The reflections presented in this book emerge from a fundamental inquiry into the meaning of labour in the neoliberal era and its enduring political significance. Rather than treating labour as a fixed or self-evident category, this work interrogates the ways in which it has been historically constructed, ideologically framed, and politically instrumentalised. In doing so, it seeks to trace the shifting role of labour within contemporary configurations of power. This book does not aspire to offer definitive answers. Instead, it endeavours to articulate a critical method — one capable of mapping the range of possible responses to the question of labour, understood not as a stable object of analysis, but as an open-ended methodological perspective. The challenge, however, is particularly acute in an era in which labour appears to be undergoing a deep crisis: denounced for its complicity in exacerbating inequalities, discredited for its inability to protect the most vulnerable, and fractured by the disintegration of collective subjectivities.2