Framing ‘precarity’ through labour-power and class struggle

The paper is structured as follows: in the first section we briefly sketch how critical ideas on class and class struggle can inform the understanding of precarity, comparing this insight to the ‘institutionalist perspective’, whose main focus is the legal framework of employment. In the second section, Regulation School is reviewed and while its emphasis on class converges with considerations on precarity as developed here, the priority on ‘regimes of power’ and regimes of governance is not shared. Regulation School and the institutionalist perspective have had a huge influence on mainstream approaches, thus Kalleberg’s work is assessed within this frame. The third section tries to comprehend approaches that use the frame of ‘Standard Employment Relations’ (SER), that is: the regulation of labour produced by the regime of power of Fordism: feminist approaches and the anthropological literature on precarious labour in the Global South are assessed in that these are critical of SER as a historical universal fact. In the fourth section, classic Marxist approaches are criticised because, while individuating important features of precarity, the issue of class struggle is not prioritised: economistic and technological factors are given the centre stage and the fundamental issue of ‘primitive accumulation’ is considered only in historicistic sense.