Extensive urbanization and violent neo-extractivism in Brazil: ten considerations on the explosion of the Brazilian social conflict

Abstract

This critical essay explores the relationship between the process of extensive urbanization, the crisis of capital and the dynamics established by the logic of extractivism in Brazil. Anchored in the Marxian thesis of a tendency to raise the organic composition of capitals, the essay argues that the extractive dynamics also operate in these frameworks and thus promote the extension of urbanisation. Extensive-extractive urbanisation, therefore, implies the dissolution of historically determined forms of sociability. Thus, the text addresses the dynamics of the violent content of the social conflict produced by extensive-extractive urbanization in at least three senses: the violence proper to extraction; the violence present in the relationship of extractivism with organized crime; and, finally, the relationship of extractivism with the violence of the new extreme right.