Abstract
We saw in the previous section that the “civilising” phase of capitalism ended in the late 1960s. Since then, capital has systematically denied workers the hard-fought achievements of the first half of the twentieth century: limited working hours, right to formal contracts, right to retirement and paid vacations, end of slave and child labour, right to housing, right to a public health system, etc. These and so many other achievements have been partially or completely destroyed in the new phase of capitalism, which some call “flexible accumulation” and others “capitalism under financial hegemony”.
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Notes
- 1.
Any resemblance is purely coincidental. In the film “Conterrâneos Velhos de Guerra”, by Vladimir Carvalho, the mistreatment of the candangos (as the masses of migrant workers who came to the rural countryside of central Brazil to build Brasília were called), the spoiled food and the terrible accommodation are evident. Carvalho shows the hidden face of Brasília's construction, based on the overexploitation of work, suicides, diarrhoea, repression of strikes and everything else. The city that was the example of progress did not shelter its worker-builders.
- 2.
Brazilian statistics divide society into 5 socioecomic “classes”. Class C sits right in the middle, but would correspond to a lower-middle class.
- 3.
Riberinhos are traditional Brazilian population groups whose life is centreed around certain rivers. Ribeirinho literally means riverside-dweller.
- 4.
For Lukács, totality, as a founding category of reality, means: “firstly, the concrete unity of interacting contradictions; secondly, the systematic relativity of all totality, both upwards and downwards (which means that all totality is constructed by totalities subordinate to it and also that, at the same time, it is overdetermined by totalities of greater complexity…); and, thirdly, the historical relativity of all totality, that is, that the totality-character of all totality is dynamic, changeable, being limited to a concrete, determined historical period” (Lukács 1949 apud Netto 2009).
- 5.
Cooperatives and associations demonstrate the possibility and need for a more advanced form of work, even though they tend to reproduce all the defects of the capitalist mode of production (Novaes and Christoffoli 2013). It is possible to find in workers’ associations the “wealth and misery of labour” associated under the mantle of capital.
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Pro dia nascer feliz. Diretor: João Jardim, 2005.
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Tahan Novaes, H. (2024). Manifestations of Barbarism. In: Associated Labor and Production in the Age of Barbarism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51183-7_4
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