A territorialidade camponesa como possibilidade: repensando o ordenamento capitalista a partir da comunidade Baixa Grande do Meio, São Bernardo-MA.

Abstract

The dominance relationship which extends from the dominant who holds power to the dominated who needs to bend to demands and impositions is a known trait of humanity throughout history, power aspires expansion despite what or who might be on its way. Once triumphant, said power must establish itself and, to do so, it requires to eradicate any possibility of the dominated establishing their society detached from their conquerors’ principles and laws, either through extermination or by alienating them from their own culture, knowledge and ways of conceiving themselves and their territories. Nowadays, capitalism as an economic model and the nation-state as a political-territorial model that have triumphed throughout virtually the entire globe do not escape such logic, seeking to conform the territories that remain existing in their particularities the needs, impositions and disqualify any other form of territorial planning that is not aligned with their projects. In the State of Maranhão, this relationship is shaped, among several examples, in the conflict between the many marginalized territorial forms (peasant communities, quilombos, indigenous lands, etc.) and the expansion of agribusiness, led by public authorities in order to meet private needs and making use of all weapons at their disposal: violence, propaganda, legal harassment, etc. This situation is observed in the community of Baixa Grande do Meio, municipality of São Bernardo, where the soybeans expansion puts the existence of the community at risk, which, by its own means, imposes resistance and demonstrates that it is not open to the supposed offered development and the impacts of this conflict reveal that there is indeed the possibility of building autonomy and territorial wellbeing, possibility that makes the exercise of rethinking sociability in capitalism based on the concentration of power and social stratification as the only possible a less tortuous exercise and with more signs of hope of living free from such cruelty