Introduction to Francisco de Oliveira's thinking

a rare avis in Brazilian dialectics

Abstract

This article aims to make an introduction to the thinking of sociologist Francisco de Oliveira whose work figure among the great theorists who contributed to elucidate the particularity of Brazilian capitalism. Avis rara in the academy, he risked advancing Marx's theories and succeeded in reflecting on his (still poorly understood) anti-value and the current capitalist society he called molecular-digital. His relatively vast work ranges from CEBRAP's writings on criticism of CEPAL thinking and the construction of his critical analysis of the Brazilian economy and society to his last reflections on the present moment. Sensitive and visionary, he saw that Brazilian society had headed for “complex processes of new rights, neoconservatism, physical and cultural racism, intense transformation of social subjects, unemployment, which at bottom express a radical exasperation of the limits of the commodity. A crisis of modernity that returns to the limits of totalitarianism, in a kind of Auschwitz without crematorium chimneys.