The article is a reply to Ilya T. Kasavin’s “Creativity as a social phenomenon” and is devoted to the phenomenon of the scientific precariat. A systematic analysis of the relations between the scientific precariat and the academic community as a dialectical opposition of the individual and the collective is undertaken. The method of critical analysis is aimed at rethinking the stable ideas that have developed in science about the collectivity of scientific work. The concepts of labor and employment (...) in science are considered. It is concluded that the global development of digital technologies has led to the disappearance of the boundaries between physical and intellectual labor, against which there is an elevation of creative activity. The availability of information on the Internet, opening up incredible opportunities for research, destroys the monopoly of professional scientific communities on the possession of scientific knowledge. Scientific precarious loudly declare themselves in the public space, demonstrating the boldness and unusual nature of the ideas expressed. Inspired seekers of scientific truth embark on a free voyage through the vastness of the unknown. Traditional scientific communications, while retaining their significance, are enriched with new, non-standard ideas of precarious scientists who, ignoring rules and hierarchies, bring the creative spirit of freedom into modern science. However, the activities of such scientists may have an ambiguous assessment: a precarious scientist completely loses touch with the existing methods and approaches of classical science, and flight from work standards instead of expanding the horizons of scientific creativity turns into new problems caused by “multi-task” and instability of the labor activity of a “free” scientist. Despite the fact that in the conditions of the development of modern society and technology, the opposition of the pair of individual and collective is leveled, many scientists need common structures that determine the development of science, which at the present stage of the development of scientific knowledge are rather represented not by a social organization, but by an intellectual, linguistic and methodological unity focused on the creative development of the world. (shrink)

In this reply to the article by I.T. Kasavin “Creativity as a social phenomenon” the authors discuss the possibilities of the scientific precariat as a free creative class, which having entered the scientific community, will give it a new creative potential. The authors express some doubts that such a merger will preserve precariat's special creative spirit. The article draws attention to the diversity in understanding the nature, goals and values of creativity. The specificity of understanding creativity in the (...) scientific community is due to its rational and methodological guidelines, while the precariat is part of postmodern society, and its creative potential stems from a break with traditional rationalistic methodology. However, as long as peer review remains in the hands of the exclusively institutionalized scientific community, there is a high probability that the creativity of the precariat will be marginalized, and becoming part of the scientific community, the precariat will be forced to accept its epistemic values and lose the creative potential that is expected from them. The authors refer to P. Feyerabend’s theory of creativity, in which he rejects the subject-centered model of scientific creativity. According to Feyerabend, creativity is intersubjective in nature and grows organically from the sociocultural environment of the subject. The scientist creates following a cultural instinct, but the subject does not disappear from the creative process, since the cultural instinct is refracted through his individual style. If creativity is a reflection of the spirit of times, the precariat is the best way to embody it. In conclusion, a way for overcoming the social is outlined and, in a broad sense, the methodological problematic nature of the unification of the scientific community and the precariat, which the authors see in the general democratization and pluralism of society. (shrink)

This paper is a part of the discussion about creativity and the scientific precariat, initiated by I.T. Kasavin’s article. Proceeding from his proposal to revise the ideology of creativity in science through the desire of certain precariat groups for independence and freedom, the author questions the nowadays perspectives for the scientific precariat. This paper discusses the varieties of the precariat, such as freelancing and digital nomadism. The author considers a number of advantages and disadvantages of precarization. (...) The author questions whether scientists can be seriously considered as candidates for the precariat and how widespread the scientific precariat is in contemporary society. It is pointed out that the collective nature of modern science and its institutionalization impose certain obligations on scientists, which sometimes confront their individual internal aspirations, including the desire for freedom. The tension between the institutional conditions for the existence of science and the personal motives of scientists, noted once by M. Weber, lead to a decrease in personal autonomy, the emergence of a “world of specialists” and make it difficult to realize scientists’ aspirations for independence and freedom. On the one hand, a number of current trends can be viewed as a kind of precarization in science. On the other hand, the status of an independent researcher without research and educational affiliation hinders scientists’ social recognition and financial returns. The author admits that representatives of “garage science”, some public intellectuals, science, communicators, etc. can be attributed to the scientific precariat; however, in general, the scientific precariat is not a common trend. At the same time, modern postscience and post-normal science potentially make this phenomenon quite legitimate. (shrink)

The precariat is a notion and a phenomenon that has drawn special attention of economists since the turn of 20th and 21st centuries. The article is based on the assumption that the precariat involves unwanted and long-term insecurity and uncertainty, a highly changeable situation on the labour market and many other negative consequences. The paper advances the thesis according to which the phenomenon in ques-tion will escalate and be experienced by a growing number of people who have reached (...) pre-retirement age and are no longer mobile in occupational terms. The article is aimed at presenting reasons of possible growth of the problem under discussion, as well as the consequences faced by people who deal with it. Last but not least, potential ways of fighting precarity will be discussed. The analysis will be based on the literature on the subject, data derived from Central Statistical Office of Poland (GUS) and Eurostat, as well as research con-ducted by the author. (shrink)

This paper argues that much of Jacques Rancière’s redefinition of emancipation owes a lot to one key character from his archival research on nineteenth-century worker-poets, Louis-Gabriel Gauny, the self-proclaimed plebeian philosopher. This is especially the case in regard to Rancière’s understanding of subjectivation forming a double of the self and a double of social reality as worlds within worlds. The paper puts forward that Gauny’s form of emancipation is valid today as an aesthetic revolution that reveals Rancière’s practices of equality (...) to be an emancipatory way of life. In doing so, it will engage with Gauny’s connection with the contemporary precariat. (shrink)

Studies of the scale of unemployment in Poland and in Europe conducted in recent years lead to the conclusion that one of the largest and growing problems of the modern labour market is the unemployment rate among young people. An unfavourable phenomenon related to the problem that is increasingly appearing in public debate is the rising unemployment of graduates. Therefore, it is important to attempt to identify the phenomena in today's job market and one of them is the formation of (...) a new type of employee on the labour market, the member of the precarious class. The analysis aims to present the origins, nature and scale of the precariat phenomenon in Poland. The problem is described from the perspective of the labour market position of a selected social group, i.e. young people entering the labour market after finishing their education. The study attempted to identify factors that affect this phenomenon and the characteristics confirming the sense of its separation on the labour market. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Capitalism on Edge aims to redraw the terms of analysis of the so-called democratic capitalism and sketches a political agenda for emancipating society of its grip. This symposium reflects critically on Azmanova’s book and challenges her arguments on methodological, thematic, and substantive grounds. Azar Dakwar introduces the book’s claims and wonders about the nature of the anti-capitalistic agency Azmanova’s ascribes to the precariat. David Ingram worries about Azmanova’s deposing of “economic democracy” and the impact of which on the (...) prospect of radical change she advocates. William Callison casts doubt over the empirical plausibility of Azmanova’s vision of crisis-free transition out of democratic capitalism. Eilat Maoz interrogates Azmanova’s emancipatory project from the historical standpoint of (de)colonization and global imperialism. In her reply to these criticisms, Azmanova accepts some and parries others, while bringing their points closer to her anti-capitalist vision. (shrink)

This article introduces a special section concerned with precariousness and cultural work. Its aim is to bring into dialogue three bodies of ideas — the work of the autonomous Marxist `Italian laboratory'; activist writings about precariousness and precarity; and the emerging empirical scholarship concerned with the distinctive features of cultural work, at a moment when artists, designers and (new) media workers have taken centre stage as a supposed `creative class' of model entrepreneurs. The article is divided into three sections. It (...) starts by introducing the ideas of the autonomous Marxist tradition, highlighting arguments about the autonomy of labour, informational capitalism and the `factory without walls', as well as key concepts such as multitude and immaterial labour. The impact of these ideas and of Operaismo politics more generally on the precarity movement is then considered in the second section, discussing some of the issues that have animated debate both within and outside this movement, which has often treated cultural workers as exemplifying the experiences of a new `precariat'. In the third and final section we turn to the empirical literature about cultural work, pointing to its main features before bringing it into debate with the ideas already discussed. Several points of overlap and critique are elaborated — focusing in particular on issues of affect, temporality, subjectivity and solidarity. (shrink)

This article draws upon clinical experience of GPs working in a deprived area of the North East of England to examine the potential contribution of Universal Basic Income to health by mitigating ‘patient-side barriers’ among three cohorts experiencing distinct forms of ‘precariousness’: 1) long-term unemployed welfare recipients with low levels of education (lumpenprecariat); 2) workers on short-term/zero-hours contracts with low levels of education (‘lower’ precariat); 3) workers on short-term/zero-hours contracts with relatively high levels of education (‘upper’ precariat). We (...) argue that any benefits must be accompanied by robust institutions capable of promoting health. (shrink)

Introduction. Non-institutional humanities, philosophical practice, and informal education are “a family like” phenomena that are outside the social institution of science and education and are adjacent to socio-cultural activities and social work. The purpose of the article is to outline the contours of the informal educational creative industry in the postmodern society, which combines non-institutional humanities, philosophical practice, and informal education. Methods. The author uses the methods of autobiographical reflection, comparative analysis, empirical observation and analysis of the primary sources of (...) non-institutional humanities. Scientific novelty of the research. The transition to nonmaterial work of the postmodern era is the reason for the relevance of the area under study. The growing demand of a contemporary for such issues as the meaning of life, happiness, the growth of the precariat, the ousting of philosophy from formal education constitute a new social reality that determines the novelty of the research in the informal educational creative industry. Results. The author classifies non-institutional humanities according to the spheres of its existence and the strategies of subject genesis presented in the teachings. The concept of dedifferentiation is considered as an explanation of the area under study in postmodernism. The specificity of the philosophical approach in the work of a practicing philosopher is considered. Conclusions. The author connects the prospects of the informal educational creative industry with institutionalization in the way of leisure, entertainment, and other personal services. The author makes conclusions about the differences between formal and informal education, and indicates the risks and opportunities for the development of the informal philosophical sector. (shrink)

The condition of precariousness not only provides insights into a segment of the world of work or of a particular subject group, but is also a privileged standpoint for an overview of the condition of the social on a global scale. Because precariousness is multidimensional and polysemantic, it traverses contemporary society and multiple contexts, from industrial to class, gender, family relations as well as political participation, citizenship and migration. This book maps the differences and similarities in the ways precariousness and (...) insecurity in employment unfold and are subjectively experienced in regions and sectors that are confronted with different labour histories, legislations and economic priorities. Establishing a constructive dialogue amongst different global regions and across disciplines, the chapters explore the shift from precariousness to precariat and collective subjects as it is being articulated in the current global crisis. This edited collection aims to continue a process of mapping experiences by means of ethnographies, fieldwork, interviews, content analysis, where the precarious define their condition and explain how they try to withdraw from, cope with or embrace it. (shrink)

This article is a part of the discussion of Ilya Kasavin’s article “Creativity as a social phenomenon” and is devoted to the analysis of creativity in the era of digitalization. The author discusses creativity in computer programs and the actions of assistant robots. They can be creative because they are able to find new solutions to various problems. The Go program used new strategies that human players had never played before; another program predicted the crystal structure of various substances that (...) had not yet been studied experimentally. The concept of implicit knowledge is used to answer the question about the specifics of creativity. H. Collins singled out three types of tacit knowledge: relative, somatic and collective. The first is associated with the acquirement of various procedures – like cooking, the second – various skills related to body control, such as swimming or cycling, the third – social and cultural rules. Only the third type of tacit knowledge is associated with creativity. Programs and assistant robots can master relative and somatic implicit knowledge. They are not able to work with collective implicit knowledge. Creativity cannot be digitized. At the same time, digitalization forms important social prerequisites for the development of creativity. Currently, a new social group is being formed – the precariat. This is a marginal group; its representatives are not very firmly included in social structures. It is possible to single out the scientific precariat. With the help of digital technologies, it forms new ways, mechanisms, strategies and tools for solving various problems, form new ideas that expand our collective tacit knowledge. (shrink)

The article considers the problem of universal basic income. The author believes that this topic can become one of the most relevant for social-philosophical research. The author notes that although the problem has been of concern to philosophers and scientists for a long time, it has become especially relevant only recently – over the past ten years. The following reasons are given as an explanation: recent experiments on the introduction of a universal basic income in Western countries, the trend toward (...) automation and technologization, the transformation of the economy, which is becoming more and more precarious. The author notes that the topic of universal basic income has become relevant even in Russian science, however, not in social philosophy, as in the West, but mainly in economics. The author argues that, since the discussion about basic income in the economic dimension has already taken place, it should be expanded to the field of social philosophy. To do this, the author raises a number of questions that will shed light on the social-philosophical nature of the problem of universal basic income – freedom, justice, welfare state, etc. Special attention is paid to the curious ideological transformations that became possible by the emergence of topic of basic income. First of all, basic income contributes to the formation of new ideologies, such as post-capitalism. Secondly, basic income itself can be considered as a new ideology, which is a synthesis of other ideological trends – libertarianism, feminism, Marxism, etc. Thirdly, post-capitalism, which emphasizes basic income, opens up much more significant problems than replacing labor and turning all people into a precariat. The author hopes that this paper will serve as the beginning of the discussion of the issue of basic income in the context of social-philosophical knowledge. (shrink)

Precarity applies to people who, in order to survive, need to work in a low-quality job, which is uncertain, temporary, low-paid, with no prospect of promotion, no security and no contract. In this sense, the precariat is a category related mostly to the secondary segment of the labour market, according to the concept of a dual labour market. It is also the universal feature of Post-Fordism and the modern working conditions in which women, more often than men, are located (...) in the ‘worst’segment of the labour market. In this context, it can be noted that since the beginning of the era of globalization, women start working particularly in those sectors that were more uncertain and unstable e.g. in services and trade. It was feminization in a double sense: there were more and more working women on the one hand, and on the other hand, the flexible jobs were undertaken usually by women. Most of these kind of jobs were precarity jobs. Precarity is combined with insecurity, which does not allow the people in this group to plan anything, and wages so low that they can’t afford a decent life. In the article I would like to prove that the threat of precariat is more probable for women than men. I present data related to precarity for Poland compared to other European countries (based on data from Eurostat and the OECD). (shrink)

This chapter focuses the future of work as it relates to automation, artificial intelligence, the gig economy, and the technologies that will emerge from the so-called “fourth industrial revolution.” The goal here is to analyze the ways in which our modern capitalist economy drives technological development and the ownership structures which are built into our economic and technological relations. Our current ownership structures point to a future of “precariatized” labor, leading to less stable, more automated and more deskilled labor. What (...) this chapter therefore seeks to do is provide an overview of the present predictions concerning the future of work – the likelihood of job automation, the types of jobs that will remain, the skills future workers will need to develop, etc. Furthermore, this chapter also attempts to outline a social theory for the future of work, specifically one which prioritizes the concept of ownership as a necessary component of the future of work. What is ultimately suggested is that, given the current capitalist economy and predictions about the future of work, any post-capitalist vision for the future of work ought to prioritize new forms of ownership, including work ownership, technological ownership, and information ownership. (shrink)

The machine as a social movement of today's “precariat”—those whose labor and lives are precarious. In this “concise philosophy of the machine,” Gerald Raunig provides a historical and critical backdrop to a concept proposed forty years ago by the French philosophers Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze: the machine, not as a technical device and apparatus, but as a social composition and concatenation. This conception of the machine as an arrangement of technical, bodily, intellectual, and social components subverts the opposition (...) between man and machine, organism and mechanism, individual and community. Drawing from an unusual range of films, literature, and performance—from the role of bicycles in Flann O'Brien's fiction to Vittorio de Sica's Neorealist film The Bicycle Thieves, and from Karl Marx's “Fragment on Machines” to the deus ex machina of Greek drama—Raunig arrives at an enhanced conception of the machine as a social movement, finding its most apt and concrete manifestation in the Euromayday movement, which since 2001 has become a transnational activist and discursive practice focused upon the precarious nature of labor and lives. (shrink)

The comparative sociology of the structure, dynamics, and experience of urban relegation in the United States and the European Union during the past three decades reveals the emergence of a new regime of marginality. This regime generates forms of poverty that are neither residual, nor cyclical or transitional, but inscribed in the future of contemporary societies insofar as they are fed by the ongoing fragmentation of the wage labour relationship, the functional disconnection of dispossessed neighbourhoods from the national and global (...) economies, and the reconfiguration of the welfare state in the polarizing city. Based on a methodical comparison between the black American ghetto and the French working-class banlieue at century's turn, this article spotlights three distinctive spatial properties of `advanced marginality' — territorial fixation and stigmatization, spatial alienation and the dissolution of `place', and the loss of a hinterland — and draws out their implications for the formation of the `precariat' in postindustrial societies. (shrink)

How can we equalize opportunities while respecting people’s freedom? According to a view that I call libertarian resourcism, people’s fair shares of resources should normally take the form of unconditional, individual cash endowments, thereby supporting the freedom to do whatever they might want to do. This view, of which Van Parijs’ philosophy of ‘real freedom for all’ is the clearest and most well-known example, has become a powerful weapon to criticize work conditionality as unfair and perfectionistic (or illiberal), and to (...) motivate political struggles for the emancipation of the precariat. However, similar views are also expressed in many other justifications of basic income that stress the strategic importance of exit-based empowerment. This article argues that the reliance of these theories on concepts and assumptions of libertarianism makes them ill-equipped to justify core requirements of social empowerment, and to identify the forms of agency needed to sustainably advance the radical objectives they favour. The implication of this is not to reject the link between social justice and unconditional resource endowments but to dissociate the justification and design of such measures from libertarian ways of thinking. (shrink)

The comparative sociology of the structure, dynamics, and experience of urban relegation in the United States and the European Union during the past three decades reveals the emergence of a new regime of marginality. This regime generates forms of poverty that are neither residual, nor cyclical or transitional, but inscribed in the future of contemporary societies insofar as they are produced by the ongoing fragmentation of wage labor relation­ship, the functional disconnection of dispossessed neighborhoods from the national and global economies, (...) and the reconfiguration of the welfare state in the polarizing city. Based on a methodical comparison of the black American ghetto and the French working-class banlieue at century’s turn, this article spotlights three distinctive spatial properties of “advanced marginality”—territorial fixation and stigmatization, spatial alienation and the dissolution of “place,” and the loss of a hinterland—and draws out their implications for the formation of the “precariat” in postindustrial societies. (shrink)

The article develops the idea of forming postcapitalist social relations as a social revolution of an individual, which consists in the fact that popularity becomes a key advantage, the “possession” of which is a desired goal and a significant resource of political influence. At the same time, it is shown that this process leads to forming a new dominant stratum — personalities (“people with personality”): celebrities, popular bloggers, social media influencers, micro- and nanosignature. It is substantiated that the personaliat domination (...) is a consequence of contradictory social relations between the new aristocracy represented by the representatives of the personaliat and many people who do not “possess” a popular personality - the impersonaliat (“extra people”, “lower” precariat, those who turn out to be outsiders in the world of social platforms). This contradiction is associated with the rooting of a celebrity’s culture, which encourages a lot of people to fight for popularity and focus on finding advantageous differences from others in the process of self-realization. However, this struggle in the end for the overwhelming majority turns into an increase in creative competition and subtraction. Various new forms of subtraction that appear in situations of widespread self-realization are revealed. Accordingly, arguments are given in favor of the fact that in the context of the “personality revolution”, the truly left will be rather an alternative that will call into question the ways of solving social problems formulated by popular personalities. In other words, it will be possible to oppose the total pursuit of popularity with the projects of society, in which the person is relied not as someone who rises above the others, but as an involved person who values life in harmony with others higher than his own “I”. (shrink)

The philosophical understanding of scientific creativity cannot be limited to the analysis of cognitive abilities or ways of solving problems. It is always anthropologically-laden, based on a historically specific image image of a human being that acquires knowledge. The problem of creativity also articulates a well-known paradox of novelty: the new does not arise from the old, since it is significantly different from it, but it cannot arise from nothing, because then it remains incomprehensible. Paul Feyerabend criticizes such a “mysterianic” (...) concept of scientific creativity, which emphasizes its emergent character, i.e. its suddenness and inexplicability. The distance between subject and object, man and nature, knowledge and reality in this case remains insurmountable. To solve this problem, it is necessary to place creativity in the space between the uniqueness of the creative personality and the mechanisms of social recognition. This, in turn, requires rethinking of the ontological content of creativity, as well as the concept of “labor” with reference to its treatment by Karl Marx’ rethinking of it as the production of not only material goods, but also of the person itself. Moreover, creativity does not just form a person: it is a way of cultivating the entire social space. An unexpected move is provided by an appeal to a new social group – the precariat, which in science gives a lesson in openness to novelty and theoretical freedom. As a result, a deeper understanding of the social base of creativity arises, and a new strategy for the interaction of the scientific community with extra-paradigm groups and marginal individuals is being built. (shrink)

A decade ago, a useful word was coined in honor of May Day by radical Italian labor activists: "precarity." It referred at first to the increasingly precarious existence of working people "at the margins" -- women, youth, migrants. Then it expanded to apply to the growing "precariat" of the core labor force, the "precarious proletariat" suffering from the programs of deunionization, flexibilization and deregulation that are part of the assault on labor throughout the world.

The following interview was conducted on July 13, 2009 at the JFK Institute for Graduate Studies, Freie Universität in Berlin, shortly after a conference, entitled “Class in Crisis: Das Prekariat zwischen Krise und Bewegung,” at which Harvey delivered a keynote address. The conference, organized by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, engaged the political, socio-economic, and conceptual dimensions of the so-called precariat class. The precariat (das Prekariat or la précarité) is typically defined by short-term employment, persistent marginalization, and social insecurity—something (...) of a fragmented urban underclass whose precariousness is increasingly evident in traditionally middle-class economic life. While the concept of the precariat has yet to take root in English-language social theory, the work of Loïc Wacquant (who also delivered a keynote at the Berlin conference), for example, has been popularizing it. (shrink)

In this article, I respond to Laury Naranch’s and Mary Caputi’s discussion of my book Power and Feminist Agency in Capitalism (2017). In response to Naranch, I clarify how the political subject-in-outline translates into collective political action through the figure of the Chicana working-class woman. I also explain why the proletariat, more so than the precariat, implies a radical political imaginary if we rethink this concept in the context of my idea of the political subject-in-outline. I also clarify that (...) my chapters on Marx expose how Adorno and Marx have problematic imaginations of the working-class woman, which counter their otherwise radical imaginary. In response to Caputi, I clarify the meaning of capitalism in my book and underline that we need a rigorous critique of capitalism to counter the rise of the Far Right. I also explain why the fluid subject does not have agency and why the subject-in-outline is a better way to theorize transformative feminist agency. I also clarify that my conception of feminist political subjectivity does not assume a privileged vantage point outside power structures. (shrink)

En parallèle avec le dossier d’œuvres que Warren Neidich a préparé pour la rubrique Icônes, cet article pose les bases théoriques d’analyses conceptuelles et d’expérimentations politiques faisant du « cerveau sans organes » un principe de résistance aux dangers posés par le « cerveau câblé ». La multiplication d’interfaces promettant d’assurer une communication directe entre nos systèmes nerveux et nos appareils de computation est ici envisagée à travers la mutation du cognitariat du capitalisme cognitif en un « précariat surordonné » (...) du capitalisme neuronal, c’est-à-dire d’une force de travail disponible 24/7 dont les capacités cognitives, affectives, mémorielles et imaginatives seraient techniquement modulables selon les besoins de l’appareil productif. (shrink)

The process of integration of digital technologies into the structure of social production and distribution leads to a series of definite trends in capitalist development. These trends are regular and interdependent. The acceleration of information exchange provides an opportunity to replace the Fordism with a thriftier network model, which involves outsourcing and reducing the longevity of contractual obligations and hiring relationships, which leads to the precarization of labor of a certain social group, which can be described as “precariat”. The (...) change in working conditions leads to the change in ways of increasing labor productivity, which is the reason for the emergence of “societies of control” characterized by: distributed power, embedding previously external coercion into the personality, affective engineering, prolongation of the educational process, increasing tempo and rhythm of work, spreading the project as the form of work replacing routine forms, and the emergence of a liquid short-term identity inherent in representatives of the precariat. This article aims to discover and demonstrate the interconnection between these processes. Achieving this goal will open the way to a more thorough separate study of each of these processes in the future but this research will be made from the perspective of their systemic unity. According to the purpose of the article, the structure of work is the following: the first section is devoted to the acceleration of social time, which is connected with the compression of social space and with the change in scale in which commercial and state enterprises can operate. Quick positive feedback, which is provided by the digital network, leads to changes in the infrastructure of enterprises and the transformation of production and logistics models. In addition, the acceleration of the feedback between the employee and the employer leads to the precarization of labor, which is accompanied by the appearance of “societies of control”. (shrink)

This paper is a reflection on Peter Railton’s keynote speech at the Central APA in February 2015, especially on his disclosure of his struggle with clinical depression. Without attempting to deny the significance of Prof. Railton’s outing, we want to draw attention here to something that did not prominently figure in his speech: structural features of the philosophical profession that make people sick. In particular, we focus on the “ideology of smartness” in philosophy and how it creates a pathological double-bind (...) for those that come into the discipline from the margins, or find themselves in its margins. (shrink)

The author asks about the conceptual tools which would enable a critique of contemporary capitalism without falling back to Utopianism and its historically-discredited theses. With the help of paired categories like community–society, human dignity–self-awareness, need–desire, Gernot Böhme portrays the deficiencies of contemporary Western social reality, e.g. the steadily exhausting reserves of the highly-bureaucratised welfare state system, the rapidly mounting differences in income, or the negative moral and psychological effects of unemployment and the so-called precariat. Böhme presents his critique of (...) “aesthetic capitalism,” which does not satisfy human needs in the Marxist sense but rather the aesthetically-refined consumer desires of today’s affluent societies, in reference to the views of contemporary critical theory authorities. (shrink)

The following interview was conducted on July 13, 2009 at the JFK Institute for Graduate Studies, Freie Universität in Berlin, shortly after a conference, entitled “Class in Crisis: Das Prekariat zwischen Krise und Bewegung,” at which Harvey delivered a keynote address. The conference, organized by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, engaged the political, socio-economic, and conceptual dimensions of the so-called precariat class. The precariat (das Prekariat or la précarité) is typically defined by short-term employment, persistent marginalization, and social insecurity—something (...) of a fragmented urban underclass whose precariousness is increasingly evident in traditionally middle-class economic life. While the concept of the precariat has yet to take root in English-language social theory, the work of Loïc Wacquant (who also delivered a keynote at the Berlin conference), for example, has been popularizing it. (shrink)

This article reviews the theoretical and political history of the concept of precarity, used to describe various forms of insecurities, primarily those related to conditions of labor, employment, and wage. Precarity and the related neologism precariat have recently gained ground in Anglophone intellectual and political discussions. It is the premise of the article that, with an increasingly globalized economy, discussions and movement action based on precarity may be of growing importance in a Danish context. The aim of the article (...) is to show how the history of these concepts has unfolded in sociological discussions and social movement practices since the turn of the century. I begin with the sociological discussion about the concept of the precariat, a class formation based on the conditions and experiences of precarity. I then show how the concept of precarity has a history in activist thought beyond these sociological discussions and how social movements, based on this thought, throughout the 2000s have mobilized around the concept, primarily in the so-called EuroMayDay parades. In the last section, I discuss how the economic crisis has affected social movement practices and how labor unions have begun paying attention to the predicaments of precarity. (shrink)

Economic insecurity is an endemic problem across the rich countries of the Global North. What is the solution? This paper compares and contrasts two major proposals: the conventional welfare state package of public services and regulations versus a basic income. By comparing and contrasting these systems in three different contexts – a “nightwatchman” context, a neoliberal context, and a social democratic context – and carefully modeling the monetary equivalence between them, we are able to provide a more precise and compelling (...) comparison of the two systems than has yet been accomplished. We evaluate the two systems on the basis of economic security as well as a number of other important criteria, including the economic well-being of oppressed groups, power, carbon emissions, the gender division of labor, free time, social stigma, and transformative potential. We find that without a welfare state background, services and regulations are generally preferable for most vulnerable groups. However, as the welfare state develops, into a neoliberal or a social democratic context, basic income becomes a generally superior option. (shrink)