Presentation.
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December 2020
Our heartfelt greetings to the readers of Revista Direito e Práxis!
The year 2020 is nearly at its end, and it has become historical due to its tragic record of more than 1 million deaths worldwide caused by COVID-19. Although it is a natural phenomenon, the new coronavírus puts a spotlight on many old issues of inequality, while aggravating social injustices. The exploitation, oppression, and exclusion brought upon by the current social, economic, political, juridical, and cultural structures became even more overwhelming during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic this year.
It shows the absolute importance of making continuous efforts to tackle high-level research on the critical studies of Law, in order to produce the knowledge that reveals both the structures of social domination and the various pathways to resistance and change. With that in mind, our section of brand-new articles will bring forth some invaluable contributions, dealing with fundamental themes such as: gentrification of urban áreas; public sphere, social movements, and the law; human rights and refugee law; migration policies; precarization of contracted work; freedom of expression; feminist theory and criminological criticism; precarization of work and the outsourced female workers; centralization of the State during the Brazilian monarchy; Brazilian syndicalism and the precarized workforce; State and human rights under Marx theory; affirmative action for black workers in public tenders.
In the translated works section, we have two important translations in Portuguese: the first covers the article "Law, Utopia, Event: A Constellation of Two Trajectories" by Johan van der Walt from University of Luxembourg; the second refers to the article "Dialectic and revolution: confronting Kelsen and Gadamer on legal interpretation" (Dialética e revolução: confrontando Kelsen e Gadamer quanto à interpretação jurídica) by Hans Lindahl, from Tilburg University. We give thanks to Ricardo Martins Spindola Diniz for both translations. On the review section, our journal will present articles reviewing the following books: "Pensando Como um Negro: Ensaio de Hermenêutica Jurídica" (1), by Adilson José Moreira; and "Teologia Negra: o sopro antirracista do Espírito" (2), by Ronilso Pacheco.
And for the last dossier of 2020's volume of Direito e Práxis, we have a well-polished work arranged by guest editor Gustavo Seferian (Federal University of Minas Gerais), titled "Work, Crisis and LaW". Either due to problems that arise from the capitalist accumulation or because of the technological advancements in the world of work, for a long time have the workers' rights been repeatedly strucked down. In Brazil, during 2017, a onew labor reform, approved by the former president Michel Temer, was widely celebrated by economists and entrepreneurs at the time, but heavily criticized by syndicalists and representatives of the International Labor Organization and the Labor Public Attorneys. In 2020, President Jair Bolsonaro's government pushes forward new changes in the labor legislation, allowing for further flexibilization of workers' rights. In this context, we take this opportunity to promote a deep reflection on such themes through these dossier's articles. Texts from various national and foreign authors deal with the crisis, changes, and resistance in the Labor world, as well as the Labor rights, in syndicalism, social security, and in Labor Justice. Certainly, this dossier will be a point of reference for many critical studies on Labor relations!
We would like to remind the readers that the editorial policies for the different sections of the Journal can be accessed through our homepage, and that submissions are permanent and are always welcome! We thank, as always, the authors, reviewers and colaborators for the confidence put in our publications.
Enjoy your reading!
Direito e Práxis Team
Work, crisis and the law
Gustavo Seferian
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte. E-mail: seferian@ufmg.br. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5587-6734.
Back when this dossier was being proposed, less than two years ago, it would be hard to fathom how a crisis that was already so devastating could still reach even deeper levels at the time of its publication.
The year 2020 had barely started when the world--at least the one in which we belong--was already being ravaged by a global biological threat. Although many had been alerted to the risk of a pandemic of catastrophic proportions, at the dawn of the 21st century--as seen since previously written works by the sociologist Mike Davis (2006) and from the evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace (2020)--none has resulted in any satisfactory preventive measures from the governments of the capitalist world in order to safeguard against the spread of dangerous new infectious diseases.
Such disregard for safety has since exposed the underbelly of this social order, which tries to lull us into a false sense of normality, security and predictability, but ultimately fails to hide the chaos that it uses as it's footstool.
The many (badly)implemented methods used to hold back the spikes in contamination, lacking in union and organization, show us that the international cooperation initiatives created to face the surge of the COVID-19 pandemic have been awfully shy, up until at least the end of 2020, when this text has been made.
Besides the widespread insuficiency of our healthcare systems, we also deal with a frantic race for the development of an effective vaccine--fueled by the interest of big pharmaceutical labs and imperialistic agencies--which reveals part of the resulting drama brought upon by this conjuncture.
The health crisis that lays waste to all of the world's nations--bar some few isles on the Pacific, as well as some countries with obvious information transparency issues--calls for our most earnest attention, seeing that it is not the only thing that dampers our own healthcare efforts. The break from the apparent systemic normalcy comes as the result of one of the most overwhelming examples of crisis of the capitalist civilization, industrial and modern, as seen in works by Michael Löwy (2013). It doesn't just enclose itself on economic problems, but also reaches the fields of politics, morality, family, ecology and many others. As stated by Ernest Mandel (1977, p.51), "a crisis happening in one sector [of the capitalist society] has effects in every other sector" of the social order, which leads to a highly volatile conjuncture.
Thus, it seems invaluable for us to observe the social phenomenons around us in a complexifying and profound fashion, in order to comprehend the whole picture of the causes, effects and ways to confront this crisis. In the current dossier, we shall search for an aproximation o all of those elements, having labor issues as it's centerpiece.
Considering that the vast majority of the texts contained here was written before the pandemic outbreak, even though it reaches well into the roots of this contemporary crisis, we understand that they should be preceded by another presentation, which links the strong ecological and sanitary factors of the crisis and its broader issues, focusing on the importance of the sum of those contributions.
***
The connection between the metabolism of human society and the surrounding nature--as seen by works written by Karl Marx (2004,2013)--displays the tendency towards a lack of coordination, made worse under the capitalist means of production.
Capitalism, with its wild hunger for profit and marketability, seems incompatible with the possibility of harmony and sustainability in the world around us. The constant acceleration of the cycle of production, consumption and disposal, aren't an adequate fit for the natural growth rate of resources and decomposition rate of discarded goods.
Such a combination of factors results in the transposition of walls of a sociability of labor, already less restrict in territory when compared to that which existed two and a half centuries ago, claiming the almost entirety of the Earth's domains for the benefit of the capitalist society.
As we know, a decisive part of this dominance--which stimulates the rupture of said metabolism--is the imposition of such a way of life that brings, by itself, a large window of opportunity for sanitary risks. This is due to the unprotected organization of labor and eating habits that it constitutes, with its homogenous nature and its dependency in animal sources of protein.
In that sense, the global statement of capitalism mixes several elements of culture, diet and industrial administration of production of livestock. (DAVIS, 2006, p.119-141; PERROTA, 2020), which integrate the fields of human sociability--especially labor--and of the domesticated beings used for human consumption, as well as some other animals that haven't been routinely used for such ends. Such a turn of events resulted, historically, in the intensification of the spillovers and contaminations originated by infectious diseases, especially in the most dynamic centers of the above global statement of capitalism on the production of animal protein.
Among those diseases, there are those brought by the coronavirus family, which has the bat as it's main vector (CUI, LI, SHI, 2019; BANERJEE et alii, 2019). However, when refering to COVID-19, those "animal origins" still aren't entirely explained, with the "guilt" falling upon the pangolin--a wild ground mammal with nearly no overlap in habitat with the human societies- as prime suspect for originating the infection (NATURE, 2020).
However, what is certain is that the origin of the disease comes not from cultural habits of the chinese population (PERROTA, 2020)--which by itself shows a series of racist remarks that should be rejected entirely--but from the means of production that sustain the culture of consumption brought by the capitalist civilization...
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