Terra, poder e cooperativismo no Oeste do Paraná: o caso da COOPAVEL

Abstract

In the west of Paraná, the connection WITH the land and WITH THE agricultural production PROPERTY made possible, starting in 1970, the formation of a different agrarian ruling class that played a role in the construction of a productive pattern, characterized by the modernization, the technological improvement, the search for competitiveness and by the integration of the economy in regional, national and worldwide markets. Those class parts have historically organized the local and regional economic output and its perform in civil society organizations, assuring them that a significant part of other agricultural production sectors could be integrated in the capitalist production method, even though it happened in a subordinate way. In that process, the agricultural and cattle cooperatives have had a determinant role. They gradually have assumed the condition of a collective subject that organizes the proletarian class and conducts the modernization of the productive process. The study on how some social groups or parts of the ruling class organize in civil society and manage to assure their presence and leading role in order to garantee their political demands is fundamental to understand the power relations that permeate the whole of society. This thesis is the result of a research that had as object the agrarian part of the ruling class in Cascavel and surroundings and the Agroindustrial Cooperative of Cascavel (Coopavel) as a territory and place for organization and construction of its productive arrengement and diffusion of an hegemonic method to local and regional economy. The cooperative role in the diffusion of a culture that managed to create a common understanding on “its members and others” about the importance of agribusiness is also significant. The Rural Show Coopavel, the Coopavel Corporate University, its magazines and the role of its executives and associates in organized civil society entities, besides the defense of its interests along with the restrict State Government, are expressions of its leading part. The hegemony of a class, or part of a class, expresses itself mainly by the economic power and intelectual and moral influence, or, in other words, a cultural influence, in a broad sense. Antonio Gramsci offered a decisive contribution to the comprehension and analyses of the instruments used by a class, or part of a class, to exert its power, domain and hegemony, diffusing its values and imposing its social project. In the west of Paraná, the landowners class, through the agricultural cooperative production system, have assumed, regionally, a leading part in the dissemination of new findings, new production techniques, technology and agricultural machines; in the form of management, the residence time of some executives; in the corporate management of the cooperative agroindustrial complex; in the definition of a new commercial nature of the agricultural production and in the way the land and the soil are used; in the definition of land ownership and work activities and workers; aside from coordinating the integration of regional agricultural production in the capitalist relations of production, what is called, more recently, agribusiness.