Slavery and dependence: oppressions and super-exploitation of the Brazilian workforce

Abstract

This article analyzes historical-structuring elements of the Brazilian economic and social formation to discuss the super-exploitation of the workforce as particular, structural, and systematic characteristic of dependent economies. The main aspects of contemporary enslavement, typified by article 149 of the Brazilian Penal Code, are apprehended as the most evident expressions of super-exploitation, analyzed as resulting from the reinvention of transitory or hybrids forms of exploitation of the labor force from slave-holding Brazil to dependent capitalism. Contemporary slavery reveals, in its data, the permanent movements of capital expropriations, intelligible in the oppression-exploitation of a racialized workforce marked by patriarchy, which migrates to survive.