Farewell to Work? : Essays on the World of Work?s Metamorphoses and Centrality

Farewell to Work? presents the large process of capital's productive restructuring, triggered in the 1970s―a process with tendencies to both intellectualize labour power and increase the levels of the working class' precariousness on a global scale.
This book hypothesizes that instead of work's loss of centrality in contemporary capitalism, when the world of production is analysed in its global dimension, including countries in the North and South, a substantial process of growing heterogeneity, complexity, and fragmentation is observed. The resulting configuration is a new morphology of the working class. Therefore, as new mechanisms are created to generate surplus labour, there is, simultaneously, an increment in casualisation and unemployment, pushed by the ongoing corrosion of labour rights in countries all across the globe.

Ricardo Antunes is a Full Professor of Sociology (University of Campinas) and author of The Meanings of Work and Addio al lavoro?, among other books. He was Visiting Professor at University Ca'Foscari and a Visiting Researcher at University of Sussex.