This blog is intended to be a resource for me in understanding better what precarity is or is thought to be, as an objective condition or in the third person, and what the precariat is or is thought to be as an active and oppositional subject, in the first person. Another interest is the hinge between these two, the first person experience of the condition of precarity.

An initial goal is simply collecting and organizing materials on precarity and the precariat. That will be an ongoing point of this blog.

I live in the United States. I have spoken a number of times with people here about precarity and I have paid a moderate-to-small amount of attention to precarity discourses in Europe. A frequent question is why the term hasn’t caught on here given that there is so much precarity in conditions. That’s a good question. Sorting that out is one of the goals here.

For the present, I plan to organize the blog using the following set of tags, which may expand, contract, or change wildy.

This blog
Events (from planned by a group - May Day demonstrations or San Precario actions - to unplanned - riots - and in between)
Initiatives (includes some events and all organizations)
Organizations
Perspectives and analyses (theory etc which orients a discussion as well as theoretically informed reflection upon terms, directions, etc)
Law (labor law, policing, border policy, etc)
Social wage (welfare state)
Waged work
Unwaged work
Wages
Terms (definitions of precarity, other terms deployed)
Actions (all events are included, other things as well like mutual aid, sustained conflicts or cycles of struggle)
Reprinting texts (for ease of finding and out of fear they’ll vanish)
Books
Various tags on countries, because the national-state level is one at which there are some important differences (regimes of labor law, border policy, etc). Regions as well.
Previous history (prior to the present, vaguely defined - accounts of parallel conditions and activities in earlier times)
Web resources (useful web sites)
Hypotheses (provisional observations and speculations from me)