As disputas em torno do conceito de trabalho escravo contemporâneo no Brasil sob a ótica da biopolítica

Abstract

The present research uses the theoretical contribution of the biopolitics of the philosopher Giorgio Agamben and aims to analyze the disputes around the concept of Contemporary Slave Labor (CSL) in Brazil, from the bills in progress in the National Congress that seek to modify the concept, the Ministry of Labor Ordinance nº 1129/2017 and Federal Supreme Court's judgments on the subject. The biopolitical regime in the contemporary Democratic State of Law is examined based on the conceptual discussions brought by Agamben in the Homo Sacer Project, also as the debate on the ambivalent role of human rights and the ambiguous character of their discourses, especially in view of their weakness of protection in the limit situations. The condition of CSL is reflected as a bare life produced by the rule of law, which shows the paradox of sovereignty and bare life in which the homo sacer and the umbilical relation between state of exception and the rule of law. It is also analyzed the historicallegal development of international and national documents in an attempt to unveil the strategies of the biopolitical exercise of control of the individual’s life. In this sense, the study has as hypothesis that the examination of the disputes around the concept of CSL, from the study of the aforementioned corpus, shows that the state action, instead of contributing to the eradication of the CSL, constitutes a biopolitical formula of control and maintenance of the phenomenon. Therefore, the preservation of the structure of brazilian society would be based on a biopolitical control of exclusion-inclusion of the living subject, in this case contemporary slave labor, which would consolidate bare life in contemporary society. As for the methodology, the postulates of the interpretative and qualitative paradigm in scientific research (DENZIN; LINCOLN, 2006), allied to bibliographic procedure, according to a documental research modality (REGINATO, 2017), theory of the acts of speech of Austin (1990 [1962]). Once the theoreticalmethodological path described above has been undertaken, it was found that the biopolitical regime of the CSL, initially constructed as a discursive strategy that creates subjects in a situation of vulnerability is carried out under contexts of: a) restriction of the victim's freedom; b) reiteration of sctructural inequality and c) hierarchy of human life.