As the pillars of the policy regimes of social democracy implode, we realize that society is constructed, and that the seeming stable surfaces and veneers of solidity, solidarity, and civility are dissolvable. Rhizomatic indignation manifests fugitive flashes, fugitive differences, fugitive emergent moments transversing the force field, attempting to shatter it, before they sublimate into solidity and solidarity. These fugitive flashes remind us how so many of us are Indignados nowadays.
These fugitive differences are bearers of mutually recognizable signifiers and commitments. Bearers of a fugitive intersubjectivity wherein we mutually recognize each other:
• as intentional agents in moments of creative juxtaposition: moments of the collage/montage of becoming;
• as bearers of a fugitive yet prophetic minority impelling us, plunging us into self-reflexive valuation and revaluation, disrupting promises of reflexive global governance.
Social rights as human rights are back on the agenda. J.M. Bernstein (2001) refers to these as flashes of “fugitive ethical moments” that haunt the present as they rupture it out of time in a not wholly cognitive manner – with strong durational intensity, offering multiple temporalities in a way foreshadowed by Bergson and Georges Sorel.
With the dismantling of the 1945–75 social democratic regimes, we have plunged into a Latour-like world where governance is more understood in association(s) than in sovereignty. These are associations with multiple centers, sites, and nodes – the society of networks. As Jacques Donzelot (1984) and Niklas Rose (1999; cf. Rose and Miller, 2008) show, this is a world where the state no longer positions itself as a manager that can solve society’s problems, but deflects these problems back on society.
Can protests and resistance stem the tide of liquidation, destruction, and austerity unleashed by the economic crisis? Can they initiate tides of their own – tides of social re-embeddedness/social reinsertion?
Political economy is not a morality play; it is instead rooted in regulative governance rationales. The Indignados are buffeted by more than the forces of globalization. They are swallowed up in the whirlpool of illusions of “expansionary austerity”: growth based on cutbacks (Blyth, 2013), suffocated by illusions of eventual equilibrating, while the bailed-out banks are allowed to continue to regulate themselves.
Can we pose a supply-side social democracy to counter the predominant supply-side neoliberalism? (See Streeck, 1992, 2012, 2014; Streeck and Schäfer, 2013.) Along with the deregulation of capital, there is a normative re-regulation wherein risks become de-socialized, privatized, and individualized. This is a neoliberal cultural counter-revolution – a counter-legitimatory rationale with a constituted normative valence that infects the desire and affinities within which we live.
Globalized neoliberalism generates a class fragmentation in its dismantling of social insurance programs. This is a social class of frustrated educated youth without predictability, without security, and with a restricted range of social rights. They live in a context of increasing temporary agency labor, outsourcing, and abandonment of non-wage benefits by firms. They live, in the words of Guy Standing (2012), “bits and pieces lives,” in and out of jobs without a narrative of occupational development, precariously insecure.
Standing (2011) – working out of the Decent Jobs Project of the International Labor Organization – refers to these as the Precariat, and delineates the new social strata of the advanced societies of the developed world as follows:
• the Elite;
• the Salariat;
• the Proficians with bundles of skills, who live opportunistically with their wits and contacts;
• the Proletariat;
• the Precariat;
• the UnderClass or the lumpenproletariat, often living in gangs and involved in addictions.
The Precariat is cut off from:
• classic circuits of capital accumulation;
• the institution of collective bargaining;
• fixed workplaces that were the pillars of twentieth-century social democracy; and
• the working-class parties allied with welfare state policies.
Frustrated educated youth face a drift into: (1) the infantilization of limitless electronic game play, streamed popular entertainment, and passive use of time in front of electronic screens; (2) part-time, flex, temp and freelance work; and (3) worse, a drift into the lumpenproletariat in an underground of illicit jobs.
The term précarité – as in travail précare – emerged in France during the 1980s in socio-economic literature with the emergence of the neoliberal regime of capital accumulation to characterize the changing patterns of work and declining centrality of the wage relationship in structuring society that Gorz had pointed out.
The Precariat is a stratum, not a class-in-formation: not a class-for-itself; not a class posed in a relational manner; not a part of a transformation aimed at overcoming the “realm of necessity.” It is a non-class in Gorz’s terminology, used as an expansion of the reserve “army of labor” to discipline the labor market. Marginal and underemployed, the Precariat – very much the new graduates who are underemployed or unemployed – represents a newer incarnation of what Karl Marx and Nicos Poulantzas referred to as petty bourgeoisie falling into the stratum of lumpenproletariat.
Neoliberal normative valence involves an explicit imposition on the political, cultural, and social systems by a particular market rationality that inverts the force upon the economic agent by the sympathetic moral sentiments posited by Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment. Actor-network theory (ANT) scholars Koray Calisken and Michel Callon (2009) label this as “economization.” It involves what Latour describes as a new form inserted in network nodes for “ruling spaces at a distance.” This is a system of rule operating in an extremely fluid mode: less rooted in the material practices of institution, and more oriented to processes of rules (see Walters, 2004). Aihwa Ong (2006, 2007) sees all this as less a unified hegemonic order of policies than a fluid process of rule involving “migratory mobile technologies”:
• for self-mastery so as to secure optimal profits; and
• for discerning points of entry into non-hierarchical/even heterarchical network flows so as to cash in on asymmetrically unfolding job opportunities.
In summing up, neoliberal normative valence involves: (1) an emphasis on the capability for individual self-care and self-investment; (2) a dematerializing and deregulating of labor so as to expose labor to a more flexible and precarious contracting process; and (3) technologies of calculative performance within the polymorphous perversity of assessment audits that make Taylorist scientific management monitoring seem kind and helpful.