Economia dos setores populares e inserção social pelo trabalho: a reprodução da vida para além da norma salarial

Abstract

This thesis presents a critical analysis of the (un) connection between the foundations underlying the politics of social insertion through labor – predominantly based on the condition of the labor force commodity and regular wage earner employment – and the effective dynamics of the agents of the popular sectors. To formulate this critique, the thesis makes a theoretical and practical characterization of the popular sector's economy, in order to make explicit its peculiar dynamics. This understanding guided the analysis and statistical treatment for the sizing of this economy, and the characterization of the profile of the workers employed in it. The starting point of this analytical effort consists in the description of three typical situations, composed based on the effective practices of the agents, which illustrate scenes of life and work organization that transcend the representation of wage earner labor. Its analytical function is to highlight the social reality that one wants to understand from a theoretical point of view, from which the fundamentals underlying the politics of social insertion through work are interpellated. The thesis presents a conceptual historical view of the process of (un) commodification of the labor force in capitalism – with the institution of social rights that refer to the wage society – and to the singular historical process in which it occurred in Brazil, and particularly in Bahia, the incorporation of the workers in the capitalist order, revealing the structural character of an urban popular economy that precedes, reproduces and is rebuilt with and beyond the wage norm. The parts that compose the chapters mobilize a set of arguments in a reflexive analytical movement, which contains a ´come and go´ between the social reality represented by the model situations, the theoretical formulations, and the insertion politics. It concludes that the theoretical notions that guide the policies of social insertion through work do not capture what is unique in the social reality portrayed by "typical situations". This disconnection between theoretical categories and real dynamics keeps the work and daily life of millions of people in the dark as a hidden face of our capitalism, compelling them from the analytical point of view to the limits of social relations, consecrating the disjunction between work and citizenship. In the end, the thesis returns, methodologically and analytically, to the scenes of life, explaining the political dimension of an economy conceptual approach of the popular sectors in a transformative perspective of the citizen affirmation of work.