ABSTRACT

This essay reflects on the dismantling of a comprehensive Primary Health Care (PHC) as a fundamental step in the de-democratization that has advanced in large steps both in Brazil and in the world in recent years. It asserts that this process is one of the conditions for the consolidation of a neoliberal necropolitics that seeks to institutionalize and silence any life potencies. At the same time, this text also reaffirms that it is through PHC itself that the helm can be inflected – altering the barbarism route to which we navigate – towards the inspiring utopia of the Unified Health System (SUS) and its solidary and citizen civilization project. Considering the attributes and guidelines that found and organize the Brazilian PHC and the concertation of voices that it entails, this reflection proposes, lastly, that PHC can be a strategic trench in the struggle to invest in an effectively democratic society, in which everyone recognizes and affirms themselves as political subjects, subjects who have rights, in defense of life.

KEYWORDS
Primary Health Care; Politics; Capitalism; Democracy; Community participation