Introduction: The Precarity Debate
This chapter introduces debates on precarity and insecurity. It argues that there is a mass of literature suggesting a shift towards more contingent forms of employment. It suggests that these discussions often fail to draw on the empirical data. The chap
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1.1 What Is at Stake? Early in 1848, a 30-year-old German revolutionary, exiled in Brussels, despatched to his printer in London the text of a manifesto for an obscure organisation known as the Communist League. It closed with the slogan, “Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch!”—“Proletarians of all Countries, Unite!” (Marx [1848] 1977, p. 493; Nimtz 2000, pp. 52–55). At the time, the proletarians of all countries in the sense understood by Karl Marx, the originator of the slogan, must have amounted to a few million people. Even in Britain, by far the most industrialised country at that time, a slender majority of people still lived in the countryside; outside Britain, France, Belgium, Saxony, Prussia and the USA, there was no country in which more than a tenth of the population lived in towns or cities of 10,000 or more. Most of those on the land remained peasants engaged in small-scale, labour-intensive agricultural and handicraft production. Measured against the global population, the global proletariat was “numerically negligible”, perhaps 5 or 6 per cent of the total (Hobsbawm 1994, p. 363; 2000, p. 205). Yet, a century and a half later, around 885 million were believed to be wage labourers © The Author(s) 2019 J. Choonara, Insecurity, Precarious Work and Labour Markets, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13330-6_1
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(Filmer 1995, p. 38, Table 5-B). This growth has since accelerated. From 2013, for the first time in history, over half of those in the global workforce were, according to the International Labour Organization, now wage workers. They amount to some 1.6 billion people (ILO 2013). Marx’s emphasis on the proletariat was premised not simply on the potential of the class to expand numerically and geographically but on a set of capacities and interests with which it was imbued by its social position. For Marx, these existed objectively, regardless of the state of consciousness of the working class or the level of struggle. As he wrote in The Holy Family, composed at the outset of his career as a revolutionary, “The question is not what this or that proletarian, or even the whole of the proletariat, at the moment considers as its aim. The question is what the proletariat is, and what, consequent on that being, it will be compelled to do” (Marx and Engels [1845] 1956, p. 53). It is the capacities and interests possessed by the proletariat, in contrast to the other classes of capitalist society, that make it, from Marx’s perspective, the potential agent of a social revolution that could overthrow capitalism and inaugurate a communist society. Unsurprisingly, Marx’s propositions have from the outset been vigorously contested, whether by critics of a conservative, liberal or, a little later, social democratic, persuasion. However, what is striking today is the extent to which challenges to the Marxist position on class have become commonplace not simply among these critics but also among many who would identify with the radical left, including those who espouse “neo-Marxist” or “post
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