Serviço Social: contribuições analíticas sobre o exercício profissional
| Autor | Marilda Villela Iamamoto |
| Cargo | Social Worker, Ph.D. in Social Sciences (PUC-SP) |
| Páginas | 143-146 |
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This issue of Revista Katálysis, Serviço Social: con-
tribuições analíticas sobre o exercício profissional (So-
cial Work: analytic contributions to professional
practice), presents an overview of the multiple theoretical
and political trends underway in the professional universe
and discusses their relation to the essential elements of
professional activity.These trends are seen in the direction
imprinted on the profession by the production and
reproduction of social relations, in the implementation of
professional education, in the interpretation of the historic
determinants of this professionalization and in the ways of
explaining and realizing the responsibilities of social workers
in the contemporary historic scene marked by profound
historic economic, political and cultural transformations.
The diversity of perspectives found here in the
interpretations of the process of institutionalization and
development of the profession within different national
societies, of the current challenges confronting the work
of the social assistant – in the inseparable theoretical-
methodological, ethical-political and technical-operative
dimensions – condenses the professional and academic
debate in the field of Social Work in Brazil. At the same
time, it opens a dialogue with work concerning the
European Union (Portugal and Germany) and other Latin
American countries (Uruguay and Argentina). At the same
time, visibility is given to the challenges confronted by so-
cial workers in the construction of a collective professional
project, the social foundation of which is the social forces
that struggle for social hegemony.
The articles presented here intensify a rigorous and
demanding theoretical debate that has a scientific basis and
is dedicated to understanding the determinants of social life
beyond their empiric manifestations and to deciphering the
discourses of social agents such as they appear at the
surface of social life. The articles also examine the
“scientific” formalization that legitimates and reiterates
these discourses, and undertake the theoretical criticism
needed to unveil these discourses. This is a pre-condition
for identifying the teleological dimension of work, and for
elucidating the meaning and the social effects of professional
activities on the social subjects to whom they are aimed
and, in particular, on the subaltern classes. They seek to
affirm their social interests and needs on the public scene,
in the struggle for rights of citizenship, with this understood
as a historic process that involves the socialization of political,
economic and cultural power (COUTINHO, 2000).
The articles gathered in this issue of Katálysis analyze
and respond to professional challenges that are historically
circumscribed: they involve Social Work, but do not explain
its internal barriers that are drawn by the deep and broad
transformation underway in capitalist society, in the context
of the global expansion of capital, which reinforces the
combined unequal development of regions and countries,
companies and production sectors, social classes and cul-
tural formations, which are tinged by the traces of their
historic particularities (LÊNIN, 1976; MANDEL, 1985).
In the counter-trend of a long recessive wave on the
world scene, under the hegemony of financial capital
(CHESNAIS, 1996, 1998), orchestrated by the multilateral
agencies in the shadow of the North American empire,
Capitalism has advanced in its vocation of internationalizing
production and markets, and in its demand for “structural
adjustment” policies from the national states. These poli-
cies give free reign to speculative financial capital without
regulation and to the profitability of large multinational
conglomerates, while radicalizing the “social question”.
The conservative character of the neoliberal project is
expressed, on one hand, by the naturalization of the capitalist
order and by the social inequalities inherent to it that are
considered inevitable. This obscures the living presence of
collective subjects and their struggles for the construction
of history in favor of the exaltation of isolated individuals,
according to liberal canons. On the other hand, this
conservative character is expressed in a historic regression
that is condensed in the dismantling of accumulated social
conquests, which resulted from historic struggles of the
working classes, consubstantiated in the universal social
rights of citizenship, which are mediated by the State. The
neoliberal project presents these conquests as “threats or
difficulties” that are the cause of the “excessive social
spending” that is at the root of the fiscal crises of the States.
This is complemented by the spread of the liberal idea that
“social well-being” pertains to the private realm of individuals,
families and communities, and that gives priority to voluntary
work and philanthropic initiatives. This is part of a broad
effort to moralize the “social question” by disqualifying it as
a public, political and national issue (YAZBEK, 2001) and to
depoliticize the notion of civil society. The intervention of
the State, to attend social needs, focuses on social programs
to combat extreme poverty and control social risk. It
attempts to transfer the provision of social rights to market
and philanthropic forces. Soares (2003, p.12) reaffirms:
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