Doutor, quem paga essa conta? a política social do endividamento

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how Brazilian social policy has been reconfigured under the hegemony of financial capital. It departs from the hypothesis that social indebtedness is not a deviation but the historical form assumed by social policy in the era of financialization. The research articulates three dimensions — theoretical, institutional, and empirical — to understand how the logic of interest-bearing capital invades the field of social rights and turns social protection into a mechanism of financial accumulation. The first chapter starts from historical concreteness and theoretically reconstructs the trajectory of financialization as a stage of contemporary capitalism. It is grounded in Marxist categories of fictitious and financial capital and draws on the contributions of Mandel, Lapavitsas, and Chesnais. It demonstrates that the expansion of finance redefines the form of the State, which takes on the role of ensuring financial valorization while ideologically diffusing its rationality. The second chapter returns to the institutional sphere and examines how the Brazilian State internalized this project, converting the discourse of “financial inclusion” into a policy of “financial citizenship.” The analysis of official documents and Central Bank reports, combined with the study of the programs Minha Casa Minha Vida, FIES, and payroll loans linked to the BPC, reveals the deliberate action of the State in creating instruments that bind social rights to debt contracts. Within this dynamic, Caixa Econômica Federal emerges as the main mediator between citizenship and credit. The third chapter returns to the concrete level and analyzes the lived experience of this mechanism through the Legal Assistance Cases (PAJs) of the Federal Public Defender’s Office. The narratives of indebtedness revisit and challenge the theoretical categories developed throughout the study, showing how the promise of inclusion turns into debt and the right becomes a contract. The conclusion is that, in the context of financialization, social policy ceases to operate as an instrument of universalization and begins to reproduce the logic of the commodity, subjecting workers to a permanent cycle of credit and expropriation. The state emerges as the centerpiece of this new form of domination.