Since the birth of the organised labour movement there have been intermittent claims that
some alteration in the conditions of workers had rendered class struggle irrelevant or who
suggested that class stratification meant that different workers had different interests
and thus could not take united action. This was apparent in the struggle between craft
unionism and syndicalism in the days of Connolly and Larkin, or the mantra that ?the class
struggle is over? in more recent times.
The current economic crises and the neo-liberal program of austerity that has ensued has
blown the latter theory out of the water but the idea that different groups of workers
have interests so disparate that unity is impossible has arisen in a new form. The
?precariat? is heralded by some, both inside and outside of its ranks as a new class whose
conditions and interests are separate from the traditional working class. If this was
true, the view of class struggle as capital versus labour would be obsolete. Anarchists
and other socialists would have to completely rethink their politics and possibly even
give up on the idea of building a movement capable of carrying out a radical
transformation of society.
The precariat can be loosely defined as workers in short term, part time labour, working
irregular hours, who experience intermittent periods of unemployment and who, when not
selling their labour, are working to sell themselves by writing C.V.?s and attending job
interviews. The precarity of their economic situation seeps into the rest of their lived
experience as they move from flat to house share, to live with their parents and back to
renting again.
Some of those trying to build a space for the precariat within an anti-capitalist
framework see the need to dispense with the politics of the past and develop a theory and
practice fit for these new times. The Swedish autonomist group Prekariatet rejects the
?previous Marxist and feministic frameworks? and declares ?we allow ourselves to start
from zero and experiment, make mistakes, and learn and progress as we go.?[i]
Culture, Alienation, Boredom and Despair
In his book Precariat: The New and Dangerous Class, the academic Guy Standing describes
the subjective experience of members of the precariat as one defined by ?anger, anomie,
anxiety and alienation?[ii]. Anger emanates from living a life of relative deprivation,
scraping by to make ends meet while being surrounded by consumer culture and the screaming
excess of celebrity lifestyles. The actions of looters during last year?s London riots,
spilling out of retail outlets laden with expensive sportswear and flat screen televisions
was an expression of frustration by those whose prospects of upward mobility and middle
class prosperity are close to zero.
?Anomie is a feeling of passivity born of despair.?[iii]The successive defeats of the
labour movement internationally over the last few decades have left a whole generation of
workers without any hope of improving their situation. They are faced with a lifetime
moving from the dole queue to boring, short term contract jobs with low pay and back
again. There is no prospect of career progression or job security.
Without job security there is no life security. Feelings of anxiety arise over bills, rent
and providing for family. When unemployment is high and union representation is
non-existent, one mistake can cost someone their job. Many employers now hire workers as
contractors rather than as company employees. Because they are classed as self-employed,
they can be fired easier and at the same time, their entitlement to state benefits is reduced.
The concept of alienation is not a new one for those familiar with left wing theory. It
stems from workers having no control of the product of their labour, producing goods and
services not for themselves or their communities but for others to sell and profit from.
Standing maintains that the precariat experiences alienation in a magnified form, being
also subject to ?the cult of positive thinking?. The modern worker is expected to be a
happy member of the team, working with others towards a common purpose. They are not just
alienated from the product of their labour but are also forced to sell their personality
and sociability.
Nowhere is this heightened alienation more apparent than in the field of customer service.
?Here the demand to ?just be yourself? (is) nothing but a cunning way of capturing the
much needed sociality of the employee: affability on the phone, friendliness, and
intuition?[iv] Celine, a part-time worker in the service industry describes the process of
selling this side of yourself: ?One of the worst things you hear when you?re going for a
job interview is that line ?we?re all a big family here?, because then you know you?re
going to have to be this artificially bubbly character that gets on with the staff and can
have a bit of banter with the customers and it creates that weird relationship with
management where you?re supposed to pretend you get along but you?re really just working
for them.?[v]
Standing on Quicksand
The deterioration of the subjective experience of working people on its own however,
doesn?t constitute the birth of a new class. There would have to be a major change in
objective circumstances and particularly a seismic shift in social relations. To prove
this it would have to be demonstrated that the relationship between the precariat and
capital was qualitatively different to that between the traditional working class and
capital. When Guy Standing begins to outline the essential difference between the
objective conditions of the precariat and the proletariat, his theory begins to sink into
the quicksand upon which it is built.
?The precariat was not part of the ?working class? or the ?proletariat?. The latter term
suggests a society consisting mostly of workers in long term, stable, fixed hour jobs with
established routes of advancement, subject to unionisation and collective agreements, with
job titles their fathers and mothers would have understood, facing local employers whose
names and features they were familiar with.?[vi]In other words, the socio-economic
situation of the working class is defined by Standing as the possession of job security, a
living wage, the right to organise and a personal relationship with the boss.
The working class as described above however, only existed for a brief time and won those
conditions through decades of organisation and strikes where many went to prison or were
killed in the process. The factory or office worker who worked nine to five, Monday to
Friday was largely confined to the white male of Western Europe, the Soviet bloc, and
North America. Around the rest of the world, workers were subject to long hours, casual
work, poverty and the threat of state repression if they tried to unionise.
Even within those areas where years of struggle had provided some sort of security for
men, migrants and women found themselves taking insecure, part time employment as
cleaners, hotel workers, and domestic servants. In Ireland, the idea of permanent
employment was a product of the nineteen nineties, when the Celtic Tiger boom brought
previously unknown levels of prosperity that are now receding as quickly as they emerged.
Right up until the mid-nineties the standard Irish working class experience consisted of
the dole queue, short term factory work or farm labouring, bounced paychecks and one way
tickets to Holyhead or Boston.
Broadly speaking, the working class has always been defined by anarchists and Marxists
alike as those who are bound to sell their labour to those who possess the means of
production in the form of private property. This includes the Fordist factory worker, the
office clerk, the farm labourer, the cleaner and even those classed as self employed who
contract themselves to a large employer. It is the relationship between labour and capital
that defines class, not the length of a contract or the number of days a week worked.
The Stainless Steel Claw of the Market
If the working conditions of the precariat are almost identical to the conditions of
majority of the last century?s working class, why is it being discussed as if it is
something new? The answer may be that it is not what is happening that?s important, it is
who it?s happening to. Now, people who were redefining themselves as middle class, who had
attended university and saw the prospect of upward social mobility as a given, are feeling
the pain. ?The articulation of precarity in recent years is... due to ?its discovery among
those who had not expected it?; those who might previously have been shielded by the
relative stability of Fordism.?[vii]
Like all good movie victims, the precarious subject had let its guard down. It seemed as
if the spectre of unemployment was a thing of the past. The confident, educated,
post-industrial worker could leave one job on Friday and walk into a new one on Monday.
Our generation?s future was paved with gold or at least gold credit cards. When it was
least expected, the villain that was assumed vanquished re-appeared in the form of the
financial crisis and the economic shock doctrine that accompanied it.
By the end of the July 2012 in Ireland, there were over four hundred and sixty thousand
people signing on the live register. Over eighty thousand of these were registered as
casual workers (working three days or less). This figure doesn?t account for people
working more than three days who only work a few hours a day, those who don?t know they
are entitled to sign or those who have a partner with means from insurable employment.
Fifty six percent of the total live register was made up of short term claimants. This
suggests that there is a constant turnover of people moving from the dole to short term
contract and insecure employment as the live register figure itself has stayed relatively
static over the last year. [viii]
The relatively sudden rise in unemployment and precarity had a knock on effect in housing.
The tiger generation saw the biggest rise in home-ownership in the history of the Irish
state. Of course ?ownership? in the majority of cases meant mortgage holding. When the
crisis hit and the toll on the labour market became apparent, this translated into a
meteoric rise in negative equity mortgages, arrears and repossessions. At the end of March
of this year, over seventy seven thousand mortgages (10.2% of total stock) were in arrears
of over ninety days. Almost sixty thousand of these were in arrears of over one hundred
and eighty days. Legal proceedings were issued to enforce the debt on two hundred and
seventy eight mortgages and one hundred and seventy of these were repossessed.[ix]
Homelessness is also on the rise. It is difficult to obtain precise statistics on this
phenomenon but the 2011 census recorded three thousand eight hundred homeless people, with
over three thousand seven hundred of these in accommodation for the homeless. Half of
those aged fifteen or over were in employment, while four hundred and fifty seven were
children under the age of fourteen. Nine hundred and five people comprised two hundred
and ninety six family units.[x]
We Are Just Statistics
What is startling about these figures is that a large proportion of homeless people do not
fit the stereotype of the person living rough, who is alone, unemployed and perhaps
unemployable. The picture they actually paint is of the sharp end of precarity in the
Irish state. Government statistics however, tell a limited story. The numbers classified
as homeless by the CSO only represents people on the streets or in designated
accommodation for the homeless. It does not account for the thousands of others whose
housing situation is precarious, who have been forced to couch surf at friends houses,
adults who have had to move in with their parents or those who are constantly under threat
of losing their homes due to low wages, unemployment or underemployment.
The Roman poet Horace wrote that ?we are just statistics, born to consume resources.?
Horace was the favourite poet of the Emperor Octavian and a mouthpiece for the new
imperial order. The language of the state?s statistical data presentation replicates this
attitude. The terms casual worker, unemployed, underemployed and jobseeker mask the fact
that the problem is not necessarily whether one is unemployed or underemployed but whether
one possesses the income necessary to live comfortably. They also hide the subjective
experience of the precarious individual, the emotional and psychological effects of
precarity and the restrictions it places upon life outside of work.
Paradoxically, it seems the more time the modern worker spends out of work the less
freedom they posses. The next offer of work may be only hours away, so constant
availability is a must. Celine?s leisure time is regularly disturbed by a phone call from
the job. ?I find it very difficult to plan ahead. I?m supposed to be given three days
notice before I?m working but that rarely happens. A lot of the time it can be less than
two days notice and it?s often less than twelve hours notice.?[xi] Constant availability
places huge strains on the individual and their ability to lead a normal life. It is
common to hear people talking of not being allowed time off work for funerals or family
emergencies at short notice. One individual had been refused time off to attend his own
graduation.[xii]
With the labour market firmly favouring employers, scenarios like this are hard to avoid.
Long commutes are no longer a reason to refuse a job. Neither is low pay or the knowledge
that the job may only last a couple of weeks. Moving from one neighbourhood to another
because the only job available is on the other side of the city makes it difficult to
settle anywhere. Friendships and other personal relationships become precarious and the
people around you come to resemble a rotating cast of extras in a television soap opera.
The Troika is Coming, Look Busy
One particular feature of the present age is the move towards the institutionalisation of
precarity. If the institutionalisation of Fordism and Taylorism in the last century could
be described as the militarisation of labour, then the current trend represents its
militia-isation. The demand of constant availability is no longer the preserve of the
small employer; it also extends to the corporation and the state. The corporation demands
we take our work home, that we are contactable via email and smart phones. The distinction
between work time and free time is evaporating. The state however demands that even when
we are not linked to a particular employer, we are constantly job seeking, constantly
training, always available for welfare reviews and F?S interviews.
Since the tightening of the grip of the troika over the economic policy of the Irish state
with the ratification of the fiscal compact there have been moves towards increased
assessment, inspection and regulation of welfare recipients. To speed this up, compulsory
personal interviews to assess job prospects or the need for further training with F?S have
been replaced with group sessions that were described by one individual as something like
AA meetings for the unemployed. ?There were twelve of us at the meeting, mainly lads in
their twenties. They sat us down and did a couple of powerpoint presentations, showing us
options like Job Bridge or self-employment schemes. The overall message was ?get the fuck
off the dole?. No one asked any questions, everyone just wanted to get out as quickly as
possible.?[xiii]
Job Bridge is an internship scheme whereby welfare recipients work for six or nine months
and are paid their regular social welfare rate plus an extra fifty euro allowance. For
anyone working more than twenty seven and a half hours a week, that works out below the
minimum wage. It is not yet compulsory, but refusal to attend F?S interviews or comply
with the T?S community work placement scheme can result in benefits being withdrawn. It
would not be a major departure in policy if Job Bridge went the same way. With new
profiling measures in place it will become easier to centrally direct labour under the
pretence of getting people out of ?unemployment traps?.
The experience of other EU countries suggests a move in this direction. Workfare, a
similar scheme to Job Bridge in the UK is compulsory in some cases and in cases where it
is not strictly mandatory, the threat of sanctions is still used. George Osborne MP stated
that ?young people who do not engage with this offer will be considered for mandatory work
activity and those that drop out without good reason will lose their benefits?[xiv]There
is also evidence that Workfare is replacing paid jobs, with ?ASDA sending paid staff home
early over the Christmas period and using Workfare to fill the gaps.?[xv]
Work Less, Live More
Since the beginning of the economic crisis, sections of the left in Ireland and the UK
have made the right to work a central demand. While it is important that those who wish to
work for a living are given the opportunity, there is a danger of fetishising work for its
own sake. The right to work under capitalism means the right to sell one's labour, the
right to be exploited by the owners of private property. More often than not it means the
right to participate in the production of goods and services that the individual worker
has no interest in other than the wage they receive at the end of the week.
In many cases the full time worker finds themselves in a position that is the polar
opposite of the precarious worker but is not necessarily more desirable. In the best case
scenario, they have a regular income which provides the financial means to live the way
they want to, but they don?t have the time or energy to do the things they want. Work that
takes over the majority of one?s life, that is not geared towards one?s own abilities and
interests can be asphyxiating and dehumanising. The call for the right to work should be
accompanied by the adverb ?less? and the phrase ?for more?.
The valorisation of the Fordist worker only became central to the labour movement upon the
ascendency of social democratic and Leninist hegemony. The Russian ?Communists? wanted
rapid industrialisation and believed that one-man management and bureaucratically
centralised production were the best ways to achieve this. The social democrats were in
favour of incremental improvements in workers? conditions under capitalism. In both cases
Fordism and Taylorism made ideological sense.
The fight for the eight hour day and union recognition in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries however, were not seen as ends in themselves but as a means to an end.
The International Workingmen?s Association saw it as ?a preliminary condition without
which all further attempts at improvements and emancipation of the working class must
prove abortive?.[xvi] After the eight hour day was won, the expectation was that unions
would fight for further improvements and some did. The IWW has been calling for a four
hour day for over seventy years and when they adopted that demand, even ?the American
Federation of Labor was officially committed to the six hour day.?[xvii]
Communism through the Looking Glass
If the goal anarchists are trying to achieve is a libertarian communist society, then the
way we think about campaigns for reforms must take that into account. In The German
Ideology, Marx wrote that ?In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of
activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the
general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another
tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening,
criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming a hunter, fisherman,
herdsman or critic.?[xviii]
The condition of the precarity under capitalism in the twenty first century is a perverse
mirror image of Marx?s vision of work under communism. The precarious worker has no
exclusive sphere of activity but becomes accomplished in none either. It is possible for
one to be a barista in January, an office clerk in April, a tour guide in July, a shop
assistant in December and a job seeker for the rest of the year, without ever becoming a
barista, office clerk, tour guide or shop assistant. Rather than calling for the return of
Fordism and specialisation, there is a need to seriously rethink how we get from the
current state of things to the society we desire.
?A think-tank, the New Economics Foundation (NEF)... argues that if everyone worked fewer
hours ? say, 20 or so a week ? there would be more jobs to go round, employees could spend
more time with their families and energy-hungry excess consumption would be
curbed.?[xix]Sharing work is important, but the NEF clearly do not advocate a twenty hour
week with the same remuneration that is currently applicable for a forty hour week. The
implication is that to curb ?energy-hungry excess consumption? people would have to earn
less and adjust their lifestyles accordingly. Guy Standing on the other hand argues that
the state should guarantee a minimum income that would cover life?s necessities while any
further income would be accumulated through ?work for labour?.[xx]This would be funded via
taxation and states investing in ?emerging economies? I.E. the exploitation of labour in
other countries.
Both of these solutions are based on utopian capitalist visions. They rely on legislators
that are bought and sold by large corporations to act in the best interests of working
people and in both cases they fall way short of those interests. The interests of the
majority of the population can only be served by their self-organisation to campaign for
improvements in their own living conditions. Our demands however must develop tangentially
to forms of exploitation and oppression into an expression of the needs and desires of the
broad working class.
The Praxis of Everyday Life
Demands however are nothing without a movement capable of carrying them out. Despite
precarious workers being the most exploited sections of the working class, organising them
can be problematic. Traditional trade union structures make it difficult to organise
workers whose employment is often short term. The effort of joining a union might not seem
worth it if you know you?re going to be leaving that job in a matter of weeks or months at
which point you?re unemployed or in another job where a different union organises the
workforce. Union organisers may not see the point in recruiting members who won?t be there
for the long haul, especially where a union is service-orientated.
The early history of the Industrial Workers of the World in the United States holds some
lessons for organising today. ?They found that membership tended to swell dramatically
with struggles, and then ebb away. It?s been said that ?many a worker who did not carry
the red membership card or had kept up dues payments was still to be counted a Wobbly.?
The IWW was opposed on principle to the kind of incentives for member retention pursued by
more mainstream unions, such as health or insurance benefits, and instead opted to deploy
a job delegate system. This entailed travelling organisers authorised to collect dues and
form union locals amongst the highly mobile, casual workforce of the early 20th century
United States. Consequently, ?a local could exist in the hat or satchel of a mobile
delegate.??[xxi]
What is necessary is an organisation whose structures do not require permanent active
membership, where a member can move from job to job and link in with the local section
wherever they go. The battles it should take on should come directly from the needs and
desires of its members. All too often activists on the left neglect to reflect on their
everyday lived experience, preferring to campaign on whatever the big issue of the day is,
believing this will encourage people to get involved.
While it may not be necessary to ?start from zero? in terms of theory as the Swedish group
Prekariatet have suggested, it is a useful approach when tackling demands. Rather than
assuming what people?s issues are, organisers should engage in workshops with work
colleagues, friends and neighbours to see what common problems people face and come up
with ideas for solving them and ways of organising around them.[xxii]
Beyond the grandiose claims of academics like Guy Standing of the precariat being a new
class, there are a growing number of people drowning in a sea of uncertainty. Their
passivity can be mistaken for an unwillingness to organise and fight back but it is more
likely that they just don?t see the point. Many see the unions as lobby groups for a
select group of ?privileged? workers with secure, fixed wage jobs and benefits such as
pension schemes. The challenge for activists of the left over the coming period is to find
ways of organising that are fit for purpose, that are extensions of working and unemployed
people?s lived experience and that can also point the way towards a radical transformation
of society. The world isn?t static so it is important to keep re-interpreting it, but the
point is still to change it.
The article is from the winter 2012 issue of the Irish Anarchist Review:
[i] http://prekariatet.se
ii] Standing, Guy, Precariat: The New and Dangerous Class, Bloomsbury Academic, 2011
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Cederstrom, Carl and Fleming, Peter, Dead Man Working, Zero Books, 2012
[v] Interview with the author, July 2012
[vi] Standing, Guy, Precariat: The New and Dangerous Class, Bloomsbury Academic, 2011
[vii] Southwood, Ivor, Non Stop Inertia, Zero Books, 2011
[viii] Figures from the Central Statistics Office. (CSO)
[ix] Figures from the Central Bank.
[x] CSO
[xi] Interview with the author, July 2012
[xii] Conversation with the author, September 2012
[xiii] Interview with the author, September 2012
[xiv] http://www.boycottworkfare.org
[xv] ibid
[xvi] IWA convention, Geneva 1866
[xvii] http://www.iww.org
[xviii] Marx, Karl, The German Ideology, http://www.marxists.org
[xix] Cut the working week to a maximum of 20 hours, urge top economists, Heather Stewart,
The Observer, 8th of January 2012
[xx] Standing, Guy, Precariat: The New and Dangerous Class, Bloomsbury Academic, 2011
[xxi] Fighting for ourselves ? preview,
http://libcom.org/blog/fighting-ourselves-preview-05092012
[xxii] For info on ?activist research? see
http://provisionaluniversity.wordpress.com/2012/07/16/notes-on-activist-research-workshop-on-collective/
Bron : a-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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