idea of precarity, then, is this interminable lack of security. Is precarity then simply defined negatively - as a situation marked by the absence of 'jobs for life' ?

AF: Exactly. While existential precarity is what attracts interest in the issue - because it is lived on the bodies and minds of everybody - we think precarity has more to do with a position in the labour market. It is a post-class discourse, if you like. Previously in this society we were used to blue-collars and white-collars so to speak. Now what we see is a transition to a more unstable social configuration based on service and knowledge labour. In old classist terms, this class exists ex se but not yet per se. That is, it has a clear role in social production, but it doesn't yet have representation of its collective needs - needs of social aggregation, access to standards of sociability, housing, access to knowledge, open source forms of organising, union rights and bargaining rights all around the table. What we have seen is that creative workers do not perceive themselves as workers anymore. The reversal of the new economy exposed the myth that talented people would be protected forever from market fluctuations.

This is what we have to focus on: to fight against exclusion and inequality and bring in a new radical subjectivity and identity in creative productive distribution processes in which social relations and transborder exchanges are absolutely vital. Especially in terms of the polity on which we want to base our social claims and agitation. We think in Europe today, at the juncture of a global crisis of neoliberalism, there is space for radically organising Eurowide. EuroMayDay is a first step in this process. The migrant struggles are another example of a struggle that is articulating itself on a wider scale. The basic human rights are being written right now and we want basic rights for temps, part timers and migrant labourers to be included on the European continent.

GP: The classical labour movement also agitates around similar issues: full employment, workers' rights, social services, social exclusion, and temporary work. What distinguishes your political agenda (or the radical activity around precarity) from that of the classics?

AF: Full employment is already here. Everybody is working 100% of the time - either when they work or when they consume, and display signs, body signs, visual signs, choices. The fact that you wear a particular sneaker or that you write a composition, an email, or mime that becomes an ad. And of course, during the daytime you produce for wage labour. Your data is capital for market research. Your biometric data is capital for biotech firms. We are 100% of the time part of the [re]production of capital. In this sense, full employment has already been negatively overcome. I mean, what we need to do is to find ways of social representation that are different from the social democrats and the union parties. Because if Seattle really marks a transition to a new kind of politics - a participatory politics, a biopolitics if you like, in which the old distinction between political work, union work and cultural work is dissolved - then that world is over.

I think that the future lies in developing forms of self-management of conflicts federating themselves across borders and across wider political spaces - from the regional to the transcontinental. As in, a way of expressing political and social claims independently - in the political forms of working with existing radical parties and existing radical unions and associations - yet as an autonomous force. Radical organisations are too stale and backward looking to see what the social mobilisations are that society is asking from us. In France, Spain, and Germany wee see massive amounts of people protesting against welfare cuts and European monetarism (the total right wing European construction made by banking concerns that is keeping social spending low and interest rates high).

All of this activity needs a new form of organisation. I personally think that Anarcho-Green is our output and destination. I think that now that the cold war is officially over on the European continent, we can merge Libertarian, anti-Racist, and Transgender social activism together to create new radical identities that can bring Eastern European and Western brothers and sisters into a new political project capable of opposing fascist Bushism. I mean, this is the task at hand and social conflict is spiralling. Others possibilities are, of course, the peace movement, the open source information movement, the alternative global fair-exchange movement etc. But we need to pose ourselves the question of power and the institutional interface. This is vital at this stage.

GP: One of the things that I noticed in the manifestos that were circulating throughout EuroMayDay this year were new words that we do not know in Northern Europe - like flexicurity. Could you explain what you mean by flexicurity and how that word is activated alongside precarity.

AF: Yes. In fact, in one sense flexicurity means we do not want to go back to a 'job for life' - the system of the previous generation. We accept the flexibility inherent in the computer-based mode of production, but we want to disassociate from the precarity that is implicit in this forced (Faustian) bargain. In the Netherlands, flexicurity is the reality - since in Holland, by law, you cannot discriminate between a part-time worker and a full-time worker in terms of the hourly wage paid. So if we could extend this principle, which is a minimal social claim, all throughout the EU. The fact that part timers cannot organise themselves because they can be fired is, in fact, wage discrimination (with a union discrimination attached). We could also build into this claim a demand for a European minimum wage, ten euros per hour, all across the union. These are the staples - the building blocks of a more advanced, solidarious, less Darwinist society - that could become the 'European model' as opposed to the neoliberal model or to the Chinese or the nationalist capitalist model. Fuck it! I did not choose precarity for myself as a destiny. But I think that out of that condition, our generation - the post cold war generation - can fight for a socially progressive shift. In Spain it is already happening. In the UK it will happen. In Italy it will happen. A shift that can posit a new radical left. Just as the thirties and the forties were times of social experimentation with radical identities, this is the time to invent new forms of cultural imagery. A new imagery of conflict, a new imagery of picketing, a new imagery of social activism. Of course, the media you develop is essential to this task.

GP: As you mention, the theme and discourse of precarity has become a very important organisational vehicle in Italy, Spain and France - with lots of people on the streets for EuroMayDay this year, quite a great deal of material being written and circulated about it, and conferences being organised on the topic. But material conditions in Southern Europe are quite different than those in Northern Europe or the Netherlands ?

AF: Fragmentation and individualisation of service labour is the norm all across advanced capitalist countries - be it Japan, the Netherlands, the UK or Spain. What is different, and specific to Holland, is that the unions were more moderate and in the 1980s struck a bargain to regulate flexibility. Nevertheless, we still see a pressure on the long-term unemployed and a desire to cut benefits all across the board. So I don't at all agree that this is only a Southern European problem.

What is most striking about Southern Europe is that the welfare state there is more backward and traditionally less developed. There is more importance attached to the family and corporatist ways of integration etc. But the tendency toward the reduction of welfare services is universal, and Maastricht is a system designed to keep social spending low. We see that even Germany and France cannot respect these restraints. If we don't act now, we're looking at a future of precarity for all Europeans. Because the idea is to make us a new Asia or a new America - not a new Europe.

OK. I am inviting Dutch brothers and sisters to think about it. Neoliberalism is still very strong. Bolkestein is a neoliberal whose commissioners mission is to make Europe safe for the US and other global corporations. We are the new workforce produced by neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is managing and governing the construction of Europe. So we are the only credible adversaries and the only guys and girls that can actually block the system of exchange and the flow of information. If young people stop working in Amsterdam, Amsterdam shuts down. No bars can operate; no tourist hotel can operate; no fucking newspaper can be ever produced; no theatre play can operate. Amsterdam is a factory shut for business. This is what Amsterdam says to the world, it is image brand and sociability, which occurs through bodies and minds of thousands of young temps, precarious freelancers coming from all over the world. This is what precarity is - it's both a condition of exploitation and an opportunity.

GP: Precarity as a word to describe the existence in advanced capitalist economies of a fragmented workforce seems very useful and it has undoubtedly been used really effectively in the EuroMayDay events this year - which, as you have said, have seen tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating around the theme of precarity. Yet you also mention that there are lots of different types of workers within and under the banner of precarity - extending from unrecognised migrant and feminine labourers towards creative workers working in design and media industries etc.

How useful and effective do you think the concept of precarity can be in linking people together who have vastly different incomes? Precarity seems to be different than blue-collar or white-collar; it seems to be bringing together lots of different types of people from very different social strata. Do you think this is a limitation on how useful the concept might be in creating and organising this new radical subjectivity?

AF: It's a crucial objection and I want to answer with an example that is unfolding before our eyes which is the intermittent struggle in France initiated almost a year ago. What happened was that there was a reform of the unemployment benefit system that excluded thousands of people from maternity leave and other livelihood necessities, especially during the wintertime when the art and culture festival scene is more dormant. What happened then was that these people started blocking all festival productions across France and decided to sabotage the 8 o'clock TV news, breaking into the studios and reading communiques, eventually forcing the issue onto the whole of the cultural intelligence, a much higher class than the intermittent themselves who were mostly stagehands and part-time workers. We have to remember that for every festival there are a thousand workers setting up the stage and that they are cultural workers too. So we saw that film directors and major actors and actresses joined in solidarity with the intermittent cause. And as a result, eventually public opinion started to take an interest. From a discussion on their specific system of unemployment benefit, it quickly became a discussion on the system of unemployment benefits itself. And from a specific discussion about a certain cultural sphere, it soon transformed into a national discussion on the place of knowledge and culture in French society and what kind of rights should be allocated to this sector. In Cannes we saw (Jean-Luc) Godard giving their press conference and Michael Moore expressing solidarity with them. Now the intermittent cause is known to readers form Sydney to Singapore and New York. What we see here is that from a very specific conflict - through networking and criss-crossing social classes and roles in the production process - the elites and the non-elites, exploited migrants and middle class women, all collectively produced a general shift and movement against precarity.

So precarity rallies different people. As Milanese and MayDay people we think that certain young people, women and migrant workers have a special stake here because they are the social categories being most aggravated by precarity. From another point of view, I think that service industry and knowledge industry - technicians, programmers, cashiers and retailers, sellers, cultural operators, truck drivers and pizza delivery boys - are crucially important. These two very polarised categories are statistically the two sectors that seen the highest growth of employment during the last twenty years of neoliberalism.

GP: So, you don't see this as a phase of pan-capitalism, where the breakdown of the welfare states and social rights are withdrawn as long as the economy is in crisis? Don't you think that when the economy booms again, politicians will be able to circulate around more money, and that salaries will rise etc.?

AF: This system is structural. The sociologist Manual Castells, looking at the last twenty years, saw the precarisation of one quarter to one third of the labour force in advanced capitalist countries as a structural feature. It won't go away with an expansion. If anything, the expansion will simply lure a segment of the knowledge class into the bourgeoisie. But as soon as the boom subsides, there are new additions and the pool of precarious workers will enlarge itself. That's what we've already seen. Italy started in the 1980s with ten percent of precarious workers, a million and a half black market workers. Nowadays, we have seven million precarious workers (contingent, freelance and temp) and four million black market workers. That's almost half of the total workforce! And it won't go away. Unless - and this is vital for us - we strike on the workplace, we picket the workplace and we manage to get the money: not from the state but from greedy corporations. This is really what organising is all about, that is where the money is.

Who benefited from the dotcom boom? We know: Amro Bank benefited, Nina Brinks benefited, Enron and other guys that where just tricking the accounts. These guys were not making the money; everybody was falsifying the accounts to accumulate financial wealth. Now we see what was behind it all. You see, the problem is, if you keep everybody under the poverty line - as Wal-Mart is doing with its workers - the system collapses. You have to resort to forge and fraud to keep up the system, to keep up financial wealth because you are not selling. Man, this is really a great recession what we are seeing. So nothing will happen unless we organise. There is no easy way out of this system. This is structural. This is historical. It requires a major social shift otherwise it is going to become Brazil all over the world. Already, Holland is a very unequal country - more so than Sweden and Germany. There are very rich elites commanding major amounts of global income. This is what Mayday is about - beating neo-liberalism on its feet and on its territory: global chain stores, global banks, global nodes of finance, global media conglomerates: Murdoch, Berlusconi, Gates.

GP: Many precarious workers are working in areas where there is no self-organising activity. What kind of methods are you using to experiment with organising traditionally unorganised people in these new economic sectors?

AF: We started trying to merge subvertising (as a way of communication) with traditional forms of anarcho-syndicalism - that is, the picketline, the direct action, from breaking the chainstore glass to blockading the delivery vans that run to the fastfood joints, handing out flyers on the motorways and at every autogrill. We thought that since young workers were taking the brand of the neoliberal rules of work or the 'new flexibility' so to speak, and they have no memory of class struggle, we have to make it attractive. I am speaking about it but I am not the one doing it. You know, it's our graphic designers Karen and Zoe - who are behind the EuroMayDay website and the ChainWorkers webzine. So, it is to speak in a lingo which changes across time. I mean, youth language changes, youth aesthetics change, fads and fashions change. To market an idea of radical union activity, to look if it is possible to make radical unionism attractive to the masses. So we built a website, we created merchandising, we have a board game called Precariopoly, the netparade in which anyone could join (which rallied 20 000 people alone - almost as large as the actual MayDay). You know, traditional leftist organisations tend to dismiss this kind communication as beside the point. But today people form their identities through media before reality. So if you have an attractive medium, as we have managed to develop, you have a powerful tool of organising and activation. Through the website people have started connecting us and little by little we have built a network in Lombardy that became national and then transnational. It is about being focused and unafraid to market oneself to the unconverted. Because it is easy to convince the Anarchists, the Communists, Zapatistas, Situationists etc. The hard part is talking to the people that are suffering with their bodies but they have no way out because they have no cultural system of reference that enables them to rebel against a very repressive system. If you read about Wal-Mart, if you read what Mike Davis has to say about Wal-Mart or even what Business Week has to say about Wal-Mart. It is a system based on prison labour - this is the model of work and production in the department stores and big retail industries.

GP: You were saying before that the idea of organising around the theme of precarity is not to demand the mundane existence of the workers of the 1960s and 1970s. But you are using terms like 'fuga' or 'exodus' to talk about escaping from the whole production system. In what way do you think working around these issues will capacitate people to get out and not be working all their lives, having these shitty jobs?

AF: Being a labour agitator is already a better job...[laughter] but sorry if I am joking. The point is, over the last twenty years there have been many ideas of escaping ... for example, Deleuze and Guattari. But what we have seen, and Empire is clear about this, is that there is no external dimension to this system nowadays: it is either war or trade. There is no escape.

Although every individual does not define him/herself according to the job they do. I mean, you are an activist, you are a lover, you are a father, you are a Moslem, a Jew, a stamp collector. But you are not a worker, as in the 20th century. Yet paradoxically you work a lot more than your dad did. That's the point. You work a lot more than a car assembly operator in the 1960's and the 1970's. All the struggles to have paid vacations, to have the weekend off, to have universal healthcare etc are crumbling. Even in the Netherlands, where there is universal healthcare, if you are an undocumented migrant (and there are thousands) you are not going to have it. If you are a mentally diseased person you are going to end up homeless and you are not going to have health coverage. Exclusion is everywhere.

So you are thinking you're cool in this niche, in your social work identity. But in fact, you are doing a favour to system of neoliberal capitalism because you are not confronting power relations on the job where they matter most. And increasingly, given the absence of public social spaces, what is the last public social space left on earth? The work environment is where people meet, discuss, share, talk about politics, sex, lives, whatever. So we are talking about access but we are there the whole fucking time talking about something else - being elsewhere, with the internet, with our minds, but we are there. And with your cell phone, you are always a call away from your boss, when you are eating, when you are fucking ... and you have got to go because there is a call. This is precarity.

We have to emancipate ourselves from the fiction that we are not subject to class domination. Because we fucking are! What new forms do class domination take? It is not Lenin, it is not Rosa Luxemburg, it is not Trotsky. It is something else that together we are fighting and discovering through our conflict. This is what I regard as autonomy, another good concept...

Interview circulated in the lead up to the launch of the Precarity Issue of Greenpepper Magazine during the European Social Forum, London. The launch features a critical debate between activists from different groups across Europe on/around the theme of precarity. It will be held on 15 October 2004, 3:00 - 5.00pm, at Middlesex University, White Hart Lane Campus, Tottenham. London N17 8HR (exact room to be confirmed). For more information see www.greenpeppermagazine.org or email contact AT greenpeppermagazine.org

Before the precariat came the mass worker. Kidd McKarthy puts precarity in historical perspective and challenges those working around the term to overcome their reproduction of existing power relations

The ChainWorkers CreW's call, ‘Chain+Brain Workers Unite!’ is bold, brash, and necessary for a reinvention of first person politics in the work place, but while ChainWorkers and BrainWorkers both share precarious work environments and social conditions, the precise conditions of their exploitation are critically different. The word precarious is difficult to properly translate into English, as in English it has a purely negative meaning. Webster's defines precarious as ‘dependent on chance circumstances, unknown conditions, or uncertain developments; b: characterised by a lack of security or stability that threatens with danger.’ This definition is an accurate characterisation of the working conditions of precarious labourers and a stark relief to the post World War Two socio-economic guarantees. These guarantees of wages tied to inflation, health care, housing, paid time off, unemployment insurance, and pensions were given to those workers who were deemed necessary, like the factory or mass workers, but were not given to students, part-time workers, and housewives. The past 30 years have been marked by a removal of these social guarantees from all working classes, and the fight to both retain and go beyond them.

In the United States, because of weak social movements and strong state repression, the protections of the welfare state were never as thorough compared to other industrialised countries. The removal of these social guarantees is much more advanced and complete than in other industrialised states. In 1999, when the founders of the CreW traveled in the US, they saw first hand what the reorganisation of waged work and the destruction of social safety net looked like, and knew that other industrialised countries, like Italy, would soon follow in a similar direction. The ChainCreW, composed predominantly of skilled media and technology workers and using the term ‘precarious’ to cover both skilled and unskilled labour, first organised in Milan as a web zine, and then expanded to include other actions and events. Since organising their first Mayday in 2001, they have used this day as their primary vehicle for defining and spreading their identity of precarity. I had the honour and privilege of working with ChainWorkers from the first meeting of 2004 to the first successful EuroMayday. In this article, I explain how the precarious identity was developed in both the Italian context and globally, and ask the question, ‘Is the idea of precarity enough to honestly describe a wide variety of working experiences and bind us together to fight and to win?’

MAYDAY AS POST-MASS WORKER PROJECT
The project to dismantle the mass worker as the central object for labour struggles and place it on the shoulders of the more encompassing but diffuse idea of the precarious worker is an ambitious, yet necessary one. If we are to understand the precarious worker as a response to the mass worker, first we must understand the mass worker. The mass worker describes the generation of male, unskilled, assembly line workers of the gigantic factories that were first built in the 1900s but become ubiquitous after World War 2. In many places, Italy and the United States serving as two examples, this rise of the mass worker was accompanied by waves of internal migration from the rural south to the industrial north, and the firing of the female workforce that had entered the factories during World War 2. These massive factories, built for tens of thousands of workers, had many separate points of weakness that, when attacked concertedly, would halt the entire assembly line. During the global wave of struggles from roughly 1959-1977 factory workers were able to exploit these weaknesses. By using techniques such as checkerboard strikes organised on alternative days, lightning stoppages up and down the line, and the self-limitation of production, workers could collectively refuse to work, forcing factory bosses into negotiations.

From the mid-1970s, politicians and world leaders dismantled the controls imposed on capital by the Bretton Woods agreements’, suspending the convertability of the dollar to gold (the gold standard).¹ With these controls gone and other shifts in the global economy, mass factories were replaced by smaller specialised factories, which were often moved to ‘international’ locations. New technologies facilitated automation in the factory and the factory worker became more disposable than ever before.
Taken together these shifts dramatically changed the nature of the factory-based labour force. Fewer workers were required, and the ability for these corporations to transfer operations and financial capital to other locations meant they were much less vulnerable to protest, attack, sabotage, and pressure from inside the factory than before. With the overall decrease in the factory workforce, for the first time in generations, new generations would not be condemned to the factories, yet they faced the insecurity of having no guarantees of long-term employment or financial security. This insecurity and constant turnover was a dramatic change from working one job for thirty years, which not only provided a form of economic security but also a solid social identity. Once, the expectation was to get a job and keep that job or employer until retirement. Now, being part of a ‘flexible’ work force means having six or seven careers in a lifetime. Without an expectation that any of these jobs will be held for long, identity has become more grounded in life outside of work, life outside of work being both more self-managed and secure than waged work. It also meant that since workers are unable to disrupt production using classic methods, workers would have to develop new strategies to force factory owners and investors to negotiate and/or capitulate.

The destruction of the manufacturing base has been accompanied by the stagnation of wages and the rise in working hours. The United States and England are two telling examples. In the Unites States, the average two parent, middle income family now works 16 more weeks per year than in 1979², and the workforce in the US in 2002 worked five more weeks a year than Germany.³ 20 years after British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher broke the miners’ union, British workers now work more hours a year than anyone else in the European Union.⁴ Yet, despite the destruction of the manufacturing base, the mass worker still remains the central figure in the work force in the western world.

THE ABSENCE OF A CRITIQUE OF SOCIAL POWER
The CreW lacks an analysis of power and how it functions across lines of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Because Italy is relatively racially homogeneous, issues of class and gender are of prime importance. Directly related to gender is the invisibility of domestic work. In fact, globally, most people are not even ‘wage labourers’, but actually work for no wages. Most people perform the work of basic work necessary for day to day living and social reproduction: cooking, cleaning, childcare, tasks that in other words encompass the wide range of basic labour that is usually considered 'woman's work'. No analysis of wage labour can be complete without an analysis of unwaged labour. This glaring blind spot colours solutions like a 'social wage' or 'income for all'.⁵ Through the co-optation of feminist struggles in the 1960s and ‘70s, the home has been transformed from what was usually a place of patriarchal domination to what is now another site for wage labour.

BRAIN OVER CHAIN
BrainWorkers are creators, writers, artists, musicians, programmers; people who are hired not for their general labour but for specialised skills or their creativity. Though their time and creativity is stolen from them and sold back to us all as commodities, as software programs, movies, jingles, and advertising clips, they are more socially respected and able to command higher wages. In comparison to ChainWorkers, BrainWorkers have much greater control over their working conditions. The very nature of the work makes it impossible to Taylorise⁶ and there is more flexibility at work to use the time directly as they wish. This is impossible for the ChainWorkers of Walmart, Starbucks, McDonald's, etc. They are automatons and the only thing they have to sell is their labour. With the introduction of computerisation and the commodification of all forms of information, an extreme form of rationalisation pervades the entire workplace: hamburgers are now measured in 15-minute blocks, and keystrokes are measured by the hour. For ChainWorkers, there is all the discipline of the factory with none of the interdependency and vulnerabilities which formerly allowed workers to fight back.

CONCLUSION
The CreW, being a very media-savvy organisation, has been able to change the terms of the debate about work in Italy. However, issues around social power remain formally unaddressed and despite the call for unity, BrainWorkers dominate the group. The CreW operates as a relatively closed group, intervening in the work place from the outside, encouraging workers to assert their rights and to make contact with the self-managed unions in Italy. Perhaps, instead of treating all forms of labour insecurity and exploitation as the same, it might be more effective for ChainWorkers as an organisation to empower chainworkers by transmitting its skills and tactics in creating media, so that ChainWorkers can control their own struggles. And, perhaps, we activists in the English-speaking world can join the debate around precarity and begin to grasp how waged labour has changed over the last 30 years, so we can challenge and destroy it.

This is an edited  version, of a text that originally appeared on the website of Greenpepper Magazine
http://www.greenpeppermagazine.org/process/tiki-index.php?page=Contrarian+Article

FOOTNOTES
¹ The Bretton Woods system of international economic management was set up at the end of World War 2. A chief feature was the maintenance of fixed exchange rate between currencies back by (US) gold reserves. [Mute editor: For a fuller analysis of the significance of the end of dollar-gold
convertability see Michael Hudson’s book ‘Super Imperialism’. Free download at: http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0303critic/0303socialcriticism.html]
² http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/newsroom_releases_swa0 90102
³ International Labour Organisation: http://www.ilo.org/public/english/employment/strat/kilm/kilm06.htm or CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2001/CAREER/trends/08/30/ilo.study/
⁴ http://money.guardian.co.uk/work/story/0,1456,1256144,00. html
⁵ Dating back to the late ‘60s, the idea of a ‘social wage’ or ‘income for all’ was theorised by Italian far left groups to challenge the immediate hierarchies of skill and command found in wage labour and to uncouple income from productivity.
⁶ Taylorism or the theory of Scientific Management, is the theory that there is a most efficient way to do any task. In this view the workers are machines to be reprogrammed with better and more efficient instructions.

Kidd McKarthy is the author of this text. It is published under a licence granting the rights to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work. You are also free to make derivative works, under the following conditions: you must give the original author credit; You may not use this work for commercial purposes; If you alter, transform, or build upon a text, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one. Thanks to Alan and Steve. For their history and insights, written and otherwise

Impacts, traps and challenges of a complex term and its relationship to migration

I. Precarious literally means unsure, uncertain, difficult, delicate. As a political term it refers to living and working conditions without any guarantees: for example the precarious residential status of migrants and refugees, or the precariousness of everyday life for single mothers. Since the early 1980s the term has been used more and more in relation to labour. Precarious work refers to all possible forms of insecure, non-guaranteed, flexible exploitation: from illegalised, seasonal and temporary employment to homework, flex- and temp-work, to subcontractors, freelancers, or so called self-employed persons.

II. Precarisation at work means a growing transformation from guaranteed, permanent employment to less well paid and more insecure jobs. On a historical and global scale, however, precarious work is not exceptional. In fact the idea of a generalisation of so-called guaranteed working conditions was itself a short lived myth of the ‘welfare state’ era. In the global South, in eastern Europe, as well as for most women and migrants in the north – altogether the great majority of the global population –, precarious working conditions were and are the norm. Precarisation describes moreover the crisis of established institutions, which represented for that short period the framework of (false) certainties. It is an analytical term for a process and hints at a new quality of societal labour. Labour and social life, production and reproduction cannot be separated anymore, and this leads to a more comprehensive definition of precarisation: the uncertainty of all circumstances in the material and immaterial conditions of life of living labour under contemporary capitalism. For example: wage level and working conditions are connected with a distribution of tasks, which is determined by gender and ethnic roles; residence status determines access to the labour market or to medical care. The whole ensemble of social relations seems to be on the move.

III. Precariat, an allusion to proletariat, meanwhile is used as a combative self-description in order to emphasise the subjective and utopian moments of precarisation. Through the mass refusal of gender roles, of factory work, and of the command of labour over life, precarisation has, in fact, a double face: it is possible to speak indeed of a kind of flexibilisation from below. Precarisation is not simply an invention of the command centres of capital: it is also a reaction to the insurgency and new mobility of living labour, and in this sense it can be understood as the attempt to recapture manifold struggles and refusals in order to establish new conditions of exploitation of labour and valorisation of capital.

Precarisation thus symbolises a contested field