Trajetórias e concepções do cooperativismo camponês no nordeste paraense

Abstract

The cooperativism emerged as an alternative to capitalism. In Brazil, two trends have developed, one traditional/business and one popular/solidarity.It is asked: what factors influence the trajectory of a peasant cooperative, its conceptions, contradictions and novelties, considering whether they tend towards a logic of traditional cooperativism or popular cooperativism? The general objective was to analyze the conceptions, contradictions and novelties of the peasant cooperative movement.The research was of the quantitative and qualitative type, with an inductive approach, with a quantitative study of 14 cooperatives and deepened in the case study of three of them, analyzing the categories: work, management, solidarity and emancipation. As instruments of data collection, there are historical interviews, semi-structured interviews, objective questionnaire, timeline, direct observation, documentary and bibliographic research and photographs. Data analysis was carried out by systematization and horizontal and vertical analysis of the interviews, based on hermeneutics-dialectics. In Pará, the impetus for cooperativism took place during the military dictatorship. During the 1990s, NGOs took up work with popular cooperatives, and OCB had a focus on credit unions and the metropolitan region of Belém, only after 2015 to focus on the agricultural sector and cooperatives linked to family farming. The diagnosis made shows that peasant cooperatives in the studied regions present the majority of cooperatives without salaried workers, half have agribusiness, more than half participate in fairs and marketing networks, more than three quarters of them trade with non-members, all it holds a general assembly and board meetings, solidarity actions with communities are not prioritized, intercooperation is carried out by almost all cooperatives. nd in the agribusiness, by the working partners. It is concluded that the cooperatives in the region are designed to solve an economic problem, of income improvement from the commercialization of agricultural products. When linked to the union struggle, a class debate is added. Contradictions appear in their practices, either in relation to the exchange value of work overlapping its use value, or in representative democracy taking the place of the participation of the partners, or even, in the erasure of the value of solidarity.