The Politics of Precarity

Spaces of Extractivism, Violence, and Suffering

Gediminas Lesutis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000521108
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

Based on critical theory and ethnographic research, this book explores how intensifying geographies of extractive capitalism shape human lives and transformative politics in marginal areas of the global economy.

Engaging the work of Judith Butler, Henri Lefebvre, and Jacques Rancière with ethnographic research on social and political effects of mining-induced dispossession in Mozambique, in the book, Lesutis theorises how precarity unfolds as a spatially constituted condition of everyday life given over to the violence of capital. Going beyond labour relations, or governance of life in liberal democracies, that are typically explored in the literature on precarity, the book shows how dispossessed people are subjected to structural, symbolic, and direct modalities of violence; this simultaneously constitutes their suffering and ceaseless desire, however implausible, to be included into abstract space of extractivism. As a result, despite the multifarious violence that it engenders, extractive capital accumulation is sustained even in the margins, historically excluded from contingently lived imaginaries of a "good life" promised by capitalism.

Presenting this theorisation of precarity as a framework on, and a critique of, the contemporary politics of (un)liveability, the book speaks to key debates about precarity, dispossession, resistance, extractivism, and development in several disciplines, especially political geography, IPE, global politics, and critical theory. It will also be of interest to scholars in development studies, critical political economy, and African politics.

1Theorising precarity Space, violence, politics

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178569-2

Conceptually, the book explores how within socio-material orders created by, and sustained through, the violence of spatial capitalist abstractions, precariousness, as an ontologically shared vulnerability of a human body, is mediated, negotiated, and constituted into precarity – a spatially engendered condition of everyday life given over to suffering that exists as an affective and material tension with the spatialities of intensifying extractive capital accumulation. I theorise precarity in this way by openly reading the work of Judith Butler, Henri Lefebvre, and Jacques Rancière who, although writing from different epistemic standpoints, are committed to expounding how human life is shaped by, and unfolds through, conflicting social, political, and material relationalities. Reinterpreting their work on precarity (Butler 2004, 2009), space (Lefebvre 1991, 2009), and politics (Rancière 1999, 2001), in this chapter, I outline how the condition of precarity is mediated by the violence of abstraction constituted by, and constitutive of, specific formations and possibilities of politics. This provides a theoretical framework to reflect on the politics of precarity engendered by extractive capitalism – or contemporary capitalist development more broadly – that exposes human life to multifarious dispositions of semiotic and material injury.

Precarity

Whilst the term precarity has entered Anglophone academia at the turn of the 21st century, its genealogy has a much longer history in continental Europe (see Barbier 2002; Bourdieu 1963; Mattoni and Doerr 2007; Pitrou 1978). It was in France where the term précarité was first used by Bourdieu (1963, 361), who in his work on social divisions between permanent and contingent casual workers in Algeria described the latter as précarité. In 1970s France where the insecurity of labour was largely unknown, précarité, rather than linked to employment, in academic registers was associated with the notion of poverty (see Pitrou 1978). However, with the crumbling golden age of the European welfare state, employment soon became one of the key factors in understanding the conditions embodied in précarité; for instance, in Italy (precarieta) (Berardi and Empson 2009; De Sario 2007; Lazzarato 1996) and Spain (precaridad) (Casas-Cortés 2014), precarity generally has signalled unstable, precarious employment.

Resonating with these conceptual origins, in its contemporary usage, precarity is predominantly linked to a recent – and what is argued to be historically exceptional – phenomenon of labour flexibilisation in a post-welfare/post-Fordist neoliberal state. Bourdieu (1998, 1999), Dorre et al. (2006), and Molé (2010), for instance, underline the specificity of precarity as primarily an experience of formal employment, specific to the current historical juncture of rapid economic and social transformations unleashed by intensifying neoliberal globalisation. According to these, and other, theorists (see Dicken 2003; Gorz 2000; Ohmae 1990), in the contemporary period of advanced capitalist economies, participation in labour markets is primarily characterised by instability and the lack of employment protection. This marks a significant shift from a full-time employment, with a range of extensive statutory benefits and entitlements that once defined welfare-state systems in Western Europe or North America (Rogers and Rogers 1989). As Peck and Theodore (2000, 2001) have argued, precarious employment conditions define labour relations in the post-Fordist period: they are attributed to diverse employment experiences at a variety of positions in labour markets, ranging from low-paid work in service industries to higher paid work in “creative class” such as advertising industry or academia (Vij 2012; Waite 2009). In this context, “precariat” emerged as a neologism that signals a new emerging social subject, a “dangerous class in the making”, constituted by neoliberal labour conditions (see Standing 2011).

Such analyses of precarity have been challenged in several important ways. On the one hand, the concept refers to a minor group of the privileged labour force that tends to be white/native, middle-aged, able-bodied, cis-bodied, and male. As the otherness defined by gender/sexuality, nationality/citizenship (often interlinked with race/ethnicity), body-ability, and age fundamentally condition securities and instabilities of work, a specific revision of the term has been articulated by critical feminist scholarship. This body of work has challenged the dominant understanding of precarity for excluding dynamics of reproductive, affective, and unwaged labour that are fundamental for capitalist modes of production, as well as convincingly demonstrated that the dominant readings of precarity do not account for the dynamics of domination, alienation, and exploitation that go beyond economic approaches to the lived experiences of work and employment within capitalism that tend to focus on relations of production (see Federici 2006; McRobbie 2012; Mitropoulous 2005; Schultz 2006; Vishmidt 2005; Weeks 2007).

On the other hand, another prominent critique of the initial conceptualisation of precarity foregrounds that the golden Fordist/welfare state period only refers to a bounded time-space of the industrial core of the global economy. Whilst the conditions of precarity are not new, nor historically exceptional – even if they have not been specifically labelled as precarity – social, economic, and political development trajectories of the countries in the Global South have escaped the analytical lens of precarity. For, due to its ubiquity, in these contexts precarity has been the rule rather than the exception. As Waite (2009, 419) observes, “if we widen the perspective both geographically and historically to countries where informal sector work absorbs the majority of the workforce, then precarity arguably becomes the norm”. Ettlinger (2007) similarly notes that essentialising precarity in relation to specific accumulation regimes “establishes a norm that obfuscates conditions pertaining to a significant percentage of the world’s regions and populations” (p. 323). Munck (2013) argues that the economic readings of precariat (e.g., Standing 2011) are “a colonising concept in the South in classic Eurocentric mode” (p. 751): although intended to capture the essence of the newly emerging socio-economic class of precarious workers, instead it ends up understanding the rule as an exception, thereby ignoring the harsh economic realities in which the majority of the Global South populations live. As Munck (2013, 752) summarises, “decent work, to call it that even though it is a rather dubious term, has never been the norm in the postcolonial world. Rather, hyper-exploitation, accumulation through dispossession and what might be called ‘permanent primitive accumulation’ have by and large prevailed”. In the same way, Harris and Scully (2015) have argued that across the Global South the precarious labour conditions have been a corollary to capital accumulation before the global neoliberal turn.

As international political economy scholarship shows, precarity and exploitation are integral to global structures of development based on capitalist modes of production (LeBaron 2014; Phillips 2011; Phillips and Mieres 2015; Taylor 2010). Precarious labour is the norm of capitalist production and reproduction; or rather, the norm of precarious labour, conditioned by the inherently exploitative nature of capitalism, blurs the boundaries between production and reproduction in the capitalist system. As Neilson and Rossiter (2008, 54) argue, “far from the talk of ‘neoliberalism as exception’ (Ong 2006), a deep political consideration of the concept of precarity requires us to see Fordism as exception”.¹ Whilst the vocabulary of precarity has emerged in a particular historical moment of neoliberal capitalism and thus served its role in a class struggle in the context of labour movements in Europe, Neilson and Rossiter (2008) observe that the discourse of precarity has not translated onto a global scale “as a descriptor of contemporary labour precisely because of its connection as a political-analytical concept and mobilising device within predominantly European-based social movements responding to the erosion of the welfare state” (p. 54). Therefore, overall from a Global South perspective, the focus of precarity on the flexibilisation of formal labour relations is Western/Northern-centric and thus unable to meaningfully account for multifarious, coterminous forms of neglect, harm-making, and suffering under capitalism that unfold outside of formalised labour regimes.

Such divergences in the theorisation of precarity with those, on the one hand, attributing the term specifically to the social and economic insecurities caused by the dismantling of the welfare state and the subsequent labour flexibilisation, and those within critical postcolonial and feminist scholarships, on the other hand, who see precarity as a more general condition of social reproduction mediated alongside the development of the global capitalist system, present a challenge when navigating the exact meaning of precarity. It is not clear what processes, in what ways, and under what circumstances constitute the condition of precarity, nor, in particular, what the exact analytical and political purchase of the language of precarity is. For instance, Waite (2009, 416) argues that, as precarity has entered English academia at the turn of 21st century, its exact meaning is yet to be defined at this specific historical juncture of global neoliberal capitalism. To date, this has been most comprehensively addressed by Bernards (2018), who, empirically focusing on Sub-Saharan Africa, has demonstrated how “precarity and violent coercion are persistent, structural features of life under capitalism” (p. 3, emphasis in the original). Therefore, it is political and social struggles over labour conditions and processes of primitive accumulation and proletarianisation – both fundamental to the workings of capitalism – that determine historically specific differentiations between normalised, acceptable forms of labour exploitation and those that are considered to be coercive, unstable, or resulting in precarity (see Bernards 2018).

Although departing from a similar point that understands precarity as a fundamental feature of capitalism, the book differs from such approaches particularly due to its claim that precarity describes the vicissitudes of social life beyond the question of labour exploitation. A fundamental component of the key argument is that precarity expounds not only conditions of labouring but also those of living – or social life – under capitalism at large. This is where the book turns to critical theory, in which a coherent theorisation of precarity has been offered by the post-structuralist philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler. Through her sustained philosophical reflection on the (re)constitution of social and political marginalisation in present-day Western liberal democracies, particularly in the context of the Global War on Terror after the 9/11 – most prominent in her Precarious Life: The Power of Violence and Mourning (2004) and Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009) – Butler offers a theoretical framework to understand the politics of contemporary human vulnerability. In regard to the political economy literature on precarity that focuses on labour conditions only, the real strength and value of Butler’s theorisation is that it indicates how ontological precariousness of a human body (an inevitable vulnerability trans-historically shared by all human beings) is mediated through precarity (a historically specific political exposure to violence constituted through power relations), into a precarious life – a form of sociality shaped by the violence of social and political orders.

In her theorisation of precarity, Butler’s fundamental philosophical concern is life. Frames of War, in particular, iterates a political-philosophical question of when life is considered politically and socially significant and, therefore, grievable. Butler’s understanding of what constitutes life resonates with Agamben’s (1995) differentiation between zoē (bare life of a corporeal body) and bios (socio-political life of a subject). As life is made liveable through socially and politically attributed significance, for a human being there is no viable biological life on its own, insofar as “any life requires various social and economic conditions to be met in order to be sustained as a life” (Butler 2009, 14). Therefore, in the context of precarity created by the governing biopolitical logics of Western liberal democracies, the social death (the death of bios) makes the corporeal death (the death of zoē) politically insignificant and thus non-grievable. This, for instance, explains the widespread public indifference to the suffering of Muslim civilians in the Global War on Terror, which Butler explains focusing on modalities of ungrievability that, resulting in the social death of marginal populations, render the corporeal death politically insignificant and socially unnoticeable. As Butler (2004) writes, the death of someone who has been stripped of bios and not given a social and political life “cannot be mourned because they are always already lost or, rather, never ‘were’, and they must be killed, since they seem to live on, stubbornly, in this state of deadness” (p. 34).

Although already alluded to in Precarious Life, it is in Frames of War that Butler distinguishes between precariousness and precarity most explicitly. Precariousness (as an ontological vulnerability trans-historically shared by all human bodies) and precarity (as a politically induced differential exposure of a body to violence that results in social death that makes corporeal death non-grievable) are “intersecting concepts”. Precariousness as an ontological truth of human life is shared by all human beings materially, irrespective of their social, economic, and political entitlements. Put differently, precariousness constitutes life in general, and thus in its very essence is collective. All social beings, from the beginning of their lives, depend on all of that which is outside of the body: other beings, institutions, sustained, and sustainable social, political, and economic milieus. In Butler’s (2009) words, “precariousness implies living socially, that is, the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other” (p. 14). Life, therefore, requires constant support and favourable conditions that enable it to continue and flourish, in order for that life to be liveable – “there is no life without the need for shelter and food, no life without dependency on wider networks of sociality and labour” (Butler 2009, 24–25).

This claim that precariousness stems from the sociality of a human body – its material and social porosity and indelible dependence on others – is a fundamental point of the Butlerian understanding of precarity: it is not possible to divorce the ontology of a human body from social and political contexts and relations within which this body exists and is capacitated or disavowed. As Butler (2020) underlines, our fragility does not exist in vacuum, but we are “always vulnerable to a situation, a person, a social structure, something upon which we rely and in relation to which we are exposed” – vulnerability is thus “a feature of the relation that binds us to one another and to the larger structures and institutions upon which we depend for the continuation of life” (p. 46). Expounding this ontological interdependability of all social life as “avowed interdependency” that lets “go of the body as a ‘unit’ in order to understand one’s boundaries as relational and social predicaments” (ibid., 35), Butler demonstrates how it is through the political mediation of precario...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Theorising precarity: Space, violence, politics
• 2 Colonial, postcolonial, neoliberal precarisation
• 3 Spaces of structural violence: Precarity as exclusion
• 4 Spaces of symbolic violence: Precarity as inclusion
• 5 Spaces of coping: Precarity as abandonment
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index