The past few decades have seen a new condition arise in the lives of many Americans: precarity. What makes life so precarious today for the average American? Just what does this precarity look like?
The Government Accountability Office estimated in 2015 that more than a third of all workers in the USA are contingent workers, i.e. those whose work is not secure and does not come with the benefits and stability that defined many 20th century jobs. In response to these developments a number of scholars and activists have argued that we are now entering a new stage of capitalism defined by the increasingly precarious nature of labor.
Political scientist Jacob Hacker, in his compelling work The Great Risk Shift, laments “the rise of a reserve army of part-time and temporary workers.” The problem is not flexible work per se but rather that this flexibility is imposed on workers by and in the interests of their employers.
Hacker summarizes this transformation in the following terms: “Over the last generation we have witnessed a massive transfer of economic risk from broad structures of insurance, including those sponsored by the corporate sector as well as by government, onto the fragile balance sheets of American families.”
What are the consequences of this increase in economic risk? From the 1970s to the 2000s bankruptcies and foreclosures increased dramatically. And this was before the 2008 recession and its aftermath, which only drove these numbers up further. In addition, not only has inequality grown but income instability has grown rapidly. Individual people’s incomes now vary much more year to year than they used to. Conventional economic statistics (including GDP growth, productivity, and even unemployment) fail to capture “what most Americans feel: a sense of ever-increasing financial risk.” In addition, almost 60% of Americans will experience at least one year of poverty between the ages of 20 and 75, due to this income instability.
Precarity does not just produce anxiety and insecurity. It is coercive. In her book Capitalism on Edge, Albena Azmanova discusses the specifically coercive nature of our current form of precarity capitalism, as she calls it. “When we lack basic certainty regarding our source of livelihood, we lose control of our existence. Economic insecurity is politically debilitating…” This coercive form of precarious insecurity is growing in the United States and elsewhere, a point well-documented in the recent works of Guy Standing.
This precarity in the private sector is also reflected in a growing precarity in the public sector. Political theorist Sheldon Wolin in his 1980s work The Presence of the Past argued that Reagan-era efforts to shrink social programs were actually best understood as an expansion of coercion and social control rather than a reduction in state power. Why? Because shrinking social programs made them more uncertain, unreliable, means-tested, and stigmatized. Our lives are thus much less certain, and less under our control, than they used to be. Let’s explore this further.
Contrary to contingent, means-tested programs, universal programs are liberating, empowering, and claimed as a matter of right. They are not stigmatizing and exert no coercion over us. But limited, means-tested programs, in addition to carrying an ugly stigma, also are far more coercive: they require much more effort on the part of citizens to attain them and much more state supervision. As a benefits claimant, one must continually fill out forms, comply with requirements, remain up to date on eligibility criteria, submit to humiliating supervision and the invasive disciplinary eye of the state, all to acquire and keep these benefits. Hardly a reduction in state power. Indeed, such coercive interventions have more in common with Foucault’s nightmare vision of the all-seeing panopticon than with some libertarian dream of a minimalist state.
As an example, consider Hacker’s depiction of Medicaid: “applying for Medicaid is often hopelessly complex…but even when enrolled in Medicaid, families often find themselves without coverage soon after they enroll because they briefly lose eligibility or…fail to follow cumbersome and frequent reapplication processes.” More precarious work, combined with precarious benefits, creates a coercive world in which we lack the freedom to control the conditions of our lives.
These developments, in other words, add new dimensions to the coercive nature of contemporary neoliberal capitalism. In addition to the coercive necessity of acquiring a job and working in an authoritarian institution, one must grapple with the damaging effects of precarious work, in which the very work one must rely on to pay for necessities is itself insecure, unreliable, and liable to automation, outsourcing, and downsizing. Similarly, to claim the limited benefits offered by the American welfare system one must submit to regular intrusions and endless bureaucracy.
(Contrast this with the near-universal stimulus checks enacted in 2020 and 2021. Eligible recipients did not need to apply for such checks; rather, they were automatically mailed or deposited electronically to everyone who qualified. Unsurprisingly, these checks were very popular. This is a small sign that the neoliberal consensus may be replaced with something better.)
Philip Mirowski, in his incisive Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, notes that neoliberalism was a “set of programs to infuse, take over, and transform the strong state.” Furthermore it expanded the “discipline of citizens through the further injection of neoliberal themes into everyday life.” This characterization is powerful because it correctly recognizes that although the US government may be less competent now in important respects (witness the coronavirus response at the federal and state level) it is also more coercive and stronger than ever in other dimensions. The neoliberal insinuation into every institution and interaction can percolate into individual life itself, as we are increasingly pressured to be “creators”, “self-starters,” “entrepreneurs,” “innovators,” and miniature firms. All this in the context of an economy in which the average hourly wage for US workers is lower than it was in 1973.
We should therefore challenge those on the right when they characterize capitalism as the pinnacle of voluntarism and freedom. As Thomas Frank reminds us, regarding the campaign of the wealthy in 1936 to defeat FDR, “tycoons and bankers and newspaper publishers—the people who ran the country into the great depression—were using “liberty” as a fig leaf for their privilege.” It is striking how frequently the wealthy use the word “liberty” to characterize their worldview. They are rarely genuine libertarians. What they mean by “liberty” is the freedom to accumulate wealth and private power. We see this today when Silicon Valley tycoon Peter Thiel describes himself and is dutifully described by the media as a “libertarian” yet his most notable political interventions have been to support would-be authoritarians on the right.
To conclude, it is as important as ever for those on the left to stress that our political-economic vision calls for a massive expansion of the freedom enjoyed by ordinary citizens, both politically and economically.