Ruptures of the neoliberal order: critique of individualism, political atomization and identity polarization

Abstract

Neoliberalism understood as an order of material production and social reproduction affected the world of work and consequently all human relations within the society in which work is inserted, withering the concept of class. This article seeks to understand the current political and institutional situation in order to investigate the neoliberal subjectivities hidden within the social struggles that permeate contemporary democracies. From this purpose, it was discovered that the dissolution of historical references that built workers as collective subjects, as a class, takes place through a process of constant deterritorialization, in which traditional subjectivations lost strength, without being replaced by other forms social cohesion. Atomized workers, guided by the overvaluation of the self and polarized by digital networks and walls, gave form to a new social ethos resulting from a depoliticized and passive (merely consuming) culture. The production of this diagnosis had two more detailed analyzes: the first consisted of analyzing the waves of feminist movements in the midst of neoliberal subjectivation. The second was to study what happened in Brazilian democracy after the 2013 demonstrations, when digital masses and their new identification economy emerged. Therefore, the transformations that have altered the dynamics of the contemporary political sphere are the main issues of this article. The prognosis reached was to recognize that the digital masses have made their own identity a fetish of immaterial capitalism, removing the ethical sense of politics or, still, confusing it with competition. This critical perspective allowed to defend in a transparent and forceful way that social relations are due to plural intersubjective constructions and at the same time mutually recognized among individuals in a political community.