The Meanings of Work: Essays on the Affirmation and Negation of Work

272 Pages·2013·1.66 MB·English

by  Ricardo Antunes

The Meanings of Work
Historical
Materialism
Book Series
Editorial Board
Sébastien Budgen, Paris – Steve Edwards, London
Marcel van der Linden, Amsterdam – Peter Thomas, London
VOLUME 43
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hm
The Meanings of Work
Essay on the Affirmation and Negation of Work
By
Ricardo Antunes
Translated by
Elizabeth Molinari
LEidEN • bostoN
2013
The English translation has been made possible with the kind support of the Fundação de Amparo
à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)
First published in 1999 as Sentidos do Trabalho by Boitempo Editorial, Brazil.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Antunes, Ricardo, 1953–
[Sentidos do trabalho. English]
the meanings of work : essay on the affirmation and negation of work / by Ricardo Antunes ;
translated by Elizabeth Molinari. – 2nd ed.
p. cm. – (Historical materialism book series, issN 1570-1522 ; v. 43)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbN 978-90-04-23459-8 (hardback : alk. paper) – isbN 978-90-04-23598-4 (e-book)
1. Labor movement – History – 20th century. 2. Labor – History – 20th century. 3. Labor
movement – History – 21th century. 4. Labor – History – 21th century. I. Title.
Hd4854.A5813 2012
335.4’12 – dc23
2012029790
issN 1570-1522
isbN 978-90-04-23459-8 (hardback)
isbN 978-90-04-23598-4 (e-book)
Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke brill NV, Leiden, the Netherlands.
Koninklijke brill NV incorporates the imprints brill, Global oriental, Hotei Publishing,
idC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.
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Fees are subject to change.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
To Diva and José,
my parents

‘O strange demands of civil society, which first perplexes and misleads us, then asks
of us more than Nature herself.’
Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship
‘What times are these, when to speak about trees is almost a crime, because it implies
silence about so many horrors?’
Brecht, ‘To Those Born After’
‘It is only when man in society seeks a meaning for his life that the failure of this
attempt brings in its wake the antithesis of meaninglessness.’
Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being
‘The time is out of joint.’
Shakespeare, Hamlet

Contents
Foreword by István Mészáros ...................................................................... xiii
Preface to the English Edition ...................................................................... xvii
Preface to the Second Edition ....................................................................... xxi
Preface to the First Edition ............................................................................ xxiii
Introduction .................................................................................................... 1
Chapter One Capital’s Social-Metabolic Order and its System of
Mediations ................................................................................................... 5
the system of first-order mediations ...................................................... 5
The emergence of the system of second-order mediations .................. 7
Chapter Two Dimensions of the Structural Crisis of Capital ............... 15
The crisis of Taylorism and Fordism as the phenomenal expression
of the structural crisis ............................................................................ 15
Chapter Three The Responses of Capital to Its Structural Crisis:
Productive Restructuring and Its Repercussions in the
Labour-Process ........................................................................................... 21
the limits of taylorism/Fordism and of the social-democratic
compromise ............................................................................................ 22
The emergence of mass-worker revolts and the crisis of the
welfare-state ............................................................................................ 26
Chapter Four toyotism and the New Forms of Capital-
Accumulation ............................................................................................. 32
The fallacy of ‘total quality’ under the diminishing utility-rate of the
use-value of commodities ..................................................................... 35
The ‘lyophilisation’ of organisation and labour in the Toyotist
factory: new forms of labour-intensification ...................................... 37
x • Contents
Chapter Five From thatcher’s Neoliberalism to blair’s ‘third Way’:
the Recent British Experience ................................................................... 44
Neoliberalism, the world of work and the crisis of unionism in
England .................................................................................................... 44
Elements of productive restructuring in Britain: ideas and practice ... 58
British strikes in the 1990s: forms of confrontation with
neoliberalism and the casualisation of work ..................................... 71
New Labour and tony blair’s ‘third Way’ ............................................ 75
Chapter Six The Class-that-Lives-from-Labour: the Working
Class Today ................................................................................................. 80
Towards a broader notion of the working class .................................... 80
Dimensions of the diversity, heterogeneity and complexity of the
working class .......................................................................................... 83
The sexual division of labour: transversalities between the
dimensions of class and gender ........................................................... 84
Wage-earners in the service-sector, the ‘third sector’ and new forms
of domestic labour ................................................................................. 89
Transnationalisation of capital and the world of work ........................ 93
Chapter Seven The World of Labour and Value-Theory: Forms of
Material and Immaterial Labour ............................................................. 96
the growing interaction between labour and scientific knowledge:
a critique of the thesis of ‘science as primary productive force’ ..... 96
The interaction between material and immaterial labour ....................... 102
Contemporary forms of estrangement .................................................... 107
Chapter Eight Excursus on the Centrality of Labour: the Debate
between Lukács and Habermas ............................................................... 112
The centrality of labour in Lukács’s Ontology of Social Being ............... 112
Labour and teleology ............................................................................. 113
Labour as the model of social practice ................................................ 116
Labour and freedom .............................................................................. 121
Habermas’s critique of the ‘paradigm of labour’ .................................. 123
The paradigm of communicative action and the sphere of
intersubjectivity .................................................................................. 124
The uncoupling of system and lifeworld ............................................ 126
The colonisation of the lifeworld and Habermas’s critique of the
theory of value .................................................................................... 128
A critical sketch of Habermas’s critique ................................................. 133
Authentic and inauthentic subjectivity ............................................... 135