Theoretical considerations on precarity

In his latest book, John Holloway (2022: 5-7) asks us to start again, “not from fear, but from hope”. Or “better, start from antagonism, from struggle”. Critically understood, the antagonistic society is the material force that moves the theoretical understanding of the social process. Rather than being the “foundation” of the argument proposed here, the antagonistic society is the drive for understanding social phenomena and must be placed at the start of the exposition of issues around precarious employment, precarity, job insecurity and the suffering around these social conditions. So, the starting point may be an indefinite ‘people in job insecurity’, rather than precarity as a social phenomenon, even if the two are interlinked.
To use critical terms, we can frame individuals in job insecurity as ‘living labour power’ that needs to be sold as a commodity in exchange for wages, where ‘living labour power’ does not immediately mean neither individual personhood nor a precise group of people. Rather, this commodification signals the social pressure on the generality of working people and it is a social pressure that let emerge an inherent class antagonism, because individuals have to struggle to attain a certain degree of security of income through the security of employment. It is from this social existence within the antagonistic society that we will try to frame precarity as the immediate pressure to turn work into wages. The starting point then would be the social existence of human beings, but the division and the struggle they are subjected to, cannot be fully expressed through the work-logos in cognition (Bloch, 1986: 256)