An Introduction to the Special Issue. Politics of Precarity: Migrant Conditions,Struggles and Experiences

From ‘Social Exclusion’ to ‘Precarity’

During the 2000s the notions of ‘precariousness’, ‘precarization’, ‘precarity’ and ‘precariat’ have gained extended importance in the social sciences. In this special issue on the ‘politics of precarity’ we ask if these concepts and their presuppositions help to span the agency of actors as diverse as students in China, pensioners and unemployed in Sweden and Spain, and irregular and regular labour migrants in Southern Europe, Turkey, Russia and South Africa. Can they stretch from wider anti-austerity movements to movements advocating migrants’ rights? By exploring the notion of precarity as a theoretical and analytical concept and its link to migration, the contributions in this issue venture beyond what is currently (for lack of a better term) still referred to as ‘the Global North’; formerly the First among the ‘Three Worlds’ of the Cold War. The articles explore relations to affinities, synergies, convergence and dissimilarities with related concepts like ‘social exclusion/inclusion’, ‘unfree labour’ ‘flexibility’, ‘austerity’ and ‘exploitation’.

The notion of ‘precarity’ (precarité) is derived from Pierre Bourdieu’s (1963) writings on colonial Algeria in the 1960s. Subsequently the concept has gained importance as a perspective in critical labour and citizenship studies in general, and in studies on migration in particular. The invention of its derivative ‘precariat’ is attributed to French activists campaigning for irregular migrants’ rights at the turn of the millennium (Jossin et al., 2005); it was adopted as a banner for alternative Euro-Mayday parades (Foti, 2005), and gained importance in youth movements across Europe (Casas-Cortés, 2014). It has been diffused broadly to signify social movements which contest the politics of austerity and it is used as a controversial neologism in the social sciences. Guy Standing (2011) has popularized the concept widely in his book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. Its wider reference is to a globally growing force of casual labour whose experience in the world of work is marked by ‘precarity’ in terms of informal labour, wage squeeze, temporariness, uncertainty and pernicious risk. It is a term designating a certain historical moment marked by the emergence of a new global norm of contingent employment, social risk and fragmented life situations which provide no security, protection or predictability. The ‘migrant’ is its quintessential incarnation.

The conceptual development of precarity can be read as a shift in perspective from a dominant mainstream concept of ‘social exclusion/inclusion’ to one of critical social studies attempting to understand inequality and social disadvantage as deeply embedded in the structuration of contemporary neoliberal globalization, as well as signifying an interpellation of counter movements challenging the foundations of its political economy and hegemonic ideological underpinnings. Whereas - proceeding mostly from an essentially functionalist (Durkheimian) paradigm (Levitas, 1998) – mainstream perspectives on ‘social exclusion/inclusion’ are derivatives from theories of ‘integration’ and ‘social cohesion’ depicting social disadvantage as a consequence of redeemable institutional shortcomings, a critical heterodox discourse depicting precarity as a ‘constitutive element of the new global disorder, to which it is very functional’ (Ricceri, 2011: 68), turns functionalism on its head. From this perspective social exclusion appears not as a systemic ‘error’ that can be fixed through social engineering or politics of moral improvement; rather it serves an essential purpose in a disjointed political economy of neoliberal globalization within which the excluded are unsafe and vulnerable – but not superfluous. Not a regrettable mistake; on the contrary, seen from this perspective, the excluded are ‘valuable’ because they are ‘vulnerable’, i.e. open to exploitation (Bauder, 2006: 26). The wider historical-structural context is the generation of a multiple million ‘surplus population’ ¹ during the past three and a half decades. It is a globally mobile reserve army of labour at the disposal of transnational corporations, sub-contractors and franchises. It is produced by austerity programs rolling back the social compacts of welfare and developmental states, and it has grown on the ruins of actually existing socialism in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and China. Through international migration it feeds private as well as public employers across the globe. Poverty, insecurity and unpredictability are consequently moved beyond the integrationist Durkheimian concern with ‘social cohesion’ in prevalent discourses on ‘social exclusion-inclusion’ into the Marxian terrain of ‘exploitation’ (Schierup et al., 2015), with the surplus population and the industrial reserve army as disciplinary vehicles for regulation and the instigation of morality (Harvey, 2010). Taken in broad terms, we may thus speak of precarity as a mode of keeping the ‘reserve army of labour in labour - thereby maximising both productive activity and placing downward pressure on wages’ (Moase, 2012). That is precarity as ‘flexploitation’ (Bourdieu, 1999).

A Political Proposition

The ‘migrant’ is the quintessential incarnation of precarity. Migrant workers are among the most disadvantaged in a globally expanding reserve army of labour. Precarization of work develops in tandem with a precarization of citizenship as the dual contingencies of the (global) restructuring of economy and labour markets alongside a fracturing of frameworks of citizenship (Goldring and Landolt, 2011). It structures precarity as a condition embodying imperatives of flexibility, multilocality and compressed mobility (Tsianos, 2007: 192). It designates the centrality of mobility in workers’ behaviour and struggles (Casas-Cortés, 2014), but furthermore what precarity activists have termed ‘the becoming-migrant of labour’ where ‘[w]orking conditions suffered by migrants … (such as informality in the contract, vulnerability, intense links between territory and employment, low salaries, lack of union rights, temporality, total availability, etc.) are spreading today to the rest of workers’ (Casas-Cortés, 2014: 217; also Martin Bak Jørgensen, this special issue). Hence interlinking migration and precarity offers a productive point of departure for investigating the interconnection of social and economic conditions and contemporary social struggles.

This reference to perspectives of the scholarly – and to some degree activist – debate also hints at problems inherent in ‘the precariat’ as a theoretical and analytical tool. Standing’s attempt to lump extremely heterogeneous groups into one analytical category has faced criticism from different angles (e.g. Breman, 2013; Seymour, 2012). Disregarding the discussion on whether the precariat constitutes a class or not – from a Marxist perspective – a problem that does arise is that the precariat in Standing’s definition is defined much more by what it is not than by what it is.

In this special issue we explore the range and strength of analysing contemporary transformations and struggles through the lens of precarity. Rather than defining a single precariat, we explore the ‘varieties of precarity’ found on a global scale. These take different shapes in different parts of the world, on different scales and in different socio-economic contexts, and yet they share certain characteristics in terms of conditions and capacity for agency. Maribel Casas-Cortés (2014: 220) quotes a Spanish EuroMayDay organizer who argues that: ‘Precarity is a political proposition more than a sociological category’. The statement implies that precarity is more related to action than to an analytical description of the current transformations. The aim is here to do both. The present selection of papers we label as the ‘Politics of Precarity’, thus providing a framework for the political economy of neoliberal capitalism which produces precarity of labour, livelihoods and citizenship, and also resistance against the systemic structuration through which it operates.

In the article ‘Precariat– what it is and isn’t – towards an understanding of what it does’, Martin Bak Jørgensen enquires into the analytical gains of working with the notion of precarity. He engages in a theoretical discussion with the literature on the precariat and distinguishes between precarity (as a condition), precariat (as an identity) and precarization (as a process). In his article he reflects on what precarity adds to political strategy and analysis. The focus of the article is therefore on precarity struggles and their potential for political and social change. Following the position taken by Hardt and Negri (2004), he regards migrants as comprising a special category within the precariat. They occupy this position because they embody the experiences of precarity and because the mobility which is the key characteristic of migration is also a response to borders and identities. Thus migrant struggles not only prefigure the struggles of the precariat (‘labour becoming migrant’), they are also characterized by an urge to resist (cf. Hardt and Negri, 2004). Migrants in this sense react against neoliberalism and can inspire other migrant and non-migrant actors and activists to do the same. Thus precarity can serve as an interpellation in struggles for rights and a just society and as a possible catalyst for transformation. In order to substantiate this claim, Jørgensen discusses two empirical cases: the collective mobilization and constitution as a group of the Lampedusa in Hamburg (LiHH) and the transnational solidarity march Freedom Not Frontex which drew participants from all over Europe to Brussels in May 2014 – followed by an Action week in Brussels in conjunction with a European Council meeting which was coordinated by European sans-papiers movements. The cases elucidate how precarization unfolds in practice and how the precariat’s position becomes a rallying point for mobilization that builds alliances across ethnic, racial and class-based divisions, takes forward a movement-based political analysis, and defines wider strategies for resistance and the claiming of rights.

Beyond ‘North’ and ‘South’

In current critical sociology ‘precarity’ and the neologism ‘precariat’ refer to deep changes in economy, citizenship and class structure in European welfare states, conventionally referred to in terms of ‘Fordism’. Scholars - taking off from there – attempt to globalize the concept (Standing, 2011). This has been met by criticism referring to historical conditions in the global ‘North’ as well as the ‘South’; speaking provisionally in the language that has become the standard in critical research and replacing discourses of the ‘Three (or four) Worlds’ or ‘Centre’, ‘Periphery’ and ‘Semi-Periphery’ in the ‘World System’. Thus, argue Brett Neilson and Ned Rositter (2008), ‘a deep political consideration of the concept of precarity requires us to see Fordism as exception’, as only a short ‘episode’ in European and Western history. Or, as phrased by Hal Foster (2011), far from being a distinctive product of the post-Fordist economy, ‘historically precarity might be more the rule and the Fordist promise of relative job security and union protection more the exception’; a condition with which proletarians, seen in a longue durée perspective on the history of capitalism, have not been gifted. Others contend that precarious labour and livelihoods were always, and continue to be, the norm for the majority of the world’s population ‘in the global South, in Eastern Europe, as well as for most women and migrants in the North’ (Network, 2006; cf. Munck, 2013) - with the South taking the lead, in terms of ‘conditions’ as well as the spearhead of ‘resistance’, with livelihoods stemming from the informal economy as key (Keyworth, 2012).

Colonial and postcolonial predicaments and present-day imperial politics continue to reproduce a critical watershed as to economy, political power, state and society in the South and the North. Yet the present conjuncture suggests an approach from a perspective of ‘incorporating comparison’ (McMichael, 1990), seeing precarization of labour, citizenship and livelihoods in the North and South as potentially comparable since they are shaped and connected by ostensibly similar forces and processes of globalization. At the same time a need is posited for a review of theories of political economy that have been critically opposing neo-classical orthodoxy. General lines for the makeover of critical theory about the global political economy of migrant labour were suggested by Alejandro Portes and John Walton (1991: 190) in Labor, Class and the International System. They argued that ‘[c]lass formation on a global level […] means that geographically dispersed labor is not only part of the same stratification system, but increasingly occupies common locations within that system apart from its residence in the core, semi-periphery or periphery’. Thus, they saw ‘core and periphery hierarchies’ as interpenetrating and ‘sharing some (increasingly) common positions and attendant fortunes’. Their proposition remains worth discussing, given the particular character of class dominance and labour force management in neoliberal globalization, and its current impact on societies in the South as well as the North. This pertains not least to critical globalization studies which tend to remain concentrated on the treatment of southern migrants, while risking obscuring the emergence of more complex patterns embodied in dehumanizing policies and exploitation in so-called ‘emerging economies’ of the South, which are at least ostensibly similar to those prevailing in the dominant economic and immigration nodes of the north (Tobias, 2012).

This is the central concern of Nazli Senses’ contribution to this issue. She focuses on the relevance of the notion of precarity and precarious labour in connection with Turkey’s transformation from a developmental state on Europe’s periphery, exporting (migrant) labour on a grand scale, into what has been designated as one of the world’s ‘ten big emerging markets’. It is driven by a neoliberal transformation, one new feature of which has been the growth of a labour force of irregular cross-border migrants as a particular category within an already huge and growing informal ‘domestic’ labour force. Yet, she contends, the irregular migrants embody the essence of precarity, exposed as they are to an exceedingly vulnerable existence distinguished from the conditions and livelihoods of a large domestic informal precariat by the lack of any formal rights, except for those enshrined in certain international human rights’ conventions. Senses argues for the need to assess with care the specific Turkish experience, both in terms of its particular political economy of precarity that cannot be restricted to the ‘South’ or the ‘North’, and the specific challenges confronting labour unions and an emerging Turkish precariat movement, for which the inclusion of irregular migrant workers appears to represent a sine qua non.

Susanne Bregnbæk’s article on university graduates in Beijing elucidates further aspects of changing livelihoods and the multiple varieties of migrant precarity in an increasingly multipolar world. It is, beyond North and South, shaped by rapidly changing regimes of accumulation, especially in China and other BRICS countries (Garnaut et al., 2013). China’s established position as ‘the world’s factory’ has been built to a large degree by a regime of primitive accumulation, exploiting low-wage hukou peasant workers. It has involved growing masses of workers from the rural areas caught up in internal circular rural-urban migration and subjected to precarious working and living conditions (Ngai and Huilin, 2010), under the cold hand of a draconian ‘bloody Taylorism’. ² They were for a long time alienated from the wider city community by a stringent pass regime. ³ China’s rural labour force has been far from depleted and the peasant-worker regime is still far from being a legacy of the past. Nevertheless, while the stringent administrative means by which urbanization was once curbed has now been relinquished, the lack of welfare provision and social services continues to deter many internal migrant workers from settling or dwelling in the cities for longer periods (Meng, 2013). China’s current great leap ahead towards a higher value, innovative and knowledge-intensive economy speeds urbanization and spawns growing categories of moneyed urbanites. But it also generates new forms of urban poverty, precarious livelihoods and a ‘race to the bottom’ involving a motley multitude of less resourced new urbanites, among them China’s so-called ‘Ant Tribe’. They are college graduates from recent rural backgrounds living in the outskirts of Beijing, who, although ostensibly similar to Western Europe’s reserve army of young educated precarians, in many ways, contends Bregnbæk, share the predicament of China’s hukou migrant workers. Their life in a vulnerable community on the edge of the megacity bears witness to a situation in which the collusion of a precarious labour market and the insecurities embodied in a cut-throat educational system extends the boundaries of belonging to a multifaceted precariat in a society undergoing spectacular political-economic and social transformation. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Beijing, Bregnbæk depicts a ‘race to the bottom’ among first generation, young urban college graduates learning to labour. They are caught between a competitive educational system, the moral burden of inflated expectations from parents and communities in the rural hinterlands from which they migrated and a cut-throat urban labour market. It is a society, contends Bregnbæk, in which ‘the idea that social mobility can be attained through higher education is often a fantasy reserved for elite families’.

In their contribution to this issue Anna Gavanas and Ines Calzades offer a further deconstruction of the global North-South dichotomy by depicting different faces of precarity along a charged north-south axis in a European Union experiencing disjointed politics of austerity, here represented by Sweden and Spain. Their analytical focus is on ‘international retirement migration’ (IRM) which has become a standard designation for the retreat to low income countries by old age pensioners from high income countries in North America and Northern Europe. They are the increasingly numerous people from the United States and Canada whom you will encounter in any tourist resort along the coasts of Mexico or across the Caribbean. In the EU, Spain takes on a similar function for old age pensioners from the dominant northern economic powerhouse of the Union - for example Germany, Sweden and Holland – as Mexico does in the NAFTA. Gavanas and Calzades present a multifaceted analytical perspective and empirical account of intersecting dimensions of precarity along this north-south regional axis, which they see as contingent on different neoliberal transformations of established welfare regimes in Sweden and Spain. Politics of austerity has, as in other parts of the EU South, contributed to an increasing precarization of labour and livelihoods in Spain, largely contained in a swelling informal economy and labour market which provides a huge reserve army of labour at the disposition of a flourishing IRM industry managed through local petty entrepreneurs and chains of subcontracting. This precarious reserve army of IRM service and care workers is in itself ethnically segmented and racialized through politics of citizenship and indigeneity, with a still numerous migrant labour force as the most vulnerable and cheapest on sale, the most exposed to unabated risk and expulsion from the institutions of a shrinking Spanish welfare state. Yet, based on a critical perspective of a parallel neoliberal transformation of the Swedish welfare state, Gavanas and Calzades reject any view that would present Swedish IRMs as uniformly privileged northerners. Many are themselves economically and socially vulnerable and seek recourse in IMR, not simply to conquer a place in the sun but through attempts to escape from the increasingly precaritized livelihoods of growing numbers of old age pensioners in a rapidly deteriorating and increasingly unequal northern welfare state.

‘Necropolitics’ or ‘Politics of Possibility’?

Neoliberal globalization spawns precarious labour and fractured frames of citizenship in North and South, West and East. Russia is no exception. Having the second highest flow of labour migrants after the United States makes it a crucial case for studying migration and precarity. In their contribution John Round and Irina Kuznetsova argue that the precarization of migrants has expanded and now characterizes an ontological position of migrants in Russian society. The fragile border between life and death is the focus of their work. ‘Necropolitics’ emphasizes ‘death’. By applying Achille Mbembe’s (2003) term to the example of migrants in Moscow, Round and Kuznetsova contend that necropolitics is not a historical exception. It does not signify Nazi death camps and treatment of prisoners but the experiences and everyday conditions of migrants living in Moscow. While this resembles the understanding of precarity as an ontological concept of existential vulnerability (e.g. Butler, 2009), Round and Kuznetsova stress how the ‘city of exception’ is created and maintained with crucial effects on the lives of many migrant workers. Migrants are forcibly kept in illegal conditions and exposed to a constant reification of vulnerability and precarity. For Mbembe and the authors, necropolitics is not just about killing but rather about who is left to die through decisions taken by the state. In the case of Russia, migrants are both visible and invisible. They are invisible through being sans papiers but visible when the state puts blame on ‘the migrant’ as the carrier of disease, as criminal, and as a racialized object of disgust. ‘Necropolitics’ is thus a framework through which the state views migrants as diseased, criminal and deviating. The result can be death but more a ‘letting die’ contingent on a hateful institutionally embedded racism, as when the authorities close their eyes to far right groups hunting down migrants and build control through securitized state-sponsored police harassment. Round and Kuznetsova present a dystopian warning, claiming that Russia may not be an exception in our current ‘age of migration’, ⁴ but at the same time appear to contend that only by revealing the actions, priorities and desires of the state in an extreme case such as Moscow can we get the tools to unravel the conditions and practices in countries and cities where the abuse of migrants may appear to be on a lesser scale.

Yet we may ask whether Russia is indeed an exception. The still-increasing death tolls in the Mediterranean bear witness that death is an integral component of most contemporary migration flows and migration regimes. Neither is ‘letting die’ an exception. Stories about migrants dying on their way to Greece and Italy make their way into the news every day. The termination of the Italian Mare Nostrum program and its replacement in early 2015 by the EU Operation Triton with much less funding led only to an increase in the number of deaths at sea. The European Union has indeed desperately endeavoured to buy absolution for its self-inflicted, so-called ‘refugee crisis’ through concentrating asylum seekers in a Turkey which itself is riven by internal warfare, but with seemingly little objection to the conditions of refugees struggling to survive in those same Turkish refugee camps. They are living examples of Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) description of ‘the bare life’ - ‘a life stripped of all rights’. Nor are xenophobic attacks a particularly Russian phenomenon. Neo-fascist hate-mongering is on the political agenda all across Europe. Refugees in the ‘Jungle’ in Calais, France, were attacked by armed far-right militia. The refugees accused the local police of failing to protect them from the beatings and of carrying out their own assaults. In Northern Finland, vigilante groups calling themselves the ‘Soldiers of Odin’ are patrolling the streets of Kemi on the watch for asylum seekers. In Stockholm, masked far right adherents made a public call for action in late January 2016 and started ‘cleansing’ the central station of migrants depicted as ‘criminal and disgusting’. In February, a masked citizens’ guard which hunts asylum seeking minors across the city centre already seems to have become part of the creeping ‘pathological normalcy’ ⁵ of a country that, not long ago, was hailed as a moral-political great power (Ålund et al., 2016). A driving force in Swedish political conjuncture today seems to be that the dominant neoliberal economic and political establishment is seeking recourse in a compromise and an alliance with a conservative neo-communitarian and proto-fascist nationalism, which – come what may – is reminiscent of the rapprochement between German corporate capital and the Nazi party before the Second World War. The same could be said for other parts of the EU. It looks like a covert stratagem for perpetuating, under changing political conditions, the hegemonic politics of ‘accumulation through dispossession’, implicating a deepening precarization of labour, livelihoods and citizenship, with migrants (including asylum seekers) as the core of a flexible hyper-exploited precariat, yet guaranteeing to the extreme radical right that migrants will never become ‘citizens’ and gain full membership of the nation (Ålund et al., 2016).

Thus there is, in the current crisis, no lack of dystopian scenarios. This may be an essential starting point for any penetrating analysis. ‘[D]ystopian thinking has both an analytical and a moral core […] On the one hand, it magnifies social trends and tendencies and, on the other, it warns of anti-social outcomes’ (Sitas, 2010: 47). ⁶ But dystopian imaginations in heavy doses may lead at the same time to a sterile and despondent realism or a sardonic cynicism. ‘Utopian thinking’ may, in contrast, wilfully ignore antithetical trends ‘to lift people over the hill to gaze at how the possible could become real’. However, while attempting ‘to preserve a logic of emancipation intact’, utopian thinking may equally magnify ‘threats to the project and disintegration of the movements that have nurtured it’ (Sitas, 2010: 47). The contribution by Round and Kuznetsova, positing necropolitics as epitomizing a globalizing political economy of precarization, consequently induces us to return to one of the central tenets of this special issue; that migrant struggles prefigure those of the precariat in general.

The other aspect of the politics of precarity is popular resistance – in a Polanyian sense a countermovement for the de-commodification and restitution of the commons. While the dystopian perspective outlined by Round and Kuznetsova leaves no place for this, the contribution by Nicos Trimikliniotis, Dimitris Parsanoglou and Vassilis Tsianos on ‘Mobile commons and/in precarious spaces’ challenges this perspective. They investigate migrant struggles and resistance in Athens, Nicosia and Istanbul. They find a reading of the world that succumbs wholly to global neoliberal elites exceedingly problematic – a world imprisoned and controlled via technologies of surveillance. It tends, they argue, to reproduce ‘paradigms of pessimism’ at the expense of a ‘politics of possibility’. Mapping migrant struggles, digitalities and social resistance, they go on to demonstrate how political subjectivity and agency emerged among migrants in the three cities. As in the other contributions to this special issue they identify precarity as being at the core of migrants’ livelihood and subjectivity. Precarity goes beyond work and working conditions to matters of health, housing, education, culture, social rights and mobility. Their field-work in three cities documents precaritized migrants’ collective mobilization through ‘mobile commons’, emerging as a frame of practice which captures the everyday life experiences of migrants: ‘common’ because it is constituted by the shared social reality and coping strategies of the migrants. Mobile commons become spaces of ‘precarity-and-resistance’ which constantly try to redefine the notion of rights through struggles for the character, use and meaning of spaces. It also alters the meaning of ‘borders’, which become mobile and flexible. The shared knowledge and struggle of migrants not only to survive in the cities but to reclaim their rights and to transform themselves become a micropolitics of the commons. While precarity can be represented as the ontological commons (cf. Butler, 2009) – that which we are born into – the mobile commons refer to everyday lives as resistance, a perspective that focuses on concrete actions for constituting political subjectivity in terms of re-claiming rights and existence at the neighbourhood-level, including those of migrants and non-migrants alike. It is a social practice through which the subaltern responds by reshaping social groups, new public spaces and new modes of citizenship.

The micropolitics of mobile commons begs the question of whether the everyday resistance embodied in survival strategies among migrants in Istanbul, Nicosia or Athens may be the harbinger of a wider transformative potential of the precariat: there, as well as elsewhere. This special issue ends with Carl-Ulrik Schierup’s enquiry into the structuration of precarity and a living-dead memory of people-power buried in South Africa’s ‘unfinished revolution’, a state of protracted crisis for the dreamland of a democratic post-apartheid ‘Rainbow Nation of God’ shattered by a Faustian neoliberal compact, a predacious extractionism and inequality, all entangled with a surreptitious politics of xeno-racism ruling through turning poor black citizens against poor migrant ‘aliens’ in poverty-stricken townships. The article departs from an exploration of the transformation of South Africa’s labour force management and its migratory system resulting from a centralized management of unfree labour by the apartheid state bureaucracy, to a post-apartheid state of precarity driven by ‘flexploitation’. In effect, ‘precarity’ comes to serve as a critical deconstruction of the global corporate language of ‘flexibility’, the underside of which is the extended contemporary reproduction of a large composite relatively surplus population (McIntyre, 2011) - overwhelmingly black and to a considerable degree migrant - whose wretched members are driven to employ inventive survivalist strategies beyond the reach of formal regulatory frameworks. There has been little help from labour unions whose leaders are trapped in the constraints and privileges of the post-apartheid hegemony.

A visionary democratic, internationalist and anti-imperialist, socially, culturally and racially inclusive ‘South African exceptionalism’ claimed in post-apartheid discourse is difficult to recognize in these circumstances. The embrace of neoliberalism has ‘stolen the South African Dream’ and turned South Africa into a dehumanizing neoliberal laboratory similar to others around the globe. South Africa may therefore be another dystopia, yet a dystopia challenged. The second part of Schierup’s article moves from analysing precarity as a sociological category to that of a political proposition carried forth by a precarious multitude daily engaged in the micro-political creativity of ‘invented spaces’ embodied in a myriad of protests against housing privatization, forced evictions and the commodification of basic needs like electricity and water. Hence while there may be no pot of gold under the end of God’s rainbow, current popular upheavals bear witness to arresting knowledge production (Choundry and Kapoor, 2010), capacities for building subaltern rainbow commons and resuscitating people power, drawing on memories from the 20th century’s long struggle against apartheid. It is a volatile precariat that can be mobilized by authoritarian politics of xeno-racism and tokenistic social policies; alternatively, however, by building its own commons from the ground up. In this latter reading the precariat turns into a ‘dangerous’ (cf. Standing, 2011) inventive ‘informalization from below’ that carries with it more than a flexible and affirmative adjustment to corporate ‘informalization from above’; it is a transmutation from being a facilitator of ‘flexploitation’ to a rebellious ‘politics of informal people’ ⁷ bearing challenges to the neoliberal hegemony. It may merge into or come to be piloted by a broader popular countermovement and by political parties reclaiming the commons on a wider scale, including by contentious factions of a fractured trade unionism that seeks its own roots in memories of a formerly community-based movement for people power offering an ideopolitical heritage ready to be mobilized under novel conditions across neo-apartheid divisions between ‘aliens’ and ‘natives’.

This perspective suggests parallels with, not least, EU-Europe and the United States in terms of a from-the-ground-up rainbow movement of ‘uncivil society’ deriving from the ‘third great transformation’ (Schierup and Ålund, 2013) ⁸ – a movement that, insofar as it forms alliances across deepening racialized divides, stands up against a crisis-driven mobilization and mainstreaming of a neo-fascist ‘pathological normalcy’ ⁹ in the present state of ‘the North’ (Ålund et al., 2016). The initial growth of popular movements from the ground up and their later institutionalization as new or reformed political parties ¹⁰ can be read as seed beds for a coming-together in struggles against politics of austerity stemming from what can be captured by the ‘precariat’ as a political interpellation (Agustín and Jørgensen, 2016). As a ‘movement of movements’ – in Gramscian terms (McNally, 2015) – it becomes the voice of the insurgent. It is an active and deliberate re-politicizing of society rearticulating deep-seated disputes and conflicts. The driver of this type of politics is the formation of alliances among a multitude of political actors coming together - beyond identity politics and beyond North and South - in social struggles that challenge an immanent democratic closure. Solidarities from below, as practices in different settings and on different levels, ensure the conformation and redefinition of political identities in defence of and for reclaiming the commons. At the same time they may produce a shared understanding of what the common is. ¹¹