Armed with a bag of weed and some time, I have locked myself into a room, reading the tiresome history of primitive accumulation. Not the actual historical of process, but the concept. Not the noblest of occupations for a militant with time… Immersed in this stuff I began wondering (prodded by Negri and a friend’s challenge) what a ‘immaterial common’, which does not make reference to the notion of public could consist in philosophically. My obsession over the last month, or more, has been non-payment and the possibility of its being seen as a common (particularly in so far as it has as its consequence, decommodified access to water). The problem is posed as follows: In what sense are potentially unrelated acts of non-payment a common. If my usage of the common does not require ‘common’ intent on the part of the (commoning) participants, is it not potentially flawed? Certainly intent is implicit in the concept. And would this not allow the researcher/Negri-head to insert his or her own undertanding as the master arbiter of the common. Perhaps the question can be asked another way. Does a value-creating network (in so far as the numerous acts of non-payment become an affective netork) require that each individual part share the same representations of the network as a whole (philosophically this seems impossible). But perhaps the objection is less a matter of concept as much as the political usage of a concept. The tradition of the last 100 years (at least) of left politics teaches us that to negate the private (to common) is to affirm the pubic (the common). As we have already noted our own common lacked an appropriate institutional notion of the public (it should be noted that in our age of postmdernism/real subsumtion the concept of the public is in decline - in fact, this is the context in which Negri reworks the concept of common) Perhaps here we need to ask a philosophical question, that is, what would a non-dialectical common look like? In our own case we have literally millions of people united by a single negation – non-payment with arguable very different reasons. Neibour doesn’t pay so that he can buy a carton of cigarettes, or neibour b says “well I can get away with so why not” or the guy across the road thinks it more important to send his daughter to a model c school and uses the money for transport costs or, or... (The way these things are mediated however would be far more complex). That is, there are whole ranges of things that are being affirmed. Consider as well that it this common act, non-payment, when it came under threat, spawned a series of defensive movements and continues to dictate the path of cost recovery initiatives. A ‘common’ slogan in the anti-globalisation movement (particularly amongst its anarchist and autonomist currents) is One no Many yeses. It’s a great slogan that invokes D&G either or, or,…and although our humble “refusal to pay common” may not have been what the Zapatista’s had in mind, the slogan is now ‘common’. If we move with this formulation we can say that the act of non-payment is the common. It should also be clear how this act, this strategic possibility, may be link to the payment boycotts (organised) struggle. And intent cannot be inscribed because the condition of claim is clear.

This is a beginning: a way of getting started as I think through the last 30 years of struggle and crises in South Africa. But it’s also more than that (or maybe less). It’s a contribution to completing my masters.

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When asked by the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal to describe my research project in a single line, I wrote the following: “The research will examine the relationship between Johannesburg’s restructuring of the delivery of basic services and Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation (PA), through a survey of the effects of neoliberal cost recovery practices on the life strategies of urban poor communities.”

Reading this sentence again, I am struck by its narrowness and inability to represent the scope of the kinds of stuff that I want to talk about.

*

One tendency in recent usages of the concept is to invoke the PA in relation to neoliberalism in order to narrativise - within a Marxist framework - aspects of capital’s accumulation strategy that occur outside of the ‘traditional sites of production’ and operate through extra economic strategies of dispossession. That is, the project tends to be an exercise directed at theoretically rescuing the explanatory power of Marxism for the current context, and as such, tends to be an ideologically driven intervention . Secondly, there is a real sense in which the concept describes a specific historical moment in the history of capitalism . Finally narratives of the process of primitive accumulation, particular the histories of the development of capitalism in the south, have often done tremendous violence to local contexts and histories. That is, the history of the concept is not a good one.

Against (or different from) these usages of the concept, my own thinking has focused on the ongoing process of primitive accumulation in relation to the idea of separation , and is explicitly situated on the terrain of subjectivity. Still, I can’t ignore the nagging question, why use the concept at all then? And with that we arrive at the first task of this project i.e. to determine the extent to which the concept of primitive accumulation is useful in approaching “the effects of neoliberal cost recovery practices on the life strategies of urban poor communities”.

*

A very smart friend of mine visited a while back. At the time I was writing a report for the CSVR where I used the concept of PA. Because my friend is really smart, I used the opportunity to get his take on what I had written. He liked it except for the fact that I had used this concept (PA) and he told me as much. My friend is a Deleuzian, or at least he was on this occasion, and as such, he suggested that instead of PA I should use the concept deterritorialisation. Like my friend I like the concept, and like him, I agree that it would work in this context. At the time however, I wondered whether the usage of deterritorialisation might not alienate my co-author on the project. Another reason for not using the concept deterritorialisation on this occasion was the fact that outside of a very small community of very smart people, the concept is either not known or completely misunderstood, and the labour of the usage would need to be carefully explanatory, first in a general sense and then in the specific sense of PA. I chose against my friend’s advice to stick with PA.

Our current project has no such restrictions (except maybe not being smart enough) so the notion now presents itself as a very real alternative.

*

DeAngelis? In his essay, ‘Towards A Theory Of Globalisation As Strategy’, Massimo De Angelis, offers a means for characterising aspects of neoliberal restructuring within the broader narrative of capitalist strategies of accumulation (De Angelis, 1998a). Following Perelman, De Angelis argues that the notion of primitive accumulation, used by Marx to describe the emergence of the preconditions for capitalist production, may be understood, not simply as a particular historical phase of capitalism, but as a “continuous phenomenon within the capitalist mode of production”. The term ‘primitive accumulation’ was used by Marx to describe the process of separation and dispossession of people in relation to the social means of production and reproduction, creating a section of the population with no means of survival but their labour power. De Angelis argues that in contrast to the accumulation strategies associated with, for instance, factory production, primitive accumulation does not rely on the “silent compulsion of economic relations”, but is instead imposed through ‘direct extra economic forces’ such as the state (De Angelis, 1998b: 9).

An important element of this analysis is its demonstration of the relationship between strategies of primitive accumulation and worker struggles. De Angelis, building on the work of Polanyi, argues that capitalism is characterised by a double movement of the market and struggle: “On the one side there is the historical movement of the market, a movement that has no inherent limits and therefore threatens society’s very existence. On the other, there is society’s natural propensity to defend itself, and therefore to create institutions for its protection”. For De Angelis the second movement often involves processes of commoning, which may be characterised as the creation of “social spheres of life” aimed at providing “various degrees of protection from the market”.

The commodification of all life and the dismantling of the protections won through worker struggles may therefore be understood as the creation of “new enclosures” in so far as the process implies the ‘enclosure’ of what would otherwise be held in common. In other words, such ‘enclosures’ bring about “a separation between people and their conditions of life, through the dismantlement of rights, entitlements, etc … The aimed end result of these strategies of enclosures share the same substance: to forcibly separate people from whatever access to social wealth they have which is not mediated or co-optable by the market … New enclosures thus are directed towards the fragmentation and destruction of “commons”.

Under neoliberalism, people have been separated from those basic resources considered essential for all life, such as water, housing, electricity, health care, education, and so on, that have been made into areas for greater accumulation by a few. Whereas people previously had unlimited access to a naturally occurring resource such as water, today water has become big business with individuals having to now pay for it as a commodity. In this way, people have been forced to hand over the control of their individual and collective lives to the rule of profit and the market.

In the context of neoliberalism and the crises in capitalism, primitive accumulation strategies become the primary means by which neoliberalism addresses the limits posed to accumulation by the successive protections won by workers and communities.

*

Another very smart friend of mine – this one is fond of discussing every single theoretical discovery he has come across with me – insisted I read DeAnglis?, and I did. I immediately liked it and was grateful to my friend who indirectly is responsible for setting me along this path. The thesis seemed to explain well what was happening in relation to South Africa’s experience with neoliberalism. That is, the commodification of basic services was a process that had at its end the separation of people from the means of social reproduction. How could the forced mediation of access to water and electricity be anything else? Certainly this was as perniciously a process of dispossession as the hut taxes imposed a century earlier (even if the crisis wasn’t the same) ?

However, De Angelis’s frame of reference was the welfare state, the context in South Africa is however extremely different. In short I needed to understand what is being enclosed. What was the common?

This is how I approached this problem when writing up the CSVR report.

During the 1980’s the struggles of communities worked to create various protections against the market. While these struggles were largely concentrated in townships, they had a significant effect in de-legitimising the apartheid regime and profoundly affected the life strategies of communities. In particular, township resistance of the 1980s utilised strategies, in particular service payment and rent boycotts, that would contribute to the augmenting of household social income. Thus resistance allowed for the elaboration of life strategies under apartheid that allowed for people’s survival in this system and articulated a social common held and reproduced in struggle. The refusal to pay for the basic conditions of reproduction (water, electricity and housing) became a dynamic front in the struggle against apartheid, enjoying almost universal support and massive participation in many townships across the country (decades later these life strategies would come to present the central challenge to the new government and its attempts to remove the barriers to “the natural working of the market” in a neoliberal South Africa).

The near insurrectionary mood of communities and the local economic crisis, saw the apartheid state implementing several reforms aimed at removing obstacles to accumulation and the free movements of the market while attempting to pacifying resistance. Such reforms sought to address these problems through a two-pronged strategy of ‘total onslaught’ and ‘inclusion’ – complete repression of Black resistance as well as the gradual inclusion of parts of Black communities in aspects of governance, the improvement of services to certain parts of Black communities (e.g. the electrification of parts of Soweto in the early 1980s) and attempts to restructure the labour market. With the apartheid state’s strategy extending to include concessions to the liberation movement, by the early 1990s, with the release of political prisoners (including Nelson Mandela), and the unbanning of political organisations, the road to change became that of a negotiated settlement. For the liberation movement, however, this new configuration of strategy was to dramatically alter its vision of the post apartheid future. Concepts like ‘people’s power’ began to disappear or were harnessed towards the ends of assuming state power in a neoliberal world order. Thus, when the African National Congress (ANC) ‘came to power’ through electoral democracy in 1994, it intensified the restructuring of the South African economy along neoliberal lines.

Notably, however, the most profound limit to this process is the life strategies of township communities. Thus, the deepening of the commodification of basic services depends, to a large extent, on the transformation of these life strategies. As noted by McDonald? and Pape, the role of local government shifted, under GEAR, from a redistributive one (imagined in the RDP and probably partially elaborated in the first two years of democracy) to an ‘enabling’, or ‘facilitating’ one (McDonald?, 2002: 4). In this way, the central social responsibility of government has become one of establishing the means for increasing redress rather than delivering access directly. Under this model, real access has come to be determined by market forces, with the state becoming the facilitator of this logic. However, as facilitator of this logic, the state is tasked with disciplining these life strategies as the limit to the free working of the market.

The limits of the transition have meant that neoliberal orthodoxy defines the parameters of the state’s approach to service delivery. What has emerged, as a result, are two conflicting narratives of the social commons created in the payment boycotts of the 1980s. For the state, cost recovery programmes have necessitated a de-legitimation of the ‘commons’ in the interest of restructuring parastatals and state institutions along lines appropriate to its macro-economic priorities. For many communities and critics of the government’s growth path, by contrast, the commons have come to represent the central redistributive challenge of the new state and need to be institutionalised.

In the first narrative the payment boycotts of the 1980s were merely a means of leveraging the position of the liberation movement in relation to the apartheid state. The persistence of non-payment in this context has been characterised as a pathology of ‘a culture of non-payment’ that requires the intervention of the state only in restoring law and order (i.e. payment). The second narrative, in contrast, treats the commons as a fundamental part of the reproductive needs of poor communities, and the social income secured therein, as one of the few protections the most vulnerable have in relation to the capitalist market. The clash of these narratives represents the conceptual basis for the contemporary conflict between the state and communities in relation to basic socio-economic services and their ‘delivery’

*

The CSVR narrative was very attractive . Primarily, it allowed me to frame the entire thrust of the restructuring of basic services in terms that placed struggle at its centre. This approached also presented, in a reasonably original manner, the limits of neoliberalism in South Africa , and a narrative of the South African social movements in terms of a profound continuity between the struggle against the commodification of basic services and the struggle against apartheid. The argument was, however, open to a number of obvious criticisms. Firstly, it simply assumes the link between people’s life strategies and the payment boycotts. Secondly, it tends to homogenise these life strategies and township communities in the process. Finally, it moves too quickly and so that the logical leaps are not always easy to follow. Although the bulk of these problems could be dealt with through a longer and more directed project (like my MA), some of them, at least, could be addressed by developing the concept of life strategies.

*

The concept presented itself while reading Foucault’s ethics and thinking through the resistance to prepaid meters in Soweto. With respect to the latter, while we had a sense that the entire history of cost recovery interventions were converging and becoming clarified through the installation of these meters, the only concept we had to describe what was being transformed was the “culture of non-payment”. Of course subjectivity was an option, but who knows how to deploy such a concept, and so much work seems to precede it (hopefully this work is a contribution to getting some of that work done). At the time prishani’s writings were focusing on life, and the manner in which neoliberalism generally, and the meters specifically, were commodifying it. It was also clear to us that the meters were not just the product of governmental rationalities but were specifically pedagogical in their approach to life. The meters were about teaching new life strategies, which at the time initially meant something like ‘the strategies people have for taking care of themselves’. One only needs to look at the promotional information that Johannesburg Water distributed to realise that this was an explicit aim of the programme.

*

In what sense were the payment boycotts a common?

Without emphasising any spatial connotation, the payment boycotts were maintained in part through the creation of no go areas that were facilitated through the development of a complex networked response to the presence of state officials. It is, as Andy Clarno would say, the creation of an ungovernable space. Essentially, through a whole range of tactics a particular condition is created, an affect whose effect is the commoning of services. But even if we move beyond the spatial affects, and acts of collective solidarity, to individual acts of the refusal to pay - and the significations of that act, which allow for its valorisation and reproduction – we recognise an effect, the commoning of services .

The fact that these services are about accessing the means of life, the strategic investments made in obtaining them can be considered part of the strategies people construct in taking care of themselves - that is life strategies. Further, the fact that such strategies often involve investments in collective action and shared meanings clarifies their potential social investment. That is life strategies may converge through their creation of common meanings and networks. The common is essentially created in the creating of these networks and meanings.

*

In what sense is the installation of prepaid meters an aspect of primitive accumulation ?

In so far as these life strategies imply the creation of common meanings and networks aimed at accessing the means of social reproduction, the transformation of these life strategies has the effect of separation implied in the definition of primitive accumulation. That is separation from the social means of (re)production.

*

Transforming township life strategies becomes the primary task of overcoming the limits of the neoliberal restructuring of basic service delivery. But this is no easy task. In the last ten years the state has variously experimented with a series of ideological and punitive interventions aimed at this task. At the ideological level, campaigns such as Masakhane were launched emphasising good citizenship through the payment for services. That is, it attempted to remake the meanings of non-payment. On the other hand, cut-offs and the attachment of property were used as retroactive measures to ensure compliance. However, in comparison with the strategy that would succeed it (prepaid meters), the elements of these two aspects of the state’s response seemed dislocated. Where government and parastatal public relations departments carried out the ideological interventions, cut-offs and attachments were treated as administrative actions and presided over by low-level officials. The introduction of operation Gcina ‘manzi, in many ways, marks the evolution of neoliberalism’s strategy in this regard and explicitly brings these together - the prerogative to save (implicit in the name of the programme) and self-disconnection.

*

Subjectivity, a far more difficult concept, tends to animate life strategies and determine how they invest different acts (for instance, the non-payment for services). We should also note that while life strategies tend to imply subjectivity, they are not coextensive. Instead, I tend to think of life strategies, as an effect of subjectivity; however, in following the paths of a strategy, subjectivity is also remade. This also seems to imply that life strategies are a negotiation of available freedom and ideas of self. However, life strategies do not simply encounter “available freedoms” as a closed set, but are potentially the means through which the limits of the latter are marked or opened up. I also want to pose this concept (life strategies) against that of survival strategies. The latter seems far too narrow, and reactionary, in the sense that its objects are externally given. From this perspective, the most attractive aspect of this concept is that it allows me to say a few things about subjectivity without it having to be the explicit focus (which seems to me to be an impossible research task).

Our definition of life strategies as ‘people’s strategies for taking care of themselves’ no longer describes the direction in which the concept is developing. We have already seen its relation to social means of production and its elaboration of collective investments. For now the following formulation will have to do: by life strategies, I imply that which is constructed, as a negotiation of people’s available freedom and notions of self, through assuming various strategic positions as a means towards creating the conditions of life.

*

Hardt and Negri’s Empire takes up the theme of Primitive Accumulation as well. However, where theorists such as David Havey have tended to invoke the concept in relation to notions of inside/outside, Hardt and Negri offer an analysis of a properly postmodern form in which the distinction increasingly becomes untenable.

Their analysis contrasts postmodern PA with the figures of modern primitive accumulation that highlight the relations between inside and out and wealth and command. In relation to the latter, they argue that processes of PA were experienced differently depending upon mediations of the geographies of imperialism. So, for the type of PA described by Marx (ostensibly European), wealth came from outside while command arises internally. On the other hand in Europe’s colonies, wealth came from inside, while command came from outside.

In the postmodern era, what disappears is not PA (“capitalist relations of production and social classes must continually be reproduced”) but the play between inside and outside (or rather, it declines). Further under postmodernism, social wealth - the subject of appropriation - increasingly becomes immaterial: “social relations, communication systems, information and affective networks”. Equally as “the proletariat is becoming the universal figure of labour, the object of proletarian labour is becoming equally universal. Social labour produces life itself.”

They go on to argue that information (the figure of postmodern wealth) carries through its networks both wealth and the command of production such that “informational accumulation destroys or at least destructures the previously existing productive processes, but immediately integrates those productive processes in its own networks and generates across the different realms of production the highest levels of productivity”

*

Negri’s conception of postmodern primitive accumulation, in spite of a few deficiencies opens up a whole new set of questions that we can discuss when we meet. But a few connections should become clear 1. Firstly that the common of our life strategy thesis is in fact a product of immaterial labour. 2. Such a conception of PA opens up a whole range of possible narratives that speak to the manner in which the post apartheid context has facilitated the widespread appropriation of common . 3. In South Africa the intensive integration of labour (through technologies such as prepaid) elaborate forms of biopower that reconstitute township life strategies as a means to facilitating their insertion into the collective biopolitical body. 4. The forms of reconstitution of life strategies take the figure of entrepreneurialism as an all encompassing master narrative of social production , forcing our thesis into dialogue with various pieces of research on governmentality (not least of which is the work of AvS)

This is where things start getting interesting. However this was only a begining and maybe u can already see where I am taking this…

*

The following is an outline of the practical process of researching life strategies in relation to water and prepaid meters.

The research will develop a narrative of the various cost recovery interventions led by the South African state over the last ten years, with a specific focus on the introduction of prepaid water meters. It will try to identify the manner in which these interventions have been shaped by, or have responded to community resistance and what has often been referred to as the 'culture of non-payment'. From this perspective the research will also seek to identify the manner in which the actual introduction of prepaid meters has altered the strategies through which people create the conditions of their lives. In addition, the research will attempt to understand the relationship between instances of resistance and these life strategies.

Through the above process, it is intended that we begin understanding the effects of neoliberalism and commodification on people's reproduction (including the whole range of social relations embedded therein). Finally, it is hoped that through this research the concept of life strategies may be developed with a specific focus on its relationship to subjectivity.

With these broad objectives, the research will attempt to answer the following questions:

o What was the specific economic and political context of the ANC government’s adoption of an ostensibly neoliberal approach to the delivery of basic services?

o How did this approach specifically alter the provision of water?

o What were the challenges faced by municipalities in rolling out this process?

o How was 'prepaid' framed in relation to these challenges?

o What were the specific challenges encountered in the roll out of prepaid technology in Soweto?

o What is the relationship between these challenges and various acts of resistance against commodification (including non payment)?

o What is the relationship between these challenges and the social history of Sowetans (eg. the payment boycotts of the 1980s), in particular their experiences of water delivery?

o To what extent do such social histories mediate people’s practices in relation to approaches to non-payment before the implementation of prepaid water meters?

o How do the social histories of Sowetans mediate their responses to prepaid water meters?

o What other factors mediate people’s responses to prepaid meters?

o How has the delivery of water though prepaid systems altered people’s approaches to essential activities such basic hygiene, sanitation and nutrition?

o How has the introduction of prepaid affected peoples approaches to ‘non-essential’ activities such gardening and recreation?

o How has the system effected the financial planning of households, in particular the household budgetary regimes and priorities?

o How has the introduction altered the relationships within the household and with the broader community?

o What has been the effect of these meters on what is often called ‘housework’ or feminised work necessary for the reproduction of the household (e.g. cooking cleaning fetching water)?

o What kinds of strategies do people develop in order to resist or navigate the effects of the system in the relation the categories outlined above? Literature Review A detailed survey of literature related to the above themes and research questions will be conducted. In addition, audio-visual material will be sourced from Indymedia-SA.

Household Critical Ethnographic Studies Five households will be selected in Phiri, Soweto. The researcher will spend a substantial amount of time with each household, interviewing members, observing their behaviour, and initiating conversations, debates and discussions with and amongst them to understand their approaches to life and living. The households will be selected to illustrate differences with regard to the nature of Phiri (representing the different sections), and differences with regard to the responses of households to 'cost recovery' practices.

The researcher will attempt to construct through the above a social history of each household, and map household strategies for living over time. In particular, attention will be paid to access to income, employment strategies, payment for basic services, differentiation of roles in the household, decision-making, etc. These themes will, however, be expanded on through interaction with the five households.

The researcher will construct a specific set of questions for members of households to understand their strategies with regard to prepaid meters. These will be designed in such a way as to understand the effects of prepaid meters on the social histories that would have already been constructed in the manner outlined above.

The researcher will try to draw 'rhizomatic maps' from the information gathered in the above manner to pull together similarities and differences of experiences amongst the five households, in this manner allowing the local experiences to determine the answers to the overall research questions.

It will be difficult to set from the beginning a finite number of interviews as the process of interaction that will have initiated this project will also determine who and what exactly the interviews will focus on. In summary, this project will involve a number of semi-structured interviews with various members of households about various issues related to their choices and strategies for living. It could be said that this project will be a series of 'conversations' with members of households in Phiri about life.

Draft under revision, please don't circulate. From my friend Franco Ingrassia.

* In spanish at -

11 Precarias Ideas for a Biopolitical Sindicalism

00. Introduction

To speak of precarious labor is to speak, to begin with, of half the workers in Argentina: those who work in the black economy. To continue, it is to speak of the multitudes of un- and undermployed who, despite working outside the wage relation, also produce a type of wealth which, in many cases, is directly linked to the survival of hundreds of millions of people. To those must be added those who work under the so-called “garbage contract”. Contracts for services, temporary, without recognition of minimum labor rights. Neither holidays nor vacations nor sick days. To those must be added, in addition, a multiple variety of [becarios - grantees?], [pasantes], ad-honorem [??] workers, volunteers, etc.

This is the precariat. The workers not recognized as such by outmoded conceptions that assign the condition of worker based on a type of contractual relation that is increasingly exceptional. Workers invisible to the State which does not recognize their rights and also to the majority of the unions, which do not permit them to affiliate or participate for themselves. This is the precariat today: the vast majority of the class that lives from its labor.

The precarization of labor, the permanent instability of the conditions of life profoundly alters the very notion of project of life in young workers. Our parents had project of life with contents distinct from those of our grand parents. The conditions of life for the one and for the other were distinct, but in both cases these conditions were relatively stable. For our generation it is not a matter of elaborating distinct contents but rather of reinventing the very notion of project of life. How to project when instability becomes a point of departure? In what way can singular and collective trajectories be constructed that avoid remaining subject to disperion and the aleatority of market flows? To reinvent the notion of project is a task that connects immediately with the task of reinventing the spaces of collective organization that allow us to materialize said projects.

What is sindicalism or what could sindicalism be after precarity? What type of transformations in its organization, in its dynamic and its modes of action would tend to be introduced by a union that [plantee dejar de desconocer a - arose ceasing not to know?] the most significatn portion of the present workforce [note: the Spanish, fuerza de trabajo, can translate into English as both 'workforce' and 'labor power'. In English 'workforce' normally indicates an existing group of people in a specific workplace or labor market, while 'labor power' is a more abstract (which is not to say unimportant) marxian category. The use here is in the text is closer to 'workforce', but the term also includes 'labor power' in a linked set of meanings which it is difficult to express in English - tr.]

This writing attempts to propose some precarious ideas, tools, and hypotheses that contribute to the labor of reinvention and relaunching that the worker organizations most committed to social change are attempting to carry forward. It is a matter above all else of a set of sketchs, fragments, or clues that will have value in as much as they are able to stimulate the collective process of debate and thought.

01. mobility

The laboral instability proper to precarity produces a constant fluidification of the workforce. The individual itineraries of each worker begin to resemble a species of laboral dispersion in which one passes from one job to the next, from manual tasks to intellectual tasks, from complex labors and intense hours to periods of under- or unemployment. Is there an alternative to this which would not be simply reactive, that is to say, the attempt to rigidify the labor market? Perhaps the key is identifying this mobility as a characteristic common to an increasingly broad sector of the class and to being to intervene upon this mobility, in order to change it, in certain conditions, into a militant practice. To migrate from one center of labor to another permits constituting relationships with dissimilar compañeros. It also permits knowledge of some situations to resurge in other parts. Additionally, mobility as a central characteristic supposes the reformulation of the union organization which, until know, that thought of itself following schema of permanence. The forms of organization that continue separating workers by branch or by center of work continue losing, in a tendential form, their relevance to the degree that the workforce makes itself more and more flexible.

02. intermittence

In the everyday life of the precariat the periods of employment are found to alternate with periods of unemployment and/or underemployment. Waged labor, previously a full presence, is an intermittence in the life of the precarious worker. As such, the categories of employed worker and unemployed worker are increasingly fluid. A biopolitical sindicalism, a sindicalism that wants to empower (potenciar) the antagonistic capacities of the precariat, can not think itself in the same way, then, as a space of organization exclusive to employed workers. The biopolitical union presents its first hybrid figure: the crossing of organizational forms and modalities of collective action of the mass union and of the movement of unemployed workers. That is to say, the question remains open, what type of union organization could group together the precarious worker, that is to say, the intermittent worker?

03. autonomous cooperation

Precarious workers, subjected to instability as a permanent condition, only survive through the permanent generation of relationships, of networks of contacts in distinct instances of the productive territory. This capacity, in the light of discontinuity in incomes which intermittence produces, can bring us to conceive the idea of a new type of sindicalism, which would be able to organize these capacities for the configuration of forms, these capacities for cooperation, orienting them toward the productionof more or less autonomous forms of existence of the workforce, beyond the wage relation. With that, the biopolitical union presents its second hybrid figure: the crossing of the union with the productive experiences of the cooperative workers.

04. recombination: militant task in dispersion

Intermittence, mobility, discontinuity of incomes and laboral instablity have changed the social existence of the precariat into an experience very distinct from the pre-existing forms of the workforce. Since 30 years ago, against the permanent and [inconsulta] structuration of laboral activity brought forward by the boss. This structuraction extended to the disciplining of the rest of social life, from the time of nonwork. This industrial worker struggled against domination understood as fixation of the body to one place and to one task. For its part, the precarious worker sturggles against a very distinct form of domination: instability. This laboral instability has an extralaboral correlate: social dispersion. In conditions of stable structuration the militant tasks are to break, negate, subvert the rules. In conditions of social dispersion, the militant tasks are to invent autonomous modes of cohesion and recombination of resources and of human bonds that always threaten to escape, to disperes. In a certain sense, the present militant task of those that concentrate in intervenint inside the precariat could be considered as the slow and intricate process of subjective reconstruction of the working class, taking the objective conditions of generalized dispersion as point of departure.

05. heterogeneization

Contemporary capitalism produces fragmentation and introduces heterogeneity (in assigned tasks, forms of contractual relations, incomes, continuity/discontinuity in the job, etc) and the individualization of the precariat. It is necessary to produce new forms of action that take advantage of this multiplicity. If the mass union constituted its power (potencia) on the basis of the growing homogeneity of the life of workers, biopolitical sindicalism should find its force in the wealth of differences, in the capacity to politically articulate the contemporary heterogeneity, in the will to carry this process of hetereogeneization beyond the logic and the projects of capital.

06. confluences

Biopolitical sindicalism has to propose producing horizons of confluence of living labor in its multiple current forms of existence: stable work, precarious work, long term unemployment, etc. The project of construction of a non-state public sphere as much as the general income (or minimum guaranteed income) could become collective projects. Beyond the visibility of immediate implentation of proposals like the basic income, it is a matter of producting common horizons, territories of cooperation in which the different forms of existence of precarious work can recognize, recombine, and articulate themselves.

07. instability and self-organization

Instability, mobility, and heterogeneization define the characteristics of a fluctuating class composition. The conditions of life of the precariat are in constant change. A biopolitical sindicalism would be able to construct flexible organizational dispositifs capable of accompanying this mobility constitutive of precarization. The models of organziation that base themselves on fixed structures reveal their limits. The union should function as a permanent space of self-organization and recombination for the workers that move in a productive and labor context in constant change. The capacity of organizational innovation becomes fundamental in order to be able to respond to the variable problematics that arise in struggles at each moment.

08. new topologies of conflict

In conditions of laboral instability, the same economic dynamic situated the place of antagonism and of struggles inside the factory. The analysis of the productive cycle specific to each productive unit permitted discovering which were the key points, the seccions that, by being halted, had the capacity to paralyze the whole set of production. In conditions of precarious work, this is never defined beforehand. In passing from a logic of structures, that is to say of fixed places and relations, to a logic of processes, where there are flows of capital, information, and resistance that redefine themselves at each pass through places, productive relations, and their occupants, [de lo que - such that?] it is a matter alway, in the first instance, of being able to produce, construct the conditions for the localization of the conflict. Inside or outside the productive space? In the street or in the media? In the places of production, in the avenues of distribution or in the spaces of consumption? A biopolitical union would have to be able to have the tools of analysis to be able to situate, in each concrete case, in each concrete struggle, where it would be best to localize and deepen collective conflictivity and action. Many times a creative and innovative approach to the problem of the localization of the conflict is defined in large part by the type of prior struggle.

09. networks

If the strucutre was a system of fixed relations, proper to contexts of stability, the organizational form that will be most effective in situations of instability is the network. Without predetermined relations, open to the permanent incorporation of new elements, without a centralized command structure, the network permits a collective to be able to reconfigure itself successively following the changes of its environment, in order to always be able to act with the greatest transformative capacity. Unions up until now adopted structural organizational forms, in consonance with the structural organization of production proper to the industrial era. Presently the productive spaces, in agreement with the postfordist and toyotist theories, have initiated processes of transformation of structures into productive networks. A union that has the capacity to act taking into account the new forms of labor would be a network-union, an organization with the capacity to transform the characteristics that constitute the precariat (mobility, intermittence, heterogeneity, etc) and change them into tools for struggle, into mechanisms of political aggregation.

10. research

Since the workers inquiry by Marx for the International Workingmens Association, there have existed numerous experiences of appropriation of diverse tools of research on the part of the worker movement. Today the fluid characteristics of precarity lead us to intensify these practices, proposing a labor of permant self-inquiry. The biopolitical union would also be the dispositif starting from which the working class could investigate its own technical and political composition: the characteristics that define it, the tendencies and countertendencies that pass through it, the everyday resistances susceptible to recombining themselves into an antagonistic project. Biopolitical sindicalism as process of though, of collective elaboration of knowing about own conditions and potentialities. It is a matter of producing the passage from action-research to participative union research.

11. mixed models

The biopolitical union is a diffuse project today, a set of hypotheses on how there can be thought a union organization inside precarization. The term "biopolitical" indicates to us that it is a matter of being able to respond to a type of capitalism that is misunderstood [se dentiende - should this be 'misunderstands'?] [de] the problem of reproduction of the work force (as the dramatic closeness of the average wage in our country to the line of indigence defined by the INDEC [??]). It is a matter of being able to think how to collectively construct conditions of life, cooperation, resistance, and social invention. In the present conjuncture, biopolitical sindicalism could be thought following a mixed model, which can recombine in a dynamic form elements stemming from the three great dispositifs of organization created by the worker movement: the union, the cooperative, and the worker party. Economic struggle, autonomous organization of productive capacities and political struggle will function as articulated dimensions of the biopolitical labor of a new sindicalism able to confront the challenges of the new contemporary forms of exploitation. And to transform them.

Franco Ingrassia.

[The following is a rambling loose reflection, in part, on some of the effects of certain types of work on speech and relationships. It’s part of my own trying to understand some of the claims made about immaterial labor, and the differences between different types of this labor, and its effects on those of us who do it for a living…]

“For too long some of the most influential disciplines in the humanities - disciplines such as politics and economics, which determine the course of nations and the human possibilities of millions – have shared more with the enterprise of "Newspeak" in which the boundaries of the thinkable perpetually contract and ossify. As Orwell implicitly understood, this is a serious political danger, both for the practice of democracy and the enterprise of policy. It reduces knowledge to an instrumental tool, a political commodity, and mouths an arrogant rebuke to the liberal premises of the university as a free space of intellectual inquiry. Yes, knowledge needs structure and logic, but it also needs freedom and surprise, sudden disjunctions and conjunctions, caution and daring at once. Theory needs to be constantly challenged, both on its own epistemological terrain and at the crossroads of its intersection with history and practice. Theory needs to find itself surprised by events, even as it breaks up their structure of obviousness and commonsense.”

Borderlands is a fine entity. I pasted in this quote from their manifesto mainly because I like it. The quote also resonates with some conversations my partner and I have been having lately.

Recently on a long car trip we started talking about speech. The conversation started off talking about when we lived in the UK, about different phrases that have different meanings in the UK vs the US. Then we start talking about the circle of friends we had there, which included a number of exchange students who were not native English speakers. In order to converse with some of those friends we had to monitor our speech, avoid colloquialisms and certain metaphors, including ones that we didn’t recognize as metaphors (“take a right on Dalkeith then head south”, “I’ll fix you a cup of tea”, etc).

I quite enjoyed aspects of this, being deliberate about word choice and so on. For years I have periodically decided upon new terms and phrases to introduce into my regular parlance. (My most recent favorite is “interweb”.) I used to do this in high school, train myself to use new terms and phrases until they became habitual, then I would see if my friends would pick up on them, and I would then decide whether or not I wanted to keep using the term. (I started saying “swingin’!” in high school, in place of “cool!”. It took two or three weeks before I stopped being embarrassed and before it stopped being forced. After another 2 weeks most of my friends had picked it up, and in another month the phrase had entered the vocabularies of people from entirely different subcultural units.)

This conversation turned into a conversation about friends and family. We both are at the higher end of the formal education spectrum for our families. We have some friends who are grad students and professors, and many who are not. We have both had the experience of using terms that others didn’t understand. When we first starting reading Marx we would have annoying go-rounds with people where we’d be trying to make points about, you know, The Man, and people wouldn’t get what we meant. “Estrangement? Externalization?” Being honest, it was sometimes a type of maneuver – a powerplay within the language game. Certain modes of speech can serve to place one on a hierarchy. (Of course, this hierarchy is somewhat relative – some people are wowed by polysyllabic phraseology, others are dismissive and unimpressed.) In my experience this has occurred most frequently around lefties – big words and name- dropping can be a way to win an argument.

On the other hand, it can be particularly frustrating to try and talk to someone and to accidentally make a conversational move that is interpreted as a powerplay. This can happen with theory/philosophy and politics, and in my circles of friends used to happen with indie music. (Luckily we’re mostly all grown out of deliberately trying to score points by knowing obscure bands’ discographies and changing member line ups.) Someone would be talking about a band they’ve become very excited about, and someone else would think they were trying to impress people, to be an expert on indie music. It’s certainly happened with me and members of my family. People have asked me what I like to read, or what I was studying when I was in university. I would explain in the terms given in the books and courses. Afterward what I had created was not clarity over my interests, but a communicative misfire (ie, they didn’t understand me and I felt frustrated either at their inability to get it or at my inability to explain). Of course, misfires are themselves productive of other effects – they can be performative actions to place at a position on a hierarchy. (“You don’t understand me because I am smarter, better read, more sophisticated.”)

There’s a great essay by HP Grice called “Logic and Conversation”, argues that conversation is basically structured around a pragmatic principle of agreement. At the very least, an agreement to converse, which, more fully fleshed out , includes agreements or rules like ‘be relevant’ (don’t make non sequiturs), ‘be clear’, and so on. These rules can be violated sometimes in the spirit of agreement – non sequiturs can be a form of humor, for instance. Grice doesn’t address that the rules can also be violated in order to produce other effects, like jockeying for position. What’s particularly frustrating is when one does this by accident, when one is genuinely not trying to jockey for position but has mistakenly violated a rule (since clarity is relative) so that the other person thinks that one is playing a game of one-upsmanship.

When I first went through organizer training at the AFL people would make this mistake – lefty studenty types like myself, using phrases like “this exploitive situation can be rectified if you and your colleagues act collectively”. This type of misfire can be a big problem during a home visit, when one is trying to establish initial rapport with someone. If people don’t learn to stop doing this, they don’t last long on the job.

On rapport building… My partner works as a nanny. I have worked in a variety of ‘nonprofit’ organizations, as an organizer, canvasser, etc. Both of these involve linguistic labor: rapport building (with the child and with the parents; with workers and with union bosses), asserting authority (over the child; to the workers to establish oneself as an expert who should be obeyed when necessary), and establishing competency (to the parents with regard to one’s ability to understand and care for the child, and to hand emergencies; to the union bosses as a ‘loyal soldier’, as someone who can both build rapport with workers and who can assert authority over them as needed, and as someone who can strategize). Each of these areas has its own competencies.

It’s useful to think of each of these areas as a set of goals and techniques for maneuvering oneself into a position on a conversational hierarchy. Rapport building for a nanny and an organizer, to be successful, requires establishing a horizontal relationship, a relationship between relative equals who can plan and converse together in a situation of trust, confidence, and ease.

Typically when dealing with children and workers rapport building is an operation of climbing down a hierarchy, one starts from a position of perceived superiority and asserts that one is not (or does not think oneself to be) so much above the other after all. In some settings, though, depending on the child or the worker, there may be an initial assumption on the other’s part that one is inferior in some fashion (not cool, too old; overeducated, too young, too white, etc). This rapport building, when successful, places one in a horizontal relationship with an option upward: one is not just an equal, but an equal who can be superior. That is, one occupies a position of equality on a hierarchy with the flexibility to rise to a higher point as needed (ie, one can, as needed, assert authority/expertise in order to be listened to). When dealing with one’s employers, rapport building is a matter of establishing an inverse horizontality: an equality that recognizes it is an equality as the behest of the employer. One ascends to this equality, but does not assert without tacit approval. That is, the boss is still the boss.

Asserting authority is the placing of oneself in a superior position on a hierarchy. In dealing with children and workers this is an authority which allows one to give orders, to be listened, to dictate strategies and behaviors. One uses different terms, different body language, and different tones of voice to do this. One speaks differently when disciplining a child and explaining behavioral expectations (asserting oneself as in charge and to be listened to) than when one is praising or simply chatting or playing. One speaks differently to workers and tenants when one is explaining legal knowledge or campaign strategy (and such explanation is often as much a performative expression of one’s right to explain and to dictate strategy, that is, an assertion of oneself as an expert to be listened to) than when one is chatting, getting to know someone, learning their concerns and grievances, etc.

In dealing with employers, one also asserts oneself as an authority, but this is not the ability to make decisions. Rather, it is the ability to make decisions as authorized by the employer (the boss is still the boss). The authority is a form of expertise, not command. It is the establishment of competency. At times, this competency or expertise may be greater than that of the employer or lesser than that of the employer (it may be genuinely greater or lesser, or perceived as greater or lesser). This can vary depending on the situation and the employer – some want to be the greater expert, others want the employee to have a greater expertise.

Both of these jobs involves not only being good at the competencies of the specific areas above but also at being able to move from one type of linguistic labor to another fluidly.

My partner works as a nanny for people who are relatively educated and who have enough money to afford a nanny. She has to be able to converse with them, in a way different from how she converses with the children. The ability to change between these types of conversations is an element of her success in the work. The speech used to converse with the child is very important, but she will not be allowed to use it for long if she does not have a different, preferred mode of speech when dealing with the parents.

It’s the same with my experience in union and community organizing. One must be able to talk to workers and residents. One must also be able to talk to the bosses about those conversations, in a mode of speech that is sometimes taken to be superior to - but always held to be inappropriate for – the way one talks with workers and residents. And of course, there are different aged children with different backgrounds and parents with different backgrounds and temperaments. There are residents and job classes with different educational and other backgrounds. One can’t talk to each of them in exactly the same way, or rather, one will be less successful in the work if one does so.

So, a large portion of the work (of being perceived as competent in the work, which is what determines one’s degree of success) involves a pragmatic flexibility: the ability to shift between idiolects in order to be able to converse with many different – and different types of - people (and, of course, to accomplish required tasks in/when using a given idiolect, ie, one mush be able to converse successfully with different types of people, successful as defined by the ends of the job [and just to make sure I’m clear, by ‘idiolect’ I mean something like ‘idiosyncratic dialect’, basically the individual and relatively unique way that each person talks, which includes word choice, sentence structure, body language, tones of voice, and which people usually vary from setting to setting]). Success in each work related idiolect has a set of skills and techniques that must be acquired (we used to roleplay home visits, in order to be able to be more successful at them).

Flexibility in changing between idiolects is also a skill, and one for which, in my experience, there is less pedagogical technique developed. That is, there was less – certainly less deliberate and recognized – training in shifting gears between modes of conversation, than there was in certain specific modes of conversation. (Personal aside: I have found this flexibility of idiolect tremendously useful in my social and familial life. Misfires happen much less often, and much less often by accident. I have also found the techniques of rapport building very useful – In some settings and moods I tend to be reclusive, nervous, and shy, particularly when meeting and getting to know new people and in large group settings. From my work experience, however, I have gotten practiced at asking a set of questions to show interest in someone, and to get them talking about themselves or some subject of interest to them. I have also gotten practiced, though this skill is harder to maintain, at pay attention to cues – body language, tone of voice and diction, as well as conversational content – which indicate where to ask follow up questions, to get someone to speak further and to elaborate on some topic. )

Among our friends who are professors and students it strikes me that sometimes they have less flexibility of idiolect. My hunch is that this is because the labor of professing and studying involves less rapport building, and certainly less rapport building downward. That is, professors (like doctors, lawyers, other teachers, other experts) work in a setting where part of the work is establishing and maintaining oneself in a superior position on a hierarchy, both superior to those one works on (students, patients, clients) and superior to those outside the realm of that work (ie, smarter than those outside the academy, more in touch with health than the rest of the popular, etc. I suspect there’s much in common here with clergy – a relation between clergy and laiety, in which laypeople are defined in part by the clergy’s access to/use of certain language and texts.) The rapport building that does exist is less of the rapport with those who are below one, like rapport with children and workers for the nanny and organizer, rapport with an upward option (though perhaps this is overstated, and perhaps it changes with trends in pedagogy and customer service – trying to get know one’s students, having a good bedside manner, etc) and more rapport with colleagues – fellow professors, doctors, and lawyers, where one must define oneself (and one’s discipline/area of expertise) as equally (or better yet, more) competent and worthwhile compared to others, rapport that is also (is predicated on) establishing competency, rapport that resists any downward motion, the nonvoluntary placement of oneself at a lower place in a hierarchy. I think the linguistic labor of students mirrors this, but I’m not entirely sure.

What is most interesting to me in all of this, and which I haven’t really touched on, is the relationship of work and nonwork here, and some of the occupational hazards of immaterial labor (and, given that there are different sorts of linguistic and relational work, claims about the political possibilities of immaterial labor must be further qualified, as some of the relationships produced by immaterial labor are not of they type that one wants to see continue). The work on the clock certainly impacts the time and life off the clock (and some of the time off the clock is unremunerated work – reading and writing for students and teachers, for example, not to mention the effects of stress etc.) When I worked as an organizer I became decidedly unsocial in my personal life – spending my time building and maintaining relationships for a living for me meant that I had less energy and interest (and given the god awful work hours, very little time) to spend my little free time on similar pursuits off the clock. My partner leaves work hungry for adult conversation and to be on the receiving end of caring attention, rather than the giving end. It strikes me that one effect of graduate student and perhaps of professorial and other expert labor (an occupational hazard, so to speak) is a rigidity of idiolect, with regard to the terms, style of speech, and contents of one’s conversations. This is why I include the Borderlands quote – the mention of ossified language, and the dangers it poses to thought and democracy. I’m not sure about the thought and democracy part in this particular case, but I have seen this rigidity cause tension in relationships (friendship, familial, and romantic). Partly there is a disconnect – a tendency toward unintended misfires. These misfires can sometimes be taken as attempts at powerplays, at jockeying for position on hierarchies. And sometimes they are powerplays – the operation of producing oneself in the position of an expert can become habit, and can be corrosive to horizontal relationships in the rest of one’s life. (Of course, this is not to say that these particular damaging effects of work are worse than others, but there is perhaps a different wrinkle… being too tired or too stressed to go out because of work can be damaging to relationships too, but it is recognizably linked to work. Habits that one has because of work, habits of interaction, can be taken at times as being less as work related behaviors than as character or personality traits, as part of ‘who one is’, and so can perhaps be a different sort of challenge to deal with.)