Struggling with Precarity: From ‘More Jobs’ to Post-work Politics

Abstract

The experience of precarity has become the new normal under capitalism, moving up the echelons of class and occupational background. What was once the standard employment relation for the fringes of the labour market (informal workers, migrants, racial minorities, women, artists, and the working poor) is now becoming a common experience for middle-class professionals and industrial workers of the North as well. By recounting the story of the rise and fall of Fordist post-war capitalism and the subsequent triumph of neoliberalism, as it has been reconstructed by regulation theorists and autonomist Marxists, this chapter wants to show that precarity is far from the state of exception under capitalism or a reality unique to neoliberalism. In fact, for a variety of reasons, it is the post-war full employment economic success story that stands out as an exceptional episode in the history of capitalist accumulation, difficult to reproduce in times of relative peace, informational economy, and ecological fragility. For practical and ideological reasons, this chapter argues, the Left should not stake its political hopes on solving the secular crisis of capital with another (green) New Deal. Instead, we should understand neoliberal precarity as an anti-labor attack on the very legitimate demands for less work and more autonomy and flexibility in work that students and industrial workers raised at the height of the social democratic period. It is this dream of increased worker autonomy from paid labour and the realm of necessity that should serve as inspiration for a true socialist alternative to the present crisis, which should counter the ideology of work (the obligation to work to survive and full-time full employment as litmus test of good government) with a post-work vision that reduces work, diminishes the stronghold paid work has on our livelihoods, and fundamentally reimagines the relationship between occupation, employment, and income along more dignified, socially meaningful, and ecologically sustainable lines.