ABSTRACT
Thus the essence of the social question today will be, once again, the existence of the “useless of the world,” supernumeraries, and beyond them a nebulousness of conditions marked by insecurity and uncertainty about tomorrow that testifies to the return of mass vulnerability. If we imagine for just a moment the whole span of this relationship between man and labor, this may seem paradoxical. It has taken centuries of sacrifices, suffering and even the use of force—the dictates of legislation and of regulations, the constraints of need and of hunger as well—in order to fix the worker to his task, and subsequently to hold him there by means of a bundle of “social” advantages that go into forming a status constitutive of his social identity. Yet it is at the very moment when this “civilization of labor” appears to have been definitively imposed through the hegemony of wage-labor that the edifice itself is shattered, bringing back to the foreground the old popular obsession of having to “live from day to day.”
