Crisis and Coup - by Alysson Leandro Mascaro

In his new book, Crisis and coup, jurist Alysson Leandro Mascaro starts from the current political-economic crisis and the ongoing coup to unravel the complex relationship between the State, law and social formation. In an original interpretation, influenced mainly by Evguiéni Pashukanis and Louis Althusser, the author reveals the structural character of crises and coups, founded on ideological and institutional bases typical of capitalism. His analysis of Brazilian jurists and law itself offers a new perspective for understanding the crisis. “Just as in 1964 there was not just a strictly military coup, but a class coup, so in 2016 there is not just a legal or political coup, but a bourgeois class coup that realigns fractions of national and international capital for accumulation in a specific situation of crisis in global and Brazilian capitalism, post-Fordist and neoliberal”, says Mascaro. Crisis and coup hits bookstores in September and should illuminate the Brazilian electoral debate with its reading of the political situation of recent years. Beyond this context, this is an essential reading to fully understand the dynamics, limits and contradictions of the State and law today.