A Mobilidade espacial do capital e da força de trabalho na produção de celulose e papel: um estudo a partir de Três Lagoas (MS)

Abstract

From the second half of the 1990s, the city of Tres Lagoas (MS) started to show the first traces of a frantic and diversified industrialization process, whose flagship is the pulp mills (belonging to the companies Fibria Celulose and Eldorado Brasil), and to a lesser extent, also paper mill (International Paper). Such phenomenon is part of a broader context of strengthening and expanding of the so-called forest complex, and within it, the pulp and paper sector in Brazil over the past decades. The goal of this dissertation is to uncover and understand the main features of the dynamics of spatial mobility of the capital and labor force, engendered from the territorialisation of corporations in the pulp and paper sector in Microregion of Três Lagoas. The theoretical-documentary and empirical research revealed that underlying the installation of these industrial plants and their bases of monoculture in the study area are, on the one hand, the structural transformation of the world paper industry, and secondly, the movement to farther areas of production of cellulose in Brazil. Both movements are direct consequences of the inexorable of the always magnified accumulation of the capital, within which the spatial mobility acts as an absolutely essential expedient. The more specific explanations about the choice of the city of Tres Lagoas to the location of the projects are mainly by the presence of a set of key constraints in this place. Special emphasis should be given to the role of the State, at all levels and spheres of government, an absolutely indispensable agent of the capital mobility. The research also enables to verify that the advent of pulp and paper production in the study area led to the occurrence of an intense migration of workers, employees in various work activities involved. Because of the heterogeneity of migrant workers who make up the stream, a typology was set up that divides them into three groups: a) the construction and assembly workers; b) planting and management of eucalyptus workers; c) industry workers. The migration process observed highlights the intense fragmentation of the current working class and the phenomenon of spatial mobility of the workforce, consistent with the uneven character and combined of the capitalist geography, being correlated with the most perverse elements of flexible production only in cases of the first two groups, while, paradoxically, it means the opposite in the third. At the end, it is concluded that the spatial mobility is not only a consequence of the operation of the social metabolism of the capital, but, concomitantly, a sine qua non factor for this operation, having deep and structural meanings within it.