Hidronegócio e ruptura metabólica: contradições econômicas e socioambientais da implantação de barragens no território Cantuquiriguaçu

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the relationship between the hydronegusiness of the energy sector and the materialization process of the metabolic rupture between human society and nature. Through exploratory research, it documented processes related to the implementation and operation of large dams on the Iguaçu River that affect the Cantuquiriguaçu territory in Paraná, as well as, its contradictions and connections with the capital system as a hegemonic totality in contemporaneity. The results are wide-ranging: potentialization of the development of productive forces and concentration and centralization of capital on one hand, and deterritorialization, compulsory displacement, systematic violation of human rights of the affected populations, environmental, socioeconomic, and cultural degradation of the affected regions, and class conflicts on the other. These are elements of the metabolic rupture deepened by hydrobusiness on multiple scales, from local to global. Metabolic rupture is the most comprehensive and radical expression of capital's organic and structural crisis. It is inaugurated and reproduced in a profound way in every cycle of production and reproduction of value, by alienated activity. In the same way, the discovery and use of electricity became one of its main factors. It enhanced productive capacity and revolutionarily transformed different dimensions of social life. Therefore, hydrobusiness, in its mediations, reproduces the same relations and results by annexing territories, populations, natural bases, and public and private infrastructures to the domain of capital. But the research also demonstrates that the ecological crisis imposes scientific, technological, economic, ethical, and socio-political challenges, as it proves to be insurmountable under the validity of the capital relation. Hence the crossroads in which humanity – the conscious part of nature – and especially the working class - producer of value – finds itself, since we have reached, for the first time in history, the concrete possibility of self-annihilation: complete ecological [or warlike] collapse under capitalism or the reinvention of social relations in the transition to socialism. Human emancipation, as the overcoming of the alienation of the social being and productive activity, has become urgent and necessary. The state, an essential element of contemporary sociometabolisms and the expansion of hydrobusiness, needs to be transformed in order to operate the efficient mediation of the emancipation process.