By JOSÉ RAIMUNDO TRINDADE*
Considerations on the agrarian question in José de Souza Martins
“Pregnant I resist/believing that behind the fence of the latifundium/the pindobas sing/and the old palm trees whistle a song of freedom”
(Lilia Diniz, Empress/Maranhão)[I]
The debate and theoretical treatment of the agrarian question in Brazil have followed different trajectories and sought meanings: from the vision completely linked to the partisan aspects of the former PCB, the essential contributions of Caio Prado, to the views of intellectuals linked to the Catholic Church. Some of the interpretations specifically in the field of Marxism establish an interpretative mosaic of diverse modes that converge and diverge at the same time.
We have already analyzed it on the website the earth is round a little of what Octávio Ianni observed as the nexus of the agrarian question and the formation of a Brazilian agrarian state.
Another author who seems to be key to understanding the Brazilian sociological and economic “lock” is the contributions of José de Souza Martins. This author defines the Brazilian agrarian issue as the center of any interpretative element of a society that is unable to overcome slavery or the “slave form of labor,” as the author defines it, and becomes “a capitalism of capital subsumed by land rent” or “capitalism of insufficiencies.”
For José de Souza Martins, “the Brazilian agrarian issue is not just, strictly speaking, the social issue of poverty that in the countryside results from land injustice. It is here the anomalous way in which the pact between capital and land ownership took place, with capital becoming the owner of land and mutilating itself as a capitalist mode of production” (2023, p. 26).
In the brief excerpt above, we can address five elements that seem central to the interpretation of contemporary Brazil. Firstly, how the formation of the national capitalist society was established, whose presence of a late institutional end and with contemporary permanence constituted what José de Souza Martins will call “insufficiently realized capitalism”, not only due to the conditions of “over-exploitation” of labor present here, but also due to the “unregulated economic activities, of the parallel economy of resistance and survival” (2023, p. 103).
The sociological nexus of slavery is deeper than the analyses of Brazilian developmentalist structuralism supposed. This society of insufficient capitalism requires the perennial permanence of the extraction of extraordinary profits from forms of exploitation that are not strictly capitalist, so slavery and other forms of “over-exploitation” remain contingent on the Brazilian sociological formation.
Although there is no reference, José de Souza Martins’ category of “over-exploitation” is similar to Ruy Mauro Marini’s category of “super-exploitation”. We can visualize this similarity more closely by exposing its interpretative elements. For José de Souza Martins, “over-exploitation” manifests itself in the “cheapening of wage labor far below the process of reproduction of the labor force for capital, the survival value of those who work for it”. For Ruy Mauro Marini (2005), the forms of “over-exploitation” manifest themselves in a wage rate lower than the value of the labor force, with capital using its own “wage fund”, encroaching on the worker’s conditions of reproduction.
The approximation of these two forms of exploitation (over and super) differs when José de Souza Martins (2023, p. 150) theorizes slave labor through indebtedness, a post-historical form of slavery. Over-exploitation is a manifestation of commercial capital, and the worker, before entering the production process, already presents a condition of exploitative degradation. Thus, “over-exploitation occurs before the work is performed, in the increased and monopolistic prices paid for what is needed to survive, and not during the work process”.
It is worth noting that the various forms of possible credit appropriation that exist in Brazil can, in some way, be analyzed under this categorization or derived from them, even if there is no manifestation of “forms of slave labor”, but can be viewed as forms of “accumulation by dispossession”, for example, the forms of platform work (Uber and others) or extortion via usurious interest rates manifested in the famous “shopping books” that still exist today in the outskirts of Brazil or even in credit cards, are forms of appropriation of small incomes.
José de Souza Martins' analysis establishes the necessary understanding of how the “slave heritage” manifests itself not only in the current “contemporary slavery”, but constitutes a key aspect for thinking about a society in which “unemployment, underemployment, and precarious work” create a “poor social consciousness of resignation and waiting”, but “persisting, adjusted or reinvented” the slave form of work “according to socially minimizing conditions” (…) in the “underdeveloped model of Brazilian capitalism”.
A second central point refers to the land aspects themselves, which are covered both in the aspects of social control and in the formation of the Brazilian State itself, whose notion by Octávio Ianni (2004) was of an “agrarian State”, but with enormous similarities to the perception of José de Souza Martins (1986, p.15) of “oligarchies supported by land ownership”.
The agrarian issue appears here with a double interaction: on the one hand, control over social movements and the eternal postponement of an agrarian reform that actually confronts land appropriation and, on the other, the formation of the “exclusionary pact” that has always operated in the sense of what the author calls “perverse social inclusion”, since it is not in fact a question of “social exclusion” since “the underprivileged have a function in the current neoliberal model of expanded reproduction of capital”.
This situation worsens as the cycle of agrarian power prevails, such as the current one, in which the primary-export pattern based on agribusiness and mineral extraction reinforces the logic of this “perverse social inclusion,” something that is objectified in agrarian conflicts, contemporary slavery, and the murders and genocides of peoples. As the CPT (Pastoral Land Commission) demonstrates in its latest report: “the situation in the countryside has worsened in terms of conflict, with numbers exceeding 1.500 occurrences per year between 2016 and 2018, and reaching more than 1.900 per year between 2019 and 2022 (…) and, in the last 10 years, violence in the countryside has increased by 60% in intensity.”[ii]
But the internal nexus, predominantly economic, but with deep sociological and anthropological roots, refers to the non-commercial character of the land that transforms into private mercantile appropriation in the establishment of land rent. Marx (2017 [1896]) demonstrates the irrational character of land as a commodity, with the mercantile form being established from the labor process, and nature not constituting a productive process but rather an ontological essence.
When commodifying land, through the attribute of capitalized land income, a double contradiction is observed, as established by José de Souza Martins (2023, p. 129): the use of a “natural, finite element that cannot be reproduced” as something to be used indefinitely, which leads to the necessary expansive front of agrarian accumulation; on the other hand, in “agribusiness the entrepreneur is a two-faced being (…) capitalist and landowner, two antagonistic economic logics”.
It is worth explaining this last contradiction and integrating it with the first problem. Land rent constitutes a tax deduction for the productive and capitalist use of land, and the lessee of land in order to use it productively pays in the form of absolute or differential rent a deduction of the profit obtained from the economic exploitation of the land. The landowner, therefore, functions as a parasite who obtains a part of the social wealth from the mere control and ownership of the land. What we observe in agribusiness is the personification of “realities that, even when together, move in antagonistic directions. One toward the future and the other toward the past.”
As Delgado (2005, p. 66) correctly observes, “agribusiness (…) is an association of large agro-industrial capital with large land ownership (…) pursuing profit and land income, under the sponsorship of State policies”. The consequences of an economic and social model based on agribusiness is the strengthening of rentier atavism based on land income and, as Martins (p. 130) reinforces, “blocking progress, democracy and the culture of plurality and difference”.
But the “anomalous mode” that represents the agrarian question in the interaction between archaic Brazilian capitalism and land ownership is only consolidated if it produces a continuous and expansive frontier. The Amazon frontier, as understood by José de Souza Martins in several works (1981, 1986, 2010, 2014, 2023), is the place of “objectifications” where people “degrade themselves as things and objects, impoverished as subjects of destiny.” The Amazon translates, not only in this author, but in other interpreters, such as the aforementioned Octávio Ianni, the disorganized stage of three contingent frontiers of Brazilian capitalism: the frontier of contemporary slavery; the frontier of agrarian accumulation; and the frontier of human environmental end.
The notion of border in José de Souza Martins (2014, 2023) is not a linear space, it constitutes more of a relational geography, similar to the perception of Smith (1988) and Harvey (2013), as he refers to it, it establishes an “open and mobile” logic that is permanently redefined and “alters the logic of extraction of the economic surplus”, being, therefore, a territorial formation of relational dialectics, that is, it changes conditioned by a varied set of vectors, capitalist accumulation being one of these points, but also “the social techniques of worker coercion, the variety of moral and physical violence, the modality of alienation (…)” (2023, p. 149). The State of agrarian accumulation is at the same time a result and one of these relational factors.
This frontier of contemporary slavery, expressed in the countless data released on captive and martyred workers in the Amazon, constitutes a mobile formation, as José de Souza Martins (2014, 2023) discusses, but it expresses a bloody need for expansive capitalism, whose requisition of hands and land are essential for the extraction of economic surplus, even if it is not exactly surplus value as a modern form of capitalism, but becomes surplus value that can be realized in the intense export cycle of grains, meat, and minerals. The recent historical period of the 1960s and 1980s was marked by the presence of varied “moral and physical violence” in the region, which, as the author emphasizes, “can be explained by procedures and calculations that are specifically capitalist under non-capitalist forms of labor exploitation” (2023, p. 138).
The construction of a frontier of moral degradation only occurred through the planned action of the national State, something that both Martins and Ianni reinforce through the presence of an “agrarian State” that integrates the most modern technique with the archaism of use and devotion to its mission of servitude to capital mediated by land controllers, with agribusiness constituting the most complete expression of this fusion between capital, State and large estates, whose conformation takes place intellectually and materially in the nerve center of the post-1964 authoritarian State.
As José de Souza Martins (1986, p. 90) observes: “the historical project [of the dictatorship] [was] the great conciliation between capital and land ownership to constitute the new basis of the national State (…) through the incorporation of land ownership and territorial income as partners in a capitalist development that is very different from the classical English or American model”. The Amazon constitutes an expansive territorial condition for this form of capitalism, something that is manifested by the impossibility of a non-degrading modernity, whose guiding principle is not only human exploitation, but also environmental degradation.
The expansion of agribusiness is one of the hallmarks of the current national economic pattern, centered on primary-export productive specialization and which has as one of its bases the conditions for large-scale exploration of commodities agricultural, whose economic calculation requires the use of a large amount of arable land. Capitalism develops on an increasing scale of exploitation of various territorial spaces of reproduction, creating a globalized reproductive dynamic.
The Amazon is the main space for the expansion of agrarian capital accumulation, a territory that is undergoing accelerated economic, social and environmental reconfiguration, with effects on its occupation, space, land use, value, labor relations and socio-environmental disintegration. Land rent enables a structural understanding of two fundamental phenomena: the link between agrarian production and control of land ownership and, on the other hand, the logic of increasing occupation of the hinterland Amazonian by “plantations".
Thus, agribusiness constitutes a “capital with a dual and contradictory function: that of producing profit and that of producing land income” (p. 157), which makes the Amazon region an ideal land market for rentierism, and the “dual function” that agribusiness fulfills is strengthened by an agrarian state agenda that subsidizes this sector and makes it impossible to collect taxes that could transfer value for accumulation in other productive sectors.
As José de Souza Martins (2023, p. 137) reminds us, the Brazilian State acted by donating land to big capital, while at the same time expropriating small-scale production and turning “land grabbing” into a mechanism of accumulation through dispossession and land transfer to large landholding groups. Data from the 2017 Agricultural Census show the reinforcement of the logic of agrarian concentration, thus, establishments with areas above one thousand hectares represented in the total universe in 2006 approximately 0,92% of the 5,1 million establishments, but they took up 45% of the total area of 333,6 million hectares. In the 2017 Census, these large estates represented 1,01% of the universe of 5,07 million, but controlled 47,6% of the total area of 351 million hectares.[iii]
There is no way to conclude a brief approach to the agrarian question in José de Souza Martins without addressing two converging points of the anomalous formation of Brazilian capitalism itself: the peasantry and the issue of agrarian reform, and we can, as a contribution, also establish some evolutionary theses of the Brazilian peasantry.
Em Peasants and politics in Brazil, José de Souza Martins (1986, p. 16) observes that “our peasantry is constituted with the capitalist expansion, as a product of the contradictions of this expansion”. We have here, therefore, a complete inversion of the classical logic of European formations, where the “peasantry is a class, not a status”, being a social formation of the current underdeveloped Brazilian capitalism and not of its past, continually remaking itself and reorganizing its forms of manifestation and confrontation.
When discussing the formation of the Brazilian peasantry, José de Souza Martins (1986, p.39-44) observes that this peasantry was historically formed in colonial Brazil and was doubly excluded: “from the condition of landowner and from the condition of slave”. Unlike what occurred in the USA, the way in which land control was established in Brazil, since the Land Law of 1850, “the opening of new possessions was prohibited, establishing that the acquisition of vacant lands by any title other than purchase was prohibited”.
Thus, the Brazilian slave-owning bourgeoisie, through the oligarchic state, formed a veritable siege on any possibility of non-slaves or freedmen of any kind appropriating land. The result of this process was various forms of “contract” work, performing activities ranging from cutting down the forest to preparing the land. “The peasant was responsible for opening a farm and establishing a coffee plantation in exchange for the right to plant the crops he needed, such as corn, rice, beans, and cotton, among the coffee trees.” This dynamic would characterize the Brazilian peasantry for a long time “as producers of foodstuffs for domestic consumption.” It must be said that, to this day, family farming will continue to be highly relevant in providing the basic food basket of Brazilian workers.[iv]
The peasantry is characterized by the production of a surplus greater than the family's reproductive value, something that is established as part of a simple mercantile economy, that is, the production of goods does not appear as an obligatory reproductive condition but rather as an excess. Even though this surplus can be appropriated as a commodity in the system that constitutes the entire capitalist mercantile economy, the center of this form of social reproduction continues to occur in a community or family form, which constitutes a basis for differentiated economic and cultural organization. Peasant production, even when destined for the market, is based on the use of land for labor and not on the appropriation of profit and land rent.
The logical continuity of the peasant form in Brazilian society is established by five dimensions that are projected socially and that can, in our view, be deduced from the contributions of José Souza Martins, and their deepening constitutes an excellent work agenda: (i) the permanence of population surpluses whose only possibility of social and cultural reproduction is through the exploitation of nature (land or other forms such as rivers and lakes).
(ii) Thus, as underdeveloped Brazilian capitalism increases its organic composition of capital and increases relative overpopulation, this induces new contingents to become peasants, even at the cost of various risks, including their existence, as demonstrated by the figures for rural violence already cited.
(iii) the cyclical logic of current exporting agrarian capital is similar to previous processes, such as plantations coffee and sugar, have limits given by the substitutability of new planting spaces in various parts of the planet, as well as by the various possibilities of technological changes, which will establish their contraction and crisis, with new availability of land for peasant use; (iv) the agrarian State has limits to sustain agrarian accumulation, whether due to possible social, urban and rural pressures, or due to the stagnation of the agrarian export cycle, as explained above; (v) a new component mentioned refers to the advance of the environmental crisis. As in other countries, the permanence of peasant communities (indigenous, quilombola and others) converges with society's interest in guaranteeing areas of protection and environmental diversity.
Agrarian reform as it is presented in this third decade of the 21st century constitutes “a social and political problem and only makes sense when proposed on a social and political scale”. With the advancement of the export-oriented agrarian specialization model and in view of the current conflicts in Brazilian society, the reestablishment of a national agenda that once again places the democratization of land rights at the center of its construction is more important than ever. Freeing the Brazilian people from land slavery seems to be the great mission of any modern radical movement.
*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
DELGADO, Guilherme C. The agrarian question in Brazil, 1950-2003. In: JACCOUD, Luciana (Organizer). Social Issues and Social Policies in Contemporary Brazil. Brasilia: IPEA, 2005.
José de Souza Martins. Agrarian reform and the limits of democracy in the “New Republic”. So Paulo: Hucitec, 1986.
José de Souza Martins. Capitalism and slavery in post-slavery society. São Paulo: Editora Unesp, 2023.
José de Souza Martins. Border: the degradation of the other in the confines of the human. São Paulo: Context, 2014.
José de Souza Martins. The Captivity of the Earth. São Paulo: Context, 2010.
José de Souza Martins. Peasants and politics in Brazil. Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 1981.
MARINI, Ruy Mauro. Dialectics of Dependence (A). In: SADER, E. Dialectic of Dependence. 1st edition. Petropolis: Vozes, 2000.
MARX, K. [1894]. Capital: critique of political economy, Book III: The Global Process of Capitalist Production. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2017.
Octavio Ianni. Agrarian Origins of the Brazilian State. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 2004.
TRINDADE, JRB and FERRAZ, LP Accumulation through spoliation and agricultural activity in the Brazilian Amazon. In: SEP Magazine, No. 67 (2023), accessed at: https://revistasep.org.br/index.php/SEP/article/view/1051.
Notes
[I] Poem by a peasant woman from Imperatriz in Maranhão.
[ii] See CPT (2024). About the map of Conflicts in the countryside Brazil 2023 access: https://www.cptnacional.org.br/downlods?task=download.send&id=14308:conflitos-no-campo-brasil-2023&catid=41
[iii] IBGE Agricultural Census (2006, 2017). Data available at: https://sidra.ibge.gov.br/acervo#/S/CA/A/Q
[iv] The data used to compare peasant and corporate agriculture are quite inconsistent, but if we use a study conducted by Embrapa and published on the institution's website, we will see the significant importance of family (or peasant) agriculture in the formation of the Brazilian food base, accounting for almost a quarter (23%) of bean production and almost 70% of cassava production, as well as rice (10,9%), wheat (18,4%) and more than two-thirds of vegetables. See: Embrapa (2020), accessed: https://www.embrapa.br/busca-de-noticias/-/noticia/55609579/artigo—qual-e-a-participacao-da-agricultura-familiar-na-producao-de-alimentos-no-brasil-e-em-rondonia
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