To escape this crisis, which in the course of the 1970s threatened to bring the whole country to a standstill, thanks to the entanglement of the workers’ struggle with that of the students and of civil society, the capitalist response made use of tools analogous to those used half a century earlier. In the first place, violent repression entrusted to the police and the judiciary, with the arrest and sentencing of thousands in the workers’ vanguard. At the same time, waves of redundancies, taking advantage of the oil shock of 1973. And finally the technological leap, with the disappearance of the assembly line and the robotisation of the factory, which revolutionises the composition of the worker. Apart from a restricted elite of specialised technicians, labour becomes further deskilled and diminished. The flexible worker is born, casualised, without entitlements (holidays, sick leave, pensions, redundancy provisions), hired for a fixed period or part-time, often off the books, generally by those small firms that now do most of the actual work for bigger corporations. The technological investment is amply compensated for by the drastic reduction in personnel, to whom the costs and obligations of a salaried employee do not apply, and by their scant ability to organise in the factory.

This restructuring, thanks to the globalisation of markets, is accompanied by the transfer of entire productive processes to countries in the third world, with minimum wages and nonexistent union protection. But even if all of this allowed capital to achieve positive outcomes in the ’90s, the profound economic crisis that is rocking it today seems to show that it was only a temporary relief. Capital only appeared to have won a victory; it has triggered a process that leads unavoidably to a confrontation with the underlying issue, expressed clearly 30 years ago in the struggles of the mass worker with the slogan ‘refusal of work’. It is an epochal question, that of the end of dependent labour, the form of coerced labour that for a little more than two centuries allowed the birth and growth of industrial civilisation in the west.