Brazil’s movement of the landless at the cutting edge of conflicted modernity

Introduction

This collection of papers on Brazil’s Movement of the Landless (the MST) is remarkable on several counts. Unlike many collections, its component chapters speak to one another and are arranged so that a richly contextualized historical portrait of the MST unfolds incrementally. Further, that dynamic portrait is progressively turned by several contributors and especially by the editor, Miguel Carter, into a complex but compelling set of arguments about the importance of the MST in Brazil’s conflicted modernization over three decades. In Carter’s own view, the portrait and the analyses reveal the MST to be one of the great movements of late modernity: on a par with the USA’s civil rights movement in its depth and historical impact.

Carter is not concerned to clinch the latter claim about the comparative international status of the MST. That claim, I think, is of the ‘look here’ variety, directed to students of development, modernity and social movements who might not expect anything so momentous to emerge from rural Brazil. The claim is elaborated at several points, e.g. when Carter presents the MST’s long, superbly organized march from Goiania to Brasilia as on a par with Gandhi’s 1930 Salt March and Martin Luther King’s famous march from Selma to Montgomery. However, these comparisons are ancillary to establishing the MST’s place in Brazilian modernity against the neglect, scepticism or hostile critiques found in Brazilian academia, media and political arenas.

Since it first emerged in land occupations in Rio Grande do Sul in the early 1980s, the MST has had a bad press in Brazil. Its identification of land reform as the sine qua non of Brazilian development has been dismissed as anachronistic given that Brazil’s urban-industrial modernization is well advanced. Its protests, albeit determinedly non-violent, and its ‘invasions’ of lands it considered in contravention of the just ‘social functions’ of property have been excoriated as unconstitutional and criminal. Its own settlements and attempts to encourage efficient agricultural production have been considered failures. Its confrontations with governments have been condemned as threats to democracy; and its own modes of organization, both as a national bureaucracy and locally on communal land settlements, have been depicted as authoritarian and at odds with its stated aim of building a deeply democratic civil society in Brazil.

The collection weaves together three approaches in response to these dismissals of the MST. There are historical overviews and original local case studies of the MST as it has developed over the last 40 years. Second, contextualizing chapters allow us to place the MST portraits in the dynamics of social, political and economic inequality in Brazil from colonial times to the present era of neoliberal globalization (including the last dozen years of the Workers’ Party (PT) presidencies). Then, in several chapters, but especially in bookend chapters by Carter, the assumptions and concepts deployed in the mainstream critiques of the MST are critically considered.

Brazil and modernization

We start with the latter. Of central importance here is Carter’s review of the charge that the sectoral focus of the MST and its key strategy of communal re-settlement of the landless on un/under-utilized land betoken anachronistic, romantic traditionalism in contrast to the modernizing projects of successive Brazilian governments. Those projects, over the last 60 years, including the military regimes (1964–85) through to a decade and a half of Workers’ Party Federal administrations, have all operated on the assumption that modernization and development require focus on the urban-industrial sectors and priority for the sort of high-tech industrialization that would place Brazil in the top rank of global economies. A corollary assumption is that the role of the rural sector in modernizing Brazil is to produce agricultural surpluses which can be directed to pay off debt incurred in the course of urban industrial development, and at the same time feed burgeoning urban populations. Yet a third assumption is that large scale, technologically advanced agri-business is the only way to achieve these goals in the rural sector, replacing the low productivity and inefficiencies of both traditional latifundia and small peasant farms. Broadly speaking, all these assumptions have underpinned the modernizing policies of Brazilian governments, military and civilian, for half a century, and they have been shared by dominant figures in academia and the media.

Carter questions the assumptions, at least to the extent that they have become embedded in hegemonic orthodoxy about one pure stream of modernization in Brazil. He draws on and points to the broader notions of modernization and its dynamics expounded by the MST’s own organic intellectuals over the years, especially by João Pedro Stédile. These broader notions see modernization not just in terms of increasing productivity in agriculture and industry, but also in terms of what Carter at one point calls a ‘civilizing process’. In that process, whole sectors of the Brazilian population which have been historically excluded from voice and agency become active citizens.

The alternative modernization envisaged by MST theorists and, according to the stories told in this volume, striven for and discernible in its practice over three decades, is predicated on a dialectics of the civilizing process and increased productivity across sectors of the economy. That dialectics is not spelled out here (this is, after all, a history of MST practice, not of its theory) but its logic will be recognized by anyone familiar with Amartya Sen’s linkage of sustained increase in economic productivity to increasing engagement of an expanding citizenry in processes of social choice. MST modernization locates the central problematic for Brazilian modernization in gross social inequality which effectively denies citizenship and the exercise of social choice to swathes of Brazil’s inhabitants.

As the MST sees it, massively unequal land distribution contributes decisively to the reproduction of social inequality and prejudices sustainable productivity growth across sectors. Land reform, in this view, is needed not only for reasons of social justice but for its contributions to the dialectics of national development and modernization. It is needed to stimulate rural productivity, especially for domestic consumption. It is needed to deal with cycles of high unemployment and continuing underemployment in rural and urban areas. It is needed to stem the migration of the poor to vast urban favelas, to halt the destruction of rural communities, and to offer healthy, nutritious and locally-produced food to the urban population. In recent years, as Carter points out in his epilogue, this latter consideration about the local production of healthy food has become a major part of the MST’s argument for land reform.

These needs have not been addressed by the conservative land reform conceded under pressure of rural unrest by successive governments as they have pursued the orthodox paradigm of modernization. Rather, under the rubrics of that paradigm, they have left in place a system of political representation heavily weighted in favour of backward looking rural elites. These elites, in turn, have harnessed and deployed state power, with varying degrees of authoritarian ruthlessness over decades, to stymie or contain land reform. From the MST viewpoint, this has amounted to subversion of deep and sustainable modernization in the name of modernization narrowly conceived.

Alternative Brazilian modernization

The historical and case study chapters which form the bulk of this collection show us the MST becoming, arguably, the vital, generative core of a movement for alternative modernization in Brazil. Far from being a single-issue movement for land reform, it has in its practices created an alternative model for modern rural development in the countryside. Further, as this model and modus operandi have diffused nationally and been replicated in the urban scene, it has provided the template for alternative Brazilian modernity. As Miguel Carter puts it in his concluding chapter, the MST has become ‘Brazil’s cutting edge’. For this reviewer, the history and cases studies shows the MST becoming the organized core of a social movement network of the kind envisaged by Alain Touraine, contesting the dominant models of society, the economy, and the polity which have been embedded and reproduced in the modernizing projects of the state.

Chapters on the MST’s early years in Rio Grande do Sul show that it was never just a single-issue movement demanding land for landless peasants. As Ivo Poleto reminds us, in those early years, specific protests and calls for reform were heavily inflected by the calls and campaigns for social justice and respect for the dignity and rights of the poor emanating from the Catholic Church and exemplified in the work of its Land Pastoral Commission. In Carter’s account of the development of the MST in Rio Grande do Sul (Chapter 6) we see the initial demand for land broaden to include new demands for agricultural credits, housing subsidies, access to schools and electricity connections – a whole range of infrastructure requirements for newly gained settlements. And, complementing expanding demands, the MST, from its earliest years, was at pains to articulate, protest, and counter a wide range of human rights violations. In more recent years, the MST has led on a range of green issues including environmental care and healthy food produced with the well-being of food producers in mind.

If scope of demands became one marker of the MST’s social movement character, chapters describing its range of practices and the strategies that sought to integrate them present us with another. They show us a movement seeking nothing less than comprehensive social transformation of the Brazilian political economy. Public attention to the most spectacular practice of land invasions missed this by occluding the sequence of steps developed by the MST to precede and follow the invasions. These steps were as important to the MST as the invasions themselves. First, families of landless rural workers, selected on the basis of commitment to and capabilities for farming, were recruited and assisted to join – not the invasion in the first instance, but an encampment on the roadside or available public land adjacent to the estate to be invaded. There, in the second stage, recruits were assisted to build shanties covered by black tarps. Then, in a third and crucial stage, the formation of often quite diverse recruits into communities of committed and competent rural workers commenced.

The late Lydia Sigaud’s portrait of the MST in action in the Brazilian northeast state of Pernambuco takes us into the routines of daily life ‘under the black tarp’. In the camps, recruits are trained in defence and methods of non-violent invasion. Plans are laid for division of labour and cooperative enterprises post invasion. But more goes on than simply attention to practicalities of viable, sustainable agricultural production and marketing. Included in and integrating the practicalities are ‘ritualized techniques’ designed, above all, to foster a new ‘landless identity’. It would appear that life under the black tarp included the regular performance of the MST mística as described more explicitly and fully by Bernardo Mançano Fernandes and Miguel Carter in their chapters on the MST struggle for land in the states of São Paulo, Paraná, and Rio Grande do Sul. The word mística refers to a set of rituals designed to achieve several ends. The rituals seek to consolidate the new identity of the recruits as independent labourers on the land rather than mere employees tied politically to their patrons. They seek to develop community and etiquette for cooperation among the recruits. Further, Sigaud tells us, the rituals engender both a sense of confident agency in dealing with the state and powers that be, and a sense of historical solidarity with those struggling for justice elsewhere. The black tarp thus becomes, for the campers, a symbol of the new political identities and the new socio-economic order they see themselves creating. Under the black tarp, campers forge connections between the local project and a wider national, even global, movement.

Several succeeding chapters fill out this profile of the MST at the core of a fully-fledged movement for alternative Brazilian modernity. An important chapter by Marcelo Carvalho Rosa shows us the ‘movement approach’ symbolized by the replication of the black tarp practices, not only in rural but also in urban settings throughout Brazil. The best known of the urban movement organizations is the MTST – the Homeless Workers’ Movement whose leaders attended MST workshops. Among the various contributions the MST made to this and other movement organizations, Cavalho Rosa emphasizes its ‘role in fostering a new pattern of interaction between the Brazilian state and social movements’ in which organized groups of the poor taking direct action become recognized as legitimate subjects for the first time.

The MST as a social movement organization

This and other case studies show the MST, by the 1990s, becoming Brazil’s preeminent social movement organization (SMO) working at the grassroots for comprehensive social, political and economic transformation – though it was certainly not alone in the field. What made the MST unique as an SMO at this time was its combination of work at the institutional apex of Brazil to complement its black tarp projects at the grassroots. An outstanding chapter by George Mészáros outlines how this work at the apex evolved in the 1980s as the desperate tactic of land invasions faltered. Landowners and the state had mobilized a debilitating legal culture and deployed the rule of law to criminalize the invasions. By the early 1990s it was clear to MST leaders that its own conservative legalism through the 1980s had allowed the forces against land reform to marshal laws enshrining the absolute sanctity of property rights, and legal procedures securing the class interests of rural elites, to hobble land reform from below. Mészáros outlines the MST response, which shows yet another facet of the MST as Brazil’s ‘cutting edge’.

The MST modified its use of the law exclusively for defence of land-invaders brought before the law to a more offensive use that put landowners and the state on the defensive – e.g. it mounted cases to show that the state had failed to accord to landless workers rights that were enshrined in the Constitution of 1988. It set about developing alternative conceptions of legality – e.g. away from notions of property rights as absolute, towards conceptions of such rights as modified by considerations of the social functions of property. Some of the move from defensive to offensive use of the law was achieved by the MST’s development of its in-house legal department. Even more important was its engagement with lawyers in the National Network of Popular Lawyers (RENAP).

Mészáros’ chapter draws attention to two features of the MST that suggest its scope and capacity at the cutting edge. One is its rich internal organizational complexity, exemplified here by its development of its in-house legal services. This feature is further detailed in Chapter 9 where the various sectors of the MST are enumerated to include education; production, cooperation and environment; communication; human rights; and international relations. By the early 2000s, the MST structure bespeaks the intention, if not the fully realized capacity, to engage with all important sectors of a complex modern society. The other feature is the MST’s role and relationships in a network of NGOs. Sometimes relations are fractious, as we see in some of the case study chapters dealing with local struggles for land reform where several SMOs compete. But in the case of RENAP, Mészáros shows the MST involved in the sort of creative exchanges of discourse, expertise and experience with other SMOs that have maintained its generative input to a broad-based movement for alternative modernity in Brazil.

Dealing with internal and external conflicts

An overview of the book’s case studies of the MST at work throughout Brazil sustains this claim about its importance in contesting Brazilian modernity. However, details of the cases should suffice to contain any hubris on the part of admirers of the MST. Several accounts of the MST in action reported in the book show misunderstandings and conflicts between organizers following scripts from central office and the local rank and file. The origins of rifts are various. Some have to do with very different conceptions of what land reform is supposed to deliver. For some groups of the rank and file, land reform has to do with individual farms worked by individual beneficiaries, as opposed to organizers’ visions of communal land and collective production and marketing enterprises. Where the rank and file have long been accustomed to wage labour on sugar plantations, land reform means wage justice and responsive landowning patrons, rather than diversified agriculture on family farms together with the formation of cooperatives, as favoured by MST central. Such rifts have been exacerbated by difficulties of translating MST templates for collective action for land reform developed in the south of Brazil to the traditional northeastern and the frontier northern regions. Wendy Wolford, for example, notes how northeastern landless initially tended to reject the legitimacy of land invasions, whereas southerners were more inclined to accept them.

Central MST has had to address these rifts occurring in its own projects. In addition it has had to deal with differences with other land reform NGOs – e.g. in turf wars in northeastern Brazil with rural unions involved before the MST arrived on the scene. In both cases it has had to address its own essential dualisms made evident when it tries both to develop autonomous citizenship at the grassroots and to coordinate a national movement sufficiently disciplined and cohesive to engage with state agencies, hostile associations of landlords, and multi-national agribusiness corporations. Several case study chapters show the MST finding its way, learning, even growing in strength as both internal and external conflicts are addressed. But nothing seems assured, and internal and external challenges remain, probably to be exacerbated as the MST, having long-since become a national organization, has now globalized as a participant in the pan-Latin American Via Campesina. We may expect too that the MST’s new and increasingly absorbing campaigns in agro-ecology will require constant review of priorities, and stretch internal human and financial resources.

Chapters in the final section of the book show us, however, that such developments need not be seen only for the tensions and challenges they might pose for the MST. Expanding reach and scope have also been contributing to the MST’s capacities at the cutting edge. For example, the expansion from land reform concerns to include the promotion of rural women’s rights (leading to the emergence of spin-off rural women’s SMOs) appears to have fed back into the MST to the point where its current agro-ecology campaigns are led by women. Similarly, expansion into the struggle for law reform, involving, as we have seen, the engagement with RENAP, has resulted in enormously increased capacity regarding the MST’s original principal concern for land reform.

Conclusion

In a Conclusion, Carter reviews evidence in the preceding chapters pointing to the MST’s central role not only in advancing the cause of land reform but in generating and developing a broader social movement. In this essay, I have characterized that as the movement for an alternative modernity in Brazil. Carter prefers to characterize that broader movement in terms of the material goal it has always been geared to: significant reduction in Brazil’s massive social, political and economic inequalities. From this perspective, the distinguishing concern of the MST set in the array of SMOs included in the broad movement has, of course, been land reform pursued to advance equality across regions, and in urban as much as rural Brazil. But it shares with SMOs of different substantive foci, e.g. the urban squatters’ movement, the strategy and practices which Carter identifies in his final pages as ‘radical democracy’. This assumes representative political democracy but ‘stresses the importance of autonomous popular organizations, their mobilization, and their participation in development concerns’ (p. 408). The broad social movement, then, has an institutional impulse. It seeks to nurture citizenship among a wide variety of effectively excluded inhabitants of Brazil, and to include them in new state-society partnerships challenging social inequality in its various modes.

How does the MST fare if we assess it with this concluding focus on state-society partnerships in mind? The record, as presented in this collection, is surely mixed. From a big picture and state-focused perspective we might judge the MST to have achieved little of its founders’ agenda so far. It has juddered entrenched systems of power and wealth distribution without precipitating in them deep and lasting transformations. Several chapters dealing with the MST’s central concern with land reform/redistribution show that, despite local successes, structures of rural inequality remain largely intact. Further, the grandest (albeit putative and never formalized) venture in state-society partnership, between the MST and Workers’ Party (PT) governments, over a dozen years have produced little and left the MST itself with a sense of betrayal.

Chapters by Sue Branford and an Epilogue by Carter document the grounds for this sentiment. In 2002 Luíz Ináceu ‘Lula’ Da Silva took office as Brazil’s first PT president. However, the Lula government re-distributed less land than the previous, supposedly more conservative, government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso. When it came to implementing land reform proposals from its own land reform ministers, the PT governments over Lula’s two terms of office continued to favour agribusiness and neoliberal development priorities in which the rural sector was secondary and the radical democracy approach had no place. This was despite the promises and policy commitments made by Lula to the thousands of MST leaders and grassroots activists who campaigned for him. In his second term, it was abundantly clear that whatever Lula’s intentions were, he was beholden to parties and individual legislators adamantly opposed to the MST and all it stood for to gain legislative support for his urban-industrial development agenda. In the two terms of his PT successor, Dilma Rousseff, now impeached and removed from office, land reform appears to have dropped out completely from the PT agenda. It must be said that, despite this, the MST mobilized protests against the impeachment process and continues to lead vigorous opposition against the new government. MST leaders know that the PT governments failed it, in large part, because the PT relied on support in the legislature on parties implacably hostile to land reform and radical democracy. These parties spearheaded the impeachment and form the heart of the new government.

Final chapters detail the failures of the relationship with the PT up to the beginning of Dilma Rousseff’s second term, but not including the final disasters of the impeachment process. It would be a mistake, however, to read these chapters as a tale of the demise of the MST and the undoing of the accomplishments outlined in the bulk of the book. Disaster, if that be the word, refers only to the defeat of what had seemed to be the best chance of adoption of MST policies at the apex of the federal political system. There is much in the final chapters to remind us that the MST is not just a political movement to be assessed on the basis of its successes in the political arena. It is, above all, a movement of civil society, and there its accomplishments stand and continue.

In the chapter before Carter’s Conclusion, Marcelo Carvalho Rosa’s survey of the impact of the MST on a range of movements underlines the range and depth of its development of Brazilian civil society. It has pioneered and diffused by example a ‘social movement approach’ through which disadvantaged groups acquire the imaginaries, the confidence and the capacities to work on and with public officials for profound socio-economic change. Its main work has been to develop what Carter in his Conclusion calls a ‘powerful counter-hegemonic force’ as the previously excluded rural poor have become engaged citizens in a transformed public realm. On a wider plane, the MST has created strategies and new repertoires of action adopted by a range of social movements and NGOs in Brazil’s teeming cities and across its diverse regions.

That latter claim requires testing in further research. Indeed much work still needs to be done before the full historical impact of the MST on battles to challenge social inequality and advance radical democracy can be assessed. Carter’s volume assures the MST’s central place in the story of the development of the social movement approach, especially on the land. But events at the political centre, and manifestations on the urban streets in very recent years, nurture the pessimistic suspicion that the age of the social movement approach might have passed. First in June 2013, thereafter in protests against the World Cup and the Olympic Games, and most recently in relation to the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, millions of protesters have poured on to the streets under various banners. But they appear united only as protesters against shifting, variegated ills. From a perhaps jaundiced viewpoint born of disappointment, the protesters seem disinterested in sustained mobilization for projects of social equity, environmental justice and radical democracy in the manner of the MST. The question must be put: has the social movement approach melted away in the neoliberal air or been rendered irrelevant in the face of Brazil’s endemic political and corporate corruption? We anticipate answers from Miguel Carter and his fellow researchers.