The spectrum of metacapitalism: crisis, violence and neo-slavery

Abstract

In recent decades, the succession of catastrophes in the most different scales and dimensions of social life caused the debate on the limits of the capitalist mode of production to proliferate. Within the critique of political economy, efforts were made to apprehend such catastrophes as manifestations of the contradictions of capital. In this article, based on propositions by João Bernardo (2018), we seek to contribute to this critical debate through a reflection anchored both in the fundamental trends of capitalist accumulation and in the historical experiences diverses as Nazism and Stalinism, as well as in contemporary social phenomena, among them the growing forced displacements, mass incarceration, and compulsory labor, verified on a global scale. It will be argued that it is inherent to capital, as virtuality, the construction of a horizon characterized by direct violence as universal social mediation, by the militarization and ghettoization of society, by the use of terrorist practices of social domination, and by the expansion of compulsory modalities of labour. And that such virtuality becomes even more threatening as capital sinks deeper and deeper into its chronic crisis of overaccumulation, due to the lack of consolidation of a revolutionary horizon capable of antagonizing it.