ABSTRACT
The thrust of the previous analyses leads us to reinterpret the social question as it is posed today in light of the degraded status of the wage earning condition. The question of exclusion, which has occupied the center stage for the last few years may be essentially misleading, for it displaces to the margins of society what is really something at its very heart. Either there are, as Gambetta imagined, only distinct “social problems,” a plurality of difficulties to be confronted one at a time; or, there is one larger “social question,” which is essentially the problem of the status of wage labor, insofar as wage labor has come to structure our social system almost entirely. 1 We have seen how wage labor existed for a long time only at the margins of society; then it became instantiated there as a function of its subordinate status; and finally it has been dispersed such that it encompasses and puts its stamp on the entire society. But it is precisely at the moment when the attributes associated with labor (i.e., that it determines the status of an individual and situates that individual in society) came to be definitely imposed at the expense of other supports of identity, such as familial membership or belonging in a concrete community, that the centrality of labor itself is violently called into question! We must wonder whether we have arrived at a fourth stage in the anthropological history of wage labor, when its odyssey turns to tragedy?
