Marginalised lives, central topics

Cambio. Rivista sulle trasformazioni sociali, 2015

In their multiple attempts to understand the decline of the working class a number of sociologists have questioned changes in intergenerational relationships, analyzing transformations happened not only within the factory, but also outside it (in school, job market, family relations, labor activism). Inspired by this approach, particularly developed in French sociology, I conducted an ethnographic research among a group of workers employed at a automotive factory in Italy. This paper argues that, if transformations in the contexts of socialization have produced a generational gap within the working class, a conflict between “older” and “younger” workers is activated, in the context of the factory, by specific management policies. Nevertheless, the generational frame represents less a deterministic structure than a “constraining environment” that offers room for a partial composition of the generational conflict and an appropriation of the old working class culture by new generations.

Routledge, 2016

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Indian city of Jamshedpur, this chapter interrogates the political subjectivities that distinguish different types of insecurely employed people. For recently precarious labourforces in the automotive sector, an historical experience of labour struggle and employment security allows for faith in the possibility of social improvement. By contrast, workers in the city’s scrap metal yards lack such historical reference points, and tend to doubt the efficacy of labour unions and the capacity for positive change. Drawing upon anthropological analyses of hope, this chapter critiques the concept of a homogenous class of global precariats, and describes how the daily life of labour politics is structured by popular understandings of historical process.

Rethinking Marxism, 2014

The term precarity has been circulating Europe since the late 1980s and is currently used by social movements to contentiously challenge classical notions of production, reproduction, and citizenship. This paper follows the development of the term among several activist networks in Europe (mainly in Spain) through their engagements with crises of the welfare state, new contractual and working arrangements, migrant labor and mobility, and gender. These social movements' specific conceptual production confronts increasing fragmentation and complexity around the workspace, rearticulating a series of identities, imaginaries, and militant practices in an open-ended process of resignification. This paper shows how precarity evolves as a political toolbox stretching beyond the workplace and national borders, enabling a Deleuzian politics of unfixed alliances.

Theory Culture & Society, 2008

This article introduces a special section concerned with precariousness and cultural work. Its aim is to bring into dialogue three bodies of ideas -the work of the autonomous Marxist 'Italian laboratory'; activist writings about precariousness and precarity; and the emerging empirical scholarship concerned with the distinctive features of cultural work, at a moment when artists, designers and (new) media workers have taken centre stage as a supposed 'creative class' of model entrepreneurs. The article is divided into three sections. It starts by introducing the ideas of the autonomous Marxist tradition, highlighting arguments about the autonomy of labour, informational capitalism and the 'factory without walls', as well as key concepts such as multitude and immaterial labour. The impact of these ideas and of Operaismo politics more generally on the precarity movement is then considered in the second section, discussing some of the issues that have animated debate both within and outside this movement, which has often treated cultural workers as exemplifying the experiences of a new 'precariat'. In the third and final section we turn to the empirical literature about cultural work, pointing to its main features before bringing it into debate with the ideas already discussed. Several points of overlap and critique are elaborated -focusing in particular on issues of affect, temporality, subjectivity and solidarity. Downloaded from T RANSFORMATIONS IN advanced capitalism under the impact of globalization, information and communication technologies, and changing modes of political and economic governance have produced an apparently novel situation in which increasing numbers of workers in affluent societies are engaged in insecure, casualized or irregular labour. While capitalist labour has always been characterized by intermittency for lower-paid and lower-skilled workers, the recent departure is the addition of well-paid and high-status workers into this group of 'precarious workers'. The last decades have seen a variety of attempts to make sense of the broad changes in contemporary capitalism that have given rise to this -through discussions of shifts relating to post-Fordism, post-industrialization, network society, liquid modernity, information society, 'new economy', 'new capitalism' and risk society

Anthropology Book Forum, 2020

In this remarcable volume edited by Susana Narotzky and Victoria Goddard, the authors analyse the places, networks, strategies and the possibilities and impossibilities for reproduction of the working class in places and times where people, families and networks have experienced some form of disruption or loss. Post-socialism; post-industrial, knowledge-based economies and the restructurings of a globalised market capitalism are some of the contexts causing disruption and experiences of loss. Flexibility is the new buzz-word that alienates people from networks, places and pasts.

2018

Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism: the title of our volume requires explanation. It is not our intention to imply that the multinational mega-corporations that employ some of the workforces it describes are peripheral. By "margins, " we aim to conjure settings geographically removed from the historical epicenter of industrial capitalism. Rather than Western Europe and North America, our case studies come from Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Five are from the postsocialist world; that is, they deal with contexts where the whole basis of the social order has profoundly changed within the last generation. Many of the chapters deal with workforces that are divided between a core of regular company workers and a penumbra of insecure casual and temporary labor. With globalization and economic liberalization, the relative size of these two kinds of workforce has in most cases changed significantly, as have the relationships between them. The first section of this Introduction discusses this division in general terms. The second asks if the two types of workers should be seen as belonging to separate social classes. The final section addresses the issue of personhood. The neoliberal order, we are often told, instills a new kind of subjectivity, an idea of the entrepreneurial individual engaged in a constant process of self-fashioning. What does our ethnography tell us about the success of that project?

Focussing on the conceptual evolution of precarious labour over the past three decades, this essay provides a genealogy of the notion of precarity. On the eve of the fourth industrial revolution, when precarity has become the norm and fears of a jobless society have alimented a dystopian imaginary for the future, this historical reconstruction seeks to identify those elements that have shaped the material conditions of workers as well as influenced their capacity of endurance in times of growing uncertainty.

2019

The introductory essay to this collection examines the possibilities that work-based collective organisation affords for transformative politics under precarity. We begin from the premise that precarity is experienced in different ways in the Global North and South, among stable workers and in ‘informal’ work. Recent scholarship has explored the relationship between precariousness in life and labour, but has paid less attention to labour relations. Contrary to some dominant theories of ‘the precariat’, we suggest that precarious workers are not always anomic and lacking in work-based political identity, but nor are they straightforwardly a ‘class in the making’. The papers in this volume show that there are multiple ways that people organise collectively to challenge and improve their conditions of work, from traditional trade unions, cooperatives, and union-like associations. All have different ramifications for politics and understandings of class composition, and of how informal and precarious economies are likely to develop in the future.