Na urgência da catástrofe: violência e capitalismo

Abstract

This master thesis discusses violence in capitalist societies. Violence means both the use of force and its abuse, legitimate coercion and illegitimate excess. Violence also cannot be reduced to explicit acts executed by people or by the state that disturbs or restore a peaceful and lawful context: it must include the violence produced by order itself, the silent and invisible violence against which explicit forms of violence are opposed. Marx was the great theorist of the objective violence of capitalism, which he attributed to capital relation and the commodity fetish. Capitalism is structured by a blind compulsion, a real abstraction which imposes itself unknowingly to the members of the community. But this unconscious economic violence must be related theoretically to the conscious subjective violence of the capitalist state, essential to guarantee capitalist order. These two kinds of violence have their own logic which includes the rule-excess ambiguity , but are always somehow articulated: the logic of capital and the logic of sovereignty. The contradictions objectively produced (created by the logic of capital) demand violent State action which must be arranged to the liberal principles they both need to exist. When the logic of capital turns itself in its excess which is its constitutive tendency so does the logic of sovereignty. This is the thread that must be followed to understand the contemporary decline of democracy in contemporary capitalist societies.