Immaterial Labor and the Determination of Social Class

Introduction

It is difficult to ignore the fact that we are witnessing a point of inflection in contemporary human history. The old conditions and paradigms which had previously guided social life among humans and nations are changing or disappearing vertiginously. Although it is necessary to take into account important differences of time and space, this drastic social change is somewhat similar to the transition from the old feudal order to a capitalist system during the 18th and 19th centuries. Nevertheless, and in spite of what certain authors and schools of thought claim, if we are indeed experiencing a change of era, this in no way implies a change in production modes. There does not appear to be any kind of shift in production, nor in capitalist social formation, nor in the fundamental concepts of the means of production and private property rights. Capital accumulation and labor exploitation remain unchanged, unlike what occurred during the shift from feudalism to capitalism. However, this is not to deny that very profound changes have been registered in economic, social and political structures in the past three decades. They have indeed occurred – and are still occurring – within the structure of global capitalism. Furthermore, there do not appear to be, at least currently, the necessary forces and conditions that Marx foresaw in his Preface to the Contribution to a Criticism of the Political Economy. He stated:

No social formation disappears before all its productive capacity is developed and there will never be new and higher forms of production relations before the material conditions necessary for their existence have matured within the old social order. It is for this reason that humanity always proposes achievable objectives. This is true because on closer view, these objectives will only arise when the necessary material conditions for their formation already exist or at least, are in the process of developing. In broad terms, we can designate these successive eras of societal economic formation as Asian, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeoisie production modes. The bourgeoisie system is the latest antagonistic form of the production social process. (Marx, 1973: 68. For this and all other quotes in English from versions in Spanish, translation by Mariana Borja Hernández)

Marx is referring to great historical epochs, to periods of mutating civilizations involving shifting production modes, to the historical societies that shaped these changes and whose altering societal dynamic lasted decades or even centuries. From this quote we can extract two hypotheses dialectically intertwined.

Firstly, there is a relationship between the development of productive forces (material, social and human) and the emerging social order. This social law is used to explain the same essential relationship and its development process: the first societal economic formation cannot be eliminated if a society has not developed all its productive forces so that a new social order can emerge with its new production modes. It is essential that within the old society, all the conditions and relationships capable of creating a cohesive process can be developed in order to cement social change and its results. The second hypothesis focuses on the real possibility that these new social, political, cultural and military forces are (or are not) capable of stimulating changes in production modes and their systemic social relationships. This needs to occur in such a way that the new system will continue into the future, consolidated in a lasting manner so that it becomes self-sustaining.

These hypotheses can be used to examine our contemporary era. It is assumed that the first statement is valid to our analysis. The leading productive forces linked to the post-World War II technological revolution have exhausted their potential. They are, in large part, dependent upon electricity and petroleum in spite of the fact that these forces have led to the increasingly important microelectronic revolution and its intimate relationship to information and the internet. This means that while the system does not develop and rely on new computer technologies in a hegemonic way, it cannot build a new economic cycle of growth and development. The problem here is critical: there is a need to determine if the capitalist system is still capable of fostering a second industrial revolution (or a fourth scientific-technological one) and thus give structure to a new productive cycle. This would be similar to what occurred in England after the first industrial revolution. Based on the first hypothesis – depression of the benefits of the technological revolution and dependence on oil resources on a global scale – it can be said that technological and scientific advances are increasingly limited to ensuring the profitability of capital. This hypothesis is summarized in the Grundrisse of Marx:

The larger the surplus value of capital before the increase of productive force, the larger the amount of presupposed surplus labour or surplus value of capital; or, the smaller the fractional part of the working day which forms the equivalent of the worker, which expresses necessary labour, the smaller is the increase in surplus value which capital obtains from the increase of productive force. Its surplus value rises, but in an ever smaller relation to the development of the productive force. Thus the more developed capital already is, the more surplus labour it has created, the more terribly must it develop the productive force in order to realize itself in only smaller proportion, i.e. to add surplus value – because its barrier always remains the relation between the fractional part of the day which expresses necessary labour, and the entire working day. It can move only within these boundaries. The smaller already the fractional part falling to necessary labour, the greater the surplus labour, the less can any increase in productive force perceptibly diminish necessary labour; since the denominator has grown enormously. The self-realization of capital becomes more difficult to the extent that it has already been realized. The increase of productive force would become irrelevant to capital; realization itself would become irrelevant, because its proportions have become minimal, and it would have ceased to be capital. (Marx, 1973: 340)

This thesis taken from Grundrisse is restated and further examined in Capital and presented in the form of a social law:

The greater the productive capacity of labour is, the shorter the necessary time period is to produce an article. There will be less concrete time spent to make the article and its value will also be reduced. In contrast, the less productive labour is, the greater the necessary time period is to produce an article. This will increase the value of a given product. Thus, the magnitude of a product’s value changes inversely to labour’s productive capacity to produce goods. (Marx, 1981: 8)

Here, one can see how important Marx’s hypothesis is in examining the relationship of labor productivity development to technological progress. This idea constitutes the core nucleus of his theory and it operates within the range of capitalist system law: ‘The increase in productive forces would become irrelevant to capital.’ What does this mean? However much capital revolutionizes its production methods, transportation modes, and science and technology applications to the production process and labor, it will still be unable to achieve significant increases in production values and profits (although natural resources and productive forces within a society will be destroyed in the process). This leads the system down a dangerous path of (quasi) stagnation, leading to long-term recession and predatory barbarism. This appears to be happening today in practically the whole world (Mészáros, 2003).

Another problem is described by the second hypothesis. Here, it is necessary to determine not only if, in light of the global capitalist crisis, contemporary social and political forces are sufficiently capable of influencing capitalist regimes and their production modes (like certain development-oriented and neo-structuralist governments in the South American Andes region), but also, if they are able to transcend the capitalist order to create a new, diametrically opposed society. These new societies would be distinctly different and qualitatively superior to the old capitalist ones. It appears that this has not happened yet.

Valorization of Capital and Immaterial Labor

One can observe the social mutations that have occurred during recent years by analyzing the varying importance that has been given to intellectual, cognitive and manual labor in economic and structural decisions regarding production values. These changes have served to counteract the limitations of working time. ¹ These factors are the true causes of the contemporary capitalist crisis and they have had serious ramifications in the real estate and fictitious capital markets. Immaterial labor is part of humanity’s work force. It has been used recklessly by capital in order to exploit it as a means of surplus production.

Marx’s approach is as follows:

Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition – question of life or death – for the necessary. On the one side, then, it calls to life all the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed on it. On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created, and to confine them within the limits required to maintain the already created value as value. Forces of production and social relations – two different sides of the development of the social individual – appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. (1973: 704).

The failure of working time to determine the value of the goods, in particular the labor force, expressed in a growing and contradictory process which means that while the reduction of the essential social labor time – which is the basis of capitalist production and surplus (or goodwill) – remains the key tool for measuring development of the material productive forces of society and the concomitant production of social wealth, that same time (essential social labor time) is reduced by the action of these same forces, impacting the reduction of surplus value and, therefore, the rate of profit, while social wealth increases on a fragile foundation that is no longer supportable by the capitalist system. Capitalism goes into crisis and plunges into the abyss and, of course, the material and historical foundation to transit to a new non-capitalist society are created. In short: the phenomenon of reduction of labor time expresses the contradiction between the essential social labor time (use value) and unpaid surplus labor (exchange value).

The problem is that the contemporary global capitalist crisis is essentially one of production and overproduction. This idea is derived from Marx’s principles presented in Grundrisse and later in Capital, ² as mentioned above. It is necessary to view contemporary capitalism as a phase that is fundamentally characterized by growing difficulties in the ability to create profits. Subsequently, there are constant irregularities in the accumulation and capital reproduction processes as well as in profits rates (regular and extraordinary). Currently, this dynamic can be clearly seen in the fictitious capital markets and the hegemony that they have within the capitalistic cycle.

Average, specific, social and necessary labor hours have been reduced, but the labor force has become increasingly marginalized. This has occurred for several reasons:

In addition, the crisis, which stems from capital’s growing difficulties in reducing production times sufficiently in order to increase profits, has intensified the process of freeze-dried organization. This can be defined as:

The following hypothesis can be deduced from the above: although productivity continues to increase due to the technological revolution’s ability to save expended labor via the increase of industrial workers’ reserves, the reduction of the essential social labor force producing those goods loses its functionality and becomes marginalized. In other words, the human labor force has become increasingly insignificant as a means to produce profits, even though physical wealth (usage values) has continued to rise. This has occurred as a consequence of the contemporary global crisis in capitalist production modes. Thus, the system has entered into an organic, structural and endemic crisis.

In this respect, Giovanni Alves clearly signals that:

The growth of labor productivity due to capital’s technological-organizational innovations in recent decades has led to a tendency of human labor to have a diminishing role in social reproduction within a mercantile order dominated by a growing financial accumulation that preserves the obligation to work. (2011: 24–25).

The unfolding of capital accumulation and its concentration in the financial sphere has resulted from social and global capital’s urgent and imperative need to continue to exist, even at the cost of constraining profit production and pressuring the system into one of economic quasi-stagnation. This is currently happening in the global capitalist economy, especially in the principal socio-economic regions of the European Union, Asia, the USA, and Latin America.

From the point of view of social class struggle, this has had two distinct consequences in my judgment. On the one hand, there has been a growing tendency to appropriate the intrinsic labor of the collective workforce into the fold to convert and materialize it into profit production. On the other hand, there has been a strong tendency to overexploit the labor force. In other words, there has been a partial or almost complete expropriation of the will to consume so that it can become an additional source of accumulation. This has led to an increase in profit rates and has benefited capital. Both of these factors make up the key pieces of the new scientific and information labor organization identified as belonging to the well-known Japanese system of Toyotism. ⁵

When talking about immaterial labor, cognitive and subjective labor is thought to have supplanted anachronistic Marxist concepts like value, surplus, and that would have changed the nature of the capitalist mode of production. However, nothing could be further from the truth. In contrast, what one sees today is a virtuous articulation between manual and intellectual labor. This can be understood as a dialectical unit that utilizes information, science and technology as its principal productive force.

Information and communication technologies have been able to virtually remove the physical limitations of labor time using cyberspace. Production time lags have been infinitely reduced and the work day has spilled into leisure time globally with the use of computers. Nevertheless, this has not created economic structural stability, nor has it led to growing rates of economic development which could have impeded the onset of the crisis and its consequences. Trejo has recognized that:

Earnings generated by the collective worker in the telecommunications industry are profits in real and virtual time. One benefit created and experienced by global networks is the ability to communicate socially. A telephone call, an internet connection or the triple play create profits in real and virtual time. This can be seen in the interconnectivity of discussions and symbols, information storage and voice, information, and image processing. (2012: 337)

The expropriation of human equality and the intensification of production rhythms have a historical-structural limit that not even the technological revolution can overcome. Thus, the forces acting within this crisis would have to unleash (and it is very possible that it could fail) a new technical and scientific revolution and deploy a series of distinct policies and strategies to assist in overcoming these obstacles. This would be the only way in which to develop a new cycle of capitalist development linked to profit generation. However, this would be extremely difficult, and even more so if there were to be a rise in revolutionary movements whose roots are in the working class and whose goals are to overcome the capitalist order. Here, once again, the struggle between labor and owners would become history’s midwife. Authors like Giovanni Alves have observed that the system exists as a process of capitalist labor that includes diverse work forms. These forms include both manual and intellectual work. They refute the existence of an exclusively intellectual labor ‘cycle’:

the concept of an intellectual production process (or cycle) is mistaken. In truth, it exists as a capitalist labor process, a complex organism which expresses itself manually and intellectually. It is a conceptual fantasy to accept a model of purely intellectual labor, as well as the separation of manual/intellectual work. (Alves, 2006: 70, emphasis in the original)

Moreover, Alves argues that it is necessary to emphasize that as a product of collective labor, intellectual labor is a genuine expression and it is contradictory to abstract labor (which determines the formation of earning and profits). He reaffirms the existence of manual labor which is deployed by the collective labor force. ⁶

The idea of ‘subjectivity’ can be found within the intellectual workplace environment. It can be considered to be an infinitely more developed form of manual labor. Yet its reproduction depends on the capitalist exploitation process. Thus, many authors believe that the ideas that intellectual labor is ‘autonomous’ and its reproduction falls into the exclusive sphere of human subjectivity are completely false. Actually, intellectual labor has been and continues to be appropriated by capital and therefore subsumed to value production. Therefore, it falls under the rubric of capital reproduction and is subject to its essential laws.

The phenomenon of the depreciation of value shows the capitalist tendency to turn work into immaterial labor and thus, the latter to operate as its cause (Marx, 1981). But here it is important to distinguish our position from that of other authors such as Lazzarato, who considers that immaterial labor has an ‘autonomous cycle’. He says:

From a strictly economic point of view the breeding cycle of immaterial labor moves to the production/consumption relationship defined by both the ‘Keynesian virtuous circle’ and the schemes of Marxist reproduction from Book II of Capital. Now, more than talking all about ‘supply and demand’, we should speak of a redefinition of the production/consumption ratio. The consumer is enrolled in the manufacture of the product from its conception. The consumer is no longer limited to ‘consuming’ goods (to destroying them in the act of consumption). By contrast, consumption must be productive of the conditions of new productions. Consumption is then primarily a consumer of information. The consumer is no longer just the ‘realization’ of a product, but a real social process that currently defines the term ‘communication’. (Lazzarato, 2008).

However, for us immaterial labor is inextricably linked to the material cycle, and is explained by it, validating the law of labor value and its corresponding theory. Therefore, immaterial labor can be understood within its philosophical framework and fundamental categories (see Sotelo Valencia, 2012).

Immaterial labor, like its manual counterpart, is also subject to capitalism’s essential contradictions as well as its processes and tendencies aiming to reduce ‘production times’. This has been the key measurement used to calculate values and the prices of produced goods. It has influenced what was identified above as depreciation of value and has provoked tension regarding production times, leading to new problems and a crisis of capital reproduction from the standpoint of profit and earnings creation. It is important to remember that these categories are dependent upon labor time constraints. Marx signals that ‘The atoms of time are profit’s elements of its creation’ (1981: 188).

It is a historical fact that there has been a tendency on the part of capital to disregard labor in its manual and intellectual production processes and merchandise creation. However, it cannot completely disregard labor because it would be hurting its own market and liquidating its economic, social and material base. Amorim states that, in effect: ‘historically, capital has tended to reduce and limit its dependency in relation to labor, but it cannot completely do so because it is dependent upon its exploitation in order to generate profits’ (2009: 17–18).

Here, it is important to remember that socially necessary production times are determined by the development of productive forces and by a labor force’s degree of skill, productivity and intensity. These factors act as interrelated processes. New value production (the equivalent value of the workforce), value conservation, and the means of production transference become the exclusive burden of the labor force as a result of its double obligation to produce value. The most appropriate method of producing relative surplus capital is to increase, at the same time, the exploitation of the labor force and productivity, in order to counteract the falling rate of profit.

Today, this contradiction (increasing productivity and reducing the value of the workforce) has been fortified and maintained by scientific and technological developments. However, by doing this, capital has threatened value and profit production. Thus, it has become necessary to extend the overexploitation of the labor force as a universal process imposed to maintain value reproduction continuity as well as a regime of mercantile production focused on profit production and increases in earnings. ⁷ This is a direct result of a system based on capitalist production methods and their fundamental concepts and categories: exploitation, private property rights, mercantile appropriation, speculation, monopolies, and capital’s social metabolism.

Immaterial Labor, Capital Speculation and Social Class Struggles

Immaterial labor, which is responsible for the substitution of manual labor and its conversion into products and goods, cannot disappear even though, as mentioned above, its morphology has experienced clear modifications since the last quarter of the 20th century. These changes have effectively demonstrated a growing complexity and have had social ramifications; there has clearly been a process of accelerated urbanization and a rise in new speculative capital sectors (new technologies, fictitious capital, call centers, etc.) in areas like telecommunications, information sciences, telemetrics, microelectronics and marketing. There have also been new post-Taylor and post-Ford labor and production structures such as Toyotism which are connected to production and speculative capital processes.

Social global capital, with its network of equipment and institutions, has shown itself to be a product of prior, unfunded and out-dated labor practices. Its reproduction and maintenance has depended on the paid labor force in whatever form it assumes. Today, what is important is not so much the ‘individual worker’ or the ‘manual’ one (miners, bricklayers, metallurgists, technicians or programmers) and the particular activity that he/she performs (in terms of usage value). Rather, social-global workers who can articulate and synthesize both productive and inert societal processes are the people that are necessary to allow capital to be able to continue its speculation with the objective of producing profits and increasing earnings.

The changes that have occurred within capitalist society (social production relationships and an unusual increase in labor productivity) have not left the social classes constituting and reproducing bourgeoisie society untouched. While it is undeniable that the influx of these transformations has given rise to new processes of accumulation and capital reproduction, the intellectual labor cycle remains cemented in (and can be explained by) the value law its essential categories: exploitation, profit creation, average and extraordinary earnings rates, private ownership of the means of production and consumption, and widened reproduction. This has led to a structural and systemic crisis that has been provoked by the problems of value production and profits derived from the predicament of intellectual labor. Alain Bihr states:

In the background, there is a contradiction between the usage values (of concrete, manual labor) and the value of change (abstract, intellectual labor) so that … the production of intellectual labor implies a growing trend of the replacement of living workers by unpaid, mechanized units. This is what produces the tendency of decreasing average earning rates. This is to the detriment of productivity increases which constitute the principal internal counterweight to this law. It is what is depriving the same base of value formation. (2010: 37)

Yet it cannot be denied that the social class structure and workers’ struggles on diverse planes (economic, social, political and ideological) have experienced some change. It would be illogical to claim otherwise and counterproductive to do so. In this author’s judgment, it would be better to indicate that the following changes have occurred as a result of capital’s constant restructuring of the global workplace during the last three decades. This restructuring has impacted both social class structure and its diverse forms. In the end, it is important to reflect on the probable impact that this has had. In particular, it has led to the inclusion of intellectual labor in classist processes and their conflictive policies.

It is important to consider that social classes, however they are defined, ⁸ have become more diversified and complex in their functioning and capital reproduction processes. New labor processes and organization forms have been developed by big industry. These forms have altered social classes’ and their factions’ profiles and behaviour. There have been significant changes in skilled labor, management hierarchies and salaries, and employees’ categories and functions. Also, one can see changes in the structural blueprint of the dominant social class. This has been due to problems surrounding speculative capital, along with contemporary capitalism’s contracting growth rates. New social classes and factions have emerged within this group as a result of what Marx referred to as fictitious capital. Currently, this can be seen primarily in the hegemony that the multinational companies have had and in transnational organizations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. These companies and organizations represent the parasitic interests of the most backward of the dominant social classes in global capitalist society.

In addition, along with a relative decline in the contingent industrial labor force working directly with the transformation of raw materials and profit production, new types of workers have emerged. These workers operate in the service sectors and in the so-called ‘knowledge sector’. They are still somewhat limited in numbers on a global scale although they dominate the workforce of post-modern economies. Where technicians, engineers, and skilled and semi-skilled workers exist in large numbers, they make up the socio-economic and socio-technological category of infoproletariats. They are part of a complete labor sector directly tied to productive and mercantile information goods and services. Their labor situation is precarious, flexible and often tenuous (see Antunes and Braga, 2009). Finally, it is important to examine the relationship between immaterial labor, social class, and social class struggle. This relationship has continued to act as the antithesis but also the motor driving the historical development of capitalist production and its socio-economic formation.

From the 16th century until today, the three main historical capitalist social classes within bourgeois society have received income from three principal sources: salary (paid labor), profits (capitalists), and rent from land use (landowners). These income sources have traditionally made up the base of ‘social class identity’. ‘In other words, within these three large social groupings, the individuals who compose them have respectively lived off of a salary, the earnings or rent of large tracts of land, and often off of profiting from labor force exploitation, and from their own capital gains or territorial property’ (Marx, 2000: 817). These are the material sources that have defined the fundamental social classes (bourgeoisie and proletariat) as well as their sub-groupings (bourgeoisie, proletariat, middle class, land-owners, and peasants). From here, it is possible to separate other component groups into social class factions, hierarchies, castes, etc.). However, they are always derived from the fundamental categories of material reproduction. For Marx, one social class exists: ‘Millions of families live in deprived economic conditions that distinguish them in their lifestyles, their interests and their culture from other social classes and place them in opposition to those others in a hostile manner’ (2009a: 171).

For his part, Lenin defines social class as:

Large groups of men who differentiate themselves by their place in a historically determined production system, by their relationship that they have with the means of production (relationships that are determined, in great part, by laws), by the role that they play in the labor social organization, and subsequently by the manner in which they obtain, and the quantity of, social wealth at their disposal. The social classes are groups of human beings, one of which can appropriate the labor of the other in order to occupy different places in the social economic regimen. (1971: 504)

It is essential that this first structural definition of social class should take into account the relevant social constituents, political and judicial factors and the formation of an ideological conscience. These factors influence social class conformation and structure. Therefore, there is not an automatic and immediate relationship between a given class structure and social and political class consciousness. This is due to the fact that class consciousness is influenced and managed by the dominant ideology and by political institutions such as the media, church and educational system. It is for this reason that Augustin Cueva indicates the need to formulate a broad definition of social class. He states: ‘Marxism maintains that the problem of social classes cannot be studied correctly if one does not begin with a general theory of history and society’ (Cueva, 1987: 8, emphasis in the original). Indeed, as the author says, social classes, as human aggregates linked by material, social, cultural and spiritual interests, cannot be conceived apart from the historical social structure and the production mode. They must be understood within the context of relationships and institutions of the society of which they are part, such as the state, family, ideology and law and the media, for example.

This is how a specific class of people, like indigenous groups, for example, has been able to achieve and maintain advanced positions within their social struggles in specific historical and social contexts. Or, at least, they can appear to ally themselves with the regressive and conservative positions of the upper class within the oligarchy, even though the indigenous groups form part of the proletariat in the wider sense.

Generally, social class should be distinguished from its empirical reality (at least as a theoretical construct). It can be evaluated by its daily reality and by its social movement dynamics. For example, the labor insurgencies that one sees daily in the international press globally raise the question: who are the insurgents? The answer is: thousands and thousands of manual laborers, intellectuals, technical workers and administrative ones; landless peasants, agricultural workers, students, workers’ children, urban and rural proletariats, and primary and secondary school teachers. They include groups linked to industry, agriculture, as well as the ‘invisible’ telecommunications, service, and ‘knowledge and software development’ sectors.

However, on many occasions, the bastions of the (traditional and modern) industrial working class fail to appear on the scene of these struggles, or at least, on the front lines of the anti-state and anti-capitalist battles. This ‘absence’ has fed the theories that organized labor has ceased to be a relevant force in the ‘new social movements’ that have supposedly replaced the proletariat and the working class as historical actors of social transformation, at least in the Marxist sense. However, Mészáros points out that ‘they can be marginalized and separated one by one, so that they cannot claim to represent a coherent and comprehensive alternative to the established order. This serves as a form of metabolic social control and a way to maintain the social reproduction system’ (2001: 46–47). The marginalization and separation of social movements is also contrary to labor, which even today is capable of providing a global strategic framework that could integrate all the anti-capitalist and emancipatory groups into an alternative project and overcome the capitalist system.

The fact is that many social movements are composed of peasants, indigenous people, and teachers. In Mexico, for example, these groups have been and continue to be at the vanguard of social struggles. They have worked with other sectors of the working class like electricians, paid laborers and rural workers who have been the protagonists of true social struggles to protect their class interests. Although they may not call themselves as such, these are true proletariat movements that are interconnected with the ‘working world’. Similarly, there have been other interconnected and intense political and social struggles involving miners, shipyard workers and automobile factory laborers, who have participated in social mobilizations, strikes and factory takeovers. They used these actions to pressure both capital and the state in order to improve salary, living and working conditions in Latin America and Eastern Europe.

Conclusion

Under current conditions, a social transformation undertaking cannot be the exclusive project of the industrial proletariat. Because of modern social mutations in accumulation processes, capital reproduction and social classes, this group has been shrinking. Rather, social transformation needs to occur as a result of actions by all social classes that are exploited by the bourgeoisie and neoliberal society. Nonetheless, the traditional and modern working class can serve as a central nucleus for an alliance with diverse social movements.

In Capital, Marx makes the argument in his three volumes that paid workers who: sell their (manual or intellectual) labor and are exploited by capital owners; transform nature; produce industrial and consumer goods; and create profit which increases capital accumulation definitely belong to the working class. In The Communist Manifesto, it is made clear that this same class of industrial worker serves as the hard core of the proletariat workforce. In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels broadly define proletariats as being made up of both the upper and lower segments of all social classes within bourgeoisie society. They label them as an ‘oppressed and exploited class’. Marx and Engels state that ‘the proletariat is the class of the modern worker … who is recruited from among all social classes in the population’ (Marx and Engels, 1999: 39).

For other authors, the proletariat is synonymous with paid workers who belong to a social class that sells its labor. They survive by their labor alone and are the object of exploitation, fraud and blackmail and expropriation by capitalists. They work in multiple activities including production, product circulation and consumption, and even public administration (Alves, 2007: 97). Antunes also uses the words ‘proletariat’, ‘working class’, and ‘the class that lives from their labor’ as synonyms. This can be seen in the following passage:

I would say in order to make an outline of this situation that the proletariat or working class today (what I will call the class-that-lives-from-their-labor) is comprised of all paid and salaried workers, men and women who live on the sale of their labor and are dispossessed from the means of production. This Marxist definition seems to me to be eternally pertinent and is an essential part of Marx’s work, and which is applicable to today’s working class. (Antunes, 2005: 190)

Still others have also perceived mutations in social class structure in the 20th century. Vasapollo (2007), for example, affirms the centrality of work and has a good understanding of contemporary tendencies, especially in Europe. He has observed the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. He defines this conversion as from ‘typical work’ into ‘atypical work’. It can be observed in economic activities like agriculture, tourism, telecommunications, and transportation, among others. He states that ‘From the workers’ point of view, while computerization has not caused structural unemployment, it has transformed ‘typical’ existing jobs into ‘atypical’ ones with very precarious working conditions’ (Vasapollo, 2007: 77). Dal Rasso (2008) has focused on the changes introduced by the information revolution. He speaks of a ‘class of intellectual and intensified workers’ and emphasizes the intensification of labor that has been introduced by modern organizational labor processes like Toyotism.

Different concepts, from various perspectives and theoretical approaches, reflect the changes in the class structure of contemporary society, both as a product of capitalist restructuring, and as the capitalist need to increase the rate of profit: the symbolic analyst of Reich (1992), the infoproletariat of Antunes and Braga (2009), the cybertariat of Ursula Huws (2009: 37–58) or the precariat of Guy Standing (2011), among others.⁹ However I emphasize that these changes are given in the realm of morphology, but not in the substance of work. Certainly, these concepts reflect the changes that have occurred in the past half century in the class structure of world capitalism, particularly in the structure of the working class but, in general, in that of the exploited and oppressed classes of society.