14th International Symposium
Recife, Brazil, July 25-29, 2005
 
Social needs, global solutions: creative approaches for social development

Keynote address given by
Ana Elizabete Mota

I would like to welcome all of you to the International Inter-University Consortium and Social Development - IUCISD – held in Recife. This is the 14th Symposium, uniting researchers, professors, students, and professionals from the field of Social Work all from various countries and continents. I would like to congratulate the co-chairs, Ana Cristina Vieira and Julie Miller-Cribbs, as well as the members of the organizing committee for the work they performed. 

I am grateful for the recognition and confidence shown to me by my colleagues at the Federal University of Pernambuco. I feel honored to be able to present the theories and policies of the Brazilian Social Welfare System.  It is a system of ethical-political and professional components which emphasizes the concept of political and human emancipation in Brazil, together with the rest of the world.   

            The theme of my talk is identical to the theme of this of this conference local needs, Global Solutions: Creative Approaches to social development.

I begin my talk by making reference to the most notable of modern thinkers, Karl Marx, who when he referred to the need to critically understand the bourgeoisie society, affirmed that reality is a synthesis of multiple determinations, and that only by understanding the movement of what is real, can we reproduce it in the field of ideas – the expression of concrete thinking – the movement of reality.

Following this, I will discuss social needs and global solutions from the perspective of social totality, using economic movements and the reproduction processes within the social relations for production, incarnated by political, cultural, and ideological dynamics that permeate State actions and large scale financial capital in the 21st Century.

I will focus on the emergence of social needs through contemporary capitalism, where economic initiatives and political decisions reveal globally constructed conflicts, in an environment marked attacks by the transnational financial bourgeoisie, and by the resistance of the classes that “work for a living”.

I will also discuss the possibilities and limits of adopting social development as a theoretical and political option; a base for a strategy designed to confront current social inequalities.

I refer to social needs as a combination of economic, social, environmental and cultural deprivations that are collective in nature and related to the process of impoverishment that results from the accumulation of wealth. My definition goes beyond the idea of biological, natural, or basic needs, dealing instead with a social-historic process.

Social inequality is inherent to the development of capitalism and this inequality results in thousands of people at the fringes of productive society. The method of producing, distributing and accumulating material goods and wealth is historic and results from the actions of men and women who continue to reproduce the social “relations”. Men and women make history, but they continue to be governed by certain conditions and relations.

More than ever, the contrast between poverty and the dizzying growth of wealth is frightening. The scope of social inequalities can be seen statistically.  Only 20% of the world population has 82.7% of the combined income and the poorest 60% of the world population, must divide among themselves a meager 5.6% of the wealth produced on the planet.

This is not to deny civilizing conquests, or the progress reached through development of science and new modes of living, but to emphasize that the concurrent impoverishment of workers has been one of the side effects of such progress.

In the course of this historic development of capitalism, it is important to note that in contrast to primitive communism, when the production of necessary goods for living was based on sexual segregation in the workplace, in the collective ownership of land, work tools, and in the collective rewards of the products from their work – capitalist production is based on the socialization of work and in the privatization of wealth. As the employer-employee relationship became formed, the phenomenon of impoverishment began to appear. This is responsible for the appearance of poverty as a “social concern”.

Made public in the 19th Century with the emergence of the working classes, the ‘social concern’ was a determinate for the emergence of the working classes, social problems and social needs emerged as the degradation of working conditions for the fieldworkers and craftspeople became unable to support themselves.  These workers then needed to sell the only good that they possessed: the force of their labor.

Since historically the number of available workers was always greater than could be absorbed by industry, those left out remained excluded from the workforce, forming a relative super population, which in early capitalism was the object of repressive social policy, or from charitable actions of the wealthy and the Roman Catholic Church.

Therefore, in the 19th Century, the root of the question destined to defy the 21st Century had surfaced. Evidence in the 19th Century: the undeniable tendency for exclusion in the production process denial of access to material goods and socially produced culture.

What differentiates the previous situation from the current problem is the expansive horizon of capitalism and the generalization of wage earning society and welfare. This is in opposition to the expansion of financial capital and in detriment to production, and neo-liberal policies that retract the social responsibilities of the state. 

In summary: during the period of expansion, the State mediated capitalistic accumulation with social intervention; today, it is a financing agent, delegating the responsibility of finding “creative” methods of social inclusion, putting the burden on social organizations and society.

 The concept of a relative super population demonstrates its vigor  for being able to contest what some refer to as the new poverty. In truth, we can observe new manifestations of the phenomenon of poverty, but the real core and center of the concept – the movement that generates the leftovers of capitalism – present themselves with the same logic from the 19th Century. 

The emergence of large scale industry and an urban-industrial society also created an environment where workers organized themselves and politicized their needs and shortages, transforming them into public and collective concerns. As a result of these social struggles, some needs of the workers and their families begin to be  recognized by the State, prompting social legislation and policies of social protection. These public responses to the social needs of the working classes spawned the development of the “Welfare State” that became prominent during the 20th Century, and was seen as a victory for the social movements worldwide. 

The combining of social workers´ rights and the offering of public Social Welfare were responsible for legitimizing the importance of worker protection and generated the appearance of ideologies that where the possibility of combining capitalism, well being, and democracy emerged.

As long as the central countries live in full employment and the expansion of security, continued rapid growth in social development, the periphery of the world will see modernization and development as a means of integrating these countries into the world economic order.

The full incorporation of peripheral economies into the amplified process of capital enhancement came about in the 70´s when underdeveloped countries were transformed into vehicles of production and for the absorption of investment capital. The role of inducing economic development was delegated to the state and social concerns were put aside.  The need to form a productive base integrated into the needs of the international oligarchies, gave origin to the extreme external indebtedness necessary to fund this expansion. This situation lasted until the 80´s when the foreign debt crisis appeared, obligating countries to export capital for the payment of loans. It was not by accident that, in such a period, the capitalistic world showed indications of the appearance of a new world crisis of accumulation and obligated the developed countries to redefine their strategies of accumulation.

Even if superficial, the efforts made to point out the relation between the developed center and the periphery showed evidence of the inequality under which this process materialized. Special attention should be given to the existence of the Welfare State in the periphery.  Just as an example, in the Brazilian case, it was only in 1988 that formal bases and constitutions were instituted for what could be called a Well Being, or Welfare State. The conditions which allowed for integration into the world economic order resulted – in the beginning of the 80´s – in its subordination to the imperatives of neoliberal thinking, marked by the retraction of the public policies of social protection, effecting a profound regression in the exercise of rights, and in the universalization of Brazilian Social Security.

The picture drawn by the crisis of the 70´s that spread to the peripheral countries in the 80´s caused a redefinition/amplification of this social concern. Those who lived from their work came to confront three concerns severely limiting their mode of being and living: structural unemployment and the crisis of wage labor.  Disintegration of the welfare state and suppression of social rights and fragmentation of the needs and political organization of the workers.

 Capitalistic restoration had implications in the restructuring of mechanisms for accumulation as well as in the redefinition of ideo-political mechanisms necessary for the formation of new and more efficient hegemonic consensus.  Elaborated by the neoliberal offensive, the social action of the State retreated and this pulverized the ability to meet the social needs of workers and limited the social responsibility of the State to public security, to action as controller, and to the attendance of only those absolutely unable to produce.

More than an economic crisis emerged. Conditions appeared for an organic crisis, marked by the loss of references installed under the paradigm of Fordism, of the Welfare State, of the great union and partisan movements, and the vengeance of actual socialism. Conditions affecting combativeness of the operator movement were exposed, playing a part from that point on which is considered to be much more defensive than offensive in social struggles.

Qualified by many as a period in which workers lost their center, or a period in which capitalism was no longer afraid, the years following the decade of the 80´s are a stage for the process of capitalistic restructuring centered on two movements.  The redefinition of the economic-world bases through productive restructuring and changes in the work world.  The ideo-political offensive necessary for the construction of the hegemony of large scale capital, evidenced in the emergence of a new imperialism and a new phase of capitalism that was marked by the dominance of accumulation of earnings.

In the new imperialism, hegemony has been exercised by the United States through means of strategies combining coercion and consensus. The U.S. exercises a style of world government that cites the ideology of its opposition in an attempt to affirm its own ideology as universal.

In opposition to the expanded accumulation of wealth marking the first half of the 20th Century, what is in the process of consolidation is really the accumulation of plunder under the command of rich countries and their material accumulations. The primary vehicle for this robbery has been the forced opening of markets all over the world and  institutional pressures exerted by the IMF and WTO.

This process covers everything from the patenting of genetic research, passing through the marketing of nature, to the right to pollute, the privatization of public goods and the transformation of public services into businesses, occurring in the fields of health, social security, and education.

Another result of the growth of industries manufacturing disposable items is the degradation of the environment – creating a society of rubble and throwaways.

Merchandising of the production sphere is also one of the new features of this current phase and is echoed in two aspects.  The expropriation and marketing of domestic and non commercial private activities (home care and social caretakers for example).  The super exploitation of families, particularly women, in peripheral countries, assuming a combination of duties as part of their domestic activities that truthfully should be public and state responsibilities.

Substantive changes can also be found in the work environment: from older forms of labor such as piecework, working at home, etc.;  to the institution of new work processes, externalizing and de-territorializing part of the productive cycle, or building new modes of cooperation included and adjusted in the same productive process, activities involving high-tech, super specialization and absolute precision. Environmental degradation and lack of socially responsible production occurs in peripheral countries: who end up conducting most of the dirty and dangerous work that rich countries need done. 

These changes, through use of new technologies and by redefinition of the space/time and territorial dimensions, live together with growth of unemployment and with situations of misery and indigence, revising – by means of new configurations – the growth of a superfluous population of the useless and unassociated, as approached at the beginning of this conference.

Important to the victory of capitalism is the assurance of the reproduction of this process passes through reform of the State and a redefinition of strategies that are formed from new cultures and socialization are important elements in the victory of capitalism.

Strictly speaking, social and moral reform focuses on attending to the social needs without breaking with the accumulation and distribution of earnings, expressed in some of the principals and directives (as in the case of relieving the State of some responsibility), and the further division of this responsibility with the rest of society when addressing concerns regarding hunger, unemployment, and environmental degradation.

Assisted by possessive individualism and by the naturalization of the marketing of life, the object of that social reform, among other things, is to transform the subject-citizen into a consumer-citizen; the worker in his job; the unemployed client in social assistance, the working class in partners with the great businesses; and the communities in local development cells (incubators), surging to form a solidary and cooperative society.

The results of this fragmentation is the proliferation of social movements “indifferent” from the political point of view, and directed towards attending to personal and/or local needs, in general connected to the problem of consumer access. This can be considered as one of the consequences of the globalization process. At the same time that it manages to join together and articulate capital from all over the world, it fragments the identities and needs of those who survive from their own labor.

It is faced with this picture that I wish to reflect on the concept of social development as a strategy for confronting social needs and the phenomenon of globalized impoverishment.

            In a strict sense, approaches for social development can be outlined around theories of modernization and dependence, although both deal with economic development. Whatever the approach is, it becomes necessary to point out that the policies directed towards development, particularly in countries peripheral to the world economic system, do not experience same effects in confronting hunger, misery, illiteracy, violence, moral degradation, and the exhaustion of natural resources.

            Nevertheless, what we have at the moment is a new social development theory designated as being self sustaining and local, supposedly breaking with economic conditionalities. No longer a consequence of economic development, but another model that can be seen as a strategy for confronting social concerns postulated by the Sustainable Development Commission of the UN, which defends the implementation of measures established at the R+10 Conference through the formation of a virtuous cycle of sustainable development constituted from intelligent investments, the social responsibility of companies, generation of jobs, increased wages for the local population, increased tax collection, generation of wealth, and the protection of biodiversity.

It is strengthened by the so-called new social movements such as environmentalism, feminism, anti-globalization, and the battle against world hunger, in eco-environmental as well as sustained development.  All share as a premise, the idea that attention to present needs should not compromise future needs and should be based on sustained growth, directed always towards human and social needs, not just accumulation.

Concerns arise regarding the ability of this proposal to coexist with the permanence, and the tendencies coming from the process of globalization of investment capital and the paradox between global and local needs. If the location constituted is the space for articulation and implementation of actions directed towards social development, sustainability cannot be guaranteed when faced with the needs of large scale capital. Can a community of workers who depend on fishing, or those surviving on family farms confront the construction of dams, the redirection of rivers, and the amplification of mega projects funded by foreign investment capital?

If social development is considered as a method of only temporarily confronting the emergence of poverty in the short and medium terms, at least some benefits are brought to poor populations. If the strategy is one of overcoming poverty, it would certainly conflict with the territorial and capitalistic logic in power. The first refers to the State and the second to the individual capitalist. It is enough to think that faced with whatever political uncertainty, capital flees from the periphery!  What is the purpose of risco país (published comparative ratings of each country’s investment risk potential)? Why alert them and submit State decisions to the economic interests of the transnationals? 

With this in mind I ask: in what condition can social development confront the destructive logic of capital?

The only response I have at the moment, and one that I leave for reflection with this audience; is that neither economic development, nor social development are configured as weapons for the eradication of poverty and inequality. Only the construction of another society based on total human development can politically and humanly emancipate men and women on the path to barbarism. It will only be possible if social movements have the force to resist the barbarism already installed, and modify the relations of current forces, promoting construction of another world; one capable of overcoming capitalism. From my point of view, social workers from all over the world should position themselves in service to this proposal. Thank you very much.