The Precariat

Front matter

The New Dangerous Class

Guy Standing

The new dangerous class

Contents

Preface to the revised edition vi Preface to the first edition x List of abbreviations xii

Migrants: Victims, villains or heroes? 153 Labour, work and the time squeeze 197

N A a A QOQ N

Preface To The Revised Edition

In August 2011, sparked by the killing of a young man by police, fires lit up the London skyline. Riots spread from Tottenham, in the city’s north-east, to suburbs and cities around England, shocking, perplexing and enraging politicians and affluent folk watching the events on television.

What linked the riots to the event in Hamburg described in Chapter 1 of this book, of life imitating art? What linked them with the EuroMayDay parades that had taken place in 25 European cities and Tokyo, involving hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, unreported by the mainstream media? What linked them to the demonstrations that swept the city squares of the Middle East in 2011, precipitated by the self-immolation of a young Tunisian graduate, reduced to selling goods off a barrow? And to the shop burning and demonstrations in Athens’ Constitution Square, coupled with the den plirono (‘refuse to pay’) movement across Greece? And to the Occupy Movement, the seething anger of the indignados in Spain and Portugal, the tentifada actions of 250,000 people in Tel Aviv later that year, to the student riots and fires in Santiago, the four nights of riots around Stockholm in 2012, the surge of protest by what the Turkish Prime Minister called çapulcu (‘riff-raff’) in Istanbul in June 2013, and to the huge protests across Brazil shortly afterwards?

PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION vii

Although some will say they all had separate causes and characteristics, which they did, they were all, partially, the stirrings of the precariat - the phase of primitive rebels, when protests and reactions are by people who know more about what they are against than what they are for. That will change. The first stage of any new social movement is the emergence of a sense of common identity. The energies unleashed in the city squares, streets, internet cafes and other public spaces have generated an identity that is becoming a social force.

As a result of the collective outpourings of 2011, we may surmise that more in the precariat, when they look in a mirror in the morning, do not see a failure or a shirker, but someone who shares a common predicament with many others. This is a necessary change from isolation, self-pity or self-loathing to collective strength, knowing that the economic institutions want a large precariat.

Those in it have lives dominated by insecurity, uncertainty, debt and humiliation. They are becoming denizens rather than citizens, losing cultural, civil, social, political and economic rights built up over generations. The precariat is also the first class in history expected to endure labour and work at a lower level than the schooling it typically acquires. In an ever more unequal society, its relative deprivation is severe.

Pain and anomie will grow. There will be more ‘days of rage’ But it is not enough to be angry. While some are listening to ugly populist, simplistic voices, others are rediscovering their humanity and desire for society. Across the world, there is an energy building around the precariat. It is organizing, and struggling to define a new forward march.

Other developments since The Precariat was written have served to strengthen the argument that the precariat is emerging as a new mass class with transformative potential. These developments include the viii PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION continued pursuit of austerity in the industrialized world, which is pushing more and more people into the precariat, and an intensification of what is described in the book as ‘the politics of inferno, including the growth of commodified and populist politics and Edward Snowden’s brave revelations on the extent of the surveillance state.

A second book, A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens, published alongside this revised edition of The Precariat, attempts to take the debate forward by discussing the impact on the precariat of the austerity era and the disturbing utilitarian thinking that underpins it. A Precariat Charter goes on to set out a series of policies aimed at addressing the precariat’s insecurities and aspirations, proposed not as a manifesto but as a starting point for the construction of a new precariat agenda.

That book also responds to those critics of The Precariat who argue that nothing has changed and that the precariat is not a class. These criticisms come mainly from those wedded to a particular brand of Marxism, for whom capitalism is unchanging. But global capitalism is profoundly different from national industrial capitalism. There is a vast amount of evidence to show how labour relations and patterns of work, and systems of social protection, regulation and redistribution, have evolved in the globalization era, in the process generating a new class structure that is far from a simplistic division between capitalists and ‘workers:

In terms that Marxist critics would presumably accept, the precariat can be defined as having distinctive relations of production, distinctive relations of distribution and distinctive relations to the state, producing a distinctive class consciousness. It is a class-in-the-making because it is internally divided at present. As a ‘dangerous’

class, it must become a class-for-itself in order to abolish itself. In

PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION ix other words, it must become sufficiently united to have the political strength to pressurize the state into creating the social and economic conditions that would remove its precariousness. These are outlined in A Precariat Charter.

The precariat will also need new forms of organization to press its demands. Some on the left have felt uncomfortable with the comments made on trade unions in The Precariat; I will just say that, although I have long been a member and supporter of trade unions, that involvement has convinced me that their ethos must adapt to the twenty-first century. Unions must escape from ‘labourism, the elevation of subservient labour above the freedom to pursue occupation (Standing 2009).

Another criticism of The Precariat has been an alleged lack of data to support its principal theses. In fact, the book was founded on over two decades of empirical and conceptual research that yielded several technical books and reports as well as journal articles, some of which are cited. The Precariat was an attempt to distil this work into an approachable narrative. Ironically, many readers who are not social scientists have shown a greater understanding of the concepts - and the realities of labour and work in the early twenty-first century - than some academics and commentators steeped in old paradigms.

It remains to thank the numerous people from all over the world who have contacted me with their reactions, in many cases relating their experiences and perspectives. I have tried to respond personally to as many as possible and apologize to those to whom I have not. Their insights and ideas have fed into A Precariat Charter. As Karl Marx famously said, the point is not to interpret the world, it is to change it.

Guy Standing January 2014

Preface To The First Edition

This book is about a new group in the world, a class-in-the-making. It sets out to answer five questions: What is it? Why should we care about its growth? Why is it growing? Who is entering it? And where is the precariat taking us?

That last question is crucial. There is a danger that, unless the precariat is understood, its emergence could lead society towards a politics of inferno. This is not a prediction. It is a disturbing possibility. It will only be avoided if the precariat can become a class-for-itself, with effective agency, and a force for forging a new ‘politics of paradise, a mildly utopian agenda and strategy to be taken up by politicians and by what is euphemistically called ‘civil society; including the multitude of non-governmental organisations that too often flirt with becoming quasi-government organisations.

We need to wake up to the global precariat urgently. There is a lot of anger out there and a lot of anxiety. But although this book highlights the victim side of the precariat more than the liberating side, it is worth stating at the outset that it is wrong to see the precariat in purely suffering terms. Many drawn into it are looking for something better than what was offered in industrial society and by twentieth-century labourism. They may no more deserve the name of Hero than Victim. But they are beginning to show why the precariat can be a harbinger of the Good Society of the twenty-first century.