Entre o moderno e o arcaico: uma análise das relações de trabalho no setor sucroalcooleiro no contexto do capitalismo contemporâneo no Brasil

Abstract

The culture of sugar cane has always occupied an important place in the national scene. This system, which is based on the large estates protected by the State, monoculture and the workforce analogous to slavery, has been a space of significant transformations that transits old and modern practices such as manual labor and the use of technologies. The implementation of mechanization has been justified as a form of environmental protection and as an alternative to reduce the exploitation of labor in sugarcane, for which reasons were not fully supported. This work, therefore, has as main objective to analyze the process of mechanization in Brazil in the context of contemporary capitalism and the consequences for cane cutters. We take as a theoreticalmethodological contribution the Marxist tradition, based on the perspective of social totality. We use bibliographical analyzes of the capitalist mode of production, the Brazilian social formation, the sugar economy, the transformations of the world of work and so on. We could observe until then that the mechanization in the cultivation of the sugar cane has advanced in the last years of significant form, but the manual work did not decay. What happened was a combination of machines and live labor, resulting in an overexploitation of sugarcane cutters because of the productivity requirements imposed by the market. These elements assume their own characteristics in Brazilian capitalism.