As Cicatrizes da acumulação capitalista no Brasil: dilemas do “neodesenvolvimentismo” e os megaprojetos de infraestrutura na crise estrutural do capital

Abstract

South America entered the circuits of global capital accumulation about five centuries ago. From these lands we were drained of any resource that would fuel the gains of Iberian monarchies. 500 years later, our natural resources continue to be drained towards the centers of capital accumulation. The Iberian crowns are no longer in charge of the process, but the external vocation continues now controlled by the big transnational corporation, that, with the help of the States, successfully maintains, and since the 1970s, have elevated the despoiling tendency to the last consequences. The 1970s marked a turning point in the logic of capitalist accumulation, in the reproduction of capital and in the forms of domination with the trend drop in the average rate of profit predicted by Marx in The Capital. The constant increase in productivity and the intensification of capital's most intimate and inherent contradictions led us to a moment that turned into in Brazil, as well as in Latin America, the exhaustion of the industrialist paradigm as a predominant form of capital accumulation, and led us to the dynamics of economic reprimarization and the advance of the neo-extractive frontier across territories. This recreation of an accumulation pattern, designed to serve external demands, has as its essential precondition the construction of an infrastructure network to guarantee the insertion of new territories in the capitalist dynamics and the expanded reproduction of the large imperialist monopoly conglomerates. Seeking to critically evaluate this process in a radical way, the objective of this investigation is to examine the protagonist role of the State in promoting capitalist accumulation in which infrastructure becomes an important vector, as well as the character of megaprojects and their consequences for the subcontinent, especially for native populations, peasants, quilombolas, riverside communities and the South American working class. To this end, we aim to intensively analyze the South American Regional Integration Initiative (Portuguese acronym IIRSA) and the Growth Acceleration Programs (Portuguese acronym PAC I and II), articulating them with the local, international dynamics and the sociometabolic system of capital that since 1970 enters a stage of deep structural crisis.