NEOLIBERAL OPPORTUNISM OF 2020 PANDEMIC: the new morphology of education and the overexploitation of teacher’s labor

The history of the second decade of the 21st century, marked by the contamination of the world population by Covid-19, has registered a global humanitarian and economic crisis and has explained the unsustainability of capitalism. This text aims to discuss the precariousness of public health policies and the trivialization of distance education during the pandemic. In Brazilian public education, the opportunism of Jair Bolsonaro genocidal State, and his state executives, has intensified the teaching labor by improvising remote work in the students teaching process during the containment of the virus in the country by social isolation. The theoretical-methodological construction of the thematic is based on historical and dialectical materialism and highlights the centrality of labor as an axis to understand the society. The marxian and marxist categories contextualize the contradictions of capital in pandemic territorialization. The expressions distance education, remote, digital, online, Information and Communication Technologies’ (ICTs) and congener were approximated as a resource to the limitation of the education improvised modality discussed in this text. In synthesis, in the analysis of this global crisis, some assumptions are highlighted, which warn about the unsustainability of the Nano State necromodel, show that the advance of the distance neo-learning represents the subsumption of teachers and families in the precarious process of teaching and learning, what reverberates in the configuration of a new morphology of Brazilian education. Finally, Covid-19 engenders, in collusion with the uncertainties of the world crisis consequences, the advance of a new labor sociability in education and accumulation based on overexploitation of teaching labor.

Key-words: Covid-19. Remote teaching. Work. Neo-teaching. Necrocapitalism.

la nueva morfología de la educación y la superexplotación del trabajo docente

En la historia de la segunda década del siglo XXI, marcada por el contagio de la población mundial por el Covid-19, se registró una crisis humanitaria y económica global, y se explicitó la insostenibilidad del capitalismo. Discutir la precariedad de las políticas de salud pública y la banalización de la educación a distancia durante la pandemia, es el objetivo de este texto. En la educación pública brasileña, el oportunismo del Estado genocida de Jair Bolsonaro y de sus gobernantes estatales intensificó el trabajo docente, con la improvisación del trabajo remoto durante el aislamiento social. La construcción teórica y metodológica de la temática está pautada en el materialismo histórico y dialéctico, y señala la centralidad del trabajo como eje para comprender la sociedad. Las categorías marxianas y marxistas contextualizan las contradicciones del capital en la territorialización pandémica. Las expresiones educación a distancia, remota, digital, en línea y congéneres se han sido acercadas como recurso para la limitación de la modalidad improvisada de educación problematizada en este texto. En el análisis de esa crisis global se señalan algunos presupuestos, los cuales alertan sobre la insostenibilidad del necromodelo del Estado Nano y revelan que el avance de la “nueva enseñanza” a distancia produce la configuración de una nueva morfología de la educación brasileña. En fin, en la historia del presente, el Covid-19, coludiendo con las incertidumbres de las ramificaciones de la crisis mundial, engendra el avance de una nueva sociabilidad del trabajo en educación y acumulación privada de la superexplotación docente.

Palabras clave: Covid-19. Enseñanza remota. Trabajo. Nueva enseñanza. Necrocapitalismo.

A história da segunda década do século XXI, marcada pela contaminação da população mundial pela Covid-19, registrou uma crise humanitária e econômica global e explicitou a insustentabilidade do capitalismo. Discutir a precariedade das políticas públicas de saúde e da banalização da educação a distância durante a pandemia é objetivo deste texto. Na educação pública brasileira, o oportunismo do Estado genocida de Jair Bolsonaro e de seus executivos estaduais intensificou o trabalho docente, improvisando o trabalho remoto no processo de ensino dos alunos durante a contenção do vírus no país pelo isolamento social. A construção teórico-metodológica da temática está pautada no materialismo histórico e dialético e destaca a centralidade do trabalho como eixo de compreensão da sociedade. As categorias marxianas e marxistas contextualizam as contradições do capital na territorialização pandêmica. As expressões educação a distância, remota, digital, online, Tecnologias da Informação e Comunicação (TICs) e congêneres foram aproximadas como recurso à limitação da modalidade improvisada de educação problematizada neste texto. Em síntese, na análise dessa crise global são destacados alguns pressupostos, os quais alertam sobre a insustentabilidade do necromodelo do Estado Nano, revelam que o avanço do neoensino a distância representa a subsunção dos professores e das famílias no processo de precarização do ensino-aprendizagem, o que reverbera na configuração de uma nova morfologia da educação brasileira. Enfim, na história do tempo presente a Covid-19 engendra, em conluio com as incertezas dos desdobramentos da crise mundial, o avanço de uma nova sociabilidade do trabalho na educação e acumulação privada da superexploração docente.

Palavras-chave: Covid-19. Ensino remoto. Trabalho. Neoensino. Necrocapitalismo

Introduction
Given the history of humanity's present time, it is not redundant to highlight debates about the set conditions which triggered the event that caused, in the second decade of the 21st century, a major humanitarian and economic crisis on a global level. A pandemic (from the Greek pan = all and demos = people), which primary epicenter occurred on the Asian continent in the interior of China, affecting the economic projections of the most remote places on the planet and directly transforming the most everyday and elementary relations of basically all the national territories. We’re addressing to the global spread of the new Corona virus (from the Latin corõna = crown), which causes the highly contagious disease called Covid-19.

The name given to this disease is an association of abbreviations for the words corona (Co), virus (vi) and disease (d) given by the World Health Organization (WHO) to a pathology discovered in 2019 (19). Covid-19 is characterized by a type of virus in the corona family which causes a severe acute respiratory syndrome (sars), similar to the epidemic that occurred in 2002 also in China. The 2020 pandemic was caused by the Sars-cov-2 virus, according to the WHO. The alphanumeric classification Sars-cov-2 is a standard international nomenclature used to characterize the second outbreak of sars caused by the coronavirus (cov) which marked the cycle of serious worldwide pathology in the first two decades of the 21st century (DANTAS, 2020; TESINI, 2020). For this purpose, in this text we will use the expressions new coronavirus, Covid-19 and pandemic not as synonyms, but as a delimitation of the object to problematize the theme.

As stated by the former Minister of Health in the fight against the pandemic, the crisis that Brazil faces in 2020 has a name and surname: Covid-19. The Decree published in the extra edition of the Official Gazette of Union (Diário Oficial da União) on April 16, 2020, 73-A, section 2, page 1, Deputy Luiz Henrique Mandetta (Democratic Party - DEM) present in the government since 2018 was dismissed¹ from the post of Minister of Health in the full rise of the virus throughout the country. His stay in the Ministry was unsustainable due to the negationist stance of the Republic President, Jair Bolsonaro (no party), in relation to scientific evidence about the disease and contrary to WHO recommendations. During a press conference on April 6 this year, the former minister used the expression “enemy” in an attempt to minimize the crisis established between the Ministry of Health and the Presidency as well as using it as an excuse for the controversial attitudes of the chief executive in the struggle against the disease.

The President, in alignment to necropolitical² interests and privileging the market over life, made explicit criticisms of social isolation as a method to contain the contamination. Furthermore, the chief executive minimized the effects of going back to school and neglected the fact that schools concentrate part of the population considered a vector of the virus (children and teenagers), incited disobedience to sanitary conduct to prevent the spread of the Sars-cov-2 virus, without the adequate preparation of Public Health System (Sistema Único de Saúde – SUS) in Brazil to receive all patients cases. In a genocidal stance, the President exposed the population health’s to risk when he was out on several times on the streets, during the ascending phase of contamination by the Covid-19 virus (LEHER, 2020; APÓS [...], 2020).

In order to problematize the contemporary theme, we borrowed the term ‘history of the present time’ as a methodological resource to delimit the repercussion of the history lived by Brazilian society, after the globalization of the disease that emerged in China at the end of 2019. According to Delgado e Ferreira (2013, p. 25), for being a unique scientific field, the history of the present time is characterized by being continually rewritten, given the dynamics of the event that still takes place in the presence of its living historical sources and therefore we justify its use as a methodological input. This way, the present time is susceptible to changes in its course according to the subjects' actions and the intentions of the sources and also includes different dimensions, such as:

[...] historical process marked by experiences that are still alive, with short-term tensions and repercussions; a provisional sense of time, with a symbiosis between memory and history; historical subjects still alive and active; production of historical sources inserted in the ongoing transformation processes; temporality in a course close to or adjacent to the research. (DELGADO; FERREIRA, 2013, p. 25).^*

For that matter, ongoing history has shown that in a few months the pandemic has been provoking intense transformations in world political and economic relations, altering the productive dynamics of countries, causing new forms of sociability on the planet and revealing the unsustainable character of the current phase of capitalism. In Brazil, the new coronavirus amplified the disastrous consequences of the minimal state implemented by Fernando Henrique Cardoso in 1995 with the Master Plan for State Reform³.

We are guided by historical and dialectical materialism for the reflexive construction of this theme. The theoretical and methodological framework is made explicit throughout the text through founding categories of this epistemology, such as: alienation, causality, concrete thought, contradiction, dialectics, class struggle, more value, means of production, merchandise, objectification, previous ideation, segregation, subsumption, overexploitation, among others. We highlight the work centrality as an axis of our society’s understanding. Using categories supports our arguments and contextualizes the explicit contradictions in the territorialization of the pandemic in the composition of the necro-state and, therefore, we do not intend to go deeper into them epistemologically.

It is also important to highlight that the expressions distance, remote, digital, online, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and similars, referring to education, will be used in the text merely as a facilitating resource for limiting the improvised modality of education⁴ problematized in this text. For discussing the precariousness of teaching work, the overexploitation of work through technology that substitutes live work and the use of the family's unpaid workforce in the formal educational process and, thus, education in the pandemic producing more value, we justify that the discussion presented here is in line with the reflections of State, Democracy and Education Research Group (Grupo de Pesquisa Estado, Democracia e Educação - GPEDE), research line Labor, Society and Education (Trabalho, Sociedade e Educação - LPTSE) of the Graduate Program, Faculty of Education, in Federal University of Uberlândia (Programa de Pós-Graduação da Faculdade de Educação da Universidade Federal de Uberlândia - PPGED/FACED/UFU).

Therefore, and with the theoretical-methodological contribution, this text aims to contextualize how the global disease Covid-19 is territorialized in Brazil, in the midst of the dismantling of social rights the precariousness of free and quality public education indicate the configuration of a new morphology of work and the teaching-learning process in the history of time. In this sense, we attempt to carefully discuss the hasty implementation of remote education as an important tool to facilitate neoliberal interests and to make the modality a driving force for preventive counterrevolution (FERNANDES, 1975) and maintenance of the hegemonic class’ interests.

From its discovery in November 2019 in Wuhan, China to the WHO declaration on March 11, 2020, in which the spread of contamination across Chinese borders was considered as a global epidemic, the geopolitical and geoeconomic relations of the main productive centers of capitalism and the remote cities of peripheral countries have been living in a crisis of incalculable proportions that denounces the contradictions of the hegemonic mode of production on a global scale.

Contradictorily, People’s Republic of China, birthplace of the Covid-19 pandemic, with its effective and efficient public policies of isolation, converted the advance of the disease in the interior of the country into stabilization of the contagion process. The communist government’s investment in Science and Technology and in education and health was able to contain the impacts of the disease in Chinese territory. Its robotic industrial park was prepared to face the sanitary-economic-social crisis and production to serve the internal market. Besides, China stands out as a supplier of medical products to contain the disease in the world (YOSHIDA et al, 2020). This fact reveals an escape from the uplift of the stability and strengthening of the Chinese economy in the midst of the global humanitarian catastrophe and the growing fear of the capitalist powers in relation to the loss of economic hegemony, especially the United States, main opponent in the world trade war.

Planetary contagion is closely linked to international travel of different interests, carried out by thousands of people through air and sea service companies, such as: tourist travel; freight transport; production and dissemination of scientific and academic research; sports championships and similar; health care in more modern hospital centers, etc. However, the most representative flows of these trips are those intrinsic to the International Labor Division (Divisão Internacional do Trabalho - DIT) such as: political and commercial agreements between countries; financial transactions of commercial interests between corporations; the transport of goods, especially primary products from peripheral countries to the wealthiest countries and the transport of industrialized/processed/high-tech goods from the capitalist powers to the economic peripheries, and the latter is indispensable for unequal, contradictory and combined capitalism as Ianni (1998) teaches us, or as dependent economic treated by Marini (1973) in his thesis on the Dialectic of Dependency.

In addition to this systemic origin of the geographical dynamics of contamination, the pandemic is exposing the necrotic character of the Minimum State, or rather, the ‘Nano State’⁵ , based on neoliberal policies of the last thirty years. We use the neologism ‘Nano State’ because it is the expression that most aggregates the characteristics of extreme decrease in the presence of State in public service sectors, in regards to the essential rights to life and in the regulation of economic activities in the countries.

At the most neoliberal stage of globalized society essential rights to guarantee human dignity such as health care, food, security and education have become commodities. Taking into account the recommendations of supranational organizations that regulate social policies and financial capitalism in the world for example: Inter-American Development Bank (Banco Interamericano do Desenvolvimento – BID); World Bank (Banco Mundial – BM); Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (Comissão Econômica para a América Latina e o Caribe – CEPAL); International Monetary Fund – IMF; Organization for Economic Development Cooperation – OECD; European Union – EU; United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization – UNESCO, among others; the health and social assistance systems were transferred to the private initiative and became commodities, in which consumer right is limited to the public that has financial conditions to buy them based on the exchange value in the commodity x money ratio. Since in capitalism the division of social classes is a milestone, the bourgeois class remained accessing the best quality services (ANTUNES, 2018; FREITAS, 2018).

The collapse in health systems in Old World countries, due to the lack of adequate structure to meet the demand of those infected by the disease, associated with the delayed decision-making of world leaders in containing the pandemic in their territories demonstrates the prioritization of profits at the expense of lives, in this serious moment of global health crisis. Globalized contagion shows that the foundations of neoliberalism are crumbling, but not by social resistance movements, not by the actions of left-wing political thought around the world, not by the dome created by financial capitalism. The economy prevailing over lives is collapsing due to the power of the invisible nature that sought a host, the humanity, to multiply. The relationship between man and nature, so contained in the analysis of Geographic Science, demonstrates that the advancement of the technical scientific information in the context of globalization (SANTOS, 1996) or the informational-digital universe (ANTUNES, 2018) was not immune to the force of nature on human life on Earth. This force ended up dictating a new human behavior on a planetary level. In this sense, destroying nature in a catastrophic and virulent manner constitutes a maxim in which man is in last place.

The pathogen multiplied its army on an exponential scale, occupying the bodies that constitute the different social classes: workers, productive force that moves the means of production and the political / economic elite of the capitalist world, both classes were held hostage by the unknown and unpredictable biological agent. The State, facing the crisis, assumed the onus of genocidal neoliberal privatizations that did not guarantee the social welfare of the population. National governments are now encountering a reality in which private science and technology has not invested in the production of reserve sui generes equipment for humanitarian catastrophes such as the pandemic.

In the meantime, few countries have prepared to face the crisis⁶. Among the actions in the European continent we highlight Germany. This country invested in a billion dollar package to save the population from the crisis⁷. In Asia, China continued to strengthen its technological and economic hegemony and to increase the dependence of other countries on its production, especially related to health. Unlike these countries, with Covid-19 the other nations reaped the effect of the petty bourgeois reality, whose market and industrial parks have always been concerned with meeting the fetish of goods and these are alien to the true human needs (MARX, 2017).

Aggravating the crisis in Brazil, the return to barbarism feared by Adorno (2013) resurfaces in the speeches of the fascist government led by President Bolsonaro, urging workers to return to their posts so that the productive cycle of capital does not cease, even if it costs the lives of workers or the lives of their families. It is predicted that, due to the precariousness of the Brazilian public health system, the premature return to work activities that bring people together will reverberate in chaos, even worse, if these people are infected with the new virus.

Barbarism is also reflecting in the slowness and even in the absence of the State to minimize the social impacts caused by the necessity for social isolation to restrain the contamination by the coronavirus. In the present time of the pandemic, students and low-income families are isolated in their homes in adverse situations. Low-income children and teenagers deprived of daily school meals and subjected to remote precarious education. Parents and guardians deprived of precarious jobs, at the mercy of the lack of efficient public assistance and preventive policy for the maintenance of human dignity.

According to Adorno (2003) barbarism will exist as long as the conditions that generate this regression are fundamental. These conditions can range from the psychological conditions latent in possible executioners or even conditions of “no commitment” of those who should ensure that the world and people are better. In this sense, the State and its respective Education Departments have intensified the naturalized conflicts in teaching. Stress, mental exhaustion, feeling of professional incompetence, responsibility to teachers in their continuing education and in service due to the transfiguration of the residence in a permanent classroom or in a secretary, added up to the fear of the new villain of the 21^st illness - Covid-19 - and to many other aspects that denounce the devaluation and precariousness of teaching work.

The pressure to return to work, the perverse slowness of the State in emergency social policies, the accountability of teachers and family for the result of education in the coming months and
the illness caused by the improvised teaching modality exemplify the dialectic of the present time and contextualize Ribeiro's synthesis (2018, p. 24) that in capitalism

[…] the human, the common people, workers are seen as a mere labor force, destined to be wasted in production […] wearable energy mass, a human coal that burns in production ”that is intended to be consumed and disposed of.

The trivialization of distance education, opportunely embraced by the Neoliberal State, occurs at the expense of “disanthropomorphization” ⁸ of teaching, that is, in the depersonification of the teaching and student social work in the production of knowledge. The absence of physical contact in the teaching-learning process and the overload of dead work for the subjects involved in this educational model are transformed into more value for the State itself and specially by knowledge owners (large corporations or individualized agents) that produced the algorithms as a driving force for digital remote education platforms, or ‘dead teaching’⁹.

In Brazil, a few days after the disclosure of the first cases of people infected by the virus heated up the political crises between the different spheres of power and the debate between saving lives or saving profit divided the opinion of different segments of civil society.

With the suspension of classes in person as a strategy to contain the transmission of the virus in society, both in schools in the most dynamic population centers and in the most remote cities in the interior of Brazil, the recommendation of social isolation triggered a discussion about the teachers’ role relevance in the educational process and the irrevocable necessity of qualified training for distance learning platforms users. As a reflex, specialists in Education, specifically those devoted to Distance Learning (Ensino a Distância – EAD), as a teaching modality, therefore endowed with its own curriculum and its own epistemologies, started to criticize this ‘neo-teaching’ at a distance, based only on the subjects ’ability to feed virtual environments with school tasks.

The unusual situation of mass confinement as a health control strategy has aroused in Brazilian society the discussion on the respective social division of labor in the different productive spaces of capitalist society, especially in homes that have suddenly changed their daily dynamics. The debate of who should stay at home and who should go out to continue exposing their only productive asset - the workforce- invades conversations on social networks (free space for virtual gathering of people) and reveals the alienated condition of the oppressed proletariat, resulting in something that is extremely vital for the hegemonic class: the class division within the same workers class ((LESSA; TONET, 2011).

Adding up to this conflict in the class, other social inclemencies also outbroke within family nuclei during the period of global exceptionality. Parents and guardians, especially grandmothers and mothers, assumed cumulatively more social roles. Working women - mothers, caregivers, cooks, laundresses and domestic chores in the endless functions of the home - acquired their fourth role work: educational tutor.

Instituted distance education, at a hurried glance¹⁰ by education departments, without planning and without the teachers’ and school community’s consent, has caused a real educational counterrevolution in our country. Families, especially mothers away from their jobs, were responsible for tutoring their school-aged children in order to comply with the program content provided in the school curriculum and in the internal and external assessments that manage students' academic performance.

The result of technological improvisation will be the responsibility of teachers and families for the precariousness of teaching and for the lack of zeal in the productive performance of students' learning at home. This performance is materialized in external, standardized assessments, which taxonomize the domain of minimum content. Such assessments are objectified by education quality control policies, such as Basic Education Development Index (Índice de Desenvolvimento da Educação Básica - IDEB), in line with the interests of international agencies (IDB; BM; ECLAC; IMF; OECD; EU; UNESCO; and others) and civil society represented by companies that, since the Todos pela Educação Movement in 2007¹¹ targeted the educational sector as a field of exploration in the consumer and financial markets (SAVIANI, 2007).

According to Fernandes (1975), the counterrevolution is revealed when State’s actions serve private purposes and are not intended to guarantee or protect education as a right, but as a service, dedicating to the permanence of capitalist desires. Thus, online education and individualized work without the decision of the school community favors social demobilization in times of pandemic tension and strengthens the undermining of the education’s revolutionary character that could attack the society’s conservative interests.

In line with the OECD (2020) checklist which guides countries to take action on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on education, especially basic education, educational authorities across Brazil quickly adapted strategies to keep school activities productive during the spread of the disease in the country. According to OCDE (2020, p.07): "Educational leaders must take a proactive approach in order to mitigate the impact of the Pandemic and prevent learning loss during the period of necessary social distancing".

In Brazil, mild decision-making based on the checklist comes into conflict against a contradictory fact: access to ICTs depends on the families’ socioeconomic conditions. According to 2018 data from the Regional Center for Studies for the Development of the Information Society (Centro Regional de Estudos para o Desenvolvimento da Sociedade da Informação - CETIC), the lower the family's income, the less use of different electronic equipment to access the internet: "Among the population with a family income of up to 1 minimum wage, the exclusive use of cell phones reaches 78% of users, with 19% using computers and cell phones." (LAVADO, 2019).

Research by CETIC (2018) reveals that 30% of the Brazilian population has neither access to computers nor internet. So it’s relevant to draw attention to what looks like a privilege, in the pseudo access to technological democratization and the informational world, it's actually digital segregation, a spectrum of the capitalist society’s class struggle. While poor children study exclusively and poorly in equipment inappropriate for quality interactivity, rich children follow opposite paths. Not to mention that digital segregation and access to remote education are debased when the conditions on the quality of data services (broadband, 3G and 4G internet etc.) to which the student has access are verified.

This model of education suggested by the international body, that prioritizes the family and school relationship in the children's learning process, would be less tragic if all those responsible for the children at home had mastery of school knowledge for school tasks, digitally proposed by teachers through remote teaching platforms. Bearing in mind that in Brazil, children in social isolation especially from public schools, historically deprived of effective public policies, are instructed by their parents who have difficulties to read, understand and interpret a simple statement of a question focused on the elementary education of the initial grades. This can be deduced because, according to data from 2018 from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística - IBGE) the majority population that constitutes the less affluent working class, over 25 years old, has only completed elementary school or similar, or are functionally illiterate. According to IBGE

[...] in 2018, 48.1% of the population aged 25 or over was concentrated in levels of education up to complete elementary school or equivalent; 27% had completed high school or equivalent; and 16.5%, university education (IBGE, 2018).

In figure 1, observing the columns of the graph classified as uneducated, incomplete elementary, complete elementary and incomplete high school, we conclude that more than 52% of the population has not completed basic education.

Figure 1 - Official IBGE data on the level of Brazilian education aged 25 or over (2018).

The data in the graph justifies our criticism regarding to the relevance of technology-mediated education in the pandemic period and on the possibilities of this home education model to achieve success in the process of learning the content provided for in school curricula of basic education, especially in elementary and early childhood education.

This teaching process injected into the school-age population, far from a technological leap in education for the future, materializes the subsumed way of teaching with the help of smartphones and creates a gap between education and social transformation. The thoughtless use of this tool and digital platforms adopted from top to bottom by government officials and substitutes for classroom teaching activities, in times of 'Nano State', the real purpose manifests: keeping the school calendar productive and the scarce financial resource pre-determined in the State budget untouchable.

This educational misfortune broadens the role of the State in denying education as a constitutional right and constitutes the emancipatory political regression that school education could and should produce in society. This change in which students and teachers, through education, could transform the capitalist society into a new society based on the equality and emancipation of the subjects. In this sense, the proposition of a distance education, especially to the basic education public, demonstrates the contradiction between the Brazilian State’s discourse and government decrees for compulsory adherence to teacher’s digital work. According to Educa IBGE, the State's objective for Brazilian education is:

Access to quality education is a fundamental right for the citizenship development and expansion of democracy. Public investments in education are extremely important for the reduction of poverty, crime and expansion of economic growth, well-being and population’s access to fundamental rights. (IBGE, 2018)

In a few weeks we realized that the project to make teaching activities more flexible and the formative processes of basic education in public schools are gradually moving towards a new morphology of society: toyotista. For Lucena (2004, p. 111-112)

The essential point of Toyotism is the flexibility of the productive apparatus and workers' rights. This system is structured by a minimum number of workers, [...] who sell their workforce in precarious conditions. […]These are working hours in which the vital forces of the workers are exhausted to the limit.[…] This increase in the pace and hours of work points to productivity gains that are not proportionally transferred to wages […].

In the specific case of this classroom model on digital platforms, teachers and families expand the possibility of reducing investment in education and, therefore, expanding the economic efficiency of the model. The teacher at home carefully plans, researches, accesses platforms on a daily basis without receiving those extra-hours, while parents / guardians oversee the activities of students without the minimum training investment from the State. The family's performance in this historic moment of the pandemic represents the most effective work exploitation because it is not paid, on the contrary. The family had the onus of being instrumentalized with pedagogical resources at home and became an efficient prototype in the state's exemption process in promoting education.

Taking on such tasks without rebelling against the remote education model, teachers and family open the door to further precarious quality of student learning. The blackboard now becomes, for the student, the electronic equipment screen, mainly smartphones, in which teachers send their daily activities through digital platforms available on the internet, or by social media groups, to be read and copied. In the case of basic education, this new morphology of teaching work is leading to an even more precarious process in the children’s education regarding access to curricular content. Parents and/or guardians of these students are replacing, in a subsumed way, the teacher’s pedagogical performance in the classroom, with the tutoring of the technical reproduction of school tasks.

The new morphology of work in the 21st century is characterized by a generation of men and women who, in the struggle for survival, reifies its condition of productive force to the overexploitation of work, according to the concept of Marini (1973), increasing their productive capacity with the least possible wage of their time spent on the task. According to Marx (2017), this is associated to the exploitation of the most value and exponential increase in the profit of the owners of the means of production. For further analysis on this text, the most value is in the exploitation of teaching in remote work, in residence, bearing own resources with all the technological instruments to access the digital platforms and carry out the teaching work. Associated with this, the tutoring of parents and guardians makes the State's divestment in the quality of education even more striking and reinforces, at present, that education is not a priority.

Subsumed teachers are facing the loss of teaching work’s meaning and importance of teaching practice as an emancipatory political practice proposed by Saviani (2011). By assuming digital platforms as a teaching space, the teaching category is subsuming to hegemonic interests in dividing society between the educated and the intellectuals.

Taking advantage of the Pandemic and, therefore, the students’ mass confinement in new educational levels in Brazil, owners of algorithm technologies that for a while have already made digital tools available on the World Wide Web as a teaching tool, are accelerating the process of replacing the teacher's productive work. This school’s invisibility substitute as a locus of learning and sociability among the subjects, a process that is extended to all Brazilian states, is taking great steps to realize the neoliberal interest of 'Nano State', which is to make the right to public education, free and of quality, of little value, in a depreciated object. Education is transformed into a deformed commodity that offers real risks to the subject’s formation who is the consumer. The risk lies in the acquisition of a strangled knowledge and the absence of a mediating didactic that makes the student able to reflect and problematize the immediate reality in which they are living, and, thus, reach the synthesis of the concrete reality thought. In this context, the alienation of the individual is the latent result of class society, dominated by the hegemonic way of the new / old bourgeoisie in Brazil.

In consensus with Marxian ideas, we realize that precarious education, and to serve the market as a prior ideation of capitalist thoughts in countries with agro-export economies like Brazil, strengthen with causality, the pandemic. Education, due to causality, is delivered to the market in an accelerated manner and without the democratic participation of educational institutions, according to the interests of the ‘Nano State’. The objectification by neoliberal capitalism, the reduction of State spending on education, gradually takes effect as the necessity to save lives extends with the extension of the days of social isolation.

In other words, the idea that is objectified becomes an object. The new object becomes part of causality, and begins suffering influences and to influence the reality’s evolution of which it is part. In doing so, it is subjected to a list of causes and effects that boost its evolution with autonomy facing the consciousness that idealized it (LESSA; TONET, 2011, p. 31).

Another risk that is enhanced in this improvised model of education through digital platforms is in the State’s and market’s ominous strategy in blaming teachers for not promoting quality education. The platforms are the management of teaching process and work materialization. With them, the productivity of the teacher's work and the contents developed are easily monitored. The digital tool thus becomes an important instrument for controlling teaching practice in order to meet the documents that guide the rights to students’ learning¹², such as the Common Base National Curriculum (Base Nacional Comum Curricular - BNCC) and respective documents prepared by the federation states for the Base’s implementation in all Brazilian schools. In this context, teaching in times of pandemic reinforces the working toyotist way for the teacher, characterized by a “rupture with the Fordist pattern and generating a way of working and living based on flexibility and precarious work.” (ANTUNES, 2018, p. 41).

According to Lucena (2004, p. 111) Toyotism, in terms of productivity gains, is based on the absence of class conflict. Based on this reflection, we can say that the necessity of social isolation for life maintenance is an appropriate tool to maintain control of individualized work and avoid sociability motivating possible criticism of the demands of the managerialist state. The use of ICTs, a fetishizing commodity, is assumed as a spectrum for the teaching modernization and the workers, sometimes enchanted by the technique, sometimes overwhelmed by work outside their main function - to mediate the teaching-learning process - do not realize that the “[...] capital places the system into operation and increases productivity. The work develops greater responsibility and versatility, increasing productivity. [...]”.

The subsumption of the category in compliance with the norms of remote work, online class, teleworking, expressions linked to improvised education and distance manifests the alienated epiphany towards technology. By accepting the remote education program without planning as an alternative for maintaining education, without the democratic consultation of teachers, and the machine as an auxiliary tool to the human intellect, we are not aware of what is being planned, that is, the reduction or replacement of human beings as mediators of the knowledge process.

Assuming, without reflection, the task of feeders for digital platforms, teachers and students are not anymore the center of the teaching-learning process and become electronic machines’ appendages that provide data to be managed by applications. In accordance with the reflections of Engels (1979) instead of the human dictates the machine’s rhythm, the machine starts to dictate more and more the productivity of the human being.

The history of the present time reveals an study object that is potentially destructive to capitalism's normalities. At the stage when society reaps the bitter fruits of the advance exploitation of man by man, the capitalist mode of production is strengthened with the development of telework / home office / remote work and its versions on different work fronts.

The teacher should not be a digital enslaved. Distance education, in its most precarious and standardized form, at the time of the greatest capitalism’s crisis after the Great Depression of 1929, finds the opportunity it needed to expand and meet the demands of the different private corporations’ interests that have made education a commodity. The world’s population contamination by the new coronavirus happens, concomitantly, with the devastating advance of productive work for unproductive work substitution, from the “introduction of the digital-informational universe” (ANTUNES, 2018, p. 27) as a work tool.

Work is a value that cannot live with a destructive logic that enriches the extreme minority of society. Popular and collective self-organization should reignite within that society, in this historic sanitary-economic-social crisis of capitalist society that, in Brazil, since 2016 with the legal-media-parliamentary coup (SAVIANI, 2018) has been characterized by a plethora of counter-revolutionary preventive public policies that are increasingly genocidal.

Compulsory confinement as a strategy to control the collapse of the public health system demonstrates how important collective action is to achieve common goals and to maintain life on Earth. The supportive stance focused on the presence of the common invisible enemy in a society divided into classes as in the Brazilian capitalist, experiences the need for changes in habits and customs of exploitation of man by man. From this experiment, we have a historical condition sine qua non for unions and collectives of different categories to checkmate the prolonged barbarism of capitalism and lay the groundwork for a new human sociability, the socialism.

The source of inspiration for this catharsis movement (SAVIANI, 2011) comes from the very history of the hegemonic and oppressive bourgeoisie that solidified as a class that held political and economic decisions in the 18th and 19th centuries. Organized against a decadent and hegemonic mode of production that oppressed it for centuries, the bourgeoisie, as a class, led the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution in Europe and overthrew the remnants of feudal society. It inaugurates, therefore, the bourgeois way of being and thinking that lasts until contemporary times (LESSA; TONET, 2011).

Thus, as the bourgeoisie built its hegemony and being the history of dynamic humanity, socially constructed by humanity, the representatives of the proletariat, including teachers, could now change the way of being capitalist (engendered by the bourgeois way of being individualistic, competitive and perverse) by the more communal way of life and without the constraints of the nefarious division of classes. At the present time, we perceive the tendency of the subjects to become increasingly individualized, maintaining the logic of social reproduction for capital. This logic, in the perspective of revolutionary thinking, can be countered by a new political sociability capable of overthrowing the strengthening of capital at the expense of human life and work.

In summary, the global event, caused by Covid-19 which deeply marks the two decades of the 21st century, allows us to highlight some assumptions: it exposes the unsustainable and dialectical imbalances in the way of producing and living under capitalism; reveals the profound crisis of this hegemonic mode of production about two centuries ago; the nature revolution against the destructive forces of its private appropriation by the capital; social isolation and home office strengthen the educational counterrevolution; emerges the domain of managing the minimum curriculum in remote teaching-learning process in the new family-school relationship; replacement of human beings as mediators of the teaching-learning process by a new logic of education, entering dead work into the domains of knowledge processes; intensifies socio-digital segregation in the educational field; exposes the incapacity and inefficiency of the Nation State and the Science and Technology Sector in meeting vital questions of society; exposes the genocidal character of the ‘Nano State’ of Jair Bolsonaro’s government, which opens the door to human barbarism and strengthens with the advance of ‘dead neoteaching’ in Brazilian education.

Anyway, not in order to conclude, the object under discussion in the history of the present time, Covid-19 engenders in collusion with the uncertainties of the world crisis unfolding, advance of a new sociability of work in education and private accumulation of teaching overexploitation.

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PAULA JUNQUEIRA DA SILVA holds a Master's degree in Geography from the Federal University of Goiás (UFG), professor at the State University of Goiás (UEG), a PhD student in the Graduate Program in Education of the Faculty of Education of the Federal University of Uberlândia (UFU), a member of the State, Democracy and Education Research Group (GPEDE).

ANTONIO BOSCO DE LIMA holds a PhD in Education from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP), a master’s degree in Education from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), professor at the Federal University of Uberlândia (UFU), coordinator of the State, Democracy and Education Research Group (GPEDE). He conducted a postdoctoral study in the area of history, philosophy and education concentration at UNICAMP, and in Theory and Fundamentals of Education, at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSC).

1 Despite the political clash with President Jair Bolsonaro during the coronavirus crisis, the former minister always defended the privatization of the Unified Health System (SUS), demonstrating

its alignment with the neoliberal project of commodification of health care. Reported in: https://www.esquerdadiario.com.br/Mandetta-defensor-da-privatizacao-do-SUS-e-demitido-por-contrariar-negacionismo-de-Bolsonaro.

2 Term by the Cameroonian philosopher and social scientist Achille Mbemb, first published in 2003 in an essay in the American magazine Public Culture. For the philosopher, necropolitics can be defined as the rationality of death in the advance of hegemonic forces. For the author, in the name of sovereignty, the State through its policies decides who lives and who dies in the society of capital.

* Information to readers: this and the subsequent direct quotes used in this text are free translations of the original text in Portuguese.

4 The expression improvised education modality was used by Freitas on April 7, 2020. Available in: https://youtu.be/NELStqkmktY .

5 The Greek expression nanos means 'dwarf'. It is used as a prefix to compose words that characterize elements of nature on a molecular scale and refers to the billionth part of a unit of measurement (x ^10–9). (JURNO, 2016).

6 According to Almeida (2020, 172 – 173): “Part of Europe experienced a collapse in the health system. Countries like Italy and Spain and France have had devastating death statistics due to lack of access to ICU beds. [...] Over the months, the new pandemic world epicenter happened to be in the USA, […]this happens in a population without a universal health system, and among the victims, a high rate of black and latin people. […]. In Latin America, the first country to collapse was Ecuador. Images of bodies on the streets and without State action […].demonstrated the countries' lack of medical structure to withstand the impact of Covid-19. In Brazil, the epidemic came at one of the most delicate moments in our democracy.”

7 About this information check in: https://brasil.elpais.com/internacional/2020-06-04/alemanha-gastara-130-bilhoes-de-euros-para-combater-crise-causada-pelo-coronavirus.html

8 Concept of Györd Lukács in the work Per l’ontologia dell’essere sociale. A cura di Alberto Scarponi, Roma: Riuniti, 1981. For further development we suggest Infranca (2014).

9 Neologism used to highlight precarious education based on the exploitation of dead labor, forged by the state's improvised educational necropolitics, in full ascendancy of contagions and deaths by Covid-19. It also typifies that the adopted strategy neglects the objective conditions of teaching in the domestic environment, such as: adequate didactic material; healthy eating; basic sanitary conditions to prevent infection by the virus; security regarding the possibility of domestic violence; etc.

10 Originally “a toque de caixa”: according to Ribeiro (2017) in Portuguese Online Dictionary the expression refers to “Running a task in an accelerated way, in a hurry; quickly, hurriedly” and its origin "refers to the hollow body of the drum, an instrument used by military chiefs to guide and command troops.".

11 Business movement that emerged in Brazil after the ‘World Conference on Education for All’, which took place in Thailand in 1990, which inaugurates the format of neoliberal education in the country.

12 Official term in BNCC documents. According to Freitas (2018) it is a contradictory concept, as it refers to the right to access some content and not the State's obligation to offer systematized and historically produced knowledge. The term aims at training the labor market and not at work as "[...] an eternal natural neecessity for mediation of the metabolism between man and nature and, therefore, human life." (MARX, 2017, p.120).