O reordenamento dos nunca ordenados: conflitos entre trabalhadores ambulantes e lojistas em Maceió

Abstract

The productive restructuring process seen in the 20th century, driven by the capital accumulation crisis, caused numerous consequences for the proletarian class, among which the flexibility, intensification and precariousness of work stand out. In which, in the scenario of technical-scientific revolutions, the need for manual labor has been drastically reduced, leaving a monumental mass of underemployed and even unemployed workers. Therefore, we see a large number of workers looking for alternatives to formal forms of work, as a way of survival, of which informal work stands out, especially the street vending trade. Many research works have been carried out in several states in Brazil, with a view to trying to understand the informal walking trade in its daily conflicts. However, few studies aimed to offer a critical analytical understanding of the Marxian perspective of their class conditions, especially in the state of Alagoas, in the municipality of Maceió. Thus, this work aimed to understand the street commerce in the center of Maceió. Specifically, to analyze the nature of the political conflicts that exist between street vendors, shopkeepers and the city hall of Maceió that arose after the occupation of “points” of public space by those to develop their trade. For that, we used a qualitative research, of bibliographic character, of authors as much of the field of the sociology of the work supported in a theoretical analysis of matrix of the dialectical historical materialism, as of theorists of the field of the critical urban geography. Thus, we apprehend, on the one hand, that the conflicts that exist between street vendors and storeowners in Maceió, appear as resulting from the clash of interests between the very classes they represent, within the position they occupy in the structural division of labor and in the complex process of productive accumulation. On the other hand, in a more situated and localized perspective in the daily developments, we realize that these conflicts in which the city presents itself as a defender of the interests of businessmen; it is established by the denial of the occupation of “points” of intense flows, which are central for the street vendors to develop their activities, having as their argument processes of revitalization and urban reordering of an excluding nature of the popular and peripheral layers.