[P2P-F] Fwd: The Precariat: Today's Transformative Class? (GTN Discussion)

[Michel Bauwens]

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 <gtnetwork at greattransition.org>
Date: Fri, Oct 12, 2018 at 4:52 PM
Subject: The Precariat: Today's Transformative Class? (GTN Discussion)
To: <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>



>From Guy Standing <GuyStanding at standingnet.com>

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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 <praskin at tellus.org>
________________________________________
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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