For a political economy of punishment from the South: reflections on penal control in contries of dependent capitalism in the Post Big Industry

Abstract

Proposing a historical-structural reading of the penal system and incorporating the legacies of the political economy of punishment studies developed during the XX century, this paper intends to contribute in the updating of these reflections based on the current stage of the capitalist accumulation. It will start from a defense of the topicality of the Karl Marx’s theory of value, tooking especially the formulations of their Grundrisse about the particularities of the subsumption of labor to capital in each capitalist accumulation stage, indicating elements for diagnosis of the contemporary, called "general intellect". This defense will allow us to configure a specific understanding of this stage of the Big Industry, diverging in the details of those post-Fordist conceptions that surpass the category "working class" and the centrality of the capital-labor conflict. From these theoretical contributions, the work will seek to align this general and abstract conceptions about criminal control to the particularities of criminal control at this stage, all to diverge, in several forms, from the eurocentric readings of the overcoming of the discipline of need and the achievement of governance of excess (positive or negative) through the development of new power in the "control society" stage, with the presence of an actuarial type of criminal system. On the other hand, although far from a counterposition to such fundamental elaborations, we will claim the tradition of the univen and combined development of capitalism to demonstrate how the penal system is configured in dependent and peripherical countries in the phase of the Post Big Industry, and their relation with the constitutive characteristis of an extermination system.

Keywords

• economia política da pena. pós grande indústria. capitalismo dependente.