Capitalist expropriation, legal violence, and social reproduction

A dialogue between the Social Reproduction Theory and the Socio-legal Reproduction of Capitalism Theory

Abstract

https://doi.org/10.1590/2179-8966/2023/66645

The recent Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) from Marxist Feminism recovers the Marxian
notion of social totality and consequently the dialectical method that informs it, pointing
to the need for a unitary understanding of capitalist social relations. However, SRT has yet
to specifically develop a critique of the social forms that make up the complexity of the
capitalist social totality. My hypothesis is that the dialogue between the SRT and
Guilherme Leite Gonçalves' Theory of the Social-Legal Reproduction of Capitalism can
help in the construction of a social theory in which Law and the State, as social forms, are
also inserted in the ontological constitution of the social relations of production.
Therefore, the aim of this article is to present a theoretical dialogue that inserts the
elaborations of Guilherme Gonçalves in the social theory built by SRT, in order to
contribute to the construction of a social theory that both apprehends unitarily the social
relations and understands Law and State as parts of capitalist social relations.

Keywords: Social reproduction theory; Socio-legal reproduction of capitalism; Unitary
theory; Expropriation; Legal violence.