Between civilizational crises: Rise and fall of the capitalist functions of labor law and the new tactical-environmental tasks of the legal protection of workers

ABSTRACT

The article discusses the Labor Law based on the idea of a civilizational crisis. Taking as reference two distinct historical moments in which the civilization of capital was profoundly shaken - the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the neoliberal financial crisis begun in 2008, exacerbed by the COVID-19 pandemic -, it proposes to draw a line that goes from the theoretical genesis of Labor Law as a structural and political necessity of the capitalist mode of production until its sinking, which follows the desperate and contradictory pursuits of the capitalists by new arrangements of accumulation. The text, which has a theoretical nature, takes historical materialism as support and conducts – through a bibliographic review of historical, sociological and philosophical writings – the explanation of the capitalist functionality of Labor Law, focusing on the dependent and peripheral context of Latin American capitalism and proposing hypotheses for a politicotactical recomposition of the legal protection of workers from new marks, appropriate to the tasks that emerge from the contemporary civilizational crisis, marked by the emergence of an ecological dimension. © 2022