The politics of precarity
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The politics of precarity Andrew Schaap University of Exeter, Penryn TR10 9FE, UK [email protected] Kathi Weeks Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA [email protected] Bice Maiguascha University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4SB, UK [email protected] Edwina Barvosa University of California-Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA [email protected] Leah Bassel University of Roehampton, London SW15 5PJ, UK [email protected] Paul Apostolidis London School of Economics, London WC2A 2AE, UK [email protected]
Contemporary Political Theory (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-020-00435-z
The adequacy of any theory of radical democracy requires that it thematize the social conditions within which an emancipatory politics might be enacted. Paul Apostolidis’s The Fight for Time offers a sustained reflection on how democratic politics is both frustrated and facilitated by widespread and increasing precarity. However, as this Critical Exchange demonstrates, the nature of precarity, the 2020 Springer Nature Limited. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory www.palgrave.com/journals
Critical Exchange
forms that political agency and solidarity might take in response to it, and the appropriate site within which precarious social conditions can be contested and transformed, is controversial. Precarity refers to a situation lacking in predictability, security or material and social welfare. Importantly, this condition is socially produced by the development of post-Fordist capitalism (which relies on flexible employment practices) and neoliberal forms of governance (which remove social protections) (see Azmanova, 2020). Precarity entails social suffering, which is manifested in the declining mental and physical health of both working and ‘out of work’ people and compounded by the attribution of personal responsibility to individuals for their politically induced predicament (Apostolidis, 2019, pp. 3–5). Precarity leads to social isolation as workers find themselves segregated and alienated by work processes while the capacity to sustain community is undermined (pp. 8–10). Moreover, precarity leads to temporal displacement with precarious workers finding they have no time to do much else than work: they must constantly make time to find and prepare for work and, in doing so, become out of sync with the normal rhythms of social life (pp. 5–8). Precarity involves social dislocation as people are forced to relocate to adapt to precarious situations at the same time as their movements are constrained and policed (pp. 10–12). Importantly, precarity is distributed unequally, with people of colour, women, low-status workers and many in the global south experiencing its most devastating effects. At the same time, however, some of its aspects penetrate all social strata. As Apostolidis (2019, p. 2) puts it, ‘if precarity names the special plight of the world’s most virulently oppressed human beings, it also denotes a near-universal complex of unfreedom’. Recognizing that anti-capitalist struggle has always b
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