The Military Dictatorship as Despotism of Capital

control over the working class in Brazil (1964-1985)

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.