O conflito fáustico: os paradoxos do weberianismo lockiano

Abstract

This work aims to analyze the consequences of the application of neoliberal governmentality, with the "democratization of the capital". Classics such as Tocqueville, Marx, Simmel, Weber and Foucault investigated, in their works, the paradoxical dynamics of modernity and classical liberalism. Individual powerlessness, alienation and reification, the loss of the meaning of life, irrational rationality of capitalism and the increase of the State’s disciplinary power, are privileged matters. Neoliberalism theorists, in the idealization of neoliberal governmentality, seek to renovate liberalism in order to scape these paradoxes. Workers should not be seen as commodities, but as human capital. The relation capital/labor is transformed in relation capital/capital, in which the workers must be economically active subjects. In this sense, we aim to proceed with a conceptual characterization of this new governmentality, which we call lockean weberianism, and to examine some of the social, economical and political transformations derived from this moviment and some of its paroxes. The changes in the sense of work, the emergence of mechanisms such as microcredit, the access to education by credit and the Sharing Economy, constitute a scenario of disseminated objective and subjective responsibilities formerly restricted to the great capitalists, here demominated as displacement of the faustian conflict. We will perform an analysis of the dynamics of Uber's drivers work at Rio de Janeiro based on interviews as qualitative method. In addition, some theoretical consequences of this economic expansion for the State, democracy and politics per se ‒ manifested in works of political theory that advocate the end of democracy and the overcoming of political engagements, with the widening of the distances between political freedom and economic freedom ‒ will be evaluated.