Precarity - An Introduction

Certain events from the past several weeks have provoked me to think about a topic which I have not studied in depth up to this time.  Those events are largely focused on the collapse of the cryptocurrency bubble last year and the corresponding destruction of the "investments" many poorer people made in "crypto" in order to increase their wealth.  (See "FTX Crypto Crash Threatens Life Savings of Working People", Truthout, November 2022, and "The Cryptocurrency Crash Is Replaying 2008 as Absurdly as Possible", Foreign Policy, May 2022.)  The collapse of economic bubbles in capitalist societies is a worthy topic of consideration in its own right  But my interest now lies in the motives and vulnerabilities of the ordinary people who were led to invest in "crypto" in the first place.  Their choice to invest was one of several coping mechanisms which they employed in order to try to deal with their social and economic situation.  That situation can be described by a single word: precarity.

Precarity is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as "the state of being uncertain or likely to get worse," and, "a situation in which someone's job or career is always in danger of being lost."  The Journal of Cultural Anthropology describes precarity as ". . . an emerging abandonment that pushes us away from a livable life . . . [It is] the politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks . . . becoming differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death."  The University of Georgia has an article on its "Neoliberalism Guide for Educators" webpage which describes precarity in concrete human terms, starting with the questions "Have you ever or do you currently live paycheck to paycheck?  Do you work 40 hours a week or more and still can't afford rent?"  We who live in the United States may be tempted to look on precarity solely in its American-style manifestations of inequality such as racism and the effects of tycoon capitalism, neoliberalism, privatization, and the destruction of social safety nets.  But precarity is a global phenomenon which can be seen even in ethnically homogeneous societies, as described by Hao Jingfang's "near science fiction" novelette titled, Folding Beijing.  (You can listen to an audio recording of her story at StarShipSofa.)  Precarity naturally arises whenever the people at the top of a society concentrate nearly all of the wealth of that society in the hands of a chosen few, thus creating a massive underclass out of the many who are not of the chosen few.  Those many become the precariat.

It is quite natural to assume that the precariat consist primarily of those historically marginalized populations without access to higher education, whose historical economic and social standing has condemned them to a blue-collar or manual labor or McJob sort of existence.  But while this is true, it is also true than an increasing number of white-collar, college-educated workers have found themselves forced into the precariat due to the destruction of long-standing arrangements between corporate masters and skilled professional labor.  For a recent example of this, consider the large number of lawyers who were laid off in 2022.  This progression of precarity among white-collar workers has been taking place for at least three decades.  (Four decades actually, if one counts the day that former President Ronald Reagan fired all of the air traffic controllers who were part of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration staff.)

Precarity is quite naturally a highly uncomfortable way of life.  This discomfort - frequently amounting to great pain and distress - quite naturally provokes a search for coping mechanisms from the people who comprise the precariat.  The usual suspects among coping mechanisms include things like the abuse of alcohol, opioids, and other drugs, or drowning oneself in other passive entertainments.  But my focus is on those more active attempts to cope which members of the precariat employ in trying to transform their situation.  So I am planning to write a series of posts on precarity, on the precariat, and on the attempts by members of the precariat to transform their situation.  A tentative outline of that series is as follows:

1. The Precariat - An Overview (This has been partly covered in today's post.)
2. My own experience of precarity
• As a teen
• As a college student
• Surprising encounters in the white-collar world
3. Origins and Spread of the Precariat
• The Link Between the Origins of Precarity and the Rise of Neoliberal (that is, radical libertarian free-market) capitalism
4. The Composition and Location of the Precariat
• Its global nature
• Its local expressions
5. The Coping Mechanisms of the Precariat
• What Doesn't Work
• Unwise "Side Hustles"
• The False Promises of Bubbles
• The Role of the "Advice" (Motivational Speaking) Industry and "Influencer" Culture
• Political Dead-Ends
• What Does (or May) Work
6. The Precariat And the Great Resignation
7. Future Directions Of The Precariat
• As Passive Victims of Forces Outside Themselves
• As Active and Activized Agents Who Take Charge Of Their Own Future
• The Potential for Such Action
• The Possible Constraints Preventing Such Action
• The Precariat in "Babylon"

Each major heading in this list will be covered in a separate blog post.  Each major heading will also require some research in order to do it justice.  But fortunately, the extreme busyness which characterized my life during most of 2022 seems to be easing up.  (I have rediscovered the fact that sleeping, for instance, is delicious!  And I look forward to chillin' with my guitar in my backyard when the weather warms up . . . )  The time taken in researching each of these topics will be time well-spent, and hopefully it will prove useful to the readers of this blog, as I believe that an increasing number of us will be forced to deal with precarity (or even be swept involuntarily into the precariat) in the days to come.

The Exports of Grandma's House

In a previous blog post I mentioned my discovery of Chinese science fiction and how it has become a manifestation of a new cultural soft power.  As part of that discovery, I stumbled a few months ago on a delightful short story titled, "Summer at Grandma's House" (" 祖母家的夏天"), written by Hao Jingfang (郝景芳).  (See this also to get a fuller picture of Ms. Hao.)  The story is ostensibly about the process by which a young college student's struggle to identify his future direction in life is resolved during the student's summer stay with his grandmother.  The grandmother is not the central figure in the story.  However, she does play a major role, and thus we get a rather full glimpse of what sort of person she is and what she does with her life.  It is that glimpse which attracted my attention to the point that the young man's story became almost secondary to me.  For it is the picture of Grandma that illustrates some of the themes which my blog has addressed over the last four or five years, and especially during the last two years.  So let's go to Grandma's house together, shall we?

First, although it's only incidental to the story, let's take a look at the house itself.  The story describes the house as a "little two-story bungalow...at the foot of the mountain, its red roof hidden in the dense treetops."  As I tried to visualize the scene, the word "bungalow" caught my attention, as this was a word which I had heard in conversation from time to time over the years, yet whose definition had never been explained to me.  (To add a bit of confusion, it appears from Google's translation algorithm that the original Chinese phrase could also be translated "villa."  But in my mind, that translation ruins the picture somewhat.  What do computers know anyway?)  So I looked up "bungalow"... and discovered that the word has more than one definition.  The definition I liked best (which also matches the description of the house in the story) is "a small house or cottage that is either single-storey or has a second storey built into a sloping roof (usually with dormer windows), and may be surrounded by wide verandas." - Wikipedia.  Think of something like this, except that the roof color is wrong:

A rather ordinary house, no?  But let's consider the things Grandma did in that house.  For Grandma was a biologist/biochemist who had been a college professor before her retirement and who now had a lab on the second floor of her house.  In other words, although the house looked quite ordinary, there were extraordinary things going on inside it.  The manifestation of hidden extraordinariness extended even to the furnishings of the house, whose front door opened by pushing on the side closest to the hinges and farthest from the doorknob, where the oven looked like a refrigerator, where what looked like a table lamp was actually a mousetrap, ...

The extraordinariness of Grandma is seen most strongly in her lab and the experiments she does with things such as transposons and photosynthesizing bacteria.  Her research has implications and consequences which I won't get into now, in order not to ruin the story for anyone who wants to read it.  But there are high-level conclusions which we can take from Grandma's work.  Here is a woman who has devoted herself to learning to engage in beautifully good work to meet necessary needs, as Titus 3:14 says.  Moreover, the work she does requires the possession of rare and valuable skills.  As Cal Newport has pointed out in his books So Good They Can't Ignore You and Deep Work, it is the possession of rare and valuable skills that meet genuine needs that gives the possessor a certain social, cultural, and economic power.  (Disclaimer: although I have enjoyed Cal Newport's early work and writings, I think he has begun to go off the rails a bit during the last few years.  Being friends with people like Joe Rogan is morally sketchy in my opinion, to say the least.)

Therefore we see that the cultivation of rare and valuable skills in the pursuit of beautifully good work is the means by which people build their own internal power, and it is the means by which communities and peoples - especially those peoples who have been historically oppressed - build their own collective power.  And this power can be built in small spaces and ordinary settings like the second floor of an elder woman's small bungalow.  In fact, it can be built in spaces even tinier and more prosaic than this.  (Want examples?  See this and this.  That second link is from a Filipina accountant and describes her home business space.)

The cultivation of this kind of power is a big step toward individual and collective self-sufficiency.  But when we think of self-sufficiency, we must shed a bit of cultural baggage that has been introduced into the societies of the developed world over the last decade or so.  I no longer believe that self-sufficiency is achievable by going entirely off-grid, due to the fact that we must all live in societies whose members must each pay some of the collective cost of maintaining those societies.  Thus, I am not really impressed by the late Jules Dervaes and his family, nor am I impressed with their "Path to Freedom" house and the rather extravagant claims they have made about their lifestyle - a lifestyle which they attempted to support by trademarking the English phrase "urban homestead" in order to force people to pay royalties to them.  Moreover, I have never really believed in the claims of people like Tim Ferriss who boast of being able to achieve retirement before 40 by building passive income streams.  The promise of "passive income" seems immoral to me, as does the type of character who chases after such a promise.  Such characters frequently get taken to the cleaners during their quest.  (See this for a humorous take on the subject.  And don't quit your day job!)  Sooner or later, both people and societies come to realize that those who have actual power are the people who produce valuable things that people actually need.  This, for instance, is why nations dominated by "service economies" are potentially weaker than nations that are dominated by manufacturing economies, unless the services offered support the production of beautifully good and necessary work.

Therefore, those of us who want the power we need to live unmolested in a hostile world must give ourselves to learning, and to self-education when other avenues of education are denied us.  As the Good Book says, "And let our people also learn to engage in beautifully good work..."  We may have to give up a number of evenings and weekends in our pursuit.  And we must learn to protect the fruits of our labors in order to make sure that those fruits are not stolen from us.  For we live in an age of dishonesty.  Therefore we must learn to be strategic.

The Adlerian Organizer

In recent days, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris has been sounding a needed alarm about the state of democracy in the United States at present, as well as the continuing efforts by the Republican Party to destroy American democracy by restricting the right to vote in various states.  Therefore I want to return once again to one of the closing themes of my series of posts on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  This is the theme of the organic, grassroots, bottom-up building of a society by the oppressed and for the oppressed in order to displace and neutralize the society constructed by an oppressive regime.  To quote Gene Sharp once again, "As the civil institutions of the society become stronger vis-a-vis the dictatorship, then, whatever the dictators may wish, the population is incrementally building an independent society outside of their control...in time, this combination of resistance and institution building can lead to de facto freedom, making the collapse of the dictatorship and the formal installation of a democratic system undeniable because the power relationships within the society have been fundamentally altered."

In a previous post I said that building an "organic, grassroots, bottom-up society by the oppressed and for the oppressed" starts when the oppressed start organizing themselves into local, small groups to provide the things they need for themselves which the rulers and owners of their society refuse to provide, or which they will only provide by charging a price which ordinary people can't afford.  These groups which are formed by the oppressed become the parallel institutions of the parallel society by the oppressed and for the oppressed.  And organizing these groups is like organizing a potluck - not like hosting a free lunch for free riders.  As they grow, these parallel institutions become a base of strength for the oppressed which enables them to organize the sustained collective withdrawal of economic and political cooperation from the oppressor's society.  It is this sustained, collective withdrawal of cooperation which shatters the oppressor's power and control.  

I also mentioned that this kind of organizing was key to many of the successful liberation struggles of the past.  Yet we see far too little of this kind of organizing nowadays.  It is good to ask why this is so.  As I mentioned in the post I have cited, a partial answer can be found in the writings of Paulo Freire, specifically in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  In that book, Freire posits that the oppressed are conditioned by their environment and by the education imposed on them by the oppressor.  This education (which takes place in all areas of society and not just the classroom) teaches the oppressed that they are merely passive victims of a fate that is imposed on them and which they must merely accept.  On the other hand, the pedagogy which leads to liberation opens the minds of the oppressed to see their situation as a problem which can be critically examined.  Critical examination of this problem leads to the realization that the problem can be challenged, changed and overcome.  Seeing the problem as something that can be changed leads to the realization that the oppressed have the power to make that change.  The outcome of this realization is that the oppressed begin to live in freedom - that is, they begin to make the changes which they see as necessary to change their situation.

In other words, Freire treats the problem of oppression in a certain sense as a problem of cognition, a problem whose solution starts with the oppressed becoming first free in their minds.  And yet freedom can be somewhat frightening, even though it begins only in the mind first.  For a free mind begins to lead to free actions.  And those who choose to begin to live in freedom will almost always begin to bear the costs of their choice, for their oppressors will begin to make the choice of freedom costly.  Those who are frightened by the cost of freedom will often therefore reject the dawning awareness that freedom is possible in order to continue their submerged existence as oppressed people without being bothered by their consciences.  So we have two kinds of oppressed people: those who are not free because they don't realize that freedom is possible, and those who are not free because they are unwilling to pay the cost of becoming free.  What is to be done for this second group of oppressed people?

I believe I have stumbled on what is at least a partial answer.  It is found in some of the writings and teachings of a European psychiatrist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries named Dr. Alfred Adler.  

Adler was an interesting character, who made much metaphorical hay from the simple realization that people always have reasons for the things they do - even when the things being done are dysfunctional or cause self-harm.  The experience of being oppressed tends to lead to dysfunctional behavior by the oppressed.  But this dysfunctional behavior has a goal, namely, to compensate psychologically for the damage done by the oppressive situation.  I suggest that this dysfunctional behavior often consists of what looks like passivity, fatalism, and apathy, and that it is an expression of "exaggerated self-protection, self-enhancement, and self-indulgence."  According to the Adler Graduate School, the objective of Adlerian therapy is "to replace exaggerated self-protection, self-enhancement, and self-indulgence with courageous social contribution."  What the organizer is trying to bring about is the "courageous social contribution" of oppressed people coming together into groups to achieve their common liberation.

Thus one part of an organizer's work is to help his or her people begin to see their own motives and the role of these motives in their continued enslavement or oppression.  For it is these motives which motivate the continued passivity of the oppressed and their continued refusal to live in freedom.  Adler used a graphic word picture to describe the process of getting patients to see both the dysfunction and the consequences of certain motives, namely the idea of "spitting in the patient's soup" in order to make the dysfunctional behaviors less palatable.  This notion of spitting into someone else's soup conjures images of organizers going to their people and telling those people what is wrong with their ongoing passivity.  However, the best and most skillful Adlerians get the patient to spit into his or her own soup - that is, they use respectful Socratic dialogue to get their people to admit to themselves out loud what are the motives, goals and consequences of their choices.  From that admission can spring the discussion of better ways to meet the goals of their people.

So it is that Adlerian dialogue can be seen as a component of Freirian problem-posing education of the sort that turns passive, fatalistic, atomized members of the oppressed into purposeful, united, interdependent people laboring together for their common liberation.  There is more that can be said about this, but I need to do some further reading both of Freire and of Adler!  Stay tuned...

From D to D, Chapters 8 & 9: The "Sin" Of Not Needing You

This is another short post.  I wrote in my last post that I need to read a book in order to write a critique of it, and that that critique might become a post on this blog, as part of my continuing series of posts on strategic nonviolent resistance.  However, this week I have been busy fixing things at my house.  And I must say that fixing things feels really good - especially when those things have been either broken or messy for years.  The fixing is by no means done yet...

But I haven't stopped thinking about the depiction of the process of liberation-in-action described in Chapters 8 and 9 of Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D).  Those who have read my last few posts on his book know that I have been particularly focused on how the building of parallel institutions and a parallel society by and for communities of the oppressed is a necessary part of a successful liberation struggle by the oppressed.  As Gene Sharp says in Chapter 1 of From D to D, "A liberation struggle is a time for self-reliance and internal strengthening of the struggle group."  (Emphasis added.)  And in Chapter 9, he writes, "Combined with political defiance during the phase of selective resistance, the growth of autonomous social, economic, cultural and political institutions progressively expands the 'democratic space' of the society and shrinks the control of the dictatorship. As the civil institutions of the society become stronger vis-a-vis the dictatorship, then, whatever the dictators may wish, the population is incrementally building an independent society outside of their control..."  (Emphasis added.)

Groups and communities of historically oppressed people who choose to build their own internal power and self-sufficiency will therefore go a long way toward achieving their liberation from a dominant oppressive society.  However, it is also true that groups and communities of historically oppressed people have often been "trained" to look to one or more of the dominant societies of the Global North for their salvation instead of learning to rely on themselves.  This has become the basis of the "soft power" sought by some of those dominant societies in their bid to establish global rule for themselves, for the leaders of some of these dominant societies have gladly dressed themselves up as "saviors" and "benefactors" ready to supply guns and other arms, military training, investment money, trucks and heavy machinery, sketchy Russian vaccines, etc, to the poor dark-skinned unwashed masses who seemingly "can't save ourselves."  I am thinking of one Global North nation in particular whose leadership looks at the entire earth as if it were already the special possession of this nation, a world which this nation's leaders have already carved up in their minds into zones with such names as "the near abroad" and "the far abroad" and on which they have drawn the "red lines" of their national narcissism.

But what if the oppressed societies (or even those societies which are categorized as "developing countries") choose to begin to build their own structures of self-reliance?  What if, moreover, oppressed groups within the societies dominated by the Global North begin to build their own structures of self-reliance?  What if these structures begin to provide for the needs of the people of these societies in a way that is better and stronger than anything the dominant cultures can offer?  I am thinking right now of the investment of Nigeria in the mathematics education of its population, as seen in such enterprises as the Cowbellpedia math competition.  One result of this investment: this year, 2021, saw a Nigerian teen named Faith Odunsi win first place in an international mathematics competition which featured students from many nations of the Global North. 

When communities of the oppressed build their own structures of self-reliance, they achieve the following results:

• They strengthen their own self-confidence and motivation as they begin to see the successes they are able to achieve with their own hands.
• They destroy the basis for the "soft power" sought by the dominant societies of the Global North.
• They manage to cross a few "red lines" as they prove that they do not need their wanna-be-Great-Power "saviors" from the dominant culture.  This causes those supposed "saviors" to choke a little.  Now that's fun!

P.S. I mentioned vaccines in this post.  The original version of the post read "worthless vaccines," but I have altered that phrase in order to make my meaning crystal-clear.  I most definitely believe in vaccination as long as the vaccines offered have undergone a rigorous three-stage series of clinical trials to prove both their safety and efficacy.  The Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson COVID-19 vaccines have all undergone this process, which is why I chose to receive the Pfizer vaccine in March of this year.  I have received both doses of the two-dose regimen.  I also appreciate the ongoing efforts to monitor the efficacy of these vaccines over time, among various populations, and in their response to the COVID-19 variants which have arisen during the last year.  The efforts to be honest and transparent - even when the news is not always good - have gone a long way in establishing the credibility of these vaccines.  The same cannot be said of the Russian Sputnik "vaccine", whose developers have been neither honest nor transparent.  Even the article published by Russian spokespersons in the British medical journal Lancet has relied on sketchy and unverifiable data.  Moreover, the publishing of that article has revealed the emergence of problems in the Lancet's peer-review process.  Yet the government of Vladimir Putin has embarked on a massive campaign of trying to make its Sputnik "vaccine" look really, really good by tearing down the vaccines developed in the West.  Which is to me yet another proof that Putin really is a thieving little man in a bunker, a Potemkin Village head-fake of a man.  Not even a majority of his own people believe in his "vaccine."  And now, rant off - secure from red alert.  Have a good night.