Indigenous school education and expanded reproduction of capital in the light of Rose Luxembourg

Abstract

We present an examination of the relationship between the capitalist mode of production and the implementation of school education in indigenous communities, with a view to designing elements that relate this implementation with the facilitation of the incorporation of natural and human resources of these societies to the dynamics of expanded capital accumulation. Our hypothesis is that such an introduction alters social relations established in historical experience based on communitarianism and collectivism by implanting, within these societies, fundamental relations of the capitalist mode of production. We examine the hypothesis in the light of what Rosa Luxemburg (1985) called “[...] the struggle of capital against the natural economy.” We used this analytical framework in three schools, territory and indigenous communities around the city of Santarém-PA. The data pointed to a contradiction in schooling insofar as, on the one hand, it induces training for salaried work, business management and the transmission of Eurocentric knowledge, but, on the other hand, re-elaborations are revealed in the school activity that strengthens, values and expands the transmission of traditional knowledge and “native” indigenous languages.