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Revista Jurídica Trabalho e Desenvolvimento Humano
Procuradoria Regional do Trabalho da 15ª Região
SILVA, João V. Marques da. A Ditadura Militar como Despotismo do Capital: o controle sobre a classe trabalhadora no
Brasil (1964-1985). Revista Jurídica Trabalho e Desenvolvimento Humano, Campinas, v.9, p. 1-36, 2026. DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33239/rjtdh.v9.295.
PALAVRAS-CHAVE: classe trabalhadora; despotismo do capital; ditadura
militar.
ABSTRACT
Introduction: It is undeniable that bourgeois democracy in Brazil is a
historical exception. The prolonged experience of colonial slavery delimited
the racialized social structure and the country's insertion in the international
division of labour as a national formation of dependent capitalism, and
therefore subordinate to imperialism. Furthermore, the almost absolute
appreciation of the national bourgeoisie for authoritarian spaces of
sociability after 1888, in its most varied expressions, ends up exercising
control over the political action of the working class. The democratic
exceptionality allows, in the dynamics of Brazilian dependent capitalism,
the close relations between political authoritarianism and the despotism of
capital. This articulation is materialized in the state political form, as a
repressive and ideological apparatus of the State. In Brazil, the State
apparatus fulfills, under certain historical conditions, the mechanism of
capitalist exploitation and accumulation.
Objective: This article aims to analyze the control over the Brazilian
working class during the Military Dictatorship of 1964-1985, based on the
Volkswagen case.
Methodology: The analysis of the article is based on historical-dialectical
materialism, criticism of the legal form and a qualitative approach, using
bibliographical review and documentary analysis
Results: The limitations of legal ideology as a means of repairing the actions
of the German company in the aforementioned interstice, in rescuing the
historical memory of Brazilian authoritarianism, shows that the dynamics of
capitalist exploitation and accumulation do not require bourgeois
democracy.
Conclusion: Criticism of the legal form is an essential part of thinking about
the connections between capitalist accumulation and authoritarianism in
the country. Thus, the exceptional nature of bourgeois democracy in Brazil
cannot be seen as a dualistic opposition to authoritarianism, since the
dynamics of capitalist exploitation, in its despotic nature, mold the
bourgeois political regime to its needs for accumulation, as was seen in the
historical period analyzed here.
KEYWORDS: despotism of capital; military dictatorship; working class.
RESUMEN
Introducción: Es innegable que la democracia burguesa en Brasil constituye
una excepción histórica. La prolongada experiencia de la esclavitud colonial