The conformation of social and political forces and their relation to the dispute between political projects: a case study in Heliópolis

Author(s)

Hugo Fanton Ribeiro da Silva

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas
• Defense date: 2016-11-23

Examining board members

Evelina Dagnino; André Singer; Maria do Carmo Albuquerque; Andréia Galvão; Luciana Ferreira Tatagiba

• Advisor: Evelina Dagnino

Abstract

This research analyzes the shaping of social and political forces and their relation to the dispute between three distinct political projects in Brazil between the years 1970-2010. For this, we conducted a case study in Heliopolis, São Paulo-SP, with techniques of the ethnographic method, with a view to the territory and their connections with the historical context. Throughout the text, the political disputes and the results of the struggles of the popular movement in Heliópolis during four decades of performance are presented. The hegemony of the authoritarian-developmentalist forces in 1970-80 was instituting of the social forces that make up Heliopolis, but were historically surpassed by the advance of neoliberal forces and the shaping of popular-democratic forces. After the context of "perverse confluence" between the neoliberal and popular-democratic projects in 1990s (DAGNINO et al, 2006), the dispute will have new significances in the new-developmentalist governments of Lula / Dilma. The Brazilian political scene of the 2000s is defined here as a macroeconomic inflection promoted by the redirection of state resources to finance social policies, which contradicts the precepts of the neoliberal project, but which was paradoxically accompanied by a reproduction - in the health sector, education and housing policies - of the neoliberal logic of transfer the state resources for its implementation by the private sector. This attends to antagonistic interests of neoliberal forces that benefit from forms of private appropriation of the public sphere and popular-democratic forces fighting for public policies and participation, in a expression of the "perverse confluence" that remains between the neo-liberal and popular-democratic projects in Lula / Dilma governments. The local politic dynamic also allowed us to analyze the changes that Work Party (PT) passed through, such as the related to the way of power exercise in the neo-developmentism: centralization in state arenas. Thus, the presence of popular-democratic forces in new developmentalism occurred in uneven and dependent conditions, because of the unequal access to power centers, hegemonised by neoliberal forces, and the dependence on the state to advance their self-organization. Despite this, the popular-democratic forces engages in disputes for hegemony oriented by their political project of a democratic transformation of Brazilian State and Society (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 13/13536-6 - The conformation of social and political forces and their relation to the dispute between political projects in health: a case study in Heliopolis
• Grantee: Hugo Fanton Ribeiro da Silva
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate