by RICARDO ANTUNES
Abstract
In this essay we will present certain distinguishing features that characterize the working class in Brazil, drawing attention to core elements of what I have called labour’s new morphology. We start from a broad definition of the working class. The working class, especially since the changes that have taken place within contemporary capitalism, should not be seen as encompassing manual workers only, but rather should be seen to extend to the entirety of social work, the whole of collective labour, selling their work as a commodity in exchange for wages and paid by money-capital, regardless of whether their activity is predominantly material or immaterial. Although centrally composed of the group of productive workers who produce surplus value and participate in the process of capital accumulation, through the interaction between living labour and dead labour, between human labour and scientific-technological machinery, it also incorporates all unproductive workers, those whose activities are used as services, either for public use, such as traditional public services, or for capitalist use. In fact, in contemporary capitalism there exists a substantial overlap between the productive and the unproductive. Suffice to remember that in the world of production today a job may have both productive and unproductive dimensions, in that the same workers who produce have simultaneously to check the quality of what they have produced.
An expanded notion of the working class must include not only productive workers in industry, agriculture and the service sector – privatized according to the prevailing logic of financial capital – but also the wide range of unproductive wage earners, who do not generate surplus value, yet are nevertheless essential in the capitalist labour process, and whose work experience closely parallels that of productive workers. As all productive work tends to be paid work, but not every wage earner is productive, an expanded notion of the working class must articulate these two dimensions. That is what we will try to do when dealing with the Brazilian reality.
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