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As the dust settles following the financial meltdown of 2008, more and more media outlets, corporate “leaders,” and economists of all stripes have taken to endlessly discussing the “new normal”—a labor
market with lower wages, fewer benefits, less democracy at work, and skyrocketing profits. Yet far too seldom is any consideration given to the question of what these new conditions of precariousness mean for those dependent on their labor to survive. As contingent work has grown there has been a simultaneous reduction in the number of jobs, an erosion of workplace rights, and the evaporation of past gains won through labor struggles, yet these sweeping changes are presented as inevitable and benign consequences of of the economic crisis.
The Meanings of Work aims to explore the theoretical and empirical dimensions of this question. Antunes starts by putting forward a wider conception of “work,” and then moves on to analyze the philosophical underpinnings of the move toward Fordism and Taylorism in previous epochs in an effort to understand the drive behind the new conditions facing labor today.
List of contents
Foreword 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
About the author
Ricardo Antunes is Professor of Sociology at University of Campinas (UNICAMP/Brazil). He was Visiting Research Fellow at Sussex University and his books and articles has been published in France, Italy, England, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, among others countries.
Summary
As precariousness becomes the new normal,” what do these conditions mean for those dependent on their labor to survive?
Foreword
Title will be prominently featured at all of the academic conferences we attend
Promotion to coincide with the annual Historical Materialism conference, which has a growing academic audience (400 graduate students and professors in 2010)
Reviews will be sought from left leaning academic journals 
