Entreprecariat reader synopses and abstracts

https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Calendars:Networked_Media_Calendar/Networked_Media_Calendar/26-09-2018_-Event_1

Synopsis and Abstract

Steve's synopsis

Writer: Michel Foucault

Title: The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978-1979

Publisher and date: Picador, 2004

Abstract: 
At the heart of Foucault’s notion of governmentatlity is the idea that everyone from the office cleaner to the director of the company has an investment in an understanding of themselves as economic units, and as producers of their own freedom. This understanding grew after the enlightenment (1700s), through the construction of the welfare state (1940s) and into the present neo-liberal era. At the heart of governance is the production of the desire of the subject to improve, to calculate their own best interests, and to minimize risk to themselves

Synopsis: "Toward the end of his life Michel Foucault became fascinated with how, during the seventeenth century and after, the state became preoccupied with the care of the individual citizen. This is particularly curious because it was at times when the state was at its most violent that it made its greatest investment in the care of its citizenry (during the French Revolution and World War Two, for instance). It is almost as if a paradoxical contract had been agreed upon: if you are prepared to die for the state then the state owes you your wellbeing. The antinomy arises: as the state apparatus constructs large destructive mechanisms (land armies and weapons systems) it simultaneously constructs technologies of care (culminating in the social democratic welfare state in the twentieth century). Foucault characterizes the antinomy with the phrase: ‘Go get slaughtered and we promise you a long and pleasant life. Life insurance is connected with a death command.’[1] It was in this period that the state was formed as the state per se, that it made it its business to make a political object of human happiness.

It was in the seventeenth century that the state formulated the notion of police, not in the sense of a force that would fight and prevent crime, but as a form of statecraft that would oversee the wellbeing of its citizenry, which would view (and construct) the citizen not only through their judicial status but as working, trading, living beings. By the nineteenth century German universities taught Polizeiwissenschaft, which concerned itself with describing, defining and organizing the new technologies of state power. It was then that the happiness of individuals was seen as a requirement for the survival and development of the state and it also became axiomatic that positive intervention in the behaviour of individuals was the state’s task. It was within this context that the political rationality arose that, as the individual had an effect on society (either positively or negatively) it was beholden on the state to compile information about the wellbeing and aptitude of the individual. This political technology, Foucault argues, provides the basic reason for the existence of the modern state and is therefore more important than any arguments about ideology, because whichever government is in power, the needs of the state prevail. The state can govern directly, through legislation, or indirectly by formulating values of individuality that the individual will seek to preserve.[2]

We now see the emergence of two seemingly contradictory values within modern society: the state produces the individual and the state sets itself the task to care for that individual. At the moment the individual is defined, however, he or she seeks autonomy from the state and, in order to foster their independence pays close attention to better self-management (forgetting perhaps that a well managed and efficient individual is precisely what the state desires). The state has to deal with a similar paradox to the individual, this is generated by the new forms of freedom liberalism produces (“freedom of the market, freedom to buy and sell, the free exercise of property rights, freedom of discussion, possible freedom of expression”). [3] Whilst the state produces these freedoms it must at the same time create regulative devices that describe limits to those freedoms. Neo-liberalism provides some accommodation of that paradox, because it is these freedoms that serve to construct the self-dependent neo-liberal subject – Homo-Economicus – who goes beyond the logic of the welfare state.

Liberalism and Neo-liberalism share a fundamental political reasoning. This reasoning – echoing Adam Smith’s conviction that it is in man’s nature to ‘barter, truck, and exchange’ – holds that the economic man is the subject at the basis of politics.[4] The difference between the liberal and neo-liberal positions is characterized by the shift in emphasis from trade (in the liberal era) to competition (in the era of neo-liberalism). In the latter scheme the human subject comes to be understood, and to understand himself, as ‘human capital’.[5]

Given that the basic elements of the self are biologically determined (our body, intelligence, skin colour et cetera) we are beholden to make investment in the self in order to maximize its earning potential and compete in the market place. In this sense, Foucault suggests, ‘homo economicus is an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself.’[6] In today’s labour market where the distinction between labour and leisure are blurred – the world of wofe (work-life) and prosumers (producer-consumers) – the production and care of the self become matters of urgency. Foucault:

The new governmental reason needs freedom; therefore, the new art of government consumes freedom. It produces freedom, which means it must produce it. It must produce it, it must organise it. The new art of government therefore appears as the management of freedom, not in the sense of the imperative: ‘be free’, with the immediate contradiction that this imperative may contain. (…) [T]he liberalism we can describe as the art of government formed in the eighteenth century entails at its heart a productive/destructive relationship with freedom. Liberalism must produce freedom, but this very act entails the establishment of limitations, controls, forms of coercion, and obligations relying on threats, et cetera.[7]


At the heart of Foucault’s governmentatlity is the notion that everyone from the office cleaner to the director of the company has an investment in an understanding of themselves as economic units, and as producers of their own freedom. It is this belief in the self that allows for control through mechanisms of governmentality through the investment in the economic unit of the self. In the neo-liberal scheme rights and laws give way to an emphasis on (self)interest and (self)investment within a context of competition. This is when the economics of desire and affect become so important to the art of politics. Jason Read puts it succinctly: ‘The state channels flows of interest and desire by making desirable activities inexpensive and undesirable activities costly, counting on the fact that subjects calculate their interests.’[8] At the heart of governance is the production of the desire of the subject to improve, to calculate their own best interests, and to minimize risk to themselves."

From Masters Of Reality, p 105-110, Sternberg Press, 2011

[SEE PAD FOR DETAILS]

Pedro

Writer — Jamie Woodcock

Title — Subjectivity in the "Gig Economy": From the entreprecariat to base union militancy

Publisher and date — Pervasive Labour Union Zine #11 - The Entreprecariat, September 10th, 2017

Abstract

This article addresses the issue of the rise of the “gig-economy“ where temporary positions are endorsed instead of long-term work contracted jobs and also the relationship between this phenomenon and the digital mediated entrepreneurialism. It establishes the relationships among the development of the “gig-economy“, the digital context that this one lies in and the effect that both have on the rise of the Entreprecariat. Self-employed/independent workers are attracted for a job where they find a precarious sense of flexibility and are stuck to a platform that is in need of real demands made online. The deprivation of rights imposed to self-employed riders was used as a tool in the food-delivery sector. Workers that found themselves in this contractless situation claimed their right to organize strikes without the need to follow trade union rules.

Synopsis

Subjectivity in the “Gig Economy: From the entreprecariat to base union militancy” is an article by Jamie Woodcock published in the Issue #11 of the Pervasive Labour Union Zine from September 2017. The article addresses the issue of the rise of the “gig-economy“ where temporary positions are endorsed instead of long-term work contracted jobs and also the relationship between this phenomenon and the digital mediated entrepreneurialism. The author starts the article establishing the relationships among the development of the “gig-economy“, the digital context that this one lies in and the effect that both have on the rise of the Entreprecariat. In this precarious economy what is portrayed is that in the foundation of this contractless job positions there are employment places that provide a lot of freedom to those who are applying.

Companies created some sort of propaganda about this free space for someone with limited availability, but with the fast rise of what the author calls the “platform capitalism“ where companies outsource their work through online systems, the reality is that people are in reality in a precarious flexibility. Self-employed/independent workers are stuck to a platform that is in need of real demands made online, no minimum wages or sick pays are assured and you have to invest in your working equipment. It is interesting how this deprivation of rights was used by employers has a tool in the food-delivery sector. Workers that find themselves in this contractless situation and that are used as a company outsource claimed their right to organize strikes without the need to follow trade union rules. This strategy was only possible because, in theory, they are their self-employed. Workers who had no prior knowledge of organizing in mainstream trade unions are now taking action in their own self-union organizations.

Jamie Woodcock finishes his article raising awareness to the increase of this kind of business models and the fact that they are being used across different sectors but also bring up the fact that these self-employed people are reorganizing themselves collectively as a counter-power to work in the so-called “gig-economy“.


Paloma

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Tancredi'

Writers: Joost de Bloois, Frans Willem Korsten

Title: Introduction: From Autonomism to Post-Autonomia: From Class Composition to a New Political Anthropology?

Publisher and date: 'Rethinking Marxism', Volume 26, Issue 2, April 2014

Abstract:This essay is a summary of the historical and ideological development of Post-Autonomia starting from the operaist and autonomist movements to its international situation. Where the beginning of the '80s signed the closure of the opening of an era of uncertainty and precarization, instead of a new horizon of self-valorization and autonomy, Post-Autonomia tries to resynthesize the old discourse and translate it to face to the new complexity of the relation between capitalism, state, multitude and subjectivity with the intent of delineate the role of the new non-subject in constant transformation.

Synopsis: In 1970 Autonomism exposed the new role of the state and the intimate working of biopolitics and surveillance in the Italian crisis context called 'years of lead', with the aim to put into practice self-evaluation and autonomy in the very moment of its historical disappearance from the core of the social factory' (Tronti), later neo-liberalism. At the end of the '70s and with the repression of autonomism in the early '80, the end of every possibility to implement the emancipatory ideal and the birth of a new series of suffering subjects was decreed. Here the debate from premonition of an anthropological mutation (Autonomism) moves on the research for a possible antidote through the direct confrontation with the complexity of the real (Post-Autonomism).

The analysis of the social condition in the new 'state of exception' (Agamben), is seen as the need to create a new social sphere outside of power (Berardi), in a reality in which a radical disjunction has occurred. Sometimes perceived as rupture (Morfino) or an ontological metamorphosis, that manifests itself in a general 'absence of memory and future' (Negri) that needs a search for continuity (Shukaitis). In this context the formation of a new subject is emerging. Assuming that the solution of the state to the crisis consists in reconstructing the system by reintegrating the antagonistic components (Negri), and that this process generates an ambiguity of values and an inability to develop a radical imagination (Shukaitis), arise the needs for awareness of such mechanisms, of how self-valorization is absorbed and twisted by the perversion of the state and capital (Berardi), and the need to avoid capitalist narratives of reappropriation. The focus then shifts to the role of 'cognitariat'. Where the bipolar logic, hyperactivity of work and consequent depression, characterizes the contemporary subject drained by the crisis and transformed into a non-subject opposed to its juridical person, the only solution is the autonomy of mental labour, capable of recombining the social elements in their perennial mutation according to a non-accumulative / non-competitive / non-aggressive principle (Berardi).

The analysis of the new subject is also articulated in its relationship with the multitude. Where the politicization of the processes of subjectification has generated branded and distorted subjects (Tiqqun), the work of the multitude is described as an animal body, embodying the 'animal spirit', feeding the parasitic economy of advanced capitalism. Here the redefinitions of the commons enable us to face this 'evil' nature of the multitude, and means recovering the productive animal force before its turned into the dark matter of capitalism.(Pasquinelli). This ambivalence of the multitude is also seen as the force of negation of language that radicalize aggression, and the reconfiguration of the political animal as a linguistic animal.The uncertainty introduced by the moltitude, derives from the impossibility open to the world of leaving the natural state, and the self-government, against this ambivalence of language, is configured in the use of the ritual as a process of acknowledgment of the uncertainty, primal setting of the original hominid and not as something that should be removed(Virno).

In consclusion the discourse is addressed into an anthropological investigation, social and individual, as the main feature of Post-Autonomism, capable of criticize the different incarnations of the anthropological subject, to not be stuck in a 'common' as voluntary servitude and self-dictatorship. The riappropriation of the 'common' must first of all produce a drastic auto-critique and this lead to the necessity to rethink the character of academic knowledge production and the intellectual. Starting from the constation that universities are not anymore the avantguard of knowledge-production, is proposed the 'machinic intellectual', one-man, interface and resistor of the circuit in contrapposition to the intellectual as representative of a large social cause(Bratich), and the critical use of academic disciplines to expose underground realities as cartography (Casa-Cortès, Cobarrubias).

Bo

Writer
(Edited by Trebor Scholz) Tiziana Terranova

Title
(Digital labour the internet as playground and factory) Chapter: Free Labor

Publisher and date
Taylor & Francis 2013

Abstract
A critical concept of the essential role played by free labor and how the digital labor is implemented in its complicated relation to the capitalist society.
Synopsis
The Chapter starts explaining about the discontents on the digital media industry including dot-com boom and 24-7 electronic sweatshop. With her text, she describes what it means to be a digital worker today which points to an unavoidable opposition towards the glamorisation of digital labor that emphasises on the modern exploitation of manpower.

This idea brings to another story about describing a process of the society-factory that have shifted to a truly complex machine. The author supports the argument on how we should speak of labor in cultural and technical way. By mentioning a postmodern socialist who referred a Cyborg Manifesto which explicitly explained the antipathy of Marxist analyses of labor, she also discussed the Internet as a site of disintermediation. Furtherrmore she explained that the chapter doesn’t deliver a judgmental opinion of the Internet on society, however it map the way that the Internet is a place to connect to the autonomist social factory.

In conclusion, the author wrapped up the story with the centralisation of cultural and technical work of the Internet and its broad activity on advanced capitalist societies.

Artemis

Writer — Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri

Title — Entrepreneurship of the Multitude, Assembly

Publisher and date — Oxford University Press, 2017

Abstract

In chapter 9 of “Assembly”, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri attempt to redefine the meaning of “entrepreneurship”. The “entrepreneurship of the multitude” as proposed by the authors, is capable of forming new social combinations, pointing to autonomous social production and reproduction. The “multitude” has the potential not only to reject the current social system as we know it, but use its entrepreneurial spirit to build the ground where “social wealth is shared in common”.

Synopsis

In the “Entrepreneurship of the Multitude”, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri perceive language and communication as significant political tools. They argue that neoliberal politicians often distort political “terms and concepts” and separate them from their original historical context, in order to support their arguments. With a focus on political antagonism, Hardt and Negri suggest that we should claim back words that have been diverted and give them our own interpretations, hence forming new alternatives. In chapter 9 of "Assembly", there is an attempt to redefine the meaning of “entrepreneurship”.

The chapter begins with Joseph Schumpeter’s description of the “entrepreneur”, as a person whose special ability is to create “new combinations” among already “existing workers, ideas, technologies, resources and machines”. The construction of these new “machinic assemblages” is a vital aspect of productivity growth. The heroic figure of the capitalist entrepreneur, portrays a “man of action”, who “gets things done” and becomes a role-model for the masses.

However, this perception hides an important part of the entrepreneurial process, which is the labor itself. Under the praised work of the capitalist entrepreneur, lies the constant expropriation of the cooperative power of the multitude. The entrepreneurial function does not belong a manager or a guru. On the contrary, it is accomplished through cooperation. As the main actors of production process, the workers collaborate, while limiting their individuality and thus create social wealth. Under this condition, the maximum human powers can be unveiled.

At this point, Hardt and Negri introduce the novel term of “entrepreneurship of the multitude”. In postmodern global economy, the production process is progressively based in new networks of collaboration and communication, in coordination with contemporary technologies. On these terms, the labor gradually acquires a degree of autonomy in production. Provided that today workers manage their social relationships and make decisions together, in the future they could set goals on their own, and eventually accomplish self-direction.

In regard to the term itself, "entrepreneurship of the multitude" can be tricky and lead to misinterpretation. Hardt and Negri clarify that their approach stands apart from “social entrepreneurship”. They argue that after the collapse of the welfare state, this practice, despite its rhetoric, failed to provide sustainable aid to the weakest parts of society. Instead, it proved harmful to existing solidarity networks of local communities in developing countries, by forcing them to follow the logic of the market.

The “entrepreneurship of the multitude” as proposed by the authors, is capable of forming new social combinations, pointing to autonomous social production and reproduction. Admittedly, people are not naturally oriented to collective self-rule. Nevertheless, Hardt and Negri believe in the power of people’s assembly. Social movements need to connect with labor organizing, and form what is referred as “social unionism”.

In conclusion, the “multitude” has the potential not only to reject the current social system as we know it, but use its entrepreneurial spirit to build novel forms of cooperation. Ultimately, the triumph of private property will be abandoned. In its place, the “autonomous organization of social cooperation” can build the ground where “social wealth is shared in common”.

Rita

Writer — Richard Sennet

Title — The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (chapter 1 and 2)

Publisher and date — W. W. Norton & Company, 2000

Abstract

The relation between work, time and the more personal aspect of life is a focal point in Sennet’s book. The state of today’s economy, described as “flexible capitalism”, has forced a constant rotation of jobs, cities, and friends which can be stimulating but can also contribute to an unstructured and meaningless life.
The author addresses these problems by analyzing his encounter with Rico, a successful man suffering from the uncertainty of life and the lack of longstanding values in society.

Synopsis

The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (chapter 1 and 2) addresses the problems and challenges that have arisen in an economy that has changed tremendously in the last 30 years. The author Richard Sennet talks about “flexible capitalism” as an economic and political system where everything feels fast-paced and unstable. Values of loyalty and devotedness were substituted by detachment to accommodate more superficial relations.

The first chapters, Routine and Drift, are centered in a working man called Rico. Rico is economically successful but he suffers from the uncertainty of his work-life. The traditional idea of building a lifelong career in one place has changed and for the new worker this means shifting lives often. This constant change of jobs, cities, and friends makes the fractured pieces of Rico’s life difficult to understand. It’s hard to build a story for himself.
Although Rico understands the characteristics of the new worker and adapts to his new situation, he lacks the lasting values and guiding principles he feels are necessary to educate his children. The old debate between the philosophers Denis Diderot and Adam Smith resurfaces, discussing if routine is necessary to compose a life or if we should search for more flexible experiences.

The author provides a historical contextualization to these issues, writing about how time and routine has influenced the management and workforce of factories since the transition from manual labor to more sophisticated industrial systems. A pin factory and the Ford Motor Company are examples of how time control can lead to better productivity or to depression. There is no clear answer on how the human being will react to the continuous lack of routine in today’s dynamic economy but Rico embodies some of the conflicts that are already surfacing in his personal life.

Simon

Writer: Lidia Pereira

Title: Towards an Incoherent Refusal of Efficiency

Publisher and date: Pervasive Labour Union Zine Issue #11: The Entreprecariat (ed. Silvio Lorusso), 2018

Abstract: A historical account of the scientific management of labour and the concept of efficiency leads to the central question of this essay; what functions as deviant and cannot be exploited by capital, within neoliberalism? Lidia Pereira proposes incoherence as a counterbehaviour to promote acceptance, rather than adaption to the norm.

Synopsis: Lidia Pereira's essay begins with an etymological and historical tracing of the modern sense of efficiency as an ideal condition of labour. Arising in conjunction with the nascent Industrial Revolution, this notion of efficiency was spurred on by proponents such as Frederick Winslow Taylor, a driving force in the Efficiency Movement, and a Soviet pioneer of scientific management of labour, Alexei Gastev, who both held that workers should operate in machine-like ways in order to optimise efficiency.

With an escalated demand for production due to the outbreak of World War I, the limitations of the human body and psyche were revealed, resulting in the establishment of the field of industrial psychology in the United Kingdom and the development of employee management techniques in the United States. These aimed to rethink efficiency by mediating the relationship between company and employer, aiming to instil in workers a sense of personal investment in the company’s success.

This enmeshment of worker’s subjectivity within the life of the company led to a shift in responsibility for addressing discontent with systematic inequality from employer to worker by "centering problems on the self and its immediate conditions". Pereira makes a connection between this individualisation with an obscured infra- and superstructure, leading to the collective exploitation of workers. Isabelle Lorey's research on the governmentality of workers, drawn from Foucault’s biopolitics and History of Sexuality draws the concept of self-development, or an individual's need to govern and adapt themselves as an extension of state power. This leads to a question; why might individuals opt for self-precarization in Western capitalist societies? These individuals are often celebrated within neoliberal discourse as entrepreneurial role models that are coherent with the hegemonic norm; white, male, nationalised and with highly developed social and creative skills. Pereira suggest it is a state-imposed narrative that imbues these individuals with authenticity while obscuring decisive factors that hinder access to equal opportunity for those outside of the norm, shifting responsibility for failure and its consequences (for both those who are forced into precarity and those who choose self-precarization) from the state to the governed subject.

The pressure on those outside the norm to adapt in order to gain acceptance leads to their diversity being conflated with their ability to be productive, but only if these differences are coherent with their official portrait and to the extent that they may be exploited by capital. Social pressures to self-improve and preoccupation with individuals “becoming themselves” through self-promotion and networking is paradoxically at the cost of building important social bonds.

In conclusion Pereira offers coherence as a concept to be explored further, proposing that by taking an incoherent, inconsistent and idiosyncratic position, individuals who deviate from the norm could be protected from exploitation by refusing to adapt.

Bi Yi

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LIST OF TEXTS

MICHEL FOUCAULT The Birth of Biopolitics (Steve= i will write a synopsis of this text)

The Creative Response in Economic History Joseph A Schumpeter

William Powell The Anarchist Cookbook

(ed. Silvio Lorusso) Pervasive Labour Union Zine #11 - The Entreprecariat

http://ilu.servus.at/issue11.html

Pedro will write about this text from the Pervasive Labour Union Zine #11 - The Entreprecariat Subjectivity in the "Gig Economy":From the entreprecariat to base union milirancy Jamie Woodcok

Simon will write a synposis of this text from the Pervasive Labour Union Zine #11 Lidia Pereira Towards an Incoherent Refusal of Efficiency

Zygmunt Bauman From Pilgrim to Tourist - or a Short History of Identity

http://pages.mtu.edu/~jdslack/readings/CSReadings/Bauman_From_Pilgrim_to_Tourist.pdf

Assembly - Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri Chapter 9: Entrepreneurship of the Multitude (Artemis = I will write a synopsis of this text)

Hito Steyrerl: Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary War (Biyi) Chapters: Proxy Politics Signal and Noise,,Apophenia and Pattern (Mis) Recognition,,Medya: Autonomy of Images

Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron The Californian Ideology

Paul Graham Hackers and Painters

Introduction: From Autonomism to Post-Autonomia: From Class Composition to a New Political Anthropology? by Joost de Bloois, Frans Willem Korsten [TANCRE]

Richard Sennett The Corrosion of Character, The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism chapter 1 and 2 (RITA)

Digital labour the internet as playground and factory - Bohye

Fake It till You Make It - Genesis of the Entrepreneurial Precariat-Silvio Lorusso (Paloma)