Gramsci in Brazil

Introduction

Brazil has a curious relationship with Antonio Gramsci. Despite Gramsci only having mentioned the nation once in his famous Prison Notebooks (Gramsci, 1971: 22), over time the nation has taken his work from an object of superficial interest to a central plank of class strategy. Such is the influence of the Italian, not only over Brazil but indeed Latin America, that he overshadows even similar local thinkers, such as José Carlos (2011). The uptake of Gramsci’s work is varied across the Latin American continent, and the applicability of his thought has depended on the particular experiences of each country, especially in their differing engagements with the ‘Pink Tide’ of responses to neoliberalism (Chodor, 2015). José Aríco (2005 [1988]) has produced the definitive study of Gramsci’s influence on Latin America; however, this article offers a more focused treatment of Brazil.

This article examines the specific case of Brazil as an area in which Gramscian analysis has been put to practical use. It therefore skips over purely exegetical works on Gramsci that were produced in Brazil (e.g. Bianchi, 2008). Examination follows three different dimensions. First, the introduction of concepts derived from the Prison Notebooks to understand the development of capitalism in Brazil. Second, the role of Gramscian thought for political parties, particularly the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) and later the Workers Party (PT). Third, the appropriation of Gramscian analysis by social movements. This section focuses on the Landless Workers Movement of Brazil (MST), and examines how different aspects of Gramsci’s thought are dispersed across the movement. This transition will show how Gramsci’s thought has been developed into a program for transformation, though not for the type of actor that Gramsci expected.

It is not within the scope of this piece to evaluate every application of Gramscian analysis to Brazil. His popularity across the Brazilian left precludes such a comprehensive treatment (for a longer treatment see Secco, 2002). Instead, I will evaluate how Gramsci has been read, appropriated, and re-purposed in Brazil with a focus on political movements, namely the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), the Workers Party (PT), and the Landless Workers Movement (MST). In this contribution, I cut a fine line of argument. I do not wish to defend orthodox readings of Gramsci, though I do intend to point out where his thought was deformed to serve non-Gramscian ends. Equally, I do not simply want to chart his uptake solely amongst intellectuals (for a treatment focused on intellectuals see Chilcote, 2014). Rather, I want to explore how the leitmotif of Gramsci’s thought applies to Brazil. This entails examining how Gramsci’s process of reasoning has been applied in Brazil, rather than just the specific concepts outlined in his writings. I will therefore examine how Gramsci has been applied in support of political agendas, translated to cope with new historical contexts (Del Roio, 2012), and embodied in the practice of new social actors, but without betraying the spirit of the original works even where the letter may be ignored.

The structure of the article centres on three ‘moments’ in the use of Gramsci in Latin America. These are the analysis of passive revolution as a path to state formation under capitalism; the struggle for hegemony through contest over government; and the construction of a ‘Modern Prince’ in Brazil. Unlike other intellectual reviews of Gramsci’s reception in Latin America, this article does not therefore deal with commentaries on Gramsci’s influence on Brazil in the order they were written (cf. Burgos, 2002, 2015). My intention here is to stress the plurality of appropriations of Gramscian analysis, rather than trying to assert that in each period of Brazilian history Gramsci was only used in a singular fashion.

The ‘Brazilian revolution’ and the passive revolution

Although Gramsci never shaped his theory with Brazil specifically in mind, there are good reasons to think that his work would be useful in Latin America. Gramsci’s analysis focused overwhelmingly on the ‘peripheral’ transition to capitalism within Europe, directing his attention towards Italy rather than towards the ‘core’ states of France and England. Moreover, Gramsci’s framing of the process of capitalist development in Italy phrases it as a response to pressures emerging from development elsewhere, particularly in terms of how Italy’s ‘passive revolution’ occurred in a context shaped by earlier transitions to capitalism elsewhere (Gramsci, 1971: 82–5) Accordingly, economies in the global periphery, such as Latin America, should have sympathy with this kind of analysis. Indeed, Brazil has been described as the ‘place par excelence’ of passive revolution (Vianna, 1997: 43, my translation).

In order to understand Gramsci’s reception in Brazil, it is necessary to give a brief overview of the state of class struggle in the country when his works were first introduced in the early 1960s. Brazilian Marxism before 1964 was effectively defined by a single major debate. Discussion on the left concerned whether or not Brazil should be considered a capitalist nation, and accordingly what tactics should be adopted in the struggle for socialism. The conflict was played out between Nelson Werneck Sodré (1979), attached to the PCB, who claimed that Brazil was still not at a capitalist stage of development, and Caio Prado Junior (1971 [1967]), who maintained that as a colony of European merchant capital, all of Latin America had been capitalist since the outset in 1500. Sodré’s position won out, and the PCB articulated an essentially Stalinist strategy of stagism, believing in the need for a bourgeois-capitalist revolution before any later transition to socialism could occur. As Fernando de Azevêdo later observed, this strategy robbed the Peasant Leagues of an opportunity to push for a more direct struggle against the passive revolutionary state under Getulio Vargas, as the rural-urban alliance with the PCB collapsed in the early 1960s (Azevêdo, 1982: 87–9). In so doing, Brazil lost another group that could have been its Jacobins, in Gramsci’s phrasing, that would have endeavoured to expand the struggle for revolution across the whole of society.

Following this defeat, members of the PCB began to engage with new currents of Marxist thought beyond the previous rigid model, principally Lukacs, Sartre, and Gramsci. Of these, the principal translators of Gramsci were Carlos Nelson Coutinho, and Marco Aurelio Nogueira. As other commentators have noted, the original engagement of these thinkers, themselves members of the PCB, was to introduce Gramsci as a philosopher and theorist of culture, rather than as an analyst of the state (Dias, 1996). However, particularly the later work of Carlos Nelson Coutinho shows a deeper engagement with the concept of passive revolution.

Coutinho’s use of passive revolution is interesting because, despite the analytical failures of the PCB line outlined above, Gramsci is pressed into the service of a similar politics after 1964. Specifically, Coutinho uses an analysis of the process of state transformation under capitalism to suggest that the era of direct confrontation with the state, in the fashion pursued by Carlos Marighella and other guerrilla fighters, was now over for Brazil (Coutinho, 1993: 104–5). In describing the passive revolution in Brazil, Countinho outlines a process of gradual change from above, based on an alliance between domestic latifundio large landowners and international capital, and notes the central theme of ‘restoration-renovation’ in the logic of passive revolution (pp. 106–9). This, for Gramsci, is the dual moment of restoration of the power of the dominant classes in the face of subaltern dissent, combined with a renewal of capitalist accumulation through renovation of the state and economy. In this way, pressures from ‘below’ are absorbed by the dominant classes, and channelled into a renewal of the form of domination. Coutinho applies this to the failed Jacobin rebellion of the ‘Lieutenants’ movement of the 1920s and 1930s, which was co-opted from ‘above’ in the dictatorial coup of Getulio Vargas (Coutinho, 1993: 109–10). However, Coutinho noticeably skips over the form of the subaltern pressure ‘from below’ before the 1964 coup that constituted Brazil’s second passive revolution, obscuring the role of the PCB in failing to unify the subaltern groups in a successful struggle for socialism.

Coutinho also extends this analysis of the condition of passive revolution in Brazil, looking to Gramsci for an understanding of how the Brazilian left should pursue social transformation. Coutinho here turned to a famous passage from Gramsci, examining the difference between the successful revolution in Russia and failed revolutions elsewhere:

In the East the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between State and civil society, and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks. (Gramsci, 1971: 238)

And so, the PCB line of before the military coup was pursued by other means, as the ‘gradualist’ and reformist strategy of the Brazilian communist party was recast as a Gramscian ‘war of position’. Here, again, Coutinho hypostatises Gramsci’s concepts, picking them out as static elements of a binary, rather than as moments in a dynamic relationship that is open and plural. The war of movement is the working-class strategy applicable to Eastern states, and the war of position that for Western, modern states, and thereby recruiting Gramsci’s phrasing in support of grassroots struggles for democracy, whilst distorting the underlying concepts (Freeland, 2014: 285–6). The culmination of this line of argument in the politics of the Brazilian left came from Coutinho’s famous essay of 1979, ‘A Democracia como valor universal’ (Democracy as a Universal Value), which advocated that this war of position should take the form of a struggle for a pluralist left-democratic movement.

At the end of the 1970s, under conditions of gradual economic collapse during the dictatorship, Coutinho shaped a position on the struggle for democracy as the hegemony of the working class which he attributed to Lenin, Gramsci, and Eurocommunism (Coutinho, 1979: 36). Coutinho claimed, in a somewhat functionalist argument, that socialist democracy was not simply a continuation of liberal democracy, but that the embryonic forms of socialist representation existed in capitalist societies (p. 37). In the abstract theoretical portion of the piece, Coutinho invoked Gramsci on the ‘regulated society’ to state that, under socialism, political institutions of the state will be absorbed into workers’ organisations of civil society (p. 40). However, the attainment of socialism, for Coutinho, was predicated not just on overcoming economic but also political alienation (p. 38). In the historical and concrete portion of the essay, Coutinho used the ostensibly Leninist-Gramscian framework he earlier set out to argue for a unified struggle for liberal democratic rights in Brazil, as a process incorporating workers, peasants, the middle classes, and even the national petite bourgeoisie (p. 43). This struggle for democratic rights would likely not result in socialist democracy, but rather liberal democracy, described as a ‘regime of formal liberties’ (p. 42, my translation). Coutinho argued in favour of this initiative, on the basis that it would constitute a break with the dynamic of passive revolution that had typified Brazilian history up to that point (pp. 41–2). In this line, Coutinho described the struggle for liberal democracy through this class coalition as a Gramscian ‘war of position’, which he defined as taking place through a gradual conquest of positions in civil society and culminating in a democratic conquest of political power (p. 44).

Through this argument, Coutinho laid the foundation for the political practice of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers Party, PT), formed in 1980 with Coutinho an early member. In this optic, Coutinho effectively closes off the possibility of a revolutionary transformation of society. The ‘war of manoeuvre’ as a direct confrontation with state power is elided. Coutinho effectively inverted the base-superstucture relationship of orthodox Marxism (Coutinho, 1993: 107), suggesting that the conquest of liberal democracy is a necessary pre-requisite to the reshaping of the economic base through governmental tools (Coutinho, 1979: 43). Where he mentions the productive aspects of civil society, it is only regarding their forms of representation, such as workers’ councils and trade unions (Coutinho, 1979: 37).

Thus, this period in the appropriation of Gramsci’s thought in Brazil entailed that the relationship between economic and political power was radically simplified. Coutinho’s analysis effectively omitted the transformation of production as a means of building workers’ power, or indeed as an element of hegemony in general. This is in contradiction to Gramsci’s analysis of hegemony, in that for Gramsci, ‘though hegemony is ethical-political, it must also be economic, must necessarily be based on the decisive function exercised by the leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity’ (Gramsci, 1971: 161). Gramsci’s work was appropriated in a manner not consistent with its internal logic, which saw hegemony and transformation of the economy as elements of a relationship. Coutinho’s rendering, that informed the practice of the PT, separated the political and economic moments, suggesting that reform of the relations of production could come only after the attainment of democratic consent under a liberal regime. Coutinho divorced the project of hegemony from the transformation of Brazilian society, by focusing on how Brazilian political institutions could be socialised through a struggle for a united front of left-democratic parties, and overlooking the need to socialise the means of production and in so doing transform the capitalist state. The next section therefore examines the consequences of this political direction for the Workers Party as the dominant left-wing party in Brazil after 1985, specifically in terms of how Gramscian analysis has been applied to understand the experience of the PT presidencies.

Translating Gramsci in Brazil: Struggles over hegemony 1985–2016

As reviewed above, the more rigid appropriation of Gramsci’s thought outlined by Carlos Nelson Coutinho was far too limited to deal with Brazilian reality. Brazilian society did not simply ‘westernise’, shifting from a nation defined by backwardness to a ‘modern’ society comparable in type to those in Western Europe. Instead, Brazil’s return to democracy threw up new problems that were foreign to the ‘classical’ analysis offered by Gramsci of European social formations. This became increasingly clear after the victory of the Workers Party in the 2002 presidential elections, which many believed could herald the beginning of a workers’ hegemony in Brazil. In this period, the use of Gramsci in Brazil shifts significantly as the central ‘moment’ of analysis changes from the struggle against passive revolution and towards the dispute over hegemony. At this stage of Brazilian thinkers’ engagement with Gramscian analysis, a far greater emphasis is placed on ‘translating’ Gramsci’s thought, rather than ‘applying’ specific elements. Indeed, this is the moment where the leitmotif of Gramscian analysis becomes most important (Gramsci, 1996: 137). This approach adheres to Gramsci’s own method of reading and interpreting texts, what he termed a

reading in favour of a particular purpose…which concentrates on the relationship between author, text and context, and which adheres to exegetical rigour and accuracy, whilst acknowledging that certain elements are immanent in the text and need to be related to the changing ‘concrete terrain of history’. (Gramsci, 1971: 450)

The post-dictatorship uses of Gramsci in Brazil include the peculiar instance of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, long aware of the work of Antonio Gramsci (Cardoso and Faletto, 1979: 216). As president of Brazil in 1997, Cardoso invoked Gramsci as the theorist of civil society against the state, in support of a neoliberal program to privatise public enterprises and change the form of regulation in Brazil (cited in Coutinho, 2012: 174). However, this reading is clearly at odds with the overall approach set out in Gramsci’s writings, which sought to challenge capitalist accumulation rather than renew it through re-regulation. Instead, the more genuine bearers of Gramscian thought in Brazil after 1985 could be found within the Workers Party. In an essay from 2002, Raúl Burgos gives a great overview of the PT engagement with Gramscian themes, drawing on preparatory documents for the national conference of the party, as well as official documents produced to codify its positions. Early documents describe the PT as the ‘bearer of the working classes’ will to hegemony’, and suggest that the political praxis of the Workers Party is based on constructing a workers’ hegemony (cited in Burgos, 2002: 21; see also Secco, 2002).

The rise and failure of a post-Leninist PT became the central focus of Brazil’s Gramscians after 2002. Most innovative amongst these were Francisco ‘Chico’ de Oliveira and Armando Boito Jr. Writing after Lula da Silva’s second successful presidential election in 2006, de Oliveira drew on Gramsci to articulate a novel theory of hegemony (De Oliveira, 2006). Primarily, de Oliveira was concerned with how the PT had ceased to be a ‘mass’ party advocating social change, as indicated in the quotes from Burgos above, despite its successive electoral victories (de Oliveira, 2006: 7). De Oliveira is clear that the PT in its mass movement phase was close to what Gramsci defined as a hegemonic project, providing class leadership and moral direction (p. 17). However, following Lula’s ascent to the presidency, the PT lapsed into a kind of populism based on the extension of social programs in a context of de-industrialisation and financialisation, and where key roles within the state were taken up by capitalist managers rather than socialists with a remit for transformation (pp. 19, 15–16). This does not, however, result in the collapse of the PT and its removal from power, but rather: ‘Class bases in decomposition, neo-populism emerging through that very dissolution, a bourgeoisie that cannot be unified through the dominance of finance capital, a “new class” defined by its investment function – all this seems to point to a new paradigm’ (p. 21).

This new paradigm, outlined by de Oliveira, is that of ‘hegemony in reverse’ (see also de Oliveira et al., 2010), a situation under which the working classes have formally taken power through electoral politics, but under which ‘the dominated dominate, since they provide the “moral direction” and even provide the personnel to staff state organizations’, and in this sense the capitalist class exercises leadership over society despite its apparent defeat by the organised working class (De Oliveira, 2006: 22).

Armando Boito Jr. displays a similarly creative engagement with Gramsci. His intellectual trajectory illustrates how applying Gramsci in Brazil became inadequate under neoliberalism, particularly after the ascension of the PT to the presidency. Writing of the Cardoso government of the 1990s, Boito used Gramsci at a more orthodox register, arguing that neoliberalism had formed a new historical bloc that was the basis of a new class hegemony (Boito, 1998: 71). However, in the period of the Lula presidencies (2003–10), Boito claimed that the traditional Gramscian analysis of hegemony no longer applied in Brazil (Boito Jr, 2007: 130 fn5). Instead of the positive hegemony outlined by Gramsci, where one class assumes ‘leadership’ over the others in an essentially active relationship, Boito suggested that Brazil’s neoliberal phase was defined by a ‘regressive’ hegemony (Boito, 2003: 5). This conception of hegemony is positioned in contrast to the traditional Gramscian notion of hegemony. As noted in the previous section, Gramsci identified hegemony as having a material basis, but Boito affirms that capitalist hegemony under neoliberalism offers no real material concessions to workers (p. 5). Instead, it effectively demobilises and disarticulates a working class that continues to be disadvantaged through rising unemployment and falling economic growth (p. 5). In this way, the impoverished class fractions came to support neoliberalism despite being disadvantaged by it, as their blind reaction against social inequality was channelled into a program of state reform which did not benefit them (pp. 14–15). In this sense, the support of the poorest for neoliberalism was for ideological reasons, rather than an ‘organic’ cohesion between class fractions (p. 14). The ideological critique of state clientelism, rooted in Brazil’s history of social exclusion for the majority, was employed to convince workers to support the erosion of their own standards of living (p. 19). The defining characteristic of this form of hegemony is that it is based upon divisions between the different fractions of the working class, as opposed to a unifying project based on the leadership of a single class fraction (p. 22). As a consequence, neoliberalism in Brazil was based more on dismantling the privileges of the few than a universal demand for improved social wellbeing.

Boito’s characterisation of neoliberalism in Brazil was a knowing departure from Gramsci, in an attempt to translate the category of hegemony to a new empirical context. Like de Oliveira, Boito emphasised that the experience of neoliberalism in Brazil was something separate from the historical situations described in the Prison Notebooks, whilst maintaining that Gramsci’s overall approach retained significant explanatory power. Therefore, though the use of Gramsci in discussing hegemony has centred far more on the openness, flexibility, and dynamism of his thought, this has also taken place during a de-linking of Gramscian analysis from the practice of the Workers Party, mirrored in the separation of the PT apparatus from its social base (Anderson, 2011, 2016). Writing on the economic and political crisis in Brazil after 2014, Ruy Braga and Sean Purdy (2018), employ another adaptation of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. As the limited gains observed under the Workers Party presidencies are unwound by recession, austerity, and a ‘parliamentary coup’ (p. 9) in the wake of the Lava Jato corruption scandal, Braga and Purdy suggest that these events are driven by the collapse of a ‘precarious’ hegemony. This is precarious in a dual sense, in that it requires the passive consent of the precariat of informal workers combined with the active consent of leaders, and that such hegemony was undermined by the transformation of Brazil’s class structure that it drove (pp. 3–4, 11). As Giovanni Semeraro (2017) has observed, the collapse of the progressive potential of the Workers Party reflects a failure to engage in the ‘intellectual and moral reform’ promulgated in Gramsci’s work, where the masses were to be made active participants in the construction of a transformative workers’ hegemony (p. 93). The combination of these observations suggests that the aforementioned separation of Gramscian analysis from the practical activity of the Workers Party contributed to an unsustainable political and economic strategy.

The emphasis in this moment of Gramsci’s reception in Brazil was defined by the theme, present in much of his work, of explaining the failure of working-class agency. Both de Oliveira and Boito, and indeed Carlos Nelson Countinho (2012), drew on Gramsci to explain how radical transformation had been frustrated, and not how it could be built. Thus, whilst they adhered to much of the method of Gramsci’s thought, Brazilian academics often elided his focus upon the possibility for the subaltern to construct an alternative social order. However, developments beyond the Workers Party showed that Gramscian analysis could have a positive dimension in Brazil. This paradigm of engagement with Gramscian analysis is defined by Gramsci’s concept of the ‘Modern Prince’ (Gramsci, 1971: 129) as the organiser of subaltern struggles for hegemony. Marcos del Roio (2011), another Brazilian interpreter of Gramsci. has made the salient observation that in translating Gramsci’s analysis to Brazil, we should not expect the ‘Modern Prince’ to take the form of a political party, any more than Gramsci expected the Prince to be a single individual in the Italy of his time. Instead, he suggests that the Landless Workers Movement of Brazil may be a more viable option. However, Del Roio never explores this topic in depth (see also Burgos, 2015: 180). Therefore, the final section of this article is devoted to exploring how the MST may constitute a ‘Modern Prince’ for Brazil.

Heirs of Gramsci: Social movements in Brazil

The Landless Workers Movement of Brazil is Latin America’s largest social movement, organising over a million rural workers and involved in continual political struggle. Though early Anglophone treatments of the movement focused primarily on its strategy of using occupations to win land (Wright and Wolford, 2003; Ondetti, 2010), more recent work on the movement has emphasised that it is a Marxist organisation with a complex political strategy and a vision of social transformation (Vergara-Camus, 2014). As I will argue below, the framework underlying this strategy and vision is based on an integration of the different aspects of Gramsci’s thought.

In a sense, the uptake of Gramscian analysis by the Landless Workers Movement mirrors the development of Gramsci’s thought. As Peter Thomas (2013: 31) notes, Gramsci’s thought developed from an analysis of passive revolution and hegemony to a theorisation of the ‘Modern Prince’, as the agent of a new kind of subaltern politics and the foundation of a new social order. Likewise, Gramscian analysis in Brazil has shifted from grasping the process of passive revolution, to examination of hegemony, and finally to the formation of a subaltern actor that could become a ‘Modern Prince’ in the Gramscian sense. In his commentary on Machiavelli, Gramsci (1971: 129) writes:

The modern prince, the myth-prince, cannot be a real person, a concrete individual. It can only be an organism, a complex element of society in which a collective will which has already been recognised and to some extent asserted itself in action, begins to take concrete form.

This fact is at its most explicit in the political arm of the Landless Workers Movement. During field research undertaken in Brazil in 2012, I attended political meetings of the MST in the south of Bahia. At one such encounter, a member of the national leadership outlined the analysis of the state and government used by the MST, saying:

The state is no longer simply the legislature, judiciary, executive. The state now, it is amplified [integral]. Do not believe that the state is only a police and military…there are two states, but they are the same. One, is the political state…The councillor, the mayor, governor, judge, parliamentarian. This is the political state…There is another state, which is the civil state [civil society]…It is part of the amplitude of the state, which is the school, the university…the church…private means of communication…the public prosecutor’s office…The two together constitute hegemony over society…this hegemony is created by two apparatuses…private apparatuses of hegemony – the NGOs…[and] the church. (MST national-level leader, Santa Cruz de Cabrália, Bahia, 11/6/2012)

The engagement with Gramsci’s leitmotif does not end at the level of the political leadership. It is spread across all levels of the movement. This mirrors Peter Thomas’ summary of the role of the construction of hegemony through class agency, in that:

…as a project, hegemony involves the articulation of different modes of social, cultural and economic leadership into the form of an overall political project. It involves active and continuous agitation and organization on the widest range of fronts, from the explicitly political, to the social, to cultural and religious practices, conceived in a broad sense as common ways of thinking and seeing in a given sociocultural formation. (Thomas, 2013: 27)

The educação do campo project also incorporates a considerable amount of intellectual output, both from the movement itself and academics integral to its political theorising. These outputs include Roseli Salete Caldart’s (2004) foundational work Pedagogia do Movimento Sem Terra (The Pedagogy of the Landless Workers Movement), and more recently the collaboratively produced Dicionário da Educação do Campo (Dictionary of Education from the Countryside) (Caldart et al., 2012). This last work, in particular, highlights the centrality of Gramsci’s work on education, culture, and intellectual and moral reform to the practice of critical pedagogy in MST schools. MST militants and educators contribute chapters on critical education, hegemony, and collective intellectuals which all draw on insights from Antonio Gramsci. Equally, the MST has produced its own educational guides, used within schools on agrarian reform settlements. This material is also suffused with a Gramscian conceptual vocabulary, indicating that the different areas of the movement appreciate the different aspects of Gramsci’s thought. These range from the role of intellectuals, to political strategy, but crucially to the role of ideas which binds together productive and political projects. In describing the broader role of education for the political praxis of the MST, one teaching guide describes how education ‘is always connected with a determined political project and with a conception of the world’ (MST, 1995: 5, my translation, emphasis added). This connects educação do campo to Gramsci’s notion of a conception of the world, as a philosophy that provides a practical guide to political engagement, and necessarily forms the basis of social transformation (Gramsci, 1971: 267). In amongst the material described above, and developed elsewhere (Bogo, 1999, 2010), is the need of the Landless Workers Movement to produce ‘organic’ intellectuals in Gramsci’s terms, as intellectual workers who also play a function in co-ordinating the social and political activity of their class (Gramsci, 1971: 5). In this way, the MST project to educate its own cadre of agronomists in agroecological methods is also an extension of a Gramscian program that combines productive and political activity.

In connecting economic production, critical education, and political strategising through using a theoretical framework based on Gramscian analysis, the MST fulfils the tripartite functions of a ‘Modern Prince’. These are ‘mass elements’, a principle cohesive element (i.e. a leadership) and an ‘intermediate’ element which binds the two together and maintains contact between them, on a moral and intellectual level (Thomas, 2013: 31). The MST possesses each of these elements, in a cohesive leadership engaged in political life (Vergara-Camus, 2009), a mass membership connected to the goals of the movement, and a strata of organic intellectuals who bind the two together. Crucially, this is based on a knowing engagement with Gramsci’s work, at all levels of the movement. It is in this sense that that MST ‘embodies’ Gramscian analysis in Brazil, by weaving together different aspects of Gramsci’s thought across the movement as a whole. Through this embodiment of his work, Gramsci has been more fully translated to Brazil than ever before.

Conclusions: A Gramscian research program for Brazil

A review of the above material opens more questions than it answers. We can clearly identify a shift from ‘applying’ Gramsci, in service of a project that was not itself Gramscian, to ‘translating’ Gramsci to deal with contexts that he himself never encountered, and finally of ‘embodying’ the leitmotif of his work in the praxis of the Landless Workers Movement. However, this identification is only half of the work to be done in evaluating the influence of Gramsci in Brazil.

Francisco de Oliveira, Armando Boitio Jr, Marcos del Roio, and the MST all engage in significant innovations around the framework set out within the Prison Notebooks, whilst remaining true to the leitmotif ingrained in Gramsci’s analysis. In challenging the nature of hegemony under neoliberalism, as well as the form of social organisation that will confront this mode of capitalist accumulation, each has made a significant contribution to translating Gramsci to Brazil. The legacy of Gramsci in Brazil suggests that it is the method of his thought which remains the most important, linking class forces, ideas, and production in an open and flexible approach that can explore new historical situations rather than lapsing into dogma.

Despite the positive tone I adopt in the final section of the paper, I want to end on a note of caution. The danger in identifying the MST as a Gramscian actor is that commentators may do so uncritically. Recent analysis from outside Brazil has identified the Landless Workers Movement as a ‘counter-hegemonic’ actor (Karriem, 2009). However, as Gramsci reminds us, study must not be complacent but instead conducted with a ‘heroic fury’, motivated by a practical connection to the subject matter (Gramsci, 1971: 381–2). Accordingly, the study of the influence of Gramsci upon the MST is not merely a descriptive study. It is an evaluative study. The question is not whether the MST has the desire or the strategy to become a counter-hegemonic force, but whether or not it has the capacity or the right tactics. This is not a point to be assumed via an optimism of the will, but rather to be explored just as equally through the pessimism of the intellect. This task is in itself the cornerstone of a new research program for Gramscians in Brazil.