Description
Book SynopsisBillions of men and women depend exclusively on their labour to survive. For them work is not a choice, and yet the restructuring of the global economy has forced increasing numbers into unemployment and eroded the rights and economic gains of those still on the job. What does this increasing precariousness mean for today's labour markets?
Table of ContentsForeword by István Mészáros Preface to the English edition Preface to the second edition Preface to the first edition Introduction 1. Capital’s Social-Metabolic Order and its System of Mediations The system of first-order mediations The emergence of the system of second-order mediations 2. Dimensions of the Structural Crisis of Capital The crisis of Fordism and Taylorism as the phenomenal expression of the structural crisis 3. The Responses of Capital to its Structural Crisis: Productive Restructuring and its Repercussions in the Labour-Process The limits of Taylorism/Fordism and of the social-democratic compromise The emergence of mass worker-revolts and the crisis of the welfare-state 4. Toyotism and the New Forms of Capital-Accumulation The fallacy of ‘total quality’ under the diminishing utility-rate of the use-value of commodities The ‘lyophilisation’ of organisation and labour in the Toyotist factory: new forms of labour-intensification 5. From Thatcher’s Neoliberalism to Tony Blair’s ‘Third Way’: the Recent British Experience Neoliberalism, the world of work and the crisis of unionism in England Elements of productive restructuring in Britain: ideas and practice British strikes in the 1990s: forms of confrontation with neoliberalism and the casualisation of work New Labour and Tony Blair’s ‘Third Way’ 6. The Class-that-Lives-from-Labour: the Working Class Today Towards a broader notion of the working class Dimensions of the diversity, heterogeneity and complexity of the working class The sexual division of labour: transversalities between the dimensions of class and gender Wage-earners in the service-sector, the ‘third sector’ and new forms of domestic labour Transnationalisation of capital and the world of work 7. The World of Labour and Value-Theory: Forms of Material and Immaterial Labour The growing interaction between labour and scientific knowledge: a critique of the thesis of ‘science as primary productive force’ The interaction between material and immaterial labour Contemporary forms of estrangement 8. Excursus on the Centrality of Labour: the Debate between Lukács and Habermas 1. The centrality of labour in Lukács’s Ontology of Social Being Labour and teleology Labour as the model of social practice Labour and freedom 2. Habermas’s critique of the ‘paradigm of labour’ The paradigm of communicative action and the sphere of intersubjectivity The uncoupling of system and lifeworld The colonisation of the lifeworld and Habermas’s critique of the theory of value 3. A critical sketch of Habermas’s critique Authentic and inauthentic subjectivity 9. Elements towards an Ontology of Everyday Life 10. Working Time and Free Time: towards a Meaningful Life Inside and Outside of Work 11. Foundations of a New Social-Metabolic Order Appendices Appendices to the second edition 1. Ten Theses and a Hypothesis on the Present (and Future) of Work 2. Labour and Value: Critical Notes Appendices to the first edition 1. The Crisis of the Labour-Movement and the Centrality of Labour Today 2. The New Proletarians at the Turn of the Century 3. The Metamorphoses and Centrality of Labour Today 4. Social Struggles and Socialist Societal Design in Contemporary Brazil References Index
