The meanings of work : essay on the affirmation and negation of work / / by Ricardo Antunes ; translated by Elizabeth Molinari.

• Author: Antunes, Ricardo, 1953-
• Year of Publication: 2013
• Edition: 2nd ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Historical Materialism Book Series 43.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (272 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

The Meanings of Work aims to explore some dimensions of the changes taking place in the labour-world, as well as looking at the consequences, theoretical and empirical, entailed by these transformations, such as the relevance and pertinence of the category of labour in the contemporary world. Billions of men and women depend exclusively on their labour to survive and encounter increasingly unstable, precarious or casual workers and the unemployed. As the contingent of workers has grown, there have been a vast reduction in jobs, rights have been corroded and the gains of the past have been eroded. The Meanings of Work starts with a wider conception of work and seeks to understand this new condition of labour today.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material -- Introduction -- Chapter One Capital’s Social-Metabolic Order and its System of Mediations -- Chapter Two Dimensions of the Structural Crisis of Capital -- Chapter Three The Responses of Capital to Its Structural Crisis: Productive Restructuring and Its Repercussions in the Labour-Process -- Chapter Four Toyotism and the New Forms of Capital-Accumulation -- Chapter Five From Thatcher’s Neoliberalism to Blair’s ‘Third Way’: the Recent British Experience -- Chapter Six The Class-that-Lives-from-Labour: the Working Class Today -- Chapter Seven The World of Labour and Value-Theory: Forms of Material and Immaterial Labour -- Chapter Eight Excursus on the Centrality of Labour: the Debate between Lukács and Habermas -- Chapter Nine Elements towards an Ontology of Everyday Life -- Chapter Ten Working Time and Free Time: towards a Meaningful Life Inside and Outside of Work -- Chapter Eleven Foundations of a New Social-Metabolic Order -- Appendices to the Second Edition -- Appendices to the First Edition -- References -- Subject Index -- Author Index.