Persistência do tradicional: o processo de modernização da agroindústria canavieira do Brasil e a sobrevivência de formas produtivas não-capitalistas

Sugarcane plantations industry, the oldest and more important activity of rural transformation in Brazil, experienced profound metamorphosis in twentieth century. This process began in the last quarter of the previous century, and resulted in the progressive establishment of an essentially new reality. Those changes were grounded on technological modernization, which was always legitimated by the ideology of progress and led by the big rural, industrial and commercial capitals which controlled the sugarcane plantations sector. Among the political transformations which changed the Brazilian State profile and molded economic policies based on another institutional structure and on distinct instrumental resources, the incisive intervention by the State in sugarcane activities, since the beginning of the third decade of twentieth century, was regulated by meeting classes' interests. The State was protagonist of transformations which resulted in intensification of an age long process of expropriation and impoverishment for the great majority of producers and workers. Nevertheless, the perversion of the concept 'modern', expressed in economic and technological transformations along with the preservation or deterioration of archaic social structures, made possible the survival and reproduction of the traditional. The maintenance of non-capitalist forms as a way to amplify the exploration of work and optimize profit was of particular interest to the capital.