TRASHFUTURE - *Unlocked* Riley's Commie Book Club - 'State of Insecurity'

Episode Date: March 25, 2019

It's that time again! In an unlocked bonus episode, Riley read a book, drank some wine, and is ready to talk about it to you fine people. This month, we're looking at State of Insecurity by Isabell Lorey, available now on Verso. It's all about precariousness and how neoliberalism has turned us into our own disciplinarians. Check out the book here: https://www.versobooks.com/books/1737-state-of-insecurity Do you want more Commie Book Club? Access this month's episode (an examination of the work of Mark Fisher) by subscribing to the Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/25530712 *LIVE SHOW ALERT* We'll be performing live at Bristol Transformed on Friday, April 5th at 8 pm. The venue is Hamilton House 3A, 80 Stokes Croft, Bristol BS1 3QY. https://www.facebook.com/events/814946762200366/ View the Facebook event page here: https://www.facebook.com/events/814946762200366/ Also: you can commodify your dissent with a t-shirt from http://www.lilcomrade.com/, and what’s more, it’s mandatory if you want to be taken seriously. Do you want a mug to hold your soup? Perhaps you want one with the Trashfuture logo, which is available here: https://teespring.com/what-if-phone-cops#pid=659&cid=102968&sid=front

Hello, friends. It's Nate with a quick update. We're unlocking last month's Kami Book Club featuring a review of Isabel Laurie's State of Insecurity. And for March, the Kami Book Club features a discussion of the work of Mark Fisher. So if you like this free episode, definitely sign up on the Patreon to hear more. Thanks. Hope you enjoy. Hello, premium subscribers and free subscribers. About a month from the date of this recording. It's time for yet another episode of Riley's Kami Book Club.

That's right. It's the podcast within a podcast that I have no idea why is popular. Who on earth is the combined audience for Balthasar Speedboat and Kami Book Club? I don't get it, but I love all of you deeply. Anyway, so let's just kick off, right? Because I've had a big old day at the freaking office and I'm ready to roll. So today we are talking about a book that came out in 2015 by Isabel Laurie, who is a political theorist at the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Politics and also is a professor at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Kassel.

That is the first line of her Wikipedia page. I've not memorized this information. She's written only one book. It's called State of Insecurity, Government of the Precarious. And it was published by Verso Futures, which is the sort of sub-imprint of Verso that also published Psychopolitics, the first Kami Book Club episode. And these are short, sort of highly theoretical works that deal with sort of the concepts that are about describing the future, what it might look like, how it might be reclaimed from capital, and all this good stuff. It's just bottom line up front. It's a book I'd recommend getting if you're interested in theory.

It's a book I'd recommend reading about if you have sort of just more of an interest in politics because she writes brilliantly, but in a very technical way. So there's a lot of discussion of sort of very sort of finicky, like Foucaultian concepts and so on and so forth. But never mind. That's why you have me and this podcast and a podcast to do my very, very utmost to explain what the hell is going on. So let's just sort of start. What's state of insecurity generally about? It is about the way in which you might say liberalism, you might say governments, you might say capital, you might say there's the constellation of powers that be, govern the modern subject.

The modern subject is just a person, you and I are modern subjects, and she is coming quite a bit from Judith Butler and Michelle Foucault. And so what she's interested in is power. She's interested in power and control and specifically the way that different kinds of power and control don't just control what you do as a subject, but they actually control what you are. So power doesn't just compel, power is actually productive. So you are produced by power. And this is like a core idea in Foucault. So Laurie is working on extending Foucault in this book. And so let's first go into a couple of very brief overview of some of Foucault's concepts.

Governmentality is one of Foucault's sort of biggest concepts. He's talking about conduct, how conduct gets conducted, how not just how you exercise control, but how control is exercised over the control that you control yourself with. So his classic example is the penopticon, which is a theoretical prison. I'm sure many of you are familiar with this theoretical prison in which there is a circular room where there are prisoners that all can see out into the middle, but they can't see side to side with one guard tower on the inside. And the guard can see all of the prisoners and they can't tell if they're being watched.

So they have to assume that they're all being watched all the time. And so they will then govern themselves accordingly. So this is this kind of conduct of conduct without actually forcing you to move. So I'm controlling you not by grabbing you and dragging you across the street. Let's say in London there is like zebra crossing, stripey bits of the road that if you walk across cars have to stop. There is nobody in the car forcing them to break and there's no police officer sort of dragging me across the street at the right area.

Rather, I sort of know generally that I'm being governed. And so governed mentality is this kind of control without direct compulsion. And biopolitics is an extension of this idea is the government of physical bodies. What physical bodies do, where they go, how long they get to live in what sense. And it is the biopolitics of me moving my legs in a certain way across the road that then is how that control sort of caches out. So how do liberal societies exert this kind of control over their subjects? Well, Laurie writes,

what distinguishes liberal forms of governmentality is that the governmentality of each and every individual within a population always becomes possible through the way in which they conduct themselves. So this means is that liberal societies tend to avoid using hard compulsion at least within their own borders as much as possible. And instead control most conduct by influencing through incentives and disincentives the way that people conduct themselves. So as an example of this, it's very easy to think of the way in which

welfare in the states or sort of or benefits in the UK are distributed and so the ways in which certain kinds of conditions are attached to them. So no one is saying in the US or UK that if you're poor, it's illegal not to look for a job, right? There is no police officer coming into your house and forcing you to log on to the Job Center's website and do interview training and attend your job sessions or whatever it is that you do. Rather, what they're doing is they've arranged the incentives in such a way that they are forcing you to discipline yourself and become a job seeker, essentially. So they've said, look, we can't force you, but what we can do is we can say if you

log on to the Job Search website and search jobs for long enough, you have to discipline yourself, then you'll get your unemployment benefits, then you'll be able to continue living. So this is another example of biopolitics where my fingers are compelled across the keyboard so that I must continue searching for a job even if I know there isn't one in my area. I just must maintain discipline for discipline's sake. So this is part of the, this really becomes a huge concept as the book carries on, the idea of almost weaponized self-discipline, that we are governed not by compulsion, but from within and from the incentives that are sort of constructed around us.

So Lorie then goes on, she says the governmentality entails individuals having an acting influence on the actions of others or on the possibilities of conduct. So that goes back to the crosswalk example, the zebra crossing example, the possibilities in which you are able to cross the road safely are limited. And there are some individuals who decide and other individuals who are filtered. Now, for something like a road, it's not particularly sinister. It's basically fine that we have roads and it's basically fine that we have ways to go across them. That's because theorists of power like Foucault and Lorie aren't talking about like,

yep, power is always bad. It's always, always, always bad. There should never be power, never any kind of compulsion. They're not saying that because they're not naive. I mean, if you look back to the failure of something like Occupy Wall Street, it's because, at least this is as diagnosed by Adam Curtis, where he talks about how they debused a movement that tried to be without power entirely, that just tried to have intelligent methods of organizing that would sort of, people would just sort of self-organize into autonomous groups of, I don't know,

semi-radicals, that there was no sort of hierarchy, nothing, et cetera, et cetera. No central mission because to state a central mission would be the exertion of power and we're against power in all of its awful forms. No, that's deeply silly. If you're against power, then that means that you're also against people driving normally and crossing the street in predictable ways. What they're interested in rather is how power can be used for good or ill and that's where sort of governmentality comes in

and that's where we can start thinking of the ways in which governmentality is used against us and then as Laurie finishes, how governmentality can be used for our own, you might say, purposes as well. So that's sort of some of the basic Foucaultian concepts, right? Sort of power, governmentality, biopolitics that she's looking at. But the book is called State of Insecurity, Government of the Precarious. So we have government, we know what government means. It means in this case the power of some individuals to control the conduct of some other individuals. Fine.

But now let's get into precarity. So precarity is one of the fundamental vectors, one of the functional vectors of liberal control through governmentality. Laurie writes, precariousness as an existential state designates what constitutes life in general. So the fact that if we don't eat, we die, so that's me clarifying, she didn't write that. So we are all in some way precarious, just at a basic level, but she doesn't want to start trying to use precarity itself as a first principle to sort of unite all of humanity because it's more than just that. She goes on, it is the social and political conditions that enable historically specific modes of being,

making it possible for bodies to survive in a certain way. You know, Foucaultians like to talk about people as bodies because they're interested in biopolitics. They're interested in what you are constituted as in terms of veins and muscles and bones and so on. We could also say people just as much, regardless. To survive in a, I'm no Foucaultian, that's why I'm fine with doing that. I'm sure Foucaultian would not be so fine with that. But making it possible for bodies to survive in a certain way, which would not be viable without there being embedded in social, political and legal circumstances. And some of these lives are protected and others are not.

And that's going to become a very large concept. So let's unpack some of that stuff, right? So we know that all humans are precarious because we have to keep taking some actions to prevent ourselves from dying, or at least dying now. But the social and political conditions that enable historically specific modes of being. So let's think about, say, a group of hunter gatherer societies. Hunter gatherer societies are very, very egalitarian traditionally. Or at least I remember that from some sociological reading at some point. I'm sure there are a million, million different ones that haven't been.

And there are some of you who are yelling at your phones now saying, fuck off, Riley, that's not true. I'm sure it's not. I'm sure I'm generalizing. But just bear with me where what we have, but we have a sort of more flat organization in a hunter gatherer society. Let's just say as those societies settle down and begin practicing agriculture and they begin specializing. What you get is division of labor. And with division of labor comes hierarchy as some people labor doing one particular task that taken. But they can't just march off and do by themselves because they're now dependent on the other people doing their bits of the task. And one other person who has to manage the whole thing.

So farming, what it does, it creates a productive surplus and it creates settled communities, which creates classes of priests and specialists and clerks and scribes. Because you don't have to deal with all of this productive surplus that you can then use to advance your own society and so on. I'm not trying to be Talcott Parsons as a functionalist about this. I'm aware it's all about power. I'm mostly just using this as a stylized example of how social and political conditions can enable historically specific modes of being. So a farmer who has to farm in order to, like say on the Nile River Delta, who has to farm in order to stay alive, versus a pharaoh whose mode of being is enabled by all the farmers, versus a beggar outsider whose mode of being is largely excluded from the entire social strata,

are all essentially products of the powers that have created the social and political conditions that have enabled these historically specific modes of being. And those continued lives, that of the pharaoh and the farmer and the beggar, are not really viable without being embedded in ancient Egyptian society and its social, political and legal circumstances. And a lot of what those do is describe whose lives are protected, who is protected from precariousness, how far people are from precariousness. So the pharaoh is pretty fucking far from precariousness. The farmer might be much closer. The beggar is deep in it. And these structures that maintain these divisions.

And in liberal society, so let's fast forward from like a pharaonic society where, you know, it's very obvious who is precarious and who is not, and why it was all ordained by Ra. I feel like we've all forgotten Ra. We should really work to get our societies closer back to Ra. In liberal societies, we are notionally free to act as we will, but we must discipline ourselves away from doing so. This fact creates the tension of control in liberal societies. And this is really the starting point of Laurie's analysis of risk, security and precarity. So these two divisions between the freedom we have to act and the control others have over how we act, so crossing the street wherever, which you're free to do, but you might get hit by a car versus crossing the street at a specific point.

But let's say it takes you very far out of your way as you have to wake up earlier, creates and who is protected and not. So who has more freedom? So let's say the road metaphor kind of breaks down here, but who simply, who has more freedom away from almost like the sharper ends of control? So if you're wealthy, you don't really have to work, which means you don't have to discipline yourself very much, which means you don't really have to be as control and how these frontiers interact. So where do we have freedom? Who has freedom? And how do the frontiers of protection increase or limit that freedom work and where do they move and when? So this is where Lori sort of moves from Foucault to a theorist of labor, Robert Castell.

So we live in security societies. These are historically specific political, legal and social relations, which correspond to the search for systems of protection. But because all-encompassing security can never really be established, we're always peering forward constantly. We're trying to understand the threat and safety at a social level. And threat and safety operates on two levels here. It operates on the social level and it operates on the individual level. And precarity is, like we say, the fact that sort of we might die. The thing that will, if you like, decouple us from society if it no longer protects us.

So understood in Marxist terms, this would simply be when the contradictions of capitalism become sort of, or the contradictions of a given system becomes so pronounced that revolution becomes the much safer option for the subjects of that system. So you'd say precarity is almost the individual functional cash-out of the contradictions of capitalism or any other system. So working themselves through. And security is immunization from the consequences of those contradictions. So on an individual level, the contradictions of any given society threaten your ongoing life. Because the exploitation of labor increases as the rate of profit falls. And as that happened, the danger to society also increases because the danger of a revolution, let's say, ratchets up, up, up and up.

And so what Castel talks about, and the dynamic Laurie takes from him, is immunization. So because if precarity is a virus that sort of spreads through society as the contradictions of a given system sharpen, it is through security that you can immunize against that virus. And you can immunize your whole society from it by immunizing certain populations of otherwise precarious people from precarity. I'm sure a lot of you are thinking about the welfare state right now, and you're right. That's one of the main ways it's been done in the 20th century, but we'll get there. So we define security as a modern dynamic of legitimizing and securing relations of domination. That is, precarity is biopolitics, the conduct of conduct aimed at controlling people by creating a dichotomy of safety and danger that they live in between.

So precarity is the virus and things like the welfare statements are immunization agents that we use to more or less prevent the breakup of society. But in addition to preventing the breakup of society, they also prevent revolutionary change that we might say is for the better. So historically, threats that require immunization have come from without. The state builds walls around the cities to secure your life from the Mongol hordes. So you know where the threat is coming from, it's coming from the Mongols. So you build some walls around your city, and then your city is more or less secured. Your once precarious society is basically secured. But neoliberalism has encompassed everything.

So there are no more invading hordes. You know, there's al-Qaeda and we try to secure ourselves from them as much as we can. I mean, if anything, we sort of, again, there's a sort of double effect there where we use the specter of al-Qaeda to secure society against, you know, threats from within, from, say, more socially just causes. But modern discourses, and this is back to Laurie, of immunization no longer solely involve potential dangers from the outside. The endangered weak position is part of society, and if its endangerment is not controlled and regulated, then it can only be contained at best. The threats that can lead to this do not come from outside, but instead develop an excess that is no longer governable, that grows from within protective regulation. Laurie cites Kestel's example of wage labor. At its outset, wage labor was seen as a dependent and wretched position, mainly because it was.

I quote, for a long time wage labor led to poverty, but then only in the last century did European and North American welfare states succeed in removing wage labor from disadvantage, associating it with safeguards against social risks and transforming it into a secure life. So, in effect, what you have is the transformation of wage labor from what you might think of as say Victorian conditions, into what you might consider sparkling 1950s conditions where dad works at a factory and mom stays at home raising 2.1 kids and so on and so on, where before it was considered a degenerated form of life. It has been elevated, if you like, and part of what elevated it was the immunization that the welfare state gives against the uncertainties that come with it. So, in effect, your precariousness as a wage laborer where you can't afford what you produce.

In fact, the sum total of all wage laborer can't afford what is produced by the sum total of all wage laborer because, guess what? The capitalist needs its profit. There's the contradiction of capitalism. It's just there in one sentence. Anyone who says this is complicated is wrong. It's not complicated. Anyway, this kind of labor is highly precarious largely because your stake in your continued existence is based on your continued usefulness to capital, whereas the welfare state of the 1950s, 60s and 70s and 80s and 90s in some places basically decoupled the wage life from that kind of precariousness.

If you were to lose your job, there were support systems in place for you to continue being alive. So, if you go back to biopolitics, there are no longer as many things threatening your life at the economic level on a day-to-day basis. But the relationships of precarity are constant and society must protect itself by enforcing precarity because of its own foreseen threats. Individual male breadwinners being precarious by the wage labor system were then immunized by the welfare state. But the feminized private sphere was precarized through dependence on the husband to say provide health insurance. So, the one important thing about precarity and immunization is that it is all about who gets protected and who then remains a dependent and precarious subject. So, what I read here into this is that precarity is basically one of the natural outcomes of a division of labor plus a hierarchy of power. You do something I cannot and I need you to do the thing but I cannot make you and I have no similar obligations over you.

Therefore, I'm precarious quite simply because you could choose to withhold that thing from me. As the soul male breadwinner on a 1950s picket fence suburban home, I as the recipient of the immunization against precarity because of the division of labor in the home where the wife would perform unpaid household tasks and the man would perform paid valued labor that there is a thing that the wife depends on the husband for for which the wife has no similar obligation. There's no that inequality renders her precarious. So, just as within society, the male breadwinners and so on are kept winning bread more or less to prevent social breakdown in the house that that precarity is then extended to the women and children who must then depend on the husband continuing to immunize them against precarity of more or less his own volition, which of course, as any good Marxist will tell you, the point about eliminating hierarchies is not putting good people in the hierarchies because you can't always assume good people will end up in the hierarchies. Better to make it so that bad people can't really can't really externalize their badness. If there were no massive sort of economic or physical inequalities, then a lot of racism and sexism would just basically become people being dicks.

But because there are those massive inequalities of power, it's something much, much larger because it creates precariousness in the people on the sharp ends of those prejudices. Prejudice is, I don't know, I'm prejudiced against coconut, I don't particularly like it. I'm prejudiced against people who read Harry Potter, I think they're stupid. But there is no power in that relationship. My dislike of the people who read Harry Potter does not precarious them in any way. Whereas Liam Neeson, for example, note to people listening for free, this was current as the recording of this episode. Liam Neeson's decision to go murder a black guy because he was mad, that is one of the forces that precarises black people for the benefit of white people. So that's one of the reasons that precariousness is such a useful analytical tool because it allows us to not just say, well, of course,

all of these isms and so on have a class element or have a power element, which is why you might, which is why you can be against someone like Kamala Harris in the States and still like, and have that be okay, where, and it's precariousness that sort of caches that out because Kamala Harris as a woman of color, her direct choices as the district attorney for all of California, district attorney for San Francisco and the attorney general of California, precarioused a lot of women of color who didn't have the same sort of choices and advantages that she had, right? So this is why it's analytically useful. And so let's go back to the welfare state. The thing about welfare state immunization is as we were talking about it only immunizes a normalized group against precarity. So we've talked about the House, but we can also think about how FDR's New Deal immunized a couple generations of basically mostly white men against insecurity because of redlining.

Like black people really didn't benefit from the New Deal that much because you'd say, well, we're going to give out loans in these neighborhoods but not for black neighborhoods. Like it's all designed to exclude them without necessarily mentioning race overtly that much. So this is why we remember the New Deal very well and sometimes uncritically. But really what it did was it normalized protection for one group of people in exchange for keeping another group precarioused and therefore subject to power because when you think about it in the UK, one nation tourism is about the responsibilities that the powerful have, the rich, the aristocracy or whatever, to make sure that enough people are secured in order to protect the existing set of power relations. And so for Castel and for Lori, which she draws out of Castel, is that precarity and immunization against precarity is not necessarily a good thing. So FDR's New Deal was essentially a piece of white supremacist legislation. It had some good elements, but you can't just say it was necessarily a good thing.

And so what's important for Castel and what Lori draws out is that precarity is not necessarily a binary. When you're immunized against precariousness, there's still always precariousness gnawing at the edges. What if something happens to me and I'm no longer in the in-group that gets the immunizer? And this is where we sort of transition from Fordist politics, so the politics of the factory, the predictable employment, this 1950s household that we're talking about in theory to the politics of post-Fordism. So this is the politics of now, endless freelancing, weWorks, learning to code, all that nonsense. Policing the edges of this zone of immunization versus the zone of precarity are various official, so border police, DWB caseworkers, normal police, official non-state, universities, workplaces, et cetera, and non-official, so racial, sex, prejudice, forces. And the idea is to sort of understand who is immunized and who is not against precarity and why. So Lori writes, in this kind of domination security dynamic that I called biopolitical immunization, security is to be achieved in a twofold way.

In order to stabilize and heal the constantly contaminated self, it occurs with the integration of those others who can be neutralized, in other words domesticated, as well as through the exclusion or rejection of the foreigner who cannot be integrated. So this is going beyond Castel, I quote again. The reasons for the inflammatory viral infection are no longer to be found in the unreasonable political, economic, and positions to which the marginalized are subject, but consist rather in the normalization of precarization throughout the whole of society. So this is big. This is the transformation to neoliberalism, where rather than obtaining consent for government through immunization, the point of precarization is to remove immunization as much as possible to roll back the welfare state and all its forms, and then force every individual to sort of grapple with precarity internally by basically the relentless imposition of self-discipline.

So, for example, what we might talk about is the way in which a worker, let's say, in the old model, and this actually goes back to something Michael Walker said about how austerity is about disciplining the workforce rather than saving money, because it costs more to means test than it does just give people stuff. What they're really doing, what Laurie would say they're doing is they're extending precarity. So they're saying we are going to... So should you lose your job or should you leave your job, then you are eligible for assistance in a very small number of circumstances. Your immunization is now hanging on by a thread. You have to then jump through an enormous amount of hoops in order to stay on the in-group of people who are immunized, people who are in jobs.

And the fact that now with labor protection slipping away, you can constantly lose your job for almost any reason, which means that precarity is no longer something you are or you aren't, it's a constant condition. So in order to not slip down one rung of precarity for closer to the gnashing teeth of the unemployment industry, I need to make sure I'm relentlessly self-disciplined overperforming at my job, never really looking for anything else unless it's a sure thing, it's of greater value. So I'm basically going to be a much, much more disciplined worker as a result of it. If I have a zero-hours contract, I'm always going to make sure I'm constantly available, because at the moment I'm not available and I lose that contract, then I get put into the DWP churn.

And the DWP churn is so precarious that it's very easy to fuck up, which means I might starve. So there's a very, very, very short journey from I have a zero-hours contract and I've been called in at the last minute, but I have to go pick up my kid from school to, well, I'm homeless now. But the extent of precarization is now so universal under the neoliberal model that simply looking back in time and extending the old model of immunization by wage stabilization will not be able to take in all of the precarious. So how will this model take in precarious women, non-citizens,

not to mention the fact that the post-Fortist organization of the workplace is such that basically everyone is immediately expendable all the time? How do we even create an in-group of a subset of those people who receive the biopolitical immunization? So the contemporary normalization of precariorization challenges the foundations of the politics of basically people being consented to buy into society, because it basically works for them, because the integrated or non-integrated groups just aren't in balance anymore. We have some billionaires and one-percenters or whatever who are super-integrated, who could never possibly become precarious.

And then we have a growing mass of immiserated subjects who are constantly precarious and who are generally always two crises away from being homeless. And there are more and more and more people who are like this. This is not the realm of sort of the cold-dust smeared worker. This is the realm of the respectable university graduate, et cetera. I'm not saying that this is right and proper, that precariousness is the realm of the cold-dust smeared worker, but rather that all of these groups who sort of blithely assumed that they were the subjects of immunization are now sort of waking up to the fact that they no longer have that protection.

So let's reorient ourselves, because we can be in big danger of seeing the welfare state as Keteris paribus a basically good thing. Remember it isn't. Its function is to provide just enough security to ensure social cohesion and therefore exclude some people from that security to create an in-group. It will take mass precarialization in order to splinter these societies apart and create something entirely new. Now, we're going into a chapter in which Laurie discusses the state in detail,

but given my almost regrettable focus on the state last month, I'm going to gloss it over slightly, but I'm still going to talk about it. So remembering the welfare state governs by alleviating precarity for group of insiders, the neoliberal state governs via precarity for everyone. Retrenching itself to focus exclusively on physical security, which really less than a security and rather than securing the state against outside invaders, because in the neoliberal world, who's going to invade? It essentially becomes an internal surveillance web and a technique of discipline and control.

So how does the neoliberal state normalize social insecurity and govern by it? Well, we talked earlier about how austerity governs, disciplines labor markets by precariousness and insecurity. Again, remember how it's bad economics for everyone but the rich. The generous welfare state means more people are spending more money, which is good. And people who benefit from the lower wages of austerity are basically capital. This is why everything is slowing down, but that's still fine. And why the Tories can say with a straight face,

no, we believe we just haven't cut enough. That's the problem because what they're looking for is a more disciplined labor force, not a more prosperous economy. So also, let's talk about the states a little bit as well. In the current, I don't want to say debate, but in the current field of Democratic candidates, you can always know who sucks and who's good based on the way they talk about healthcare. If they're talking about access to healthcare, then that means they suck.

If they're talking about universal healthcare, that means they're good. From the logic of precariousness, why is that? Access inserts an if into healthcare, which means if you have access to healthcare, that means if you can afford it, you're guaranteed to be able to get it. So if you have, I have access to an Aston Martin store, I could walk over to the one in Barkley Square and I can walk in, but I can't walk out with an Aston Martin because not enough of you have signed up to the Patreon. The simple equation is this.

The more that the working class are immiserated and dominated, the less that their threat is from splitting off from society, and so the less they must be inoculated against precarity. Welcome to the limits of electoral politics, i.e. without labour militancy, there would be very little incentive to decrease precarity, because we talked earlier about immunization as sort of kicking the can down the road in terms of the contradictions of capitalism. Well, that contradiction only results in, say, a revolutionary force

if there is a working class with class consciousness that is able to organize amongst itself in, say, labour unions that will then actively resist the power of capital and potentially even overthrow it. But, and I think this is sort of where I become a little bit of an adornian, if the power of capital is so overwhelming and is so totalizing that even in your leisure time you are forced into relentless self-discipline and it's not internally imposed self-discipline, it's externally imposed self-discipline, which it will get into,

then essentially what's happened is the state has gone from being a comfortable zoo, so feeling like it's providing for you, to basically being a much more obvious prison. Now, again, we're in danger of sounding nostalgic, which we shouldn't, because the state was always a prison for a lot of people. There was a large electoral coalition that it wasn't a prison for. The difference is that through the imposition of internal self-discipline, through immiseration and sheer power, capital has largely been able to break the power of the working class to resist it,

scatter it into little pieces, and then vampirize them all individually, which means that those contradictions of capitalism, the contradictions of capital mean that one side is going to crunch more or less. In every previous society, well, in many previous societies, revolution has meant that the ruling class gets crunched over, and then another class takes over. So the French Revolution, you know, the bourgeoisie and the peasantry were sort of so immiserated by the aristocracy that they were able to unite together,

to form a block to take power to overthrow the aristocracy and create a new society of their own. But the bourgeois society that resulted from that now is in open war against the working class and has been for a long time. And now the contradictions are very sharp, but through these techniques that they have reduced the ability of the working class to resist them. So let's go back to Laurie. She says, biopolitical steering techniques govern in this political economic mode on the basis of competing differences.

It is no longer primarily a matter of deviations from a national normality, so let's think of the beneficiaries of the New Deal, but rather a means of regulating a tolerable difference between diverse normalities. This means individuals are supposed to actively modulate themselves and arrange their lives on the basis of a repeatedly lowered standard of safeguarding that's making themselves governable. So if the standard is always lower and it's a race to the bottom among the working class to meet that standard of safeguarding,

then essentially what's happened is you no longer even need to conduct conduct. People are now disciplining themselves. So when we talk about how Netflix has no holiday policy, that is to say at Netflix there is no set amount of holidays you can take. You can take a million days if you want to. What actually happens is because people are so precarious, it means that it's a race to the bottom to take no days. Netflix doesn't even need to have a rule about holidays anymore.

They just allow people's precariousness to mean that they all limit their own holidays apparently voluntarily. This is the basic ideological underpinning of quote unquote, learn to code. So we journey down now into the very nature of work itself. Modern labor, especially cognitive and communicative labor, Laurie argues, is akin to that of the virtuoso. So a virtuoso singer is not engaged in productive labor according to Marx's definition when she sings quote unquote like a bird, i.e. not in any way that generates a return on invested capital.

The exact same singing, the same notes, the same length, the same location, everything, when paid for by an entrepreneur who is selling tickets, for example, is productive labor because then it becomes part of the relations of production. So it becomes labor that generates returns on capital. So much of cognitive labor now becomes acting, speaking, and so on in the presence of others. Think about the endless copywriting, graphic designing, consulting, workshop leaning, and so on that constitutes much of the newly precarious middle-class labor. It's singing, but it's performance, it's not literally singing, but it's communicative,

but it's performance communication to a business rather than an audience. When the presence of others quote unquote, which for Hannah Arendt is a precondition of what it means to act politically, is reduced to a capitalized product relation, the compulsion to prove one's own virtuosity becomes a self-referential and competitive servility. So consider the endless blog posting on LinkedIn or the activities of constant brand-building or people who are always circling back and touching base, people you really hate to interact with, to be honest. It feels so false and embarrassing because there's an endless attempt to prove one's own virtuosity as a worthwhile member of a productive relationship.

What this in turn amounts to is a kind of self-government, where instead of acting in public to make ourselves political, as Hannah Arendt would say, we act in public to make ourselves governable and to demonstrate how governable we can be. And so if we go back, if we really go back to thinking about what it means to be free, self-determining, what it means to be safeguarded, we go back to that original tension between freedom and security, you can really sort of look back to someone who's like a blithely ignorant startup, a zillionaire or whatever, who says yes, but money doesn't buy happiness, and tell him to go fuck himself because of course it fucking does.

Obviously it does. What it does, it buys freedom and safety and safety from compulsion. And this is what Laurie says. In the permanent race for the hope for securing of one's own life and that of one's immediate social milieu, so your friends and family and stuff, against competing others, the fact that a lastingly better life cannot be an individual matter is obscured. So what essentially that means is that security is not something you can achieve just by basically doing your best and learning to code and trying really hard and waking up every morning and rising and grinding and so on. It's actually all of social relationship.

So in governmental subjugation, she goes on, the demands of preventive individualist self-protection, self-immunization is in precariorization, are more affirmed than questioned. Self-government and the conduct of life are primarily at the service of political governability and capitalist valorization, and the anxiety of precariorization maintains this relation. So this is one of the reasons that we find sort of rise and grind types or people who seem to really love their jobs to sort of be so annoying because you know that they're basically all the adult version of a kid who wore a bow tie to elementary school and carried a roller backpack and they're basically apple polishing nerds.

They're basically suck ups to authority. It's sort of servile. It's they're saying, yes, I'm going to do my best. I'm going to rise and grind. I'm going to be the best employee I can be, but it's basically just them saying, look how good I like your boots. So Lori, I want to take the gun out of their mouths right now, because Lori then goes on to an affirmative basis for the politics of the future that takes precarity into account. So for Judith Butler, who also wrote the introduction to this volume, precariousness can form this affirmative basis for politics rather than serving as capital wants to to set labor against labor and terror induced virtuoso LinkedIn blogging or benefits interviews,

grouping people together in an alliance against the logic of protection for shrinking few at the cost of many others. Lori discusses precarious a la deriva, which are a feminist militant research group in Barcelona that are engaging what you might call radical militant research on this subject and are focusing on what you might call a care crisis. Individualization and atomization separate us from one another. As we become unable to depend on one another, we become less able to deal with precariorization from which capital benefits so comprehensively. So privatized risk management among middle class people, including the extreme self discipline

necessary to like continue living in a society that's governed by precarity, reduce the possibility of generally horizontal communities of care emerging. So the requirements of constant availability to work if you have a zero hours contract with cut social and employment rights mean more and more of your life outcomes and those of your family depend on how much you're actually able to be present at work as a body. Because remember we're talking Foucault, this is biopolitics here. So all of our care, the care we attend to one another's bodies with, the care that we attend to ourselves, even self care was really just a way to keep yourself whole and exploitable by capital

without them having to intervene that much is all going upwards to capital. So what they're talking about is a care strike, which is not seek to interrupt care work, so to speak, which is feminized, invisibilized and frequently denied social and citizen rights, but rather to move its excesses away from capital and toward the center, in towards one another. And Laurie discusses this as a kind of exodus because in accepting one another's precarity, which is essentially a biological concept because we all die if we aren't part of social relations of care, then we exit the prison that we are kept in by precarialization by turning one another's care activity towards one another. Because in this sense, precarity becomes an asset because there is nothing tying you to this fundamentally exploitative system.

So in reality, she's almost an accelerationist who is like, we have been made so precarious, we have been detached so much that there is very little sense in our continued buy-in and that one of the first things we could do as a kind of almost... I think this is sort of a big element of this is the feminist angle, is this kind of working together. And the performance of servile virtuosity to demonstrate our cyclopean care, tending worry and availability for capital will end and being replaced by a non-servile virtuosity caring for one another. In this sense, our precariousness becomes our ability to exit and start something radically new. She ends, the first step in this direction is disobedience, the refusal of servile virtuosity. Any case, that is state of insecurity.

It's available on Verso books. I really enjoyed reading it. If you want something quite dense and academic, then I really can't recommend it enough. I think it's worth getting immediately. Otherwise, it only serves for me to thank you for listening. Thank you for subscribing or in a month from now to consider subscribing. And that for our subscribers, we have a, again, it's for everyone but the time will have passed by the time you get it. If you're listening to this as a Patreon subscriber, we have a live show coming up at the Star of Kings with Josie Long

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