Social Work in the State Apparatus and its Ethical-Political Positioning in the Guarantee of Social Rights

Abstract

The objective of this article is to analyze reports of a group of social work professionals in Spain who, with the goal of reviving the essence of social work considering the troubling position of exercising the work in a context of remercantilization and privatization of the social, blur the professional commitment. These reports are supposedly ideologically neutral and distant from practices committed to social equality and the guarantee of social rights, forming a singular thinking. To emphasize the importance that the professional relationship be based on the defense of social rights and the provision of economic resources and benefits is to resist essentialist visions of social work; it is to go beyond discourses that establish an antagonism between intervention based on rationality or emotionality; on the objective or the subjective; on material help or psychosocial support; on bureaucracy or adhocracy. The strategic consequence is that social workers in the public social work system adopt an ethical and political attitude that contributes to regenerating the social portion of the state.