Privilege of Servitude

Ricardo Antunes is a Full Professor of Sociology at the University of Campinas and the author of The Meanings of Work (Brill, 2013) and Farewell to Work? (Brill, 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 EditionAcknowledgementsA Preliminary NotePart 1 Between Corrosion and Rubble: The Emergence of the Digital-Age Proletariat1 Photographs of Precarious Global Labour2 The Explosion of the New Service Proletariat3 Infoproletariat, Informality, (Im)materiality and Value: The New Global Proletariat and Its Main Tendencies4 Labour and (De)value in Platform Capitalism: Three Theses on the New Age of the Disanthropomorphisation of Labour5 Workers’ Subjectivity, and Innocent and Estranged Reifications6 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 Services8 The Society of Work-Related Illnesses9 Precariousness of Labour as a Rule10 The Society of Total Outsourcing11 Where has the New Trade Unionism Gone? Directions and Misdirections of a Trade Union Practice12 From Confrontational Unionism to Bargaining UnionismPart 3 The Age of Conciliations, Rebellions and Counter-Revolutions13 Two Notes about Two Routes of Social Liberalism14 The Phenomenology of the Brazilian Crisis15 The June 2013 Rebellions16 The Age of Rebellions, Counter-Revolutions, and the New State of Exception17 The (De)construction of Labour in Twenty-First Century Brazil18 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 AmericaAppendix: Original Sources of the ChaptersBibliography