Increasing inequalities and transformations engendered by capitalism have mobilized the emergence of solidarity-based economic initiatives undertaken by civil society, which inevitably establish relations with the State. The objective of this study is to analyze the relationship between the solidarity economy (SE) and the Brazilian welfare state over the last decades, looking at whether rights and citizen participation increased, or whether it opens paths to the implementation of workfare.
SE emerged in Brazil during the post-military dictatorship period, linked both to autochthonous forms of production and the activation of the solidarity potential by progressive forces. Solidarity economic enterprises were taken over by the workers themselves through self-management, socialization of the means of production, cooperation and sustainability. The virtues of reciprocity generated the possibility of establishing a "necessity entrepreneurship" by the excluded people, even without capital (GAIGER, 2014). The evaluation of the efficiency of SE in Brazil is controversial, since the mercantile parameters and indicators do not capture its economic effects (which includes atypical combinations between redistribution, domesticity, market and reciprocity) (POLANYI, 1977), nor its extra-economic effects (child care, mental health improvement, violence and social vulnerability reduction, etc.)
The Brazilian government began to implement public policies and and SE structures - linked to the economic area - from 2002 onwards, responding to demands of the social movement. They were developed during a period known here as the "glorious years of Brazilian citizenship", whose landmark was the Constitution of 1988, furthered in the 2000s under the Workers’Party government. During this period the dynamics between social movement and construction of the public agenda worked almost in unison. SE public policy incorporated a democratic structure similar to that of universal policies: representatives of the SE acted as policy makers through participatory spaces managed from the municipalities to the federal level.
In this type of institutional arrangement, there were many advances: economic (resources destined for specific purposes) and political (citizen participation and disputes, to some extent, by development projects within government). However, a legal framework for SE – essential for its autonomy - was not built.
In terms of articulation with welfare, SE was inserted into the social assistance policy as one of the economic forms to stimulate the productive inclusion (similar to work integration in the North) of the poorest. Its target public were the beneficiaries of the Bolsa-Família Program, a globally recognized program which significantly reduced poverty in Brazil.
However, productive inclusion is a controversial issue and is criticized both by scholars of SE (for the risk of being confused as a strategy to combat poverty, removing its emancipatory feature), as well as scholars of social assistance (they rebel against economic actions related to social protection because this refers to workfare state and they consider SE a precarious and informal alternative). In Brazil, empirical evidence showed that it was not a case of workfare state because there is no loss of social rights - until now. Instead, an expansion of economic rights of the poorest was highlighted by dealing with the residual tendency of the social policy (FERRARINI, 2016). It is necessary to emphasize that all the current analysis of the Brazilian reality might delimit the "pre" and "post" 2016 period (the year President Dilma Roussef was impeached) due to the dismantling of the political and state structures in progress, with unpredictable outcomes.
The study concludes that, unlike the North, SE policies expanded in parallel to social policies and rights in Brazil, not linked to the state retraction, which only recently played a significant role in the provision of social services. Despite the political advances in terms of process, the SE did not guarantee legitimacy of its results at the end of this cycle. The lack of a legal framework and incentives did not adequately stimulate SE as "another economy" and it also reinforces the rejection of its articulation to emancipatory social protection, despite the significant presence of beneficiaries of the Bolsa-família Program in solidarity enterprises.
In the voids generated by the ineffective social regulation and the severe economic recession, the directions that Brazilian society will take are unpredictable, but there are indications that it will follow the North winds towards the privatization of the State, which gave its first steps towards citizenship in the last decades. The political conjuncture indicates the end of a cycle which had many flaws, but that deserved to be improved and extended to reverse the abyssal and persistent Brazilian inequality.
FERRARINI, Adriane. (2016). Inclusão produtiva na política de assistência social: Workfare à brasileira ou ampliação de direitos? Caxambu: Anais do 40º Encontro Anual da Anpocs.
GAIGER, Luiz et al. (2014). A economia solidária no Brasil: Análise de dados nacionais. São Leopoldo: Oikos.
POLANYI, Karl. (1977). The livelihood of man. New York: Academic Press.
9. Social and solidarity economy, civil society and social movements
