The Labour Debate

In a world dominated by capitalist work, working for a wage is the central, unavoidable reality of modern social life. While waged work 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 volume aims to re-establish labour as the fundamental contitutive principle of the social world, through a 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 facing the concept and reality of labour in the 21st century.