O desmonte da política de assistência social: uma reflexão a partir da Emenda Constitucional n.º 95/2016

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the dismantling of the Social Assistance Policy in Brazil in the face of constant attacks on the budget of social policies that, as such, make up social security, most notably following the approval of Constitutional Amendment n.º 95/2016. Based on the Marxist perspective, using the critical dialectical method, research was carried out in bibliographic and documentary modes. The fundamental references were Marx's classic work, Capital, and contemporary authors such as José Paulo Netto, Elaine Behring and Evilásio Salvador who explain how the State intervenes in the face of current social issues and the place occupied by the public fund in capitalist dynamics in Brazil. To this end, it was necessary to understand the relationship between the State, the structural crisis of capital and neoliberalism, in order to explain how this relationship impacts the conduct of social policies today. Faced with the domination of financial capital over social relations and the intensification of the financial crisis, the State has acted decisively in implementing measures based on the guidance of multilateral organizations and through neoliberalism, where in this model there are new determinations for the State on the economic and social level, from the perspective of the minimum State, becoming increasingly restricted for work. It starts from the observation that in times of intense crisis, capital uses strategies even more sharply to mitigate its impacts, in favor of serving the private interests of capitalist accumulation, via the appropriation of public funds. The composition of the public fund, effected through surplus labor and necessary labor, has been misused in a more forceful way in moments of intensification of capitalism's contradictions, being a structuring element of the production and reproduction of capital. Since the Master Plan for the Reform of the State Apparatus, Brazil has experienced a permanent fiscal adjustment that affects the public fund, with its capture by financial capital intensified after the 2016 coup in order to directly affect the working class, through the massive dismantling of rights social. It is evident that one of the ways of dismantling social security has been through the transfer of resources, which would be intended for the operation of these policies, to pay the public debt, benefiting large national and international banks and investors. Following the approval of Constitutional Amendment 95/2016, approved by the Temer government, there is an intensification of the process of dismantling social policies, such as the Social Assistance Policy (PAS), as it proposes the freezing of social spending for twenty years. When investigating the effects of Constitutional Amendment 95/2016 on Social Assistance Policy, the research emphasizes that the constant defunding of this policy has had impacts on the functioning of the Unified Social Assistance System, intensified during the period of health crisis installed by Covid-19 and opening precedents for the unpredictability in ensuring the provision of social assistance services. It was therefore found that the defunding of PAS has hit social assistance services most notably, while income transfer programs have consumed the majority of the policy's budget. Therefore, the present study presents the main consequences of the defunding of social assistance policy and how the spending cuts imposed by fiscal adjustment favor the demands and trends of capitalist development in crisis, in Brazil, to the detriment of meeting the needs of the working class.