From the (macro) social rights of conflict to the (micro) social rights of resilience in the constitutional paradigm of the global market order: new forms of exploitation through material devaluation of labour

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to reflect on the causes of the end of wage Labour as a political subject, or, in other words, on the perennial process of the irrevocability of materially devalued wage labour initiated in the 1980s. To this target, the analysis is situated within the framework of the Critical Theory of the Constitutional Law of Conflict. This implies redirecting the approach to State-Law-Constitution relations. Specifically, if the constitutionalisation of Labour represented the juridification by the fundamental text of the redistributive conflict determining the new functions assumed by the form of social State and its Constitution, the new constitutional paradigm of the legal order of the market is materialised around the unconditional centrality of the economic link of the market, which has in the Law of the Union its most complete legal form. The main function of the new constitutional order is to undo the conflict by placing the strategy of accumulation for accumulation's sake as the only link of legitimacy of the constitutional paradigm of the market. The confrontation between constitutional paradigms is particularly visible at times of systemic crisis and the new phases of global capital. The denaturalisation of labour as a mere functional factor in the interests of global capital, together with the reproduction of new forms of free labour under the digitalisation phase of capital, has given rise to proposals (such as, the Universal Basic Income) that have in common the reversal of the ever-widening spaces of new forms of exploitation, by devalorisation, of labour. However, the majority of these approaches go further in denaturalising the subjectivisation of conflict, of class struggles, when the current phase of the constitutional paradigm of the market has not precisely brought about the end of wage labour. On the contrary, its validity has been accentuated, generating as a central question how to recover the unity of Labour as a political subject and, therefore, the structural role of the working classes in the processes of reproduction of global capital.