Práxis ecológica em organizações substantivas: articulação entre trabalho comunal, gestão comunal e economia plural em ecovilas

Abstract

In capitalism everything can be a commodity, including the natural environment. The degradation of ecosystems and human life is an immediate consequence. Thus, intentional communities of ecological motivation, such as ecovillages, seek alternatives for such a situation. An ecological praxis would be formed in these environments. The thesis, therefore, aims to delineate the concept of ecological praxis in organizational studies from multiple economic practices and communal dynamics of lobor and management in ecovillages. I use the marxian view of concrete labor, which generates useful things, and abstract, alienating labor, oriented towards the production of goods. For the economic dimension, a plurality of possible interactions addressed by Karl Polanyi and Marcel Mauss, incorporating Vandana Shiva in denouncing the contemporary way of life in terms of monoculture of the mind, in daily material practices and in relation to the natural environment and agriculture. For communal management, the central reference is Guerreiro Ramos subsidized by Maurício Serva. A journey of ethnographic inspiration in four intentional communities and in the 2019 National Meeting of Alternative Communities, totaling 57 days, comprised the collection of primary data. The initiative in the Comunidade das Formigas, put into practice at the beginning of the doctoral course, motivated the research and served as a laboratory for this thesis. As a result of the theoretical-methodological path, the concept of ecological praxis emerges as a counterhegemonic pattern of life reproduction that gives ecovillages specific organizational characteristics anchored in communal labor, communal management and economic plurality. Through natural and complex agricultural practices and experimentation with community life in diversity, which, ideally, excel in social reproduction and not in capital, the thesis synthesizes possibilities of labor and economic relations different from those strictly oriented to the market and abstract labor. Such factors are presented as counterpoints to the alienation characteristic of the capitalist mode of production that degrades, in addition to nature, the human being in all its complexity and fits him in processes of predominantly utilitarian rationality. Organizational management based on substantive rationality, self-managed rationality, on the other hand, joins the notion of communal labor and plural economics to provide support for what I call ecological praxis.