Guy Standing, The Precariat.

St.-Denis, Xavier

GUY STANDING, The Precariat. The New Dangcrous Class. London: Bloomsbury, 2011, 198 p.

Guy Standing builds-up on some of his earlier work (Standing 1999) and political economy analytical framework to set the underlying narrative of The Precariat, which goes the following way. We are in the globalization era (1975-2008), and the laborist model of welfare is enduring a neoliberal offensive. Industrialized countries suffer from Chinindia's "unlimited supply of low-cost labor" (p. 26) competitive pressure; collective institutions are rolled-back while disembedding the economy and (re-)commodification become central elements of converging public policies across the globe. All this is the cause of great transformations, a prohiminent one being the increasing labor market flexibility. It consists of "transferring risks and insecurity onto workers and their families" (p. 1). This process toward more labor flexibility is behind the creation of a new class. Its emergence is the source of great apprehension.

From Standing's account follow pessimistic conclusions. The result of this great transformation and of labor market flexibility has been the creation of a global "precariat," consisting of many millions around the world without an anchor of stability. They are becoming a new dangerous class. They are prone to listen to ugly voices, and to use their votes and money to give those voices a political platform of increasing influence. The very success of the "neoliberal" agenda, embraced to a greater or lesser extent by governments of all complexions, has created an incipient political monster.

The Precariat investigates the situation from two different angles. On the one hand, Standing writes as a scholar making social policy recommendations in order to tackle insecurity problems related to labor flexibility. On the other, Standing plays the role of a social commentator and tries to contribute to the making of the precarious workers into a class-for-itself able to challenge neoliberal capitalism. The mix of both perspectives makes a rather complete, polemic book.

In the first place, The Precariat is about class and status stratification. This precariat is a new class and it is much different from the traditional working class: it is nothing like a new proletariat ("a working class of stabilized labourers" [p. 96]). Instead, it is composed of flexible workers living a precarious existence. Those workers can be identified by two elements: their lack of labor-related security, and the absence of any sense or prospect of career and occupational identity. They are also denied several rights usually granted with industrial citizenship. This makes them denizens, or citizens with partial rights.

Although Standing identifies varieties of precariat on a sociodemographic group basis (women, youth, old agers, migrants, convicts, and so on), the relevance of his conceptual effort lies in the demonstration that precariousness is a transversal variable which describes best the macro effects of labor market flexibilization. Different groups are consequently put under the same umbrella and turned into one cohesive class, at least in itself, at the conceptual level. At first sight, it is easy to dismiss Standing's effort by saying his classification is too broad, that it forgets much of the detailed scholarship on labor market segmentation that has been done since the 1970s. However, the aim of The Precariat is not to conceptually break down workers into different labor status, as much of labor market segmentation scholarship does. Instead, the aim is to conceptualize the underlying dynamic behind the multiple forms of flexible, nonstandard employment status.

For Standing, the laborist model of welfare was put into place for labor, and more precisely for the industrial proletariat. It is now inadequate, and corrupted for many reasons. More precisely, it is unable to answer the needs of the precariat, such as the need to take into account "tertiary time" (the blurrying of borders between time blocks which were clearly separated under the previous laborist model of society--homeplace-workplace, work-labor-leisure, and so on) or "work-for-labor" (unpaid work in order to gain employment). The collapsing laborist model is inefficient at ensuring income security and the sense of a career in this context.

Then, the big question comes: "what is to be done?" For Standing, the answer is clear: either inferno or paradise. Inferno is the use of panopticon strategies and social darwinism principles as means of governmentality to contain the dangerous class. Paradise is a renewal of the progressive left with solutions adapted to the precariat. Standing himself has been pushing for such progressive policies for the last two decades. They are guided by two principles. First, security, or universal basic citizen income and work rights (replacing means-tested assistance and outdated labor-based entitlements). Second, agency, or the creation of representative associational structures for the precariat designed to favor collective action and provide it with bargaining Voice. More broadly, Standing wishes the progressive left to turn toward the precariat, the new class, in order to renew itself in the face of the prevailing neoliberal ideas.

However, the use of the word dangerous tells a lot about Standing's ambiguous attitude toward the precariat. On the one hand, it is a victim of labor flexibilization and a class-in-the-making which has a great potential of political mobilization. On the other hand however, it is a threat Standing considers with apprehension. The precariat is evil and a potential source of catastrophe. This is exactly Standing's vocable through the book. Obviously, he stays far from nineteenth-century conservatives who labeled casual laborers and the urban poors of darkest London as criminals and deviants. Nevertheless, he is close to Marx and Engels' anxiety in the Manifesto of the Communist Party: "The dangerous class [lumpenproletariat] [...] may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue" (Marx and Engels [1848] 1969:20). Standing's precariat could be such an unpredictable, dangerous class, he says. And he clearly believes the political monster the precariat threatens to turn into can only be defused by a new progressive political agenda--politics of paradise.

XAVIER ST-DENIS, McGill University

References

Marx, K. and F. Engels. [1848] 1969. "The Manifesto of the Communist Party." Pp. 1-68 in Marx/Engels Selected Works, Vol. 1. Translated by F. Engels. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Retrieved September 15, 2012 (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/ download/pdf/Manifesto.pdi).

Standing, G. 1999. Global Labour Flexibility. New York: St. Martin's Press.