Transição energética: crítica marxista sobre a desmedida da produção de energia

Abstract

This dissertation investigates, from a Marxist perspective, the unmeasured of energy production in capitalism and the contradictions found in proposals for energy transition, under renewable energies, in such a way that it conditions new technologies to the same capitalist process. Based on a critique of the alienation of capitalism, under the abstraction of use values in favor of exchange value, it is evident that energy is produced not to meet concrete social needs, but to sustain the incessant valorization of capital. The methodology used consists of a theoretical and critical analysis of Marxist categories, such as labor, value, and nature, thus presenting the processes of alienation and unmeasured, associated with empirical data on the Brazilian energy matrix, the international energy market, and the socio-environmental impacts of energy expansion. The characteristics of capitalist logic are connected to social changes when capital transforms nature into a commodity and organizes spaces into abstractions for the purpose of accumulation, creating an alienated relationship between society and nature. The study demonstrates how the search for energy efficiency and new technologies does not result in lower production or lower ecological impacts, but reinforces the excess of production, generating economic crises and maintaining the fossil economy as a central pillar. It is argued that renewable energies, although less polluting, are incorporated into capitalist logic as market niches, subject to production cuts, infrastructure saturation, and the maintenance of global inequalities. In this way, the Brazilian energy matrix is analyzed, highlighting the development model to attract foreign direct investment and the conditioning of the economy for the export of commodities, which shifts the environmental costs of international capital to Brazil, while its high share of renewable sources does not represent a break with the capitalist mode of production. The work concludes by proposing a social reorganization based on use values, meeting the concrete needs of communities in such a way that there is a need to reevaluate the limits of the capital, so that ecological, production, and social limits are the opposition to the unmeasured logic of capital.