Dear James, thank you so much for this interesting analysis, I agree with you, and I only use 'precariat' in precise analytical contexts, at SMart for example, we use the concept of 'autonomous worker', but I work to link it specifically with the economy of the commons to liberate these workers from the dictates of the capitalist market, however, in the context of building generative livelihood, which today by necessacity entail a relation with the commons if not commons-centricity, I use the concept of commoners, I find people readily accept it once they get the narrative behind it, what would be your objections to using 'commoners' ? On Fri, Oct 12, 2018 at 11:14 PM <[email protected]> wrote:
Michel et al
I've thoroughly enjoyed the discussion on the precariat in the Global Transition Network during the month of September 2018. I certainly don't disagree with the accuracy or power of this basic definition of the precariat, which is sharpened by Guy Standing (the originator of this idea) in the response below. He makes clear that since the precariat is embedded in the capitalist paradigm, it's important to emphasize (in Marxist fashion) the transformational potential that arises through the dangerous conditions of all workers who are helplessly stuck in the structural framework of Private production and distribution and State control through *de*regulation. Indeed so. I get it that we must resist the rules and conditions through which we have been so profoundly set up to fail.
Yet, from the standpoint of revolutionary storytelling and transformational branding, I continue to wonder if a term like *precariat*, which is chosen partly because of its potential to organize workers based on their implicit alienation, dispossession and misery, is really apt for this evolutionary moment. I also note that 'precariat' implies violent resistance over peaceful resistance to these unequal conditions. This makes me think that there may be a better choice of language which expresses both a strong motive power and a positive vision for change, yet is capable of gathering together the citizen-workers of the world under one banner. I'm not proposing such a term here, but I do suggest that this language must convey a sense of decentralization, participation, collectivity, cooperation, commons, reinhabitation and sustainability. I don't get any of this from the term 'precariat'.
The other day a friend of mine was asking, "What would Gandhi do?" in our present economic/political state of commiseration. It occurred to me that even if organizing and mobilizing under the banner of 'precariat' inspired our citizens to shed the old, crystallized system and prepare for some new kind of structure, without an equally powerful vision of the regenerative and collaborative system to which we aspire, those who were united under the precariat banner would soon splinter in disarray and the result would be social chaos.
The American, French and Russian revolutions were complete gambles born of despair -- with no plan of what was to come. We must recognize that our time is entirely unlike that of the 18th, 19th or 20th centuries, when the revolutionary goal was to create social change by continuously reigning in the oppressive oligarchies which sought infinite economic growth to sustain their wealth and power. Things are very different now. Ecology is telling us to prepare for an age of finite economic growth. Our goal must be to slow the destruction of the environment and create social emancipation while managing economic contraction. How? We must 1) adapt to the precarity that we are now facing in the environment, while 2) continuing to resist and transform the precarity of the entrenched capitalist dialectic and its new oligarchy.
Ok. But might we express this another way? My view is that a double negative such as this -- a precarious environment and a precarious working class -- will only bedevil our strategy and tactics with endless fear and confusion. It's critical to understand that the negativity of the world's declining resources combined with the negativity of greater human need within a growing population will not inevitably lead to disaster if the situation is framed from a larger perspective. In nature, for example, two negative charges of energy immediately turn into a positive charge without losing the power of either of the two formerly negative energies. This is entirely a function of expression -- of how we perceive the forces at work and our apply our understanding of this to our circumstances.
We see this same apparent dichotomy between resources and needs operating in molecular biology. When energy is required within an organic system, the need of this energy is automatically met when it is recognized. This is how cells and organisms and living systems develop: they enable the resources available in an environment to meet the needs of the population through their labor. Note that this labor is both ecological and human.
Transforming two interrelated negatives is the essence of progressive resistance. It demonstrates that there is a dynamic equilibrium which underlies an apparent contradiction. In the new economics of social classes faced with planetary limits to resources, this requires embodying both the evolutionary meaning of nature as limited by its regenerative capacities and human labor as limited by its biophysical needs. I do think this is what Gandhi would be saying today: that it would be shortsighted not to use the laws of nature to turn the message of global class resistance into a purely positive meme for transformation. Economics must be designed with this kind of integration if human society is to exist. Marx and his followers have failed to complete this loop of ecological/social metabolism. Here's hoping we do not.
James Quilligan
----------------------------------------- From: "Michel Bauwens" To: "p2p-foundation", "Research stream email of P2P Foundation" Cc: Sent: Friday October 12 2018 11:27:36AM Subject: Fwd: The Precariat: Today's Transformative Class? (GTN Discussion)
This is a dense but very rich and lively text by Guy Standing, which sets the record straight on both the issues of the precariat and on the basic income; Guy stresses the relation between the precariat and the commons in a very direct way,
---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Great Transition Network <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Oct 12, 2018 at 4:52 PM Subject: The Precariat: Today's Transformative Class? (GTN Discussion) To: <[email protected]>
From Guy Standing <[email protected]>
------------------------------------------------------- Thanks are due to those who commented on my essay. This rejoinder will not be able to address all points raised, but rather will focus on a few key arguments and recurring themes.
First, I want to rebut the claim, made previously and repeated here by Ronaldo Munck in his two comments (backed by John Russo, William Robinson, and Bill Fletcher) that the precariat is a “Northern-centric” concept, inapplicable in what he calls the “Global South,” a notion hard to maintain in a globalized capitalist system. I first conceptualized the precariat while implementing a “labor flexibility” survey in 3,000 industrial enterprises in Malaysia in the 1980s, and then refined it in similar surveys in the Philippines, Indonesia, and what was then Bombay. I refined the ideas while director of the ILO’s technical work in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the 1990s. The first estimate of a national precariat was in South Africa, where I was research director for Nelson Mandela’s Labour Market Commission.
Subsequently, I had the privilege of working for over a decade with the Self Employed Women’s Association of India, a union of two million women outworkers (i.e., employees who perform their work at home or at a place not normally considered a business premise), with whom I implemented three basic income pilots covering thousands of people. But perhaps most revealing is that some of the most outstanding recent research on the precariat has been in China (cited in footnote 3 of my essay).
Based on my work and research on the “Global South” over thirty years (including 400 presentations on these ideas in 37 countries), I believe the charge that the precariat concept is “Northern-centric” to be a flippant and superficial reading of my argument. Obviously, the precariat and the emerging global class structure are more pronounced in some countries. That has always been the case with class structures. Perhaps Ronaldo and the others should direct their fire at Marx for being Northern-centric. After all, his conception of the proletariat was based on little more than the knowledge Engels gleaned in Manchester. Perhaps not.
In his second comment, Ronaldo also dismisses basic income as a “very ‘Northern’ concern,” claiming it relates “very much to the limited world of the North Atlantic.” As it happens, I have been involved in basic income pilots covering thousands of people in India and Namibia, besides analyzing moves in that direction in other developing countries. We called the book on the Indian pilots Basic Income: A Transformative Policy for India (Bloomsbury, 2015). This was because the evaluation surveys showed a series of transformative changes—improvements in nutrition, health and schooling, better sanitation, emancipatory breakthroughs for women and the disabled, greater cooperative work activity, and reductions in the power of landlords and moneylenders. We found similar effects in Namibia.
What was particularly encouraging was that when the Indian Finance Minister presented his budget to Parliament in January 2017, he included a report stating that basic income was affordable and feasible in India. While I was writing this, friends sent me news that the UN Secretary General in his address to the Security Council had endorsed basic income. Having argued for it for nearly forty years, and been ridiculed for doing so, you may appreciate that the news induced a gulp in my throat.
Another claim by Ronaldo, supported by others, is that the precariat concept shows a “complete lack of understanding of contemporary labour or of the labour movement’s organisations and strategies.” I utterly reject this criticism based on my research and my experience as a union member for most of my life, both of which have led me to view worker organizations as vital. I have addressed numerous unions around the world, and worked with many, including the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA). But we must avoid idealizing unions. Consider five examples that reveal inherent failings of laborism.
First, for a decade, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) refused to accept SEWA as a member, blocking it as a worker body in the ILO, even though it was fighting for the rights of women outworkers and had two million members. I acted as an intermediary, as SEWA activists struggled against excommunication. Unified working class? The sexist bias was ugly. The argument used by the unions was that SEWA did not represent “employees”—a Northern-centric position indeed.
Second, I recall with distaste being invited to discuss the new unions in Eastern Europe with the then-president of the AFL-CIO. Between expletives, his message was that I should stop working with them and that he wanted their leaders dead. I was working with individuals who had bravely stood against tyranny and for worker rights. Yet here was the leader of the world’s biggest union confederation showing lack of class solidarity, to put it mildly.
A third example occurred when I addressed an international group of union leaders at a “Summer School.” I posed the question, “Why is it that union leaders have been among the most vehement opponents of basic income? After all, it is about giving everybody basic security.” Although the chair tried to prevent discussion, one leader said, “I think it is because we think that if people have income security they will not join unions.” I pointed out the immorality of that sentiment, adding, “Fortunately the premise is wrong. People who are chronically insecure are less likely to join a collective body, for fear of retribution. If they have basic security, they are more likely to have the courage to fight for rights.”
Fourth, recently a decision had to be made on building a third runway at Heathrow that will mean planes flying over low-income neighborhoods in east London. Nobody denies that it will intensify noise and air pollution, endangering lives and child development. But one group lobbied feverishly (and, sadly, successfully) for the runway on the grounds that it would create jobs. Yes, the unions. Other examples abound of how unions have shown disregard for environmental degradation. Jobs or the environment? No contest.
Fifth, when invited to present on the precariat to a conference of about 500 members of UGT (a large Brazilian union) in São Paulo, I was impressed that speaker after speaker said it was vital to reach out to the Brazilian precariat. Had Ronaldo or others told them the precariat had no “resonance” in Brazil, they would have scoffed at the idea. Unions will have to change and understand the precariat.
This leads to Maurie Cohen’s comment in asking “whether a basic income constitutes a sufficient strategy.” Of course it does not. For successful transformation, two meta-securities are needed: basic income (for without economic security, nobody can feel in control of their lives) and strong “Voice” (for without collective organizations to represent our interests, we are always vulnerable). That is why in our Indian pilots, we tested for the impact of Voice by splitting the communities into those where only the basic income was paid but where there was no organization to represent their interests and those where a collective body was operating as well.
Having worked with unions for many years and interacted with unionists from all over the world, I concluded that they must transform themselves by responding to the priorities of the precariat, not just the proletariat.
So, immodestly, I posed the double question: What would constitute a manifesto for the precariat today, and how would it differ from a proletariat charter, had it existed, one hundred years ago, at the founding of the ILO in 1919? This resulted in A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens (Bloomsbury, 2014).
That book argues (Articles 5-10 of the Charter) that we need a synthesis of the best elements of the craft guilds that industrial unions helped to destroy and the best elements of trades unions, and that to reach the precariat, they should focus on “collaborative bargaining” not just “collective bargaining.” This was elaborated in Work after Globalisation: Building Occupational Citizenship.
In developing the Charter, one point crystallized in considering how the precariat could be a vanguard for social change (which William Robinson claims is absent in my analysis, but which is treated at length in both Chapter 5 of the Charter and Chapter 8 of Corruption of Capitalism). In exaggerated form, it is this: the proletariat’s primary (or frontline) antagonist is the employer, the boss, the capitalist; the precariat’s primary (not only) antagonist is the state.
That became clear in Occupy movements and in the evolution of precariat movements since. All transformations begin with recognition of common identity and interest, and with understanding the nature of the enemy. This is a necessary first step on the road to transformation. The precariat knows that the immoral regulatory practices of social, economic, and labor market policy are directed at it, and that this is where the morally weak underbelly should be critiqued.
Several commenters, notably Fred Magdoff, referred to the commons. I would like to correct an apparent impression that I favor “leaving the commons as private property.” That is the opposite of what I believe. We need to reclaim the commons and commoning, while extracting the rental income acquired by those who have enclosed, privatized, or colonized our commons. Although, as recalled in The Corruption of Capitalism, Marx himself was radicalized not by rapacious mill owners but by witnessing the theft of the commons in the Moselle. Marxists and others have been too quiet about this. That is why “Revive the commons” was Article 27 of the Precariat Charter.
Peter Barnes, whose work I commend to everybody, says I want “to replace existing taxes on income and consumption with commons levies.” I do not say that. We need both, but with greater reliance on the latter than has been the case. They are also less avoidable. And contrary to what William Robinson says, I do not think that curbing rentier dimensions of capitalism will “solve the problem.” But the rentier character of contemporary global capitalism is extreme. It is neither morally nor economically justifiable in any school of economic thought, which is why criticism should focus on it in developing a progressive politics.
Several comments referred to “job security” (Alexandra K öves, Alison Tate and Evelyn Astor) when what is meant is “employment security.” In the seven forms of labor-related security long sought by social democrats, far too much attention was given to employment security, to the neglect of what I have called *occupational security*. In conceptualizing the precariat, I found it useful to see how people in it were losing all seven forms of labor-related security.
Robinson’s comment that workers around the world have been subject to what “Standing and many others, myself included, have identified as unstable and deregulated labor relations” shows he has not read my work carefully, since a central claim of mine, right or wrong, is that there has been no “deregulation.” Indeed, a reasonable hypothesis is that, in the evolution of capitalism, never has state regulation been more comprehensive or directive. And this is directed primarily at the precariat.
George Liodakis’s comment is hard to understand. I will just say that, while I am unsure how I have “a communist vision,” I strongly disagree that “relations of distribution are always attendant to specific relations of production.” It is a key to understanding the different material interests and tensions between the salariat, proletariat, and precariat that while all three experience wage labor as part of their “relations of production,” they have very different structures of social income, with the first group receiving a large and growing part of their income from capital, the middle group a rising proportion from the state, and the precariat none of the former and a shrinking share of the latter. This is why it is vital to define class by reference to all three dimensions—relations of production, relations of distribution, and relations to the state.
Alison Tate and Evelyn Astor, on behalf of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), with whom I have worked with pleasure, say, “the ITUC rejects the idea that increasing unemployment and precarious employment are inevitable.” If they mean to associate this idea with me, they are mistaken. Actually, I reject the term “precarious employment” and think that, with the dominant state regulatory policy, low open unemployment is more likely than high. Concealing unemployment has been a feature of social democratic support for workfare, as exemplified by Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare act, the Hartz IV reforms made by the Social Democrats in Germany, and Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s regime of tax credits and means-tested benefits in the UK. They have reintroduced Speenhamland.
It is revealing that the labor movement in general has done very little to undermine workfare, but have persisted in promoting laborist social security. Tate and Astor advocate support for ILO Convention 102 on Social Security. In my writing and in many speeches, I have nominated that Convention as the most sexist and laborist of all labor Conventions. Passed in 1952, it defines the “standard beneficiary” as “a man with wife and two children,” and helpfully adds “the term ‘wife’ means a wife who is maintained by her husband.” The fact that representatives of the international “labor movement” support such paternalistic policy is sad. The precariat would be deeply disadvantaged if Convention 102 were put into effect.
I should also like to respond to the interesting comment by John Bellamy Foster, whose work I greatly respect, particularly in connection with the Lauderdale Paradox, which is useful for understanding the role of the commons and why it is so important for the precariat. As he recognized, I have addressed the Marxian typology in detail elsewhere. Marx made contradictory statements on the distinction between labor and labor power, and the distinction between labor (which has exchange value) and work (which has use value), which Engels addressed in a famous footnote in Capital.
But contrary to what Foster suggests, Marx’s notion of “the stagnant population” does not correspond to what most social scientists call the “informal sector” and neither are “similar to Standing’s concept of the precariat.” In my writing and in the ILO, where the informal sector notion was defended most strongly, I have always rejected the notion of the informal sector. It mixes up petty production, a labor reserve, and a lumpen “stagnant” population, allowing some observers to depict it as the focus for development, others as a reflection of developmental failure. The precariat does not correspond to any of that. It is the core “active” desired feature of global capitalism, providing “flexible” labor. But for critics of existing capitalism, the beauty of it is that it is a dangerous class, and it is this which is overlooked by leftish critics who mistake the meaning by focusing only on the downside. It is dangerous precisely because it is not the proletariat and not a “proto-proletariat” or a lumpen category.
Critics presume I am writing about “precarious labor,” a term I have come to detest, and that the precariat is just a bunch of victims, wallowing in insecurity. But I tried to convey the dialectical character in the two books on the precariat—in the first contrasting “groaners” and “grinners,” and in the second stressing why the growing part is emancipatory. The proletariat and their laborist representatives want *decent labor*. But the beauty of the precariat is that its growing part does not suffer from the false consciousness that decent labor is the answer to a sensible existential question. Its progressive part wants liberation from labor. This is why it is so important to differentiate between work from labor and leisure from recreation, a theme on which the books concentrate.
This is why I found Foster’s comment on William Morris disappointing. Morris has been a major influence on my thinking, along with Hannah Arendt. What Morris railed against was the drabness of labor and the stultifying quality of what Arendt was to call the jobholder society. The radical message of News from Nowhere was that when the peaceful revolution came in 1956, the first thing that happened was that everybody was provided with a basic income, helping to resurrect the values of work that he did so much to promote along the Thames.
I will end this response by pleading for a new conceptual vocabulary. Too many critics of the precariat and the proposed class typology seem determined to stick with nineteenth-century words and notions. Millions of people with secondary and tertiary schooling are surely puzzled or alienated by being told they are in “the working class.” And to be told there is a united working class, or that it soon could exist, strikes many as risible.
Guy Standing
************************************************************
Friday, August 31, 2018
From Paul Raskin <[email protected]> ________________________________________ Dear GTN,
In 2018, our discussions have been focusing on key oppositional streams for building a systemic global movement: vivir bien, human rights, feminism, peace, and much more to come.* Now, the spotlight turns to the working class, a change agent long central to social and economic justice struggles. After all, the industrial proletariat, pushed to the wall by the capitalist system, spawned a mighty movement able to win vital shop-floor concessions and social welfare protections. However, the very success of such reforms, along with harsh neoliberal counterblows and massive economic changes, has muted the militancy and solidarity of the labor movement in recent decades.
Is it time, then, to bid farewell to the working class as a driver of transformation? Not so fast, argues Guy Standing in his new GTI essay, “The Precariat: Today’s Transformative Class?” While rejecting anachronistic proletarian dreams, Guy examines the shifting class structure of contemporary global capitalism, and finds new bases for hope. Specifically, he believes the “precariat”—the growing army of workers leading precarious lives of insecure jobs and unpredictable futures—could crystallize into a new mass class for spearheading system change.
True, some segments of the “precariat” (the word is a portmanteau of “precarious” and “proletariat”) may serve as fodder for reactionary politics, but others can lead the progressive challenge to the neoliberal order. Whatever you conclude about Guy’s controversial thesis, his essay is sure to stimulate thinking and challenge preconceptions. Please read it at www.greattransition.org/publication/precariat-transformative-class, and let the discussion begin!
Comments are welcome through Sunday, SEPTEMBER 30.
Over to you, Paul GTI Director
* You may recall that this series kicked off at the end of 2017 with my framing paper, “How Do We Get There? The Problem of Action” ( www.greattransition.org/publication/how-do-we-get-there). The full GTN discussion of that paper is archived at www.greattransition.org/forum/gti-discussions/201-how-do-we-get-there-the-problem-of-action .
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