Social policies in Brazil: encouragement of accommodation or emancipation?

Criticism of social policies in Brazil, especially the Bolsa Família program, is nothing new in our history. Since the early days of free-market capitalism, those who could not find employment and required protective measures were often left at the mercy of philanthropy and charity.

The questions that arose were whether such actions would not reproduce people's complacency, since they would receive incentives and thus stop seeking work. The initial idea was that people who received some kind of help would compensate in some way, usually through forced labor, in a lawless capitalism.

During the same period, only those belonging to the nobility and the bourgeoisie had civil and political rights. Workers were deprived of protective rights, a situation that would only change at the end of the 19th century.

Analyzing current events, we are reminded of the widespread idea that beneficiaries of the Bolsa Família program should work to compensate for the aid received, and that they should even have their right to vote revoked due to receiving any type of state assistance. We observe a revisiting of old free-market discourses.

This makes us reflect on the social right of people: are we mistakenly helping people when they should actually be working? Or are we simply seeking citizenship rights enshrined in law through blood, sweat, and historical struggles, and even a minimum reparation for centuries of domination, subordination, exploitation, exclusion, and injustice?

Let's think about these issues: Let's consider 500 years of exploitation of the country's riches by a white, landowning, and business elite managing the nation solely for their own benefit.

Let's consider an unjust, perverse, savage capitalist system, with outsourcing, precarious work, underemployment, and long working hours in exchange for low wages, so that people are unable to reflect on their miserable condition.

Let's consider a capitalist system that says everyone can achieve success, but omits the fundamental information that there isn't room for everyone in the system.

Let's consider the state's historical abdication of responsibility in the country, leaving individuals without a quality education system, a healthcare system that truly cares, and a permanent sense of insecurity.

Let's consider who is responsible for our children: a perverse educational system with automatic and demotivating approval, or a parallel power that is present, attractive, granting benefits in exchange for loyalty, but with repression?

Let's consider the centuries-long encouragement of the consumption of legalized psychoactive substances and the unprecedented spread of drug addiction, leading to family conflicts, mental suffering, and political leaders who benefit from such practices.

Let's consider a powerful mass media that acts as an ideological apparatus of the status quo, standardizing people's behavior, stimulating consumption and hedonism, and never promoting emancipation or enlightenment, always seeking profit at the expense of domination.

Let us consider the cursed legacy of slavery that plagued most of the Brazilian people for centuries of history, remembering that many of us today come from an incomplete liberation process, and there has never been a concern for the poor and working people of this country.

Let's consider that at no point did 'no one talk' to the boy or girl who suffers physical and psychological violence, even sexual abuse and exploitation, who is homeless, uses psychoactive substances, or is involved in drug trafficking, who reproduces the petty thinking of pleasure or economic advantage. No one told these children that there is another world, that life can be different, that the best part of life is encountering others, is solidarity, is giving your best, is humanity.

And let us think of the women (daughters, wives or mothers) who are forgotten, mistreated, victims of adverse circumstances, who often bear the burden of the consequences of life's oppressions and impositions.

The liberal idea that helping the poor and vulnerable encourages complacency and dependency, leading us to believe we are helping people when they should actually be working, is nothing new. But how can they work if there isn't room for everyone? How can they fight on equal terms for a place in the world of work in the face of such adversity?

History is always told from the perspective of the victors. How many indigenous people are left to tell their side of the story? How many Black people resisted and were able to have their stories immortalized? How many poor and working-class people were able to have their history of struggle and exploitation given new meaning?

Those who oppose social policies actually want to see the poor return to slave labor, a xenophobia disseminated by capitalist intellectuals to public opinion, which the middle class reproduces through consumption and without reflection.

Given so many historical ills, it is undeniable that people need help. The State must protect its citizens. Everyone's taxes should serve to protect us all, especially our peers who suffer and are excluded. This is the democratic rule of law in which we live.

Let's think from the other side, let's think in reverse, let's think about the nation's historical debt to the working classes and about social rights as an irrevocable ideal of citizenship, and let's think that we can build a new societal project for all of us.