In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Georges Van Den Abbeele about his article “Can the Precariat Be Organized?: The Gig Economy, Worksite Dispersion, and the Challenge of Mutual Aid,” from Telos 198 (Spring 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss the history of the welfare state in the context of mutual aid, the idea of the “precariat” and how it relates to the idea of the working class and the question of mutual aid, and the new forms of mutual aid that are now possible with the rise of both the gig economy and new forms of social interaction. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 198 are available for purchase in our online store.
Can the Precariat Be Organized?: The Gig Economy, Worksite Dispersion, and the Challenge of Mutual Aid
Georges Van Den Abbeele
The development and success of the welfare state during the twentieth century coincides with the power of labor unions and their influence on the political process, both through the ballot box and by direct action in the form of strikes, boycotts, and protest marches. Already in the nineteenth century, however, and prior to the development of the modern welfare state, nascent labor unions modeled the concept of welfare as a function of mutual aid within the organized proletariat. Unions stockpiled supplies, for instance, in anticipation of strikes and work stoppages so that membership could survive management retaliations such as the suspension of pay or the denial of access to the workplace. Indeed, the history of trade unions, and before that of guilds and craftsmen corporations, is inextricably bound with that of mutual organizations, fraternities, and benevolent associations. Peter Kropotkin famously argued that robust forms of mutual aid are a necessary as well as species-beneficial result of evolution, defying classic Hobbesian and social Darwinist views that emphasize the fierceness of individual competition and the value of a model where only the “fittest” survive.[1] What we call the welfare state is perhaps most plausibly understood as the nationalization and homogenization of diverse organizations for mutual aid, amalgamated under the paternalistic aegis of the state.[2]
But this history of labor’s triumph, most especially in liberal democracies, can be interpreted in different ways. On the one hand, there is the triumphalist narrative of collective organizing to realize a progressive agenda of more equitable wages, safer working conditions, limited hours, and benefits ranging from paid vacations to pension plans. A widely posted bumper sticker from the early 2000s loudly proclaims this outcome: “Unions: The Folks Who Brought You the Weekend.” Under this scenario, the welfare state would again simply expand and incarnate at a national level and for its entire citizenry the “safety net” secured in local labor disputes between specific businesses and their workers, and embedded in various forms of mutual organizations associated with specific trade unions or local communities.
On the other hand, one could also understand the broad accession of benefits to workers by management less as corporate retreat than as an effective response. Giving some due to workers’ grievances also preserved the essence of the liberal state and its capitalist infrastructure at a time when these were seriously threatened by socialist and communist alternatives. The dramatic rise of the welfare state in Western Europe after the Second World War occurs in tandem with the U.S.-funded Marshall Plan, itself arguably a geopolitically interested form of mutual aid[3] and a corollary of the Cold War Truman Doctrine aimed at containing the spread of communism. The welfare state thus can be seen, from this perspective and has long been noted, to function as a small dose of reform that is worth the prevention of the more fearsome alternative of revolution. Better to give the workers a little bit of job protection than to let them run the show!
With the demise of the communist alternative in the late 1980s, however, the need (or excuse) for the protective bulwark of the welfare state disappeared. As communism receded, neoliberalism roared in, fueling the decline in support for state-based aid by viewing its beneficiaries as not only an irredeemable expense to the state but as increasingly demotivated citizens by dint of their very dependency on state support. At the same time, the political and financial power of labor unions was diminished as the self-designated representatives of the traditional working class. The functional end of communism also enabled the rise of globalization as the worldwide dominance of capital and its concomitant practices of circumventing uncooperative as well as overly generous nation-states (both rogue states and welfare states in good international standing). The ability for capital to move jobs, resources, and supply chains across borders and around the world radically transformed the relation between worksite and economy. The holistic production model of the traditional factory, for example, where everything was built on location from available raw materials, gave way to today’s manufacturing plants, which function merely as the final point of assembly for complex commodities (airplanes, automobiles, appliances) whose individual components are produced in multiple different locations around the world. In concert with the rise of telecommunication technologies and the World Wide Web, these developments further weakened the traditional proletariat and the kinds of labor practices and protections typically put in place at the local or national level. Not much in the way of labor negotiation or resistance could be mounted when whole industries could be readily moved to other locations or countries where wages were lower—and they are always lower somewhere.
Today, in the wake of a shrinking, stagnating proletariat, we see the concomitant growth of what has come to be called the precariat,[4] a term made popular by Guy Standing to describe that “precarious” labor force behind what has elsewhere been called the gig economy, which treats workers as contingent or “independent contractors” with few or no rights to claim traditional employee benefits, including standard hours, predictable income, health insurance, AD&D, or retirement plans. What the precariat would reveal instead is a world in which there is no longer proletarian wage labor (compensation based on time), nor fixed salary (managerial, professional), but only payments per individual service rendered. To the extent that the very term, precariat, is modeled directly on the preexisting category of the proletariat, its analysis all but requires a certain continuation of Marx’s materialist approach, but as we shall see the definitional challenges of the new term end up questioning some of those materialist assumptions, particularly as concerns work in the digital environment.
As for the suggestive term “gig economy,” that appears to have been coined by Tina Brown in a 2009 editorial in the Daily Beast, where she proclaimed, “No one I know has a job anymore. They’ve got gigs,” defined as “a bunch of free-floating projects, consultancies, and part-time bits and pieces they try and stitch together” to makes ends meet.[5] Although Brown nowhere mentions it, the expression “gig” betrays its origin in the arts, specifically in popular music (and especially jazz), where payment is issued per individual performance. This might mean a concert, a theatrical performance, or a stand-up act, which is treated as a service rendered by an independent agent, who is not otherwise dependent upon the payor of the gig and remunerated on a one-time contractual basis. Such service providers are also often referred to as “independent contractors,” a term that has come to bedevil discussions about the wider use of this “gig” metaphor to very different services and activities. In the actual functioning of the contemporary gig economy, however, a lot of time is spent on standby where the worker awaits assignment for gig work (a ride, a delivery, phone work, construction, or repair jobs, perhaps even an entire university course made available at the very last minute for a contingent lecturer) but is not paid until the gig itself is actually completed, or in some situations, at least undertaken. This differs dramatically, of course, from a traditional proletarian wage model where workers are steadily employed in tasks for a specified amount of time (eight hours per day, five days per week, in the classic version), or even in the competing model of payment by the piece, where one’s income could in principle be increased by completing more tasks within a specified time, or just by extending the allotted time. Beyond these material conditions, part of being in the precariat is to live, so Standing describes, with the insecurity of uncertain work, and work typically of a kind that bears little or no occupational satisfaction and leads nowhere, often with zero-hour contracts that nonetheless require one to be “on call” for immediate task completion for periods of time that may far exceed the traditional job shift, at least if one wants to make a livable wage.[6] But this “precarity,” it seems to me, is to be distinguished from traditional “gig” artists who stereotypically hold some “day job” that, while it may not be what they want to do (such as waiting tables or driving a cab), provides at least the basic income for them to pursue their real career aspirations as artists when not occupied by this work. The so-called gig economy turns this on end, since for gig or precariat workers, the day job, such as it is, is the gig itself, or at least indistinguishable from whatever other gig one might also be able to pick up beyond that one. To quote Brown again, “No one I know has a job anymore. They’ve got gigs.”
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1. Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution (New York: McClure, Philipps & Company, 1902).
2. The so-called welfare state can also be seen as the overcoming of the historical tensions between the free establishment of mutual aid organizations, on the one hand, and their attempted eradication by Church and/or State, on the other hand, as in the infamous French Loi le Chapelet or the British Combination Act, both of which outlawed all professional or occupational organizations. While such anti-syndicalist legislation drove trade union mutual aid underground until their repeal in the later nineteenth century, they also allowed the growth of specifically charitable organizations during that same period, most especially faith-based associations such as the Salvation Army or the various Catholic relief agencies.
3. While debates about mutual aid and welfare turn around the differing potential roles of state and private organizations, how should one conceive of relations between states that mimic the function of mutual aid at the geopolitical level? Diplomatic programs like the Marshall Plan and its successor USAID, or more recently the Chinese “belt and road” initiative, borrow amply from the rhetoric of charitable aid and are proposed as gifts to other nations rather than loans that would require repayment. On the other hand, their intent is to assert economic and political influence by bringing the nations receiving the aid into the orbit of the nation providing the aid. And indeed, their domestic political support is acutely dependent upon the nationalistically self-serving underpinnings of such charity.
4. While the word remains most associated with the work of Guy Standing, he himself indicates the origin of the term with French sociologists as well as its early use in Italian alternative May Day demonstrations. See Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, rev. ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 10.
5. Tina Brown, “The Gig Economy,” Daily Beast, January 12, 2009, https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-gig-economy.
6. Guy Standing, A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 72–74.
It may be necessary to switch the focus to the possibilities (if any) for the creative use of ressentment, rather than pursuing dead-end alleys like mutual aide or largely impossible dreams about organizing among the precariat.
On a gut level Trump radiated a legitimate ressentment (possibly originating in his own belief that he is in fact equal and more similiar in character to those who despise him but also realizing the that such a hypothetical equality will never be realized. Such a ressentment, I would argue, is the emotional foundation of his political success because it captures a not so pleasant envy and hatred also felt by most of his supporters who similarly believe they are, in fact, equal but realize the apparent impossibility of such equality every becoming reality.
Our national security, techno-financial, surveillance and academic power centers are now breeding this type of ressentment on a massive scale as they continue to consolidate and coordinate their hold on power through the different dimensions of digitization including the capacity to deliver a basic income to an overwhelmingly anomic population containing greater and greater rage.
As Paul W. Kahn recognizes, in another article in Telos 198, such emotions will never be satisfied by such gestures and consequently our politics will become more and more dangerous for all of us.