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145

Back to Piraeus: Precarity for All!

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some interesting thoughts on China's role in all of this, which I didn't quite feel like typing out fully. in sum: the ECB and EC implicitly blame China for poor working conditions, but it's really about labour regimes, and other European companies would do similarly if they felt they must to compete (so nothing to do with China in particular)

Philipp, C. and Parsanoglou, D. (2018). Back to Piraeus: Precarity for All!. In Ness, I. and Alimahomed-Wilson, J. (eds) Choke Points: Logistics Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain. Pluto Press, pp. 145-161

151

Since the emergence of precarity as "the central organising platform for a series of social struggles that spread across the space of Europe," there has been an effort, particularly by prearious activists, to build a subject that could be considered as the dominant form of the contemporary (post-Fordist) working class:

The precariat is to postfordism what proletariat was to fordism: flexible, temporary, part-time, and self-employed workers are the new social group which is required and reproduced by the neoliberal and post-industrial economic transformation. It is the critical mass that emerges from globalization, while demolished factories and neighborhoods are being substituted by offices and commercial areas. They are service workers in supermarkets and chains, cognitive workers operating in the information industry.

Nevertheless, it seems that the experiences of precarious workers cannot be accommodated in a unified subjectivity in analogy with previous patterns of class-based collective identities. Precarious labor exists only in the plural, as a multiplicity of experiences variously positioned, exploited, and lived within contemporary capitalism, and not as a unified subjectivity or "preciariat". Precarity is a multifaceted and ambivalent condition, including vulnerability, insecurity, and possibly poverty, but also ambivalences such as flexibility and mobility, as well as a strange kind of freedom. [...]

quoting some random paper

—p.151 by Carolin Philipp, Dimitris Parsanoglou 5 years, 5 months ago

Since the emergence of precarity as "the central organising platform for a series of social struggles that spread across the space of Europe," there has been an effort, particularly by prearious activists, to build a subject that could be considered as the dominant form of the contemporary (post-Fordist) working class:

The precariat is to postfordism what proletariat was to fordism: flexible, temporary, part-time, and self-employed workers are the new social group which is required and reproduced by the neoliberal and post-industrial economic transformation. It is the critical mass that emerges from globalization, while demolished factories and neighborhoods are being substituted by offices and commercial areas. They are service workers in supermarkets and chains, cognitive workers operating in the information industry.

Nevertheless, it seems that the experiences of precarious workers cannot be accommodated in a unified subjectivity in analogy with previous patterns of class-based collective identities. Precarious labor exists only in the plural, as a multiplicity of experiences variously positioned, exploited, and lived within contemporary capitalism, and not as a unified subjectivity or "preciariat". Precarity is a multifaceted and ambivalent condition, including vulnerability, insecurity, and possibly poverty, but also ambivalences such as flexibility and mobility, as well as a strange kind of freedom. [...]

quoting some random paper

—p.151 by Carolin Philipp, Dimitris Parsanoglou 5 years, 5 months ago

(noun) an expression of real or pretended doubt or uncertainty especially for rhetorical effect / (noun) a logical impasse or contradiction / (noun) a radical contradiction in the import of a text or theory that is seen in deconstruction as inevitable

157

the need described above is intensified by an aporia that occurs whenever someone tries to explain the most blatant contradiction that characterises austerity-and-crisis Greece

—p.157 by Carolin Philipp, Dimitris Parsanoglou
notable
5 years, 5 months ago

the need described above is intensified by an aporia that occurs whenever someone tries to explain the most blatant contradiction that characterises austerity-and-crisis Greece

—p.157 by Carolin Philipp, Dimitris Parsanoglou
notable
5 years, 5 months ago