Issue 2, 2018: Marx from the Margins
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Precarias a la deriva

Julia Tirler

Precarias a la deriva is a feminist initiative situated between research and activism, active in and around Madrid from 2002 onwards. In June 2002 Spanish unions organised a general strike in response to changes in the labour legislation. A group of women, most of them active in the feminist social centre La Eskalera Karakola in Madrid, were unsatisfied with the lack of representation for addressing concerns about their unstable, flexible and precarious working and living conditions, and doubted the effectiveness of strike mobilization as a resistance tool. With these considerations in mind the group spent the day of the general strike on the streets asking women if they were striking, and what were their views regarding the strike and their precarious conditions. The initiative Precarias a la deriva (literally: Precarious women adrift) arose from this experience and organised its first deriva (literally meaning ‘drift’) in October 2002. The method of deriva is appropriated from the Situationist International, a group of artists and activists active between 1957 and 1972 mainly in France, that used purposeless wandering in the city – dérive (French for ‘drift’) – as a performative and subversive technique for experiencing the urban space differently and to provoke social change. In Precarias a la deriva’s version the situationist dérive is released from its bourgeois and masculine connotation of the flâneur in order to be used as a situated, “open and multisensorial”1 (Precarias a la deriva 2004a, 26) method in the regular everyday space of the participating women. For several months an open and flexible group of women met almost weekly to wander around the relevant places constituting their precarious working and living conditions in the fields of communication work (translation and language teaching, call centres), domestic work, catering, nursing, and in a later stage also sex work, scholarships, advertising, mediation and education. The derivas were inspired by the idea of coming together to create a cartography of these feminized precarious working and living conditions by exchanging experiences, sharing reflections, and taking the self as a starting point for common struggle and resistance (Precarias a la deriva 2004a).

Feminist critique of the general strike as a resistance tool is already mentioned in the 1970s in the context of a general critique of Marx’ analysis of capitalism, which points out that Marx failed to consider the importance of unpaid reproductive work carried out by women, and the role reproductive work plays in the (re-)production of labour-power (Federici 2009). Precarias a la deriva’s analyses and practices were inspired by (Marxist) feminist critiques and took them a step further. They were interested in reproduction in a broad sense and found contemporaraneous rearticulations of a feminist critique on reproduction in the works of Donna Haraway (1991), Chela Sandoval (2000), Anna G. Jónasdóttir (1995), Rosi Braidotti (2002), Cristina Carrasco (1999), Jane Flax (1995) and Cristina Morini (2001). Following Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and Carole Pateman they took analyses of multiple forms of power relations into consideration, such as the “sexual division of labour, control of sexuality, normative heterosexuality and family socialisation” (Precarias a la deriva 2004a, 22-23). 

Precarias a la deriva stressed the importance of an analysis of contemporary capitalism which takes reproduction as well as the history of colonialism, patriarchy and domination based on racism into account. With regard to post-Marxist approaches on immaterial or affective labour (Lazzarato 1996; Hardt/Negri 2000) Precarias a la deriva pointed out that some approaches deriving from immaterial or affective labour theories did not consider the effects of racializing and patriarchal domination (Precarias a la deriva 2004a, 23). Moreover, they made the body as “a place of the expression of domination and exploitation” (Precarias a la deriva 2004a, 23) a subject of discussion and referred to feminist theories on the public and the private, stressing the importance of public visibility and linking precariousness with «questions of care and sexuality» (Precarias a la deriva 2004b).

Based on this theoretical framework, Precarias a la deriva analysed precariousness not as just confined to wage labour but as an ongoing, heterogeneous process that affects the whole existence, and as a tendency which is not new – most of the work carried out by women and people outside of the global north is and always has been precarious – and is affecting hitherto secured sectors of society (Precarias a la deriva 2004a). They defined precariousness as “a juncture of material and symbolic conditions which determine an uncertainty with respect to the sustained access to the resources essential to the full development of one’s life”, an approach which aims at “overcome(ing) the dichotomies of public/private and production/reproduction and to recognize the interconnections between the social and the economic” (Precarias a la deriva 2004b).

Even though today Precarias a la deriva are no longer active under this name, their theories and practices continue to inspire and stimulate militant research practices and initiatives within as well as outside of Spain.

 

 

Referenties

Braidotti, Rosi. 2002. Metamorphoses. Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Carrasco, Cristina ed. 1999. Mujeres y economía. Nuevas perspectivas para viejos y nuevos problemas. Barcelona: Icaria.

Federici, Silvia. 2009. “The Reproduction of Labour-power in the Global Economy, Marxist Theory and the Unfinished Feminist Revolution”. Reading presented at UC Santa Cruz Seminar The Crisis of Social Reproduction and Feminist Struggle, Jan. 27, 2009. https://caringlabor.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/silvia-federici-the-reproduction-of-labour-power-in-the-global-economy-marxist-theory-and-the-unfinished-feminist-revolution/

Flax, Jane. 1991. Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West. Berkeley, California: University of California Press.

Flax, Jane 1995. Psicoanálisis y feminismo. Pensamientos fragmentarios. Madrid: Cátedra.

Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women the Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books.

Haraway, Donna. 1991. Ciencia, cyborgs y mujeres. Madrid: Cátedra. 1991.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Jónasdóttir, Anna. 1994. Why Women are Oppressed. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Jónasdóttir, Anna. 1995. El poder del amor ¿Le importa el sexo a la democracia? Place: Publisher.

Lazzarato, Maurizio. 1996. „Immaterial labor“. In Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, edited by Paulo Virno and Michael Hardt, 142-157. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Morini, Cristina. 2001. La serva serve. Le nuove forzate del lavoro domestico. Rome: Derive Approdi.

Precarias a la deriva. 2003. “A la deriva (por los circuitos de la precariedad femenina).” Video. https://vimeo.com/3766139

Precarias a la deriva. 2004a. A la deriva por los circuitos de la precariedad femenina. Madrid: Traficantes de sueños. https://www.traficantes.net/sites/default/files/pdfs/A%20la%20deriva-TdS.pdf

Precarias a la deriva. 2004b. “Adrift through the circuits of feminized precarious work”. Transversal Texts 4. http://eipcp.net/transversal/0704/precarias1/en

Sandoval, Chela. 2000. Methodology of the Opressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Noten

1] All translations from Spanish: JT

Biografie

Julia Tirler

Julia Tirler is a cultural scientist, writer, precarious worker and currently a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna with research interests in intersectional feminisms, theories of collectivity and labour struggles and their representation.