In the age where the internet and the so-called ‘new economy’ are everywhere, labour is not on headlines anymore.1 At best, we still know and recognize it from the standpoint of its computerisation. The moment would definitely be that of communication and informational interaction and no longer of the Promethean effort to make oneself ‘master and possessor of nature’, according to the Cartesian formula. This is the latest version of a postmodern theme that, for almost twenty years, has taken place at the end of the century and millennium under the banner of the ‘end of work’ and the ‘farewell to workers.’
With this work, Ricardo Antunes deliberately places himself in conflict with the dominant ideology. Without falling into the latter’s facilities, its schematic form little-inclined to argument, which simply reiterates that its strength comes from repetition and media amplification, here the author presents a detailed analysis of the changes currently affecting labour’s reality, both objectively and subjectively.
From these transformations, Antunes strives, above all, to grasp the dialectical complexity, the unity of opposites and even contradictory movements that characterize them. There has been a de-proletarianization of industrial labour in core capitalist countries, followed by a relative and absolute reduction in the size of the traditional working class
Accordingly, the predominant idea Antunes advances is not that of an ‘end of work’, but of the fragmentation and heterogeneity within the world of work, and consequently of workers themselves. Essentially, in regards to the ideology of the ‘end of work’ Ricardo Antunes presents what it is, without a doubt, a
However, this is also what allows one to distinguish, within the ongoing changes, the premises of the end of ‘abstract labour
As for those who waved farewell to workers and to the ‘class-that-lives-from-labour
However, it is also at this scale that, more than ever, the current fragmentation and heterogeneity of the proletariat imposes itself. Therefore, the inevitable question of how to bring unity among the scattered fragments of a worldwide working class
Translated by Henrique Amorim and edited by Murillo van der Laan.