Sulla precarietà del lavoro nel capitalismo crepuscolare

In the capitalist mode of production, precarity cannot be considered a recent phenomenon, but rather a structural feature of all subordinate and para-subordinate work. A higher degree of labour “informality” has always tended to correspond to a higher degree of precarity. What rather seems to be emerging is an enormous phenomenon of homogenisation of the conditions of the workforce on a global scale, which is realised through a process of generalised hyper-precarity of work and precariousness of existence, a process that now threatens even those professions considered, until recently, more stable and “secure”. The causes of this phenomenon are to be found in the worsening of the accumulation crisis which, both in the past and today, immediately turns into a “crisis of labour”. If the logic of capital necessarily implies the production and reproduction of a surplus working population that assumes the function of an “industrial reserve army”, today this surplus also seems to manifest itself as a social “waste”, represented by a growing mass of wretched people who seem definitively excluded from any access to the labour market. On this “waste” of humanity - functionless for capital, unprecedented in its size and potentially dangerous for the “social order” - a constant structural violence is exercised, aimed at confining it to the extreme margins of society and reducing its size.