conricerca

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Greenpepper interview with Alex Foti (Chainworkers)

*****

This interview took place in July 2004 at the Mill Squat in Amsterdam,
during the period it was liberated from the destiny of selling
'traditional' Dutch parephenalia to tourists. Merijn Oudenampsen and Gavin
Sullivan from the Greenpepper magazine spoke with Milano-based organiser
Alex Foti - formerly of the Italian flexwork syndicate ChainWorkers
(www.chainworkers.org) - about precarity, european labour conflict, and
the spread of new syndicalist modes of subvertised collective action
across Neuropa. Alex Foti is guest written editor for the upcoming
Precarity issue of the Greenpepper Magazine and will be part of the
PrecarityPingPong! launch and critical debate during the London ESF at
Middlex University, White Hart Lane Campus, Tottenham on 15 October 2004
between 3:00 - 5:00 pm. See www.greenpeppermagazine.org for details.

*****

GreenPepper: Alex, can you introduce yourself, and the Chainworkers?

Alex Foti: I am a union and media activist from Milan, Italy and have been
part of the ChainWorkers CreW since it's inception in 1999 - 2000. Most
noteworthy, we are associated with the MayDay parade - which this year
reached its fourth edition, bringing around 100,000 temp workers,
partimers freelancers and other types of non-standard workers onto the
streets in a joyful (but angry) expression of dissent around sub-standard
conditions of work and living. This year the MayDay parade took the form
of a major picket line throughout the shopping arteries of Milan. In fact,
within the city limits of Milan, no major chain store or retail outfit was
open for trading - either because they had become scared by the campaign
we had developed in the months prior to MayDay, or because of the flying
pickets that 2000-3000 people did in the morning prior to the start of the
MayDay parade. This year, the parade was a EuroMayDay parade because it
was done together with sisters and brothers in Barcelona, and organised in
assemblies that took place throughout Milan, Barcelona, Rome, and (most
crucially) Paris - with the participation of the Intermittents: the temp
stagehands and part-time actors that recently blocked the Cannes film
festival.

GP: You have been organising around the theme of precarity. Yet here in
the Netherlands we do not really know of this concept. The idea of
precarious labour, ie, dangerous working conditions - is somwhat
popularly circulated, but the idea of precarity in itself and the
precariousness of life has not yet reached northern Europe. Could you
explain what is meant by the term precarity?

AF: In the radical left nowadays there are two major interpretations of
the concept. One is existential precarity. That is, that life is
precarious in times of global war. Either you are a body subject to bombs
and military conflict or you are a prisoner whose habeas corpus is
violated in Abu Ghraib or some other Western prison. Wherever there is
total domination there is existential precarity.

Precarity is also, however, the condition of being unable to predict one's
fate or having some degree of predictability on which to build social
relations and feelings of affection. The diffusion of intermittent work
and the attacks on the welfare state have resulted in a widespread
increase of existential precarity across Europe - affecting increasing
numbers of the population even in the wealthy countries like Holland. A
clear example of this precarization is witnessed by the incredible rise in
the use of psycho-pharmaceuticals and anti-depressants. Work hours have
increased all over the territories - in Europe, the USA and Japan. What is
noteworthy is that in Europe, working times have increased. Working on
Sunday, Saturday, ungodly hours and night shifts - which previously only
involved a small percentage of the workforce - has now expanded and
increased. This is precarity: being unable to plan one's time, being a
worker on call where your life and time is determined by external forces.
And, of course, if you have a sub-standard contract you do not have a full
social citizenship. That is what Mayday is all about: claiming social
rights for an emergent subject that is crucial to neoliberal production.
Neoliberal production is postindustrial - it's service, information, and
knowledge-based and we want to get into that. This is at the heart of the
accumulation process that is taking place today in Europe and in all
advanced capitalist countries. So wherever there are neoliberal chains of
production in the five continents, there is going to be precarity -
peripheral in terms of rights, but central in terms of the financial web
of the creative value produced.

We have been concentrating on two types of workers: Chainworkers (being
workers in malls, shopping centres, hypermarkets, and in the myriad of
jobs of logistics and selling in the metropolis) and what we call
Brainworkers (cognitive labourers; programmers; freelancers who possess
individual value on the labour market but do not yet have a collective
force or a subjectivity with social rights - that is, they might make
above-standard wages but if they lose their job they are thrown into
poverty). Chainworkers, on the other hand, are always on the verge of
social exclusion. They are collectively unorganised, but they could
organise. What we've been working on is establishing solidarity. That
is where media activism comes into play - by supporting strikes, picket
lines, sabotage, boycotts on the part of taylorised proletariansed service
workers, and at the same time agitating university researchers, teachers,
workers in the information industries and advanced service sectors.

GP: The main idea of precarity, then, is this interminable lack of
security. Is precarity then simply defined negatively - as a situation
marked by the absence of 'jobs for life' ?

AF: Exactly. While existential precarity is what attracts interest in the
issue - because it is lived on the bodies and minds of everybody - we
think precarity has more to do with a position in the labour market. It is
a post-class discourse, if you like. Previously in this society we were
used to blue-collars and white-collars so to speak. Now what we see is a
transition to a more unstable social configuration based on service and
knowledge labour. In old classist terms, this class exists ex se but not
yet per se. That is, it has a clear role in social production, but it
doesn't yet have representation of it's collective needs - needs of
social aggregation, access to standards of sociability, housing, access to
knowledge, open source forms of organising, union rights and bargaining
rights all around the table. What we have seen is that creative workers do
not perceive themselves as workers anymore. The reversal of the new
economy exposed the myth that talented people would be protected forever
from market fluctuations.

This is what we have to focus on: to fight against exclusion and
inequality and bring in a new radical subjectivity and identity in
creative productive distribution processes in which social relations and
transborder exchanges are absolutely vital. Especially in terms of the
polity on which we want to base our social claims and agitation. We think
in Europe today, at the juncture of a global crisis of neoliberalism,
there is space for radically organising Eurowide. Euromayday is a first
step in this process. The migrant struggles are another example of a
struggle that is articulating itself on a wider scale. The basic human
rights are being written right now and we want basic rights for temps,
part timers and migrant labourers to be included on the European
continent.


GP: The classical labour movement also agitates around similar issues:
full employment, worker's rights, social services, social exclusion, and
temporary work. What distinguishes your political agenda (or the radical
activity around precarity) from that of the classics?

AF: Full employment is already here. Everybody is working 100% of the time
e - either when they work or when they consume, and display signs, body
signs, visual signs, choices. The fact that you wear a particular sneaker
or that you write a composition, an email, or mime that becomes an ad. An=
d of course, during the daytime you produce for wage labour. Your data is
capital for market research. Your biometric data is capital for biotech
firms. We are 100% of the time part of the [re]production of capital. In
this sense, full employment has already been negatively overcome. I mean,
what we need to do is to find ways of social representation that are
different from the social democrats and the union parties. Because if
Seattle really marks a transition to a new kind of politics - a
participatory politics, a biopolitics if you like, in which the old
distinction between political work, union work and cultural work is
dissolved - then that world is over.

I think that the future lies in developing forms of self-management of
conflicts federating themselves across borders and across wider political
spaces - from the regional to the transcontinental. As in, a way of
expressing political and social claims independently - in the political
forms of working with existing radical parties and existing radical unions
and associations - yet as an autonomous force. Radical organisations are
too stale and backward looking to see what the social mobilisations are
that society is asking from us. In France, Spain, and Germany wee see
massive amounts of people protesting against welfare cuts and European
monetarism (the total right wing European construction made by banking
concerns that is keeping social spending low and interest rates high).

All of this activity needs a new form of organisation. I personally think
that Anarcho-Green is our output and destination. I think that now that
the cold war is officially over on the European continent, we can merge
Libertarian, anti-Racist, and Transgender social activism together to
create new radical identities that can bring Eastern European and Western
brothers and sisters into a new political project capable of opposing
fascist Bushism. I mean, this is the task at hand and social conflict is
spiralling. Others possibilities are, of course, the peace movement, the
open source information movement, the alternative global fair-exchange
movement etc. But we need to pose ourselves the question of power and the
institutional interface. This is vital at this stage.

GP: One of the things that I noticed in the manifestos that were
circulating throughout EuroMayDay this year were new words that we do not
know in Northern Europe - like flexicurity. Could you explain what you
mean by flexicurity and how that word is activated alongside precarity.

AF: Yes. In fact, in one sense flexicurity means we do not want to go back
to a 'job for life' - the system of the previous generation. We
accept the flexibility inherent in the computer-based mode of production,
but we want to disassociate from the precarity that is implicit in this
forced (Faustian) bargain. In the Netherlands, flexicurity is the reality
- since in Holland, by law, you cannot discriminate between a part-time
worker and a full-time worker in terms of the hourly wage paid. So if we
could extend this principle, which is a minimal social claim, all
throughout the EU. The fact that part timers cannot organise themselves
because they can be fired is, in fact, wage discrimination (with a union
discrimination attached). We could also build ointo this claim a demand
for a European minimum wage, ten euros per hour, all across the union.
These are the staples - the building blocks of a more advanced,
solidarious, less darwinist society - that could become the 'European
model' as opposed to the neoliberal model or to the Chinese or the
nationalist capitalist model. Fuck it! I did not choose precarity for
myself as a destiny. But I think that out of that condition, our
generation - the post cold war generation - can fight for a socially
progressive shift. In Spain it is already happening. In the UK it will
happen. In Italy it will happen. A shift that can posit a new radical
left. Just as the thirties and the forties were times of social
experimentation with radical identities, this is the time to invent new
forms of cultural imagery. A new imagery of conflict, a new imagery of
picketing, a new imagery of social activism. Of course, the media you
develop is essential to this task.

GP: As you mention, the theme and discourse of precarity has become a very
important organisational vehicle in Italy, Spain and France - with lots of
people on the streets for EuroMayday this year, quite a great deal of
material being written and circulated about it, and conferences being
organised on the topic. But material conditions in Southern Europe are
quite different than those in Northern Europe or the Netherlands ?

AF: Fragmentation and individualisation of service labour is the norm all
across advanced capitalist countries - be it Japan, the Netherlands, the
UK or Spain. What is different, and specific to Holland, is that the
unions were more moderate and in the 1980s struck a bargain to regulate
flexibility. Nevertheless, we still see a pressure on the long-term
unemployed and a desire to cut benefits all across the board. So I don't
at all agree that this is only a Southern European problem.

What is most striking about Southern Europe is that the welfare state
there is more backward and traditionally less developed. There is more
importance attached to the family and corporatist ways of integration etc.
But the tendency toward the reduction of welfare services is universal,
and Maastricht is a system designed to keep social spending low. We see
that even Germany and France cannot respect these restraints. If we don't
act now, we're looking at a future of precarity for all Europeans. Because
the idea is to make us a new Asia or a new America - not a new Europe.

OK. I am inviting Dutch brothers and sisters to think about it.
Neoliberalism is still very strong. Bolkestein is a neoliberal whose
commissioners mission is to make Europe safe for the US and other global
corporations. We are the new workforce produced by neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism is managing and governing the construction of Europe. So we
are the only credible adversaries and the only guys and girls that can
actually block the system of exchange and the flow of information. If
young people stop working in Amsterdam, Amsterdam shuts down. No bars can
operate; no tourist hotel can operate; no fucking newspaper can be ever
produced; no theater play can operate. Amsterdam is a factory shut for
business. This is what Amsterdam says to the world, it's image brand and
sociability, which occurs through bodies and minds of thousands of young
temps, precarious freelancers coming from all over the world. This is what
precarity is - it's both a condition of exploitation and an opportunity.

GP: Precarity as a word to describe the existence in advanced capitalist
economies of a fragmented workforce seems very useful and it has
undoubtedly been used really effectively in the Euromayday events this
year, which, as you have said, have seen tens of thousands, or hundreds of
thousands of people demonstrating around the theme of precarity. Yet you
also mention that there are lots of different types of workers within and
under the banner of precarity - extending from unrecognised migrant and
feminine labourers towards creative workers working in design and media
industries etc.

How useful and effective do you think the concept of precarity can be in
linking people together who have vastly different incomes? Precarity seems
to be different than blue-collar or white-collar; it seems to be bringing
together lots of different types of people from very different social
strata. Do you think this is a limitation on how useful the concept might
be in creating and organising this new radical subjectivity?

AF: It's a crucial objection and I want to answer with an example that is
unfolding before our eyes which is the intermittent struggle in France
initiated almost a year ago. What happened was that there was a reform of
the unemployment benefit system that excluded thousands of people from
maternity leave and other livelihood necessities, especially during the
wintertime when the art and culture festival scene is more dormant. What
happened then was that these people started blocking all festival
productions across France and decided to sabotage the 8 o'clock TV news,
breaking into the studios and reading communiques, eventually forcing the
issue onto the whole of the cultural intelligence, a much higher class
than the intermittent themselves who were mostly stagehands and part-time
workers. We have to remember that for every festival there are a thousand
workers setting up the stage and that they are cultural workers too. So we
saw that film directors and major actors and actresses joined in soidarity
with the intermittent cause. And as a result, eventually public opinion
started to take an interest. From a discussion on their specific system of
unemployment benefit, it quickly became a discussion on the system of
unemployment benefits itself. And from a specific discussion about a
certain cultural sphere, it sooned transformed into a national discussion
on the place of knowledge and culture in French society and what kind of
rights should be allocated to this sector. In Cannes we saw (Jean-Luc)
Godard giving their press conference and Micheal Moore solidarising with
them. Now the intermittent cause is known to readers form Sydney to
Singapore and New York. What we see here is that from a very specific
conflict - through networking and criss-crossing social classes and roles
in the production process - the elites and the non-elites, exploited
migrants and middle class women, all collectively produced a general shift
and movement against precarity.

So precarity rallies different people. As Milanese and Mayday people we
think that certain young people, women and migrant workers have a special
stake here because they are the social categories being most aggressed by
precarity. From another point of view, I think that service industry and
knowledge industry - technicians, programmers, cashiers and retailers,
sellers, cultural operators, truck drivers and pizza delivery boys are
crucially important. These two very polarised categories are statistically
the two sectors that seen the highest growth of employment during the last
twenty years of neoliberalism.

GP: So, you don't see this as a phase of pan-capitalism, where the
breakdown of the welfare states and social rights are withdrawn as long as
the economy is in crisis? Don't you think that when the economy booms
again, politicians will be able to circulate around more money, and that
salaries will rise etc.?

AF: This system is structural. The sociologist Manual Castells, looking at
the last twenty years, saw the precarization of one quarter to one third
of the labour force in advanced capitalist countries as a structural
feature. It won't go away with an expansion. If anything, the expansion
will simply lure a segment of the knowledge class into the bourgeoisie.
But as soon as the boom subsides, there are new additions and the pool of
precarious workers will enlarge itself. That's what we've already seen.
Italy started in the 1980s with ten percent of precarious workers, a
million and a half black market workers. Nowadays, we have seven million
precarious workers (contingent, freelance and temp) and four million black
market workers. That's almost half of the total workforce! And it won't
go away. Unless - and this is vital for us - we strike on the workplace,
we picket the workplace and we manage to get the money : not from the
state but from greedy corporations. This is really what organising is all
about, that is where the money is.

Who benefited from the Dotcom boom? We know: Amro Bank benefited, Nina
Brinks benefited, Enron and other guys that where just tricking the
accounts. These guys were not making the money; everybody was falsifying
the accounts to accumulate financial wealth. Now we see what was behind it
all. You see, the problem is, if you keep everybody under the poverty line
- as Wal-Mart is doing with it's workers - the system collapses. You have
to resort to forge and fraud to keep up the system, to keep up financial
wealth because you are not selling. Man, this is really a great recession
what we are seeing. So nothing will happen unless we organise. There is no
easy way out of this system. This is structural. This is historical. It
requires a major social shift otherwise it is going to become Brazil all
over the world. Already, Holland is a very unequal country - more so than
Sweden and Germany. There are very rich elites commanding major amounts of
global income. This is what Mayday is about - beating neo-liberalism on
it's feet and on it's territory: global chain stores, global banks, global
nodes of finance, global media conglomerates: Murdoch, Berlusconi, Gates.

GP: Many precarious workers are working in areas where there is no
self-organisnig activity. What kind of methods are you using to experiment
with organsing traditionally unorganised people in these new economic
sectors?

AF: We started trying to merge subvertising (as a way of communication)
with traditional forms of anarcho-syndicalism - that is, the picketline,
the direct action, from breaking the chainstore glass to blockading the
delivery vans that run to the fastfood joints, handing out flyers on the
motorways and at every autogrill. We thought that since young workers were
taking the brand of the neoliberal rules of work or the 'new flexibility'
so to speak, and they have no memeory of class struggle, we have to make
it attractive. I am speaking about it but I am not the one doing it. You
know, its our graphic designers Karen and Zoe - who are behind the
EuroMayDay website and the ChainWorkers webzine. So, it is to speak in a
lingo which changes across time. I mean, youth language changes, youth
aesthetics change, fads and fashions change. To market an idea of radical
union activity, to look if it is possible to make radical unionism
attractive to the masses. So we built a website, we created merchandising,
we have a board game called Precariopoly, the netparade in which anyone
could join (which rallied 20 000 people alone - almost as large as the
actual MayDay). You know, traditional leftist organisations tend to
dismiss this kind communication as beside the point. But today people form
their identities through media before reality. So if you have an
attractive medium, as we have managed to develop, you have a powerful tool
of organising and activitation. Through the website people have started
connecting us and little by little we have built a network in Lombardy
that became national and then transnational. It is about being focused and
unafraid to market oneself to the unconverted. Because it is easy to
convince the Anarchists, the Communists, Zapatistas, Situationists etc.
The hard part is talking to the people that are suffering with their
bodies but they have no way out because they have no cultural system of
reference that enables them to rebel against a very repressive system. If
you read about Wal-Mart, if you read what Mike Davis has to say about
Wal-Mart or even what Business Week has to say about Wal-Mart. It is a
system based on prison labour - this is the model of work and production
in the department stores and big retail industries.

GP: You were saying before that the idea of organising around the theme of
precarity is not to demand the mundane existence of the workers of the
1960s and 1970s. But you are using terms like 'fuga' or 'exodus' to talk
about escaping from the whole production system. In what way do you think
working around these issues will capacitate people to get out and not be
working all their lives, having these shitty jobs?

AF: Being a labour agitator is already a better job [laughter] but sorry
if I am joking. The point is, over the last twenty years there have been
many ideas of escaping - for example, Deleuze and Guattari. But what we
have seen, and Empire is clear about this, is that there is no external
dimension to this system nowadays: it is either war or trade. There is no
escape.

Although every individual does not define him/herself according to the job
they do. I mean, you are an activist, you are a lover, you are a father,
you are a moslem, a jew, a stamp collector. But you are not a worker, as
in the 20th century. Yet paradoxically you work a lot more than your dad
did. That's the point. You work a lot more than a car assembly operator in
the 1960's and the 1970's. All the struggles to have paid vacations, to
have the weekend off, to have universal healthcare etc are crumbling. Even
in the Netherlands, where there is universal healthcare, if you are an
undocumented migrant (and there are thousands) you are not going to have
it. If you are a mentally diseased person you are going to end up homeless
and you are not going to have health coverage. Exclusion is everywhere.

So you are thinking you're cool in this niche, in your social work
identity. But in fact, you are doing a favour to system of neoliberal
capitalism because you are not confronting power relations on the job
where they matter most. And increasingly, given the absence of public
social spaces, what is the last public social space left on earth? The
work environment is where people meet, discuss, share, talk about
politics, sex, lives, whatever. So we are talking about access but we are
there the whole fucking time talking about something else - being
elsewhere, with the internet, with our minds, but we are there. And with
your cell phone, you are always a call away from your boss, when you are
eating, when you are fucking ... and you have got to go because there is a
call. This is precarity.

We have to emancipate ourselves from the fiction that we are not subject
to class domination. Because we fucking are! What new forms do class
domination take? It is not Lenin, it is not Rosa Luxemburg, it is not
Trotsky. It is something else that together we are fighting and
discovering through our conflict. This is what I regard as autonomy,
another good concept=85

by Merijn Oudenampsen and Gavin Sullivan

Interview circulated in the lead up to the launch of the Precarity Issue
of Greenpepper Magazine during the European Social Forum, London. The
launch features a critical debate between activists from different groups
across Europe on/around the theme of precarity. It will be held on 15
October 2004, 3:00 - 5:00pm, at Middlesex University, White Hart Lane
Campus, Tottenham. London N17 8HR (exact room to be confirmed). For more
information see www.greenpeppermagazine.org



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posted by thomas  # 3:23 PM