Precarious Lexicon

>Precarious Lexicon

>

>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.

>

>Not withstanding, 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,

>hyperintensified 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 rythm 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 mobilites 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

>glbalization, 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 timespans 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 organziation 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, it is traversed by axes

>of stratification. 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 unforseen 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 2

>April 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

>postmodernity 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 [ante - before? due to? - I'm not

>clear, does this mean to imply a causal link between the changes in

>work contracts and uncertainty, or does it mean say that uncertainty

>is greater than/prior to the changes in work contracts? - tr] 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 attentionwork...

>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 rebellionin

>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

>Argentia 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 demonstratiosn 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 nonwork, generating shortcircuits 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) oof 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 colelctive 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 nonremunerated, with and without papers: these professionals of

>geographic and vital flights, fixers [??-tr] 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

>that "life have 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

>can not 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 betteer 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 movment, 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 teh worker

>movement can not be useful. It means only that the battle inside and

>against precarization can not 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 nonlabor, which is

>the passage that we inhabit.

>

>

>Rights of Citizenry

>

>The 8th of May 2004, in the neighborhood of Pumarejo in Sevilla there

>was inaugutrated a rehabilitation hoiuse 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

>neigbors of the Pumarejo neighborhood having the right to use enjoy

>the [cuidadania - is it possible to make a similar word play in

>english between citizenry and care? or should there just be an

>explanatory translators note? both? - tr]". From chance or mistake,

>the "u" and the "i" changed places, launching to the passers-by a

>paradoxicalwink that soon became a slogan. Faced with the abstract

>(and mistifying) bond that unites the cIUdadania 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

>- Show quoted text -

>preferred not to save the lifeboat of meaningless securities and to

>take to the sea of uncertainties. Mariners of the interminable life

>has elected to navigate the heavy swells of the intense present, the

>tides of the desire to leanr, 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 ingomes 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 nonwork; 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 cetainty 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 articuluation for a politics

>from below adequate for our times. Some times traversed by crossroads

>such as the overcoming of the society of lanbor 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 nonwork 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 crossborder voyage, across the geographies of earth,

>mind, and bodies.

>

>(www.sindominio.net/ctrl-i/)

>

>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@lists.riseup.net.