Privilege of Servitude

Ricardo Antunes is a Full Professor of Sociology at the University of Campinas and the author of The Meanings of Work (2013) and Farewell to Work? (2021), among other books. He has been a Visiting Professor at Ca’ Foscari University and a Visiting Researcher at the University of Sussex.

• Preface to the English Edition Acknowledgements A Preliminary NotePart 1 Between Corrosion and Rubble: The Emergence of the Digital-Age Proletariat1 Photographs of Precarious Global Labour 2 The Explosion of the New Service Proletariat 3 Infoproletariat, Informality, (Im)materiality and Value: The New Global Proletariat and Its Main Tendencies 4 Labour and (De)value in Platform Capitalism: Three Theses on the New Age of the Disanthropomorphisation of Labour 5 Workers’ Subjectivity, and Innocent and Estranged Reifications 6 Uno or Omni Work: The Dialectic Between Concrete and Abstract LabourPart 2 The Devastation of Labour Reaches Brazil (Precarisation, Outsourcing and the Crisis of Trade Unionism)7 The New Morphology of the Working Class in Contemporary Brazil: Workers in Industry, Agribusiness and Services 8 The Society of Work-Related Illnesses 9 Precariousness of Labour as a Rule 10 The Society of Total Outsourcing 11 Where has the New Trade Unionism Gone? Directions and Misdirections of a Trade Union Practice 12 From Confrontational Unionism to Bargaining UnionismPart 3 The Age of Conciliations, Rebellions and Counter-Revolutions13 Two Notes about Two Routes of Social Liberalism 14 The Phenomenology of the Brazilian Crisis 15 The June 2013 Rebellions 16 The Age of Rebellions, Counter-Revolutions, and the New State of Exception 17 The (De)construction of Labour in Twenty-First Century Brazil 18 The Devastation of Labour in the Preventive Counter-Revolution: the Destructive Affinities between Temer and BolsonaroPart 4 Is There Light at the End of the Tunnel?19 Is There a Future for Trade Unions? 20 Is there a Future for Socialism? Towards a New Way of Life in Latin America Appendix: Original Sources of the Chapters Bibliography