The Privilege of Servitude presents a detailed and up-to-date portrait of today’s working class.
Ricardo Antunes examines the main trends in new labor 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 labor, while also exploring changes in labor relations globally—with a particular focus on Brazil’s recent history, from the period of redemocratization to the Bolsonaro years.
Publication date: September 25, 2026
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
