Abstract
Abstract Since the emergence of the crisis of capitalist globalization in 2008, the deconstruction of the Fordist wage relationship and the rising unemployment in various countries have stimulated the growth of labour informality, distancing workers from labour protection, intensifying turnover and stimulating intermittent employment. Collective bargaining has become increasingly rare and decentralized, and jobs increasingly precarious and individualized, undermining the protective capacity of the ‘moral economy of the poor’ and transforming direct action - that is, popular action without the mediation of unions and traditional political parties - into perhaps the only credible alternative for ‘precarious workers’ to express their demands in a world marked by the commodification of labour, basic services and housing. A return to the era of the ‘class struggle without class’? This is the conjecture that this article sets out to evaluate, comparing the class experience of poor and precarious workers in three countries from the so-called Global South: Portugal, South Africa and Brasil.
Highlights
Right and left of the political spectrum, the present seems to be a time of social polarisation with so-called populism returning with full force and on a global scale
As already amply argued and documented, the crisis of globalisation that began in 2008 was a watershed in international politics, prompting the ruling classes of the Global North to resort to state interventionism as a means to stabilise the system
The advance of the global crisis in the country ended up eliminating margins for offering concessions to workers, radicalising the redistributive conflict and precipitating a reactionary outcome: a parliamentary coup whose ultimate reason is to deepen neoliberalism through social spoliation policies focused on eroding social spending, labour and social security rights, subverting the expectations of Brasil’s subaltern classes
Summary
Right and left of the political spectrum, the present seems to be a time of social polarisation with so-called populism returning with full force and on a global scale. In order to analyse the experience of poor Portuguese workers and their forms of mobilisation in the last decade and a half, I shall focus on the construction of different independent organisations of young adults experiencing precarious employment and the emergence of a renewed agenda and new repertoires of direct action.
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