Contents

Foreword

Preface to the English Edition

Preface to the Second Edition

Preface to the First Edition

Introduction

Chapter One 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

Chapter Two Dimensions of the Structural Crisis of Capital

The crisis of Taylorism and Fordism as the phenomenal expression of the structural crisis

Chapter Three 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

Chapter Four 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

Chapter Five From Thatcher’s Neoliberalism to 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’

Chapter Six 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

Chapter Seven 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

Chapter Eight Excursus on the Centrality of Labour: the Debate between Lukács and Habermas

The centrality of labour in Lukács’s Ontology of Social Being

Labour and teleology

Labour as the model of social practice

Labour and freedom

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

A critical sketch of Habermas’s critique

Authentic and inauthentic subjectivity

Chapter Nine Elements towards an Ontology of Everyday Life

Chapter Ten Working Time and Free Time: towards a Meaningful Life Inside and Outside of Work

Chapter Eleven Foundations of a New Social-Metabolic Order

Appendices

Appendices to the Second Edition

Appendix 1 Ten Theses and a Hypothesis on the Present (and Future) of Work

Appendix 2 Labour and Value: Critical Notes

Appendices to the First Edition

Appendix 1 The Crisis of the Labour-Movement and the Centrality of Labour Today

Appendix 2 The New Proletarians at the Turn of the Century

Appendix 3 The Metamorphoses and the Centrality of Labour Today

Appendix 4 Social Struggles and Socialist-Societal Design in Contemporary Brazil

References

Subject Index

Author Index