Capitalismo, estado de bem-estar social e mercado de trabalho em países selecionados de capitalismo desenvolvido

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the transformations in Welfare States (WS) and their relations with the labor market, especially in selected central European countries, after the structural crisis of capitalism from the 1970s onwards, and to point out the conditions of reproduction of the working-class life. The central hypothesis is that the development of post-crisis capital hinders the consolidation of a WS in the mold of the golden years period, even in central countries, necessitating the exploitation of the working class. To build our argument, we start from the analysis of two fundamental categories exposed in Marx's Capital – surplus labor and excessive labor, as well as the development of capitalism. Based on this theoretical foundation, we demonstrate two logical-historical moments of capital development. The first concerns the thirty golden years, during which central countries built a WS committed to full employment, which we consider to be the foundation of this societal arrangement. In it, the working class, through regulated capitalism, could obtain gains that approximated the exchange value of labor to payment according to normal conditions, surplus labor (exploitation). With the advent of the structural crisis of capital and the deregulation of the system, we point out that the condition of exploitation (surplus labor) was reversed. Capital begins to spoil (excessive labor) the working class through its mechanisms. Through the analysis of central countries whose labor market consisted of high regulation, we find that the transformations in the capitalist system point to the exploitation of the working class even in these countries in the post-structural crisis period.