Book Review: Farewell to Work? Essays on the World of Work’s Metamorphoses and Centrality by Ricardo Antunes

Trade unionism has been marked in recent years by the efforts and partial success of workers at Amazon and Starbucks to unionize. We witness an undeniable rise in syndicalism across developed countries, and as these efforts appear to be concerted within the service private sector, it contrasts with both the historical image of factory trade unions and the syndicalism of public employees. I believe that it is in this current context that Farewell to Work? Essays on the World of Work’s Metamorphoses and Centrality by Ricardo Antunes makes a timely and important contribution.

The book was published in 2021 by Brill, and it is a translation in English and a revised edition of the first edition published originally in Portuguese in 1995. Farewell to Work? asks the question of whether, in the context of post-Fordist transformations, the working class remains a valid category for Marxist analysis and for social and political mobilization. It is organized into two main parts. The first, originally published in 1995, tackles these issues relating to transformations in work during the post-Fordist decades of the 1970s and 1980s. The second part comprises texts originally published as stand-alone papers in the early 2010s and deals with more recent developments.

Thus, in one regard, the book sets out to analyse post-Fordist transformations in labour. Part one analyses the rise of Toyotism and the severely diminishing role of syndicalism. Part two brings forth the rise of immaterial work in the service and information sectors and the continuous precarization of some groups. Antunes launches a destructive critique of Toyotism, or the so-called just-in-time model of work, as a system that deskills the worker through flexibilization and is oriented towards high competition. In comparison to ‘Fordism, which was moved centrally by a more despotic logic, Toyotism is more consensual, more engaging, more participative and, in truth, more manipulative’ (p. 21). Moreover, Toyotism was associated with a transformation within trade unionism as it favoured the hierarchical integration of unions within corporations. As the Toyotist system was exported more or less to other economies, such configurations brought another blow to worker’s solidarity, bringing unions to a more defensive position while they were already under attack from the core ideology of neoliberalism. These contributed to a crisis of syndicalism as it became more bureaucratized, institutionalized and less participatory. Antunes’ critique of neoliberal global capitalism also describes how it constantly pits territorialized workers against those who are de-territorialized, thus fragmenting labour solidarity and rendering immigrant workers a marginalized category. Across many economies, post-Fordism signified a more important role for the service economy. This was intimately associated with the rise of the digital sector. For some, this was not necessarily an improvement in their working condition, since ‘the age of computerisation of labour and of a mechanical and digital world, is also the age of labour informality, of outsourced, precarious, subcontracted, temporary and part-time work, in other words, an age of the subproletariat’ (p. 87).

Within this context of labour morphology, Antunes places the main argument of the book: that, notwithstanding these transformations, the working class or the class-that-lives-from-labour as the author calls it, is still a valid category for analysis and mobilization. This is in fact a critique directed against Gorz’s Farewell to the Working Class: an Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism published in 1982 and others, such as Habermas, Offe and Kurz, who argue that in the context of the crisis of labour society, social sciences should move forward and away from the analysis of labour. Antunes presents the case that while post-Fordism brought important labour metamorphoses, it didn’t replace fundamental Marxian categories. Production is still made through the combination of constant and variable capital. Moreover, abstract labour, which is responsible for the creation of value is still important. Scholars such as Habermas conflate labour with abstract labour and speak about a crisis of labour society, while in fact there is only a restructuring of abstract labour. As presented, particularly in the second part of the book, the advent of the service economy does not represent a contestation of the law of value. Immaterial work can be productive as long as it produces value under capitalism. This means that workers in the service economy are part and parcel of Marx’s proletariat.

Henceforth, as labour in its duality of abstract and concrete labour is still elemental to capitalism and the working class is still a valid analytical category, we finally depict the coordinates of a possible anti-capitalist transformation. Drawing from Lukács’ reading of Marx, Antunes argues that labour is fundamental to human species in all of its historical eras – the proto-form of the social being (p. 55). This necessarily implies that ‘the concrete labour sphere is the starting point under which it will be possible to establish a new society’ (p. 56).

It’s important to highlight a serious issue and shortcoming with the book’s structure. In the second part of the book, there is a lot of repetition in between the chapters, giving the impression that the material is disconnected and looks more like a collection of previously published articles than a book. For instance, Chapters 7 and 9 both contain the same lengthy quotation from Marx from Volume 2 of Capital about productivity in the transportation sector.

Written mostly at a time when many important leftist scholars announced the crisis of the labour society and the dissolution of labour and working class as categories of analysis, the book anticipates the current rise in importance of the class-that-lives-from-labour. It is here that Farewell to Work? brings a necessary contribution. It helps outline the contours of labour struggles under the current stage of global capitalism.