Abstract
The book under review is based on Deni Rubbo’s masters thesis research and addresses a little-studied aspect of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil. In the main, it concentrates on the internationalist aspect of the movement. The MST’s internationalism, which has been deployed since its inception in 1984, influences the movement’s critique of capitalism and its broad conception of class struggle to transform different aspects of capitalist society. This influence is marked by the support networks of the Pastoral Land Commission and the Latin American networks adhering to Liberation Theology, which have similar critiques of capitalism. According to Rubbo, Christianity and socialism converge in the MST insofar as both reject the claim that the individual is the ethical basis of economic rights and criticize capitalism and the doctrines of economic liberalism, thus seeing humanity as a whole. Both believe that the poor are victims of social injustice, the result of the processes of uneven and combined development that impact negatively on the periphery of the world capitalist system.
The MST has been outstanding in its organization and willingness to stimulate a diversity of capillary links with civil society. This is one of the greatest novelties of the contemporary political history of the Brazilian peasantry, which has become the most expressive voice of agrarian reform in Latin America. The strategies designed by the MST include the formation of the International Brigades, which are inspired by the Cuban and Sandista revolutions and enable them to connect with struggles abroad. In the beginning, the Brigades had the objective of attending to specific tasks, such as providing support and services for short stays to activists from other movements. But, today, they enable the organization to maintain more systematic and organic exchanges and facilitate learning from struggles led by others. Thus, the internationalist question becomes a ‘present historical reality’, with groups of activists in Bolivia, Guatemala, Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti and Mozambique maintain links with the MST.
Although internationalism is the main focus of the book, Rubbo constructs a broad theoretical panorama to support his analysis. This panorama of ideas includes Latin American Marxist theory (with José Carlos Mariátegui, Caio Prado and Florestan Fernandes as the found-ation), an analysis of the modernization and globalization of agriculture, and a perspective on the relation between social movements and the state. On the latter, the MST’s affinity with the governments of Brazil (from 2003), Cuba and Venezuela has allowed a climate of ‘stability’ for horizontal institutional cooperation in educational and technical projects such as agroecology, official state recognition of the Freirean pedagogy, access to higher education through PRONERA (National Program for Education in Agrarian Reform), and other programmes and courses. The cooperation includes academic exchanges with Venezuelan and Cuban schools. However, the proximity to the Brazilian government has been contradictory in nature. On the one hand, the departure from the alliance of various members of the MST and other organizations (such as Via Campesina, the Unemployed Workers’ Movement, Consulta Popular and leftist political parties), in 2011, showed a possible withdrawal of state support from the construction of a popular project, and effectively contemplating agrarian reform. On the other hand, it also signified the changing character of the state which has pushed reforms to advance the interest of agribusiness.
An immense bibliographical resource base has been used, in which the Jornal dos Sem Terra is of fundamental importance to discuss the role of the ‘official’ MST internationalist discourse. Rubbo presents an interesting systematization of the sources used, in addition to interviews with nine activists, of which two did not participate in the National Directorate or in the International Relations Collective of the MST but were part of the International Brigade of Haiti. The methodology reproduces the criticism often made about the MST and its internationalist policy vis-à-vis two aspects: (a) the political and ideological influences on the trajectory of one of the greatest peasant movements in the world; and (b) a declared heterogeneous transnational activism that participates in multiple forms of mobilization (social and political organizations, NGOs, universities, churches, governments) but is still far from achieving its objective. The internationalism present in the ‘mistics’, newspapers, commemorative dates, and names of various settlements and occupations is not enough to connect organically with the core base of the MST.
This finding is recognized as a permanent challenge by the National Directorate itself. However, the articulation with popular movements linked to the countryside, the creation of, and participation in, the Latin American Coordination of Rural Organizations (CLOC) and Via Campesina are a coherent alternative of struggle and exchange of strategies and tactics for the peasants’ advancement and resistance on an international scale.
The various capillary links of the MST at the international level show that despite the imminent need of agrarian reform in the country, the struggle for land and food sovereignty, together with a project of popular life, will advance only with the structural transformations in the world food system, which continues to be based on a large-scale scientific agriculture and monoculture export model.