CAPITALISM AND HARASSMENT: A STRUCTURAL LINK

Abstract

This review presents a critical analysis of the topic addressed in the article "Productivism at Any Cost? Managerialism and Moral Harassment at the University." In light of Karl Marx's social theory, the article seeks to analyze the phenomenon of harassment in higher education institutions. Thus, rather than understanding it as an individual deviation, an ethical issue, or a management failure, the text situates it as a structural result of the relationship of capital's domination over labor. Under capitalism, harassment appears as a functional mechanism of control, fear, and pressure, ensuring productivity and the extraction of surplus value. In universities, harassment takes specific forms: productivity demands, unattainable targets, resource cuts, flexibilization of rights, and wage reductions. These conditions impose an entrepreneurial and docile profile on workers, while new government policies and measures aim to channel complaints and hold institutions accountable, without addressing the root of the problem. Even if preventive measures produce palliative effects, harassment persists and tends to intensify in times of crisis, strikes, or reforms that increase precariousness, such as the current Administrative Reform proposal. The review concludes that only the overcoming of capitalism, with the abolition of private property and the State, would allow the elimination of violence and harassment, enabling a socialist society based on the collective organization of wealth and the satisfaction of human needs.