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Precarity North and South: A Southern Critique of Guy Standing Ben Scully, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa ABSTRACT Guy Standing is among the most provocative and influential analysts of the rise of precarious work around the world. His writing is part of a wave of global labour studies that has documented the spread of precarious work throughout the Global North and South. However, this article argues that by treating precarity around the world as a single phenomenon, produced by globalisation, the work of Standing and others obscures the different and much longer history of precarious work in the Global South. This article shows how many of the features that Standing associates with the contemporary “precariat” have long been widespread among Southern workers. This longer history of precarity has important implications for contemporary debates about a new politics of labour, which is a central focus of Standing’s recent work. KEY WORDS precariat; precarious work; precarity; South Africa; Global Labour Studies Introduction: Precarious Work North and South The past decade has witnessed the flowering of globally oriented labour studies (Burawoy, 2009; Munck, 2010; Waterman, 2012). This new wave of scholarship is not unprecedented in its focus on workers in the Global South. Indeed, some prominent voices in today’s global labour studies were previously key participants in what was called “new international labour studies” (NILS) in the 1980s (Munck, 1988). Yet while there are continuities between NILS and contemporary global labour studies, in a certain sense the intellectual projects underlying these two bodies of literature are the inverse of one another. The aim of NILS and much other earlier work on Southern workers was, as Ronaldo Munck (2009: 617) has put it, to “mainstream” fields of inquiry that were then compartmentalised as “third world studies”. NILS-oriented scholarship insisted that “the study of labour in India, Latin America or South Africa was ... as important as what [was] then called ‘metropolitan’ labour studies” (Munch, 2009: 617). In other words, NILS argued that scholars should treat Southern workers as similar to their Northern counterparts, recognising their agency and their importance to economic and political developments within their countries. The global labour studies of today is much less likely to argue that the Southern working class resembles, or will come to resemble, the working class of the North. Scholars now increasingly recognise that “[t]he long-cherished idea that the nations of latecomers in the process of transformation will follow in the footsteps of the frontrunners, has not proven to be valid” (Breman and Van der Linden, 2014: 937). Instead, many scholars have reached the opposite conclusion. As Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(2), Page 160 Jan Breman and Marcel van der Linden (2014: 937) put it, it increasingly seems that “the West is more likely to follow the Rest than the other way around”. This realisation has finally pushed labour scholarship beyond its traditional focus on organised, formally employed workers. Precarious work has become a central focus of the field as scholars attempt to both analyse the present and understand the seeming future of work across much of the world. This global focus is a welcome antidote to the parochialism and Euro/US-centrism of mainstream labour studies, and indeed of much mainstream social science more broadly (Connell, 2007; Burawoy, Chang and Hsieh, 2010; Bhambra, 2014). However, as precarity has come to be analysed as a global phenomenon, there has been a tendency to employ a somewhat simplistic assumption of global convergence. While precarious work has been on the rise throughout the world, fundamental differences in the histories of work, and of workers, in the Global North and Global South should caution against viewing precarity as a universal phenomenon whose meanings and implications are cognate for workers everywhere. This article presents a critique of the work of Guy Standing, who has written some of the most influential analyses of precarious work as a global phenomenon (Standing, 2011, 2014). His ideas and terminology have influenced debates about contemporary work around the world. However, his work also provides an example of the problematic tendency to universalise the causes and effects of precarious work. In his most recent book A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens, he explicitly turns to the question of formulating a new politics of labour for the precarious age which can replace what he sees as the increasingly obsolete politics of the “old” working class. Standing deserves praise for this model of politically engaged research. Unlike most critical scholarship that stops at diagnosing problems, he has the intellectual courage to advance clear positions about potential solutions to the crisis facing many of the worlds’ workers. However, in doing so he brings into relief many of the problems with simplistic assumptions of global convergence. In part, Standing’s simplification of geographic and historical diversity is understandable. It is the natural inclination of someone making a call for a specific programme of political action. However, an understanding of the different histories of work in the North and South is not merely a matter of academic “correctness”. The central argument of this article is that, by ignoring the much longer history of precarious work in the Global South, Standing and others blind themselves to important lessons from and examples of anti-precarity labour politics among Southern workers. The article begins by examining the Eurocentric historical narrative that lies behind Standing’s idea of precarity. It shows how he contrasts precarious work with a non-precarious past defined by stable employment, welfare provisions and other features of Northern countries’ histories which are virtually unknown in the history of Southern countries. The next section considers three of the ten “defining features” that Standing uses to describe contemporary precarious work, namely a “detachment from labour”, “distinctive relations of distribution”, and “distinctive relations to the state”. In Southern countries these are not recent products of contemporary precarity, but longstanding features of wage work; they have shaped workers’ politics from the colonial era, through the period of post-independent development, and into the neo-liberal present. The final section describes how this longer experience of precarity in the South has shaped a distinctive Southern labour politics. In particular, it highlights new forms of organising, labour’s use of social coalitions to push for the opening of democratic spaces, and demands for new forms of social protection, all of which have defined labour politics of the South in the neo-liberal era. It has become especially Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(2), Page 161 important to understand this Southern politics, since Northern workers are now facing similar forms of precarity and looking for new political strategies to build labour movements of the present and future. The Eurocentric Narrative: A Golden-age Past versus the Precarious Present In contemporary labour studies, precarious work is generally associated with the globalisation era. Standing makes the association between globalisation and precarious work explicit. He argues that “globalization ... has generated a [new] class structure, superimposed on earlier structures” in which the precariat has emerged as the key class. While most of Standing’s examples of precarious work and the precariat class come from Europe, he does make some references to Southern countries, especially China and India. For example, Foxconn in China, with its “flexible manufacturing” model, is held up as an exemplar of how globalisation is remaking the global experience of work (Standing, 2014: 47). Despite these references to contemporary Southern precarity, the historical narrative that Standing presents comes from a clear Northern perspective. Because he views precarious work as a product of the globalisation era, most of the story he tells takes place from the 1980s to the present. However, there is a longer history which is implicit in the contrast he frequently draws between contemporary precarity and an earlier era of secure wage work. He recognises that there has always been “insecure”, “uncertain” and “volatile” labour. However, he argues, in the past these forms of work were the exception, whereas today they are the norm (Standing, 2014: 17). In this more secure past the working class was defined by “proletarianisation” which signified a “reliance of mass labour, reliance on wage income, absence of control or ownership of the means of production, and habituation to stable labour” (Standing, 2014: 15). For Standing, it is this bygone golden age of secure work which produced the specific form of labour politics which has now become obsolete: From the nineteenth century up to the 1970s, the representatives of the proletariat – social democratic and labour parties, and trade unions – strove for labour de-commodification through making labour more ‘decent’ and raising incomes via a shift from money wages to enterprise and state benefits. ... All labour and communist parties, social democrats and unions subscribed to this agenda, calling for ‘more labour’ and ‘full employment’, by which was meant all men in full-time jobs (Standing, 2014: 15–16). Of course, even in the Global North, this old labour politics was often a guiding vision rather than a widespread reality. Significant portions of the Northern working class were never incorporated into the kind of institutions Standing describes. But it is accurate to say that Northern labour politics was shaped by this vision, even where and when it wasn’t fully realised. In the Global South, by contrast, it can be said that, despite significant variation, there were very few places where a golden age comparable to the one that Standing describes ever seemed like a possibility for more than a tiny portion of the working class. For workers in much of the former colonial world, precarity is not new, but has been a defining feature of work throughout the colonial past and into the present era of national independence. In the period that Standing identifies as the Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(2), Page 162 pinnacle of “old” working class politics, the late nineteenth to the mid twentieth centuries, workers in much of the Global South were struggling against colonial occupation. Colonial work regimes were more likely to be violent, despotic and repressive than secure and stable. Yet this repression was not limited to the workplace. As a result, the politics of labour that emerged in the colonial world was always broader and less focused on the workplace than the “old” working class politics that Standing describes. Because of this different history, the narrative that frames the precarious present as a decline from a golden age in the past is inadequate for understanding contemporary work and the contemporary politics of labour in the South. The next section of this article turns to some of the key features that, for Standing, define contemporary precarious workers. I draw on both recent and historical scholarship on Southern labour, as well as my own research on precarious work in South Africa and elsewhere, to show that many of the features that Standing associates with today’s precarious workers were experienced by Southern workers long before the globalisation era. As a result, the politics of work in the Global South, which has emerged under these conditions of precarity, can provide a lesson to those like Standing who hope for a reformulation of traditional labour politics in the North. Three Features of the Precarious Past of Southern Workers In A Precariat Charter, Standing presents ten “defining features” that set the precariat apart as a distinct contemporary class. While a case could be made that all ten features were experienced by workers in the Global South before globalisation, this section focuses on three features: detachment from labour, distinctive relations of distribution, and distinctive relations to the state. These three features are used to show that the longer experience of precarity in the South has shaped a distinct politics of Southern labour, which holds important lessons for contemporary struggles against precarious work around the world. By speaking about the experiences of “Southern workers” as a whole, there is a risk of reproducing the same over-simplification that this article criticises in Standing’s analysis. The following is not meant as an account of the experiences of all Southern workers, just as the generalised “decline from a golden age” narrative should not be assumed to apply to all workers in the North. The purpose here is to show how a generalised history of precarity from a Southern perspective points to forms of both historical and contemporary labour politics which are obscured by the Eurocentric narrative. Detachment from labour Standing argues that: Those in the precariat are more likely to have a psychological detachment from labour, being only intermittently or instrumentally involved in labour, and not having a single labour status – often being unsure what to put under ‘occupation’ on official forms…. They are therefore more likely to feel alienated from the dull, mentally narrowing jobs they are forced to endure and to reject them as a satisfying way of working and living (Standing, 2014: 23–24). Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(2), Page 163 For Standing this detachment from labour sets precarious workers apart from members of the “old” working class, whose identities were firmly and unambiguously built around their roles as workers. However, this sort of “attachment” to labour was never universal. It was limited to a very specific period of history, and primarily in Northern countries. Detachment from labour, far from being a recent phenomenon, has been the norm for most workers throughout the history of capitalism. Even within Europe, peasants and early industrial workers exhibited a fierce resistance to dispossession and proletarianisation. As Michael Burawoy (1982: s9–s10) has argued “popular class struggles of the 19th century [in Europe arose] not where proletarianization and deskilling had advanced the most, but where they were being resisted”. This resistance to proletarianisation suggests a strong detachment from, even a rejection of, the experience of wage labour. While such resistance was marginal in the North during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it has remained central to the labour politics of workers in the Global South. Semi-proletarian Southern workers who fight to maintain access to non-wage income sources display exactly the kind of “intermittent” and “instrumental” approach to labour that Standing associates with the contemporary precariat. However, this detachment from labour of today’s Southern workers is part of a long legacy of distinct forms of labour struggle, and is not simply a product of globalisation or contemporary precarity. Africa is the region where resistance to wage work has been most extensively analysed (Hyden, 1980; Cooper, 1987; Bundy, 1988). According to Bill Freund (1988: 30–31), “For African workers, total commitment to a proletarian life-style was rarely the most attractive of options. … Wage labour was most desirable when it could be combined with systematic exploitation of subsistence production on a household basis at the same time”. But Southern workers’ resistance to full proletarianisation was not limited to Africa, nor to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Shaohua Zhan and Lingli Huang (2012) have shown how the labour shortage in China’s coastal industrial cities which has pushed up urban wages over the past decade is driven largely by rural workers choosing to remain in rural areas, relying on a mix of income from rural employment, their own agricultural production, and non-farm rural business activities. For Zhan and Huang this reliance on non-wage income represents an alternative source of bargaining power among Southern workers. Liliana Goldin finds a similar reluctance to abandon rural connections among maquiladora workers in Guatemala, who use the practice of “turning over”, or periodically quitting jobs to return to rural homes to “show that they are still in transition, not fully proletarianized, but keeping a foot in agricultural practices. As such, turnover can be construed as an expression of resistance to a version of capitalism that does not fit with expectations of a modern, better life, removed from agriculture (Goldín, 2011: 151). Michael Levien’s (2012) work on peasant resistance to land dispossession in contemporary India provides another example of fights against full proletarianisation. Levien focuses on the widespread “land grabs” in India which appropriate rural land for uses – such as high-end housing estates, commercial property developments, and offices for IT support companies – which offer few benefits to the poor land owners who are dispossessed. These land grabs have become flash points of conflict and resistance because many “Indian farmers ... can see – quite rightly – that the types of development proposed for their farmland will create no place for them, or at least not a good enough place to warrant surrendering their land” (Levien, 2012: 965–966). All of these examples of contemporary workers’ detachment from labour have very little in common with the underemployed urban youth who constitute a significant portion of the Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(2), Page 164 precariat movements of Europe. For these Southern workers, the detachment from labour that modern precarious work creates is not a “problem” for existing forms of labour politics. These workers are able to draw on an alternative “old” politics of labour in the Global South, which has long seen wage labour as disempowering. There is a continuity between peasant resistance to proletarianisation and dispossession in nineteenth-century Africa and the contemporary practice of “turning over” among maquiladora workers in Central America. These examples also show how, in the South, detachment from labour is intricately related to an attachment to land. Throughout the long history of precarious work in the South, workers have often seen access to land and other forms of non-wage income as a form of resistance and a basis for autonomy. One implication of this is that a significant portion of Southern workers have long histories of complex mixed-livelihood strategies. This fact is important to keep in mind when considering the Southern perspective on another of Standing’s defining features of the precariat, what he calls their “distinctive relations of distribution”. Distinctive relations of distribution By highlighting the contemporary precariat’s “distinctive relations of distribution, or remuneration”, Standing (2014: 18) is referring to what he sees as an increased commodification of precarious workers’ livelihoods, as they lose access to social income and come to rely increasingly on wages earned in the labour market. He contrasts this with the decommodification that marked the experience of workers in the twentieth century, when “the trend was away from [reliance on] money wages, with a rising share of social income coming from enterprise and state benefits” (Standing, 2014: 18). However, this decommodification was a feature of Northern states and does not accurately capture the historical experience of Southern workers. As Kevin Harris and I (2015) have argued, although commodification of livelihoods is generally associated with the neo-liberal era, in many important respects the mid-twentieth-century developmental era was a period of widespread commodification for Southern workers. In the period of state-led development, Southern states aimed to foster capitalist growth by transferring labour from rural and agricultural settings to the urban and industrial sectors. Industrialisation and urbanisation were processes which diminished workers’ access to non-wage income on a grand scale in the middle of the twentieth century. So the picture was significantly different in the South in the era during which Standing argues the “trend” for workers was “away from money wages” and towards “social income”. That is not to diminish the fact that Southern workers’ crisis of livelihoods was made worse by policies of the neo-liberal era. As Harris and I have put it, “Post-war development policies had already increased mass reliance on markets for income and social reproduction, but by removing market regulations and social protections, neoliberal policies turned these vulnerabilities into fullblown crises” (Harris and Scully, 2015: 424). However, because the starting point of Southern economies was not widespread security and stability, the effect of neo-liberal policies on the class structures in these countries is not the same as in the North. Standing argues that the decline of access to social incomes has fragmented the class structure, separating the precariat from the more privileged old working class who retain some of the security and protection that was associated with stable twentieth-century labour. In most of the South, decommodified social protection was never widely available in the twentieth century. Therefore, even relatively secure wage workers have long had a tendency to rely on complex Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(2), Page 165 livelihood strategies that combine wages with non-wage income sources such as subsistence production (of both food and other reproductive needs), petty commodity production for the market, small-scale trading, as well as solidarity and reciprocity in various forms. This is not meant to suggest that Southern workers have been naturally altruistic or inherently cooperative. Especially in the contemporary period, a great deal of research has shown how increasing precarity has fractured networks of support and mutuality (Mosoetsa, 2011; Bähre, 2014). However, it is a fact that, in the face of the precarious economic realities that Southern workers have faced for generations, pooling of household income has been a key economic strategy for survival. In the South, the class structure cannot be easily divided into those who retain access to secure wages and social protections and those who are precarious. In order to understand how precarious forms of employment have affected the class structure, it is necessary to analyse how the complex livelihood strategies of Southern workers have changed as work has become less secure. Obviously, this question does not have a single answer that applies to the entire Global South. However, my own research and that of others looking at this question in South Africa point to a very different contemporary class structure than the “fragmented” model that Standing posits. As Claire Ceruti (2013: 104) has argued, summarising her analysis of the class structure in Johannesburg’s largest township, “understanding class in Soweto in an era of work restructuring requires primarily a consideration of how the worlds of work are mixed at the level of the household”. Furthermore, she argues, the instability of those who do have formal wage work means that individuals frequently “move between different worlds of work over the course of their lifetime” (Ceruti, 2013: 112). The combination of “mixed” households and work status instability mean the fragmented class structure that Standing identifies is not readily apparent in this part of Johannesburg. [I]n the case of Soweto, many unemployed and informal workers rub shoulders with the employed in former council housing. Out of all the categories of waged employees, only teachers and nurses were completely absent from shack settlements. Trade union members were present in both squatter settlements and in areas dominated by people with steady jobs. Any of these individuals could form a node in a network to link one world of work with another (Ceruti, 2013: 122). My own research on workers’ household livelihoods in South Africa suggests that Ceruti’s findings are applicable beyond Soweto as well. Using data from a nationally representative household survey, the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS), I identified two sets of what could be considered relatively “secure” or “stable” workers, namely formal workers and unionised workers. Table 1 analyses the membership of these relatively better-off workers’ households. Specifically, it identifies the percentage of formal or unionised workers’ households which also contain an unemployed member, an informally employed member, or a member who receives a government social grant. Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(2), Page 166 Table 1: Security and precarity within households As the rightmost column indicates, the majority of “secure” workers live in households that contain at least one precarious member. Given the volatility of the South African labour market, it is likely that even more “secure” workers’ households would contain precarious members if we looked across time, rather than at the snapshot that the data used here provides. The workers’ households described in Ceruti’s and my own research suggests a very different relationship between precarious and more secure workers than the one that Standing presents. Members of Standing’s precariat are a new and separate class because they have lost access to sources of non-wage income while a more privileged, but shrinking, section of the working class has retained the security provided by enterprise and state benefits. In South Africa, the rise of precarity does not seem to have driven sections of the working class apart to the same degree. Instead, precarious workers and the unemployed live their social and economic lives alongside many of the remaining formally employed workers. Their interdependence signals a material link between precarious workers and formal wage work. At the same time, formal workers’ ties to their precarious family members likely make their economic situations less stable and secure than they seem if we look only at the workplace. Neither Soweto nor South Africa as a whole can tell us about the experiences of all Southern workers. But these examples do show how the transformation of work in the era of globalisation has not had the fragmenting effects on all of the working class that Standing suggests. This seems especially likely for Southern workers who have relied on livelihood strategies that mixed wage-income with various non-wage sources of income since long before the period of globalisation. To use Standing’s phrase, the “relations of distribution” for precarious and more secure workers have not necessarily become distinct from one another. This has important implications for the prospects of anti-precarious labour politics. Distinctive relations to the state For Standing, a third defining feature of the contemporary precariat is their “distinctive relations to the state”. Specifically, he argues that members of the precariat lack a range of basic rights which the state has historically provided to its citizens. Standing argues, therefore, that members of the precariat are modern-day denizens, or individuals who lack full citizenship rights. The implication is that strong and universal forms of citizenship were a feature of political life before the rise of precarious work. Again, while this narrative is partially applicable to the Global North, the history in the South is markedly different. In the mid twentieth century, the citizenship rights enjoyed by Northern workers reached an Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(2), Page 167 apex with the construction of Northern welfare states. As Standing notes through his discussion of T.H. Marshall, twentieth-century Northern welfare states clearly linked the rights of citizenship with citizens’ roles as workers (Standing, 2014: 2–3). In contrast, for the first half of the twentieth century, the majority of Southern workers were denied almost all citizenship rights under various forms of colonial government. The wave of independence in the middle of the century did transform these workers from subjects into citizens. However, their relationships to their new states rarely included rights based on their identity as workers. For Southern workers, the “social compact” of the mid twentieth century was not built around social protection, but around the promise of national development McMichael, 2011). Security and stability were not entitlements of citizenship, but future goals which would be achieved through successful national development. This produced a very different type of politics, and a different relationship to the state, among Southern workers. Sakhela Buhlungu’s argument about the emergence of the African labour movement could be applied to unions in many parts of the Global South: The ubiquitous hand of the colonial system, including at the workplace, meant that the emergence of trade unions was more than merely a response to conditions of economic exploitation by employers. It was simultaneously a response to the conditions of political oppression created by colonialism.... African trade unions were therefore economic and political creatures from the early days of their existence (Buhlungu, 2010: 198). Even after independence, the development imperative that animated the politics of new countries meant that Southern workers were more likely to be subject to government repression and control than to be beneficiaries of class-based rights like their Northern counterparts. The few examples of significant developmental social protection, such as the guaranteed employment of China’s “iron rice bowl”, differed sharply from the democratic and citizenship-expanding welfare systems of the North. Anti-democratic labour relations were a standard feature of Southern states pursuing development. As Gay Seidman put it: Where it has occurred, capitalist industrialization in the Third World has generally been marked by intensified inequalities: states seeking to attract or retain capital have often turned to political and labor repression, postponing both democracy and redistribution in the effort to promote growth (Seidman, 1994: 8). Seidman’s comparative study of labour movements in Brazil and South Africa provides one of the clearest analyses of the way in which this specific “relation to the state” produced a different class politics among Southern unions. Seidman shows how unions in these countries adopted strategies of social movement unionism (see also Webster, 1988), which linked workers’ demands to broader social and political issues. Her comparison aims to uncover whether there is “something in the organization of newly industrializing societies that stimulates social movement unionism” (Seidman, 1994: 3). Based on her own work and subsequent research on Southern unions’ politics, the answer seems to be yes. Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(2), Page 168 Conclusion: Anti-precarity Politics of the Global South Standing’s writing on the rise of precarious forms of work constitutes one of the most thoroughgoing accounts of transformations that have taken place in the world of work over the past three decades. The Southern critique of his work that is presented here is not meant to deny the importance of the very real trends that he has identified. However, taking a Southern perspective on the history of precarious work does call into question some of the political implications of his findings in Southern countries. The heart of A Precariat Charter is a call for a new form of class politics, which can replace the outmoded politics of what Standing repeatedly calls the “old working class”. The above discussion has tried to show that the old working class of the South is quite different from the one Standing has in mind. The Southern old working class shared many of the characteristics of the precariat, which Standing identifies as the “emerging” class of the twenty-first century. This recognition is important for thinking about the possibilities of a potential anti-precarity labour politics in both the North and the South. As Standing notes, citing Przeworksi (1985), “[old] working class politics were defined and shaped through struggles and not clearly perceived beforehand” (Standing, 2014: 133). Similarly, the politics of anti-precarity has already begun to emerge in the South in a number of important respects. Simplistic assumptions of convergence between the experience of work, class structure and labour politics in the North and South obscure important lessons that can be drawn from Southern workers’ long history of struggles against precarity. This article has argued that a narrative which frames precarious work in contrast to a secure past is inaccurate for most workers in the Global South. Yet despite the long-standing existence of precarious work in the Global South, the era of globalisation and neo-liberalism are important to any periodisation of Southern labour. In the North the period of the 1980s to the present has witnessed the steady erosion of work security and the subsequent undermining of what Standing calls the “old” politics of labour. The same period in the South has seen the emergence of new forms of labour politics through which workers confronted precarity in the workplace and beyond. The social movement unionism that Seidman identified in South Africa and Brazil was part of this new politics of Southern labour. Later research has shown that these new tactics and strategies were not limited to a few countries. In fact, the 1980s and 1990s were a period of innovation and militancy for workers in many parts of the Global South (Minns, 2001; Silver, 2003; Kraus, 2007; Ford, 2009). If one had to identify a golden age of unionism in the South, the 1980s and 1990s are much stronger candidates than the mid twentieth century. Some of these late twentieth-century developments faced challenges in the early part of the twenty-first century. Yet even in the current period, across the Global South, there continues to be a proliferation of both old-style labour politics in the form of industrial strikes and union organising (Butollo and Ten Brink, 2012; Chinguno, 2013; Anner and Liu, 2015) and innovative new forms of collective action among vulnerable workers (Chun, 2009; Agarwala, 2013; McCallum, 2013). Because of the narrative of decline which frames most discussions of labour in the contemporary era, these developments are often characterised as relatively futile struggles of hyper-exploited precarious workers. Yet the struggles of Southern workers in the last thirty years have achieved a range of meaningful gains. Jon Kraus’ and his colleagues’ analysis of unions’ role in the wave of democratisation that took place across Africa in the 1980s and 1990s provides a concrete example of workers winning historic victories during a period in which many scholarly narratives dismiss the political potential of labour (Kraus, 2007). The labour movements that Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(2), Page 169 drove this political transformation were not simply a delayed version of mid twentieth century old working class politics of the North. They involved demands beyond wages and welfare, most notably for expanding democratic political space. They also involved broad social coalitions that, in many countries, linked relatively secure formal-sector workers with the precarious majority. Another success of Southern workers in the era of their supposed irrelevance can be seen in the increased access to state provision of welfare that has taken place in the past twenty years. As Kevan Harris and I discuss extensively elsewhere (Harris and Scully, 2015), the period since 1990 has seen a massive expansion of various forms of social protection in countries across the Global South. In direct contrast to the narrative that Standing presents for Europe, which focuses on the erosion of social protection and citizenship rights, states across the Global South have expanded welfare entitlements on an unprecedented scale. Flagship programmes such as the Bolsa Família in Brazil, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in India, the Di Bao in China, and the Old Age Pension in South Africa have become models for other Southern countries to emulate. Such entitlements, which were virtually unknown for Southern workers in the mid twentieth century, are now on the books, or at least on the political agenda, in countries across the Global South (Barrientos, 2013). In most instances such welfare entitlements have been driven by demands from below, and their implementation has created new political alliances between parties and movements of both formal and precarious workers (Harris and Scully, 2015). These programmes are inadequate to provide the level of security associated with the Northern welfare states of the mid twentieth century. However, their growth from non-existence to ubiquity in the period that Standing associates with the hollowing out of citizenship rights illustrates the very different trajectories of labour politics and precarity in the North and South. As James Ferguson (2015: 207) speculates, it seems plausible that “we are now witnessing the beginnings of a new kind of politics – a distributive politics – that is potentially quite a radical one”. These examples are not meant to diminish the reality of vulnerability and precarity which contemporary Southern workers face. They do, however, highlight the problematic tendency to analyse Southern workers through historical and political lenses derived from the Northern experience. Valuable insights can be gained from a comparison of workers across the world, and analyses such as Standing’s, which thoroughly documents transformations in organisation of work, have an important role to play in that project. The precarious forms of work he describes are experienced by workers across the world. However, to better understand the possibilities for antiprecarity labour politics, this contemporary precarity must be situated within the distinctive historical struggles of Southern workers. REFERENCES Agarwala, Rina (2013) Informal Labor, Formal Politics, and Dignified Discontent in India. New York: Cambridge University Press. Anner, Mark S. and Xiangmin Liu (2015) Harmonious Unions and Rebellious Workers: A Study of Wildca Strikes in Vietnam. ILR Review, 69(1): 3–28. 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McMichael, Philip (2011) Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective, 5th edition. Los Angeles: Sage. Minns, John (2001) The Labour Movement in South Korea. Labour History, 81: 175–195. Mosoetsa, Sarah (2011) Eating from One Pot: The Dynamics of Survival in Poor South African Households. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Munck, Ronaldo (1988) The New International Labour Studies: An Introduction. London: Zed Books. Munck, Ronaldo (2009) Afterword: Beyond the ‘New’ International Labour Studies. Third World Quarterly, 30(3): 617–625. Munck, Ronaldo (2010) Globalisation, Labour and Development: A View from the South. Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa, 72(1): 205–224. Przeworski, Adam (1985) Capitalism and Social Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seidman, Gay (1994) Manufacturing Militance. Berkeley: University of California Press. Silver, Beverly J. (2003) Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Standing, Guy (2011) The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Standing, Guy (2014) A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Waterman, Peter (2012) An Emancipatory Global Labour Studies Is Necessary! On Rethinking the Global Labour Movement in the Hour of Furnaces. IISH Research Paper 49. Available online at http://www.interfacejournal.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Interface-4-2Waterman.pdf (accessed 6 March 2015). Webster, Edward (1988) The Rise of Social Movement Unionism: The Two Faces of the Black Trade Union Movement in South Africa. In State, Resistance and Change in South Africa. edited by Philip Frankel, Noam Pines and Mark Swilling. London: Croom Helm. Zhan, Shaohua and Lingli Huang (2012) Rural Roots of Current Migrant Labor Shortage in China: Development and Labor Empowerment in a Situation of Incomplete Proletarianization. Studies in Comparative International Development, 48(1): 81–111. BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE BEN SCULLY is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He researches and publishes on precarious work, trade unions and social policy with a focus on South Africa. Since 2015 he has served as an editor of the Global Labour Journal. [Email: Ben.Scully@wits.ac.za] Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(2), Page 172 EDITOR’S NOTE Ben Scully was invited to contribute to this Special Issue before he became an editor of the Global Labour Journal. Since becoming editor he has been recused from all editorial decisions relating to this Issue. Global Labour Journal, 2016, 7(2), Page 173 Precarity in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter Sean Hill II Abstract: Guy Standing’s theory of precarity fails to account for the myriad ways in which people of African descent, specifically Black Americans, experienced precarity prior to the rise of neoliberalism. This facilitates Black Americans remaining an eternal precariat class and also undermines the multiracial, progressive coalitions that could assist in solving precarity. Were Standing’s theory to center those who, both historically and contemporaneously, have been most marginalized, his theory and recommended solutions would be more comprehensive. The intersectional approach of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), and the transformative effect it is having upon law practice, can guide us in the development of a more robust theory of precarity that produces sustainable solutions and change. Keywords: intersectionality, Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), critical race theory, Black Lives Matter, movement lawyering, National Conference of Black Lawyers (NCBL) Two hundred and twenty-eight years. It’s just shy of the 240 years that America has celebrated as an independent nation. It also happens to be the number of years it would take the average Black American family to build the same wealth as their white counterparts (Asante-Muhammed et al. 2016). This is the financial state of the Black community as it bids farewell to the first Black president and steels itself for the promised dangers of the Trump administration. The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), launched with the 2013 tweet #BlackLivesMatter, has become a channel for many Black Americans to voice their dissatisfaction with a country that, for all of its rhetoric of “freedom” and “equality,” cannot solve long-standing disparities between its white and Black citizens. WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 45: 3 & 4 (Fall/Winter 2017) © 2017 by Sean Hill II. All rights reserved. 94 Precarity in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter 95 Yet a few years before the inception of M4BL, Guy Standing (2011a) proposed an explanation for the ever-increasing wealth disparities seen not just in the United States but around the globe. It is a concept that he calls “precarity.” The “precariat,” Standing (2011a) claims, is an emerging class of people denied the security and protections associated with the postwar Keynesian era—a livable wage, unionization, opportunities for training and advancement, etc.—as a result of neoliberal policies that encourage the privatization of social services and reliance on a transnational, unskilled labor force. “Precarity,” according to Standing (2011a), is a relatively new phenomenon, the result of countries rejecting the policies of the Keynesian welfare state in favor of neoliberalism’s calls for fewer government interventions on behalf of the proletariat. In Standing’s (2014, 2011b) opinion, if we are to solve the issue of precarity, then political leaders must embrace policies that are sensitive to the plight of the precarious class, like the provision of a basic income and other progressive measures. Yet when we examine the United States through the lens of precarity, we encounter a glaring contradiction—namely, that Black Americans have had the markers of precarity since the country’s inception through to the present day. Their existence as a precarious class in fact preceded neoliberalism. The last several decades are only unique in that the pool of precarious persons has now expanded to include white Americans and others of European descent, the lives that have “mattered” both historically and contemporaneously. It is this small subset of the precarious class that Standing is seemingly describing in his scholarship: newly exposed to the job insecurities of capitalism and especially susceptible to the appeals of fascist leaders. I will spend the first part of this article briefly exploring the ways in which people of African descent have been a perpetual precarious class in America. I will then proceed to identify the inherent dangers of failing to account for their precarious status. And in the final section, I will examine how M4BL can guide us toward eliminating precarity both in America and on the global stage. Mapping Precarity in the Black American Community Precarity, in Standing’s estimation, is a contemporary phenomenon, the product of industrial nations adopting, exporting, and imposing neoliberal policies on a global scale. Whereas the proletariat, which preceded 96 Sean Hill II the precariat, was able to secure the seven forms of labor-related security—adequate income-earning opportunities, protection against arbitrary dismissal, the opportunity to gain skills through apprenticeships or employment, etc.—the precariat is said to lack all of these securities (Standing 2011a, 10–13). In a world that prioritizes the use of a transnational, cheap labor force, they cycle in and out of short-term, low-wage jobs that have little to no opportunity for advancement. According to Standing, they lack a work-based identity and do not feel part of a “solidaristic labour community,” which only serves to intensify “a sense of alienation and instrumentality in what they have to do” (2011a, 12). They are “denizens” in that they are denied at least one of the rights afforded true citizens, e.g., civil, cultural, social, economic, and political rights (14, 87–88, 93–96). Yet Black Americans carried all of these markers of precarity before neoliberalism assumed global proportions. Take, for example, Standing’s (2011a) position that today’s precarious classes are defined by an inability to unionize, and the denial of basic employment and income securities associated with the labor movement of the postwar era. This stance presumes there was an era when all or a majority of the members of the proletariat had equal access to the protections and security of union membership. An examination of America’s labor movement, however, shows concerted, intentional, and altogether successful efforts by white laborers to exclude their Black counterparts from unions and their related rewards (Velez 2015; Honey 1999). As late as 1968, Black Americans were forced to create alternative union collectives because the AFL-CIO unions remained deeply discriminatory and persistently denied admission of Blacks to the higher ranks of leadership (Georgakas and Surkin 1998). Across all seven forms of labor-related security that Standing enumerates, history shows us that Black Americans have not just fared far worse than white members of the working class, they have also more often than not found themselves without any of the labor protections that the precariat class is only now said to be lacking (Perea 2011; Moreno 2006; Kropp 2002). Similarly, Black Americans have occupied the role of denizens since first arriving on America’s shores as slaves, and even after their de jure release from bondage (Blackmon 2008). The era of Jim Crow, which followed on the heels of abolition, rested firmly on the denizen status of Black Americans, who were not treated equally before the law, not protected Precarity in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter 97 against crime and physical harm, not entitled to income-earning activity, and not granted an equal right to vote (Woodward 1974), all of the rights Standing claims are critical to a nonprecarious existence (2011a, 14). This denizen status has only continued, unabated, in the age of neoliberalism, with our ever-growing prison and policing systems acting as the primary vehicles for the routine denial of basic rights to Black Americans (Hinton 2016; Alexander 2010). In the last several decades, we have seen voter suppression transform into pervasive felony disenfranchisement (Davidson 2016), rampant discrimination in housing access (Coates 2014), and severe employment disparities (Desilver 2013) that undercut any claims of equal access to the various forms of state-sponsored social protection. Capitalism, which finds its origins in the slave trade, demanded Black Americans occupy the role of denizens (Quijano and Wallerstein 1992). Given that Standing counts people of African descent amongst today’s precariat (2011a, 86), it follows that their denizen status has continued uninterrupted since chattel slavery into the present. I am not the first to identify precarity and precarious classes as preceding neoliberalism. In Precarious Existence and Capitalism: A Permanent State of Exception, Tayyab Mahmud makes the compelling argument that precarity “is an unavoidable historical and structural feature of capitalism” (2015, 701) and that neoliberalism has simply served the dual role of expanding and deepening precarity. This expansion has resulted in what he calls the “hyper-precarious,” a labor pool of undocumented immigrants that is “large, flexible, super-controlled and super-exploited” (722). He explains that, “Dislocated from their spaces and communities of affiliation, these workers have to contend with low wages, low-status work, denial of labor rights, political disenfranchisement, state repression, racism and xenophobic nativism” (723). The racist ideologies underlying their oppression “help keep the attention of relatively privileged sections of the working classes away from the crisis of global capitalism . . . undermin[ing] unity and coalition building among the working classes” (724). While Mahmud does the necessary and critical work of demonstrating capitalism’s longstanding reliance on precarity, like Standing, he does not address the perpetual status of Black Americans as a precarious class. He begins the work of defining a new, hyperprecarious class when Black Americans have also been exhibiting the signs of hyperprecarity for centuries, including being relegated to low-wage work, and being subjected to political disenfranchisement, state repression, and racism. And the rac- 98 Sean Hill II ist ideologies he identifies as being responsible for division within today’s working classes were used in nearly identical fashion to divide Black and white workers in America before the rise of neoliberalism (Honey 1999). In the next section, I will identify the inherent risks in failing to acknowledge people of African descent as the persistent precariat class. I will then proceed to identify one way forward in efforts to eradicate precarity for good: the platform and demands of those in M4BL. The Dangers and Pitfalls of Failing to Acknowledge Black Americans as a Perpetual Precarious Class Failing to account for Black Americans’ perpetual state of precarity has several consequences, some obvious and others discrete. Chief amongst these consequences is that it facilitates Blacks remaining an eternal precariat class. Following Standing’s lead, American precarity, for example, is being cast as an altogether new phenomenon whose effects are being felt primarily (if not exclusively) by the white working class (Patton 2016).1 There is no shortage of pieces on what Hillary Clinton and the Democrats did wrong in their appeals to the white working class, and what Donald Trump got right (Leonard 2017; Kilibarda and Roithmayr 2016; Eisler 2016). This provokes a conversation that is exclusively about what needs to be done to make the lives of white Americans better, rather than the lives of Black people or the millions of hyperprecarious individuals residing within America’s borders (Patton 2016). Policies are recommended and applied on the basis of what a small subset of the precarious class—white people—wants or needs, rather than on what would be best for the entire precarious class (Stephanopoulos 2015; Hutchison 2010). This, in turn, allows for the ever-greater concentration of wealth and resources in white communities (precarious or otherwise), while capitalism and its brother, neoliberalism, continue uninterrupted and unabated, using Blacks and undocumented persons as a perpetual pool of cheap labor. Believing precarity has been solved (at least for them), whites become susceptible to messages from neoliberals and fascists alike, that Blacks and other hyperprecarious persons have an innate dysfunction that explains their lack of basic labor-related securities, like steady employment and wages (Franke 2016). These inaccurate and racist tropes distract white members of the precariat and ensure they do not interrogate the neoliberal systems that are crushing their own communities (Mahmud 2015, 724). This, in turn, Precarity in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter 99 allows Black Americans’ status as denizens to be further justified, exploited, and entrenched. A failure to examine African-descended peoples as a precarious class also normalizes whites’ routine selection of racist and xenophobic fascists whenever the privileges temporarily afforded them as white members of the precarious class (like unionization, a livable wage, social welfare programs, etc.) are at risk of being made available to other members of the precarious class.2 Standing speaks of migrants, Black and otherwise, being convenient scapegoats when neoliberal policies prove ineffective (2011a, 90–102), but there is no analysis of how such scapegoating also serves to concretize what it means to be white. This phenomenon is worthy of its own full analysis and explanation, given that the white precariat’s reliance on a shared white identity produces not just fascist leadership but also leadership that is deeply invested in the oppression of Blacks and other ethnic minorities (Adichie 2016; Morrison 2016; Painter 2016). It is the type of leadership that produced a system which routinely and disproportionately cages Black and brown bodies (Alexander 2010), and that routinely exports war and terror on a global scale (Selby 2016). Breaking this cycle requires an analysis that accounts not just for the degree of precarity class members experience based on race and ethnicity but also for how each subset of the precarious class reacts to their precarity, particularly in the context of political choices and decisions.3 Finally, failing to acknowledge and name Black people as a perpetual precarious class is undermining the ability of progressives to build the broad, multiracial coalitions necessary to end neoliberalism (Glaude 2016; Laymon 2016). Because Standing’s (2014) and others’ sense of precarity is divorced from race, it results in policy recommendations and political platforms that are sensitive to class, exclusively, as opposed to class and race. The Sanders campaign was routinely criticized for taking an exclusively class-based approach (Thrasher 2016; Coates 2016), with some commentators drawing connections between his primary loss and a failure to make specific, race-based appeals to Black Americans (Starr 2016). An exclusively class-oriented approach will lose even greater traction in the wake of the Obama administration, which regularly claimed that promulgating and implementing policies on the basis of class would inevitably result in benefits to Blacks, who make up a disproportionate number of the precariat (Darity Jr. 2016). But with recent studies showing that Black households would have to save 100 percent of their in- 100 Sean Hill II come for three consecutive years just to close the Black-white wealth gap (Hamilton et al. 2015), it is becoming increasingly difficult to convince Black Americans that their full citizenship—including labor security and basic civil rights—will be realized through policies claiming to help the entire precarious class but which only help a specific subset: whites (Taylor 2017). The next part of this article will examine how M4BL and the broader demands being made by Black Americans can help guide our visions for a future free of exploitative capitalism and, thus, precarious classes. The Movement for Black Lives and the Fight to End Precarity The most troubling aspect of Standing’s theory of precarity is that it makes little to no distinction between those who have, for centuries, been relegated to the precariat versus those who are newly experiencing precarity. This then produces restrictive solutions that are exclusively class-oriented and do not address the broader systems and institutions responsible for precarity. Standing’s (2014) universal basic income, for example, may raise the standard of living for certain precariat members, but such changes are nominal and temporary where racism, sexism, and ableism continue to relegate certain individuals to the precariat while elevating others (Gaddis 2014; Bessler 2014). Standing’s theory of precarity could be more robust were he to adopt an intersectional approach that acknowledges the differing degrees of marginalization members of the precariat experience according to their identities. Intersectionality encourages us to center the experiences of those who are the most marginalized, which in turn allows for comprehensive solutions and the reimagining of existing, oppressive institutions and systems (Crenshaw 1991). M4BL offers guidance in developing a more robust theory of precarity in two ways. First, it does so by modeling an intersectional approach in both form and substance, and second, through the transformative effect it’s having upon legal practice and how privileged professionals work to amplify the voices of precarious communities. M4BL evinces intersectionality in terms of its organizational and leadership structure, as well as in terms of its policy platforms. Not only was the movement itself founded by three Black women, two of whom identify as queer, unlike its predecessor movements, the M4BL does not have a central body or figurehead. Instead, it is a loosely affiliated network of or- Precarity in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter 101 ganizations, collectives, and individuals invested in eradicating anti-Black racism. This loose affiliation is more than just a pragmatic response to state surveillance and continued efforts by the state to discredit movements by discrediting their leaders; it is also an egalitarian approach that facilitates shared decision-making and prioritizes the leadership of individuals marginalized within the Black community itself, specifically women and those identifying as LGBTQI (Kelley 2017; Teuscher 2015). This approach stands in sharp contrast to narratives and structures that centered cisgender men during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements (Chatelain and Asoka 2015). It also provides a radical vision and model of what leadership that is not steeped in violence and patriarchy can be, taking Standing’s basic income solution one step further by actually building alternative institutions rather than recommending a nominal change in existing policies or leadership. In the realm of policy, the M4BL launches campaigns and issues demands that accommodate and are sensitive to those who are especially marginalized, namely cisgender and trans* women. While major news outlets almost exclusively focus on Black men killed by law enforcement and vigilantes, the collectives and organizations affiliated with the M4BL intentionally and routinely engage in protests and campaigns that highlight the alarming number of Black women and girls harmed and killed by the police each year (McClain 2015). In August of 2016, fifty of these organizations came together to release a platform entitled “A Vision for Black Lives,” replete with demands and policy recommendations to achieve Black liberation (Newkirk 2016). A countless number of the demands—such as the call to abolish prisons or to expand protections for workers—are premised on the discriminatory and disproportionate effects certain policies have on Black women and girls (Movement for Black Lives 2016a). In fact, nearly all of the policy recommendations appearing in Kimberlé Crenshaw’s “Say Her Name” report (Crenshaw and Ritchie 2015), which was specifically intended to help stakeholders address Black women’s unique experiences of profiling and policing, also appear throughout the Vision for Black Lives platform (Movement for Black Lives 2016b). In addition to modeling an intersectional approach, the M4BL is having a transformative effect upon the practice of the law. This is especially relevant given that the provision of Standing’s basic universal income does nothing to transform existing institutions and systems responsible 102 Sean Hill II for precarity, nor does it offer an alternative to those same systems. The legal system is often understood as a vehicle for protecting the wealthy at the expense of the indigent and precarious, and existing methods of legal practice, such as impact litigation and direct legal services, are prone to that particular criticism (Freeman and Freeman 2016; Ashar 2008, 362–64). M4BL, however, is breeding a new type of attorney known as a movement lawyer. These are lawyers who work in collaboration with collectives and movement leaders, to help them build their own power and capacity so as to effectuate sustainable change (Freeman 2015). In sharp contrast to Standing’s theory of precarity, these lawyers center and defer to community members themselves in addressing racial and economic disparities. The New York Chapter of the National Conference of Black Lawyers, which I cochair, offers an excellent example of this new style of lawyering in the form of its Mass Defense Network. Rather than litigate a series of police brutality cases or launch a campaign for a state or federal change of policy, our affinity group instead created a network of legal observers and defense attorneys that provides legal support to Blackled collectives. This network was a direct outgrowth of what collectives, themselves, said they needed: first, to have culturally competent, Black and brown legal observers to observe police conduct while protesters engage in protest and other constitutionally protected conduct, and second, to have defense attorneys that aren’t just zealous advocates but are sensitive to protesters’ unique needs as members of larger collectives. Fulfilling these responsibilities amplifies the voices of Black communities by contributing to their having greater confidence and security when in the field (contrary to the chilling effect heavy police presence and criminalization are intended to have on protest). Further, this approach ensures grassroots and movement leaders can continue to build awareness and power within communities, rather than face incapacitation as a result of undue arrest and over-incarceration. Those directly impacted by issues of anti-Blackness remain in the fore while attorneys remain in the background. They instruct the bar on what they need, limiting the co-optation and hollow reform traditionally affiliated with the law (Siegel 1996). Were Standing to take a similar approach, by centering the voices of those historically relegated to the precariat, both his theory of precarity and recommended solutions would set the foundation for solving rather than entrenching precarity. Precarity in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter 103 Conclusion In 2012, three Black women reignited the movement for Black liberation and self-determination with the compelling declaration and hashtag: #BlackLivesMatter. The demand—that the world stop treating the lives of Black people and others of African descent as disposable, and instead vest them with the dignity and respect reserved exclusively for those of European descent—sprang from the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the extrajudicial killing of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida (Garza 2014). According to the proponents of what is now broadly termed the Movement for Black Lives, making Black lives matter requires more than just an end to white vigilantism; it demands that we reject all forms of state-sponsored violence against Black communities, whether that violence manifests itself in police misconduct, housing and education disparities, or in the ever-worsening wealth gap between white and Black Americans. Standing’s theory of precarity offers one explanation for the abysmal conditions of Black and other members of the precarious class, seeing in neoliberalism an explanation for low-wage, short-term work without the promise of advancement or basic job security. While his assessment is accurate, it is lacking in its failure to account for the long-standing status of Black Americans as a precarious class. The result: the perpetuation and fortification of precarity in Black communities, the normalization of white precariat class members selecting far-right, fascist leaders, and the undermining of progressive coalitions to combat neoliberalism. M4BL, with its foundation in intersectionality, can guide us forward in solving precarity. Such an approach has allowed the movement to center the voices of those most marginalized within the Black community, as well as generate new methods of leadership. Moreover, it has transformed how attorneys practice the law, thus laying the foundation for building entirely new institutions and systems. Were Standing’s theory of precarity to adopt similar approaches, this would not only resolve his erasure of people of African descent, it would also allow for comprehensive solutions that actually address and eliminate precarity on the global stage. Sean Hill II, Esq., is the cochair of the New York Chapter of the National Conference of Black Lawyers and on the Steering Committee of Law4BlackLives. He works on bail and speedy trial reform throughout New York in an effort to end mass criminalization. He can be reached at seanhill.ii@gmail.com. 104 Sean Hill II Notes 1. Stacey Patton noted this particular phenomenon in a recent article for Dame magazine, in which she criticizes right-wing media for casting white men as the exclusive victims in America and as the only demographic denied the American Dream. This narrative not only “privileges White male experiences of hardship,” but it also “takes attention away from [the] system and the elites controlling it.” She adds, “It says that the media and politicians need to understand the White male voter in Ohio or Pennsylvania but not the black voter in Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, or New Orleans that [Trump] wants to be watched closely at the polls on Election Day” (Patton 2016). 2. Michelle Alexander’s concept of the “racial bribe” can be used to partly explain this phenomenon. Specifically, she contends that white elites, as a means of maintaining their dominance over both poorer whites and people of African descent, have always extended special privileges to poor whites so as to keep them divided from their Black counterparts. This strategy has been employed since chattel slavery and resulted in an entrenched racial caste system, which poor whites have a vested interest in maintaining (Alexander 2010, 25–57). 3. One explanation for whites’ susceptibility may be that the white members of the precariat classes have no choice but to rally around their (fictional) identities as white people as a means of filling the identity void that’s left whenever they are denied labor-related identities as a result of neoliberalism. It follows that they then select fascist political parties and candidates because these entities make specific appeals on the basis of a shared national (often exclusively white) identity. In fact, Blacks could be said to use their shared identity in similar fashion: to assuage the trauma and concomitant challenges of perpetually being denied labor-related securities and the full range of rights accorded to citizens. However, Black Americans’ reliance on shared identity does not result in the selection of far-right candidates and parties, despite such conduct being a logical outgrowth according to Standing’s conception of precarity (2011b). 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Bessler, Abigail. 2014. “A Black College Student Has the Same Chances of Getting a Job as a White High School Dropout.” ThinkProgress, June 25. https://thinkprogress.org/a-black-college-student-has-the-same-chancesof-getting-a-job-as-a-white-high-school-dropout-b7639607fdf1 Blackmon, Douglas A. 2008. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Anchor Books. Chatelain, Marcia, and Kaavya Asoka. 2015. “Women and Black Lives Matter: An Interview with Marcia Chatelain.” Dissent, Summer. https://www. dissentmagazine.org/article/women-black-lives-matter-interviewmarcia-chatelain. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. 2014. “The Case for Reparations.” The Atlantic, June. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/ the-case-for-reparations/361631/. ———. 2016. “Why Precisely Is Bernie Sanders Against Reparations?” The Atlantic, January 19. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ archive/2016/01/bernie-sanders-reparations/424602/. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–99. Crenshaw, Kimberlé, and Andrea Ritchie. 2015. “Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality against Black Women.” The African American Policy Forum. Accessed April 1, 2017. http://www.aapf.org/sayhernamereport. Darity, William A., Jr. 2016. “How Barack Obama Failed Black Americans.” The Atlantic, December 22. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/ 2016/12/how-barack-obama-failed-black-americans/511358/. Davidson, Joe. 2016. “6 Million Citizens, including 1 in 13 African Americans, Are Blocked from Voting because of Felonies.” Washington Post, October 7. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/10/07/6million-citizens-including-1-in-13-african-americans-are-blocked-fromvoting-because-of-felonies/?utm_term=.3262fbcb36a9. Desilver, Drew. 2013. “Black Unemployment Rate Is Consistently Twice that 106 Sean Hill II of Whites.” Pew Research Center, August 21. http://www.pewresearch. org/fact-tank/2013/08/21/through-good-times-and-bad-blackunemployment-is-consistently-double-that-of-whites/. Eisler, Peter. 2016. “How Hillary Clinton’s White Voters Melted Away.” Reuters, November 10. http://www.reuters.com/article/ us-usa-election-whitevoters-insight-idUSKBN1352MO. Franke, Katherine. 2016. “Making White Supremacy Respectable. Again.” BLARB (blog), Los Angeles Review of Books, November 21. http://blog. lareviewofbooks.org/essays/making-white-supremacy-respectable/. Freeman, Alexi Nunn, and Jim Freeman. 2016. “It’s About Power, Not Policy: Movement Lawyering for Large-Scale Social Change.” Clinical Law Review 23 (1): 147–66. Freeman, Jim. 2015. “Supporting Social Movements: A Brief Guide for Lawyers and Law Students.” Hastings Race & Poverty Law Journal 12: 191–204. Gaddis, S. Michael. 2014. “Discrimination in the Credential Society: An Audit Study of Race and College Selectivity in the Labor Market.” Social Forces 93 (4): 1451–79. Garza, Alicia. 2014. “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement.” Feminist Wire, October 7. http://www.thefeministwire.com/2014/10/ blacklivesmatter-2/. Georgakas, Dan, and Marvin Sunkin. 1998. Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Glaude, Eddie S., Jr. 2016. “My Democratic Problem with Voting for Hillary Clinton.” Time, July 12. http://time.com/4402823/glaude-hillary-clinton/. Hamilton, Darrick, William Darity, Jr., Anne E. Price, Vishnu Sridharan, and Rebecca Tippett. 2015. “Umbrellas Don’t Make It Rain: Why Studying and Working Hard Isn’t Enough for Black Americans.” Oakland, CA: Insight Center for Community Economic Development. Accessed January 14, 2017. http://ww1.insightcced.org/uploads/CRWG/Umbrellas-DontMake-It-Rain8.pdf. Hinton, Elizabeth. 2016. “From ‘War on Crime’ to War on the Black Community: The Enduring Impact of President Johnson’s Crime Commission.” Boston Review, June 21. http://bostonreview.net/us/ elizabeth-hinton-kerner-commission-crime-commission. Honey, Michael Keith. 1999. Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hutchison, Harry G. 2010. “Employee Free Choice or Employee Forged Choice? Race in the Mirror of Exclusionary Hierarchy.” Michigan Journal of Race & Law 15 (2): 369–416. Precarity in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter 107 Kelley, Robin D. G. 2017. “Births of a Nation: Surveying Trumpland with Cedric Robinson.” Boston Review, March 6. https://bostonreview.net/ race-politics/robin-d-g-kelley-births-nation. Kilibarda, Konstantin, and Daria Roithmayr. 2016. “The Myth of the Rust Belt Revolt.” Slate, December 1. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ politics/politics/2016/12/the_myth_of_the_rust_belt_revolt.html. Kropp, Steven H. 2002. “Deconstructing Racism in American Society—The Role Labor Law Might Have Played (but Did Not) in Ending Race Discrimination: A Partial Explanation and Historical Commentary.” Berkeley Journal of Employment & Labor Law 23 (2): 369–99. Laymon, Kiese. 2016. “Hillary Clinton Isn’t Progressive. She’s just the Lesser Evil in the General Election.” The Guardian, April 27. https://www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/27/hillary-clintonprogressive-values-black-voters-lesser-evil-election-2016. Leonard, Robert. 2017. “Why Rural America Voted for Trump.” New York Times, January 5. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/05/opinion/why-ruralamerica-voted-for-trump.html. Mahmud, Tayyab. 2015. “Precarious Existence and Capitalism: A Permanent State of Exception.” Southwestern University Law Review 44: 699–726. McClain, Dani. 2015. “#SayHerName Shows Black Women Face Police Violence, Too—and Pregnancy and Motherhood Are No Refuge.” The Nation, May 21. https://www.thenation.com/article/sayhername-showsblack-women-face-police-violence-too-and-pregnancy-and-motherhoodare-n/. Moreno, Paul D. 2006. Black Americans and Organized Labor: A New History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Morrison, Toni. 2016. “Mourning for Whiteness.” The New Yorker, November 21. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/21/aftermath-sixteenwriters-on-trumps-america/. Movement for Black Lives. 2016a. “End the War on Black People.” Accessed January 15, 2017. https://policy.m4bl.org/end-war-on-black-people/. ———. 2016b. “Platform.” Accessed January 15, 2017. https://policy.m4bl.org/ platform/. Newkirk, Vann R. 2016. “The Permanence of Black Lives Matter.” The Atlantic, August 3. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/ movement-black-lives-platform/494309/. Painter, Nell Irvin. 2016. “What Whiteness Means in the Trump Era.” New York Times, November 12. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/opinion/ what-whiteness-means-in-the-trump-era.html?mwrsm=Facebook&_r=0. Patton, Stacey. 2016. “Why I Have No Sympathy for Angry White Men.” 108 Sean Hill II Dame. November 1. http://www.damemagazine.com/2016/11/01/ why-i-have-no-sympathy-angry-white-men. Perea, Juan F. 2011. “The Echoes of Slavery: Recognizing the Racist Origins of the Agricultural and Domestic Worker Exclusion from the National Labor Relations Act.” Ohio State Law Journal 72 (1): 95–138. Quijano, Aníbal, and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1992. “Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World-System.” International Social Science Journal (134): 549–57. http://www.javeriana.edu.co/blogs/syie/files/ Quijano-and-Wallerstein-Americanity-as-a-Concept.pdf. Selby, W. Gardner. 2016. “Jill Stein, Green Party Candidate, Correct about U.S. Bombing Seven Countries.” Politifact, October 21. http:// www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2016/oct/21/jill-stein/ jill-stein-green-party-candidate-correct-about-us-/ Siegel, Reva B. 1996. “‘The Rule of Love’: Wife Beating as Prerogative and Privacy.” Yale Law Journal 105: 2117–2207. Standing, Guy. 2011a. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. ———. 2011b. “Who Will Be a Voice for the Emerging Precariat?” The Guardian, June 1. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/jun/01/ voice-for-emerging-precariat. ———. 2014. “Basic Income Paid to the Poor Can Transform Lives.” The Guardian, December 18. https://www.theguardian.com/business/ economics-blog/2014/dec/18/incomes-scheme-transforms-lives-poor. Starr, Terrell Jermaine. 2016. “How Bernie Sanders Lost Black Voters.” Splinter, July 10. http://splinternews.com/how-bernie-sanders-lost-black-voters1793860129/. Stephanopoulos, Nicholas. 2015. “The False Promise of Black Political Representation.” The Atlantic, June 11. http://www.theatlantic.com/ politics/archive/2015/06/black-political-representation-power/395594/. Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. 2017. “Barack Obama’s Original Sin: America’s Post-Racial Illusion.” The Guardian, January 13. https://www.theguardian. com/us-news/2017/jan/13/barack-obama-legacy-racism-criminal-justicesystem. Teuscher, Amanda. 2015. “The Inclusive Strength of #BlackLivesMatter.” American Prospect, August 2. http://prospect.org/article/inclusivestrength-blacklivesmatter. Thrasher, Steven W. 2016. “Bernie Sanders Isn’t Winning Minority Votes—and It’s His Own Fault.” The Guardian, May 3. https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2016/may/03/bernie-sanders-failure-diversity-hispanicblack-voters. Precarity in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter 109 Velez, Denise Oliver. 2015. “Labor Day, the Labor Movement, and Black Americans.” Daily Kos, September 6. http://www.dailykos.com/ story/2015/9/6/1417213/-Labor-Day-the-labor-movement-and-blackAmericans. Woodward, C. Vann. 1974. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford University Press. Precarity in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter Sean Hill II Abstract: Guy Standing’s theory of precarity fails to account for the myriad ways in which people of African descent, specifically Black Americans, experienced precarity prior to the rise of neoliberalism. This facilitates Black Americans remaining an eternal precariat class and also undermines the multiracial, progressive coalitions that could assist in solving precarity. Were Standing’s theory to center those who, both historically and contemporaneously, have been most marginalized, his theory and recommended solutions would be more comprehensive. The intersectional approach of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), and the transformative effect it is having upon law practice, can guide us in the development of a more robust theory of precarity that produces sustainable solutions and change. Keywords: intersectionality, Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), critical race theory, Black Lives Matter, movement lawyering, National Conference of Black Lawyers (NCBL) Two hundred and twenty-eight years. It’s just shy of the 240 years that America has celebrated as an independent nation. It also happens to be the number of years it would take the average Black American family to build the same wealth as their white counterparts (Asante-Muhammed et al. 2016). This is the financial state of the Black community as it bids farewell to the first Black president and steels itself for the promised dangers of the Trump administration. The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), launched with the 2013 tweet #BlackLivesMatter, has become a channel for many Black Americans to voice their dissatisfaction with a country that, for all of its rhetoric of “freedom” and “equality,” cannot solve long-standing disparities between its white and Black citizens. WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 45: 3 & 4 (Fall/Winter 2017) © 2017 by Sean Hill II. All rights reserved. 94 Precarity in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter 95 Yet a few years before the inception of M4BL, Guy Standing (2011a) proposed an explanation for the ever-increasing wealth disparities seen not just in the United States but around the globe. It is a concept that he calls “precarity.” The “precariat,” Standing (2011a) claims, is an emerging class of people denied the security and protections associated with the postwar Keynesian era—a livable wage, unionization, opportunities for training and advancement, etc.—as a result of neoliberal policies that encourage the privatization of social services and reliance on a transnational, unskilled labor force. “Precarity,” according to Standing (2011a), is a relatively new phenomenon, the result of countries rejecting the policies of the Keynesian welfare state in favor of neoliberalism’s calls for fewer government interventions on behalf of the proletariat. In Standing’s (2014, 2011b) opinion, if we are to solve the issue of precarity, then political leaders must embrace policies that are sensitive to the plight of the precarious class, like the provision of a basic income and other progressive measures. Yet when we examine the United States through the lens of precarity, we encounter a glaring contradiction—namely, that Black Americans have had the markers of precarity since the country’s inception through to the present day. Their existence as a precarious class in fact preceded neoliberalism. The last several decades are only unique in that the pool of precarious persons has now expanded to include white Americans and others of European descent, the lives that have “mattered” both historically and contemporaneously. It is this small subset of the precarious class that Standing is seemingly describing in his scholarship: newly exposed to the job insecurities of capitalism and especially susceptible to the appeals of fascist leaders. I will spend the first part of this article briefly exploring the ways in which people of African descent have been a perpetual precarious class in America. I will then proceed to identify the inherent dangers of failing to account for their precarious status. And in the final section, I will examine how M4BL can guide us toward eliminating precarity both in America and on the global stage. Mapping Precarity in the Black American Community Precarity, in Standing’s estimation, is a contemporary phenomenon, the product of industrial nations adopting, exporting, and imposing neoliberal policies on a global scale. Whereas the proletariat, which preceded 96 Sean Hill II the precariat, was able to secure the seven forms of labor-related security—adequate income-earning opportunities, protection against arbitrary dismissal, the opportunity to gain skills through apprenticeships or employment, etc.—the precariat is said to lack all of these securities (Standing 2011a, 10–13). In a world that prioritizes the use of a transnational, cheap labor force, they cycle in and out of short-term, low-wage jobs that have little to no opportunity for advancement. According to Standing, they lack a work-based identity and do not feel part of a “solidaristic labour community,” which only serves to intensify “a sense of alienation and instrumentality in what they have to do” (2011a, 12). They are “denizens” in that they are denied at least one of the rights afforded true citizens, e.g., civil, cultural, social, economic, and political rights (14, 87–88, 93–96). Yet Black Americans carried all of these markers of precarity before neoliberalism assumed global proportions. Take, for example, Standing’s (2011a) position that today’s precarious classes are defined by an inability to unionize, and the denial of basic employment and income securities associated with the labor movement of the postwar era. This stance presumes there was an era when all or a majority of the members of the proletariat had equal access to the protections and security of union membership. An examination of America’s labor movement, however, shows concerted, intentional, and altogether successful efforts by white laborers to exclude their Black counterparts from unions and their related rewards (Velez 2015; Honey 1999). As late as 1968, Black Americans were forced to create alternative union collectives because the AFL-CIO unions remained deeply discriminatory and persistently denied admission of Blacks to the higher ranks of leadership (Georgakas and Surkin 1998). Across all seven forms of labor-related security that Standing enumerates, history shows us that Black Americans have not just fared far worse than white members of the working class, they have also more often than not found themselves without any of the labor protections that the precariat class is only now said to be lacking (Perea 2011; Moreno 2006; Kropp 2002). Similarly, Black Americans have occupied the role of denizens since first arriving on America’s shores as slaves, and even after their de jure release from bondage (Blackmon 2008). The era of Jim Crow, which followed on the heels of abolition, rested firmly on the denizen status of Black Americans, who were not treated equally before the law, not protected Precarity in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter 97 against crime and physical harm, not entitled to income-earning activity, and not granted an equal right to vote (Woodward 1974), all of the rights Standing claims are critical to a nonprecarious existence (2011a, 14). This denizen status has only continued, unabated, in the age of neoliberalism, with our ever-growing prison and policing systems acting as the primary vehicles for the routine denial of basic rights to Black Americans (Hinton 2016; Alexander 2010). In the last several decades, we have seen voter suppression transform into pervasive felony disenfranchisement (Davidson 2016), rampant discrimination in housing access (Coates 2014), and severe employment disparities (Desilver 2013) that undercut any claims of equal access to the various forms of state-sponsored social protection. Capitalism, which finds its origins in the slave trade, demanded Black Americans occupy the role of denizens (Quijano and Wallerstein 1992). Given that Standing counts people of African descent amongst today’s precariat (2011a, 86), it follows that their denizen status has continued uninterrupted since chattel slavery into the present. I am not the first to identify precarity and precarious classes as preceding neoliberalism. In Precarious Existence and Capitalism: A Permanent State of Exception, Tayyab Mahmud makes the compelling argument that precarity “is an unavoidable historical and structural feature of capitalism” (2015, 701) and that neoliberalism has simply served the dual role of expanding and deepening precarity. This expansion has resulted in what he calls the “hyper-precarious,” a labor pool of undocumented immigrants that is “large, flexible, super-controlled and super-exploited” (722). He explains that, “Dislocated from their spaces and communities of affiliation, these workers have to contend with low wages, low-status work, denial of labor rights, political disenfranchisement, state repression, racism and xenophobic nativism” (723). The racist ideologies underlying their oppression “help keep the attention of relatively privileged sections of the working classes away from the crisis of global capitalism . . . undermin[ing] unity and coalition building among the working classes” (724). While Mahmud does the necessary and critical work of demonstrating capitalism’s longstanding reliance on precarity, like Standing, he does not address the perpetual status of Black Americans as a precarious class. He begins the work of defining a new, hyperprecarious class when Black Americans have also been exhibiting the signs of hyperprecarity for centuries, including being relegated to low-wage work, and being subjected to political disenfranchisement, state repression, and racism. And the rac- 98 Sean Hill II ist ideologies he identifies as being responsible for division within today’s working classes were used in nearly identical fashion to divide Black and white workers in America before the rise of neoliberalism (Honey 1999). In the next section, I will identify the inherent risks in failing to acknowledge people of African descent as the persistent precariat class. I will then proceed to identify one way forward in efforts to eradicate precarity for good: the platform and demands of those in M4BL. The Dangers and Pitfalls of Failing to Acknowledge Black Americans as a Perpetual Precarious Class Failing to account for Black Americans’ perpetual state of precarity has several consequences, some obvious and others discrete. Chief amongst these consequences is that it facilitates Blacks remaining an eternal precariat class. Following Standing’s lead, American precarity, for example, is being cast as an altogether new phenomenon whose effects are being felt primarily (if not exclusively) by the white working class (Patton 2016).1 There is no shortage of pieces on what Hillary Clinton and the Democrats did wrong in their appeals to the white working class, and what Donald Trump got right (Leonard 2017; Kilibarda and Roithmayr 2016; Eisler 2016). This provokes a conversation that is exclusively about what needs to be done to make the lives of white Americans better, rather than the lives of Black people or the millions of hyperprecarious individuals residing within America’s borders (Patton 2016). Policies are recommended and applied on the basis of what a small subset of the precarious class—white people—wants or needs, rather than on what would be best for the entire precarious class (Stephanopoulos 2015; Hutchison 2010). This, in turn, allows for the ever-greater concentration of wealth and resources in white communities (precarious or otherwise), while capitalism and its brother, neoliberalism, continue uninterrupted and unabated, using Blacks and undocumented persons as a perpetual pool of cheap labor. Believing precarity has been solved (at least for them), whites become susceptible to messages from neoliberals and fascists alike, that Blacks and other hyperprecarious persons have an innate dysfunction that explains their lack of basic labor-related securities, like steady employment and wages (Franke 2016). These inaccurate and racist tropes distract white members of the precariat and ensure they do not interrogate the neoliberal systems that are crushing their own communities (Mahmud 2015, 724). This, in turn, Precarity in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter 99 allows Black Americans’ status as denizens to be further justified, exploited, and entrenched. A failure to examine African-descended peoples as a precarious class also normalizes whites’ routine selection of racist and xenophobic fascists whenever the privileges temporarily afforded them as white members of the precarious class (like unionization, a livable wage, social welfare programs, etc.) are at risk of being made available to other members of the precarious class.2 Standing speaks of migrants, Black and otherwise, being convenient scapegoats when neoliberal policies prove ineffective (2011a, 90–102), but there is no analysis of how such scapegoating also serves to concretize what it means to be white. This phenomenon is worthy of its own full analysis and explanation, given that the white precariat’s reliance on a shared white identity produces not just fascist leadership but also leadership that is deeply invested in the oppression of Blacks and other ethnic minorities (Adichie 2016; Morrison 2016; Painter 2016). It is the type of leadership that produced a system which routinely and disproportionately cages Black and brown bodies (Alexander 2010), and that routinely exports war and terror on a global scale (Selby 2016). Breaking this cycle requires an analysis that accounts not just for the degree of precarity class members experience based on race and ethnicity but also for how each subset of the precarious class reacts to their precarity, particularly in the context of political choices and decisions.3 Finally, failing to acknowledge and name Black people as a perpetual precarious class is undermining the ability of progressives to build the broad, multiracial coalitions necessary to end neoliberalism (Glaude 2016; Laymon 2016). Because Standing’s (2014) and others’ sense of precarity is divorced from race, it results in policy recommendations and political platforms that are sensitive to class, exclusively, as opposed to class and race. The Sanders campaign was routinely criticized for taking an exclusively class-based approach (Thrasher 2016; Coates 2016), with some commentators drawing connections between his primary loss and a failure to make specific, race-based appeals to Black Americans (Starr 2016). An exclusively class-oriented approach will lose even greater traction in the wake of the Obama administration, which regularly claimed that promulgating and implementing policies on the basis of class would inevitably result in benefits to Blacks, who make up a disproportionate number of the precariat (Darity Jr. 2016). But with recent studies showing that Black households would have to save 100 percent of their in- 100 Sean Hill II come for three consecutive years just to close the Black-white wealth gap (...
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Q1
Social mobility is integral in creating a sense of identity. It is not always certain as Ong explains
due to various barriers, which are unfortunately not expected by Bourdieu. First, it is foreign
accent. Individuals can learn a new language and acquire a new culture but they cannot gain
social capital. Social mobility is dependent on social capital without which people are likely to
remain in the same social class for long. People tend to despise others that they consider not to
be belonging in their level. Despite gaining the cultural capital, an individual is unlikely to be
accepted in a specific social group. The capability to speak like individuals in a specific social
group is not an entry point to join them. The gained cultural capital does not translate to the
expected social capital.
Second, it is cultural taste. According to Bourdieu, cultural taste is characterized by the way
people consume cultural goods, for example, fashion and food. Individuals living within a given
locality are likely to get used with specific music, dressing style, and cuisine. Despite the
exhibition of extensive cultural taste, people are unlikely to experience social mobility....

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