Abstract
The present article aims to indicate a possibility of expanding the conditions of understanding of the socio-legal reproduction of capitalism in the critical sociology of law. First I demonstrate that the antiproductivist turn (following the Habermasian form) resigns this epistemological project: It leads the critical sociology of law to the liberalism-idealism and thereby produces an analytical deficit in understanding the legal organization of the fundamental structures of accumulation. Next, I suggest that the critique of law (following a Paschukanian form) offers a solution to this deadlock by recognizing that the “ought to be” (Sollen) is already achieved in the structures of inequality. I argue however that such criticism can not exhaust the possibilities of understanding the socio-legal reproduction of capitalism, since it embraces the position of law only at the moment of the exchange of commodities. Nevertheless, beyond this momentum the capitalist development, pressured by situations of overaccumulation, has an expansionary phase oriented to the taking of non-commodified spaces, where the surplus can flow, opening a new cycle of valorization. This phase will be analyzed through the notion of permanent repetition of primitive accumulation and the theory of Landnahme. My hypothesis is that, under these conditions, the law appears as explicit legal violence and prescription of inequality. Considering these structures, I state that law operates on the basis of: legal discourses of othering (human rights), privatization regimes (public-private partnerships) and criminal law (criminalization of protest and poverty). Finally, I argue that the concept of primitive accumulation and the theory of Landnahme have the potential to make critical sociology of law to advance in the understanding of the socio-legal reproduction of capitalism.
Keywords:
capitalism; legal violence; primitive accumulation; theory of space expropriation