Nowtopian

On my recent trip to Milan for Mayday I got to meet Alex Foti over lunch. We decided to conduct an interview by email and here it is. Foti is the author of a manifesto I quoted at length in an early blog post, regardind the politics of Precarity and the so-called ‘cognitariat’ in Italy and Europe. We continue the discussion here…

1. Describe your involvement in Chainworkers. When did it start, what was the instigation? How many people have been involved with it?

Zoe and I made a trip to California and the Northwest in 1998: we were struck by the wal-martization of America and how service labor was being pitilessly exploited in offices and malls. We thought this was a trend already present in metropolitan Italy and that America in a way was showing us the bleak future in store for European precarious workers if they didn’t fight back. On the plane back, we read of a Vancouver McD’s that had just been unionized by two teen-age girls. I proposed we create a webzine, ChainWorkers.org, in order to help young temps and part-timers organize and defend themselves from greedy and manipulative employers in Milano and beyond. Zoe designed the beta version of the webzine in early 1999. Then we read NO LOGO and became Kleinian converts immediately. We presented the project of merging media+labor activism to the squat we were members of in the spring of 2000. Then the CreW was born. At its peak in 2004-2005 it involved some 50 activists who could mobilize 500 people with short notice for actions and pickets.

2. In Greenpepper you described a further entity called PRECOG, which was described as the precarious retail and service workers PLUS the cognitariat of media and education industries. Can you describe how these two disparate sectors actually connect? Are there active alliances between say, sales clerks at a department store on one hand and web workers at a media company on the other? How does that look? What do they do? Can you describe the relationship between organizing efforts among chainstore workers and cultural/media workers?

Precog was founded in late 2003 and basically lasted one year as a national online and offline network linking antiprecarity movements in main Italian cities. It created San Precario and did the most politically relevant mayday of all, that of 2004, when non-communist radical movements, pink collective and militant sections of unionism did a splash by shutting down all chainstores and supermarkets still opened on May 1st (legal holiday in Italy according to the labor code). It was a high time of interlinking ideas and struggles and everything seemed possibile. It did not last. I think precog wanted to bridge the gap between student movements and incipient struggles of service workers. Up to that moment, students had not really taken an interest in the sorry condition of the Italian labor market, with millions of their peers flexploited and discriminated. In a way the synthesis was already in the CreW, where cashiers, runners, social workers, media operatives, people with union experience were all coming together to discuss very creative ways of approaching the unorganized young people in the city. But I don’t deny there’s a problem trying to reach programmers and cleaners with the same spell. It’s the same problem that cross-class progressive alliances in the 20th century had to face. But I don’t see how we can alter the balance of power on the labor market if we don’t merge sections of the service class, with sections of the creative class, and of the knowledge class in a wider radical alliance aiming at raising conflict and provide cross-sector solidarity.

3. In Processed World magazine we began describing the rise of the “6-month worker” in our second issue in 1981. Over the years it became clear that while this was an accurate objective characterization of a growing number of people, the subjective experience of being in this category was anything but uniform. Some people want full-time work and can’t get it. Others were happy to have precarious work because it was relatively well-paid, allowing them to take time off to do their “real work.” Can you talk about the problems of the category of the “precariat” in Italy as a unifying identity?

It’s not yet an identity but it’s in the process of becoming at least a social subject aware of its potential, if an organization finally emerges addressing precarity from a generational angle (the European precariat is mostly a conflation of generation and class). Let’s talk about part-time workers. Usually these workers have no control on their work time (they’re supposed to do say 20 hours per week, but have to work 40 with no notice if managers require them to do so), and are paid per hour less than correspondent full-time workers. So clearly there are structural elements of precarity in part-time work. Also, since you work part-time you earn a partial income, and so the likelihood of moonlighting increases sharply. But there’s no doubt that while involuntary part-time is the norm, there’s a number of people that find flexible work schedules a plus for their individual freedom. In fact, we don’t want to abolish flexibility even if we could. We want to impose social regulation on it through labor conflict, social agitation, media hacktivism. Most especially (and this is were we disagree with commie parties and unions) we want to fight for a new European welfare system (call it “commonfare”) that provides the young, women, immigrants with basic income and universal access to health care, paid maternity leave and paid vacations, cheap housing and education, free, ubiquitous broadband and peer-managed culture. If such a new welfare system were to be built, then people could actually choose the level of flexibility they’re comfortable with. We are also trying to raise support for a common minimum wage in the eurozone (at a sufficiently high level, and it would be sustainable, if it is set in conjunction with a basic income). But there’s no secret about one thing. However you put it, we have to achieve a sizable redistribution of income and wealth from the upper to the lower classes. If we don’t do that, any new social measure would be perfunctory.

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