Index

My endeavour of translating excerpts from the book “Sub-humanos: o capitalismo e a metamorfose da escravidão”, published in 2021 by the Boitempo Publishing House, was assisted by Aprrr, who proofread it. The primary objective of this translation is to disseminate the knowledge contained herein; consequently, the author's writing style should have been of low priority. However, this is one of my first attempts to translate such complex subject matter on my own, and the author's stylistics do not facilitate the process. The translation was thus executed with a view to preserving both the meaning and the word choice of the original text, with minimal to no alteration in syntax and sentence order.

Cavalcanti’s writing is oftentimes too long, too labyrinthine and too confusing. Even though he explain things as if he expects the reader to have a rudimentary level of knowledge on the subject, he does not know how to explain it with a smooth, straightforward and accessible language. Nevertheless, the way he writes is negligible and solely superficial when compared to the relevance of the meaning he implies. My lack of previous experience allowed me only to do what scholars such as Catford would think is best. I hope that in future translations my knowledge will be expanded and I will provide better, more understandable, and more reliable translations.

September 2nd, 2025, Maiden Death, Emma.

SUBHUMANS:

Capitalism and the metamorphosis of slavery

by Tiago Muniz Cavalcanti

translated by Emma

proofread by Aprrr

At the end of World War II, the governments of the industrialised countries, influenced by Keynes’ thinking, established a series of agreements to rule trade and financial relations and delineate the new world order: the Bretton Woods system, developed with the aim of managing the international economy in 1944; the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Monetary Fund, created in 1944 and 1945, respectively; and the Marshall Plan, an economic recovery program for Western Europe, enacted in 1947.

It is because of the influence exerted by Keynes on state intervention in the economy and on the adoption of such measures that we often speak of a Keynesian state. This interventionist state created a propitious scenario which celebrated a social pact between capital and work, an alliance between fundamental industrial classes that, on one hand, provided the workers with the incorporation of old claims in the economic and social policies plan and, on the other hand, created the conditions for industrial expansion and capitalist accumulation.

Carlos Montaño and Maria Lúcia Duriguetto assert that “a new pattern of accumulation is followed by a new regulatory regime, anchored in the ‘wage’ relationship of labour, in political, social, and labour rights, in the stimulation of mass consumption, and in the productive reinvestment of capital”. It is thus processed as “an articulation between Fordism and Keynesianism”.

It is in this historical period and in this new form of state that Taylor’s scientific management theory and Ford’s mass production model find the ideal conditions for their realisation. If mass production requires mass consumption, and if mass consumption, in turn, demands full employment, only in an interventionist state that encourages productive investment will there be a high and permanent level of employability capable of assuring the population’s consumption capacity.

This politically, socially, and economically organised capitalism allowed the emergence of the so-called social welfare state, characterised primarily by the promotion of social policies and expansion of labour rights. All of this, however, was far from being capitalist altruism: the interventionist state at the service of the people — guaranteeing them economic and social rights that enabled a relative ‘well-being’ — had as its covert interests to reduce social conflict and legitimate the bourgeois social order, dissipating any and every movement capable of challenging the prevailing model of society.

In other words, the welfare state had an eminently political function: it was capitalism’s alternative to the constant threats of a different order that had the 1917’s Russian Revolution as its model. Therefore, it was necessary to attenuate the more flagrant cruelties of capitalism to mitigate the growing revolutionary movements. The “Keynesian pact” thereby meant a trade-off— the relative welfare was to be compensated with obedience. It is in this sense that Guy Standing examines the welfare state. According to him, if the elder proletariat enjoyed a certain degree of occupational safety — mainly due to the existence of social protection against risks of unemployment, illness, old age, accidents, etc., it was a manipulative form of security, for it was provided by the state as long as the worker obeyed the discipline and the dictates of work.

Indeed, while promoting relative social progress in given regions of the world, the welfare state eased the political dissatisfaction among the un(der)privileged, legitimated the system as ‘fair’, silenced the social unrest, granted the economic stability on which business profits depended and, in doing that, consolidated and fortified the capitalist mode of production. It therefore helped save capitalism.

The stable society was short-lived. With the socialist movement in decline and the union mobilisation suppressed, capital broke the social pact that it had established with work. A unilateral breach that imposed — again, but under different circumstances — a state withdrawal of the private relations.

Proponents of neoliberal economic policies argue, in short, that there is no alternative to the market economy and that ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’. This first argument became popular during the administration of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. She sustained that, to avoid disaster, societies had no a choice but to defend the free market and trade. This idea, that neoliberal globalisation is an inevitable and spontaneous process — an automatic consequence to the technologic and scientific development —, is, however, a false discourse: it is, in fact, a directive in the service of a political and economic project, conceived and brought to pass, in the words of António José Avelãs Nunes, “in a conscious and systematic manner by all the political power instances and supported, as never before in history, by the powerful arsenal of apparatuses that produce and disseminate the dominant ideology, a single, totalitarian view was affixed to neoliberalism’s dogmas to be followed/a totalitarianism of the single thought based on the dogmas of neoliberalism”.

The second argument asserts that the market’s liberalisation presents itself as an opportunity for economic growth, which, in turn, provides social integration. This means that neoliberalism’s benefits, conceived from capital favouritism, would automatically extend to all. As it will be further studied later on, these arguments, incorporated into the social consciousness — which then became the common sense around the globe — do not hold up in practice.

The Soviet Union’s downfall eradicated all the limits imposed onto capitalism by its alternatives. The former socialist countries were incorporated into capitalism, creating, for the first time in history, a market that comprised all the countries of the world: the true ‘globalisation of capital’ began. This was the moment in which capitalism became not only a hegemonic and dominant regime, but virtually the only one. This absolute predominance enabled it to revert into its most savage and most violent self, capable of resorting to cunning mechanisms of social persuasion to obtain support for its fiscal adjustment agenda.

What Naomi Klein calls the ‘shock doctrine’ refers to the creation or exploitation of a crisis or disaster and the manipulation of the resulting panic to impose policies that, under other circumstances, would be considered unthinkable. Thus, neoliberalism feeds off the fear of budgetary deficits to ‘shock’ and frighten the people into supporting the policies dictated by the new order. And this strategy allows capitalist solutions to be proposed for problems created by capitalism itself.

Along the same lines, Boaventura de Sousa Santos sees the ‘permanent crisis’ as a device for the adoption of fiscal adjustment policies. The author asserts that we live in societies that, for the last thirty years, have been in a permanent state of crisis. And while this happens, an insidious and invisible turn occurs: instead of demanding an explanation, the crisis is used to justify everything, including wage and pension cuts. Thus, unlike everything around it, the only thing not in crisis in our society is the crisis itself, and this leads to the “politics of resentment, in which people confront each other, victims against victims, and the oppressed against the oppressed”. Ergo we live in a society of fear, in which people are constantly terrified by the sensationalist discourse about the possibility of job losses, the cessation of essential public services, the social security embezzlement, the fiscal deficit, etc.

Faced with this terrifying reality, the state becomes a mere manager of the permanent crisis:

The closer it gets to a state of financial emergency, the further the state is reduced to its recessive core. The infrastructures are oriented according to the needs of transnational capital. As in colonial territories, social logistics are increasingly restricted to a select number of economic centres, while the rest are abandoned. What can be privatised is privatised, even if this means excluding more and more people from the most basic forms of supply.

That is to say, this new global scenario did not make the state disappear, but rather converted it into a neoliberal governance associate, responsible for legitimising the new formula of governability touted by non-state actors: the government of the market. The truth is that the idea of a minimal state to the neoliberal actually means a state sufficient and necessary solely for the interests of capital reproduction, becoming, in this sense, a present-absent structure responsible for operating the self-exclusion of its own institutions and having as one of its most important economic functions that of guaranteeing more attractive conditions for foreign investments. This includes privatisation and denationalisation of public companies, the reduction and restriction of socio-public expenditure and, as will be examined later, the deregulation of workplace relations. This occurs because transnational corporations — including financial institutions and global banks — are big enough to be governed by a national state: capital becomes supranational, converts itself into an external centre of power, its interests transcend borders, and its strategies must be obeyed and implemented by the government programs around the world, especially in the global South. This is, hence, a new form of governability that Achille Mbembe calls private indirect government.

Without this active government intervention, international finance capital and big multinational groups would not have been able to destroy so rapidly and radically any obstacles and restraints to the expansion of the exploitation of economic, human, and natural resources, wherever it befitted them. The watchword was the society’s adaptation to the new demands and obligations of the market: all areas of social life, without exception, should be subject to the valorisation of private capital. Capitalism should, therefore, be free of operating rules.

With the adoption of this new paradigm, obedient and submissive to international capital, states, in their battle for survival, enter into competition with each other for investments by means of fiscal, social and ecological dumping practices. It is precisely from this moment on, when these governments are no longer capable of establishing control over state sovereignty, policies for the preservation of human life, and of natural resources, sharing them with powerful transnational private actors, that this new international, political and economic order provides a general restructuring of capital that undermines the forms of social organisation structured in previous periods, which, in a way, mitigated the damages resulting from inequality.

The truth is that neoliberal globalisation is a class project. It is a project of general capital restructuring, carried out in favour of multinationals and corporate elites. By privileging the interests of these elites, it aims at nothing more than to consolidate capitalism, even if the social cost is quite high: in this condition, as a class project, neoliberalism is a recipe for high levels of inequality.

Contrary to its promises, neoliberalism deepened the crisis. Countries that followed its recommendations to the letter exacerbated their economic and social problems.

[…]

The permanent crisis intensifies at every moment — claiming responsibility for frightening society and justifying the deterioration of social protections both in countries that achieved significant development and in those that had little to no development of their social protection systems. The crisis clearly manifests in the increasing tendency of property and wealth being centralised in the hands of the few, the existence of growing surplus population masses, and the intensification of the process of pauperisation and proletarisation of several social portions, paired with the subsequent systemic violation of social security previously won by the older generations. These processes become an implicit process of one losing their citizenship.

To this effect, Boaventura de Sousa Santos says that capitalism lives today in one of the most destructive moments of its recent history. New modes of primitive accumulation emerge through the despoilment, the land confiscation, the wage theft, the displacement of countryman and native people, the environmental devastation, and, finally, the “eternal renewal of colonialism, which, with old and new disguises, reveals the same genocidal impulse, the same racist sociability, the very same thirst for appropriation and violence against resources considered infinite and against people deemed inferior and even non-human”.

As market forces intensify, inequality spreads misery around the globe, where millions of people are reduced to an almost nomadic existence, being force from their roots and moving around without a perspective of a final destination. And like this, as disorganised states and nations implode, “the populations, driven mad by the competitive battle for survival, gladiate each other in ethnic gang warfare”.

In it’s application, the neoliberal recipe for economic prosperity, secured on the promotion of deregulation and labour market flexibility policies, has been especially terrifying.

4.2. Progressive deregulation, excessive precarisation

4.2.1. Regression to the juridical pre-history: the death of the mediator state

In an increasingly more open and globalised world, in which the states began to legitimise the neoliberal governance promoted by non-state actors, their capacity to regulate work and employment vanishes. Obedient and submissive to the new order, states started to implement policies of progressive labour market deregulation as a measure considered ‘essential’ to attract multinational investments and compete in the global economy.

An insidious programme of indoctrination that demonises all of the potential obstacles to the neoliberal programme comes into play and directly affects labour rights by dismantling the state mediation on the conflict between capital and labour. An enormous wave of deregulation in the most distinct spheres of the labour world unleash: social rights are eroded, economic rights are weakened, working conditions are deteriorated. In this way, is the first time in history that the state systematically removes rights from its citizens.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos, as a matter of fact, sees in the deregulation a latent threat. According to him, the historical working class’ battle for work and labour rights was one of the main ways by which the popular classes obtained access to citizenship and to involvement in democratic processes. If the work market’s regulation was a political process, everything started to change during neoliberal globalisation, of which the main impulse was to transform the labour force into a global resource — a commodity just like any other. The devaluation of work composes the already precarious subsistence conditions of the popular classes and of the oppressed groups, crushing any prospect of a better life that could possibly still exist.

One of the main expressions of the labour legislation’s flexibilisation has been the dissemination of the so called spasmodic work, also known as “zero-hours”. In this contract mode, the worker doesn’t have a fixed work schedule, doesn’t have a previously established workload, and doesn’t have a defined wage by the end of the month. The ultra-flexible character is created for the worker, available at any time of the day, night, week, or year, being able to alternate periods between services, provision, and inactivity, left to the tender of the employer’s necessities. This type of job, uncertain and poorly paid, has been preventing many workers from leaving poverty, despite doing, obediently, what society tells them to do: work.

As this is a coordinated response by capital to the current crisis, the offensive against work is a new hegemonic strategy that has been common practice around the globe. To get an idea, between 2008 and 2014, labour law reform was carried in 110 countries, in which the majority, either in the centre or in the outskirts, followed the general deregulation tendency. Some countries, however, experimented with a reinforcement in labor legislation, though it was only in exceptional cases, generally referring to countries with little to no preexisting labor protection.

[…]

4.2.2. Precarisation and self-exploitation: the exacerbation of violence.

[…]

It is in this context — which is exceedingly propitious to the intensification of exploitation of human labour — that occurs a capital restructuring capable of significantly modifying the production process of companies, based on overcoming the archaic forms of organisation and adopting new management and administration methods that provides the decentralisation of production through outsourcing, subcontracting, and new forms of recruitment and labour management, with the goal of reducing costs and increasing business competitiveness. It is the so called system of flexible accumulation, which dismantles the traditional business organisation and transfers manufacturing, plants, and production facilities, as well as the associated costs, to outsourced small businesses.

[…]

The novelty, therefore, in my judgement, lies in the intensification of a flexibilisation that is at the very essence of capitalism. And this new form of production, even more flexible and decentralised, had catastrophic effects on the employment structure, intensely changing the bond established between employee and employer: reducing salaried work and increasing precarious work. It is, in truth, a structural precarisation of work that occurs by means of a fracture in the employment contract’s unity, the restructuring of labour rights and, above all, the introduction of a plethora of employment contract types, with distinct rights and different execution conditions. All of this creates a new work pattern in the global context, a new general condition for the workers’ life in the era of flexible accumulation.

Despite presenting complex and varied manifestations on the legal, economic and social forms, it can be said that precarious work is a degraded form of work, characterised by the denial of minimum benefits: it is a fluid, fragmented, flexible, and ephemeral work. Its nature is precarious, in terms of working hours, payment, protection, etc., it is the fruit of the economic rationalisation and of the constant search for the endless accumulation, endless accumulation, a directive that aims to create and recreate new forms of work. It has as main characteristics, therefore, instability, insecurity, and social defencelessness. The contractual categories are varied, associated with this profile and that suggest the idea of unstable, insecure and underpaid work: the outsourced and subcontracted, the informal, the clandestine, the temporary, and, above all, the “self-employed” workers — entrepreneurs that, apart from being exploited, take on the risks of their businesses themselves. Here it is the newest metamorphosis of exploitation and of mistreatment of human labour, product of the globalised ultra-liberalism: the self-exploitation.

Thus, a new form of exploitation is born, manifested in the midst of the labour law crisis, which transfers risks and responsibilities to the precarised worker. It has its origins in the sharing economy, the “uberisation” of working relations, and new forms of exploitation and precarisation, such as crowd-work and work on-demand, by providing services on online platforms or applications. Faced with this new reality, resulting mainly from the speed of new technologies employed by multinationals which occupy territories and ignore legislations, and the state’s slowness in the promotion of regulatory measures, this mode allows, on one hand, immediate income for millions of unemployed people and, on the other hand, precarises labour conditions without any ethical or social commitment.

Capital assumes an aura of modernity — new technologies, new resources, new strategies, new “associates” — and requires that the worker adopts a new profile, to have “business initiative” and a disposition to “work for yourself”. The old promise of formal and permanent work vanishes, and a new proposal of “autonomous” work arises.

It is, however, a formal and apparent autonomy, which is presented through the possession or ownership of the instruments of work, but which hides an enormous economic dependence on those who hold the true means of production. In Maria Aparecida Alves and Maria Augusta Tavares’ words, “the forms resulting from this ‘new’ organisation do not guarantee autonomy to workers nor do they diminish the power of capital, insofar as it continues to prescribe the nature of work and the quantity to be produced”. In other words, control over the work organisation and the entire structure of service provisions, such as prices, deadlines, flows, etc., remains entirely with capital, formerly known as the “boss”.

The truth is that the petit bourgeois belief in autonomy and stability, as if they were their own person, contrasts with reality. In this regard, Boaventura de Sousa Santos states that there is no autonomy without the proper conditions of autonomy, and, as it is known, these conditions are unevenly distributed in society. But going even further: in an era of neoliberal economy and politics, the individuals that are the most pressured to be autonomous are those most deprived of the conditions to be so: “Individual autonomy becomes a cruel slogan as it destroys one’s conditions to exercise autonomy effectively”.

According to the Portuguese author, the idea of autonomy is an ideology as it reinforces the relations of dominant powers in contemporary societies. It works as a kind of “normative apoliticism”, asking — if not demanding — that people become autonomous only to leave them in the greatest helplessness when they see their failures as a result of their dependence or inability to exercise autonomy:

This ideology tends to prevail in all corners of the world, although the impact of its penetration varies greatly for each region. It is the ideological form of a structural, post-state, post-social, highly concentrated power, by which 1% of the global elite dominates 99% of the world’s impoverished population. As an ideology, its strength is based on its performative value, not on its true content.

The ideology of autonomy is intrinsically linked to the idea of meritocracy, which is responsible for making the worker believe in success through one’s own efforts. According to José Reginaldo Prandi, the stories of the self-employed worker who became an who became a prominent entrepreneur within the urban petite bourgeoisie (which obviously does not correspond to the most significant reality of the capital accumulation process) reinforces the ideology of individual effort and the virtue of work. In reality, the general rule is that the autonomous worker be expelled from the work market, considering there isn’t a buyer to their labour force; but the belief in autonomy by choice frequently acts as a ideological support: “Simplifying, the expulsion can be disguised as an option”.

Maria Aparecida Alves and Maria Augusta Tavares, in the essay “The double face of informal work: ‘autonomy’ or precarisation”, observe that the idea according to which all workers can become proprietors suggests that the abolition of the wage system — the foundation of capitalist society — would be capable of obscuring the exploitation of surplus value and the contradiction of capital-work.

If the salaried society is heading towards an end, the change is only formal: the truth, states the authors, is that we are faced with the old forms of precarious work covered by shell of autonomy and independence founded upon the absence of explicit order, as if this was sufficient to transform workers into proprietors.

What is currently seen as modern organisation of work consubstantiates a sophisticated arrangement between the two poles of the capital-work relation, through forms that dissimulate exploitation, and that are signs of informal work generalisation. In addition to objectively maximising exploitation, the expansion of small businesses, cooperatives, home office, and of other practices used by outsourcing, suggests a change in reality, leading employees to believe that they can become the boss even if, sometimes, only of themselves.

Still according to the authors, the idea of autonomy disseminated by the dominant point of view sees the small production or the small businesses in a perspective that leads to the belief that anyone can be a capitalist, when, in reality, the activities called autonomous can not even be an alternative to unemployment.

The current tendency of capitalism to embed in the worker the entrepreneurial code — the “I/Me Inc./Ltd.” — works as a strategy to exclude them from the formal labour market, transferring responsibilities and social burdens to them. This “entrepreneurship ideology” thus is a strategy which aims to gain the workers’ acquiescence to capital’s new dictates: a flexible, rights-free, and seemingly autonomous work.

For Juliana Teixeira Esteves, a professor in the Graduate Program in Law at the Federal University of Pernambuco, “the discourse surrounding education contemplating subjects aimed at building an entrepreneurial profile is also seen as a strategy to enable the training of people for new work relationships”, which, according to her, “demand, today, autonomous and flexible workers who can work on different fronts”.

Carlo Benito Cosentino Filho, also a professor in the Graduate Program in Law at the Federal University of Pernambuco, believes that the new, supposedly “modern” work models seek to restructure the legal-labour relations so that it appears autonomous. This is an ideological model: while its legal nature is debated, subordination disguises itself as hypercomplex structures managed by capital.

This pseudo-autonomy, advertised by the new and allegedly modern work models in the flexible accumulation era, incites the self-employed to increase their workload to satisfactorily pay-off at the end of the month. In other words, the ‘autonomy’ related to the work length actually shows wearing working days that aim to compensate the low wage and the absence of social benefits, such as retirement pension. This way, these professionals end up working more than they would in traditional jobs.

In Brazil, the ‘autonomous’ motorcyclists that provide delivery services through application companies have an average working day of thirteen to fourteen hours, living on the poverty line and for whom labour rights and any and every other form of social protections are denied. Much similar to the days of the past, when workers went to the factory doors waiting for work, these workers can be seen on the sidewalks, on the street corners, and in the parks, waiting to be called to do something that could give them some pittance.

The intensification of the working day, the precarisation of working conditions, the emergence of production risks and costs, and the exclusion of the legal system and the state regulation of work are factors that are directly related to the hyperproduction of surplus value. According to Carlo Cosentino, the perverted system, which is responsible for accentuating the levels of exploitation of labour and restricting capital’s commitment to the workers dignity, engenders itself through a politically correct form of organisation. For the author, the ‘infoproletarian’, who is inserted in a infotaylorist model capable of exploiting their labour to the limit of their physical and mental sanity, is exposed to the worst variables of scientific management models.

It is important to emphasise, furthermore, that the fragmentation of production and the diffusion of productive units — through the decentralisation of companies into allegedly autonomous smaller units — the labour externalisation, the outsourcing, the subcontracting, and other factors, make syndicalism, social agreement, and the democratic and direct exercise of discussion and adoption of strike movements difficult (when not outright unfeasible).

Glossary

Governability or governableness — noun (technical), quality of what is governable, stable political situation in which a democratic government is allowed to implement its program.

Priberam Informática, S. A. s. d. governabilidade. Dicionário Priberam da Língua Portuguesa. Acesso em 3 de outubro de 2025.

Governance — noun (technical), the activity of governing a country or controlling a company or an organization; the way in which a country is governed or a company or institution is controlled.

Hornby, A. S. 2005. Oxford advanced learner’s dictionary. 7o ed. Londres, England: Oxford University Press.

Infoproletarian — It is the worker that, in any activity they perform, depends on digital or informational machine, smartphone or some form of digital work, explains the sociologist Ricardo Antunes. i.e. motoboys, telemarketing agents, software industry technicians and bankers.

Os infoproletários, a tecnologia e a uberização do trabalho. s. d. Sindicato dos Bancários de SP. Acesso em 3 de outubro de 2025.

Precarious — Precarious literally means unsure, uncertain, difficult, delicate. As a political term it refers to living and working conditions without any guarantees: for example the precarious residential status of migrants and refugees, or the precariousness of everyday life for single mothers. Since the early 1980s the term has been used more and more in relation to labour. Precarious work refers to all possible forms of insecure, non-guaranteed, flexible exploitation: from illegalised, seasonal and temporary employment to homework, flex- and temp-work, to subcontractors, freelancers, or so called self-employed persons.

Precarisation — Precarisation at work means a growing transformation from guaranteed, permanent employment to less well paid and more insecure jobs. On a historical and global scale, however, precarious work is not exceptional. In fact the idea of a generalisation of so-called guaranteed working conditions was itself a short lived myth of the ‘welfare state’ era. In the global South, in eastern Europe, as well as for most women and migrants in the north – altogether the great majority of the global population –, precarious working conditions were and are the norm. Precarisation describes moreover the crisis of established institutions, which represented for that short period the framework of (false) certainties. It is an analytical term for a process and hints at a new quality of societal labour. Labour and social life, production and reproduction cannot be separated anymore, and this leads to a more comprehensive definition of precarisation: the uncertainty of all circumstances in the material and immaterial conditions of life of living labour under contemporary capitalism. For example: wage level and working conditions are connected with a distribution of tasks, which is determined by gender and ethnic roles; residence status determines access to the labour market or to medical care. The whole ensemble of social relations seems to be on the move.

The Frassanito Network. 2006. Precarious, Precarisation, Precariat? Mute. 1o de setembro de 2006.

Precarisation denotes the decisions and processes through which people become exposed to precarious working conditions.

Precarisation and Self-Precarisation. s. d. Precaritypilot.net. Acesso em 3 de outubro de 2025.

Index