Pandemia COVID-19 e a ruptura da última fronteira: crise da reprodução social e a expropriação de pessoas em situação de rua em um município do Sul de Minas Gerais

Abstract

In this study, we sought to analyze how the ideology of neoliberalism affects the perceptions of public agents and homeless people in a municipality in the south of Minas Gerais regarding the main measures adopted in favor of this population in the period of the COVID-19 pandemic. 19. A descriptive, qualitative research was carried out, in which data collection took place through semi-structured interviews with homeless people and public agents who work with homeless people at the municipal level. The analysis of the data obtained was carried out through Content Analysis, with selection and categorization of the main arguments of the interviewees for analysis in the light of Nancy Fraser's Critical Theory and the Theory of Social Reproduction. The following emerging (non-priority) categories of analysis were listed: municipal public measures to protect homeless people during the COVID-19 Pandemic in the southern municipality of Minas Gerais; COVID-19 pandemic for those who were already there and for those who arrived on the streets; perceptions of homeless people and public agents about public measures adopted in the municipality and the crisis of social reproduction and the process of expropriation of homeless people. The results point to the increase in the process of capitalist expropriation in the face of the neoliberal context of crisis of accumulation, intensified by the COVID-19 Pandemic that attacked, above all, the conditions of social reproduction, explaining the increase in the homeless population and that people Newcomers to the streets blame themselves, and not capitalist structures, as responsible for the situation in which they find themselves, reproducing the discourse of the pedagogy of work as the main exit from the streets. It is hoped that this research can contribute to the understanding of the process of increasing the number of homeless people in Brazil, as well as to a critical reflection on the capitalist dynamics that generate it.