Labor and Land Struggles in a Brazilian Steel Town: The Reorganization of Capital under Neo-Extractivism
Massimiliano Mollona
Chapter from the book: Breman, J et al. 2019. The Social Question in the Twenty-First Century: A Global View.
Part of
Chapter from the book: Breman, J et al. 2019. The Social Question in the Twenty-First Century: A Global View.
This chapter discusses how Brazil’s neo-extractivist model – a mixture of financialization, laborderegulation, poverty reduction and extractivism – impacts onworking-class struggles in Volta Grande, a steeltown in the state of Rio de Janeiro. Based on ethnographic fieldwork inside a multinational conglomerate combining steelmaking, mining and logistics, and the overview of local land and urban struggles, the chapter examines the coupling between the strategies of accumulation by dispossession by the conglomerate – relying on rent seeking, commodity export, labor precarization and open conflict with the local community – and the labor and economic policies of the Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff administrations, including the popularization of finance, the transformation of the Brazilian state from developer to financial investor, and its co-optation of the traditional trade-union movement.
Mollona, M. 2019. Labor and Land Struggles in a Brazilian Steel Town: The Reorganization of Capital under Neo-Extractivism. In: Breman, J et al (eds.), The Social Question in the Twenty-First Century. California: University of California Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.74.i
This chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution + Noncommercial + NoDerivatives 4.0 license. Copyright is retained by the author(s)
This book has been peer reviewed. See our Peer Review Policies for more information.
Published on July 30, 2019