It is with the privatization of the public sphere that the inequality and social injustice that generates the plague is aggravated.
By Joelma Pires*
The owners of capital, with their hegemony, established the legitimacy of the neoliberal economy market, crossed the borders between nations, disqualified peoples and their cultures and deconstructed democracy with reference to the public sphere and the common good. They instituted themselves as a transnational financial elite that sustains and reproduces itself with speculative capital to the detriment of productive capital that depends on the labor relationship constituted through negotiation with workers as a workforce.
Productive capitalism, even though based on the predominance of exploitation of the workforce, recognizes its limit in establishing barbarism by not fully transferring the costs of social reproduction to people for the benefit of capital. Such a limit is imposed on capitalists by workers when they establish a correlation of forces in which they act as historical subjects capable of demanding the guarantee of a minimum participation in productivity gains with few social rights that maintain their basic condition of existence without perishing in misery. However, the financial capitalists of the neoliberal economy break the frontier of the correlation of forces with the workers, ignore their limit of establishing barbarism and pass on to people the costs of social reproduction for their benefit. In effect, they intentionally operate the dismantling of all public services for their private appropriation.
With the maximum accumulation of capital, the financial capitalists reconfigure and intensify their political and economic power, reinvent the exploitation of the workforce and disassociate themselves from any responsibility towards the workers. For this, they operate through the State the most intense precariousness of workers with labor reforms that are inhumane to the extreme. In this way, the hegemony of these capitalists is manifested in the State, which they control, either through their strategy of occupying public office, or through their tricks to elect the politicians who represent their interests. Financial capitalists are transnational and have an articulation network that puts them in a condition of disengagement from any development project of the Nation-State, as they consider themselves the State itself that does not recognize borders and promotes its laws of private interest. Those who are not part of this restricted group of equals are seduced by entrepreneurship or subjected to the penury of social exclusion.
At this juncture, the structure of the capital and labor relationship is dismantled and replaced by the domination of the private sphere, prevailing the dealings of private interests. In this context, the individual who presents a flexible subjectivity for the quick learning of the deceiving cleverness of businessmen in guaranteeing their advantage is praised, as this is a reference of success. Above all, this individual of adequate subjectivity for the operationalization of the project of the new capitalism based on the trivialization of evil and the apology of crime is considered the model of efficiency and productivity. For that, lies the collective ethics that sustains the human condition that prevents barbarism from being the only possibility of existence. There lies the correlation of forces, necessary to face limitless domination, and the alienation and criminalization of resistance are established. Workers no longer impose themselves on the exploitation of capitalists, as they intend not to be identified as workers in their hallucination of being emerging in the neoliberal market, and then assume the condition of collaborators or entrepreneurs. In view of this, they nullify the historical meaning of the work relationship and, therefore, ignore its condition as a historical subject in a society structure that can only be less unequal and unfair through the correlation of forces based on the reaffirmation of the public sphere and of politics.
From collaborators to entrepreneurs, workers are figuratively transformed into precarious partners of capitalism, in this situation they do not participate in productivity gains, but become operators of artifacts that only favor financial capitalists. The subjectivity of collaborators and entrepreneurs expresses self-enslavement as a manifestation of voluntary servitude for reasons of survival based on basic needs or self-interest based on consumer compulsion.
In the case of Brazil, if such a condition of alienation is inherent to workers with low qualifications, it does not fail to affect highly qualified workers, since almost all assume the condition of entrepreneurs committed to individualistic competition and the expansion of the market for all social relations , reaffirming the private sphere. Entrepreneurs are in the private and public sectors, in schools and universities, in the media, in the legal and political systems, disseminating with maximum obedience the dominant ideology of the laws of the market in institutions with the aim of transforming them. into profitable companies and secure their desired share of advantage. Entrepreneurs are objectified in their condition of alienation. Consequently, institutions are uprooted from any commitment to democracy that reaffirms the public sphere. The only possible democracy is that of the market, which subjugates public law to private law, thus imposing domination that exacerbates inequality and social injustice.
It is with the privatization of the public sphere that the inequality and social injustice that generates the plague is aggravated. The inseparable companion plague of barbarism dominates a society that privileges the strength of the economy that enjoys poverty and ignores the minimum condition for social inclusion. This despotic society, creator of the plague, by subjugating itself to alienated work, interrupts the culture based on the dialectic of emancipated work that institutes the humanized man. This is the only one capable of overcoming barbarism and preventing any catastrophe, as his action reveals the social practice that enables the elaboration of thought committed to humankind, the common good and the public destiny. The humanized man in the public sphere guaranteed by the policy of plurality, equality and freedom as a collective ethics, problematizes and interrupts the disorderly doing that is the driving force of productivism that is a predator of a psychopathic drive.
* Joelma LV Pires is a professor at the Faculty of Education at the Federal University of Uberlândia.