Has Solidarity a Future?

The term “precariat” replaced, simultaneously, the terms “proletariat” and “middle class” - both well beyond their use-by date, fully and truly “zombie terms”. What “unites” the precariat, integrating that exceedingly variegated aggregate into a cohesive category, is the condition of extreme disintegration, pulverization, atomization. Whatever their provenance or denomination, all precarians suffer – and each suffers alone, each individual suffering being well-deserved individual punishment for individually committed sins of insufficient shrewdness and deficit of industry. Individually born sufferings are all strikingly similar: whether induced by a growing pile of utility bills and college fees invoices, miserliness of wages topped up by the fragility of available jobs and inaccessibility of solid and reliable ones, fogginess of longer-term life prospects, restless spectre of redundancy and/or demotion – they all boil down to existential uncertainty: that awesome blend of ignorance and impotence, and inexhaustible source of humiliation. Such sufferings don’t add up: they divide and separate the sufferers. They deny commonality of fate. They render calls to solidarity sound ludicrous. So, has solidarity a future?