Precarious Residence. The Universal Embassy as a site of social production

Translated by Lisa Rosenblatt

Stefan Nowotny

Brussels, Avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt: a long stretch on the periphery of the European capital, forming a section of the connection between one of the most stylish shopping districts in Brussels and the noble suburbs to the south of the city. Here, away from the city center, and also away from the European quarter and its immigrés de luxe, is a row of embassies and ambassadorial residencies, classical sites of international diplomacy and representation. One of these villas, lined up side by side, housed the Somali embassy until 1991. Today, due to Somalia’s civil war and the lack of an internationally recognized government, the embassy has lost its function. Whatever might be happening in "Somalia" and whatever the affairs of "Somalis" might be anywhere in the world, for the time being, this can no longer be represented within the framework of an international representational model based on the idea and practice of national delegates.  The fading photographs of Somali politicians hanging on the walls in the interior of the abandoned embassy, the maps, on which the lost integrity of a territory is recorded, are the mute witnesses to this impossibility. 

Fuzzy Production Logics. Experience and Reflection in the Laboratory of Insecurity

Translated by Aileen Derieg

Klaus Neundlinger

Since the 1970s a topos relating to the economic and political situation of Italy has enjoyed particular popularity: this has to do with a laboratory, a field of experimentation for the most different forces, interests and currents. The particular diversity of protest forms and differentiations of the non-parliamentary public sphere from the late 1960s to the turning point of 1977 seems to be especially susceptible to sparking romantic notions with respect to the strength of a "counter-power", a constitutive movement that does not allow itself to be coopted by representative structures.

Info-Labour and Precarisation

Franco Berardi Bifo

Translated by Erik Empson

"We have no future because our present is too volatile. The only possibility that remains is the management of risk. The spinning top of the scenarios of the present moment."
(W. Gibson: Pattern recognition, tr. It. L’accademia dei sogni)

La inseguridad vencerá. Anti-Precariousness Activism and Mayday Parades 

Gerald Raunig

"We are the precarious, the flexible, the temporary, the mobile. We’re the people that live on a tightrope, in a precarious balance, we’re the restructured and outsourced, those who lack a stable job, and those who are overexploited; those who pay a mortgage or a rent that strangles us. We’re forced to buy and sell our ability to love and care. We’re just like you: contortionists of flexibility."
("Mayday, Mayday! Les precàries i precaris es rebel.len",
Manifiesto convocatoria Barcelona EuroMayDay 004)[1]

Adrift through the circuits of feminized precarious work

by Precarias a la Deriva

Synopsis: we are precarious. Which is to say some good things (accumulation of diverse knowledges, skills and abilities through work and life experiences in permanent construction), and a lot of bad ones (vulnerability, insecurity, poverty, social exposure). But our situations are so diverse, so singular, that it is difficult for us to find common denominators from which to depart or clear differences with which to mutually enrich ourselves. It is complicated for us to express ourselves, to define ourselves from the common ground of precariousness: a precariousness which can do without a clear collective identity in which to simplify and defend itself, but in which some kind of coming together is urgent. We need to communicate the lack and the excess of our work and life situations in order to escape the neoliberal fragmentation that separates, debilitates and turns us into victims of fear, exploitation, or the egotism of ‘each one for herself.’ Above all, we want to enable the collective construction of other life possibilities through the construction of a shared and creative struggle.
-From the invitation to participate in the first derive, October 2002.

MAYDAY MAYDAY! euro flex workers, time to get a move on!

Alex Foti

__Synopsis of previous conflict episodes__

Since 2001, a network of Italian, French and Catalan media hacktivists, rank-and-file unions, self-run and squatted youth centers, critical mass bikers, radical networks, student groups, labor collectives, immigrants’ associations, assorted communists, greens, anarchists, gays and feminists have given life to the MayDay Parade taking place in the afternoon of 1 May in the center of Milan, Italy. Milan MayDay has steadily grown in participation and meaning from 5,000 people in 2001 to 50,000 people in 2003. MayDay 2004 mobilizations of precari@s in Milano and Barcelona saw 100,000 demonstrators parading for organizing and social rights as a way out of generalized precarity. MayDay has proved to be a horizontal method of cross-networking the Genoa movement with the radical sections of unionism - thereby enabling an alliance between two generations of conflict based on subvertising, picketing, organizing and the proliferation of multiple methods of action. MayDay has also triggered multifarious urban actions and labor conflicts in the Milano metropolitan area and, soon after, across the rest of Italy - mobilizing young temps, partimers, freelance and contract workers, researchers and teachers, service and knowledge workers.

Precari-Us?

Angela Mitropoulos

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.

The Precarization of Cultural Producers and the Missing "Good Life"

Translated by Aileen Derieg

kpD

Precarization is not happening for the first time because so-called normal working conditions are changing. There are continuities running through the history of capitalist nation-states. In the past two hundred years, those who have been affected again and again by precarization are the ones positioned as "others" with respect to a hegemonic male, white, national norm.
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