População em situação de rua: um estudo sobre os supérfluos no capitalismo contemporâneo

Abstract

Capitalist sociability is in a structural crisis centered in the commodity production system. The development of this system in the last decades allowed a revolution in the productive forces, with impacts on labor and, especially, on the possibilities of reproduction and life conditions of those who live from their own work. Revolution 4.0 confirms nowadays one of the many contradictions of the current mode of production identified by Marx in the XIX century, the increase of investments in constant capital in detriment of variable capital. Production processes are more automatized, demanding less workforce. This process is a contradiction and an obstacle to the accumulation of capital, since it expels humans from the productive processes and does not show any sign that it is going to use them in another moment. The crisis contains high unemployment taxes, informality and super exploitation of those who manage to insert themselves productively. In large parts of the Western world, unemployment coexists with underemployment and with the fragility of employment and income that make impossible to meet human needs. The struggle for the public fund favors the capital. In the Brazilian context, this is expressed by the underfunding and inefficiency of the existing public policies. Besides the unemployed and the underemployed, we identify a growing number of people living on the streets who cannot access the productive sphere because of the aforementioned systemic dynamic. They are seen as superfluous from the capital point of view, thus being terminated or abandoned and left to die. People living in the street are the human expression of the many inequalities of the present time and show, among many other phenomenon, the failure of modernity and the need to overcome capitalist sociability.