Biosyndicalism
Biosyndicalism - or biosindicalismo - has been travelling around a little of late in euro circles, emerging principally in Spanish discussions around that other recent meme, ‘precarity’.
Textwise, there’s a short article by Andrea Fumagalli, ‘European Precariat Biosyndicalismo’ at Interactivist, which Nate translated from the Spanish [orig. here]. There’s also ‘’Precarious Ideas On Biosyndicalism’, also in Spanish, and which Nate has indicated he’ll be translating soonish. The word also appears in the upcoming Fadaiat callout, and as part of a seminar with Precarias a la Deriva. With my limited Spanish, the latter provides perhaps the most detail, but even here, not so much.
As far as my Spanish will allow, for Precarias a la Deriva the word is meant to indicate an “overcoming of previous the union form and and first steps of a tool of struggle that as yet does not have a name, but that starts off and is located against the precarisation of existence.” Moreover, it is an attempt to locate a common plane for a myriad of experiences and organisational tools: such as “the absence of collective rights”, non-firm-specific struggles, mobile strike funds, and so forth.
In many ways, I think the concept suffers from the same problems as does the use of ‘precarity’. But more specifically: a search for the commonplace, without once pondering the question of whether arriving at a commonplace is in fact a condition of struggle or whether it indicates, as I think it does, a politics of nostalgia and loss formed against the presumption of the Fordist themes of homogeneity and collectivity as both exemplary and necessary. For instance, when, in the entire history of capitalism, have ‘collective rights’ actually been present, as something other than the result of national, gendered and racialised representations through which the collective was then able to posit itself as, often by force, collective? It is not a question here of insisting on a fuller, more adequate and additive, representational form (corporatism or pluralism), but of moving beyond the desire for representation that, in its effects, functions as a substitute for organisation.
In this sense, it would seem important to cleave those aspects of the discussion around biosyndicalism - such as mobile strike funds, non-firm specific strategies, and so on - from nostalgia and the desire for a commonplace in which plenitude will be attained. Werner Hamacher’s discussion of National Socialism is worth considering here, particularly given the implicit productivism that pervades the theme of “all life is work” coupled with the themes of loss and plenitude. Where is the desire for escape? Also worth thinking about more is Sergio Bologna’s discussion of the IWW in ‘Class Composition and the Theory of the Party”, where he discusses the way the IWW transformed mobility into a vector of organisation, the ‘hobo agitator’.
Why the persistent fear of contintency, the fear of an ‘absence’? Why not a precarious politics, a contingent form of organisation? Why not a toolbox of tactics and strategies which do not require the foundationalism of representational politics to be put to use? For the moment, the discussions around biosyndicalism seems to me to reproduce the insight that ‘all life is work’, rather than offer a way out.
