Professional Background of the Residents of a “Typical” Neighborhood in Great Buenos Aires

Abstract

This article seeks to understand the role that social policies play in the social reproduction of the residents of a neighborhood of Buenos Aires based on their life standards. A general characterization nowadays suggests that the life standards of this population and, therefore their problems, are explained by the Government’s absence and, according to this, one should think that its presence would solve these problems. Leaning away from this characterization, the thesis developed in this paper is that the Government is not absent (and that it never was); that the magnitude of its presence is a result of the problems in the reproduction of the life led by these people, typical of the form adopted by the accumulation of capital in Argentina, and that their presence cannot solve them because the reason lies elsewhere: in the place that these subjects occupy within the social reproduction process. This last point is the core of this article.