From discipline to necropolitics, the role of work and security in Foucault and nowadays

Abstract

The transition of the worker (European) from the Middle Ages to the Modern forced the bourgeois means of production to create ways of positivizing the culture of labour. Beyond the ideologies and misery, themselves, as promoters of the work culture, what we intend in this article is to highlight the role of social security as instruments of subjectivation and normalization, originally disciplinary; using a Foucauldian reading of the theme. We will start from how disciplinary techniques have adjusted workers' bodies to work and have fixed them with the help of pension funds, until we come to the current understanding of social security reforms and counter-reforms as a result of what has today been recognized as a necropolitics. Currently, no longer only of European workers (but global), seen as something that in the name of a biopolitics has become this ultra-defence of life. A defence that, on the edge, would justify even the death of a large part of the population. Therefore, we have the passage from biopolitics to necropolitics. And in the same order, we have the passage of a social security system which is no longer made for the aid or the fixation of the worker, but for the management of the use and disposal (death itself) of this same subject in the labour market.