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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.
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.
Price: $167.00
Pages: 136
Publisher: Brill
Imprint: Brill
Series: Studies in Critical Social Sciences
Publication Date:
11 November 2021
ISBN: 9789004465589
Format: Hardcover
"Ricardo Antunes is a lucid and passionate (these two characteristics can coincide) narrator of the epochal transformations of workers’ labouring, living and organisational conditions […] A narrator that, in profoundly describing the capacity of global capital to materially transform and subjectively manipulate work and workers, never loses sight of society’s social antagonisms and of the possibilities of emancipation from wage labour, inscribed in the capitalist social relations of our time." — Pietro Basso, Un cataclisma, e il suo lucido narratore. Preface to the Italian edition of Farewell to Work?
"Ricardo Antunes’s book presents theoretical insights of great interest on the current question of the Marxist distinction between ‘abstract labour’ and ‘concrete labour’, and on the increasing hegemony of the former on the latter, under the capitalist organization of society. Supported by György Lukács’ Ontology of Social Being, this Brazilian sociologist courageously defends the idea of labour’s central role as the ‘proto-form’ of social organization, and clarifies the importance of the transition from the heteronomous condition of workers to that of real autonomy." — Nicolas Tertulian, in: Actuel Marx no. 22, France
"I have read Farewell to Work? with all the attention that it deserves. The question of changes in the organic composition of capital – with all its justified controversies – is really a matter of concern to all of us. I dealt with this problem, a long time ago, when I had the energy for such a task. In almost all of the Western languages, there is an extensive bibliography on the subject. Behind it lies the peculiar idea that the category of labour is vanishing. This is similar to that theoretical current that longs for a society in which only the bourgeoisie exists, without the proletariat. I really like this book. It is clear, objective, well-informed and indispensable to those worried by the subject. Congratulations! It is the most important book on Economy and Politics that has emerged here in the last years, very long years." — Nelson Werneck Sodré, in: Brazilian historian
"This remarkable and very up-to-date book by Ricardo Antunes demonstrates that capitalism, above all, remains a form of exploiting the workforce. Technical and social forms of organizing the production of commodities – whether material or cultural, prosaic or virtual – are modified. It is not about waving “farewell to work”, but to recognize along with Ricardo Antunes that forms of labour and production’s technical and social organisation change continuously, nationwide and worldwide. In all cases, the expropriation is put in question, always accompanied by the contradictions between labour and capital, i.e., the workers and the owners of the means of production. That is why the class contradictions remain the main driver in the history of capitalism, moving towards socialism." — Octávio Ianni, from the back cover of the Spanish edition of Farewell to Work?
"Ricardo Antunes’s book presents theoretical insights of great interest on the current question of the Marxist distinction between ‘abstract labour’ and ‘concrete labour’, and on the increasing hegemony of the former on the latter, under the capitalist organization of society. Supported by György Lukács’ Ontology of Social Being, this Brazilian sociologist courageously defends the idea of labour’s central role as the ‘proto-form’ of social organization, and clarifies the importance of the transition from the heteronomous condition of workers to that of real autonomy." — Nicolas Tertulian, in: Actuel Marx no. 22, France
"I have read Farewell to Work? with all the attention that it deserves. The question of changes in the organic composition of capital – with all its justified controversies – is really a matter of concern to all of us. I dealt with this problem, a long time ago, when I had the energy for such a task. In almost all of the Western languages, there is an extensive bibliography on the subject. Behind it lies the peculiar idea that the category of labour is vanishing. This is similar to that theoretical current that longs for a society in which only the bourgeoisie exists, without the proletariat. I really like this book. It is clear, objective, well-informed and indispensable to those worried by the subject. Congratulations! It is the most important book on Economy and Politics that has emerged here in the last years, very long years." — Nelson Werneck Sodré, in: Brazilian historian
"This remarkable and very up-to-date book by Ricardo Antunes demonstrates that capitalism, above all, remains a form of exploiting the workforce. Technical and social forms of organizing the production of commodities – whether material or cultural, prosaic or virtual – are modified. It is not about waving “farewell to work”, but to recognize along with Ricardo Antunes that forms of labour and production’s technical and social organisation change continuously, nationwide and worldwide. In all cases, the expropriation is put in question, always accompanied by the contradictions between labour and capital, i.e., the workers and the owners of the means of production. That is why the class contradictions remain the main driver in the history of capitalism, moving towards socialism." — Octávio Ianni, from the back cover of the Spanish edition of Farewell to Work?
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.