I’m sure you’re familiar with debates around this re Angela or largest swaths of the mini-mute on precarity. I’m not sure what else there is write…

What I could find with a quick search was Steve’s Confronting the crisis of ‘fordism’: Italian debates around social transition from 96 and a small mention in an interview just published by the journal Affinities (but translated before that).

Forgive me for not using better footnotes. I feel I’ve grown a bit lazy in this regard…

Take it easy but take it.

Sorry, I forgot to answer that question. This is notes for a talk I’m giving to folks I know in the university who are interested in and already talking about precarity in some different senses. I’m trying to lay out an understanding of the term in a pretty straightforward marxist sense, partly because that sense of the term isn’t as present as I’d like to be among the folks I’m thinking of, and to make the point already discussed above.

I’m not sure I follow you on the precarious subject part. Can you say more on that please? Do you mean ‘the precariat’ as a subject, or do you mean something else? Can you point me to the docs you’re referring to that Steve translated? I may have read them but I’m not sure, and if I did it was ages ago.

take it easy,
Nate

And while you pointed out various instances in the US that have referenced parts of the precarity discourse, your explanation is missing a key referent (or I perhaps you just have ellipses around it at the moment). What underlies many (but not all) of the discourses on precarity is the notion of the precarious subject (a heterogenous subject to be sure, but a subject none the less) as a subject of social change.
Steve Wright has translated some material from the debates on guaranteed income from Italy in 90s, You might want to look at that for the elements it as an almost proto-precarity discourse without having a precarious subject.

Thanks for the comments. Joshua, I agree with you I think, and that’s exactly where I want to get to with this. You anticipated my conclusions, and in a way that I find helpful so thanks for that.

Like I said, I think there has been and is a discourse - actually, there have been several - on precarity in the US, as part of discourses on class. (Since there can be a discourse on X without X ever appearing as a name.) I’m not convinced that there needs to be a discourse on precarity in the US, in the sense of people using the word “precarity”. I think some of the impulse behind some folks wanting there to be such a discourse - myself not all that long ago, for instance - is well intentioned, I don’t know that all of it is.

If anything, my agenda on this is to say that there has been a long history of fighting precaritization (or at least facets of it), fights against casualization/flexibilization on the job, organizing under precarious conditions in terms of weak or nonexistent legal protections, organizing under and against conditions of poverty/marginalization and absence of a welfare state, etc. So if anything folks concerned with precarity should be looking to the histories of struggles against these various conditions for ideas and inspiration, rather than the other way around in the US today.

Is that clearer?

take it easy,
Nate

Is it useful? A lot of time has been spent asking why hasn’t the US developed X while europe has? Why there was never a mass socialist party in US seems to be only the most frequently asked.

I would argue that it is no longer useful, or useful as a direct import for one of the very reasons you state: phenomenon which are relatively recent in Europe have long been present in the US. I don’t think 15th century discourse on land enclosures in England would pack the same punch in the US today.

ps: To whom are you planning on quoting Athusser & Ranciere?