Controle sociopunitivo do capital: a refuncionalização neoliberal da punição no Brasil

Abstract

This is an exploratory-descriptive study on capitalism and the system of social control exercised through punishment. Observing the fact that the transformations driven by the contemporary crisis of capitalism in 1970 determined the reinforcement of bourgeois socio-punitive control in circumstances of mass unemployment, it begins by recognizing contemporary forms of punishment, within the framework of neoliberal advances, as a praxis of human control by capital. This study aims to identify the main elements and characteristics, engendered by the neoliberal prescription, that reinforce bourgeois socio-punitive control over the working class through Brazilian punitive systems. Based on the foundations of Marxist criticism and in the light of historical and dialectical materialism, bibliographical and documentary research were the methodological procedures adopted to analyze the object, in its singularities and totality. The study investigates social complexes such as the State, Punishment and Capitalism, based on the theoretical assumptions of the Political Economy of Punishment, with a view to understanding punishment as a complex of domination, prominently configured by the demands of wealth production in society and managed by the State, which uses the justification of fighting crime to personify “enemies” and preserve the status quo, in line with punishment as a public security strategy. The history of social domination is revisited, in order to refine its analysis in the context of the neoliberal resurgence of punishment systems in the world, of which the United States, China and Brazil are the main exponents. To delve deeper into the Brazilian context, documentary data on violence and incarceration were analyzed, coming from reports of consolidated national research, such as the Atlas of Violence and the Brazilian Yearbook of Public Security. It was identified that the processes of demand for order and refunctionalization of punishment, operated in different social systems up to the present day, preserve class subjection. In capitalism, the criminalization of poverty, emphatically for racialized segments, preserves the accumulation of capital through the subjection of workers. Therefore, the determinations of the mass incarceration carried out by the country, under the guise of the neoliberal bourgeois State, are exposed based on elements such as: capitalist accumulation, the country's condition of dependence and the demand for subjection of the black and poor population. Through the apprehension of punishment as a strategy of domination of class societies, enhanced by the capitalist logic of control over the "dangerous" population, the correlation was found between the trajectory of assimilation and the exercise of punitive movements by the Brazilian State, the increasing incarceration and the context of structural unemployment. In this context, Brazilian punitive systems have been nourished by the authoritarian relations characteristic of neoliberalism, which incite and ideologically legitimize punishment through deprivation of liberty as a way of confronting social issues. Consequently, the militarization of social life and the “depositing” of the “superfluous” population in prison reveal antagonistic processes of seeking profit, determined by the class struggle in the neoliberal context.