Direito e natureza: em direção a uma crítica eco-marxista

Abstract

The object of this research is the law, understood as a historically determined social relationship, seeking to find the ecological aspects of the Marxist critique of law. To this end, we will use the extensive bibliography of the field of Marxist ecology and its contributions, especially the (re)discovery of metabolic rift, understanding that there is a fertile space for these debates to intersect. The methodological foundations of the research rest on categorical historicity, the dimensions of essentiality and totality, and dialectical language. Under this aegis, we propose a descriptive and interpretative work of material reality, of a theoretical essence, which will be divided into three chapters. The first will summarise the debates on Marxist ecology, with the aim of understanding not only the social aspects surrounding the law, but also its relationship with the physical and chemical aspects of the Earth System. In this endeavour, understanding the Anthropocene, climate change and the ongoing ecological crisis are fundamental. We will demonstrate how, through Marxism, it is possible to understand not only capitalism's inexhaustible vampiric thirst, but also its need to appropriate nature, ultimately creating an unavoidable contradiction: an infinitely growing production system in opposition to the finiteness of the Earth System. Finally, the importance of the separation between countryside-city and worker-nature for the genesis and generalisation of capitalism, triggering the metabolic rupture. To this end, the first chapter begins by revisiting ecology in Marx, arguing that there is a materialist conception of nature in his work. We move on to the contributions of Engels, culminating in what John Bellamy Foster calls the dialectics of ecology, and finally to debates on contemporary Marxist ecology within the context of climate collapse, addressing questions of consensus and the scientific frontier regarding the Anthropocene. The second stage will defend a tradition of Marxist criticism of the law, which draws from the sources of revolutionary and critical Marxism, the authors who debate the tactical use of the law in Brazil and ecosocialism, exposing the difference between the phenomena in their essence and appearance. In order to establish a Marxist view of the legal form and the state, thus trying to lay the foundations for the understanding that will be used for the third part, which is propositional. In order to satisfy the problematic theme of the research, the third and final part will seek to create a synthesis between the two previous parts, trying to find within the Marxist critique its ecological aspects, demonstrating that law is a product and producer of metabolic rupture, possessing a profoundly anti-ecological aspect in its quest to maintain and facilitate capitalist relations of production and exchange, finding limits and potentials specific to the spheres it reaches and develops. We end by using the example of the rights of nature and popular and agroecological agrarian reform as opposite poles of the potential of struggles in the field of law.