Farewell to Work? : : Essays on the World of Work's Metamorphoses and Centrality / / Ricardo Antunes, translated by Murillo van der Laan and others.

• Superior document: Studies in Critical Social Sciences Series ; Volume 198
• VerfasserIn: Antunes, Ricardo, 1953-
• TeilnehmendeR: Laan, Murillo van der,
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden, Netherlands : : Brill,, [2022]; ©2022
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Edition: First edition.
• Language: English
• Series: Studies in Critical Social Sciences Series ; Volume 198.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (154 pages)
• Notes: Errata sheets inserted.

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.

Table of Contents

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.