Tendências da assistência social brasileira sob a ofensiva social-liberal: a focalização na extrema pobreza nos governos "neodesenvolmentistas"

Abstract

This dissertation focus on the Social Assistance Policy on “neo-developmentalism” governments, seeking to identify the unraveling of concept incorporation, strategies and mechanisms of social-liberal ideal, assimilated by these governments, in order to fight extreme poverty. As a theoretical-methodologic perspective approach and object analysis, we went through the historic-dialectical materialism, considering this heuristic resource provide a critical dialectical movement of investigation and exposition, which allows seizing the study object in its determinations, contradictions and tendencies. As for technic-methodological resources, we performed a Bibliographical Research about social-liberalism – starting from its founders, in special, the Indian Amartya Sen –, which resulted in a theoretical deepening of this perspective. Then we performed a Documental Analysis of the legal milestone from Social Assistance, seeking to comprehend the implications on the uptake of social-liberal though by this Policy. Understanding that the socio-liberal project configures as an exit from the capital’s structural crisis and that, thus, answers to its interests, we identified the mechanisms incorporation which seek to assure efficiency and efficacy to PAS in the recommended shapes by the multilateral organisms – like World Bank (WB) and The United Nations Development Programme of peripheral economy (UNDP) – especially when socio- liberal concepts are incorporated such as social justice and equity, Social Vulnerability and Social Risk and, through them, (re)direct the Policy actions, in the sense of creating opportunities to develop capacities and individual strengthening whom find themselves in a vulnerable situation and/or social risk, so they are able to “autonomously” get out of this poverty condition. In this sense, we observed that the Social Assistance Policy also attribute itself of social-liberal strategies, like the centering of referenced family (prioritizing the woman as the beneficiary) and the use of monitoring and evaluation mechanisms (like “Cad Único” and the “Busca Ativa”), which promotes a true selectivity and focalization, reducing this Policy to an exclusive instrument of poverty control and management. The results of our analysis corroborates the Brazilian assistencialização (assistance) of social protection thesis and indicates that the Social Assistance Policy enlarge its functionalities to the capital, while reduced to a poverty control and management, at the same time it is engaged with the capacity to meet everyone who needs it, becoming, in fact, a depoliticization and gap instrument of class conflicts which emerge from the expressions of “social issue”