State, capital and nature in contemporary Amazon: Questions of a central debate for the social sciences and Brazilian society
Estudos de Sociologia, Araraquara, v. 28, n. esp. 2, e023012, 2023. e-ISSN: 1982-4718
DOI: https://doi.org/10.52780/res.v28iesp.2.18953 2
The debate on the relationship between the development of capitalism and the
exploitation of nature is one of the main topics on the contemporary research agenda of the
Social Sciences (O'CONNOR, 2004; ALTVATER, 2010; CALHOUN, 2014), as evidenced by
the current discussions on the causes and effects of global climate warming and the analysis of
the correlations between the destruction of natural ecosystems and the production of pandemics
(BOYER, 2020).
In the case of Brazil, this discussion has the Amazon as one of its main focuses, given
the importance that this region plays in global ecological processes and the strong
anthropization that it has undergone over the last fifty years, as shown by the data on the
development of agricultural activities and the evolution of deforested areas (COSTA, 2000).
The dynamics of forest destruction involve different social forces, mobilizing collective
and individual agents interested in exploiting regional natural resources (land, timber, minerals,
biodiversity products etc.). It is opposed by an important range of social actors who have been
mobilizing to curb this process, such as the so-called traditional populations (indigenous
peoples, quilombolas, extractivists, riverside dwellers etc.) (ACEVEDO; CASTRO, 1993;
RUSTAIN, 2021) and social groups who moved to the region more recently, such as peasants
attracted to colonization projects during the period of the military dictatorship (ESTERCI,
1987; HÉBETTE, 1991; SCHMINK; WOOD, 2012).
In this sense, the analysis proposed here seeks to account for processes that involve at
least three dimensions: the dynamics of capitalist development, the role played by the agencies
that aim for state power in the region (BOURDIEU, 2012) and the disputes between different
social agents located within civil society.
In the first case, we have a dynamic development of capitalism, which in many ways
recalls the process of primitive accumulation (MARX, 1998) or the so-called Polanyian "satanic
mill" (POLANYI, 2000), which is advancing on indigenous lands, environmental conservation
units and areas occupied by traditional populations (quilombolas, rubber tappers, Brazil nut
growers etc.), using repressive mechanisms to immobilize the workforce, now widely described
as typical of contemporary slave labor (ESTERCI, 1994).
However, this allusion to the more deleterious aspects of the process of primitive
accumulation should not obscure the fact that the economic processes underway in the Amazon
are strongly articulated and are often directed by leading actors in global value chains or global
production networks, as is the case, for example, with iron mining, soybean exploitation or