Destructive production and agroecology in Brasil

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Intellectuals such as David Harvey and Jean Ziegler show us that Brazil has become one of the biggest stages for a new phase of “primitive” accumulation, based on the occupations of new lands in “virgin” regions by capital. According to the last ibge agricultural census (2019), Brazil has undergone another land concentration process over the last 10 years. Not only that, but it revealed over one million unemployed in the countryside and the sale of one million trac- tors. Chronic problems in Brazil, such as access to land by peasants, hunger, malnutrition, and commodity exportation, are perpetuated in an increasingly dramatic fashion. The destructive production of large transnational corporations (banks, insurance companies, mining companies, contractors, automobiles, the mili- tary complex, etc.), based on the expanded reproduction of capital and the pro- grammed obsolescence of goods, generates large-scale socio-environmental crimes, creates unbearable cities, and steals land and other resources that are strategic in the new world geopolitics. Arisen from the entrails of the socio-metabolism of capital, these novel forms of production and life have enormous emancipatory potential. They can move forward, but they can also quickly fizzle out if workers around the world don’t get off the defensive. Mészáros (2002) believes that we must move not only beyond the neoliberal model, but beyond capital. Social movements are not only contesting neoliberal capitalism, but creating practical alternatives that can lead the way in the transformation to another type of society. The mst’s struggles to practice agroecology show us, in theory and in prac- tice, the potential of food sovereignty, popular agrarian reform, gender equality in countryside, associated work, healthy food production and of an education beyond capital. They distance themselves from eco-capitalism, which tends to ignore the agrarian issue and stimulate actions in “corporate social responsi- bility”, as well as from capitalist cooperativism, which moves in function of the expanded reproduction of capital.

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