De Marx ao MST: capitalismo financeirizado e forma jurídica como entraves à agroecologia

Abstract

This work starts from a critical analysis, based on Marxist thought, about the role of agriculture for the emergence of capitalism and the metabolic rupture in the relationship between human beings and nature. Historically contextualizing the advent of current environmental problems as the result of the appropriation and exploitation of the human being on nature and on the human being in the capitalist mode of production, agroecology is presented as a sustainable alternative to this model for operating in a logic external to that of capital. In this context, the objective is to verify the barriers to agroecology as a sustainable productive practice and as a right in the current phase of capitalism, using the MST as an example. To this end, the dialectical historical materialism and the following form of exposure are adopted as a method: 1. Addressing agroecology as a sustainable productive practice capable of overcoming the metabolic rupture created by the capitalist mode of production between human beings and nature; 2. Analyze agroecology in the apparent legal form in the light of sustainability and in the positive law in norms; 3. Check the barriers to agroecology as a sustainable productive practice and as a right in the current phase of financialized capitalism and the Brazilian example of the MST. It is concluded that, as a practice, agroecology is an agricultural production system that uses non-capitalist and non-exploratory agronomic methods and, therefore, it differs from other “sustainable” proposals. From a Marxist conception of right as a social form that has an essence and an appearance, analyzing agroecology as a right in the light of the constitutional principle of sustainability and in the law, it is concluded that agroecology has a wide basis to be defended legally, at least in appearance. However, before any other obstacle to its implementation, agroecology as a productive practice and as a right (appearance) finds the very essence of right as a legal form necessary for the operability of capitalist society and linked to it as an obstacle. It also encounters obstacles in the challenges imposed by the increasing financialization of capital through which corporations have come to control governments, the judiciary, the media, international organizations, civil society organizations, public opinion, in addition to the legislature itself. In this context, the political use of legal norms in the struggle for agroecology becomes relevant as it must seek to curb the destructive effects of capitalist exploitation on nature, providing more time for the development of revolutionary struggles. Agroecology, in Brazil, stands out for the struggle of the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST) that has been carrying out, through this productive practice, a progressive revolution in the means of production.