By Darim al-Basam
If there is any appalling lesson we learned from the coronavirus: inequality kills.
The pandemic is colliding with the engine of inequality.
The hard hit at the forefront are the Precariat.
The virus kills indirectly by robbing this class of people their unsustainable income, and kills directly by increasing the rate at which let die among them.
Inequality — as a political cause, as an issue of socio-economic and moral concern, is at long last, having its moment with the outbreak of this virus.
The class system at its worse is a killer.
What is the Precariat? In case the reader never heard the term before, “Precariat”, in sociology, is a social class of people defined by lack of stability and predictability in their professional lives.
Certainly all of us have heard of the term ‘proletariat’. Well, the Precariat is also a working class, but they do not have a stable income or a labour union backing, and so their life is precarious.
Therefore we call them the Precariat, an amalgam of “precarity” and “proletariat”. The concepts of precarity and precariousness have become increasingly prominent in economic, philosophical, sociological, and activist discourse in recent decades, especially after the introduction of neoliberalism in the 1980s.
The Precariat have been the big losers so far in this coronavirus pandemic, and they may be least able to respond to the particular demands of control enforced by governments.
The seriousness of impact on them was profound.
If we fail to understand precarisation, then we understand neither the politics nor the economy of the current crisis.
In this pandemic outbreak, it was peculiarly illustrated that job insecurity meets physical vulnerability in new and terrifying ways.
The tidal wave of panic at the virus has spurred massive emergency steps by states to control their populations’ movements and bolster wrecked economies.
It didn’t take long for the pandemic to exacerbate existing inequalities: while the army of “knowledge workers” can safely work from home, majority of the Precariat are either continuing to go to work in unsafe conditions, or have already lost their jobs as a result of rapidly applied social-distancing measures. (Paul Apostolidis, Jacobin, April 2020 ). Conceptually, although the term” Precarity “ first appeared in France in the 1970s, it is today widely recognised as a central object of sociological concern.
Guy Standing, a collegue of mine at the United Nations for 30 years, now a professor at the University of London, was the one who first wrote about the Precarity.
His widely read and reviewed book, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class ( 2011), has helped to draw popular attention to the term.
Guy Standing’s description of the Precariat has revitalised the debate on what the precariat is, and what it is not.
What struck me in reading his book is the sociological wide-ranging analysis. The dominant picture of the Precariat as a floating labour supply, lacking common vision and having no “shadow of the future”, which lessens their sense of empathy and reciprocity but increases short-term, opportunistic behaviour.
For Standing, people in the precariat lack meaningful work. “People in the precariat are insecure,” he said. “They’re socially disoriented, “in the sense that they don’t feel there’s any escape from their circumstances. They’re anxious.
Above all, they’re very alienated and angry. And this sense of anger is growing all over the world.”
The negative impacts of precarious work are wider still in my opinion.
By and large, precariat workers have to work “no matter what” to maintain a basic income.
Sociologically, this leads to anomie in behaviour where the survival strategy to make ends meet will be at any expense and, therefore, professional value system start eroding and disintegrating.
Put it differently, anomie leads to de-professionalisation of professions.
The resulting struggle for survival promotes individualistic opportunism and a lack of solidarity, meaning that the Precariat are not only isolated and dispersed but also that they are vying against each other.
They walk on moving sand.
But one cannot generalise this for the whole class of the Precariat.
Some are progressive that turn to be activists that belong to advocacy social movements.
There is a growing feeling that they are not just victims of unstable and insecure living, but can be active in coalescing around a new progressive politics.
Intuitively, this part of the Precariat wants to become strong enough and united enough to struggle for a transformative agenda designed to abolish itself through overcoming the insecure conditions that define it. (Guy Standing 2014).
As I will argue in this article, the production of precarity is based on new forms of power and exploitation that have become central to the neoliberal logic, according to which the organisation of social and economic ‘security’ requires precarity as a way of life, both undermining social justice.
Neoliberalism is identified with minimal state intervention and minimal public expenditure in services such as health service, social services and education.
The demands of the competitive market are remorseless: privatise everything, relinquish the concept of the state as an institutionalised model based on social rights to market-based model, reduce the range of protection and safety nets such as welfare provisions and labour rights, reduce the cost of labour and maintain a pool of unemployed to discipline those lucky enough to have a job.
Under neoliberalism, precarious is the new normal.
Precarisation ceases to be a marginal social phenomenon and becomes the rule.
That change fundamentally affects numerous other aspects of labour and life.
Over the past four decades, governments have sought to prune the welfare state and shift responsibility for services and care onto individuals.
Increasingly, citizens are expected to “live life like an enterprise”, “stand on their own two feet”, and not look to the state for “handouts” or forms of support that one could provide oneself.
The fictitious “market” is expected to fulfil social needs, which of course it hasn’t, and can’t, since the priority always is the economic bottom line. (Alan Peterson, April 2020 ).
To broaden the theoretical framework, the first point that I would like to discuss is that, besides Guy Standing recent work, notions of precariousness, vulnerability, insecurity and, consequently, immunity, security, and safety, have a long theoretical tradition and have had a remarkable impact on debates surrounding neoliberal rule and the fate of the Precariat.
At base, such notions are existential as much as social categories, predicated on the thesis that the human being is, from birth, dependent on the social.
Social bonds are necessary and desirable, but they pull both ways: they bring with them fear associated with human vulnerability, the human being exposed to others who all share the capacity to cause his death, and vice versa.
And they also, therefore, bring the various processes and instruments that protect human beings from one another. (Ana Vujanovic, book review of Isabell Lorey, 2016)
Judith Butler in her book Precarious Life and Frames of War ( 2009 ) recognises that in the course of history these instruments of protecting human lives and bodies were never used equally, that they were instead used predominantly to protect certain individuals from the risks to which the rest of society is exposed.
Governmental procedures structured security according to a logic of competition, projecting precariousness into less protected, or unprotected populations: immigrants, various ethnic minorities, lower classes, women, the underclass.
When Michel Foucault devised the concept of ‘governmentality’, aimed at capturing what he regarded as an entirely new regime of power, neoliberalism was at its infancy.
Yet, by demonstrating ‘great foresight’ the concept has influenced a broad range of contemporary analyses of neoliberalism and diagnoses of precariaty.
Neoliberalism’s role in creating the context for this kind of precariat citizenship can be seen in Michel Foucault’s description of ‘economic man: the economisation of everything and everyone in the image of homo oeconomicus.
This means the economisation and marketisation of the social and personal life.
In this sense, the individual becomes ‘an entrepreneur’ of himself, a form of ‘human capital’ made through investments, at the very level of human being.
The functioning of power, and the obligation to choose lies in the need to actively choose different ways of investing in ourselves by adopting the form of conduct thought to be most appropriate for the various challenges posed by the ‘dynamic of competition’, which obeys the “natural” and “objective” laws of market.
If this human enterprise succeeds, we should praise human capital theory – it leads an individual to increase its human capital; if a person fails into precaricity and poverty, it is his or her own responsibility, because the market is severe but fair (just like nature). (Vadim Kvachev, Open Democracy, January 2020)
This is exactly how Foucault put it: governing and power structures and determines how we act, pushing us towards ‘naturally’ competing for security and status.
The vaunting of freedom of choice in neoliberal times and the operations of power that produce Precarity are the same as those that produce homo oeconomicus, the governable and self-governing subject.
The second point that I would like to make about precariaty and biopolitics that was clearly noticeable in the current coronavirus pandemic—is the inextricable link between biopower and racism.
Judith Butler ( 2015) recognises that the experience of precarity is ‘differentially distributed throughout society.
Cultural capital, identity politics and race play major roles.
Drawing on Foucault’s concept of biopower, namely the power to ‘foster life or disallow it to the point of death,’ she depicts the singularity of the contemporary age of precarity as a new manifestation of the ‘idea that some populations are considered disposable’. This raises, in my opinion, the question of bioethics.
A close verification of the current pandemic outbreak casualties proved Butler’s argument as highly credible and valid.
Data suggest that black Americans are becoming ill and dying of coronavirus at much higher rates than white people, potentially as a result of existing health disparities that have their roots in structural racism and economic inequality.
Data released by New York City on April 8, the coronavirus death rate for black New Yorkers is twice that of white residents. The prevalence among black Americans of heart disease and other “chronic conditions that are related to socioeconomic status” is “making the effect of the coronavirus crisis much worse. (New York Times 8 April 2020).
Likewise in the UK, Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) groups are being disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus with 35% of critically ill patients identified as BAME, almost three times higher than the overall they make-up of the population.
BAME workers in certain types of work, namely low-paid, casualised, and/or otherwise precarious work are overrepresented.
The forms of racialised deprivation and disadvantage that structure health and other socio-economic inequalities in the UK have a long lineage.
Yet these dynamics have been intensified by more recent shifts in the organisation and nature of work, namely precaritisation. (Bhattacharya 2018).
The third point that I would like to address in linking biopolitics to the Precariat in the current pandemic which is probably the largest of all, is that of the plight of migrants.
The migrant is often described as the emblem of the precariat – the precarious figure per se.
Migrants not only comprise ‘a large share of the world’s Precariat’ but, as ‘denizens’ rather than citizens as Guy Standing understands it.
As we have noticed they are becoming the primary victims in this pandemic crisis.
Migrants, on temporarily bases and the illegal, tend to be politically passive all of the time. They have insecurities.
They don’t have a sense of home.
And they are just trying to make better income.
They are becoming demonised by that anti-migrant groups in some countries and thoroughly insecure.
More seriously, what is happening in a number of countries is that governments are taking rights away from migrants.
Measures introduced recently to confine tens of thousands of workers to packed quarters in confinements which may increase the risk of infection spread among them.
Some other countries are deporting migrants, mainly illegal, and sending them back to their countries of origin.
Others stopped issuing migration permits.
It is a hugely tragic situation.
The notion of state of exception, as in the current pandemic, reflects the augmentation of government powers during times of emergency when state sovereignty is perceived to be under threat.
In states of emergency, governments suspend elements of the normal legal order and strip non-citizens individuals of the rights.
The state of exception is thus the ultimate expression of state sovereignty as the power to proclaim the emergency and suspend the operation of law.
Georgio Agamben’s understanding of life in the state of exception reflects a conception of rights as fundamentally grounded in the institution of national citizenship.
Following Arendt, Agamben rejects the notion that human rights are viable outside the confines of membership in the nation-state.
Instead, “the so-called sacred and inalienable human rights are revealed to be without any protection precisely when it is no longer possible to conceive of them as rights of the citizens of a state”. Accordingly, it is those excluded from citizenship — the refugee, the stateless person, the illegal migrant — who most fundamentally represent bare life in the exception. (Agamben 1998).
The migrants’ plight in the current pandemic happened also internally.
Migrant labourers reach the metropolis in their countries for the search of better livelihood.
India can make a case in point.
Among the 470mn workers in the informal labour, there are around 120mn comprise migrants from rural areas, who come to the city to escape poverty and the feudal social order.
These are the ones in distress the most after the lockdown.
These poor migrant labourers are “the Precariats of the Precariat ” because they are distinct from the formal working class.
After the lockdown majority of these workers, having lost work and hence income, started trudging back to their villages, hundreds of miles sometimes, in the hope of finding shelter and food for surviving the lockdown.
Some were reported to have died during the exodus from major cities. (F Khan and K Mansoor, SAS, March 2020).
from Gulf Times https://ift.tt/2WDXRib
Comments
Post a Comment