Banca de DEFESA: FABIANA ALCÂNTARA LIMA

Uma banca de DEFESA de DOUTORADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
STUDENT : FABIANA ALCÂNTARA LIMA
DATE: 25/06/2025
TIME: 14:00
LOCAL: https://meet.google.com/ruc-eadt-ryb
TITLE:

CRISIS AND REPRODUCTION OF CAPITAL: A CRITIQUE TO THE CONTEMPORARY ENTREPRENEURSHIP PHENOMENON

 

KEY WORDS:

Crisis; reproduction of capital; entrepreneurship; Industrial Reserve Army.

PAGES: 235
BIG AREA: Ciências Sociais Aplicadas
AREA: Serviço Social
SUBÁREA: Serviço Social Aplicado
SUMMARY:

This thesis aims to investigate entrepreneurship as a counter-trend mechanism of the contemporary crisis. To achieve this objective, we focus on Marxist theory on crises, seeking to update its seminal formulations and connect it with the debate in the Marxist tradition. We start from the assumption that the strengthening of entrepreneurship in contemporary capitalism has an umbilical link with the capitalist crisis, whose specificities refer to the outbreak of the 2008 crisis in the USA and its repercussions on a global level, with worse repercussions in countries with peripheral economies, such as Brazil. This crisis, as a concentrated manifestation of capitalist contradictions, has demonstrated since the first decade after 2008, that its vital character is anchored in the capacity of capital to develop counter-trend mechanisms that can, in some way, intervene within the limits of capital, mitigating its most visible impacts. One of these mechanisms is the reduction of capital costs with the reproduction of the labor force, by destroying and undermining possibilities of access to regulated work, restoring to the agenda what Marx and Engels called the industrial reserve army. Regarding our research objective, we take as a representation of the EIR, the individual microentrepreneur workers (MEI) who work predominantly in the sphere of circulation of goods and services. Methodologically, the thesis comprises a theoretical research, of a qualitative nature, with exploratory investigation of bibliographic and documentary sources, as well as the use of secondary data collected throughout the research and which we seek to confront with the categories belonging to the categorical building of the critique of political economy. Beyond the invisible threads that link the MEI to capitalist production, this type of work reveals itself as a counter-trend mechanism of the crisis and, therefore, functional to capitalist (re)production, based on the State's action in guaranteeing the legal conditions for the potentialization of the exploitation of the labor force and the concealment of the determinations of value. This functionality translates into five central pillars: 1) it mobilizes the different layers of the industrial reserve army produced by the crisis and, by mobilizing this surplus labor force, it affects the interruption of the fall in the profit rate and the shortening of the capital turnover time; 2) it relieves productive capital of part of the costs of constant capital (means of production), especially fixed capital (machinery, equipment, in addition to the physical workspace itself); 3) it reduces costs of variable capital, while ensuring an abundant supply of labor force below cost, affecting the increase in working hours and the regulation of wages (refunctionalization of credit for the reproduction of capital); 4) it hides the unemployment rates and lack of social protection of labor under State regulation; 5) it contributes to the expansion of the profits of banking capital by remunerating financial capital in the form of interest.

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
Presidente - 1283608 - MARCELO BRAZ MORAES DOS REIS
Interna - 1228739 - JANAYNNA DE MOURA FERRAZ
Interno - 2475019 - HENRIQUE ANDRE RAMOS WELLEN
Interna - 1149518 - SILVANA MARA DE MORAIS DOS SANTOS
Externo à Instituição - JOSE PAULO NETTO - UFRJ
Externo à Instituição - MARCOS PAULO OLIVEIRA BOTELHO
Externa à Instituição - MARIA AUGUSTA TAVARES - UFPB