On precairous activism
eyfa - 10.02.2005 15:29
As part of a process of promoting the Precair Forum, people both inside and outside of the coordinating groups are invited to construct short (up to 600 or so word) 'provocations', texts which discuss ideas and topics that people feel need to be reflected upon.
for more: check out www.precairforum.nl (Dutch/English)
Precarious Activism
or
"We cannot write a provocation because we have no time to think"
For those who don't know, eyfa is an organisation that mainly deals with fundraising and transfer of know-how for grassroots groups and
activists collectives. Because eyfa activities are a way to transfer resources where we want them to end up (i.e. with alternative media, grassroots anti-capitalists collectives or environmental projects in Eastern and Western Europe) and because we work collectively in the office in an attempt to put our ideals into practice, we see what we do on the one hand as activism (or providing a basis for activism). But on the other hand, it is an unstable and badly paid job with no long-term security, welfare rights or adequate health care provision, and at the same time, our activities (especially project funding), allow other people to get funds to finance their activist projects, but under the same unstable and badly paid conditions (i.e. we provide no structural or core funding and therefore little 'stability'). In that way, we are in a precarious situation and foster precarity ourselves.
When we were invited by the organisers of this meeting to write a provocation, the reaction by the eyfa office team was a small silence, followed by an uncomfortable 'that's a great idea, yes, hm...' and, finally, the so well-known eyfa remark: 'Let's see if we have time, you know there's the funding deadline in February and the Winter Meeting to organise and we are short of staff at the moment...' and so forth. This is why, when we thought of writing a provocation on the issue of precarious work, instead of looking outside we thought we'd like to reflect on the precarity within, so to speak.
If this precarity concept is about the consequences of the welfare
state's safety nets being removed in the general framework of
neo-liberalisation, we can of course criticise McDonalds for not giving its employees maternity leaves and fixed contracts. However, which activist working in self-created structures do you know, who has a stable job with paid maternity leave? You will probably find very few, and those that do are usually to be found in the university sector or within welfare provisions, both of which are being privatised or dismantled as we speak.
An even more interesting question is, would you like to have such a job? Maybe most activists trying to live "outside of the market rules" do not even aspire to such security because
a) we see insecurity as part of the socio-economic system we fight and the situation can therefore not be helped anyway, or
b) we believe in the widespread idea within anti-capitalist communities that financial stability does not mean "security" or sustainability, where actions such as squatting and permanent campaigning or grassroots organisations have their own structures to create sustainability within the biggest imaginable precarity, and permanency within constant change.
Two questions arise:
1) Is precarity an inseparable element of organising life outside the State or the Market, both being based on the ideology that wants you to be scared of the future and seek security in money, mortgage and marriage and if so, can we define activism as 'precarious' at all?
2) How is it possible to organise life outside the State or the Market in the first place?
Following on from these reflections, and since this is a provocation, we pose some questions here which we do not have final answers to either.
Precarity at the personal level
Activism/resisting capitalism is a hard and unstable form of "work" (i.e. activities you undertake).
Activism is unstable because projects and people change, squats get evicted and there are new things to organise and people to network with all the time. Some (not all) activists, choose a certain "lifestyle" and way to interact with other people - a precarious (as in constantly changing) way of going about your life, with all its good and bad things.
- What does that do for you and your collectives and how do you/your collectives deal with that?
- What are the positive or negative aspects of this constant flux?
- What structures can/could create sustainability within the biggest imaginable precarity? How to improve these structures?
Activism is hard because we feel there is so much to do and because in organising an anti-whatever gathering or a campaign, running a people's kitchen or planning an action we tend to overexploit ourselves.
- Is this because we like it, or do we think it is necessary to achieve our goal?
- Does this behaviour conflict with being "sustainable" about what we do?
- Do we believe that 'Everybody must have projects all the time" and therefore just live what be say we fight, i.e. a work ethic we do not recognise as such?
Finantial precarity and personal self-exploitation
The reality for most activists is that you have to look for some part-time job outside anti-capitalist communities and within the market structure, next to your activist work, to generate some sustainable income. A more ‘pragmatic activism’. But the jobs that you then end up doing are often very precarious (e.g. cleaning , working in bars on a 0 hour contract etc etc).
But assuming we do have relative agency in choosing our living and working conditions, one critique point, and a provocation to activists, would be: why do we deliberately live the reality we claim to fight? Why if 'overactive' in self-created structures we pay ourselves little money, work 10 hours a day and we do not separate our personal life from work?
- Is it because we believe the apparent separation of work and free time is only maintained because 'free' time is needed to recreate labour power, in a capitalist society?
- Or is it also a sign of lack of history and the ignorance of past social struggles - to throw away the achievements of a once radical labour movement, such as the 8 hour day and adequate social and health security provisions?
- Or is it just a reflection of the changing nature of work and we have no choice in the matter?
- Do we simply live a capitalist work ethic and fail to see our own reproduction of what we criticise in the new precarity, that our life is our job, that we accept the fact that we have to continually reinvent ourselves to compete, that we ignore those that cannot do the same (the old, the sick, those that don't fit 'the norm')?
- Or are all these questions based on the wrong assumption, that activism can be precarious in the first place, i.e. because we are in a position to "decide" to live precariously to pursue our ideals which means our precarity fundamentally differs from non-activists-not-chosen precarity? How are these differences of economic position and privilege or subjectivity reflected in the precarity discourse?
Financial precarity and collectives
Money has undoubtedly helped a lot of amazing projects to kick in, but sometimes groups that get a lot of money somehow 'de-radicalise'. Some really amazing projects and social struggles are alive and well with no cash injections, and some are well-funded but unsuccessful…
In relation to that, fundraising being one of eyfa's activities means we are contributing to make radical projects happen by helping them get… money, which is admittedly a controversial idea. We are constantly coming back to the question of: Which of the above-paragraph situations is more true? what can money do for activist groups and resistance? What can it not do? And unless you resort to simplistic answers those are hard to answer questions.
Then as far as groups are made of people financial precarity at a personal level affects collectives - sometimes amazing projects coming to an end because people get tired of having to work in bars to sustain their activism.
Does individual financial precarity affect the nature and composition of collectives in the first place, and the shapes of our struggles, since it is harder to participate for somebody that is not as comfortable with being precarious as the young-male-healthy-legal-with no dependants type can be?
No time to think
The question of activist-precarity-as-a-choice aside, fact is all these 'precarities' can be detrimental to our physical (can you afford the dentist or physio?) and mental health (stress, burn-our, overspanning). But just as tragic: it leads to a lack of time to think. What is the point in doing an action, if you had no time to sit down beforehand to discuss and hopefully conclude rightly that this action is useful in the promotion of social change?
How do we know that our actions do not support the status quo if we don't have time to carefully weigh them up against other possibilities?
Many groups (including us), have the tendency to neglect long-term planning and strategies in favour of the short-term campaign, action or summit-run.
If we assume that precarity leads to 'less time to think' (maybe for some seasonal workers it means more time to think) and if we assume that our precarity and lack of time to think is in our own hands, we would be well advised to make time to think, not alone, but together with others.
We see these questions above as interesting intersections between the current precarity discourses and eyfa's reflection processes (see more about those on our website, or ask). Redefinition is ongoing...and see, in the end we found time to write this.
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