What do you think of the fashionable theory, which characterises the new stage of capitalism by the decline in the importance of work?
There are two aspects to this. The first is economic, with the increase in organic composition – science, technology, machinery, robotics and computers now have more importance – and the progressive decline of variable capital and of wage labour.
This is a process which has been developing for a long time, with the so-called third industrial revolution.
But to deduce sociological consequences from this, as Andre Gorz has done – he says that the workforce no longer has any role, that it has disappeared – descends into economism. These visions confuse the working class as a whole with a specific part, the industrial workers and with the classical production line; this position becomes more and more anchronistic, and its political consequences are very dangerous.
There still exists a large working class but, nevertheless, capitalism is continually penetrating, on an unprecedented scale, numerous fields from which it was previously absent.
[Ernest] Mandel is right when he says we are seeing an enormous expansion of the working class, of those who are forced to sell their labour in order to live.
The second aspect is that there is a large underclass of people becoming marginalised by the system. In Europe, as in the First World as a whole, there is now a large number of people living on the margins of society. The uprising in Los Angeles is an example of this.
But the problem is much greater in Latin America and the Third World as a whole.
Today it is clear that alongside the growth of the working class there is also a growing number of poor people, people permanently or temporarily excluded from production, consumption and society as well.
There are people who make a living from small businesses, as itinerant traders, as self employed, or from prostitution, crime, and the drugs trade; everything is getting worse.
This is a big challenge not only to the theory but also to the practice of liberation. The problem is to get unity between these groups of people, which I call the 'pooretariat', with the organised working class.