archive : s0metim3s

The shifting projects of precariousness - the latest from Precarias a la Deriva. It should go without saying that their taking a distance from the rights-based, unitarian, statifying projects that shaped other efforts is, I think, a very good thing:

Todas a Cien : Agency of Precarious Affairs (Lavapies, Madrid)

Precarias a la Deriva has been, until now, a research project on precariousness which aspired to take ourselves, our own precarious realities, as a point of departure, and to interpolate others in search of new forms of resistance and new spaces of encounter and cooperation built out of multiplicity. In our wanderings we have arrived at three certainties. We have determined that particular precarious positions - understood in the classic sense such as instability of employment – are inscribed in a general tendency towards the ‘precarization’ of life as a whole. This tendency which threads through all social strata as a threat (“If you don’t hew to the norm you’ll fall into permanent instability”) and effects all spheres of life (employment, unpaid activities, urban spaces, domestic environments…) as a force of uncertainty and social atomization. We have also realized that, though the processes of precarization effect all of us, they do not effect us in the same way: society is stratified along lines of class, sex, sexual orientation or identity, age, national origin, ethnicity, level of education… which place us in positions which are asymmetrical and sometimes in conflict.

Any project which aspires to produce something shared must deal with these forms of stratification: genuine ‘borders’ which impede social bonds and sow fear of the ‘other’. Lastly, we have intuited that the territory in which precarious women might come together is not necessarily the “workplace”: how could it be when this so frequently coincides with one’s own house, or someone else’s? When the workplace changes every few months or when the odds of coinciding with a group of fellow workers for long enough to get to know them is one in a thousand?

Often the strongest alliances, the networks of cooperation which diminish fear, lend courage and generate the capacity for transformation are constructed outside the workplace, in other spaces far from the boss’s gaze, the isolation of the household or the bureaucratic discipline of the residency, the hospital, the school. For this reason our efforts are now dedicated to creating a space of encounter and empowerment in the center of Madrid in which we and other precarious women (of other national and social origins, with more or less lines in their CVs, more or less money in their pockets, more or less persons dependent upon them) might find counsel and tools for self-defense against the thousand and one daily injustices we face. But also where we might find spaces for expression and analysis of our precarious realities which permit us to mutually enrich ourselves and to imagine practices of cooperation and resistance against the precarization of our lives and against the borders which each of us face.

Thus we propose a space open to the exchange of information, support and strategies against precariousness, in which the specific counseling – provided by people with experience in confronting difficult situations (related to work, health, housing, migration law…) – is not conceived as essential or unidirectional work sustained only by ‘experts’, but rather the collective production of practical knowledge, a “precarious instinct” of resistance for the empowered transformation of the different precariousnesses which touch our lives. Given that these precarious situations are intertwined and are not necessarily ordered according to established categories, falling within the domain of specific professional figures, we refer to a transversal “precarious
instinct” which might be capable of developing forms of resistance even in the cracks of a Welfare State sometimes oriented more towards control than towards the guaranteeing of rights. We depart from the articulation between different knowledges and experiences in order to construct, beyond the exchange of information and support, a space for collective self-organization.

This effort has a name: Todasacien. Agency of Precarious Affairs.