Precarity, subjectivity and class struggle

In this paper, what may be perceived as a subjective view — that precarity is the more overt form of blackmail capitalism imposes on a specific section of the working class — is presented as the central argument about, and against, precarity. I argue that precarious employment entails, and is connected to, a specific manifestation of being working class, in which material pressure on the owners of labour-power forces them to behave more directly as such: as people reduced to being mere owners of labour-power that must be sold on the labour market. Precarity is part of what Walter Benjamin (1999: 842) calls “modernity as the time of hell,” in the sense that an entire class of people is — suddenly and without warning — cut off from stable employment and confronted with the impelling need to rely on wage labour to survive, only to struggle in securing even insecure work. The necessity of a stable income is experienced as “hell” because it is a conflictual necessity — one that must be understood within the framework of a class-divided society. Thus, this paper argues that in the current historical moment, precarisation is proletarianisation. I therefore understand precarity as the naked face of wage subordination, or even wage slavery. Section 2 presents a speculative argument that aims to frame this claim within critical and objective considerations. In the spirit of a still-developing “critical theory of economic objectivity” (Bonefeld and O’Kane 2022: 6), I seek to push the analysis of precarious employment to a deeper level. According to the speculative argument developed in that section, precarity marks the abstract space between labour-power and abstract labour. The second part of the paper offers a critique of the post-operaismo (post-workerist) approach, associated with the tradition of Autonomous Marxism, and its framing of precarity. This evaluation is carried out in a spirit of dialogue, in recognition of the prominence of this current, the depth of its analysis, the novelty of its conceptual frames, and its emphasis on conflictual perspectives that foreground issues of subjectivity. There are undoubtedly points of convergence with the theoretical current of Open Marxism: post-operaismo identifies objective tendencies within the phenomenon of precarisation. However, the critique advanced here proposes a reorientation of the analysis toward class struggle. Through Adorno, I try to advance a reflection on class and on the question of “who is the subject” and explore how we might better understand “who is struggling.”