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

social relationship of purchase and sale” (RABELO, 2018, page 101). In view of this, one of the contemporary forms of expropriation that has been gaining prominence is precisely the contractual expropriation (FONTES, 2010), the one that occurs by the removal or dismantling of social and labor rights, a modality that modifies the legal bond between large masses of workers and capital, particularly through regressive and repressive public policies, creating new conditions for extraction of overwork from the withdrawal of protective bulkheads that, for the most part, were conquests uprooted by the struggles of the workers throughout capitalism itself. Boschetti (2018) in her studies has pointed out that expropriation is a social process that has been restricting the participation of the social state in the socialization of the labor force reproduction costs and that, therefore, contributes to the expansion of capital. To defend this thesis she starts from some assertions. The first is the understanding of the notion of Social State, which is perceived under class struggles, if on the one hand it is not perceived as an exclusive instrument of the bourgeoisie, denying the role of workers' struggles for social rights, on the other hand, it does not deny its class character by understanding it as an important anti- crisis strategy, with a decisive role in the expanded reproduction of capital from the 1940 onwards. In view of this, Boschetti (2018) points to changes in the role of the Social State from the capital crisis of the 1970’s, when class disputes around surplus value become explosive and the destruction of rights becomes necessary to restore conditions for maintaining profit rates. Since then the expropriation of portions of the public fund is reduced and the participation of the Social State in the reproduction of the workforce and their families has been decreasing in various policies and services, previously accessed by the workers, which impels them to submit to the most barbaric forms of exploitation. For Boschetti and Teixeira (2019) these mechanisms of expropriation of the public fund are only possible through a “interdependent dialectic between the expropriations of rights and public debt” (page 81), through various devices such as the commitment of governments to the payment of interest and debt amortizations, untying of social budget revenues to financial surpluses, regressive tax system, counter reforms in social policies, among others, setting up a permanent fiscal adjustment. The expropriation of social rights here is understood as a process of subtracting historical conditions of reproduction of the labor force, mediated by the Social State, through the reappropriation by capital of part of the public fund previously intended to the rights conquered by the working class. through successive and overwhelming counter- reforms in social policies, which obliges the working class to offer its labor force on the market at any cost and to offer its labor force on the market at any cost and to submit to the most perverse and precarious labor relations, that exacerbate the extraction of absolute and relative surplus value (BOSCHETTI; TEIXEIRA, 2019, page 81). The result of this process is the inflection of the logic of rights in actions directed to the market, with compensatory policies, fragmented, focused and increasingly privatized services aimed at meeting the most urgent effects of the crisis, managing absolute misery with scarce resources. But using means to, at all times, make these actions forms of valuation or reproduction of fictitious capital (IASI, 2018). To the extent that services are privatized, the nominal wages of workers are reduced, because to the extent that policies, services and rights are being transformed into goods, such withdrawals will have an impact on the reduction of their incomes. In this sense that Mota and Tavares (2016) understand that the precariousness of work through the expropriations of rights can be considered as a process of devaluation of the labor force, since, for the authors, the restriction of public goods (health, pensions, services) that previously composed their basket of provisions for the reproduction of the worker’s life and his or her family life, provokes a reduction of the socially necessary work, because it restricts the patterns of their reproduction to the minimum, and reduces the quality of life by contributing to the non-replacement of psychophysical wear. That is, we can infer that a dialectic is configured between expropriation and overexploitation. Taking the considerations of Luce (2013) and Osorio (2013), who follow Marini, state that overexploitation can be understood as a violation of the value of the labor force because it is consumed by capital beyond normal conditions, usurping the consumer fund and the worker's living fund in the day to day (considering the daily value of the workforce) and with the appropriation of future years of life and work of the worker (considering the living fund or the total value of the workforce ) 7 . The worker will thus become the only responsible for his or her reproduction, being the overexploitation mediated by the purchase of social services as commodities, when it is possible to access via the market, when not, the State needs to compensate for the expropriation of social protection using more precarious forms of composition of the workforce reproduction, more focused and with emergency character, as it has been shown the transfer of income in the current context (MOTA, 2018). 7 In Marx’s analysis of the value of the labor force there are two dimensions: the daily value, which considers average wear according to the historically determined average living conditions; and the total value, which means the worker’s total lifetime or the total of days when the owner of the labor force sells his or her goods in good condition, also considering the years of life in which he or she will not participate in production (retirement). (OSORIO, 2013) © 2023 Global Journals Volume XXIII Issue III Version I 28 Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2023 ( )E Expropriation of Rights, Dependent Capitalism and Transfer of Income: Reflections on the Effects of the Covid-19 Pandemic