The Precariat: a view from the South

The term ‘precariat’—a precarious proletariat—has achieved considerable prominence in recent years and is probably now ripe for critical deconstruction. It also needs to be situated in terms of a genealogy that includes the marginality debates of the 1960s, the later informal sector problematic and the ‘social exclusion’ optic that became dominant in the 1980s. I will argue that the concept is highly questionable both as an adequate sociology of work in the North and insofar as it elides the experience of the South in an openly Eurocentric manner. In terms of political discourse I think we should avoid the language of ‘dangerous class’, as deployed by Guy Standing to situate workers politically in the policy world as though frightening the ruling classes was a strategy for transformation.