4. Emancipation by Labour

Renan Salmistraro, UNICAMP Brazil

I would like to propose a reflection on the concept of work based on the discussions that we have had with regard to employability. As was previously said, the preoccupation with employment turns unemployment into a kind of Dante's hell. We should consider that from the point of view of employability the emancipation of the working class would be from work itself. This justifies the approximation of terms like “skills” and “knowledge” in higher education.

However, in capitalism, thinking about freedom from the point of view of work is a difficult task. It is worth remembering that classical liberalism defines freedom as the absence of restrictions on the options available to individuals. I am free to do what others do not stop me from doing. This idea easily leads to a notion of freedom as a matter of choice: first to choose a university, then a field of study, then a field of action in the labour market and so on.

There is a pseudo-scientific magazine in Brazil called Exame; in June this year it published an article entitled "Brazilians leave their careers here to start from scratch abroad". The author interviewed people with careers consolidated in Brazil who have opted for employment beneath their qualifications in Europe or the United States. She attributed this decision to the current economic crisis or to the search for a better quality of life. What I found interesting in this article is how much the concept of freedom as the right of choice is petty bourgeois.

The basic assumption in exchanging a career for employment at a lower level is that "a job is just a job", that is, a differentiated form of commodity, in which we exchange time for money. In my view this movement matches the concern about employability as we assume the need for work as a condition of social life. At that point it is possible to recover the fine irony of Marx in Book I of Capital, when he says that capitalism frees the working class – then the worker can choose to find a job or starve.

In this way, emancipation through labour has the potential to obscure the real penetration of obstructions to our freedom. In other words, it is difficult to think about emancipation from the point of view of labour, especially of wage labour. If we accept that wage labour is the manifestation of lack of control of means of production by the working class, we experience a form of domination that no social organization could supply.

By this bias emancipation would then only be given collectively, aiming at a form of freedom that would emancipate us as human beings. That is, it would not only be a material guarantee, but also the condition of satisfying our senses, our need for affection, knowledge and so on. Then, if the concern with employability does not start from a critical reflection on the role of labour in capitalism, it can be limited to defining strategies for survival. That is so even for the dream job, which, under the logic of wage labour, responds to a system of oppression.

In short, my question is: how to reflect about employability without being incorporated in this system?