Organizing the precarious: Autonomous work, real democracy and ecological precarity

Abstract

In 2008, just as the movement of the precarious seemed to be winning one political battle after the next, the fight against precarization suddenly dwindled. The cycle of struggles of the precarious that began in 2000 had seemingly come to an end. Ironically this was also the moment that precarity as a concept became widely known in popular opinion, media commentary and academia. This paper focuses on the movement of the precarious from its inception in the early 2000s to its decline in 2008 and its reappearance in response to the economic crisis through the widespread mobilizations for “real democracy” between 2008 and 2014. Drawing from our experience as participants in the movement of the precarious, and theoretical discussions that have shaped the politics of the movement, the paper adopts a retrospective approach to investigate the metamorphoses of a consciousness of precarity and of the underlying organizing practices that lead to its demise and subsequent incarnations. It reconstructs precarity as theory in action that lives through the organizational ontologies of the movement of the precarious.