É possível uma esteira não taylorista? Sobre a forma social da tecnologia - o projeto de uma esteira de triagem de materiais recicláveis

Abstract

Everything that is created within capitalist social relations seems to be marked with the seal of capital's domination over work, including technologies. The challenge for engineers, architects and designers engaged in building alternatives to this mode of production is to intervene in technical design processes without reproducing the domination of men and nature. There is a long debate about the nature of capitalist technology, in the search to point out different ways to build a suitable material base for an emancipated society and cooperative production practices. In current debates on the perspective of “social technology”, the critique of technology as a form of domination occupies a central place among these authors, who reject the neutrality of technology, a classic view that is predominant among specialists. To contribute to this debate, we analysed the case of a waste pickers’ cooperative, from Belo Horizonte, which inserted a conveyor belt in its sorting process. The power of gears to impose the cadence and intensify the work rhythm was the way in which the appropriation of this instrument was historically observed from the advent of Taylorism. Doesn't it seem counterintuitive to adopt this device in a cooperative system that aims at the emancipation of workers? But wouldn’t Ford's principle (1925), that "no worker needs to carry or lift anything", since "this is part of a distinct service - the transportation service", which boosted the consolidation of the assembly line, be interesting to organize a productive system that aims to emancipate workers, or at least alleviate their daily toil, by facilitating work and eliminating physically degrading tasks? So what would differentiate a conveyor from a “mechanical whip”? Would a non-Taylorist conveyor belt be possible? This is the central question of this thesis.