Direitos Coletivos, Meios de Produção e Povos e Comunidades Tradicionais no Brasil

Resumen

Western categories of thought and social analysis are accused of being insensitive if not overtly hostile to traditional peoples and communities, including social movements involved in the struggle for land. Despite these realities, I will try to show that the Western philosophical tradition reveals, in two ways, a discourse of rights that is a more subtle and powerful tool even than most practitioners of human rights consider them to be. First, I will try to show that since the
rights tradition (based in traditional liberal philosophy) seeks to recognize the “irreducibility” of individuals to the collective life of a people, this notion can be extended to include the irreducibility of traditional peoples and communities to the hegemonic culture. More still, the discourse of rights can thus become a conceptual tool to challenge the dominant culture. Second, I will seek to link the tradition of rights with two fundamental elements of Marxist philosophy: common property of the means of production and the theory of exploitation. It is often the case that traditional peoples and communities control their own means of production and they are often profoundly engaged in the struggle to defend that control. In the same way, the MST and CPT seem to achieve control of the means of production by means of occupation of land that is not fulfilling its “social function”. In both cases, the control of the means of production is a necessary condition for the possibility of the self-determination of these communities. Without control over the means of production these communities become must sell their labour power and thus become far more vulnerable to the hegemonic power of the dominant society. This reveals an important correlation between liberal notions of rights, the Marxist theory of exploitation and the struggles of traditional peoples and communities: the tradition of human rights must be extended to include the protection of individuals and communities from capitalist exploitation, precisely in order to demand that control over the means of production is a human right in itself that is coextensive with the rights of traditional peoples and communities to their own self-determination.