The pandemic exposes social inequality in a scandalous way
Mônica Dias Martins [1]
I.
The biggest victims of the pandemic are, inevitably, the temporary and underpaid workers, those who live in informal activities, unemployed and forced to inhabit the most precarious areas of large Brazilian cities. In Ceará, the data show that in the capital Fortaleza, the mortality rate shows variations due to socioeconomic inequalities and moradia, being relatively low in the cases of Meirelles (5%) and Fátima (11,9%) and quite high in Barra do Ceará (28,57%) and Jangurussu (21.42%).
Despite having many infected people in our rich neighborhoods, few people die; The deaths are more numerous in popular neighborhoods, housing complexes and favelas, in short, not what we call "peripheries." These localities have poor housing conditions and poor infrastructure, lacking urban equipment and basic services. No less important, the inhabitants of these peripheral and unassisted areas by public power suffer preconceptions, humiliation and, in decorrência, have low self-esteem. This subjective dimension of the daily lives of working families aggravates the poverty pattern, which cannot be measured solely by statistics, makes these valuable analysis instruments, as shown in the Map below.
Some would say: mas isso é Nordeste! In truth, we can observe the same phenomenon of inequality in the capital of São Paulo: in Morumbi, a neighborhood named after the bourgeoisie, 297 positive cases and 7 deaths were registered, just as in Brazil, in the neighborhood of workers and immigrants, the infected were 89 and the deaths were 54. [2] The world's largest power, the United States, is proven to have a high incidence of COVID-19 among African-Americans, according to a recent article by Jamelle Bouie, published in the New York Times. [3]
This discouraging situation is aggravated by the public health crisis, the lack of planning, human and financial resources, scientific research, among other factors. De facto, the Single Health System (SUS), devastated by decades of neoliberal policies, is being demolished in the name of the efficiency of the private sector and the economic profitability of the pharmaceutical industry, its laboratories and hospitals. Recognizing the current fragility of the public health system is still not enough to understand inequality in times of coronavirus.
II.
But what defines social inequality? Second report of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) of December 2019, Brazil is the seventh country in the world with the highest social inequality (Gini index of 0,533), despite its relatively high Human Development Index (HDI) (0,761). [4] Would it be useful to understand social inequality as measured only by the HDI, with indicators such as income, education and longevity? Perhaps it is a matter of individual behavior: poor thing, very young, preguiçoso, does not know how to poupar, invest, etc.? Or is there a coincidence, an unwanted effect of the economic system, a fault that cannot be corrected with compensatory public policies?
Sharing the concept that inequality is structural to capitalism, a socioeconomic system that discards and incorporates characteristics of the class society existing in the mid-19th century, not the West. Is a social relationship that requires us to respond: unequal in relation to what is happening?
The modern, industrial, urban Brazilian society of the 20th century has roots in colonial, patriarchal, escravagist society. Or what is the fact that Brazil is independent and republican? To what extent was the established social structure altered in that thousands of people of the working classes, especially Indians and blacks, are:
- relegated to menial jobs (agriculture, domestic, civil construction),
- denied in industrial activities (reserved in part for European immigrants) or more unpaid,
- mistreated as second class cities,
- persecuted in their cultural and religious manifestations,
- violated in their rights,
- street jogadas (the street population is unfeasible, without entering the demographic statistics whose unit is the address),
- imprisoned in the mass (or Brazil has the fourth largest prison population in the world, in its majority composed of young black people),
- submetidas to the genocide, to chacina and to the extermination.
Over the course of two centuries, we have built and consolidated social patterns that have shaped the personal and political behavior of the majority of the Brazilian population. Is a society not democratic, but extremely unequal, like a democratic state of rule? Equally, it is the result of legal disputes, including in the constitutions in the aspect of legal formality. In real life, there are many forms of inequality, some clearly disguised as hypocrisy, for example, or racism. The great scars are the street dwellers and the prisoners!
III.
No Brazil today, even though it is a chimera, a miracle. The scenario appears tragic: high unemployment, precarious work, flat salaries, deindustrialization, etc. In the midst of so many uncertainties, one certainty: as long as these patterns of inequality persist, only the workers, their families and communities that will succumb to COVID-19. They are being forced into a perverse and lying school between economic activity, ensuring food, or social isolation, guaranteeing survival. But what economy is saved when there are no more workers to make it work? O Brazil turns into the laboratory of a neoliberal totalitarian experiment. We must break the patterns of inequalities before they break us!
[1] Professor and coordinator of the Postgraduate Program in Sociology PPGS-UECE, coordinator of the Observatório das Nacionalidades research group, editor of the academic journal Tensões Mundiais and member of the Council of Directors of CLACSO. Text presented in videoconference on the topic Pandemic, Demography and Social Inequality, promoted by the Secretary of Science, Technology and Higher Education of the State of Ceará (SECITECE), on April 21, 2020.
[2] Fontehttps://g1.globo.com/sp/sao-paulo/noticia/2020/04/18/morumbi-tem-mais-casos-de-coronavirus-e-brasilandia-mais-mortes-obitos-crescem-60percent-em-uma-semana-> Accessed on: April 20, 2020
[3] Fontehttps://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-racism-african-americans.html.> Accessed on: April 20, 2020.
[4] https://nacoesunidas.org/relatorio-de-desenvolvimento-humano-do-pnud-destaca-altos-indices-de-desigualdade-no-brasil/
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