Sistema penal e formação social brasileira: a particularidade histórica de um capitalismo de via colonial

Abstract

This thesis investigates the genesis and development of the Brazilian penal system, apprehending it as an objectification of the historical particularity of national atrophic capitalism. The proposal, presupposing a return to Marx and his theory of abstractions, stems from José Chasin's perspective, according to which Brazil underwent a specific process of capitalist objectification – the “Colonial Way”. By incorporating the analysis of classic interpreters of the Brazilian social formation and a broad set of empirical data produced by historiography in recent decades, it seeks, from a higher degree of abstraction, to assess the specificities involved in the formation of the penal system in Brazil, in dialogue with the characterization of other paths of capitalist development, specifically the classic and Prussian ones. The central objective is to analyze the manifestations of punitive forms as determinations of the “Brazilian misery”, evaluating the social functions performed by the different forms of punishment Brazil has known throughout its capitalist entification process, in a journey that goes from the colonial period to the consolidation of the globalization of capital in the mid-1980s. We argue that the Brazilian path—marked by a colonial and slave-holding origin and by a hyper-delayed, subordinate, and uncompletable industrialization—has shaped, as a central equipment of an autocratic bourgeois domination, a sui generis penal apparatus, functioning as a permanent preventive counter-revolution that optimizes a weak reformism from above, and as extra-economic violence that serves a subordinate, exclusionary modernization based on the super-exploitation of labor-power.