[AUT] Precarias a la Deriva - Precarious Lexicon

[Nate Holdren <nateholdren@xxxxxxxxx>]

hello all,
Below is an English translation of something written by Precarias a la
Deriva. More by the group (including 3 texts in English and a lot of
great material in Spanish) can be found at
http://www.sindominio.net/karakola/precarias.htm
We'd love to see the text circulated further, published someplace, if
anyone has ideas on where this piece could be submitted please get in
touch. There'll be translations of a few more Precarias pieces in the
near future too.
best,
Nate

*

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@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx