Abstract
The growth of precarious and polarized work during the past several decades is becoming an increasingly urgent issue in many countries. The anxiety, anger, anomie and alienation produced by the spread of uncertainty, insecurity and inequality are reflected in the social movements occurring on Wall Street and in cities throughout the USA, los indignados in Spain and the annual EuroMayDay demonstrations, among many others. In this timely book, Guy Standing describes the victims of these events as the ‘precariat’, a term combining ‘precarious’ and ‘proletariat’ that encompasses temporary workers, casual workers and the working poor. He argues that the rise of the precariat is the result of the neoliberal and globalization revolutions that swept the world in the past three decades, enhancing global competition, weakening the power of labour and creating greater needs for states and companies to become more flexible and to remove social protections.
The precariat are ‘denizens’ who do not have key citizenship rights and ‘lack the seven forms of labor-related security … that social democrats, labor parties and trade unions pursued as their “industrial citizenship” agenda after the Second World War, for the working class or industrial proletariat’ (pp. 10–11). These seven are: job, employment, labour market, representation, income, skill reproduction security and a secure work-based identity that enables people to construct career narratives. Standing estimates that at least a quarter of the population in many countries lack these basic forms of security, though he recognizes that precise figures on their number and composition are generally unavailable. While virtually all persons are potentially members of the precariat, those most likely to belong to this group are the young, women, the less educated, the old and migrants (who are a major reason for the growth of the precariat and its main victims).
Standing argues that the precariat has many of the elements of a ‘class-in-the-making’, but has not yet developed the characteristics of a ‘class-for-itself’ that has the potential to engage in collective action. The precariat is internally fragmented, consisting of both ‘grinners’ (who voluntarily choose temporary or part-time work) and ‘groaners’ (who have no alternative but to take precarious jobs). Despite their internal divisions, they are united in their experiences of anger (due to blocked aspirations), anomie (a passivity due to despair about not finding meaningful work), anxiety (due to chronic insecurity) and alienation (due to lack of purpose and social disapproval). As such, they constitute a ‘new dangerous class’ for politics and social instability that is susceptible to being mobilized by extremist political groups and neo-fascist messages.
A basic and obvious question is whether the precariat is really a class, or if its internal divisions are sufficiently great to impede collective action in pursuit of mutual interests. Some members are young and highly educated, while others have relatively little education and lack the skills needed to compete in the new global economy. Moreover, the well educated youth in the vanguard of many precarious protest movements are likely to come to blame others within the precariat – such as immigrants, criminals and other defenseless groups – for the difficulties that they experience in the labour market. Nevertheless, Standing makes a compelling case that while the members of the precariat may have differential relationships to the means of production, they still have many vital interests in common and thus it is strategically useful to think of them as constituting a class.
Standing argues for a ‘politics of paradise’ to address the concerns of the precariat. This political agenda includes first and foremost the provision of economic security and representation security, the two ‘meta-securities’ that are needed to realize one’s rights in a flexible, open economic system. He also outlines the need for a reconstruction of the concept of work that goes beyond the notion of labour (or market-based work). Quoting (ironically) the free-market advocate Milton Friedman, Standing maintains that it is important to keep these progressive but currently utopian ideas alive until they become politically feasible.
The key challenge, of course, is how to translate these progressive principles into collective actions, so as to provide the precariat with a political program that might create the agency it needs to become a ‘class-for-itself’. Standing does not explain in detail how the changes that he proposes are likely to come about and he leaves largely unspecified the kinds of strategies and tactics that might be capable of overcoming the obstacles to achieving the politics of paradise. Still, he offers the optimistic views that the progressive policies he espouses are both possible and increasingly necessary and that we are getting closer to addressing the problems of the precariat due to the recent energy being displayed by current social movements around the world. Whether the politics of paradise triumph over the politics of the inferno remains to be seen, but this book provides a vision of a way forward.