Abstract

In a world dominated by capitalist work (labour), working for a wage is the central unavoidable reality of modern social life, and yet, the category of labour remains underdeveloped in social sciences. While waged labour in all its forms, including unemployment and mass poverty, has now invaded all aspects of social life, labour appears to have disappeared as a practice that constitutes modern society. This book revitalises labour as the fundamental constitutive principle of the social world, through a radical reinterpretation of Marx's social theory. Each chapter develops a central Marxist theme; the continuing centrality of work; class and classification; commodity fetishism and primitive accumulation; labour movements and the way in which labour moves; unemployment, subjectivity and class consciousness, and the new forms of resistance developed in Europe, Latin America and East Asia. In conclusion, the editors give an account of what they consider to be the main critical and practical problems and possibilities confronting the concept and reality of labour in the 21st century. [from book jacket]