The loss of labor’s historic leading role and slums

Abstract

This text presents a scheme of the current life scenario in the large Brazilian cities, focusing first on the world of labor and then on the place of peripheries, particularly of slums. The reflection is driven by the forms of regulation and control constituted by co-production relations between the State’s apparatuses and the configuration of population and urban order. It is a perspective, a line of reflection, that is schematic and basic (that is, structural rather than conjunctural) and attempts to articulate the great trends of change that characterize the current moment.