The capital machining and the dismounting of the work: dependence and overexploitation of labor in the region of Ribeirão Preto-SP

Author(s)

Adriano Pereira Santos

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas
• Defense date: 2013-04-29

Examining board members

Ricardo Antunes; Maria Orlanda Pinassi; Maria Aparecida de Moraes Silva; Vera Lucia Navarro

• Advisor: Ricardo Antunes

Abstract

The object of analysis of this work is the expansion of the sugarcane agribusiness in Brazil that emerged as part of a new pattern of accumulation of capital, with the new perspectives of growth due to a number of factors, among which are: the emergence of the flex-fuel cars, the high price and the scarcity of petroleum, the requirements of environmental agreements and protocols to reduce the emission of CO2 into the atmosphere, and the new demands of countries for clean and renewable fuels. This favorable situation not only triggered the recent expansion of sugarcane agribusiness in Brazil, but also engendered its restructuring process, which put it in a prominent position in the national and international economic scenario. Thus, the sector is now advocated as a sustainable model of economic development, because it is modernized and also developed new technologies that generate clean and renewable energy, but also because it has been occupying the leading indices of Brazilian exports in recent years. However, its development is contradictory. Because, while it operates the most modern ways of production, based on industrial automation and genetic engineering, there is the presence of degrading and poor working conditions and also the environmental destruction caused by harmful forms of exploitation of natural resources. Moreover, one can see that agribusiness, when structures itself on the landowners, on monoculture and overexploitation of labor, reproduces elements that characterize an economy back to the colonial times, considered backward and underdeveloped. The goal of this research is to investigate and apprehend the conditions and the labor relations of cane cutters, the characteristics of agribusiness and its dilemmas and contradictions in Ribeirão Preto region. Through a comprehensive analysis of data and information collected, and a direct qualitative empirical research, we sought to capture the dilemmas and the current contradictions in the model of development of the agribusiness. According to our studies, the current expansion of the sector in Brazil, introduced new forms of exploitation and control over the workforce, which guaranteed, on the one hand, a greater accumulation, especially of foreign capital, which stormed the industry with a globalization of the capital, but on the other hand, in intensifying the exploitation and the degrading working conditions, brought the death and the illness of the workers. This allows us to say that on behalf of the destructive logic of the expansion and the ceaseless accumulation of capital, the agribusiness operates as a "satanic mill" that grinds and erodes not only the conditions of life and work, but the body and the physis of the workers. Therefore, we conclude that from the overexploitation of labor, Brazil is currently, on the international market, in a subordinate and dependent position as one of the major producers of biofuels and commodities in the world, thus reproducing, through the presence of foreign capital, "the historic structures of dependency" of a system of neo-colonial exploitation. Therefore, the sugarcane agribusiness cannot be defended as a model of economic development (AU)