This paper situates Guy Standing’s recent work on ‘the precariat’ within a broader body of literature exploring processes of ‘precarisation’, at work and across the social field. It sets out the differential distribution of ‘precarity’ (including on the basis of gender, geography, status and sector) resulting from transformations in labour and the political economy, the rollback of social democracy and of ‘industrial citizenship’ (where these existed), as well as from processes of globalisation. The paper argues that, like many other works, Standing’s book, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, de-couples its discussion of precarious, neoliberal labour and life from the explicitly utopian agenda of radical reform it ultimately proposes. Drawing on Kathi Weeks’ engagement with Ernst Bloch’s work, the paper suggest Standing’s utopianism remains abstract, detached from an analysis of the social forces, movements and struggles that might bring it into being. It makes use of Antonio Negri’s distinctive, heterodox interpretation of V.I. Lenin to provide a framework for theorising how concrete utopian projects of radical political transformation – which is to say, ‘realist’ or materialist ones – are extrapolated out of spontaneous struggles; the predominant ‘will’, ethics and structures of which are always largely determined by the social, political and economic context from which they emerge. It is shown how, on the basis of this approach, Negri (in his collaboration with Michael Hardt) has constructed the notion of ‘multitude’ as a potential model for political organisation today – apposite to the precarious reality described by Standing and others. They draw on Baruch Spinoza’s political philosophy – often counterposing it to that of Thomas Hobbes – to affirm the capacity for common political action and decision despite heterogeneity, and to ground political organisation in social conflict rather than contract. Finally, drawing on Alain Badiou’s distinction between ‘immediate’ and ‘historical uprisings’, the paper explores the degree to which a number of contemporary movements and struggles might have tentatively achieved what he calls ‘qualitative extension’ – establishing connections and a ground for common action across social spaces and strata – potentially setting in motion enduring projects of political organisation and constitution that resemble the multitude model.
Shortly after the riots that swept across England following the Metropolitan Police’s shooting of Mark Duggan in August 2011, the British Guardian newspaper and researchers based at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) launched what continues to be the most significant empirically grounded effort to understand what had happened, how, and why. Over three months, sixty journalists and researchers interviewed hundreds of those who had participated in the riots; they collected and analyzed more than 1.3 million words of first-hand testimonies. Paul Lewis, the Guardian’s special projects editor, led the Reading the Riots project, along with Tim Newburn of the LSE. Lewis is interviewed here about their key findings and what they might reveal.
Antonio Negri (b. 1933) is an Italian political philosopher best known today for the Empire, Multitude , and Commonwealth trilogy, authored with the American literary theorist and philosopher Michael Hardt (b. 1960). Negri was born in Padua, northern Italy. At the age of 25, he completed his doctoral dissertation on German historicism in the field of “state doctrine” or “state theory” broadly speaking, the philosophy of law at the University of Padua where he became a professor shortly after.
In many liberal polities, there is an emerging “common sense” that it is unjust to deny same-sex couples the right to marry, if they so choose. This popular conception of things could certainly claim support in the liberal political philosophy of John Rawls and others. Yet, as many queer critics have noted, the rights won through “marriage equality” are also caught up with significant dangers and difficulties, including the displacement of what, drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière, I call a queer politics of “dissensus” by a new “homonormative” consensus. In itself, however, a straightforward rejection of same-sex marriage, along with the norms and normativities it doubtless helps reproduce, would do little to contest the operations of power that animate them, as even marriage's most trenchant queer critics recognize. I argue that the recent rapid rise in support for same-sex couples' access to the rights marriage confers partly derives from the precariousness experienced in these times of political economic crisis, which follow the widespread elimination of less privatized forms of security by decades of neoliberalism. As such, a queer politics of dissensus today would need to entail processes of “de-individualization” and the production of new collective political subjects capable of demanding rights shareable in ways that create space for queer forms of life, including those illegible to the institution of marriage.
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