Trabalho, Educação e Saúde - TES (Work, Education and Health) is an open access scientific journal, edited by the Joaquim Venâncio Polytechnic School of Health, from Oswaldo Cruz Foundation.

On the currentness of voluntary servitude

  • Virgínia Fontes
  • Virgínia Fontes

    Professora do Programa de Pós-Graduação em História da Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF). Doutora em Filosofia pela Universidade Paris X.



Abstract

The processes of voluntary subjection seem consubstantial to the expansion of capitalism. The change that took place in the nature of property, making it mobile and flexible, under the form of money, has its counterpart in the new mobility of the workers, expropriated from the control of the productive control group and made available as a mere productive capacity. The contemporary freedom is not a mere enticement, for it expresses a long fight for the reduction of the manorial control ties, taken into effect by the peasants and by the urban workers. But it also can not be considered as an expression of actual human freedom, since it rests on forms of expropriation that, on an apparently 'natural' manner, impose to the workers their own subjection. Currently, the deepening of the of the separation that took place between the economic property and the possibilities of political intervention aggravates the conditions of this "voluntary servitude" and is being, on an almost sarcastic manner, presented as "voluntary work".

Keywords

voluntary subjection,
freedom,
capitalism,
humanity,
abstraction

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