Global Journal of Human Social Science, E: Economics, Volume 23 Issue 3

Expropriation of Rights, Dependent Capitalism and Transfer of Income: Reflections on the Effects of the Covid-19 Pandemic* Ana Paula Ornellas Mauriel Keywords: transfer of income, expropriation, dependent capitalism, covid-19 pandemic, neoliberalism. I. I ntroduction ith the arrival of the pandemic, the debates on minimum income, basic income, income transfer, among other variations gained breadth, especially regarding the relationship between social protection and coping with poverty. The way in which social assistance has been carried out in the pandemic is connected to the neoliberal project that has been underway for decades, radicalized from the crisis of 2008, but now adapted to the management of the health and economic crisis. That is, the way of being social assistance under neoliberalism, in which the transfer of income as poverty alleviation has gained centrality, seems to maintain its essential content: if on the one hand they momentarily reduce the needs of the most impoverished segments of the working population, on the other hand it is linked to the processes of precarious work and expropriation of rights, guaranteeing the maintenance of fiscal adjustments and the remuneration of financial capital. Based on the conditions that are placed in this nefarious framework that is presented with the pandemic, we will present some reflections on the so- called income transfer programs in countries of dependent economy, where the relationship between expropriation and overexploitation prevails, situated under the expanded reproduction of dependence under neoliberalism, exponential with the COVID-19 pandemic. II. E XPROPRIATIONS OF R IGHTS , C RISIS AND THE G UARANTEE OF “ B ASIC C APITAL I NCOME ” 1 The imperialist capitalist order and the pattern of contemporary accumulation, since the crisis of the 1970, brought as a solution meas ur es materialized by neoliberal policies and adjustments, which promoted three major processes of liberalization, deregulation and privatization, whose combined effects had the objective of creating and deepening spaces of valorization for a mass of super accumulated capital that had been produced in excess, corroborating what Chesnais (2005) classified as the globalization of capital. According to Gouvea (2011), neoliberal measures to respond to the crisis imposed on the economic, political, ideological and military levels a new pattern of accumulation, where financialization acquires a new relevance, having in increasing the proportion of fictitious and speculative capital on an unprecedented scale, the particular feature of this period. Vieira (2020), in Marx’s trail, elucidates that fictitious capital, as an expression of the appropriation relations, and that presupposes for its existence the capitalist relations of production from where the most value is extracted, being a complexation and a dialectical unfolding of capital that holds interest, “by forging new capital to be put on the market (albeit under apparently fragile bases) it intensifies the rotation of capital” (p.. 147), accelerating the appropriation relations distancing itself from production. Such conditions intensify the tendency to crisis, as fictitious capital tends to dissociate itself more and more quickly from the amount of available capital and encounter difficulties of accomplishment. 1 Expression inspired by Leda Paulani (2008), who used “minimum capital income”. W © 2023 Global Journals Volume XXIII Issue III Version I 25 Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2023 ( )E Author: Ph.D in Social Sciences – State University of Campinas; Associate Professor at Fluminense Federal University. e-mail: apmauriel@gmail.com * The work is part of the result of research in progress that deals with the Social Assistance Policy in Brazil and the translation of this article was carried out with the support of Carlos Chargas Filho Foundation for Research Support of State of Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ) Abstract- The text focuses on taking stock of income transfer programs in Brazil in order to bring subsidies to analyze these initiati ves during the COV ID-19 pandemic. The result of a bibliographical review and documentary research, the article points out that monetary aid was the main form of protection against pauperization in the capitalist periphery during the health crisis, but ensuring the maintenance of the neoliberal fiscal and economic austerity agenda. The conclusions show that income transfer programs in dependent countries, where the relationship between expropriation and overexploitation prevails, were enlarged with the COVID-19 pandemic, thus helping to ensure the expanded reproduction of dependency conditions by maintaining the stagnant relative overpopulation in informality and precarious work that increased during the health crisis.