Capitalism, Inequality and Poverty in Latin America

Author(s)

Luis Enrique Rambalducci Estenssoro

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2003-09-02

Examining board members

Sedi Hirano; Ricardo Luiz Coltro Antunes; Alvaro Augusto Comin; Lucio Felix Frederico Kowarick; Marcio Pochmann

• Advisor: Sedi Hirano

Abstract

We argue that in order to overcome the crisis of the neoliberal model of economic growth, the crisis of dependent-capitalist accumulation and the crisis of the capitalist mode of production we require structural changes linked to the livelihood of 211 million Latin American poor. In this way, we envisage the possibility of eradicating poverty as a social change capable to give a minimum of possible citizenship to this population and to create conditions for future transformations. We affirm that poverty and inequality, though not exclusively a capitalist phenomena, persists and grows in this global and hegemonic production model due the two processes: 1) Capitalist economic growth, such as the commercial expansion and the foreign investment, as processes extracting surpluses from non-capitalists sectors and classes (external markets) that constitute and consolidate the peripheral areas of the imperialist system, and its internal counterpart, dependency; on the other side, 2) the over-exploration of the workers by means of increasing extraction of plus-value (intensifying the work and diminishing the wages in relation to the value of the work force), and the simultaneous process of marginal inclusion in the system of the unemployed and the working poor. The development and the dynamics of the capitalist expansion produce an industrial reserve army together with a sizable lumpenproletariat. The reserve army is typically associated with the economic functioning of the capitalist system. We argue that the lumpenproletariat is also a by-product of the capitalist system, as a population economically marginalized, socially excluded, and politically destitute of its basic rights. In short, a transformation of the conditions of such structural poverty implies structural changes able to overcome the condition of sub-citizenship or lumpencitizenship of these excluded groups. (AU)