Expansão da acumulação capitalista, mediações estatais e degradação da água dos municípios de Barcarena, Belém e Marabá entre 2015 e 2024

Abstract

The intensification of capitalist economic activities of production, consumption, and circulation, and the expansion of urban territorial space in societies, are degrading water resources on a global scale. Brazil has 18% of the world's freshwater reserves, much of which comes from the Amazon. Furthermore, the National Water Resources Policy (PNRH) regulates water governance in Brazil and determines that water is a limited natural resource and a common good with economic value. Furthermore, the thesis proposed here is that the expansion of capitalist accumulation, structured by the dynamics of value valorization and mediated by the institutional forms of the State, produces a continuous increase in the consumptive use of water in productive activities—especially mining, industry, and animal use—in Barcarena, Belém, and Marabá between 2015 and 2024. This process, in turn, intensifies water degradation, as it subordinates water as an indispensable material element for the expanded reproduction of capital. This occurs simultaneously with the conversion of its appropriation into a source of differential income and state capture of a portion of surplus value destined for maintaining the general conditions of accumulation and the financialization circuit of public debt. Therefore, the question that guides this thesis is what are the interactions between capitalist accumulation, state mediation and water degradation through withdrawal in consumptive use activities in Barcarena, Belém and Marabá between 2015 and 2024? This research uses a mixed interdisciplinary, exploratory, and explanatory approach, including a bibliographical survey and data analysis from the National Water and Basic Sanitation Agency (ANA), and a relationaldialectical approach grounded in Marxist Dependency Theory. This approach understands that Brazil's natural resources contribute to the expansion of the economic accumulation rate of dominant countries, which, through the transfer of value as an unequal exchange, obtain extraordinary profits. Simultaneously, rivers are appropriated as a means of labor and the material basis for the extraction of surplus value, articulated with the logic of financialization and state mediation, which, through taxes and levies, captures a portion of surplus value and inserts it into the debt service cycle. In this sense, the space of urban rivers is a concrete totality produced by social relations through the mediation of material and financial flows. Finally, it is concluded that when carrying out any activity of consumptive use, transformation and productive restriction also occur, as part of the water used in these activities does not return to the body of water from which it was extracted, which corresponds to one of the characteristics of water degradation, and expresses the metabolic rupture between society and nature, the alienation of use value and the selective expropriation of water from rivers in the Brazilian Amazon under the logic of capital.