Form and Essence of Precarization by Work: From Alienation to the Industrial Reserve Army at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

The vast majority of analyses on precarious labor depart from a sense of exception, either in the 1970s and 1980s or from the financial crisis of 2007–8, where a stable (stable, regulated, unionized) pattern of work levels would cease to be the preponderant factor for the proliferation of a new precarious norm. This reduction of the precariousness of labor leads to a series of misconceptions that prevent the understanding of the new forms and particularities of the processes of domination and exploitation of capitalist sociability at the turn of the twenty-first century.