A problemática da propriedade da terra na perspectiva histórico-crítica: elementos para a apreensão da questão agrária brasileira

Abstract

This thesis deals with the central historical and theoretical foundations that constitute the problem of the “agrarian question” in capitalism in general and in Brazilian capitalism in particular. We developed this study with the main objective of analyzing the process of constitution of private land ownership in Brazil, from the Marxian perspective rooted in the materialist conception of history as a method of analysis and intervention on the structurally unequal reality, in order to apprehend the central determinations of the Brazilian agrarian question that imply the historic struggle of rural workers for and on the land. For that, we carried out an investigative process of a bibliographical nature, whose preliminary results are exposed in four sections. In the first, introductory, we present our understanding of the concept of “agrarian question” and a “portrait” of some of the main manifestations of the Brazilian agrarian question today, especially in relation to the land structure and the use and occupation of agricultural land. The second section consists of an exploratory historical exposition on the historicity of land ownership, with emphasis on the processes of peasant expropriation and the constitution of private land ownership under the dominion of capital, in the context of the societal transition from feudalism to capitalism. It also discusses the centrality of land in the constitution of the social being, its meaning as an “object” and “universal means of human work” in the dialectic relationship between propertyexpropriation-appropriation, and the main historical forms of land ownership in development according to Marxian social theory. Thus, we seek to apprehend the historical factors that originally influenced the constitution of the modern form of land ownership, considered as a material presupposition of the capitalist production process in general and an indispensable element for the accumulation of capital in the countryside, the target of antagonistic social interests. The third section is devoted to the theoretical foundations of typically capitalist land ownership, in which the private appropriation of land under the command of capital, in agriculture, is exclusively intended for the production of surplus value. From this movement, land ownership assumes a radically new and contradictory phenomenon: the land-commodity. Thus, we carried out an examination of the theoretical analysis of Marx in Capital and Kautsky in The Agrarian Question regarding the central determinations of capitalist property – land-commodity and land-capital – under the theory of value, and which has in the theory marxiana of land rent a milestone in the unveiling of the historical and economic specificities of land ownership in capitalism. This aspect is understood as a central foundation of the agrarian question in capitalism in general and, therefore, a starting point for the analysis of social contradictions in and from the countryside. In the fourth and last section, in the light of the theoretical framework used in the previous sections, we deal with the constitution of private land ownership in Brazil, considering the particularities of Brazilian agrarian formation, within the framework of the colonial slave economy and the beginning of the sui generis transition to Brazilian capitalism . This past is marked, in general, by processes of expropriation, dispossession, genocide, enslavement of indigenous and African peoples, and exploitation of poor farmers. The investigative resource to this conforming historicity of Brazilian agrarian society between the sixteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries made explicit the particularities of the process of real and formal constitution of private land ownership, which produced a diverse, disordered, unequal and conflicting configuration of forms property social. From this process, different social categories emerged in the countryside, antagonistic senses in relation to possession/ownership of land and historical disputes with the rural working classes, manifested in terms of the “struggle for land”. With this theoretical-analytical journey, we seek to apprehend the main elements of the origins of the Brazilian agrarian question, which are both present in the current reality, and create new conflicts and impose new challenges to those who, more out of necessity than by spontaneous will, they dare to face the old and new forms of expropriation of labor, the subordination of property of direct producers to capital and the expansion of capitalist land ownership.