Trabalho de reprodução social comunitário em tempos de pandemia da Covid-19: uma mirada para o trabalho e a (re)produção social no capitalismo brasileiro

Abstract

This research aimed to reflect on community social reproduction work in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, in order to understand to what extent self-organized, collectivized initiatives by the working class to address the unequal impacts of the health crisis and to meet the social reproduction needs of that same class expressed terms indicative of community social reproduction work. The qualitative study was based on the critical-dialectical method and feminist-intersectional epistemology (Lole, Almeida, Freitas, 2024), using documentary sources inscribed in community-popular communication (Peruzzo, 2022), with the spatial focus of the municipality of Rio de Janeiro. Data collection included the community newspaper Voz das Comunidades; publications on official social networks of collectives, fronts and/or community organizations that developed the initiatives; as well as recorded live streams, articles, journalistic pieces and/or research reports authored by members and/or in which they participated. Our theoretical and analytical framework regarding community social reproduction work radically distances itself from any defense of abdicating the State's responsibility in meeting the social needs of the working class and from any perspective of romanticizing community social reproduction work. The inequalities and contradictions surrounding work and the social reproduction of labor power are constitutive of the capitalist social order (Marx, 2013), which took off and is sustained inseparably from racism, sexism (Moura, 1983; Gonzalez, 1984, 2020; Davis, 2016), cisheteropatriarchy (Federici, 2017; Lugones, 2008; Segato, 2021), and the dialectic of dependency (Moura, 1983; Fernandes, 1975; Marini, 2017; Oliveira, 2003; Gonzalez, 2020). We reflect that Community social reproduction work is not primarily and/or immediately organized within the domestic sphere, the State, or the market, which does not indicate the absence of different degrees of support and articulation with private-business or public-state entities, for example. This work may be developed in a given geographical area or not, and in this research it is understood especially in terms of its organization, conduct, and purpose. Community social reproduction work initiatives in response to the Covid-19 health crisis involved and announced a self-organized collectivization from the working class for the working class, prioritizing the needs and demands of social reproduction for this class. They were forged in and pointed to sociopolitical meanings of resistance and class solidarity in their determination of race and gender intertwined with black territories (Rolnik, 2007). Community social reproduction work, (re)activated swiftly with the outbreak of the pandemic crisis, in many cases developed from expressively precarious conditions, encompassed the fields of action: i) food security, ii) health prevention, iii) community communication, iv) income transfer and generation. At the same time, they acted in the provision of goods and services for the State itself, particularly the Unified Health System network. From inequalities and contradictions, Community social reproduction work – made invisible as work – became, within the limits of its possibilities, indispensable for guiding and meeting the social needs and urgencies of the social reproduction of the working class in times of the Covid-19 pandemic.