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The Privilege of Servitude. The New Service Proletariat in the Digital Age

Buy hardcover (Brill)
Published Sep 2025

Ricardo Antunes

Author: Ricardo Antunes
Translator: Murillo van der Laan
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.

Biographical Note

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.

Readership

This book is especially relevant for scholars in the humanities and social sciences, sociologists, social movements, trade unions, political parties, undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as universities and public libraries.

Table of Contents

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