Farewell to Work?

Essays on the World of Work's Metamorphoses and Centrality
Erscheinungsjahr 2021
ISBN: 978-90-04-46558-9
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 198, 136 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 386 g

Reihe: Studies in Critical Social Sciences

Farewell to Work? presents the large process of capital’s productive restructuring, triggered in the 1970s. A process with tendencies to both intellectualize labour power and increase the levels of working class’ precariousness, on a global scale.

Its main hypothesis is that instead of work’s loss of centrality in contemporary capitalism, when the world of production is analysed in its global dimension, including countries in North and South, a substantial process of growing heterogeneity, complexity and fragmentation is observed. This configures a new morphology of the working class. Therefore, at the same time that new mechanisms are created to generate surplus labour, there is, simultaneously, an increment in casualisation and unemployment, pushed by a process of corrosion of labour rights.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Antunes, Ricardo

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Wirtschaftssoziologie, Arbeitssoziologie, Organisationssoziologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Foreword by Alain Bihr

Preface to the English edition

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

LIST OF TABLES

INTRODUCTION

Part I: Heterogeneity and Fragmentation of the Working Class

1. Fordism, Toyotism and Flexible Accumulation

2. Metamorphoses in the World of Work

3. Dimensions of the Trade Unionism’s Contemporary Crisis: Dilemmas and Challenges

4. Which Crisis of Labour Society?

First thesis

Second thesis

Third thesis

Fourth thesis

Fifth Thesis

Part II: Labour’s New Morphology

5. The Explosion of the New Services Proletariat of the Digital Age

The End of the Myth

Service Work and Marx’s Fundamental Clues

Can Immaterial Labour Generate Surplus Value?

Middle Class, Precariat or the New Service Proletariat?

6. Freeze-Dried Flexibility: A New Morphology of Labour: Casualisation and Value

Introduction

Brazil in the new international division of labour

The new forms of labour and value: tangibility and intangibility

The design of the new morphology of labour

7. The Working Class Today: The New Form of Being of the Class-that-lives-from-labour

8. The Crisis Seen Globally: Robert Kurz and The Collapse of Modernization

An explosive book

And its main gaps

9. The International Working Class in 1864 and Today

Introduction

The new morphology of labour: informality, casualisation, infoproletariat, and value

Conclusion

REFERENCES

INDEX

Über Autor(innen)

Ricardo Antunes is a Full Professor of Sociology (University of Campinas) and author of The Meanings of Work and Addio al lavoro?, among other books. He was Visiting Professor at University Ca’Foscari and a Visiting Researcher at University of Sussex.