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

countries over the dispute over technological prominence; c) the transformation that takes place in the world of work, which we will address below as from the crisis, synthesized in a trend towards a new international productive restructuring; d) and the dynamics of more significant conflicts between capital and labour, expressing itself in rebellions such as the Arab Spring, youth uprisings, new social movements such as the feminist spring and Black Lives Matter, also expressing ideological conflict and clashes that question the forms of hegemony of the neoliberal period. In economics, geopolitics, the world of work and conflicts, we perceive a new configuration in the dynamics of international capitalism, which expresses that the 2008 crisis meant the crisis of neoliberal globalisation . 26 And if we talk about a transformation in the dynamics of capital, this could not happen without also expressing a restructuring of the world of work. The most evident traits of this have been widely debated in the sociology of work internationally, from what has been called platform capitalism or uberization of work. A crisis of the neoliberal accumulation pattern but without having found a new accumulation impulse that can shape a new one and generate some stability in the system internationally. 27 V. T he F actors of a N ew P roductive R estructuring O ngoing The conditions of economic crisis always favour the laboratories of experimentation of labour exploitation for capital. With the excuses of the complex crisis, and even the difficulties of organising and fighting workers in a context of rising unemployment and high living costs, capital could think of new strategies to increase the rates of surplus value. It was no different with the 2008 crisis, which initially had its most acute social expressions on the European continent, particularly in the weak links of the European Union such as Greece, Spain, and Portugal. Austerity plans and various fiscal adjustment mechanisms were applied, labour and social security reforms were implemented, and all the recipes of the old neoliberal therapy, which only aggravate the problem and create increasingly unstable situations. In the European context, the experience of precarious work was intensified with the phenomenon of immigration, with migrants being incorporated into the most precarious jobs and racism being one of the factors in the process of precariousness and accumulation in these new conditions. 28 These tendencies of attacks via fiscal policy and labor rights took place in a context that also in the neoliberal year’s, fragmentation was based on an 26 Dumenil and Levy 2011 27 Antunes 2019 28 Basso 2016 accelerated expansion of the service sector, forming not a new class but a transformation in the morphology of this sector, a new proletariat of services (Antunes, 2019). In this sense, if we think about the attacks and this transformation, we can come to the understand that after the 2008 crisis, what we saw was exclusively a repetition of the neoliberal recipe, a neoliberalism 4.0. However, such an interpretation, although partially anchored in truth aspects, if generalized, end up impoverishing the analysis of economic and political transformations in general, and the transformations of the world of work and strategic reflection in particular, since we are not only facing a deepening of the phenomenon of neoliberal fragmentation somewhat intensified by the conditions of the crisis, but in front of the opening of a new productive restructuring, an expressive modification and with transformations of quality in the morphology of the working class. What aspects would be marking this new productive restructuring? In our view, in addition to the inherited tendencies of neoliberalism, such as the precarious conditions arising from the crisis, an expressive proletariat of services, and intensified phenomena such as immigration, we also see the junction, among others, of three main determinants: the technologies of industry 4.0, sharing economies and the insertion of applications as forms of work control. Let's analyze each of these aspects. As a product of the situation arising from the crisis, in which layoffs in companies and economic downturns are expressed in the context of recession, investments in the productive sphere are impacted. As a way of attracting new investments and having a productive and technological leap, the expression Industry 4.0 appeared in Germany in 2011. The proposal was an industrial change, but it was based on a much larger propaganda transformation, an epoch one. It was about the idea that we would be experiencing a fourth industrial revolution, in which we would pass by an era of communicativeness, based on a series of technologies that would revolutionise society. Klaus Schwab, president of the social economic forum, summarised this change as follows: Think about the staggering confluence of emerging technology breakthroughs, covering wide-ranging fields such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, the internet of things (IoT), autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage and quantum computing, to name a few. Many of these innovations are in their infancy, but they are already reaching an inflection point in their development as they build on and amplify each other in a fusion of technologies across the physical, digital and biological world s 29 The fact is that industrial revolutions and a mass of new investments do not combine with economic . 29 Schwab 2016, p.7 © 2023 Global Journals Volume XXIII Issue VI Version I 5 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2023 C Beyond Fragmentation: Challenges of the World of Work in the Face of Ongoing Productive Restructuring