Desafio da vida: trabalho, velhice e memória / Challenge (thread) of life: work, old age and memory

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2008

RESUMO

The necessities of the capitalist development in Brazil demanded a significative contingent of workers for its expansion and reproduction. This is a vital element when one tries to understand the growth of the Brazilian population and, in its core, the rapid aging of workers. At the same time, despite the scientific progress, reaching longevity implies bravery of mind and soul, to face a system whose main finality is the appropriation of the surplus value. In this sense, the ideologies that destitute old age of historicity, turning it into a mere object of nature, are rejected. The centrality of work as the founding and humanizing element of the social individual is recovered. Consequently, the notion of social class, according to Marxs understanding, is indeed quite pertinent. It is by comprehending the aged not as a segment, but as members of the working class that one may lift oneself to the heights of the importance of bringing to the surface the thread that unites them to the other colleagues of their class. Therefore, it is neither age nor the withdrawal from the job market (from activity to inactivity) which subtracts the social individual from his origin of class. In fact, while deprived of the means of production, their lives are determined by work. However, the bourgeois ideology inflicts to workers as a whole their fragmentation, in order to obscure their unity as a social class. This ingenuity aims at maintaining the status quo; at the enfeeblement of struggles for the amplification of citizenship, in the countermarch of human emancipation. Even so, the aging of the Brazilian working class demands the concretization of social rights, for which workers as a whole have been struggling, since the previous century. Two interviews with directors of representative entities of old retired and pensioner workers allied to the bibliographical research on the subject matter have revealed that the claims of the elderly have as substratum the mark of the profound social inequalities engendered by capitalist production. The achievements suffer the upsets not only of the exploitation intrinsic to capitalism. They represent an arduous and continuous struggle also against authoritarianism and conservatism typical of the bourgeoisie and of the State in Brazil. The political memory of aged workers is pointed out as an active ingredient in the process of construction of the hegemony of their social class. Nowadays, in the battle against neoliberalism and its charge for the counterreformation of social security, historical opportunities are born to apprehend the memory of the struggles of old workers as a flame potentially enlightening of the unity of the working class.

ASSUNTO(S)

old age work memory velhice - aspectos sociais classe social ideology servico social ideologia velhice memória social class trabalho

ACESSO AO ARTIGO

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