Alex Foti interview, by Chris Carlsson
On my recent trip to Milan for Mayday I got to meet Alex Foti over lunch. We decided to conduct an interview by email and here it is. Foti is the author of a manifesto I quoted at length in an early blog post, regardind the politics of Precarity and the so-called ‘cognitariat’ in Italy and Europe. We continue the discussion here…
(more…)Precarity and n/european Identity: an interview with Alex Foti (Chainworkers)
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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 parephenalia to tourists. Merijn Oudenampsen and Gavin Sullivan from the Greenpepper magazine spoke with Milano-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.
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This piece doesn’t offer a lot, but addressing it could prove useful.
"Both celebrated and vilified, precarity is a lifestyle created by the new reality of casual, flexible, temp and contract work. It has been brought on by the erosion of traditional safety nets—the dole, public healthcare, pensions, lifetime corporate jobs, unions, and so on. Most are forced into it. But still others choose to live precariously, rather than scramble to survive in the collapsing old system. To them, precarity is an identity, and they’re fighting— collectively—to make it work.
At least, that’s what’s happening in Europe and parts of South America, where precarity activists are building sophisticated networks of squats and collective housing co-ops, independent production and distribution networks, and worker-run factories. It’s all a means of protecting against the volatility and uncertainty of the system around them. In recent years, they’ve even organized massive days of action—paralleling traditional May Day protests to "activate new forms of social cooperation, new abilities to share skills, experiences and resources, in order to construct and live a new imagery of social radicalism.
So here’s the question: where is the precarity movement in the rest of the world? How about in the USA, home to some of the most insecure workers in the first world? Does America’s culture of individuality preclude a collective response? Have activists been beaten into submission by corporate dominance and the heavies in the White House? Or are we wrong? Maybe the US has an equivalent precarity movement under a different name. Or it’s nameless and waiting to be discovered."
This and this provide at least the beginning of an answer to these rather unsatisfactorily posed questions.
Precarious Lexicon
by Alex Foti
From Greenpeppermagazine Precarity Issue
Precarity [Précarité/Precariedad/Prekärität/Precarietà]. Derived from the latin verb precor, precarity literally means being forced to beg and pray to keep one’s job. This neologism is a better translation than the synonym ‘precariousness’ for the social state of work and being in the age of high (and mortiferous) neoliberalism.
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Precarious Lexicon
Provisional European lexicon for free copy, modification, and distribution by the jugglers of life by some precarias a la deriva
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11 Precarious Ideas for a Biopolitical Sindicalism
00. Introduction
To speak of precarious labor is to speak, to begin with, of half the workers in Argentina: those who work in the black economy. To continue, it is to speak of the multitudes of un- and undermployed who, despite working outside the wage relation, also produce a type of wealth which, in many cases, is directly linked to the survival of hundreds of thousands of people. To those must be added those who work under the so-called "garbage contract". Contracts for services, temporary, without recognition of minimum labor rights. Neither holidays nor vacations nor sick days. To those must be added, in addition, a multiple variety of grantees, volunteers, etc.
This is the precariat. The workers not recognized as such by outmoded conceptions that assign the condition of worker based on a type of contractual relation that is increasingly exceptional. Workers invisible to the State which does not recognize their rights and also to the majority of the unions, which do not permit them to affiliate or participate for themselves. This is the precariat today: the vast majority of the class that lives from its labor.
The precarization of labor, the permanent instability of the conditions of life profoundly alters the very notion of project of life in young workers. Our parents had project of life with contents distinct from those of our grand parents. The conditions of life for the one and for the other were distinct, but in both cases these conditions were relatively stable. For our generation it is not a matter of elaborating distinct contents but rather of reinventing the very notion of project of life. How to project when instability becomes a starting point? In what way can singular and collective trajectories be constructed that avoid remaining subject to dispersion and the aleatority of market flows? To reinvent the notion of project is a task that connects immediately with the task of reinventing the spaces of collective organization that allow us to materialize said projects.
What is sindicalism or what could sindicalism be after precarity? What type of transformations in its organization, in its dynamic and its modes of action would produce a union that wanted to stop neglecting the most significant portion of the present workforce? *1
This writing attempts to propose some precarious ideas, tools, and hypotheses that contribute to the labor of reinvention and relaunching that the worker organizations most committed to social change are attempting to carry forward. It is a matter above all else of a set of sketchs, fragments, or clues that will have value in as much as they are able to stimulate the collective process of debate and thought.
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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. (more…)