Provisional
European lexicon for free copy, modification, and distribution by the jugglers
of life by some precarias a la deriva
Original
in Spanish at http://www.moviments.net/mayday/?q=node/13
Precarization
of existence
In
order to overcome the dichotomies of public/private and
production/reproduction, and to recognize and give visibility to the
interconnections between the social and the economic that make it impossible to
think precariety from an exclusively laboral and salarial point of view, we
define precarity as the set of material and symbolic conditions that determine
a vital uncertainty with respect to the sustained access to the essential
resources for the full development of the life of a subject.
Notwithstanding,
in the present context it is not possible to speak of precarity as a
differentiated state (and, as such, to distinguish neatly between a precarious
population and another guaranteed one), but rather that it is more fitting to
detect a tendency to the precarization of life that affects society as a whole
as a threat ("... be careful to behave yourself because the situation is
tense, don't push it...")
In
the day to day, precarity is a synonym for some laboral and vital realities
that are increasingly destructured: fragmented spaces, hyper intensified and
saturated times, the impossibility of undertaking middle- to long-term project,
inconsistency of commitments of any kind of indolence and vulnerability of some
bodies submitted to the stressful rhythm of the precarious clock. Some bodies
debiliated by the inversion of the relation of forces (now on the side of
capital), by the difficulties of building bonds of solidarity and mutual aid,
by the current obstacles for organizing conflicts in the new geographies of
mobilities and the constant mutations where the only constant is change.
These
new and metamorphic forms of life can get caught by the discourses and
technologies of fear and insecurity that power unfolds as dispositifs of
control and submission, or, and this is what we are betting on, the can
conceive new individual and collective bodies, willing to edify organizational
structures of a new logic of care that, faced with the priorities of profit,
place in the center the needs and desires of persons, the recuperation of life
time and of all its creative potentialities.
**
Network-Society
The
social context that we live in today is the network-society. The factory has
overflowed and has invaded the social, changing it into the principal lever of
production. The wave of struggles in the 1960s and 1970s, on one hand, and the
saturation of markets, along with the high levels of competition that
introduced the process of globalization, on the other, obligated firms to
develop techniques and technologies to make themselves more mobile and flexible
and also more resistant to conflictivity and crisis: their survival depended,
on one hand, on their capacity to detext (and take advantage of) the
politico-institutional and social conditions and of the supply of most optimum
raw materials, software, and machinery and work force; on the other hand firms'
survival depended on their ability to respond within very brief time spans to
oscilations of demand, thus in order to create (with a whole set of
identification of needs/desires/forms of life and production of signs) the
demand for a product even before manufacturing it. The key thus was in the
multiplication of contacts and in a flexible and network organization that
allowed a maximum fluidification of the circulation of information about local
and international markets and an immediate production response to this
information. In this manner, externalization, dislocalization and
flexibilization became the slogan and communicative and relational work became
the essential pivot, the active interface, of this ever more networked
production.
The
paradox of these transformations resides, however, in that these relational and
communicative capacities that are in the center of the present economy never
pertain to an isolated worker, but rather are inscribed (they form and
recreate) in the concrete social fabric, which each worker forms a part of. On
the other hand, in this networked context, the consumer/spectator/citizen works
when they select one product in place of another, one program in place of
another, on candidate in place of the other. And subaltern communities work
when they invent a new mode of wearing their pants (even if it is because of a
lack of money) that later a cool-hunter sells to a multinational fashion firm.
The blackmail, however, is rooted precisely in that, even though work takes
place in common, retribution continues to be individual and, at bottom,
profoundly arbitrary.
Borders
Precarization
affects all of us, and however, axes of stratification traverse it. Axes that
have to do with gender, ethnicity, age, and with other things. In the first
place, with the resources monetary (patrimony) and cognitive (education) that
we count on. In second place, with the networks of contacts and of support in
which we participate, in order confront unforeseen events, in order to ease
uncertainty. In third place, with the capacity for mobility: just as with
businesses, the more mobile we are the more possibilities we will have to take
advantage of comparative advantages in changing from one position to another,
but it's trouble for us, if - due to physical or mental condition, dependents
that we care for, lack of material or cognitive resources or roots - we don't
know to move at the exact moment, like a lightning bolt! Finally, the degree of
precarization has to do with our place of origin and our legal situation: those
who have come to Europe from the East and the South of the world in search of a
better life, fleeing from situations of exploitation and/or oppression, not
only have to cross ever more militarized borders, but also traverse a veritable
legal obstacle course (from their status of being "without papers",
that is to say, without rights, to achieving full citizenship) imposed by the
European policies of immigration control.
The
borders are among the principal enemies of any struggle against the
precarization of existence, because they generate veritable local laboral and
social apartheids that enclose and precarize the social bond and impregnate it
with fear of the other. Creating spaces of mixture, of alliance between
precarious with and without papers, from here and from there, is to challenge
these borders, subtract their command from them, to produce the common. The
European action day of 2April of this year for freedom movement and right of
residence is an example of this sense: see madiaq.indymedia.org,
www.globalproject.info, and pajol.eu.org.
Typologies
of precarity
Once
precarity became a key word for explaining our existence in post modernity and
the tensions that traverse it, typologies also began to spring up, that
attempted to establish some type of coherence within the galaxy of atypical
laboral figures in precarious conditions. One of them, perhaps the most well
heard, is that enunciated by the Milanese "chainworkers"
(www.chainworkers.org) and, more recently, the Italian pre-cog network - under
this perspective, there existed three key figures within the condition of precarity:
on one side, the "chainworkers" (or properly precarious), that is to
say, all those atypical workers contracted in services and the fordist chains
of the commercial public and private tertiary sector, as with flexible material
production, who live in conditions of continual blackmail imposed by
uncertainty due to the changes in the work contract; on the other side, the
"brainworkers" or cognitarios, that is to say, all those that, with
low salaries and ever longer work hours, loan their knowledges to the firms of
immaterial labor (programming, semiotic production, relational activities,
logistics, etc); finally, immigrants, that is, subject to whom the European
immigration policies force into totally deregulated frequently illegal and
probably informal labor relations, and which constitute, as such, the extreme
figure of precarity.
This
typology has various problems: in first place, it lacks coherence, because
don't immigrants sometimes work as chainworkers, in the services of public and
private cleaning, in the large fast food chains, in the workshops and factories
of flexible material production? Can't we also find them, even if with less
frequency, in informatic firms? And later, doesn't it happen sometimes that
those who work in McDonald's later dedicate their free time to writing music or
study? Are the chainworkers or brainworkers? On the other hand, where do we
place the telephone operators, frequently immigrants, whose work is repetitive
yet has a high relational and communicative content? Are they chainworkers or
brainworkers or immigrants or all or none at the same time? Secondly, this
classification is totally blind (in the most literal sense of the term) to all
those activities that develop, as some feminists have said, "in the
corporeal mode": domestic work, care work, sexual work, relational and
attention work... and which insert themselves inside that which we call the
communicative continuum sex-attention-care. That is to say, it is blind to a
whole set of labors traditionally assigned to women, marked by invisibility
and/or stigmatization, low salaries, and a strong affective component that
makes these labors central in the creation of social bonds.
In
general, in the laboral terrain, more useful typologies attempt to think from
the point of view of expressions of unrest and rebellioning the distinct
positions. Thus, we can see that, in jobs with a repetitive content
(telemarking, cleaning, textile workshops), the subjective implication with the
task performed is zero and this leads to forms of conflict of pure refusal:
generalized absenteeism, dropout-ism, sabotage... In telemarketing, for
example, absenteeism is the number one problem for the departments of human
resources, which rack their brains in search of strategies to deal with it:
from the relocation to the old colonies of the mother firm (Marruecos and
Argentina in the case of Spanish firms) to the contracting of more blackmailed
subjects (women heads of household between 40 and 50 years of age) or the
attempt to inculcate loyalty among the workforce, changing telemarketing to one
of the branches of professional education. On the other hand, in jobs where the
content is of the vocational/professional type (from nursing to informatics, to
social work to research) and, as such, the subjective implication with the task
performed is high, conflict is expressed as critique: of the organization of
labor, of the logic that articulates it, of the ends toward which it is
structured... This can be seen very clearly in the mobilizations of nurses in
France in the 90s, in the present struggles of the intermittents in the media
also in France or in the free software impelled by programmers all over the
world in the face of the logic of proprietary software of the big corporations.
Finally, in those jobs where the content is directly invisibilized and/or
stigmatized (the most paradigmatic examples are cleaning work, home care, and
sexual work, especially - but not only - street prostitution), conflict
manifests as a demand for dignity and the recognition of the social value of
what is done. "Fucking, fucking it's a service to the community"
chant the whores of Montera street in their demonstrations against the constant
police harrassment and the criminalizing plans of the mayor of the city of
Madrid.
However,
one and the other typology shares a same problem: the location of the point of
view exclusively in the laboral terrain turns our perspective myopic to the
micro and macro conflictivities that are given in and against the precarization
of existence in the passage between work and non-work, generating short
circuits in the intricate system of connections of the network society.
Mayday
Since
1886 the first of May has been the international day of commemoration (except
in the US) of the "Chicago Martyrs" (worker leaders condemned to the
gallows in the context of the general strikes for the eight hour day in the US)
and of expression of the demands and struggles of that great historical and
strongly identitarian subject, the proletariat, inexorably united in a period
of capitalism, industrial capitalism, to some modes of organization, the great
strikes and the mass unions, and to some places of mobilization, the factories.
But to the degree that capitalism has been changing its forms of exploitation
in order to dodge the workers conflicts and reappropriate their demands,
passing from industrial capitalism to fordism and, from this, to the present
postfordist mode of production, this date has been losing meaning until it
became of holiday (for some) and completely devoid of content for almost
everyone.
Because
today that monolithic antagonistic subject has been replaced by a diffuse
multiplicity of singularities that some dare to call the precariat. In the year
2001, a Milanese colelletive of precarious of the large service sector chains,
the Chainworkers (www.chainworkers.org), issued a call for May first what was
baptized the Mayday Parade. Its protagonists were atypical workers, remunerated
and non-remunerated, with and without papers: these professionals of geographic
and vital flights, fixers of temporality, experts in metamorphis who, linked by
multiplicity, sought, in the difficult times of existential precarization, to
celebrate and visibilize our struggles and dreams. The initiative caught on and
was repeated year after year with increasing numbers and increasing
expressiveness. Three years later, it was put on in the city of Barcelona as
well, and this year anticipates these Maydays in no less than 16 cities
European cities (see www.euromayday.org).
The
Mayday Parade constitutes a means of visibilization of the new forms of
rebellion, a moment of encounter for the movements, and practices of forms of
self-organized politicization (social centers, rank-and-file unions, immigrant
collectives, feminists, ecologists, hackers), a space of expression of its
forms of communication (the parade as an expression of pride inherited from the
movements of sexual liberation, but also all the media-activist artillery
developed around the global movement against the summits of the powerful of the
world) and a collective cry for rights lost (housing, health, education) or new
ones (free money, universal citizenship), which day to day and from each
situated form we try to begin and to construct from below.
Biosindicalism
Biosindicalism
has nothing to do with bifidus. It is an attempt to name a series of recent
practical and everyday experiments that are happening in the terrain of
precarity, in a provisional, provocative, and extremely pragmatic manner.
Biosindicalism is a contraction of life and sindicalism, where life crawls
toward that tradition of struggle that has been sindicalism and deprives it of
its most corporative and economistic elements. But: why insert into this medium?
1) Because life is productive. We are not among those who say, "Life has
been put into production." It always produced: cooperation, affective
territories, worlds... but now it also produces profit. The capitalist
axiomatic has subsumed it. 2) Because precarity cannot be understood only from
the laboral context, from the concrete conditions of work of this or that
individual. A much more rich and illuminating position results from
understanding precarity as a generalized tendency toward the precarization of
life that affects society as a whole. And 3) because the labor has ceased to be
a place that organizes (individual and collective) identity), a place of
spontaneous encounter and aggregation and a place that nourishes the utopia of
a better world. The reasons? The failure of the worker movement and the process
of capitalist restructuration that accompanied it, as much as the push of the
desire of singularity (of the feminist movement, the black movement, the
anticolonial movements and other movements linked to the spirit of '68) that
made the worker movement stall from the inside.
But,
look, this does not mean that the laboral can no longer be a place (among
others) of conflict, nor that the teachings of the worker movement cannot be
useful. It means only that the battle inside and against precarization cannot
be restricted to the laboral. It means that it is necessary to invent forms of
alliance, of organization, and everyday struggle in the passage between labor
and non-labor, which is the passage that we inhabit.
Rights
of Citizenship and Care *1
The
8th of May 2004, in the neighborhood of Pumarejo in Sevilla there was
inaugurated a rehabilitation house and, to leave a memory of the event, a
commemorative plaque was hung up. On the plaque one could read "on the 8th
of May this neighborhood center was inaugurated, the neighbors of the Pumarejo
neighborhood having the right to use enjoy the cuidadania". From chance or
mistake, the "u" and the "i" changed places, launching to
the passers-by a paradoxical wink that soon became a slogan. Faced with the
abstract (and mystifying) bond that unites the cuidadania as a whole population
linked to a territory and a State, the cuidadania appears to us suddenly as a
concrete and situated bond created between singularities through the common
care (and care for the common).
Thus,
from the experience of fragility and isolation that produces the process of
generalized precarization, the rights that we want to instantiate are rights of
cuidadania: right to resources, spaces, and times that permit the placing of
care in the center and, with that, the possibility of constructing the common
in a moment in which the common is shattered. But, look, if we speak of care it
is not as the exclusive task of women to care for others, but rather as an
ecological mode of taking charge of bodies that breaks with the securitarian
logic and that substracts itself from the logic of accumulation. Care as
passage to the other and to the many, as a point between the personal and the collective.
Care as a fundamental weapon against the precarization of our lives.
Flexsecurity
"Free
money"
"More
money, less hours"
"Insecurity
shall overcome"
"35
hours, ugh, what a pain!"
Those
are the happy battle cries of those who know the line of continuity between
work and nonwork, between the public and the private, between production and
reproduction: of those who know that their life is productive all the time.
Time pirates have preferred not to save the lifeboat of meaningless securities
and to take to the sea of uncertainties. Mariners of the interminable life have
elected to navigate the heavy swells of the intense present, the tides of the
desire to learn, to change, to experiment. But, though weather-beaten by the
experience, they are vulnerable navigators on the constancies of terra firma:
in long term projects, in the needs or desires to root oneself in vital,
laboral, or political initiativies. Because, as good as uncertainty is in a
certain - chosen - mode, it also is, at the same time, heterodetermined. And it
is the case that, in the present, flexibility is increasingly something that
benefits capital and not those who try to balance themselves on the tightrope.
From
here arises the need to turn this situation around, in the sense of demanding
securities and rights in the bosom of flexibility. It would be a matter of
demanding and constructing flexicurity, as a contribution to a sort of new
welfare state for intermitency. The dispositifs and demands are multiple:
assure the access to knowledge generated by all, to housing, to real mobility
(through free transportation and the abolition of migration regulations), to
health and to care; generate a universal basic income that ends with the
economic overturning of the bipolarity of temporary workers, a regularity in
their incomes that would give them negotiating power when they accede to a
remunerated job and when they refuse to accept determined laboral conditions
and that permits the organization of strong networks of resistance in the times
of non-work; to study the creation of new labor rights that respond to the new
realities of temporary workers and would be aimed at avoiding the new forms of
abuse due to this condition and to recognizes the wisdom and dexterity acquired
across the length and width of these labor and vital trajectories enriched by
mobility (changes of activity, of country, continuous education).
Copyleft
Copyleft
is a movement that, departing from the certainty that the goods encapsulated in
the concept of "intellectual property" (a book, an informatic
program, a melody...) are the patrimony of all persons (since they are
nourished from collective magmas) and that, unlike material goods, they neither
deteriorate nor are exhausted with use, nor, lastly, are they subjected to the
principle of scarcity (but rather that, to the contrary, they increase and are
enriched when they are shared), it would be a matter of fomenting the diffusion
of this idea as basis for projects of cooperation without command over living
labor and of promoting legal implementations to make it effective (creation of
licenses that assure the free circulation of immaterial goods).
Copyleft
is, also, an axis of fundamental articulation for a politics from below
adequate for our times. Some times traversed by crossroads such as the
overcoming of the society of labor in forms prescribed by the social system
based on waged labor, knowledge converted into the principle productive force
when labor time is maintained as a unity of measure or 18th century property
laws applied now to immaterial goods (pillars of our global economy) whose
qualities are completely distinct from those of tangible products.
But,
what relation does all this have with precarity? Well, among the possible
avenues of deprecarization is that of assuring that the fruits of collective
intelligence (from the development of free software to audiovisual production,
passing through all types of literary and musical creations) for the use and
enjoyment of all, because they are born from the common and nourished by the
common, because it would be the cultivating stock from which future immaterial
creations will grow. If the lang was once a common good for the few who managed
to appropriate it, the moment has come for stopping the communal lands of
knowledge from being also enclosed, the time of the freedom to access,
distribute, modify, and enrich what belongs to everyone.
Precarious
Instinct
Faculty
of staying on a tightrope.
Inclination
toward creative survival.
Illuminating
heard of the uncertain avenues of precarity.
Happy
intuition, transformative of the times of non-work into
Transitory
eternities for putting into practice new forms of relation.
Cyborg
nature that cooperates for the very pleasure of cooperating.
Sense
of smell that seeks common names for our fragmented realities.
Pushes
toward multiplicities.
Intelligence
of strong alliances.
Resort
to exodus.
Propensity
to create networks generative of community.
Impulse
for liberation from alienated labor.
Reflection
of cross border voyage, across the geographies of earth, minds, and bodies.
(www.sindominio.net/ctrl-i/)
*
Notes
1.
This section makes use of a play on words that is not directly translatable into
English. The word "ciudadania" means citizenship, as well as having
resonances with the word for city, "ciudad." The word for care,
"cuidado," is spelled vary similarly. The authors of the text use
these similarities to craft the neologism "cuidadania", referring to
proposed rights to care analogous to the citizenship rights demanded by some
sectors of the European precarity and immigrant/asylum seeker movements.
Phrased in terms of a probably outmoded and problematic distinction, it can be
said that "ciudadania" is a demand for public recognition and rights
and "cuidadania" is a demand for private recognition and rights,
though at the same time "cuidadania" is an attack on the separation
between public and private. - Tr.
Translated by Franco Ingrassia and Nate Holdren. The translators are involved in an informal collective project to encourage, support, and conduct translations of social movement and radical theory related material. Anyone interested in being involved is encouraged to contact them at notasrojas at lists.riseup.net.