Pandemic, crisis and expropriations: emergency aid and contradictions in targeting

Abstract

This article aims to bring elements to the discussion of the health crisis based on the criticism of the capitalist crisis, of expropriations as a permanent process in the capitalist production mode, and its intimate relationship with the contradictions unleashed by the Covid-19 Pandemic. It also presents a synthesis of emergency aid and discusses the limitation placed by the focus of social policies as a tendency to the lack of social protection. This is an essay with a literature review based on historical and dialectical materialism. Thus, we adopted Marxist criticism to analyze the crisis and understand the consequences of the health crisis, investigating recent processes of expropriation of social rights. The discussion is also based on an understanding of social policy as a contradictory component of the State action for the reproduction of the working class, aiming at presenting a brief review of the incidence of the focalist path in the Brazilian social policy, as well as the paradoxes that it restores in a scenario of destruction of the fragile Brazilian social protection system.