Dependent Capitalism and Social Regulation
Law; State; Latin American social formation; dependency; social regulation
This paper seeks to analyse the functioning of the legal-political body in a Latin American context marked by "dependent capitalism". To do so, it starts from the need to understand the essential common characteristics of societies in which the capitalist mode of production predominates, locating the categories of property, labour and contract as historical categories that make up a complex framework and, when set in motion, conceal the real form of exploitation of labour and valorisation of value, whether under the guise of the labour contract or circulation. In this sense, the notion of law is constructed as a social relationship that progresses into a system of regulation, specialising into branches that perform different functions within the bourgeois order. By establishing that these elements reflect and relate to the way in which it is produced, it becomes possible to criticise no longer a state or a law in the abstract, but to effectively particularise its determinations, now from a lower degree of abstraction in specific social formations. In this analysis, the Latin American formation is formulated from the perspective of the Marxist Theory of Dependency, which aims to deconstruct the ideology that positions the economic and social configuration of the peripheral countries as "immature capitalism" or that would need impulses to reach the supposed level of civilisation of the central capitalist countries. On the contrary, the configuration of Latin American capitalism is exposed as mature capitalism, as developed as European, North American or Asian capitalism, but of a different quality. It was possible to identify, in the wake of Ruy Mauro Marini, that the fact that peripheral capitals have their production geared towards the foreign market, a lower organic composition and the need to provide capital or technological inputs in greater volume, configures, as we propose to discuss throughout this work, a conditioning situation in which parcels of capital are repeatedly transferred towards countries with a higher organic composition, which has political and economic repercussions in a relationship of subordination between sovereign nations, a dependent relationship. Finally, it should be noted that, in an attempt to counteract the repeated "losses", the bourgeoisie in Latin America increases surplus value by increasing the exploitation of the labour force, which, together with the socio-historical formation that brought with it authoritarian, violent, racist and patrimonialist social relations, shape the main characteristics of law, social rights and the state in dependent capitalism.