Maria Celia Paoli

We may briefly consider that opening up a critical space for rethinking counter-hegemonic actions to the neoliberal social and economic model must address the political possibilities to recover and rebuild the disrupted social bonds created by this new (dis)order. This means mainly, as the core of this research project suggest, to re-discuss the new forms of exclusion that surround us daily in the social landscapes created by neoliberal policies. With this in mind, I attempt in this paper to examine and evaluate the increasingly active philanthropic action organized by national big business and transnational corporations in Brazil, which claims to be understood as civic actions through its allegiance to the improvement of citizenship. If it is so, Brazilian and multinational corporate philanthropy would mean that social responsibility finally appears as a newly-founded perception, and perhaps a moral commitment, in the world of entrepreneurs and companies to ameliorate the immense poverty and multiple inequalities of half of the country’s population.

Nevertheless, to evaluate this action and its novelty in Brazil from the point of view of this project concern implies to consider its potential or its failure to contribute to a counter-hegemonic critical impact in the country’s political scene. In that sense, philanthropic initiatives will be analysed less in ethical terms, that is, as linked to disclosed individual or class virtues, but mainly as a possibility to recover the political and public sense that Hannah Arendt (1998) called "acting together for a common world". A kind of action that is able to transcend its own particularity through the creation of a public space constantly fed by critical, conflicting and innovative speech that raises a new and impredictable sequence of events based on pluralistic, debated and shared values. Approaching Arendt´s idea, I suggest that recognition of potential or real counter-hegemonic actions can be made through the distinction of actions which create, in a community, critical and autonomous meanings which might work as a political reference. Even if these actions begin far from aiming a political meaning, as in the pragmatic case of philanthropic initiatives addressed to face extreme poverty and needs, a pregiven condition for their recognition as counter-hegemonic is to bring up the political dimension against privatisation of life, the narrowing down of political promotion of well-being and the destruction of political and cultural resources which overwhelm the possibility of a community or a society to live in a shared world (Arendt, 1987).

A second important point to be considered in the analysis of entrepreneurs philanthropy is the diffused plural meaning of the notions of citizenship and rights in Brazilian context. A political order based on citizenship promotion combines together many different and opposing elements, but a crucial common problem concerns the status of people endowed with the right of acting through political opinion, which bring the subject to the important field of decisions and deliberation on public goods as common goods. It is not unimportant to remember that contemporary notions of citizenship emphasize commitment to a shared responsibility for the public world (Arendt, 1987) and so requires a place where diverse and fighting interests have a chance to come together and yield decisions, thus excluding any type of particularistic domain or decision over common affairs. In this sense, the notion of citizenship allow us to make the distinction between the place where action is taken (in our case, the private realm of companies and corporation) and the political quality of the social space which is created through this action. This point may be obvious, but it is crucial to evaluate philanthropic initiatives (which are seen as "citizenship promotion" in Brazilian society) from the point of view of the possibilities of broadening consciousness and practices of the rights of citizenship in a society, in the sense of recognition of each person´s right to be related to others in debate and deliberation.

Finally, a word must be said on how the notions of citizenship and rights make sense in Brazilian political culture and in its modern recent history. Since 1980, the word "citizenship" has become a cornerstone of political discourse and academic interpretation of the uncertainties of legitimation processes that conforms public opinion to accept the unleashed country’s insertion in a global order. Citizenship (as "rights") appears with different, and conflicting, meanings but in any case as a public reference for judgment, mainly in front of the acute and deepened levels of poverty, social exclusion and political weakness that has made the historical genesis of modern Brazil. This meanings has found its roots in a double political dynamic that has been challenging Brazilian society since the last twenty years: first, the difficult transition from an authoritarian and hierarchical society and government to a democratic form of political and social relationships. Second, the corrosive effect of government economic de-regulation and the subsequent decline and delegitimation of established public policies, which, freeing the market from public boundaries, deepen the isolation and vulnerability of poor and excluded people. Perhaps this explains why Brazilian intellectual debate on political sociology goes beyond theoretical normative thinking which search for ideal evaluations of social justice and democratic procedures. In fact, one of the important impacts of the debate on citizenship and democracy in the country is to keep the critical dimension of these concepts close to the complex relations and concrete conflicts for its meaning, thus working with specific events which disclose a society increasingly living in a world of multiplied inequalities.

Such proximity to the events, actions, and debates that dispute the social and political sense of those transformations has led, in turn, to the elaboration of a notion of citizenship which is closely related to the importance of clear analytic distinctions between public space and private interests, as a basis for the critical understanding of the worsening of the social and political exclusion and the evaluation of its dynamic. In the country's current political and economic context, in my view, the totality of these distinctions and concepts has allowed a reflection that enables to concretely connect deregulation policies to the impoverishment of the political field previously promised by broadening of popular participation, as well as to the worsening of the social inequalities correlated to the negligence and subalternity to which public policies were doomed, especially those representing fundamental accesses to the survival of the poor, which, one should bear in mind, embody constitutional social rights.

At the same time, the critical production centered on the notion of citizenship has become translatable into the social experience, particularly that of the big cities where it is visible the exceeding of the "normal" levels of violence, abandonment, expropriation, unemployment, and poverty. The word "citizenship", circulating as connotative language of civility and social integration, and therefore arising as an alternative for security and order other than traditional authoritarian or repressive measures and ways of acting and thinking about these issues, has generated in the public opinion a demand for responsibility only secondarily directed to the government. In fact, this demand was captured through the appeal to the voluntary social activism of the population, and the word "solidarity" became, to common sense, a synonym with the voluntary altruistic disposition of an individual, an organization, or an enterprise. A synonym for citizenship.

Citizenship and solidarity are then demanded at exactly the same moment in which the governments of the nineties were impelled, by the neoliberal economic model adopted, to discharge themselves of investing in efficient public duties for the protection and guarantee of social rights. The elites also convinced themselves, in the words of Francisco de Oliveira (1999:57), of the "needless of a public realm" in face of a government amid a financial crisis and obliged to indebt itself with the private sector, creating in these elites the illusion of their political self-sufficiency, while the middle classes were seduced by the ideas of monetary stability and meritocratic individualism. Besides, the state reference in relation to distributive policies, though solidly established in the country's political culture, only showed itself from its historically authoritarian, bureaucratic, and inefficient side.

This framework of economic constraints, cultural heritage, and private interests might help us understand the importanc e of the relatively recent appearance of a so called "civil society" which, first through politicized and autonomous social movements and later through professionalized nongovernmental organizations, shifted the political activism for citizenship and social justice to civil activism geared to social solidarity. If the way opened by the social movements was heavily politicized and entailed a direct demand by an organized poor population for welfare, the NGOs opt for representing those demands in pragmatic and technically formulated negotiations with the governments, dispensing with the growing popular participation. This way, different practices of responsibility and compromise draw a potential conflict which differentiates the inside of the multiple organizations which constitute the emergence of what is understood as civil society in Brazil, and which tend to become criteria ever more present in the debate about its meaning.

Based on these considerations, this article has as starting point the now widely disseminated idea of shared social responsibility between citizens, organizations, and government in the context briefly described above, and seeks to examine the entrance, in the terrain of the social activism geared towards the "public benefit", of a rather unexpected actor: the entrepreneur. The interest for examining his voluntary social action stems mainly from the ambiguity in the way this actor maneuvers within the boundaries of private interest and public action, crucial to this project's question. One can observe, on one part, the likely innovative potential that the entrepreneurial responsible mobilization engages towards overcoming poverty and providing better opportunities for the poor. But, on the other, it is visible that this mobilization silences with respect to policies that widen social exclusion and politically confuses Brazilian society itself, besides occupying to its advantage, in terms of self-interests, the very space it opens as civil action for a public.

Along these lines, I hope to present in this text the hypothesis that, notwithstanding the positive dimensions presented by the social programs produced by the entrepreneurial social activism, the very criteria imbued in the notion of globalized hegemony proposed by this project -the casting out of populations from a stable social contract, the selective randomness in space and time in which these actions are undertaken, the attempt to build a response to exclusion solely on the grounds of the pasteurized managerial rationale of transnational capital, plus the above mentioned criteria regarding the public and political dimension of political agency - seem to indicate that this case is more of a counter-example of a participatory democratic action rather than a counterhegemonic action, making it, with no insurmountable contradiction, complementary to the neoliberal arrangements.

In the first part of the text, I discuss the importance of big business as part of the new and heteregeneous Brazilian civil society, associating it to government attempt to legitimate its own neglect for the social via a local adaptation of the famous theory of the "third way" by Anthony Giddens, enunciated as a new "nonstate public" sector concerned the poor and excluded that people the Brazilian landscape. In the second part, I describe the efficient responsible social actions proposed by the entrepreneurial social solidarity, pointing out the tensions and ambivalences of its application and practical results in light of the two objectives aimed at, namely, caring for the social and creating a "citizen consciousness" in the entrepreneurial class via actions of private philanthropy. In the third part, I expose my arguments to show that, however innovative and technically competent migh be the proposal for systematic private entrepreneurial investment to improve some of the basic needs of the large Brazilian poor population, its most conservative face contradictorily reveals itself in the moment that corporate philanthropy removes distributive conflicts and collective demand for citizenship and equality from the political and public arena Domesticating the political scope intrinsic to the notion of public goods to the efficiency of private managerial procedures, intervening haphazardly according to the preferences of private funding, philanthropic actions break the public measure between needs and rights and, therefore, does not generate its other pole, the participative citizen, who becomes a mere passive figure of beneficiary, a shadow of the benefactor. That is to say that those are actions moving far from the public debate that appears, in any modern political theory, as source of antagonistic and dialoguing creativities forming the center of a public and democratic decision over the allocation of the material and symbolic resources of a given society.

I. The place of entrepreneurial philanthropy's legitimacy: the discourse of the third sector

It is important to start by contextualizing the ideas in which the emergence of the entrepreneurial solidarity and responsible action takes place. The core of this context, in my view, is the dispute over a form of social regulation which should accept, or refuse, to be legitimized via broad deliberation on the interdependence of public and private goods. From this angle, two observations are important. First, the entrepreneurial responsible action legitimizes itself within the so called "third sector", which demands a model of social regulation more efficient than the State’s and, therefore, carried out in another sphere: the civil society, composed of a great diversity of actions, actors and organizations, their unity characterized by their refusal to belong to the market’s and state’s spheres. Second, the demanded efficiency it is not merely a matter of technical controversy about the models of social management, however pressing this certainly is in a country with more than half of its population below the poverty line. In fact, the expanding third sector proposes another model for addressing the social issue, one centered on broad decentralized civil qualifications, carried out by voluntary civil activism in specific areas which, therefore, requires another relation to the political capacity to implement it.

In search of recognition, this model seeks support on the practical and theoretical combinations of these actions through the idea of a "sector", which determines resorting to "homogenization, dilution, and occultation of the differences [of the actions which compose the sector] that might be socially and politically significant" in order to face problems of legitimacy (Landim & Beres, 2000:1). This diluted "sector" of action explains how easily corporations have find a place in the "third sector" and it is relevant to understand this place from the point of view of its discourse. Given the absence of texts solid enough to avoid the strategic persuasive tone common to the theoretical production of the sector, I have chosen to present this place of legitimacy through the Brazilian version of Anthony Giddens' (1998) "third way", as recreated by Bresser Pereira (1999) through the notion of "nonstate public sector" for Brazil, because of its obvious relatedness to the proposal of a "third sector".

Both authors prefer presenting the theme through a political classification which seeks to relate the different governmental proposals of the gradual deregulation of rights in each country to the political postures of the left and the right, but what stands out in the process is the attempt to exorcize the anxiety visible in the task of establishing a clear distinction with neoliberalism. Hence the affirmation of a broadened idea of "center", permeated by well-known conventional rejections of such discourse (rejection of class politics, State interventionism, social security, corporativism, bureaucracy, politicization of social issues) and the usual wishful thinking associated with such general ideas as modernization and efficiency, democratic managerial administrations, total freedom for the market competitive individual and economic stability. Here, however, it is not the convergence of ideas regarding contexts as different as Great Britain's and Brazil's that matters but, rather, their differences, especially those related to the social policies.

Indeed both authors' ideas differ in meaning the very moment they are contextualized in their countries' incomparable societies and politics. Giddens cannot ignore the historically-backed success of the British Welfare State and its inseparability from Britain's civil and social formation, responsible for generalizing the universal institute of risk protection, central to the right to citizenship, thus altering the historical pattern of social inequality. Neither can he deny the recent Thatcherist neoliberal lackluster experience with its boisterous dismantlement of social rights and the successful pattern of trade unions to negotitate them, introducting the "free market" as a democratic abstraction precisely for restricting the share of the public democratic control over economic life. Faced with both experiences, Giddens rejects what he calls the "negative approach" of Welfare State (the political values which led Great Britain to wage war on poverty and its consequences) for a "positive approach", in which the State shares with individuals, now only engaged in the challenges of the present, the responsibility for crucial problems such as containing growing inequality, providing a universal health system, defining a policy for family planning and establishing a fair measure for working hours. A task both "complicated and thorny", admits Giddens himself while proposing that such partnership should shape a "a State of social investment", in which the principles of the Welfare State "continue" as investment in "human capital" preventively but not as compensatory payment of benefits. Nevertheless, Giddens calls for work contracts and the physical protection of employees, accepting, in principle, the assumption that "workers are not any kind of commodity" and that "no society worthy of such a name would allow treating them so", despite the weakening of collective bargain in the British social structure and its replacement for individual working contracts.

Bresser Pereira is also squeezed between two different historical experiences of Brazilian modernization, but these took a different direction when compared with the British case. In adapting the proposals of a neoliberalism aspiring a civilized status it is the Brazilian past that burdens, a past that projects into the present the shadow of what once was an economy oriented towards integration and developmentalism, an economy burdened with the tensions of a civil dictatorship which, however socially active in its regulatory capacity, never truly accepted negotiation procedures for the social rights that it had legally enforced. Neither did it accept, therefore, that the ideal of equality became a real part of the social integration promoted by the expansion of the labor market market, despite the strong legal framework regulating labor relations that was extended to the workers in the form of social rights, The authoritarian distributive and financing component of an economic growth was sponsored by an intervening State, on which the entire Brazilian development, and particularly the modern formation of its elites in the 20th century, completely relied. Even though from that moment onwards the working contract gained legal status nationwide, the absence of the autonomous right to collective negotiation as a means to regulate the labor market generated, in practice, both the criminalization of the idea of social conflict for rights and the reinvigoration of old informal labor relations, combined with the bureaucratization of the social services, the political disqualification of labor unions and the use of police violence, all part of the formative experience of the Brazilian working class. Unionist and political dependence were broken only 20 years ago, and this second Brazilian experience of instituting a measure of social equality came in marked contrast to authoritarian measures, through a renewed, nationwide labor movement that, for the first time in the modern history of Brazil raised the issue of rights and social benefits to another level, that of an active citizenship which, reaching far beyond its class identity, sought to build another framework for the notorious Brazilian extreme social inequality.

As with all political attempts to break away from past heritages that account for identity traditions built upon struggles, utopias and conquests, the intellectual attempt to ignore them can only be explained in terms of subsuming history into the pure present of the "new", which bans the past in its own obsolescence, unable to retain its critical reference. That is what seems to occur not only with the proposal for a "third way" in Brazil but also with the credibility of the theoretical foundations justifying neoliberal economic policies. Both experiences, opposed, through which the country learned about social citizenship have not been abolished from the present, and pressure the theoretical fragility of the Brazilian intellectuals who strive to find some coherence in the dismantling of the public institutions in charge of social rights.

Bresser Pereira, among others, have to admit the little value of the previous experiences for the current times in order to feel free to adapt the political principles of the European posture to the Brazilian dismantling -- an operation analogous to that of the government economists when repeating the theoretical foundations learned in their North American PhDs - and build a domestic version of the passage from a society organized with reference to universal public rights to one organized by private solidarity agencies which are supposed to be responsible for the "execution of social services", side by side with the implementation of selective criteria for social security policies. To achieve that, the rights to education, health, child and elderly care - not to mention the very right to employment - are transformed into investment in "human capital" and placed in a sphere entirely dependent upon good-quality and reliable private management now termed "nonstate public sector". One should note that the argument is not that the NGOs think on and act better for social services but that "NGOs spend more wisely" and, therefore, will supply better services. A bet is also made on individual consumers who, presumably well off and thus free to choose the quality of the schools or health services they wish, are called to exercise their social responsibility.

Finally, rather than considering that such ideas might in fact express the government's desire to hand over to the private sector the public social responsibility and the fate of the Brazilian extreme inequality (as this would be a thesis of the right and not of the "new center-left" he identifies himself with) Bresser prefers to present them as a commitment to "the possible social equality" in Brazil, a commitment that considers inevitable the diminution of government´s public responsibility for social security programs. The definition of the "possible" ground of this commitment points to, paradoxically, the setting up of rules to stimulate market competition, economic initiatives and efficiency, the flourishing of individual talents, the individual or privately-organized solidarity. What remains a mystery, in the Brazilian context, is how to promote all that "without loss for a broad social justice". A task rather complicated especially because Bresser Pereira does not spend a single word in relation to contract protection or the (constitutional) rights of workers, which, by the way, have been the target of fierce attacks by the entrepreneurs who allege their high costs. Social righs have been under attack also from the government the author once cooperated with, under the argument that it is necessary to erradicate union "corporatism" that the guarantee of social rights would have generated and, with it, the lack of union responsibility regarding economic and social transformations. So the working population is asked to learn how to live without the horizon of collective public guarantees or, evoking Beck's expression (1992), to get used to a "risk society", which anyway would not actually alter much the experience of life that the poor Brazilian working population has long had of the society in which they live. In the absence of a real social contract, what remains is to efficiently "humanize" such perspective, performing it as a self-sufficient civil society.

II. The transformations of social responsibility

Important themes arise from this discussion and open questions concerning the unprecedented occupation, by Brazilian businesses, of the "nonstate public sphere" of social action which was started by the shrinkage, as the government itself admits, of guarantees and legal rights. A certain number of businessmen, concerned with the country's increasing social inequality and poverty, actively engaged in the social field, calling their peers to act responsibly to their business social contexts. Through this call, trigger a movement that redefines the sense and the modus operandi of old philanthropy, bringing it close to the notion of citizenship. To this redefined return to the idea and practice of philanthropy it was added the word "solidarity", meaning now the voluntary opening of private companies to the needs of the Brazilians poor. "Solidarity" was thus associated with preventing the future, a corporation answer to the needs of social reinsertion of the excluded, which can be seen through the prioritization of the issues of childhood, family and education as areas of business social responsibility in face of the growing deterioration of collective life. Yet another word was to be added when trying to define this ample and, in the Brazilian context, ambitious class target, that of creating a "citizenship consciousness" among entrepreneurs. Its meaning now is linked to active humanitarian consciousness of the context in which they act, although the vast majority of entrepreneurs remain silent, in this respect, on the sources of poverty increase and refrain from intervening in the debate on the current economic policy. Nevertheless, all those words, together, seem to constitute a call for entrepreneurs to act responsibly with respect to the very social base of public life, something really unprecedented in the history of the country.

A second theme comes from the fact that this organized entrepreneurial philanthropy, at the same time, adapts itself smoothly to the forms of entrepreneurial profit and echoes the neoliberal discourse that preaches individual and private initiative against the bureaucratic inefficiency of the state and the politicization of social conflicts. This is how Brazilian businesspeople join civil society’s virtues and the so called "third sector", appearing as an actor which, together with other nongovernmental social organizations, states its civil availability to contribute, from its own specific set of interests, to redefine the modus operandi of the public policies designed to foster the social and professional integration of part of the population.

The internal and external tensions regarding the appearance on the Brazilian scene of the public presence of a part of the Brazilian enterprises - in short, making itself responsible in its own way for the resolution of the social question, reacting with "solidarity" to the increase of inequalities through an activism which hopes to be closer to the promotion of citizenship than to mere social assistance - raise a number of questions about the transformation and direction of the relations between the public and the private within the Brazilian society, which, like many others in the world, experiences a trasnsition to another mode of accumulation and other paradigms of sociability based on the overall decontractualization of society (Oliveira, 1998; Santos, 1998). Such context of a simultaneous shrinking of official public policies for the promotion of social rights guarantees, on the one hand, and the broadening of that sphere to private social actions, on the other, that it should be understood the implications and limits of corporate philanthropy.

Let us start with the signification of the first process. The effects produced by the full acceptance, by the Brazilian government, of the economic guidelines enunciated in the so called Washington Consensus during the 1990s have been extensively discussed. Such acceptance has led to a clear diminution in the state's zeal and capacity for social regulation and to a dramatic reduction of public spending, under a background of increasing dependence of the Brazilian economy on the international financial movements of an unpredictable, global capital in its speculative attacks, which made perfectly clear the size of the external vulnerability of the country's economy. Although almost all countries at the world periphery have been hit in their defenses, we must take into account that Brazil jumped on the bandwagon with a specific type of vulnerability: the appalling and ever updated levels of social inequality. In fact, for a country boasting a GDP of approximately 540 billion dollars today, what is striking is the fact that 34.9% of the population -54.4 million people- is allocated in the national accounting under the rubric ‘poor people’ (able to eat but not to dress or have a dwelling) and 8.7% -13.6 million people- under the rubric ‘indigent’ (not even having access to basic alimentary needs). Though the country's per head income is US$ 3176, the average income may be just US$320. Other figures can complete the picture of the Brazilian inequality. According to the press, only 1% of the middle and upper class taxpayers own 15% of all private assets, whereas among those with lower incomes paying taxes, 43% own just 22% of total assets declared.

It is reasonable to assume that the Brazilian historical heritage of inequality, known as its "social question" since the second half of the twentieth century (when Brazil began mobilizing for its industrial growth project), would today be going through, in the wings of the current economic policy, one of its most dramatic moments. Even if unemployment is disregarded (today between 8% and 10% of the workforce), it seems evident that the today’s economic policy requires that the rationale of capital concentration and monopoly formation be minimized as well as the use of public funding according to universalized public policies be relaxed. Nevertheless, government and public control of these two factors are the only answers known to date to reduce inequality and allow the population access to public policies in the areas of health, food, education, retirement, and housing - so that the well known process of instrumentalization of public funds by private interests confers upon society its actual unmeasured face (Belo, 1999). Francisco de Oliveira (1999) called this process the "privatization of the public and the publicization of the private" which entails a veritable promiscuity between the government and part of the elites (beyond alliances still subject to dispute) by which the latter grants itself the monopoly of enunciate what market relations ought to mean. Or, in the words of Boaventura de Sousa Santos (1999) to obey neoliberal economic directives implies the institution of "false contracts", the leonine contract which, by "dessocializing the economy", engenders a subclass of excluded people confined to "savage zones", marked by the signals of social apartheid and condemned to a new state of nature. Which is why these false contracts are almost unthinkable, for through them the social apartheid becomes the general reference of sociability and the State adopts schizophrenic double standards of action and presence, democratic in the civilized zones, predatory in the savage zones of sociability. In this movement, private groups appopriate the regulating functions of the State by imposing pre- and post-contractual forms which are indeed extra-contractual, given their impositive nature.

To Brazilian society, therefore, this goes beyond the well-known reproduction of historical levels of inequality and income distribution which shaped the modern trajectory of the country. For now we are close to what Hannah Arendt (1989:329) in her work on totalitarianism, called "the production of a superfluous humankind", which loses its voice and expression in the very same loss of the possibility of a participatory political community. Excluded people become superfluous when they loose their capacity to build organized social movements centered around claims for rights, being able to challenge the democratic sense of collective life and put into question the disrupture of their space of sociability. In one word, people able to engage in the political discussion of common issues in a common world (Arendt, 1987b). Now doomed to be ‘disposable nature’ by the very dismantling of the public sector and by government contempt for the universality of the rights of citizen, subject to all kinds of violence, separated and hierarchized by the barriers obstructing the passage from the private to the public, it remains only for these people the hope of being captured by the compensatory and local policies of social philanthropy organized within the scope of civil society groups.

The privatization of the public sphere and the publicization of private interests create the scene for the second process, the emergency of the voluntary social activism of the private sector and the NGOs in its quest to improve the situation of the society's most vulnerable people, those victims of unemployment, low income and no access to social opportunities. Even though the State still retains, as constitutional provisions, all the legal obligations with respect to social and labor rights, such provisions have been shaken by measures designed to reform them. Entrepreneurs and government strive to discover legitimate ways to deconstitute social guarantees as universal rights (due to their high cost) by selectively denying their access and calling for the "social creativity" of those affected. I believe that one of the ways to achieve the legitimacy for the dismantling of state-public guarantees is the effort to adapt the idea of "participation of new actors" in the social question, originally (just like the demand for citizenship) an idea belonging to the 1980s' social movements' field. By disembeding its political sense, this idea opens a space for private or nonstate social action, and entrepreneurs occupy it in their own way, making voluntary civil participation something intrinsic to the new and excludent productive efficiency. This works fundamentally through selectively choosing those shares of the population that are to be integrated and controlling those which are to become superfluous to this movement. It is an operation of deterritorialization of universal rights that gets support both from the image of a "culture of altruism" and from the entrepreneurs' managerial model applied to the profitability and efficiency of social resources, governmental ones included. Needless to mention that, in a context in which traditionally bureaucratized state social policies are coupled with public investments neglectful of their quality, to show efficiency in overcoming lacking social conditions is a strong argument before public opinion, one which tends to expand far beyond the local sphere where the assistance action is held according to the private choices of the philanthropic entities.

For instance, an official text admits that, even though the State should be the main protagonist in the definition of a policy for social development, it "neither has the means to elaborate such policy alone, nor to implement it (...) only with an ample mobilization of society will it be possible to put together enough resources to face the problem [of Brazilian social exclusion]. It is, therefore", as the argument goes, a matter of "finding partners outside the State, that is, in society, or more specifically, in private companies and in the third sector". These partners, constituting the "protagonism of the citizens, breaks with the dichotomy between public and private, in which public was synonymous with state and private with business". This kind of argument is very common (with variations) in the discourse of the Brazilian third sector and particularly, as mentioned earlier, of the entities promoting social well-being. It is tempting to think about the semantic shifts adressed to build their main banners, as the immediate connections made between society, citizenship and private companies to propose something equivalent to a new type of local random arrangement that would replace the social contract by the mediation of social private organizations. Such shifts follow their insertion in the new "neutral" field, managerial and pragmatic, with which the expression "civil society" has been endowed and into which the once sociological and political fascination with its disclosed potentialities was transformed. But what concerns us is to show how this open space is being occupied by corporate social protagonism.

I suppose that the first entrepreneurial entity to organize for a social action modeled on the basis of a new "citizen" philanthropy --Abrinq Foundation (1990) which, I suppose, was the entity that created, for Brazil, this new model -- was intended for poor Brazilian children, often growing up under certain extreme situations such as hunger and malnutrition, broken families, household child labor, forced child labor, violence, no access to school or any reference whatsoever of organized life. With the successful growth of the innovative way of operating compensatory social programs and of stimulating enterprises to join them, the road taken by Abrinq Foundation opened paths for other organizations and provided the philanthropic agenda for companies that adopted social programs: culture, education, women's health, ecology and environmental conservation, sports, leisure, recreation and community development. As these new ideas and experiments developed, it also grew the discourse calling for the company's social responsibility (as can be verified by the increasing support of companies to philanthropic programs) and for society's civil consciousness towards the needy and the excluded (which can be measured by the growth in voluntary social work, recruited by specialized agencies). The entry of companies’ social action along these lines contributed in a technically original way to the evergrowing and ill-defined "third sector" in Brazil, which expanded after the success of the Eco-92 World Summit and that, according to recent data, is composed of a total of 220 thousand charitable entities and providers of several social services (foundations, institutes, associations, non-profit organizations). This sector accounts today for serving some 9 million people and engaging 2.2 million workers, 1.1 million of which were volunteers. The sector's estimated budget, in 1992, amounted approximately to USD 4 billion (9 billion reais) 2/3 of which came from individual taxpayers and individual donations and 1/3 from state resources through joint ventures, fiscal exemptions, and exemptions of companies' dues to Social Security.

The model of social action created by the Abrinq Foundation, taken here for its exemplarity, bases its values on the issue of business ethics, seeking to mobilize companies to act with social responsibility towards their employees, the communities that host them, to ethically-oriented business practices, to fair rules of market competition. Its leaders have clearly perceived not only the importance of the rise of well-informed consumers and of a public opinion attuned to problems such as child labor, slave labor, polluted environment, the utilization of toxic materials and others, but also of the urgency to address them businesslike, including their connection with market and competitive success. Its originality lies in the acknowledgment that if most companies adopt ethical rules only aiming at corporate profit, in the process of their adoption the social values will eventually be recognized by entrepreneurs since philanthropic practices could create social awareness and commitment .

This seems to explain Fundação Abrincq trajectory, as officially told today, at first pressuring and denouncing constitutional and statutory violations of children's rights before political and governmental bodies and later focusing on key themes regarding childhood in an attempt to sensitize companies, which implied giving visibility not only to the denunciations but also to the possibility of locally solving the problems by means of experiments in entrepreneurial social action. More than mobilizing companies for this action (also carried out through incentives to the companies' own visibility), the Abrinq Foundation started designing projects and programs and offering them to the companies, besides making itself available to attract funds and channel them to the beneficiaries of the projects. The success of these activities grants the Abrinq Foundation a specialized and efficient know-how, exported as a model to other foundations in the country addressing the needs of the poor children. Not less important is the attempt to influence local governments by stimulating mayors to adopt such programs.

In sum, the exemplarity of the Abrinq Foundation in pioneering an efficient area for the social mobilization of companies, exploiting the compatibilities between profit and philanthopy, creating a language of citizenship and participation in the twists and turns of business language and private interests, readapting its structure with agility and transparency as it acquired more experience and transforming the aleatory philanthropic-charitable action of businesses into a philanthropy of profitable "citizen investments" which serves as a reference to other foundations, is undoubtedly remarkable. But it does not redeem the entrepreneurial philanthropic experience in Brazil from being characterized by tensions and contradictions with regard to its own innovation, which claims to be alternative, stemming both from the Brazilian political context and from the world of business in the deregulated context of the market.

On the companies' side, one of these points of tension is the above mentioned discovery that philanthropy directed towards needy social groups is quite good for the companies themselves, strengthening their institutional image and improving business. This would not be that important if one considers the tempting hypothesis that corporate action coul be the way for setting up something resembling a "civilized capitalism" in Brazil (as this action is sometimes interpreted) were it not for the fact that the entrepreneurial social action also seems to take part also in the affirmation of its own private power over the communities where it works, over the labor relations it contracts and the ideas it embraces. If that is so, such movement displaces social groups and territories, little by little, to its own field of interests, a movement silenced by the intention and by the visibility of "founding act" addressed to a new entrepreneurial citizen consciousness, responsible and solidarity-driven, an intention which supports its claim for recognition as a part of civil society.

Some dimensions of business philanthropy may suggest its instrumentality as a part of corporate business control of market relations and the social space, which operates together with the valued signs of the ethics of donation. In the first place, as mentioned, what prevails are market managerial procedures in the philanthropic space, which grant it a stronger argument of legitimacy the more the base of its generosity is organized as a corporation. It is illustrative to follow the evolution of the names and objectives given to the act of entrepreneurial donation: from "philanthropy" to "responsibility" and thereafter to "social investment", it becomes clear that naming the thing is increasingly central in the companies’ internal discussion of profitability issues (in business and social) for social protagonism became what is called, in the language of business, "a competitive differential". As a happy international specialist summed up well: "Last year, most people associated social responsibility with philanthropy. Today, I realize that the discussion is much more about social protagonism as a business opportunity than a mere philanthropic attitude". The expression "value-added brand" in connection with philanthropy can better clarify this dimension. Defined as "a favorable attitude that society attributes to an organization... [that] constitutes the base for influencing behaviors of loyalty to brands and products", it not only becomes a persistent formula to motivate companies to adhere to the programs of corporations foundations, but also heavily biases the discussions only towards the instrumental proposals for the quantitative measurement of their results. With such emphasis, the accomplishments of social work become "products" whose public consists of shareholders and consumers. This might be showing that the economic rationale of private interests is what prevails in entrepreneurial philanthropy vis-à-vis the ethical commitment to the society. Most certainly the results are worthwhile, since research carried out by a respected governmental agency shows that, in the country's wealthiest region, 65% of the multinationals based there (and 37% of the national companies) openly admit carrying out social actions to promote the company's image, and social organizations that coordinate such actions insist on a good image as a motivating factor to convince companies of their social responsibility. It is not meaningless to mention that, in those cases in which the entrepreneur does not choose setting up a specific entity devoted to social work (foundations or institutes), this job is allocated in the companies' "marketing" departments.

Secondly, there is more evidence that, for the companies, entrepreneurial philanthropy means good business. Between the money collected for philanthropic activities and the final addressees (the poor) it grows a number of mediating institutions, characterizing a specialized division of labor which is internal to this activity and is constantly opening "market niches" (to use the entrepreneurial language) which, in turn, become an important sector for profit-making. This can be seen in the language of the standard discourse of these mediating institutions. Starting with the usual and assumption to which its personnel are bound up, that most of the national entrepreneurs are traditional, erratic, and narrow-minded in their philanthropic donations, there follows an endless number of technical orientations that these institutions provide the entrepreneur with. There are institutions that teach businesspeople how to donate, others that show how to attract resources and make joint ventures, still others that show how to structure a specific entity to manage philanthropic work, organize the entity so that the social action may last longer, set up the financial and accounting tools required for the activity, show how to deal with the IRS, to influence news stories, to change repertoire and mentalities, to learn how to get information in seminars, and even how to harmonize the company's productivity demands with their workers ("functionary" as workers are now called) through the adoption of philanthropic programs.

A whole new "technology of citizenship" born in the entrepreneurial world, inspired by the North-American tradition of what today is called "social development" (synonymous with "social investment") is entering the country, and the local technical function of adapting it is highly important given the difference in terms of political, social, and even fiscal contexts between countries. As a qualified expert interviewed said, what works for business is what works for the social, whereas cutting-edge entrepreneurs, and more and more their experts' qualification, think that the rationality adopted in business is universal in its efficiency to produce concrete results. Of course all this activity opens up a new business opportunity, and the intermediary institutions can offer a complete package of services or just a few of them. All that requires expertise, and universities have opened specific courses in administration and management applied to the third sector and to entrepreneurial social action (based in the business and economics schools) which must have stimulated the recent growth in the offer of specialized (data collection) and practical ("social marketing") reference books.

Perhaps this new business opened by the idea of philanthropy as corporate investment and that of the "social marketing" that follows it may explain the size of the entrepreneurial third sector, although the available lists consulted present significant discrepancies. According to one of the intermediating companies, the largest enterprise-sponsored social entities in the country invested around 200 USD million in 2000 and backed more than 14 thousand projects in the country. Between 1997 and 2000, there was an important growth, though very different, in the companies' budgetary social investment accounts. However, news reports and interviews in daily newspapers show that private investment in Brazil is not proportional to the size of the capital, and a consultant in the area says that, despite the growth in donations, there is no comparison with the figures in the U.S. The consultant continues by saying that Brazilian companies spend 2.8 billion dollars a year on property and personal security, and 18 million dollars a month on social investments. Neither does there seem to be any comparison with the U.S. when a specialized magazine in business affairs comments that the largest social enterprises engaged in the donation of money to social projects, in Brazil, do not actually donate from their own pockets, but instead merely attract resources by using a model of alliances with other companies and/or international bodies to finance their ideas, taking advantage, as a matter of fact, of state and federal incentives.

Also very little has been done to evaluate the impacts caused by the entrepreneurial social programs on local poor commnities and needy populations these programs were meant for, or in other words, what changes they operated in these social realities. It is noteworthy that, apart from the number of people aided by the programs (figures are provided by the companies themselves) the discussion focuses almost entirely on a notion of impact which, again, has much more to do with that of profit return on investment or that of "the public's perception" ("public" here a synonym for consumers and employees of the companies that invest socially, plus the shareholders), leaving us without knowing how and what was transformed in the actual social relations of labor relations or in the needs of communities that were the target of companies’ social action. One of the rare researches on the topic (Falconer, 2000), recently done on the transforming capacity of a specific instrument for entrepreneurial consciousness and mobilization aiming at the elimination of child labor -- the seal "Child-friend Company", created by the Abrinq Foundation and granted to companies that commit themselves to not using child labor in their products -- can reveal some aspects of the tensions and contradictions between needs, the use of the enterprises' "correct" image and the solution that this image represents to some companies' financial difficulties.

While taking note of the methodological difficulties to measure the impact of certification programs through a guarantee attested by social seals in Brazil, among which also weighs the lack of governmental information on the situation of child labor in the country (country's official data are, in researchers’ words, "schematic, incomplete, and, at the local level, often nonexistent") researchers reveal that even the programs of the entrepreneurial foundations that pioneered the defense of childhood in Brazil only work with information provided by the companies themselves from the time when they applied for the certification, being therefore incomplete and outdated. In one of the institutes studied, a program conducted in the city of Franca (state of São Paulo) --designed to eradicate child labor in the city and proposing compensatory measures for households that had lost the income provided by their under-16 minor children --, it was found that there were no systematic records of the social action of companies that had been awarded the seal of certification. There is no doubt that this is associated with the researchers remark that, notwithstanding the successful certification and monitoring procedures (the latter carried out by the academic staff of the local university, who twice a year visit randomically-selected outsourced families) and the success and pioneering spirit of the model applied to the country's productive sectors hit by the denunciations of child labor, the program was "primarily a service to the shoe manufacturers, a guarantee for the sector against sanctions, keeping jobs [that were] threatened by the accusations that fell over Franca". It is also noticeable, the researchers continue, "that the program has an implicit political objective, that of uniting the now weakened and economically depressed shoe industry. As to the fact that the most recent monitoring procedure uncovered the companies' practice of "re-subcontracting previously subcontracted work", which makes it difficult to keep an eye on it, the researchers remark that the industry does not give concrete value for the regular monitoring process it sponsors.

It is true that the certificate awarded by the Fundação Abrinq (the "Child-friend Seal"), is successful in attracting all kinds of companies to improve consciouness about the use of child labor. It concentrated its campaign for children's rights on sectors accused of exploiting child labor, and many of the companies that resorted to child labor have now been certified and are even operating and supporting programs that benefit children. Another important action was to make multinational car assembly corporations, in 1996, to take responsibility over the conditions required for their suppliers, among them the coal industry, notorious for using child labor. Another significant victory was over Petrobrás, Brazil's largest state-owned company, which after years refusing to recognize the use of child labor in the alcohol industry (supplying the Pró-Álcool and heavily financed by the government), accepted adopting the child labor clause in all its suppliers' contracts. Researchers, however, once again show that these well-succeeded cases happen when there is a coalition between business interests and anti-child labor mobilization, that is, whenever there are exporting sectors being threatened of trade retaliations, although these sectors neither concentrate child labor nor its most intolerable working conditions. This logic can be proven by the contradictory certification of sectors where child labor predominates (as the agricultural sector) and those where, comparatively, its incidence is low (manufacture and services). The research finally concludes that Abrinq's respected certification does not imply a true guarantee that companies are engaged in child labor issues. Despite all the quality of the mobilization and of the practical consciousness-raising instruments its programs promote, there are no direct social audits in the companies or other forms to control the commitment they make, except the trust that the visibility the certification grants to companies will keep them from transgressing, which, one suspects, does not happen in those sectors where there is propensity and tradition of using child labor.

It is certain that problems like these may be dealt technically, and there is no doubt that the foundations most committed to the project of entrepreneurial social responsibility engage themselves on these points. However, what these problems further reveal is the pragmatic occupation of the realm of social philanthropy by the kind of uncommitted standard of the average Brazilian entrepreneur, still trapped in a variation of his figure in the country's history and historiography: a kind of businessman who will do any sort of deal provided his immediate interests can be materialized and assured, preferably far from public accountability. This image is still very much alive in Brazilian society, and from this point of view is important the emergency of companies’ philanthropy as social innovation in a society that has tolerate extreme social distances and all kind of inequalities. That image speaks about interests that require public issues to be depoliticized and transformed in semi-private processes, with strong negative effects on Brazilian modern politics and culture: frontiers are stretched when the image of ruling classes' dependent, narrow-minded, and greedy behavior is tolerated, a trait aggravated by the neoliberal decontractualization. On the other side, entrepreneurial advance over the social relations tissue, reaching far beyond wage relations, can show why it becomes unbearable, to the promoters of business social investment institutions themselves, the usual inwardness and shady business transactions of the old Brazilian patronate, as well as point to the importance of producing a correct image based on the culture of civil altruism.

Nevertheless, the essential point is still lacking in this movement towards raising the elites' social consciousness, precisely that which the social rights legally guaranteed by the social contract establish, even when bureaucratized and emptied: a universally-built and, therefore, real public space, one in which organized criticism and dissent from the excluded can voice their demands for rights. This political quality makes all the difference with other kinds of commitment, be them civil mobilization inspired by the values of donation, compassion, and solidarity, or through patronage that does not hide the instrumental capture of a private notion of citizenship which does not face a real other, for there is no figure of others who may participate and negotiate the social goods donated nor any public control (not just accounting controls) over such activities. For, by any sociological, historical or philosophical conceptualization, a public, civil, and pluralized space cannot welcome the figure of the other as recipients homogenized by their needs, or accept that social goods produced socially be distributed in discourse as the private generosity of a donor or class. On the contrary, public spaces become such only when the socially unequal meet in equivalence as autonomous actors and subjects of political and civil protagonism and, by the conflictive and joint practice of debate, reflection and deliberation about a common world, move beyond the constitutional and juridical guarantees by materializing the right to take part in the plurality of demands for citizenship.

3. Ambiguities and ambivalences

Some brief reflections may shed some light on the difficulty in evaluating a theme such as the present one, mainly considering the project's main question, the counterhegemonic potential that new forms of action, knowledge, and association may oppose to the triumphant way of policies of social deregulation and political destitution of the human capacity to invent a common world. I attempt here, by way of conclusion, to highlight a few important points concerning the political ambiguity of entrepreneurial responsibility in relation to the social question.

In the first place, I deem it important to advance my hypothesis that the meaning of "business philanthropy for citizenship" and its self-invested social responsibility in Brazil is indirectly linked to the replacement of the idea of broadened participative deliberation on public goods for the notion of efficient management of social resources, whose allotment is decided on random and private basis. In this sense, these are practices that hinder the public and political reference to reduce social injustices, in which a degree of responsibility, mutual engagement and negotiations between government´ public policies and organized social groups tends to dissolve.

In Brazil, practices of participative deliberation have from their start been connected with the political visibility of the "new social movements" and with the redefinition of the practices of the labor movement, in the 70s and 80s. They have been understood through a renewed theory of social conflict which pointed to pluralistic forms of grassroots participation and struggle, calling for autonomous representation in the political processes of distribution of public goods and formulation of public policies. The Brazilian meaning of the expression "new social subjects" associated the grassroots struggles of the time with the political visibility of people who had always been obscured --as "others who don't count", inferior citizens-- by the highly classist and hierarchical culture of the Brazilian society, people whose experience with modernity and the city was limited to various levels of marginalization, precariousness and social exclusion and whose demands had perpetually been dismissed by the State as non-negotiable, either by denying their politico-institutional value or, whenever their value was acknowledged as positive, by the need to control them.

Thus the experience of visibility of this other now autonomously organized and challenging the meaning of public space -- trade unions formerly under state control, poor workers and the socially excluded, those discriminated through gender, color, age, ethnicity and sexual option, people uprooted from their environment by the predatory action of capital -- had tremendous impact on the country's political culture. It modified the way local power and cities were exercised, involved the secular turn of the Church, generated a new political left and new leftist parties, introduced a new political vocabulary at the center of which, for the first time, was the word "citizenship". Through this word, social movements strongly influenced the provisions of the new Constitution (following the end of the military dictatorship) giving new meaning and weight to other word, "rights", and introduced what would later become the local "participatory model" of public and political negotiation and deliberation. They led part of the social sciences and historiography to a renewal of the lines of sociological understanding of the country, filtering theory received from the hegemonic centers of intellectual production and, above all, made clear a dividing line, visible in the academic and political fields, between those who perceived the utopian virtualities of the substantial processes in progress and those unaware of the proposals these processes entailed.

Indirectly (which to date can only be accounted for by the social and political demobilization generated by the effects of the neoliberal model) the aspiration of the social movements for public autonomy -- which was essentially directed to a state monopolistic of public policies and unfair in the selective way in which it responded to the demands for social distribution and recognized political and civil dignity to poor communities -- gradually took the form of nongovernmental public organizations. In them, the notion of civil society was embodied and, to varying degrees, the languages of conflict, the visibility of grassroots protagonism and the republican utopias of common decisions citizens were diluted. This second movement arose from the increasingly broadened and specialized scope of the NGOs, which more and more came to be seen as a social representation specialized in grassroots demands before the public sphere. Which, in turn, led them to become a professional activity, either to develop efficient projects and procedures to channel the grassroots demands, or to produce social and political diagnoses for the several situations they deal with, or still to spot and propose pragmatically themes and areas in which they act upon the country's multiple social needs,

In the mid-90s, the efficiency of Brazilian NGOs in devising and proposing local projects and in taking part in global information and consciousness-raising networks coincided with the State's declining disposition to correct and improve its social regulatory capacity and to keep the commitments of the public social contract. Little by little, many NGOs started occupying the spaces that had been locally or thematically deregulated or abandoned by governmental policy and, though many of them (especially the older ones) are still politically committed to poor and disadvantaged populations they work with, a plethora of interests invaded and stained the very character of plurality of those initiatives until then articulated in a coherent set of democratizing proposals, which is one of the virtuous banners of nongovernmental organizations. Clearly there are political differentiations and hidden agendas (or perhaps not so hidden) in the structuring of some of these institutions addressing, in theory, the same common purpose -- to aid the disavantaged or to "rescue citizenship". Among them, in practice, it is possible to detect political proposals that are instrumental in that they seek both to legitimize the government's excluding policies and to promote peaceful coexistence between social responsibility and the introduction of market-provided practices in the efficiency these institutions must demonstrate.

In the second place, it is important to clarify the silences surrounding social investment actions by pointing out some of the likely directions these actions took in their formative process. These directions stem from the diluted borders of the political conflict for the social distribution of public goods, a process which builds a horizontal common denominator between very different nongovernmental social organizations. This process can explain why it becomes important for business social investment organizations to institutionalize themselves as third sector, for to be part of NGOs provide legitimacy for private solutions for Brazilian social question, something that, until then, would harder be considered as an ideal of public policy. So the world of business formally step into this world with the language of citizenship, with conscious responsibility towards the social context and critical posture in relation to the state's bureaucratic inefficiency. Such language, as we have seen, can silence on their business motivations, but this may not be the main problem: an audit to assess results may also technically solve the gap between intention and corporations’ social achievements, with the guarantee from legitimized social foundations. From a more important point of view, what companies only speak of sotto voce is on transformations of the very scope of finantial or industrial relations that comes with their virtuous image, by expanding their presence in the social context as a civic presence, that is, the expansion of what I call, evoking Guattari (1985), "social power".

On the one hand, using technical resources of social work (resource attraction, technical cooperation and information), the company enters in the "ethic" space by introducing the idea of business responsibility for the disavantaged, going beyond its traditional productive territory and also beyond the new globalized virtual territories, breaking along the way its historical detachment in relation to both the real communities where it is located and its workers' life in them. On the other, but at the same pace, the social donations and projects return to the sphere of business profitability adding potential value to the products, as exhaustively mentioned in the texts produced by social consulting firms to stimulate businesspeople to invest in a good brand image through products which embody not their own material qualities, but the philanthropic virtue of their producers’ brand name. Thus, efficient social actions change the form of the specific material goods the companies manufacture, attaching themselves to the products and updating them with an unsuspected virtue, that of being responsibly present in broad contexts (local and national) where the consumers and shareholders live. In a twofold outward movement, the "citizen-company" efficiently does its local charity and produces, to the public sphere of opinion and to the private sphere of its peers, the perspective of a wider and legitimate presence of the social power of capital. As an entrepreneurial leader most adequately said: "Corporations and community must be the same thing.

This includes, in the third place, another ambiguous result of business solidarity, that affecting the company's own workers. Internally, the company also starts to show two faces, one made of the traditional link between productivity and profit and other made of procedures which, apparently unrelated to the productivity on the job, turn out to be solutions to formerly more difficult internal problems, like obtaining workers' consent or reducing companies’ uncertainties. Once again appears the ambiguity of the responsible social action, for this does not erases the fact that social programs addressed for the body of workers and their families, or the local community, are well designed and efficient. In the same act, however, they reveal their side of pertinence as an instrument of company policy. At the same time, the visibility game deepens when we see, in the press, the weight given to the figure of appeased and happy workers supported by social programs or mobilized for social work in the communities, in contrast with the faded figure of the fundamental labor contract link that defines his relation with the company, that of the wage worker.

If social work and private benefits donated to workers are no longer incidental to production or profits, it must be mentioned, in the fourth place, two other important and related angles of the ambivalence of new business social philanthropy. The first one is that these experiences are shown to public opinion as evidence of the inefficiency of the state's public policies and of their archaism, on the argument that those policies only produce citizens accommodated to the surrounding context of poverty. The second one follows linking private philanthropic responsibility as the opposite of state inefficiency and alienated citizens. Private responsibility appears as the embodiment of civil modernity, now emphatically placed in the field of market relations, and, by operating with the instrumental rationality typical of market management, captures ample and voluntary activist participation that works the miracle of charity as citizenship. As we saw, the use of voluntary work amounts to 12 million people (or more, depending on the source) transferring knowledge and experience computed as value of unpaid work, which enable the multiplication of the resources donated by the companies. Together with the financial contribution of the middle class to private social institutions, the donations cover 2/3 of the available resources which, plus government contributions, end up in the companies' social programs, transforming them in promoters of a palpable citizenship, extensively covered by all the media.

Certainly the adherence of the people who volunteer is idealistic, and there are testimonies stating that donating time for social work is a significant experience in terms of opening up to the world, even if it means just a personal encounter with the poor, this needy and suffering other who might stop being seen in his pure abstract indifferentiation. In a word, the experience of volunteering can be a means for reflection. But it is also certain that such experience keeps great distance from any politicizing discussion or from any stimulus to relate it critically to government absence or to the bad performance of public policies. On the contrary, from an end to the other, the private responsibility for the social, in Yazbeck's expression (2001; 1995) depoliticizes the social question for it is based on disqualifying the public sector and, therefore, does not recognize the possibility that public dissent internal to public policies themselves might create commitment to new standards of quality before the citizens.

This kind of conflict is constantly reappearing through the technical staff of the public institutions and their local unions: doctors in public hospitals and those in public sanitation programs and disease prevention, primary and high school teachers, social workers, workers in public cultural institutions, architects and technical staff of housing programs, experts of public environmental bodies. In their struggle for the responsible sense of the public sector, all of them not only seek support in their experience but also in a theoretically-informed reference of public standards, as their specialized publications and the proximity they keep with the production of the university demonstrate. However, from the perspective that preaches state's demise and welcomes the idea of a minimal state, civil servants are disqualified in a single image: as people who do not do anything, have undeserved job stability and are accomodated in the mediocrity of their privileges. The success of this image implicitly follows the growth of the private responsibility for the social and obscures the continued renewal of that part of the civil service committed to the renewal of ideas and practices and the consequent public struggle for them, now trying to be a political alternative to the dismantling of the public sector by means of its renewal and efficient management. A kind of struggle that necessarily entails the political revitalization of their associations and unions as spaces of negotiation and dissent, both in the public sector and in the public spaces opened by local autonomous experiences.

If the distinctions drawn above make sense, it is interesting to counterpose the experiences of entrepreneurial philanthropy to the solidarity experiences being led by the workers themselves through their unions and federations. As is notorious, the current crisis of unionism is the crisis of regulated labor itself, in the midst of the intense modifications brought about by the companies' productive restructuring and the consequent reduction of the workforce. Convinced that there is little immediate chance of altering the bipolarity between, on one side, the concentration of employed laborforce in the dynamic poles of production and, on the other, the maintenance of or increase in the informal economy, the extensive use of precarious work (and the poverty they generate) and unemployment levels, trade unions were led to seek forms by which to incorporate their own unemployed peers. Of course this challenge was accepted differently by the various experiences tried, but, in any case, accepting it means leaving behind union representation practices already known, which means, in the Brazilian context, pluralize the institutional experience of mediation beyond the relations between the working world and government institutions, through which, historically, social rights were achieved.

The two main union central bodies in the country reacted differently to the challenge, particularly when they realized that the official governmental forums addressing the issue of unemployment had little or no efficacy. One of them, Força Sindical, set up a Worker's Solidarity Center that, with public funds, directly does the work of reallocating, on an immediate basis, jobless workers (through technical training and upgrading job skills, clearance of unemployment welfare payments and an employment agency). The other one, Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT), set up a Center for Employment and Income (located in the industrial city of Santo André) which, also backed by public funding and offering the worker basically the same services, boasts an important differential: it is part of a set of concerted actions conceived as a "public employment system" whose main goal is to defend workers' rights. Rejecting a solidarity action geared only to solving an immediate situation of vulnerability, CUT emphasizes a new conception of solidarity consistent with the defense of workers' rights and connected to a whole conception of struggle for policies active in the promotion of employment.

Thus, the experiences tried by CUT aim at constituting alternative ways of work and income, among which establishing work and production cooperatives, setting up incubators and fighting for the organization of finantial credit to poor workers communities. The Center for Work and Income was founded and operates together with the Santo André municipal government, a city experiencing important initiatives in the discussion and implementation of public forums (in particular, a regional chamber formed by the seven neighboring municipalities, corporations, labor unions and other organizations) to propose development policies for the region and address some of its social and environmental problems. Having interfaces, therefore, with all these union and public forums, the action of reinserting workers in the labor market is able not only to demand legal contracts with companies for the jobs obtained, but also exercise the creativity to find them in several ways, adapt them according to the specific sectorial needs, and even organize the job offer based on consumers' demands. It also tries to intervene in cases of age discrimination and, not least, modify what it calls the traditional, suspicious "entrepreneurial culture" towards unions and their carelessness with the hiring of labor, the quality of the products and the processes of production.

Why can this system claim the statute of "public" ? Besides the breadth of its proposal, this system stresses different people and interests, since it encompasses "all the actors and interests, each contributing with the debate", as stated by the central staff of the Center. This has important unfoldings, such as the rotation in the project's management, which today is carried out by CUT, and what is expected from is "to build a culture of the public [sense] to strengthen [the nature of] a public agency". It is firstly because of this twofold insertion in the public institutions' network and secondly because of the principle of debate between diverging interests that criticisms coming from groups within CUT of charitable work are rejected. To this is added the argument that, although the system is "a passive labor policy, it contains a somewhat important aspect of an active policy. It is the workers who must do this and orient their peers who are in a terrible situation, in need of everything, but what they need [above all] is orientation. I'd rather do that than leave it to the bosses. They won't do it the way the worker most needs. Is this charity? Not to me".

Of course this change in labor unions agency is not without important dilemmas. As we have already pointed out, the direct intervention of unions in reinserting workers in the labor market may "indicate a modification in the way CUT conceives the role of the state and society in the definition of public policies" (Parra, 2000:23). As here also appears government action of pushing on to society the responsibility for solving the unemployment problem, taking on the responsibility implies a daily pragmatism in which the means to achieve efficiency are fully self-justified. It is also possible, as pointed out by CUT's internal opposition, that the fight and the negotiation for public funds between the two central unions, and between them and the entrepreneurial associations, might break into pieces a public system of employment agency and increase their dependence on public funds. What is important, in any case, is that these dilemmas are widely discussed and publicized, thus embody different proposals and actors in a conflicting negotiation of values and projects whose reference retains its public character.

Thus, the different references between the social agency of the unions and that of the companies help clarify and distinguish the presence or absence of counterhegemonic potentials in the context of the accelerated modifications that affect both the shape of Brazilian inequality and the aspiration for legitimacy of the nongovernment institutional projects to mitigate or reverse it.

A public nongovernment sphere, as supported by all theoretical inspirations that show the tense transition towards a real democracy in a globalized world, is fully entitled to producing itself as an active public space provided its practices and presence keep in constant interlocution with the political context of society and the state, which implies also that it can be an innovating space for the circulation of ideas and experiences in democratic participation. Philanthropy-driven companies institutions fail precisely in this aspect: externally, they avoid joining the debate on governmental decisions, and their presence before the state appears mainly through the traditional pressure to ensure their economic and financial interests which do not hide their intentions of intermediating public funds. Internally, in front of their specific clientele, the way their social action works also reproduces something very traditional: it transforms citizens entitled to rights in recipients of favors and giving gestures, and from this angle the difference in relation to the old way of doing charity solely lies in the excellence of the programs adopted and in the commitment of those who create them.

Nothing in this technical excellence ensures that the way it works in corporations will progressively impede the deletion of the autonomous and differentiated citizen by practices and consciousness of being entitled to rights. Organized spaces for rights of citizenship demands are the only base known to date on which the production of a public sphere is concretely made at any time and in any space where it can be exercised, for the sole reason that the notion of rights engenders political self-reflective and talking communities which do not submit to the aleatory necessities and conveniences that come from outside, no matter how rewarding and praised they be. These are the lines along which I believe the paradigmatic change in accumulation processes and social organization, resulting from the contradictory movement of the current globalization, may generate the common sense described by Santos (1995:50-52), whose political trait lies in its pluralism of experiences captured as political inventions in new discourse arenas. Only through participation towards and within the scope of rights will it be possible to create new forms of resistance and sociability that, in themselves, oppose the empty ideas of a future without criticism and projects of the neoliberal economic policies.

In the ambiguous process through which a whole series of social transformations are building and changing corporate presence in Brazilian society, it is undeniable that business social action and the corporate welfare systems may constitute a relevant social and humanitarian experience in face of the pressing needs and wants of the Brazilian poor population. In fact, such initiatives characterize the positive side of the entrepreneurial presence to mobilize donation efforts associated, on a discourse level, with citizenship, and nothing could be said against them were they functioning inside a society based on real guarantees of universal rights. But, to be politically relevant as a formative experience of actors invested of social responsibility, corporate philanthropic movement would have to acknowledge, in its own constitution, the shadow projected by the struggle for the language of rights and for the public space and citizenship against the background of state deregulation. From this angle, the regeneration of the Brazilian dominant class relies less on a clear logic of citizenship than it does on the efficiency of social integration, clearly conducted and managed to limit the danger and risk inherent to the enlarged visible number of excluded people to whom rights are increasingly in a void. Its utopia of responsibility becomes thus conservative, because however concerned it may be with the social inequalities, at the same time it preserves the unequal hierarchies that produce the disempowerment of the citizens, by recreating them as second and third class citizens dependent upon the charity of an external private action to aspire the possibility of social inclusion. They depend, therefore, on the intentions, interests and the fluctuations of the successes and failures characteristic of the business world and inherent to the kind of freedom with which was coined, two centuries ago, the expression "private initiative", against which were formed differentiated public spaces, critical and able to call themselves in question because engaged in the broadened emancipation of a common world.