Crime, Power, and Authoritarian Capitalism: A Dystopian Realism Experiment

Abstract

The article contrasts the richness of academic production on illegal markets in Brazil to the obscurantist context of contemporary Brazilian politics. The text takes up the main topics of the Special Issue and faces a challenging question: considering the knowledge produced by the articles as a whole and the situation opened by the victory of the far- right in Brazil, what can we expect in the near future? Certainly, continuity, if not increase, of mass incarceration with class, racial and territorial bias, as well as strengthening of the most retrograde policies in criminal justice, with official legitimation of police lethality in peripheries and favelas, now consecrated as a State policy. On the one hand the modern edge of capitalism, the most insidiously averse to rights, exclusive and inseparable from crime; on the other, social barbarism.