Desemprego em Marx e seu redimensionamento na fragmentação do trabalho no século XXI

Abstract

This study aims to present unemployment in Marx, in the scope of the current fragmentation of work. Therefore, it analyzes the ontological foundations of work and the division of labor, situating work as an activity that will never disappear, a universal category, even with all the technological development that is currently experienced. It points out the ontological aspect of work with history, placing work from its beginnings to class societies, showing that, without ceasing to exercise centrality in social reproduction, work is metamorphosing into abstract work, into alienated work.This clarifies the difference between the natural-spontaneous division of labor, which evolves naturally from differences in sex and age, that is, that division of labor in which the work process was carried out by the tribe or family, to the division of labor in societies of classes and, in particular, in capitalism. It situates the specificity of work in capitalist production, where abstract work is distinguished from the bases of work in the ontological sense. Thus, it demystifies the idea that there is an identity between work and employment, showing the structure of professions within productive and unproductive work of added value. It emphasizes capitalist production, by historically placing the primitive accumulation of capital within the scope of manufacturing cooperation, machinery to large industry. Based on Marx's general law of capitalist accumulation, it highlights changes in production and their effects on work. It presents the formation of an industrial reserve army and relative overpopulation in the historical setting of the 19th century English Industrial Revolution. Thus, it exposes the objective bases that found unemployment in capitalist society. It emphasizes the dimension of unemployment in the management process in capitalist production from the 20th century onwards. It makes it clear that flexible accumulation intensifies the contradictions in the labor sphere, raising unemployment to a global dimension. It elucidates the chronic dimension of unemployment from the 1970s onwards, at a time when capitalism reached a crisis of structural proportions that affected the world, aggravating the contradictions in the absolute limits of capital. It considers the neo-imperialist and neoliberal policy as a political-economic strategy to intensify the accumulation of transnational financial capital through privatization, increased flexibility and job insecurity, unemployment and underemployment. It exposes work in the 21st century and the consequences, trends and perspectives of unemployment in the face of the advance of technology. Finally, it brings Marx back to affirm that it is possible to apprehend unemployment in the light of his teachings, demonstrating its relevance and the alternative of overcoming unemployment beyond the absolute limits of capital.