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

The Hungarian philosopher György Lukác s 18 The individual Word (…) becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence bursts its bounds to obscure the sense of the page; the page acquires life at the expense of the whole - the whole is no longer a whole. But this is the picture of every decadent style… the vitality, vibrance and exuberance of life withdraws into the minute image; whatever is leftover lacks life …The whole is no longer alive; it is a synthetic, contrived artifac t analyzed this phenomenon from literature (with an instigating analysis in nineteenth-century realism but mistaken in its emphases against the avant-garde and defense of Soviet realism in the twentieth century) and philosophy, and argued that even the spirits of capitalism philosophy in a decadent phase, like Friedrich Nietzsche, perceived the extremes of fragmentation in the ideological decay of society. Quoting the German philosopher: 19 And in the world of work, it could not be different: neoliberal productive restructuring combined the latest technologies of Toyotism to control work and the just-in-time regime, with the territorial dispersion of production in the new international division of labor, the so-called flexible accumulation The great irony of the matter is that what philosophers saw as an initial philosophical process during the last decades of the nineteenth century, outlined in literature and the arts, were the first expressions of philosophies that became much more acute in the twentieth century, arriving in neoliberalism with the discreet charm of combining, at the same time, the postmodern philosophies, of total relativism, with the disenchanting fragmentation bombs – a military expression of the shattered society. 20 This transformation in neoliberalism implied a course of the precariousness of work, not only internally in different countries but also as an international movement in a historical period of accelerated economic hyper-financialization and the mechanisms of division within the working class, expressed above all in the phenomenon of outsourcing. In other words, the hallmarks of neoliberal restructuring include job rotation, intensification, rights precariousness, benefit cuts, extension of working hours with hour banks, labour instability, among others. But one of these expressions worth mentioning was managing to insert an international division in the categories of workers between permanent and outsourced workers, a fragmentation of the working class that symbolised the great victory of years of neoliberal reaction. 21 18 Lukács 1917, p 132) 19 Nietzsche, Friedrich. In: Lukács 1971, p. 132 20 Harvey 2011, p. 140 21 Chenais 1917 , where the monopoly force of financial capital and its incessant yearning to expand profit margins are combined, with the possibilities that neoliberal globalization had placed in the sense of enhancing the ability to use the unequal forms of the international division of labor to connect the brutal spoliation of absolute surplus value in countries on the periphery of capitalism (mainly Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America) with the increase of technological poles. The combination of these elements of precarious work, withdrawal of rights, not only as a phenomenon to be analysed internally, but also internationally, made David Harvey use the expression “flexible accumulation” to characterise this perio d 22 IV. T he I nflection P romoted by the 2008 C risis . Bearing in mind these central aspects of accumulation in the neoliberal period and the ways to increase work spoliation and class fragmentation, we can think about the cleavages that we are experiencing in recent years, taking the 2008 financial crisis as a turning point in international dynamics and also in the world of work. Broadly speaking, three historical phenomena have had a significant influence on the course of international capitalism in the twentieth century: crises, wars, and revolutions. Amidst the possibilities of social stability that the period of neoliberal globalisation took from the restoration of capitalism in the former Soviet bloc countries and China 23 The fall of the investment bank Lehman Brothers marked the beginning of the financial crisis. Still, it was quickly realized that the artificial separation between finance and the real economy could not apply in this event and that we were facing a historic economic crisis, with effects and consequences throughout the international dynamics of capitalism. , military conflagrations and, especially, rebellions and social revolutions did not were the decisive mark during the three neoliberal decades. The inflexible phenomenon in the dynamics of international capitalism was the economic crisis. 24 Essentially, the crisis engendered transformations that we could summarize in four areas: a) firstly, in the dynamics of the world economy itself, since we experienced the intense phenomenon of the global recession of 2009, which left noticeable marks on the tendencies, to use Larry Summers’ expression, of secular stagnatio n 25 22 Harvey 2011, p. 140 23 Albamonte and Maiello, 2017 24 Tonelo 2021 25 Bach 2016 ; with stagnant growth, in addition to relatively low levels of investment and labour productivity; b) also transformations of geopolitical nature, with a particular fracture in the previous accumulation dynamics in which China was the world's factory and the United States its main buyer, shifting to a dynamic of latent conflict between these © 2023 Global Journals Volume XXIII Issue VI Version I 4 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2023 C Beyond Fragmentation: Challenges of the World of Work in the Face of Ongoing Productive Restructuring