The main purpose of this book is to demystify the category of democratic social control in social assistance policy, based on an empirical study carried out for my master's thesis in social work and social policy at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). I sought a theoretical and practical analysis based on the systematisation of the Social Assistance Council in a municipality in the Baixada Fluminense, a region marked by political clientelism of several generations in the metropolitan region of the state of Rio de Janeiro, based on a Marxist and Gramscian theoretical analysis.