HOMELESS IN THE ENCHANTED WORLD OF CAPITAL AND SOCIAL POLICY RESPONSES
Name: VERONICA MARTINS TIENGO
Publication date: 12/04/2023
Examining board:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| MAURICIO DE SOUZA SABADINI | Advisor |
Summary: The thesis aims to discuss who is the homeless in face of the contradictions inherent in the general law of capitalist accumulation, discussing its implications for insertion into informal work and for the responses offered by social policies aimed at these dispossessed. The object of the research is the relationship between the homeless and social policies in the context of the general law of capitalist accumulation. The proposed research problem is: How does the homeless integrate the relative overpopulation and what are the social policy responses? This is a qualitative, documental, bibliographic research, based on the historical-dialectical materialism, and semi-structured interviews were carried out. We present the expanded aspect concerning the working class, since the defense of its restriction may indicate ignorance of translation problems and taking what some versions call the working class when in reality Marx represented the working class. We discuss who the working class is today and conclude that all wage earners who do not own the means of production, including the unemployed, are part of it, since they also need to sell their labor power to maintain their own survival. We work in the thesis with the association between the proletariat and the working class, as synonyms. We discuss the homeless as part of the working class and the relative overpopulation in each of its basic forms and in pauperism, discussing also the lumpemproletariat as a category. We present the responses of social policies to the homeless, based on the "ladder model" in Latin American countries, WHERE there is wide insertion in informal work, essential for the survival of most of them. As argued in this thesis, relative overpopulation and its lowest sediment (the paupers) play their role in this mode of production. They compose the general law of capitalist accumulation, hence it is a
condition of existence for this mode of production, and function as its lever. Thus, there is no capitalism without the production and reproduction of a partially or entirely unoccupied group. An accumulating group of misery is a prerequisite for the existence of another accumulating group of wealth, the homeless population is the representative par excellence of the dispossessed. Relative overpopulation is part of this law. The homeless are part of this group in all forms, both the basic ones (floating, latent, stagnant) and the lower sediment (pauperism). It is especially concentrated in the stagnant form, since most live on informal labor, however, it can pass through each of the forms, and increasingly the basic forms live in greater pauperization, which makes the line that differentiates them increasingly blurred and the forms increasingly intertwine with each other.
