Precarity, Class and the Politics of Time

• In Event: Current Issues in Labor & Work: Precarity, Automation, and Inclusion

Abstract

This paper reflects on the consequences for a theory of class that stem from the central argument in my recent book The Fight for Time: Migrant Day Laborers and the Politics of Precarity (Oxford UP 2019). The book reveals counter-intuitive affinities between the conundrums of precaritised work-life faced by migrant workers on society’s outer extremities and syndromes of precarity that afflict legions of working people throughout the economy. These parallels materialise as self-contradictory patterns of temporal affect and conduct in everyday experiences of work and work-related social activities. Efforts to combat the vexed temporalities of contemporary precarity therefore need to politicise the shared experiences of those on the work society’s outer reaches and groups in more privileged employment sectors.

Notwithstanding this need for a society-wide programme of mobilisation against precarity, however, I argue in this paper that anti-precarity politics would benefit from a related conception of class and class-based organising. In critical dialogue with Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson’s autonomist critique of extraction, logistics and finance (The Politics of Operations, Duke UP 2019), and in ways illustrated by the evocative thematization of precarity-dynamics by migrant day laborers, I argue that reconceiving class in association with precarity enables analysts and activists to meet three aims. First, reworking the notion of class in relation to precarity can promote solidarity among masses of people whose forms of work are multiplying and diversifying even as all are increasingly governed by overarching capitalist dynamics. Second, making this move allows us to construe anti-capitalist politics as arising from positions of struggle paradoxically located both within and beyond capital’s reach. Third, redefining class in terms of precaritisation assists in the task of fulfilling renewed Left ambitions for political institution-building, especially in ways that build on the US day labour movement's organisational innovations through urban worker centres.

Author

• Paul C. Apostolidis, London School of Economics