Beyond a (neo)liberal rationality: microentrepreneurship and digital work platforms
Labor Plataformization; Microentrepreneurship; Informality; Neoliberalism
Given the objectively insufficient conditions in which certain groups of workers are inserted, how does the spirit of our time mobilize concepts, feelings, and values in order to justify an orderly state of affairs? Given the productive restructuring since the 1970s and the most recent frontiers of new forms of work, two groups of professionals were approached: individual microentrepreneurs and app drivers. For the purpose of this analysis, the concepts of positive and negative freedom from classical liberalism were revisited, that is, how being free translates into this dual condition of the worker who intends to achieve the autonomy to do what he wants, while understanding his material condition from the perspective of continuous interference from external actors. Furthermore, the new guises of classical liberalism also translate into a delegitimization of public spaces of dispute, that is, into a feeling of distrust of any institutionality or collective grouping. It is on this stage that neoliberalism develops as an element of justification, that is, from a movement of individual aspects such as autonomy and responsibility to the distrust of collective aspects of dispute. The various instruments of legitimation and justification that permeate the discourses of freedom, responsibility and justice are condensed into moral valuations that are elevated to the status of values of the common good. This hierarchy of values is constructed beyond a rationality restricted to aspects of cognition, given that the affects and moralities to which these workers are subjected are continually moved. Thus, when approaching workers who are subjected to new forms of management and control of working time, we analyze how the processes of justification are consolidated especially from a hierarchy of values on a scale of morality.