O tempo de trabalho: Uma chave analítica

Abstract

The working time is a central concept to the Marxist analysis of capitalist society. From Karl Marx to the present day, the discussion on the reduction of working time has been developed by several interpretations. Among them is one that points to the gradual reduction of working time. Progressive, this case is not understood on the basis of its own contradiction, in other words, as a need of capital for their valorization, but as a process of progressive reduction of working time that, ultimately, put the capital relation in check. Based on this interpretation, the trend of reduction of working time would announce the extinction of capitalist relations of production. We would, therefore, faced with a perspective that is grounded in a social automatism and therefore assumes the end of capitalism in a deterministic way. Returning to the more central implications that the restructuring process, called toyotist, has provided, especially those relating to the massive replacement of workers by informational technology and microelectronic, this article aims to revisit the notion of working time, trying thereby to demonstrate the fragility of the thesis that assumes a structural breakdown of capitalist society as the result of an automatic internal movement of capital reproduction. We conclude that these theories in practice mystify the centrality of class struggle, first as a determinant element of the constitution of capitalist productive forces, and second, as an overcoming element for the subordination of labor to capital.