Hauntings of Solidarity in Post-Fordist Italy

Abstract

Beginning in the mid-1990s and continuing through the 2000s, Italy’s population of semi-permanent or sub-employed workers doubled, while its safeguarded workforce was halved, a trend particularly salient in Northern Italy. In historical tandem with this immense socio-economic transformation, outstanding public attention, originating in the field of occupational psychology, has been focused on a form of workplace harassment called mobbing ( il mobbing ). Mobbing, I show, both as praxis and site of public discourse, articulates the inchoate threats and ravages of intra- and inter-class solidarities which have become the affective trademarks of post-Fordism. It is but one example of everyday labor practices which signal a far deeper proximity between the detached and atomized workers of a market-oriented labor regime and the Fordist ideals of material stability, valorized toil, and, crucially, affective ties. Italy’s working populations confront Fordist ruins not only as intangible and nostalgic remnants but as a labor force deprived of solidarity between workers even though workers’ affective investment in their labor has intensified. I interrogate how the eerie presence of capitalism’s affective past is reincarnated in mobbing discourse, redeployed to signal at once the solidarity-stripping capacity of post-Fordism and the affinity-affirming spirit of Fordism.

Asylum‐Seeking Work, Precariousness, and the Making of Claimant‐Workers

“…While the notion of the precarious worker often refers to the “living labor” (Lazzarato , 2) and the materialization of subjectivity that is produced in the context of precariousness (Allison ; Muehlebach ; Muehlebach and Shoshan, ; Millar ; Stewart ; White ), practices that enable resistance against the contradictory formation of worker subjectivities (Millar ; Mole ) are also central to accounts of asylum‐seeking. People's participation in precarious labor, while not directly related to asylum‐seeking is, however, sustained by the demands of the intangible labor and the indefinite time invested into the process.…”

“…People's participation in precarious labor, while not directly related to asylum‐seeking is, however, sustained by the demands of the intangible labor and the indefinite time invested into the process. Asylum‐seeking, in this sense, produces new life forms, where inhabiting transitory moments, anticipating subjective transformations, and the “feeling [of being] ontologically divided” (Mole , 43) become normalized in managing and mobilizing one's permanently precarious situation.…”

“…Comaroff and Comaroff () have called this “millennial capitalism,” in which the “legacy of irregular piecework, of menial ‘workfare,’ or relatively insecure, transient, gainless occupation” marks the beginning of the shared condition of socioeconomic uncertainty (5). On the other hand, the production of attachments and forms of longings are neither experienced everywhere the same way (Allison ; Mole ; White ) nor understood exclusively through the lens of Fordist stability and employment promises (Millar ). Rather, these ethnographies ground precarity as arising from a highly specific, flexible, future‐oriented labor participation, and paradoxical subject‐positions.…”

“…The narrative switch is so smooth and seamless that it is often the distinction between the two that seems forced and unnatural. The case, on a basic level, directs our attention to the type of “interpretive framework for one's interiority” (Mole , 43), whereby people cultivate and inhabit particular orientations, practices, and subjectivities in anticipation of precariousness as they negotiate between becoming a precarious migrant‐worker and claimant‐subject, simultaneously.…”

On Precariousness and the Ethical Imagination: The Year 2012 in Sociocultural Anthropology

“…Clifford's sense of having been robbed of this futurity is one iteration of the many insecurities (and responses to them) that anthropologists documented in 2012: among Slovenian activists who move from within their “experiences of precarity, unemployment, and even poverty” toward direct democracy (Razsa and Kurnik ); among marginal workers living accident‐prone lives in Bangkok's “wild” (informal) economy (A. A. Johnson ); in the 2011 Wisconsin union strikes, read as reactions against “accumulation by dispossession” (Collins ); in Egyptians’ postrevolutionary oscillation between moral resilience and an existential frailty triggered by malnutrition, environmental toxins, and a broken healthcare system (Hamdy ); among Japan's “net‐café refugees,” fraught with a “psychic sense of unease, uncertainty, and a darkness about the present in a state of not becoming a future” (Allison :346); in Italy's precarious workplaces, where the melancholic ghosts of Fordist material stability, valorized toil, and labor force solidarity still linger (Molé ); in ruminations about the “emergent form of precarity” of the U.S. road system, four million miles of which signify many things, including the “detritus of collective dreaming” (Stewart :522); in the South African countryside, where the volatility of life expresses itself through yearnings for a loving, powerful state (White ); or in a “phenomenology of precariousness” as witnessed in a family's daily struggles in postinvasion Iraq, when a loved one is kidnapped, held for ransom, and then released, tortured and broken (Al‐Mohammad ).…”