ILPC 2026

Abstract: Contemporary slavery appears in society as the most depressing labor activity of the 21st century and must be understood in the light of the concentrating, excluding and violent movement of capitalist (re) production. In rural areas, the Brazilian model of agricultural modernization brought with the benefits of science, the intensification of the recreation of these anachronistic relations of work and, consequently, the increase of levels of precariousness of the workers. In this sense, based on data from the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) about slave labor in Bahia (2003-2016), the objective was to understand the relationship between the occurrence of this social phenomenon and the progress of agribusiness in the state. The cases of labour analogous to slavery in Bahia are a reflection of the complexity of relationships that are formed from monoculture and consolidation of agriculture as an advanced capitalist activity. In the midst of the expansion of agribusiness, there is a widening of social inequalities, the prevalence of injustice and the reproduction of archaic forms of work, which aim, above all, to exploit and further precarious the working class in order to obtain greater profits by the capitalists.These are workers who are victims of a process of capital accumulation that is based on the concentration of land and the holding of the means of production in the hands of agricultural entrepreneurs, removing from the workers the possibilities of a decent reproduction of life by subordinating them to contemporary slavery. The analyzed numbers revealed a rather precarious panorama for the labor relations in the countryside of Bahia and are permeated by contradictions that aim at hiding the reality of this practice in the state and also in the country. The verification of the reduction in the number of cases of slave labor in recent years, for example, is far from signifying and indicating the end of contemporary slavery in Bahia, being directly related to the successive attacks on the working class by the government and the new strategies of concealment of this kind of crime for civil society. As a theoretical framework, we read authors as Marx (1964), Martins (1979), Silva (1981), Sutton (1994), Oliveira (2007);

Keywords: Labour analogous to slavery. Agribusiness. Capital.