The crisis of work in the speeches of portuguese public universities

an epistemology of the smuggler in the society of knowledge

Abstract

This paper reflects how the labor crisis expresses on discourses from Portuguese public universities. The structural crisis of Fordism-Keynesianism, started on 1970’s, generate a set of economic and social shifts. These changes are defined as economic adjustments, but simultaneously deepen the essential contradictions on capital-labor relation in the society. On this context, emerges the hegemonic discourse that attributes a central role to the knowledge in the economic development in our society, reducing the knowledge statute to one instrument, whose value is defined by its utility in productive systems. The analysis on Action Programs of three Portuguese public universities, moved us to identify the emergence of a paradigm of higher education which seeks to adapt the institutions to the determinations of the global process of economic flexibilization. This allowed us to identify that this paradigm is funded on one evolutive and positive perspective of science, which - based in a successive perspective of time - assumes the de development as one positive and evolutive process. In this conception, the immanent contradictions of the capitalist development became surmountable by the mere scientific development instead of the critic of its own scientific premises. In this regard, we propose the assumption of an “smuggler” scientific paradigm which would allow the scientific reflection to move from the contradictions of the relation between labor and the scientific knowledge by paths that subvert the limits of the capitalist forms of social dominations, whom the positive science never was effectively able to criticize.