Toward an expanded notion of labor on the threshold of the twenty-first century: what does Bolivia’s restructuring production offer?

Abstract

This article tries to rescue the debate on the centrality of the ontological and empirical work in theturn of the century made by Ricardo Antunes of Brazil and Adrian Sotelo of Mexico. It also includesthese authors’ assessment of Western sociologists work on the closing stages of collective laborsocieties and labor. We will discuss the meaning of the worker as subject, productive and unproductivework, the expanded notion of labor, from the general to the particular, the contemporaryproletarian class in the Bolivia upland, “deproletarianization”, the notion of hybrid worker, and theclassical notion of worker. Bolivia allows us an understanding of general aspects of the contemporarycapitalist accumulation characterized by a new link between absolute surplus value and relativesurplus value.