Uberização do trabalho: a materialização do valor entre plataformas digitais, gestão algorítmica e trabalhadores nas redes do capital

Abstract

Digital platforms have been shown to be ubiquitous in the contemporary capitalist scene. Establishing themselves as virtual spaces for social interaction, disseminating news, buying and selling products, sharing videos and music, filing documents and intermediating services, the platforms have had significant impacts on today's society. In a peculiar context of labor relations expression, digital platforms of work intermediation have also been presented as a fertile ground for the capital expansion on the possibilities of production, circulation and appropriation of value. Transforming the so-called micro-entrepreneurs into actors subordinate to the platforms, Computer Science professionals into producers of relentless algorithms in the control of social behavior and consumers into necessary actors for the management of productive quality and the provision of data, it is established a tangle of mediations that obscure the new conformations of the working class. In this scenario, the work Uberization movement, understood as representative of the expansion of work organization modes that follow the molds of the Uber company, lacks scientific analyzes that aim at apprehending the real, embracing the contradictions engendered by the virtualization of work relations. Seen by many as part of the Sharing Economy and, by others, as a misrepresentation of it, Uberization does not reveal all the elements necessary for its apprehension. The emergence of this phenomenon is in line with its engendering to the metamorphoses of the capitalist system, with its computational technologies of work organization and recent ways of appropriating the productive forces arising from on-line social interaction. Starting from the Marxian categories of the Critique of Political Economy, this research aims to apprehend the roles assumed by the constituent actors of the phenomenon analyzed and its historical determinants, contributing with the theoretical bases for the defense of the following thesis: the Uberization of work is constituted as a synthesis of the subsumption of the scientific worker, the uberized worker and the active consumer to the process of production and private appropriation of value, being part of a movement for the rearticulation of capital that is a product and producer of new network sociability. Starting from a science based on dialectical historical materialism, the present investigation articulates appearance and essence, particularities and totality, objective and subjective aspects.