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Call for Papers. Special Number "100 Years of Social Work: Discussions and Perspectives on the Discipline's Past, Present and Future". Submissions in Spanish or English until the 30th April 2025 for publication in October 2025 (Issue 10). For more information please see the following link.
"Pure" Capitalism, State and Public Fund
Authors
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Sara Granemann
Universidad Federa del Rio de Janeiro
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1305-5022
Abstract
The article aims to assess the importance of the public fund operated by the capitalist state. A public fund that for a brief time in human history was used - at least a fraction of it in Europe - to respond to the struggles of the working class for better living and working conditions. The responses - diverse, depending on the latitude of the planet - in the form of social policies to make social rights possible did not last long. Created in the post-1945 period, they began to be dismantled towards the end of the 1980s, which allowed the working class in some European countries to live with broader rights for around three decades. The constant crises of the capitalist mode of production and the collapse of 'real socialism' were the main determinants for the dismantling of the so-called Welfare State. The characterization of the stage of capitalism for the last 45 (forty-five) years is borrowed from Husson (2008). The French economist called the present phase of monopolies with the analytical category 'pure capitalism'. By taking his theoretical critique as an analytical reference, our effort is to debate the crises of capital in the context of social policies and their monetized form of execution. Social policies, on the one hand, are instruments that mediate rights; on the other, they are closely linked to the accumulation of capital when it metamorphoses social policies into commodities. Once the transmutation has taken place, the new commodities become advantageous investment spaces for capital in and out of crisis.
Keywords:
Pure capitalism, state and public fundReferences
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