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"We
are the precarious, the flexible, the temporary, the
mobile. We’re the people that live on a tightrope, in
a precarious balance, we’re the restructured and outsourced,
those who lack a stable job, and those who are overexploited;
those who pay a mortgage or a rent that strangles us.
We’re forced to buy and sell our ability to love and
care. We’re just like you: contortionists of flexibility."
("Mayday, Mayday! Les precàries
i precaris es rebel.len",
Manifiesto convocatoria Barcelona EuroMayDay 004)
An Australian tourist,
who had spent all his savings on a one-year trip around
the world, told me in a bar in Barcelona that he happened
to be in India just at the time of the Social Forum
in Mumbai, and now he had just arrived in time to experience
that in Barcelona. He thought this spreading of ideas
of freedom and understanding on a global scale was fantastic.
This means that one of the most important goals of the
organizers of the "Forum 2004" in Barcelona
– during preparations it had the more flowery title
of "Universal Forum of Cultures" – had already
been achieved before the forum even opened: the PR technique
of citing the successful globalization-critical Social
Forums not only in Porto Alegre and Mumbai, but also
at the European level in Florence and Paris. This false
labeling was further augmented by an impenetrably complex
program over the course of the whole summer, an equally
complicated assembly of celebrities and the conceptual
triad that sounds like a "best-of" list of
social movements slogans appropriated by neo-liberalism:
"cultural diversity", "sustainability",
"peace". The minor flaw in the euphonical
conceptual buzzwords: cultural diversity is played out
here primarily at the representationist levels of the
cultural spectacle, while the diversity of the local
autonomous and occupied houses in Barcelona was decimated
just prior to the Forum; sustainability consists in
the gentrification of an entire city district in a huge
construction endeavor that involves driving out thousands
of people living there; and peace is celebrated under
the flags of several sponsors that make their money
with military technologies. Whereas the Social Forums
are precarious attempts to make another world more than
just possible, the Forum in Barcelona is an attempt
to rewrite the current reality of difference capitalism
as a grand success story of cultures in conjunction.
Particularly in Barcelona,
though, there is also a counter-public sphere, which
does not leave this neo-liberal appropriation of both
urban and discursive space uncontested.
Prior to the Forum, prominent icons of the global movement
such as Antonio Negri and Naomi Klein, who had declined
to participate in the Forum, were invited by its opponents
to address counter-strategies in both global and local
frameworks together with activists. Prior to, alongside and beyond
this, many small networking meetings took place, which
dealt with tactical-political issues. Most of all, though,
one event succeeded in becoming the highpoint of the
local protests against the Forum, conjoining these protests
with the more general theme of the increasing precariousness
of work and life: following the example of the successful
May Day Parades in Milan,
the radical demonstration practice of May 1st was taken
up again and a large May Day Parade against the growing
precariousness of life was organized.
"We're
the precarious – the hidden face of Forum 2004"
On posters and a
huge demo banner, the Forum was branded as "fascismo
postmoderno". Although the term may be somewhat
problematically exaggerated, it was certainly based
on fundamental considerations, so that this formulation
was intended to call attention to the totalitarian aspects
of difference capitalism. In this context, "The
Precarious" functioned as the disappeared creativity
not only behind the Forum in Barcelona, but altogether
in a biopolitical setting, in which an unsettling hold
on all areas of life is increasingly prevailing, beyond
the sphere of work. While Social Democrats and unions
throughout Europe carry out their rituals on May 1st,
continuing to spread the cynical propaganda of "full
employment" in passing, and while Green parties
attempt, on the other hand, to create a dichotomous
counter-weight with the "Day of the Unemployed"
on April 30th, the reality of work and unemployment
has long since moved on; it has moved into a world,
in which not only work and unemployment become diffuse
and vanish in countless in-between forms, but also where
forms and strategies of resistance must be newly invented.
Reclaim
the Walls!
On the evening of
1 May 2004, about ten thousand demonstrators progressed
from the central square of the university through the
city to the beach of Barceloneta: sans-papiers and migrants,
autonomous activists, political activists from left-wing
and radical leftist unions and parties, art activists,
precariously employed and cognitive workers of all kinds,
who are just working on calling themselves precari@s.
Like an accelerated version of the practices of Reclaim
the Streets, a stream of dancing, chanting and painting
people flowed through the inner city of Barcelona. This
stream – as the yellow press newspapers would argue
– left a trail of havoc through the city. Yet this had
nothing to do with the familiar anti-globalist rituals
of disinhibition and transgression, for instance "removing
the glass" from banks – that occurred in Barcelona
too, but only as a marginal phenomenon – or riots between
militants and the police.
The reappropriation of the street took place here mostly
as a new arrangement of the mixed interweaving of bodies
and signs in a terrain where action and representation
blur.
With breathtaking speed, the
streets that the demonstrators passed through were transformed
into painted zones. Under the protection of the demo,
the city was dipped into an ocean of signs: template
graffiti, political slogans, posters, stickers, suggestions
of web sites, labeled pedestrian crossings, contextualizing
wall painting commented on here and there by performative
actions. The spread of creativity, the diffusion of
the artistic into the society of cognitive capitalism
thus struck back once again: because the logos and displays
of corporate capitalism that uniformly distinguish the
inner city are indebted to the creativity of a multitude
of cognitive workers, the creativity exercised in these
jobs now spread out as an opponent over these logos
and displays of the urban zone of consumerism – over
the display windows, city lights, rolling boards and
led screens as well as the walls of the buildings and
the streets.
The painting over the urban displays,
which was to mark the appearance of the city for days,
was not reminiscent of familiar old-style political
propaganda, neither in form nor in content. A mixture
of adbusting, cultural jamming and purportedly up-to-date
political propaganda reigned as a generalization of
the street art of sprayers and taggers. Where traditional
radical leftist parties used to uniformly drag their
eternally same slogans with them, here it was enough
to call attention to a web site.
"Precariousness
is what we live, flexicurity is what we want"
Parallel to the diversity
of sign forms, the ambiguity and contradictoriness of
the meanings of "precarious", this key term,
are particularly striking. The Mayday formulation "capitalisme
és precariat", for instance, is to be understood
as an analytical and ambivalent introduction of the
concept of precariousness as a definition of the current
capitalist form of society. Contrary to other – more
unequivocal – formulations such as "Contra el sistema
i la precarietat", the ambivalent concept of precariousness
simultaneously refers to the non-self-determined insecurity
of all areas of life and work, as well as to the possible
invention of new forms of resistance and the chance
of newly forming as "precariat", "cognitariat",
"affectariat". In the words of the Italian
media activist and theoretician Bifo: "Self-organizing
cognitive labor is the only way to transgress the psychopathic
present."
Thus, if we "live precariousness"
– as formulated in the Mayday Manifesto – then this
experience is also the foundation for demanding "flexicurity":
securities and rights in the midst of flexibility, of
uncertainty. And because there is often a mutual permeation
between non-self-determined and self-determined precariousness,
the practice of resistance that maneuvers from uncertain
terrain is the most appropriate. In the course of the
Mayday Parade in Barcelona, a correction was thus affixed
next to the entrance of an insurance company: "La
inseguridad vencerá".
Translated by Aileen Derieg
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