By JOSÉ RAIMUNDO TRINDADE*
Ianni's contributions can help to reformulate the Brazilian agrarian debate, and the author's works point us to the axes for rethinking the Brazilian land structure
1.
Octávio Ianni was one of the most complete scholars of Brazilian capitalism, with works of great relevance in the area of analysis of the national State, and his work State and economic planning in Brazil (1986) constitutes a central reference work for those who wish to understand the development of state intervention in the country and The agrarian origins of the Brazilian State (2004) is central to establishing the permanence of the agrarian issue in the national debate.
Our objective in this text will be to address Octávio Ianni's contributions in two related aspects: the agrarian issue and its relationship with the Amazon issue, aspects that are intertwined in the broad and critical social dispute over land that characterizes Brazilian social formation. In the text about agrarian origins, the author observes, even in the preface, that “it is possible to say that all the most notable moments in the history of Brazilian society are influenced by the agrarian question” (2004, p. 07).
The thesis espoused here is that at the present moment this assumption has only been reinforced and has become the keynote of the current cycle of national peripheral capitalist accumulation.
2.
The control of access and ownership of land by the Brazilian State has always been its main logic of state functionality, as Octávio Ianni notes, “the Empire's legislation ensured that lands were not available to any interested parties”, and “in 1842 a government recommendation suggested that it was necessary to increase land acquisition costs in order to secure free workers on coffee plantations, this recommendation was transformed into law in 1850. This landmark action by the Brazilian state, making vacant land available for use and appropriable only by capitalized agrarian sectors constitutes the foundation of the logic that the author points to as originating both from the national oligarchic State, and from the subsequent organization of a capitalism centered on the great concentration of land, with enormous consequences derived from it.
It is worth noting that the abundance of land established an authoritarian condition for State action, preventing or hindering workers' access to land ownership. Both in the agrarian expansion of the 19th century in the west of São Paulo and in the Amazonian expansion of the 20th century, the State favored land concentration, and the violence of land controllers was not only tolerated but encouraged by the national agrarian State.
Octávio Ianni (2004, p.28) summarizes the conditions of absolute power of coffee farmers over settler workers, to whom they imposed fines and “abusive prices charged by farm warehouses”, leading to “tensions between farmers and settlers”, having as a consequence “settler strikes, fires and murders”, a situation of violence that will resemble land formations in other locations in the country.
This power of control and definition of political relations is projected over time, thus, in the constitution of the sugar agroindustry, whose sugarcane and sugarcane plantation format establishes a reproductive totality, notes Octávio Ianni (2004, p. 62), the “mill owner appears as the maximum authority ”, and “in that social world of the mill and sugarcane fields” everything is organized in accordance with the maintenance of the reproduction of agroindustry, including or mainly political power.[I]
We can, based on Octávio Ianni, state that his two studies based on municipal formations (Sertãozinho, in the interior of São Paulo, at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century and; Conceição do Araguaia, interior of the state of Pará, which extends into the 20th century , especially in its second half) are elements of the formation of Brazilian agrarian atavism.
The transformations that Sertãozinho and Conceição do Araguaia undergo constitute the axis of analysis of the theses developed by Octávio Ianni. Four of these theses seem central to us:
(i) The cyclical economic changes linked to primary-export production bases, when they enter into crisis, initially enable an agrarian deconcentration, but this is soon overcome by a new agrarian reconcentration, driven by the dynamics of a new agricultural export cycle or by state induction that favors the interests of agrarian capitalists.
(ii) The Brazilian agrarian question never seems to be concluded, being continually altered by the forces of extensive land use and occupation — first in the west of São Paulo and then in the Amazonian “lands of endless”. As there is also no single path to agrarian solution, being even more diverse than those established by classical Marxian perspectives (English, Prussian, American), we can speak of paths of Brazilian conformation, whether authoritarian through the action of the State, or through the formation of new peasantries, including organized peasant paths, such as the MST (Landless Workers Movement).
(iii) The aforementioned agrarian issue is also placed in a continuum of production and reproduction of different segments of the working class, whether expanding, at times, the “proletariat”, with the expulsion of peasant populations; whether by expelling urban populations, due to continuous survival crises and producing new peasantries.
(iv) There is a dialectic between rural and urban Brazil, which Octávio Ianni demonstrates in his analyses.
3.
The Amazon emerged as an object of relational study for Octávio Ianni (1979, 1981) at the beginning of the 1970s. A reference work constitutes “The fight for the Earth”. In several aspects, this work has innovations in dealing with Amazonian society: (a) it constitutes a pioneering study of the formation of Amazonian cities, specifically the author analyzes the formation and development of Conceição do Araguaia, one of the areas of greatest confrontation and social dispute in Brazil .
(b) The conformity of social forms that relate to land power and state logic; (c) the role that the military dictatorship plays in organizing Brazilian land interests and its intervention in the Amazonian space; (d) the historical conformation of the peasantry and (e) the conditions of struggle and violence in the countryside.
The conformation of cities or population centers are diverse, and in the Amazon case, the classic centers arising from colonial occupation and indigenous slavery are central. Conceição do Araguaia, as reported by Octávio Ianni (1978, p. 233) comes from this historical form, and in its origins “the land was abundant and available; there was plenty for whoever wanted it; it was vacant or tribal, which was almost the same thing, for the Christians who arrived”.
Colonial territorial occupation always translates into three types of violence: the slave use of the native population, even if, in the Brazilian case, camouflaged with the religious ideology of Catholic power; the cultural reduction of dominated populations with the suppression of their linguistic references and, finally, the physical extermination of said populations (genocide).
The pattern of population growth, mainly thinking about the migratory attractor, as Octávio Ianni (1978, p. 157) also remembers, referring to the period between 1960 and 1970 for the local population, he deals with Conceição do Araguaia, but this is applicable to other areas of the Amazon, “increased almost five times (…) mainly due to the immigration of rural workers from rural areas in the Northeast, Goiás, Minas and others where there was overpopulation, or overexploitation, of workers”.
At the origin and permanence of the modern Amazonian social formation is the State and Capital. Conceição do Araguaia is a typological example treated by our author. The origin of the Araguaia “arraial” is in the extractive exploitation of rubber. The historical plot that dates back to the rubber century (1820/1920) is mainly the plot of the undoing of ancient peoples established on the Amazon soil, but also the constitution of archaic forms of exploitation so suited to the primitive accumulation of capital, it is specifically about the aviation and how forms of exploitation due to debt[ii] were already entangled with financial circuits that united rubber tappers (bosses), tradings rubber trade, English banks and, at the end, the workers exploited in the form of aviation, the rubber tappers.
It is worth noting that an important part of the rubber tappers in the first rubber cycle were natives, indigenous to different nations: Ticunas, Kaapós, Karajás, Oagoas. Nations that will disappear in the period analyzed by Ianni and on the path to establishing the Amazon expansion frontier.
The period that began with the business-military dictatorship of 1964 marks a new and extensive moment of capitalist and agrarian occupation in the Amazon, and Octávio Ianni (1981) correctly points out, in another important text, that state power favored and protected the “concentration and centralization of capital, providing the decisive transition of the economy largely dominated by monopoly capital”.
The economic policy of the dictatorship was decisive for the strengthening of agribusiness and the formation of an internationalized agrarian bourgeoisie, with the process of land appropriation of large Amazonian areas being part of this convergence between state technocracy and the interests of big capital. It is worth noting that Octávio Ianni marks the emergence of Sudam (1966) as a central milestone in the process of land commodification in the Amazon.
Octávio Ianni (1979, p. 47) observes that the “inclusion of agriculture, in general, in government export policy at any cost, led state power to favor, in all forms, the business of companies that were created or were functioning in the sector”. Agribusiness becomes one of the strategic centers, both establishing a base centered on primary-export production and making land control rules part of the strengthening and reorganization of the Brazilian agrarian bourgeoisie.
An aspect highlighted by Octávio Ianni (1979, p. 159) is that the dictatorship favors “the monopolization of land by national or foreign capitalists. Land is transformed into a commodity, object and means of producing exchange values, placed in the circuit of capital reproduction, as private property, mainly of large companies stimulated and protected by state power”.
Two observations: (i) “land as a commodity” implies a fictitious capital suitable for speculation, something that will only be boosted in the following decades and (ii) land rent will organize the dynamics of the land market and the dispute over property rights, with the obvious conflicts and extermination of individuals and populations, whether native or migratory.
4.
Thus, Octávio Ianni's contributions can help us reformulate the Brazilian agrarian debate, and the author's works point us to the axes for rethinking the Brazilian land structure and which we can summarize in eight relational vectors: (a) characteristic of property and possession rural establishments; (b) average dimensions of establishments; (c) type, size and appropriation of land rent (absolute and differential); (d) main productive arrangements and main reproductive base (capitalist, semi-capitalist, peasant); (e) pattern and form of state intervention; (f) social conflicts over land; (g) degree of environmental impact and (h) pattern of population growth and rural-urban relationship.
The interactivity between the aspects highlighted in order to analyze more closely and restore the debate on the agrarian issue in the current situation of agribusiness expansion and Brazilian social crisis is worth the return to Professor Octavio Ianni.
*Jose Raimundo Trinidad He is a professor at the Institute of Applied Social Sciences at UFPA. Author, among other books, of Agenda of debates and theoretical challenges: the trajectory of dependency and the limits of Brazilian peripheral capitalism and its regional constraints (Paka-Tatu).
References
Octavio Ianni. The fight for land. Rio de Janeiro: Voices, 1978.
Octavio Ianni. Dictatorship and agriculture. Rio de Janeiro: Brazilian Civilization, 1979.
Octavio Ianni. The dictatorship of Big Capital. Rio de Janeiro: Brazilian Civilization, 1981.
Octavio Ianni. State and economic planning in Brazil. Rio de Janeiro: Brazilian Civilization, 1986.
Octavio Ianni. Agrarian Origins of the Brazilian State. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 2004.
Terence J. Byers. The agrarian question and the peasantry. In: Fine, Ben and Saad Filho, Alfredo. Dictionary of Political Economy. São Paulo: Popular Expression, 2020.
José Raimundo B. Trindade (org.). Six decades of state intervention in the Amazon. Bethlehem: Pakatatu, 2014.
TRINDADE, JRB and FERRAZ, LP Accumulation through spoliation and agricultural activity in the Brazilian Amazon. In: SEP Magazine, no. 67 (2023): https://revistasep.org.br/index.php/SEP/article/view/1051.
Notes
[I] Agrarian control and political power are established as an interaction between the agrarian State and landowners. A current example is embodied in the figure of the President of the Federal Chamber. As shown in the dossier that can be accessed in Brasil de Fato, Artur Lira's agrarian power is expressed in land concentration and various forms of violence practiced against peasants and indigenous populations. Check: https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2023/11/13/dossie-detalha-face-agraria-de-arthur-lira-e-seu-cla-em-alagoas#:~:text=Com%20mais%20de%2090%20p%C3%A1ginas,humanos%20contado%20de%20forma%20in%C3%A9dita.
[ii] The use of debt as a form of social control is present in several formats of formal subsumption of labor to capital in the Brazilian case. In the work referring to the formation of agrarian accumulation in Sertãozinho (SP), Ianni (1983, p. 26) observes that the settler (immigrant) is “already in debt from the start”, with these debts “forcibly paid in work”.
the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE