August 12, 2006
PRECARITY: A SAVAGE JOURNEY TO THE HEART OF EMBODIED CAPITALISM
Vassilis Tsianos [University of Hamburg] and Dimitris Papadopoulos [Cardiff University]
A. Introduction
There is an underlying assumption to the current debates about class composition in post-Fordism: this is the assumption that immaterial work and its corresponding social subjects form the centre of gravity in the new turbulent cycles of struggles around living labour. This paper explores the theoretical and political implications of this assumption, its promises and closures. Is immaterial labour the condition out of which a radical socio-political transformation of contemporary post-Fordist capitalism can emerge? Who’s afraid of immaterial workers today? (more…)
August 8, 2006
Quotes from The Making of the English Working Class
"[W]hen we follow through the history of particular industries, and see new skills arise as old ones decline, it is possible to forget that the old skill and the new almost always were the perquisite of different people. Manufacturers in the first half of the 19th century pressed forward each innovation which enabled them to dispense with adult male craftsmen and to replace them women or juvenile labor. Even when an old skill was replaced by a new process requiring equal or greater skill, we rarely find the same workers transferred from one to the other, or from domestic to factory production. Insecurity, and hostility in the face of machinery and innovation, was not the consequence of mere prejudice and (as authorities then implied) of insufficient knowledge of "political economy." The cropper or woolcomber knew well enough that, while the new machinery might offer skilled employment for his son, or for someone else’s son, it would offer none for him. The rewards of the "march of progress" always seemed to be gathered by someone else. (…) [T]hese particular insecurities were only a facet of the general insecurity of all skills during this period," which encompasses much of the 19th century, certainly its first half.
In addition, "the very notion of regularity of employment - at one place of work over a number of years for regular hours and at a standard wage - is an anachronistic notion, imposed by 20th-century experience upon 19th-century realities. (…) [T]he problem in agriculture was that of chronic semi-employment. This was also the problem in most industries, and in urban experience generally. The skilled and apprenticed man, who owned his own tools and worked for a lifetime in one trade, was a minority. It is notorious that in the early stages of industrialisation, the growing towns attract uprooted and migrant labour of all types; this is still the experience of Africa and Asia today. Even the settled workers pass rapidly through a succession of employments." (246-248.)
In comparison with skilled workers, "less is known about the unskilled workers, in the first decades of the 19th century, since they had no unions they rarely had leaders who articulated their grievances, and few parliamentary committees investigated them except as a sanitary or housing problem (….) Distinct from the labourers were those for whom "casualty" had become a way of life: street-sellers, beggars and cadgers, paupers, casual and professional criminals, the Army." (264.)
One of the comrades from Precarias a la Deriva has a project about precarity in the US. Along the way she plans to visit with people from a number of organizations - bitter ultraleftist that I am I find myself wanting to dis some of them, which isn’t particularly productive. She links to an interesting interview of the Precarias with someone in the US, and another exchange with the same person about conditions here in the US.
Perhaps it’s worth considering formulating a call to circulate, for a network of US folk to exchange thoughts and plans on precarity here, and to formulate some goals. Among those goals I’d like to see the formulation of several provisional maps: Euro-precarity/precaritization for the US observer, Euro-precariat movement(s)/organizations/struggles for the US observer, US-precarity/precaritization for the US observer, and US-precariat movement(s)/organizations/struggles for the US observer. I’d be interested in seeing how similar calls were formulated (in Europe on precarity, and anywhere, including here in the US, on other issues such as noborders) and how the networks were formed.
In any case, I suspect she’d like it if folk would go say hello.
August 7, 2006
stuff to sort out later
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August 5, 2006
August 3, 2006
Resistance and Organization in Postfordism
On the Attempt of a Militant Research of Precarious Labor
Translated by Aileen Derieg
Robert Foltin
A tool for recognizing class composition[1] is the "militant research " (or "questionnaire" or "workers inquiry" or "joint research"), which is currently experiencing an astonishing comeback in various contexts. The con-ricerca, which emerged in Italy in the 1960s, was intended to recognize the technical composition of the working class, and to not only recognize its political composition or recomposition (in other words the workers battles and organization), but also to promote and influence it. Communication and mutual information among the workers were to be set in motion and, as it was once bombastically formulated by Wildcat (still as the city paper for Karlsruhe), to prepare "spontaneous" battles (Karlsruher Stadtzeitung reprint 1985).
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A Callcenter In London - A Montage
Marion Hamm
"Precarisation" is what the mobilisations for EuroMayday1 and many publications2 about the issue of precarity come up with in their search for a missing link between very different life situations in neoliberalised Empire – and maybe even a basis for a shared, radical consciousness. The picture emerging from writings about cognitariat and migration, from the struggles of the US-based "Justice for Janitors" campaign and the intermittents in France, from the intoxicating demonstrations3 of the EuroMayday Parades and their connectedness with mobilisations for migrant rights, seems to lend justification to the more theoretical reflections.
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Working Lives: Re-looking the Call Center Industry in Delhi
Iram Ghufran and Taha Mehmood
NOIDA, Sector 58[1]
15th September 2002
5:58:30 PM
It is late evening. The sun has not yet set but the halogen streetlights are on, casting a warm yellow glow on the street. He is standing amidst the steady stream of well-dressed individuals entering and leaving the office building. The street is bustling with activity as official cabs roll in every couple of minutes bringing the agents to work. Young men and women hang around snack carts to grab that last bite before the shift begins. Workers in about ten multistoried, international call centers in the area are getting ready to go "live".
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The Age of Uncertainty
Oleg Kireev
The new year came to Russia along with the mass protests uncomparably stronger than anything we have seen since very 1993. An immediate reason was a Summer Duma decision about what had been called "monetarization of privileges" (or "benefits") - i.e. conversion of privileges concerning free medicine, transport etc. into money. According to the former Soviet order, many social groups did have certain kinds of privileges, but here they were mostly those of pensioners - i.e. of an extremely disregarded and disadapted group of a society. The trick about the privileges was that they got monetarized (a word everyone had learnt since these months), converted into money in such a way which was quite close to cancelling them; for an example, a free medicine was equalized to approximately 1.000 rubles (28 EUR) monthly. When the law was passing, there were already some protests, but not that much. While it was only a paper, people waited. But at January, 1 they started to demand payment from old people in the public transport, and the rage grew. Moreover: in a small unnoticeable line of the bill it was added that these are local authorities who are responsible for the payments, what meant full devastation: local authorities are ever off money, with quite few exceptions (like Moscow). In reality that all meant: first, cancelling of privileges for all country; second, saving some rest of privilieges for Moscow, the richest and the most explosive city, thus deepening the gap between capital and province. The humiliation was even harder because quite many of pensioners are World War II veterans who live last years of their life. But from the other side, these pensioners are more socially involved and engaged, because they keep a socially constructive spirit of socialism (whatever to think about it), and that was proven many times by their participation in the Red opposition.
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Spectacle Inside the State and Out. Social Rights and the Appropriation of Public Spaces: The Battles of the French Intermittents
Translated by Aileen Derieg based on the German translation by Michael Sander
GlobalProject / Coordination des Intermittents et Précaires d’Ile de France
The strength of a political movement is found not only in its ability to reach a concrete objective. These kinds of successes depend mostly on the economy of power relations. The strength of a movement reveals itself more in its potential for raising new questions and providing new answers. And this much is certain: the battles of the precariously employed French cultural workers have raised new questions demanding new answers.[1]
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