A coexistência entre trabalho, tecnologia e as novas modalidades do trabalho nas plataformas digitais: afirmação ou negação do trabalho?

Abstract

This term paper aims to discuss new working models linked to Informational and Communication technology – ICTs and their relationship with the work category in contemporaneity. The objective of this term paper study is to analyze the relationship between work, technology and new modalities of work in contemporary times, with a view to understanding whether the work category remains the foundation of social relations, an essential category to understand the intense and accelerated technological development that marks the current phase of capitalism, with the insurgency of new working models related to ICTs and digital platforms. To this end, theoretical research was carried out in the bibliographical modality, referenced in classic and contemporary authors of the Marxist tradition, whose theoretical-methodological foundations made it possible to systematize the founding elements of the work category and capitalist sociability, explaining the new models of working and their impacts. Within the scope of precariousness and control of work in contemporary capitalism, demonstrate whether these technologies affirm the founding ontological determination of the work category. Thus, through the research carried out, it was learned that communication and information technologies/ICTs, brought about by the resurgence in the development of productive restructuring in the 2000s worldwide, with the unbridled expansion of the application of microelectronics and information technology in the productive sphere and services, given the urgency to guarantee the reproduction of the organic composition of capital in a structural crisis, universalize new forms of alienated/abstract work (informal, uberized, and full-time work) that intensify the precariousness of workers and bring to light new control mechanisms objectives and subjective aspects of the work. In particular, the vaunted autonomy of the worker in the face of the supposed non-existence of control over time, work instruments, management of the work process, and formal work relations created by ICTs, masks the control; the fundamental contradiction between capital and work, on the other hand, intensifies the exploitation of workers with the tenuous coexistence between the forms of relative and absolute surplus value. Thus, it appears that today's advanced technological development is necessary for the continuous reproduction of the capital relationship; however, it cannot overcome the founding dimension of the work category, given its immanent character for the constitution of material and social life. Continuing to unravel the links in this category is essential for the defense of nature and social beings in the face of the acceleration of the destructive character of capital in the contemporary world.