Precarious Writings

Abstract

Scholarly debates over precarity are gaining unprecedented visibility across fields. From labor insecurity forming a growing dangerous class to the existential condition of vulnerability induced by millennial capitalism, precarity has become an object of both empirical study and theoretical reflection. While European social movements have been organizing and writing about precarity from the late 1970s to today, still, from the US perspective, the term precarity might be mistakenly taken as strictly a scholarly invention. "Precarious Writings" offers an important corrective to the ways that precarity has been taken up in anthropology and cognate disciplines, addressing the specific epistemological and political limitations of existing usages and returning the concept to its overlooked grassroots history in social movement struggles in southern Europe. By returning precarity to these activist roots, this paper makes the case for the recognition of social movements as knowledge producers as well as sources of theoretical insight and innovation in their own right. By failing to recognize precarity's development within contentious struggles, scholarly uses miss how the activist notion enables identity reformulations toward a kind of "precarity pride." That is, the politicization of insecurity has become a source for nurturing a fluid space of political creation.A decade before Guy Standing wrote The Precariat (2014), the precariat had already named itself. In the Fall of 2004 in London, anti-globalization activists drafted "The Middlesex Declaration of Europe's Precariat," a manifesto that set forth a call for a Pan-European May Day and listed a set of basic demands. . . . Although Standing doesn't acknowledge his intellectual debt to the movement . . . what needs to be done is to rescue its theoretical legacy.