Michel Foucault defined critique as an exercise in de-subjectivation. To what extent did this claim shape his philosophical practice? What are its theoretical and ethical justifications? Why did Foucault come to view the production of subjectivity as a key site of political and intellectual emancipation in the present? Andrea Rossi pursues these questions in The Labour of Subjectivity. The book re-examines the genealogy of the politics of subjectivity that Foucault began to outline in his lectures at the Collège de France in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He explores Christian confession, raison d’état, biopolitics and bioeconomy as the different technologies by which Western politics has attempted to produce, regulate and give form to the subjectivity of its subjects. Ultimately Rossi argues that Foucault’s critical project can only be comprehended within the context of this historico-political trajectory, as an attempt to give the extant politics of the self a new horizon.

The first critical study of 'empty labor', the time during which employees engage in non-work activities during the working day.

How are we to make sense of the way work is organised and controlled? To what extent is its design the result of technological demands, the interests of capital or processes of negotiation and struggle? In recent years labour process analysis, revived by Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital , has been most influential in shaping our thinking about this question. With contributions from leading authorities in the field, this book reviews the contribution of the labour process theory to the study of work organisation. Providing a fresh response to criticisms of 'Bravermania' and lost momentum, the volume explores the theoretical foundations of labour process analysis and suggests new directions for its development

This book focuses on relations among subjectivity, work and learning that represent a point of convergence for diverse disciplinary traditions and practices. There are contributions from leading scholars in the field. They provide emerging perspectives that are elaborating the complex relations among subjectivity, work and learning, and circumstances in which they are played out.

In Marx ́s Capital, Method and Revolutionary Subjectivity, Guido Starosta develops a materialist inquiry into the social and historical determinations of revolutionary subjectivity. Through a methodologically-minded critical reconstruction of the Marxian critique of political economy, from the early writings up to the Grundrisse and Capital, this study shows that the outcome of the historical movement of the objectified form of social mediation, which has turned into the very alienated subject of social life (i.e., capital), is to develop, as its own immanent determination, the constitution of the (self-abolishing) working class as a revolutionary subject. A crucial element in this intellectual endeavour is the focus on the intrinsic connection between the specifically dialectical form of social science and its radical transformative content.

This book examines why Marxist philosophy will continue to be a central point of reference well beyond postmodernism and the Anthropocene.

Brings together a close reading of Marx texts with contemporary debates on the production of subjectivity and offers a critical and postcolonial perspective on the subjectivity of labour, and contemporary capitalism.

How we know ourselves, how we are known by the institutions in which we work, and how we are known by our co-workers and our families is increasingly affected in a constantly changing network of technologies and strategies. In the workplace, these technological forms are lashed together into systems and strategies that reflect a form of rationality and allow norms to arise - seeing, representing, and knowing work and workers. These norms and forms produce distinctly modern forms of subjectivity, 'truth', and power to make workers into subjects. Tertiary (service) labor is the fastest growing form of paid work in the economic catchment of the West. Mediation of labor through computers and telecommunication is also increasing at a remarkable rate. Nonetheless, there are few detailed analyses of subjectivity in technology-mediated tertiary labor. Drawn from ethnographic research using post-structural analytics, this book describes how a collection of technologies is taken up in a common form of tertiary labor - call centers - to produce 'truth', knowledge, power, and modern forms of subjectivity and social subjects. It also challenges assumptions of Marxian and management theory by demonstrating that workers are neither dominated nor liberated, rather how they are made responsible for and caught up in the apparatus that renders them as subjects.