Global Journal of Human Social Science, C: Sociology and Culture, Volume 23 Issue 6

its size given the immense destruction of productive forces was during the pandemic period, but for reasons completely unrelated to the “new era of communication” – on the contrary, in the pandemic the most repeated phrases were about the “essential workers”, and not essential robots. 7 Within this “labor force”, which is expressed in data from the International Labor Organization perhaps best defined as an “economically active population”, the percentage of working class within a Marxist vision would be smaller, but still highly robust. Some authors, such as Kim Moody, have better reflected the data and methodologies, just over 2.2 billio n 8 As we have pointed out, this does not mean that a transformation is not taking place in its morphology, that is, that an immense formation of a new service proletariat is not taking place and that the debate on the meaning of this new sector is not open, whether with qualifiers that define it as precaria t . This is what Gastón Gutiérrez and Paula Varela point out when reflecting on these data: As Aaron Benanav recovers, from 1980 to 2018 - according to the ILO - the economically active population, both waged and unwaged, grew by 75%. This implies that more than 1.5 billion people were added to the world's labor markets, bringing the total to just under 3.5 billion people. Based on ILO data, Kim Moody points out that about two-thirds of them, i.e., just over 2 billion, belong to the working class, comprising wage earners and "self-employed" or "own- account workers". Meanwhile, according to research by Marcel van der Linden (also based on ILO data), between 1991 and 2019, the percentage of people living on their wages will never breach the 44% threshold and, on the contrary, will rise to 55% of the economically active population. 9 , as did Guy Standin g 10 , or that emphasize the digital aspect of new work modalities, qualifying them as cybertariat, as defined by Ursula Huws 11 Working again with data to get an idea, according to China Statistical Yearbook (2020 ) . But this phenomenon of transformation has been occurring in parallel with the maintenance of a robust dimension of classic sectors of the working class, particularly the industrial sector. 12 and the website Statista.com 13 7 Antunes 2022 8 See Kim Moody. Available: https://newpol.org/issue_post/workers-of- the-world-%E2%80%A8growth-change-and-rebellion/ 9 With the mistake of considering this as a “new dangerous class”, and not as a precarious part of the working class. 10 Standing 2011 11 Huws 2003 12 China Statistical Yearbook. Available in: www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/ndsj/ 2020/indexeh.htm, last access: 19/07/2022 13 Labor force in China from 2000 to 2020 Available: https://www.statis ta.com/statistics/282134/china-labor-force/; accessed in: 19 Jul 2022. , in 2020, the number of economically active population in that country was between 811 and 783 million workers, of which, in both sources, around 30% were factory workers. This means that, in China today, at least 210 million workers are allocated in the statistics of “secondary industry”, a proletarian mass that in the nineteenth century, and even at the beginning of the twentieth century, could not have been imagined. By comparison, Stephen Anthony Smith 14 points out that in 1917, Russia had 3.4 million industrial workers, compared to an immense population at the time of 182 million inhabitants. Today, we speak of more than 200 million factory workers in China, an absolute proletarian mass at least fifty times larger than the entire Russian proletariat in the socialist revolution of 1917. The methodological issue here, therefore, is to look at the theme of the world of work today from an international perspective. With the globalisation of capita l 15 III. N eoliberal F ragmentation and the N ew M orphology of the W orking C lass and the most aggressive forms of imperialism, hegemony of financial capital, concentration of capital and oligopolies, there is no economic perspective that survives without sticking to the unequal and combined dynamics of the world economy. The so-called international division of labor seeks to account for this international process of production and reproduction of capital today. Thus, these main tendencies in work analysis must be taken into consideration: an expressive growth of the working class in recent decades; intense concentration in some poles, such as the Chinese industrial cities complex or India; accelerated expansion of the service sector, in large metropolis and megalopolis in particular, with the expression of a new service proletariat, a new morphology of the working class – a trend that we are going to deal with subsequently. The problem of the fragmentation of the working class as a form of domination is not an expression of an isolated policy of finance capital in a given context, as was more than evident in the dramatic neoliberal years. Karl Marx 16 Since then, until the turn of the twentieth century and the entrance of the imperialist er a had an acute look and a strong perception that the role of the bourgeoisie within the People's Spring of 1848 was an indeclinable indication that this class had assumed a reactionary character. 17 14 Smith 1983, p. 14 15 Chesnais 1994 16 Marx 1994 17 Lenin 1979 , reality is expressed in the paths of financial advances of monopolies occurring in parallel with interstate shocks, the social decomposition of workers, the destruction of nature and cultural decay. Social and ideological fragmentation is becoming a mark of the bourgeoisie, an irony for a world of increasing financial concentration. © 2023 Global Journals Volume XXIII Issue VI Version I 3 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2023 C Beyond Fragmentation: Challenges of the World of Work in the Face of Ongoing Productive Restructuring