Workers Day protests in Tehran, Iran. May 1, 2018. Wikicommons/Armin Karami. Some rights reserved.The groundbreaking concept ‘precariat’, coined by British economist Guy Standing, reflects the emergence of a new social class by identifying a 40-year long precaritisation process under neoliberal capitalism, due to changing relations of production and distribution. However, the concept has come under some concerted criticism from social scientists.
Firstly, it is criticized for enshrining a ‘Global North’ point of view. According to this critique, the concept cannot be deemed a global phenomenon in that it does not appropriately cover the different labor conditions of the Global South. Secondly it is argued that rather than pointing to the situating of a new social class, the concept in fact describes a particular ‘condition’ of labour relations around the world.
Where reviewers of Standing’s theory accept that the precaritisation of labour has taken place, they reject the assertion of a different global class structure under neoliberal capitalism. According to them, post-1980 labour conditions constitute just one historical phase of the proletariat under late capitalism. In short, for them, the formation of a new global class structure, whose main component is the precariat, is out of question.
