Trabalho, Educação e Saúde - TES (Work, Education and Health) is an open access scientific journal, edited by the Joaquim Venâncio Polytechnic School of Health, from Oswaldo Cruz Foundation.
Editor's Note
The so-called Economic-Industrial Health Complex (CEIS), as a project and public policy of the current and recent Workers' Party (PT) governments, is based on a certain diagnosis of reality: economic backwardness and technological dependence are the result of insufficient cutting-edge industrialization with high added value, low government investment in industrial policy and limited public-private interaction. As is easy to see, by the opposition, the mere enunciation already allows us to perceive what its formulators intend as ways of overcoming the state of affairs they reveal. However, the so-called Marxist Theory of Dependency (TMD), which has been around for just over 50 years, has made an important critical contribution to the real possibilities of development on the periphery of the capitalist system, especially on the Latin American continent. The publication of this debate results from the confrontation between these different perspectives on understanding reality and proposals for intervention in it. Structured from a problematizing basic text, followed by four other commentators, and ending with a rejoinder, it allows laypeople to understand the topic and its polemics. It offers those already initiated in the discussion perspectives of understanding and criticism that are still not very present in the public debate on the subject.
André Dantas e Letícia Batista Silva
Debate Editors
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Authors: Paulo Henrique de Almeida Rodrigues, Roberta Dorneles Ferreira da Costa Silva, Arthur Lobo Costa Mattos.
Abstract
This article, which plays the role of a problematizing text in the debate promoted by the journal Trabalho Educação e Saúde, in a thematic dossier on the Health Economic-Industrial Complex, criticizes this complex considering its theoretical-political choices, perspectives on the state-civil society relationship, diagnoses of the Brazilian and international reality, and developmental bets on the part of its main advocates. Based on the categories of the Marxist Theory of Dependency, the authors conclude that this
project – taken on as public policy by Brazil’s current federal government, in essence, by the forms and contents it defends and assumes – reinforces dependency and economic and technological subordination instead of overcoming it.
Keywords: economic policies; dependency-independence area; pharmaceutical industry; drug
production; national pharmaceutical assistance policy.
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Authors: Marco Aurélio de Carvalho Nascimento, Juliana Duffles Donato Moreira, Gabriela Rocha Rodrigues de Oliveira, Thalita Borges Oliveira.
Abstract
This article, which plays the role of text-commentator of the debate, in a thematic dossier on the Health Economic-Industrial Complex, defends this complex to overcome underdevelopment. It defends the active role of the state as a mobilizer of public and private agents with a view to national development, understands health as strategic vector due to its great economic potential, and the accumulation of capital as a potential promoter of industrial and social development. It concludes that the Brazilian reality requires bold strategies such as the Complex’s, in order to strengthen public policies of a universal nature and social welfare.
Keywords: health; development; innovation; unified health system; health economic-industrial complex.
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Author: Márcia de Oliveira Teixeira.
Abstract
This article, which fulfills the role of text-commentator of the debate in a thematic dossier, on the Economic Industrial Complex of Health, focuses its analysis on the research environment under which this Complex was consolidated at the interface of the debates on technosciences and the national policy of Science, Technology and Innovation in health. The text offers the reader a brief overview of the intellectual trajectory of the leading proponents of the Complex, which allows them to better understand the conclusion it reaches: their proposals do not overcome the neoliberal condition that is part of their own intellectual environment – and which, in the end, produces the underdevelopment they claim to overcome.
Keywords: CEIS; public policies; political economy; technosciences; health innovation.
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Comment 3 - The return of national subjugation in public health debates
Author: Maria de Fátima Siliansky de Andreazzi.
Abstract
This article, which plays the role of a text-commentator on the debate in a thematic dossier on the Health Economic-Industrial Complex, reinforces the criticism of this field of thought and political action, based on its foundations. It points out flaws in the historical analysis that forms its diagnosis of contemporary reality, points out the fetishization of the role of private initiative (of Schumpeterian matrix) and denounces the theoretical eclecticism that compromises the method and ignores the incompatibility, sometimes more or less, between the authors mobilized that give it its basis. It concludes that the result of these ‘combinations’, in the form of neo-developmentalism, is and has been a disservice.
Keywords: Political Economy of Health; neo-developmentalism; Health Industrial-Economic Complex;
imperialism; innovation.
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Authors: Áquilas Nogueira Mendes, Leonardo Carnut.
Abstract
This article, which plays the role of a text-commentator on the debate in a thematic dossier on the Health Economic-Industrial Complex, although it is also critical of this Complex, sets out to promote a critique of the critique offered by the basic text. This is because it considers that critics and the criticized are on the same ground when they attribute importance to the Health Economic-Industrial Complex in terms of its effective capacity, as a public policy, to reduce commercial and technological dependence
in health. Making use of the debate on the state promoted by the derivationist school and in defense of the theoretical-political position they adopt, the authors conclude by warning of the risk of socialdemocratizing anti-capitalist perspectives such as the Marxist Theory of Dependence.
Keywords: Health Economic-Industrial Complex; state; state-form; political economy; Marx.
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Rejoinder - The Health Economic-Industrial Complex as an alternative to maintaining underdevelopment
Authors: Paulo Henrique de Almeida Rodrigues, Roberta Dorneles Ferreira da Costa Silva, Arthur Lobo Costa Mattos.
Abstract
O This article, which plays the role of a rejoinder in a thematic dossier on the Health Economic-Industrial Complex, reviews the main text’s four comments, partly accepting and partly contesting them, in different proportions. As a synthesis of the problematizations that motivated the debate and the appreciations, favorable or unfavorable, received from different perspectives, the authors of the problematizing text return to their axis of analysis, but now from the ground traced by their critics.
Keywords: economic policies; dependency-independence area; pharmaceutical industry; drug production;
national pharmaceutical assistance policy.
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