Precarias a la Deriva
While in many ways this is the condition of women under patriarchy and of workers under capitalism as such, the Precarias seek to analyze the present relationships of waged and unwaged work and the conditions of the women who do much of this work. The group formed in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish general strike of 2002, as a response to their feeling that the type of work they did, known as “precarious work,” was not represented in the strike and the calls to action by the participating unions. The Precarias have been active in conversations and mobilizations in Europe around precarious work, including the Euromayday marches.
The 2002 general strike was unsatisfactory for members of Precarias for three reasons:
1. for not taking up – and this is no novelty – the experience and the unjust division of domestic work and care, almost entirely done by women in the ‘non-productive’ sphere, 2. for the marginalization to which both the forms of action and the proposals of the strike condemn those in types of work – ever more common – which are generally lumped
together as ‘precarious’ and
3. for not taking into consideration precarious, flexible, invisible or undervalued work, specifically that of women and/or migrants (sexual, domestic, assistance, etc.).
Sex and care are historically constructed (Precarias, "A Very Careful Strike," 2005). At the beginning of Christianity, a bipolar feminine model was created, where women were either virtuous, mother of gods, or the great sinner of the Apocalypse, the transgressor, and/or the whore. During the Enlightenment, female sexuality was controlled from religions sanctions to legal sanctions. This includes the regulation of sexual services for money, and how prostitution appeared as a specialized occupation within the division of labor of patriarchal capitalism.
Today, gender positions are more fluid. The whore is no longer just and only a whore, and the sainted mother is no longer such a saint nor only a mother. Attention and care is now professionalized as a skill in the capitalist workplace.
We have a crisis of care. First, the Welfare State has been converted into “risk management.” Second, many of the tasks previously conducted in the home are now externalized into the marketplace. This includes fast food and precooked meals that replaces the mother, the contracting of other women from the Global South to clean homes. Third, those that need care the most--children, the sick, the disabled, and the old--do not receive it because they lack resources to purchase it.
Instead we need interdependence among inhabitants of this planet, to count social cooperation as an indispensable tool. People depend on each other, these positions are not static and it is not only “the others” that need care. The proposal focuses on destabilizing these positions, which, when they are mediated by a labor relation, remain even more fixed. We must think of relationships as going beyond commodity mediations, following the logic of the gift, where one gives without knowing what, how, and when one will receive something in exchange.
Relevant selections from this text:
"In the face of this prevailing logic, our wager consists in recuperating and reformulating the feminist proposal for a logic of care. [17] A care that appears here as a mode of taking charge of bodies opposed to the securitary logic, because, in place of containment, it seeks the sustainability of life and, in place of fear, it bases itself on cooperation, interdependence, the gift, and social ecology. Seeking a definition of care, we identify four key elements:
- Affective virtuosity: this is a matter of a criterion of social ecology, which breaks with the idea that care happen because someone loves you and presents it more as an ethical element that mediates every relation. This affective virtuosity has to do with empathy, with intersubjectivity, and contains an essential creative character, constitutive of life and the part of labor (nonremunerated as much as remunerated) that cannot be codified. What escapes the code situates us in that which is not yet said, opens the terrain of the thinkable and livable, it is that which creates relationships. We have to necessarily take into account this affective component in order to unravel the politically radical character of care, because we know – this time without a doubt – that the affective is the effective.
- Interdependence: we take as our point of departure the recognition of the multiple dependence that is given among the inhabitants of this planet and we count social cooperation as an indispensable tool for enjoying it. The task of politicizing care leads to opening the concept and analyze the concepts that compose it: economically remunerated care, nonremunerated care, self-care and those activities that assure the sustainability of life. People depend on each other, these positions are not static and it is not only “the others” that need care. The proposal consists in destabilizing these positions, which when they are mediated by a labor relation remain even more fixed, because we want to think relations beyond those of the commodity mediations, following the logic of the gift, where one gives without knowing what, how, and when one will receive something in exchange.
- Transversality: when we speak of care we refer to a notion with multiple dimensions. As we have already seen, there are remunerated and nonremunerated labor of care, blurring the false line that is persistently drawn between those who think themselves independent and crosses in an indissoluble form the material and the immaterial (relational, emotive, subjective, and sexual aspects) of our life, needs, and desires. Care takes place in commodity spheres and in those at the margins of the market, in the home and outside the home, combing a multitude of tasks and requirements for different specific knowledges. Care makes newly manifest that we cannot clearly delimit lifetime from work time, because the labor of care is precisely to manufacture life. [18]
- Everydayness: care is that continuous line that is always present, because if it were not we could not continue living, it only varies its intensity, its qualities, and its form of organization (more or less unfair, more or less ecological). We are speaking of the sustainability of life, that is to say, of everyday tasks of affective engineering that we propose to make visible and to revalorize as raw material for the political, because we do not want to think social justice without taking into account how to construct it in day-to-day situations.
Affective virtuosity, interdependence, transversality and everydayness constitute the key ingredients of a careful know-how, fruit of collective and corporeal knowledge19, that breaks with the securitary logic and thus opens cracks in the walls of fear and precarization. But this is not a prescription for sacrificed women, but rather a line upon which to insist in order for radical transformation.
In the present, one of the fundamental biopolitical challenges consists in inventing a critique of the current organization of sex, attention, and care and a practice that, starting from those as elements inside a continuum, recombines them in order to produce new more liberatory and cooperative forms of affect, that places care in the center but without separating it from sex nor from communication.
And what does it mean to “place” care in the center, and in what sense is this proposal able to become a biopolitical challenge?
When we speak of “placing” we refer, more exactly, to re-placing. Because care, as we understand it, already is, in fact, in the center. Even more: it always has been and will continue to be, today more than ever, the center. The center in the sense of principle and principal, as an arche of human existence and of social relations. Because care is what makes life possible (care generates life, nourishes it, makes it grow, heals it), care can make life happier (creating relations of interdependence among bodies) and more interesting (generating exchanges of all types of flows, knowledges, contagions), care can give like, definitively, some meaning. [20] But this reality, which has been silenced in the maligned area of reproduction and time and again recovered from patriarchal mystifications by feminist critiques of political economy, today comes to be blurred even in those indispensable Italian postoperaismo analyses of immaterial labor, the forms of exploitation and subversive possibilities of the new forms of labor. One of the gravest errors of this analysis resides, following Negri, in “the tendency (...) to treat the new laboring practices in biopolitical society only in their intellectual and incorporeal aspects. The productivity of bodies and the value of affect, however, are absolutely central in this context.” [21] As such, our proposal for placing care in the center would consist, among other things, in recovering the affective component of immaterial labor from the periphery or the silence to which it is customarily relegated in analyses of reality, and in recognizing the impossibility of separating the materiality of bodies – despite the determination of late capitalism to do just that. In returning to situate this in the place to which it corresponds and which, in fact – we insist – it occupies.
Returning to the continuum: only if the maids, the whores, the phone sex operators, grant-holding students or researchers, telephone operators, social workers, nurses, friends, mothers, daughters, compañeras, lovers... only if the caregivers, which all women are and everyone should be (que somos todas y que habríamos de ser todos) rediscover the fundamental role of the labor (remunerated or not) of care and of the social wealth it produces and we withdraw from the invisibilization, hyperexploitation, infravalorization or social stigma of which care is the object, only then will we be prepared to extract from care its transformative force.
Once brought into the light, the revolutionary potential of care could become the logic that governs our lives, replacing not only the securitary logic but also that other logic which underlies it: that of the imperatives of profit. Now the interests of capital determine production (what, how, and when one produces), spaces (the houses we inhabit, the design of our cities and towns, the very global geography and its borders) and times (labor and leisure, haste, the intensification of time). But, why not begin to imagine and construct an organization of the social that prioritizes persons, that attends to our sustainability – from access to health care to the right to affect – which orients toward our enrichment as human beings – from the access to knowledge, education, and information to the freedom to move around the world – that listens to our desires? This is the biopolitical challenge.
And we need tools to bring it about. One of these is the caring strike. It seems a paradox, if, because the strike is always interruption and visibilization and care is the continuous and invisible line whose interruption would be devastating. But all that is lacking is a change of perspective to see that that there is no paradox: the caring strike would be nothing other than the interruption of the order that is ineluctably produced in the moment in which we place the truth of care in the center and politicize it.
Thus the strike appears to us in the first place as interpellation: “what is your caring strike?” Interpellation launched to all: to those of us that act as maids, as housewives, as whores, as nurses, as telephone operators... launched also to those of us that think the cities, in order to facilitate encounters, to those of us that invent bridges, so affects can come through, to those of us that imagine worlds, in order that the profit economy could be replaced by the ecology of care... and, of course, to the men – is are we going to end with the mystique that obliges women to care for others even at the cost of themselves and obliges men to be incapable of caring even for themselves? , Or are we never going to cease to be sad men and women and begin to degenerate the imposed attributions of gender?...
Because care is not a domestic question but rather a public matter and generator of conflict.