[P2P-F] Fwd: [Networkedlabour] Social (network) unionism by Tiziana Terranova

[Michel Bauwens]

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From: Orsan <orsan1234 at gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Oct 18, 2014 at 5:57 AM
Subject: [Networkedlabour] Social (network) unionism by Tiziana Terranova
To: "<networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org>" <
networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org>


*Social unionism and digital labor in the transnational space of European
austerity*

Over the past few years, European social movements have struggled to find
new ways of cooperating and connecting in order to oppose the
verticalization of European governance. Following the crash of 2008, in
fact, a regime of austerity, that is severe cuts to public spending, has
gone together with a remodulation of modes of welfare and work inspired by
the German model. This model has seen the massive introduction of
part-time, badly paid jobs (the so called *mini-jobs* ) which are part of a
system of workfare where the state makes sure that everybody is forced to
accept whatever job available through a new capillary control of
recipients’ lives. While the European Central Bank like the Federal Reserve
has deployed quantitative easing, and inundated the financial system with
money, none of this has effectively gone into the creation of new jobs,
into expanding credit to consumers and business or to essential public
services. The process of complete precarization of labor and increasing
accumulation of wealth is thus unfolding along the lines of a geographical
and ethnic division of labor which sees the European Union divided between
centre and periphery, North and South, East and West with war pressing in
on its Eastern and Southern borders.

The verticalization of European governance has thus reinforced a whole
series of trends: ‘the attack on waged labor, the compression of union
rights, the dequalification and privatisation of learning and research, the
enclosure of common goods, a new government of labor mobility and the
exploitation of migrant labor’ (http://www.autistici.org/strikemeeting/).
These considerations are central to the formation of a transnational space
of action for social movements aiming to reverse the tide of complete
neoliberalization of Europe and opening onto the global level as the only
adequate dimension of struggle.

At the core of the summer school of the Euronomade free university network
which took place in Passignano sul Trasimeno, Italy in September 2014 was
the relation between this crucial importance of the geopolitical dimension
in the unfolding of financial command over the productive cycle and new
forms of unionism. The traditional trade unions have in fact proven
themselves completely unable to answer new demands emerging out of a
dispersed and individualized workforce which is no longer primarily
assembled in factories (or only in the most transient form with high
turnover of workers) but, as Stefano Harney has argued, through the
expansion of the assembly-line by means of a generalized logistical
infrastucture through the whole of society and across all geographical
borders. It is in this context that what was once called peer production
has become effectively integrated in the *keizen *line of logistics:
synaptic labor performed under the mode of forced continous improvement
spurred by performance metrics and analytics. (Harney 2014)

In a document authored by the Pisa-based Italian collective exploit
directed at the usual technology hype of the Internet Festival 2014, the
appeal of the mythology of the digital entrepreneurs has also been shown to
be fading (eXploit 2014). While the latter continue to espouse the image of
the Internet as a revolution induced by free market capitalism able to
welcome new ideas and reward them with wealth while promoting social
progress, it has in fact produced new monopolies and the progressive
deterioriation of working and living conditions for the many. This is
evident at all three levels of exploitation enacted by the digital economy
as summarized by exploit: the material infrastructure of digital devices
which is increasingly under the control of large multinational corporations
mining minerals in Africa and able to outsource production where labor is
less paid and protected; the immaterial level of software production, web
services and crowdsourcing where labor is once again ever more precarious,
underpaid and fragmented; and the large market in metadata which extracts
value out of the most mundane acts of digital communication. This scenario
postulates a ‘extractivist’ model of accumulation where the inorganic,
organic and the social strata are put to work, that is commanded and forced
to yield surplus value, expressing new challenges and demanding new
strategies. As the eXploit collective put it, the collective ‘rewriting of
the operating system’ of the digital economy and the ‘breakdown of the
rules of the market’ appear as primary condition to reconquer that share of
wealth produced by social cooperation but appropriated and controlled by
the few.

The main challenge of organizing a labor force which unfolds throughout
society and according to intermittent times lies in the strong
individualisation of cognitive labor: ‘cognitive labor is labor without
factories, as fixed place of exploitation and class recomposition which
makes more difficult the formation of a class consciousness among cognitive
workers. For the same reason’ because of the temporal fusion between time
of work and time of life, the old forms of blocking production are
obsolete, if not impossible: the time of work is diffuse, not demarcated,
and there is no factory as site of direct action’. This is the space of
production that traditional trade unions are unable to organize as they
have proceeded to become co-managers of the crisis and of the productive
process within the boundaries of individual firms (as again in the German
model). It is not by chance, maybe, that the only succesful union struggles
that have managed to achieve their goals have been those carried out by
workers operating in the crucial sector of logistics. IKEA, Amazon and the
Italian coop system have been hit by a wave of strikes organized by
logistical workers who have been able to deploy the solidarity which
emerges out of working physically together in the same space everyday with
a succesful reconstruction of the topology of the whole network of
valorization. Maybe being aware of being part of the speculative logistical
assembly-line of continuous performance improvement is an advantage in this
configuration. Research discussed at the summer school about the strike of
Amazon logistical workers in Germany have pointed out the importance of the
‘existential’ dimension in triggering participation: the feeling of being a
cog in the machine, of not having an input in the process constituted one
of the factors which distinguished workers who joined the strike from those
who didn’t.

As an answer to these challenges, Alberto De Nicola and Biagio Quadrocchi,
have proposed to redeploy the tradition of ‘social unionism’ as a way to
‘connect the different experiences of struggle which, within and outside
organized unions, oppose the blockage of social conlifct and the pacifying
role of traditional forms of union’ (De Nicola and Quattrocchi 2014). The
effort goes into thinking of a common name able to account for the
‘proliferation of dispositifs of struggle’ which are reconfiguring the form
of the union pointing to the invention of a new ‘form of unionism’. As in
the tradition of social unionism, the urgency is how to reconnect various
experiences of struggles which have sedimented over the: the experiences of
occupation of social spaces and houses, conflicts around a democratic
reappropriation of welfare and the diffusion of new mutualisms and forms of
organization of autonomous and precarious labor, demand a better
connection. The use of the term ‘social unionism’ applied to practices
which do not recognize themselves as such is meant to produce a new
perspective able to connect these experiences. De Nicola and Quattrocchi
deploy the term ‘social’ in social unionism as a means to indicate the
level of connection breaking through the dispositifs of ‘confinement’ which
have kept these experiences as separate instances.

The concept of ‘social unionism’ has been rediscovered in militant milieus
at the same time as its first practical implementation was deviced and
launched: the ‘social strike’ called for by a network of activists who met
for three days in Rome in September 2014 (Italians, but also French, Greek,
German, Spain and Portugal) which is going to unfold through a series of
events in view of the first official date of November the 15th 2014 (Strike
Meeting 2014). The platform of the strike composes all the instances
emerging out of the world of ‘work and education, of not-work and social
cooperation’. The platform is crucially centered on the demands for a ‘new
welfare’ or ‘welfare of the common’: the right to housing, an income
unlinked from waged work, a European minimum wage, free access to
education, rejection of the subjection of the school and university system
to the logic of the enterprise’. The notion of a*commonfare* which would
not only guarantee a minimum income, but also able to refound the old
institution of welfare around a process of co-production where services are
no longer delivered but co-produced is crucial in the domains of health and
education provision, but also housing, management of natural resources, and
insurance. The social strike proposes to be a permanent experiment of
invention and diffusion of forms of strikes that can be practiced also by
those who cannot strike according to the traditional model: the unemployed,
the precarious, the domestic worker, the crowdworker, the migrant without
official documents. It thus aims to redeploy, reconnect and invent all
forms of strike: ‘the general strike of waged labor, the strategies of
blockages and occupation experimented by precarious workers and urban
dwellers, the strike of those who cannot strike, netstrikes, strikes within
the spaces of education, the gender strike A kaleidoscope of practices to
patiently construct through a series of territorial strike labs’ (Strike
Meeting 2014)

The social strike launched in September crucially includes the ‘digital
strike’ as one of its components. The importance of social networks in
organizing, connecting and amplifying various struggles is undeniable, but
with the years we have witnessed a growing awareness of the ways in which
the social Internet has been reconfigured to become a space which operates
according to a logic of security, working often in tandem with mainstream
media to marginalize activists. During the BlockBCE event - which was also
included in the series of events composing the social strike as permanent
mobilization and which saw a rally of activists contesting the meeting of
the European Central Bank in Naples, Italy - mainstream media and Facebook
for example worked together to marginalize and contain the risk of
contagion. This was not an intentional effect, wanted by and aimed for, as
much as the result of a kind of automatic logic of security as it permeates
both public discourse and communication technologies. The production of
‘toxic narratives’ and ‘order words’ by the media, the construction of
activists as violent extremists, the action of police on the ground who
pressured citizens and shopkeepers to close and keep indoors for the
duration of the rally, are the first side of the double pincer attempting
to block the generalization of the social strike, containing it as a kind
of contagion. The second side of the pincer is the algorithmic calculation
that reinforces and modulates the tendency of social networks to decompose
into sub-networks, where most acts of communication fail to expand beyond a
close numbers of related contacts and the diffuse sense of surveillance
which as even corporate-funded research acknowledges produces a kind of new
conformism on the Internet, a fear of ending up in the wrong database
(Crawford 2014) . If the rally in Naples against the European Central Bank
managed to break the siege that wanted activists to march alone in an empty
city to perform a ritualized clash able to provide suitable images for the
media by changing route and marching through the city, collecting
solidarity and encouragement on the way, other strategies need to be
deviced to break the circle that confines the social strike event within
social network platforms.

The social strike launched in Rome in September has started experimenting
with some strategies to break this process of marginalization on the
Internet: the design of standardized but customizable images to be used as
profile pics on social networks was one such level; the second was the
twitter campaign launched on the 10th of october during the strike of
students and of the school sector which pushed the hashtag #socialstrike to
the rank of second highest trending topic. In the future, as part of the
permanent laboratorial character of the social strike, new tactics could be
experimented and redeployed: Anonymous-style Denial of Service Attacks, but
also experimentation with hyper-popular forms of social network culture
such as personality tests, games, viral links factories etc. The digital
strike can thus become a new form of strike able to work synergetically
with a long-term process of expansion and remodulation of strike tactics in
a social unionism framework. The logic of social unionism, linking
territorial labs and digital networks, posing together the establishment of
long-term sites of elaboration of tactics and strategies, physical and
digital action, carries the struggle of labor on that field of
indistinction where work and life, digital and physical merge.

References

Crawford, Kate (2014) “The Anxiety of Big Data.” *The New Inquiry*, 2014.
http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-anxieties-of-b…
<http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-anxieties-of-big-data/>

De Nicola, Alberto and Biagio Quattrocchi (2014) ‘La torsione neoliberale
del sindacato tradizionale e l’immaginazione del ‘sindacalismo sociale’:
appunti per una discussione’. In*Euronomade *
http://www.euronomade.info/?p=2482

eXploit (2014) ‘Riappropriarsi della rete per una riscrittura collettiva
del presente’
http://exploitpisa.org/riappropriarsi-della-rete-per-una-riscrittura-collettiva-del-presente/

Harney, Stefano (2014)’Istituzioni algoritmiche e capitalism logistico’ in
M. Pasquinelli ed. *Gli algoritmi del capitale. Accelerazionismo, macchine
della conoscenza e autonomia del comune. *Verona: Ombre Corte.

Strike Meeting (2014) ‘Batte il tempo dello sciopero sociale’
http://www.autistici.org/strikemeeting/

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