The Privilege of Servitude
The New Service Proletariat in the Digital Age
Published on 25. September 2025
Book
Hardback
328 pages
978-90-04-73375-6 (ISBN)
Description
The Privilege of Servitude presents a detailed and up-to-date portrait of today's working class. Antunes examines the main trends in new labour relations, where precariousness, outsourcing, and deregulation have become the rule rather than the exception. He offers an in-depth analysis of the rise of the new service proletariat and contemporary forms of digital labour, while also exploring changes in labour relations globally-with a particular focus on Brazil's recent history, from the period of redemocratisation to the Bolsonaro years.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Leiden
Netherlands
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 155 mm
Thickness: 19 mm
Weight
630 gr
ISBN-13
978-90-04-73375-6 (9789004733756)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Ricardo Antunes is a Full Professor of Sociology at the University of Campinas and the author of The Meanings of Work (Brill, 2013) and Farewell to Work? (Brill, 2021), among other books. He has been a Visiting Professor at Ca' Foscari University and a Visiting Researcher at the University of Sussex.
Content
Preface to the English Edition
Acknowledgements
A Preliminary Note
Part 1 Between Corrosion and Rubble: The Emergence of the Digital-Age Proletariat
1 Photographs of Precarious Global Labour
2 The Explosion of the New Service Proletariat
3 Infoproletariat, Informality, (Im)materiality and Value: The New Global Proletariat and Its Main Tendencies
4 Labour and (De)value in Platform Capitalism: Three Theses on the New Age of the Disanthropomorphisation of Labour
5 Workers' Subjectivity, and Innocent and Estranged Reifications
6 Uno or Omni Work: The Dialectic Between Concrete and Abstract Labour
Part 2 The Devastation of Labour Reaches Brazil (Precarisation, Outsourcing and the Crisis of Trade Unionism)
7 The New Morphology of the Working Class in Contemporary Brazil: Workers in Industry, Agribusiness and Services
8 The Society of Work-Related Illnesses
9 Precariousness of Labour as a Rule
10 The Society of Total Outsourcing
11 Where has the New Trade Unionism Gone? Directions and Misdirections of a Trade Union Practice
12 From Confrontational Unionism to Bargaining Unionism
Part 3 The Age of Conciliations, Rebellions and Counter-Revolutions
13 Two Notes about Two Routes of Social Liberalism
14 The Phenomenology of the Brazilian Crisis
15 The June 2013 Rebellions
16 The Age of Rebellions, Counter-Revolutions, and the New State of Exception
17 The (De)construction of Labour in Twenty-First Century Brazil
18 The Devastation of Labour in the Preventive Counter-Revolution: the Destructive Affinities between Temer and Bolsonaro
Part 4 Is There Light at the End of the Tunnel?
19 Is There a Future for Trade Unions?
20 Is there a Future for Socialism? Towards a New Way of Life in Latin America
Appendix: Original Sources of the Chapters
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
A Preliminary Note
Part 1 Between Corrosion and Rubble: The Emergence of the Digital-Age Proletariat
1 Photographs of Precarious Global Labour
2 The Explosion of the New Service Proletariat
3 Infoproletariat, Informality, (Im)materiality and Value: The New Global Proletariat and Its Main Tendencies
4 Labour and (De)value in Platform Capitalism: Three Theses on the New Age of the Disanthropomorphisation of Labour
5 Workers' Subjectivity, and Innocent and Estranged Reifications
6 Uno or Omni Work: The Dialectic Between Concrete and Abstract Labour
Part 2 The Devastation of Labour Reaches Brazil (Precarisation, Outsourcing and the Crisis of Trade Unionism)
7 The New Morphology of the Working Class in Contemporary Brazil: Workers in Industry, Agribusiness and Services
8 The Society of Work-Related Illnesses
9 Precariousness of Labour as a Rule
10 The Society of Total Outsourcing
11 Where has the New Trade Unionism Gone? Directions and Misdirections of a Trade Union Practice
12 From Confrontational Unionism to Bargaining Unionism
Part 3 The Age of Conciliations, Rebellions and Counter-Revolutions
13 Two Notes about Two Routes of Social Liberalism
14 The Phenomenology of the Brazilian Crisis
15 The June 2013 Rebellions
16 The Age of Rebellions, Counter-Revolutions, and the New State of Exception
17 The (De)construction of Labour in Twenty-First Century Brazil
18 The Devastation of Labour in the Preventive Counter-Revolution: the Destructive Affinities between Temer and Bolsonaro
Part 4 Is There Light at the End of the Tunnel?
19 Is There a Future for Trade Unions?
20 Is there a Future for Socialism? Towards a New Way of Life in Latin America
Appendix: Original Sources of the Chapters
Bibliography