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Sociology U846.00: American Social Protest Movements, Frances Fox Piven Stephen Cheng (CUNY School of Professional Studies: MA Labor Studies) Primitive accumulation, capitalist development, and peasant struggles in modern Brazil: The rise and existence of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra Introduction: Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra (MST) and primitive accumulation The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra (MST), or the Landless Workers’ Movement, established in 1984, is a movement active in twenty-three of the twenty- seven states of Brazil that is composed of around 1.5 million rural workers who have little or no access to land. 1 MST combats this problem by occupying farmland and converting that farmland from private property under big landowners into cooperatives settled by its member-workers. This approach underscores the MST’s mission. The significance of the MST’s approach and objectives demonstrates the longstanding inequality of land in the country. Steep inequality in land holdings plagued 1 Joao Pedro Stedile and Atilio Boron (interviewer), “The Class Struggles in Brazil: The Perspective of the MST” in Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (ed.), Socialist Register 2008: Global Flashpoints: Reactions to Imperialism and Neoliberalism (London: The Merlin Press, 2007), 215-216. 1

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Page 1: Spring 2013, Social Movements - Primitive accumulation, capitalist development, and peasant struggles in modern Brazil

Sociology U846.00: American Social Protest Movements, Frances Fox PivenStephen Cheng (CUNY School of Professional Studies: MA Labor Studies)

Primitive accumulation, capitalist development, and peasant struggles in modern Brazil: The rise and existence of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra

Introduction: Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra (MST) and primitive accumulation

The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra (MST), or the Landless Workers’

Movement, established in 1984, is a movement active in twenty-three of the twenty-

seven states of Brazil that is composed of around 1.5 million rural workers who have

little or no access to land.1 MST combats this problem by occupying farmland and

converting that farmland from private property under big landowners into

cooperatives settled by its member-workers. This approach underscores the MST’s

mission. The significance of the MST’s approach and objectives demonstrates the

longstanding inequality of land in the country. Steep inequality in land holdings plagued

Brazil for over five hundred years. Land inequality existed in the country ever since its

colonial era when Portugal ruled. It was and still is a colonial legacy.2 This form of

inequality, which is the root of Brazil’s agrarian question (the question of how land is and

ought to be distributed), carried over throughout the country’s economic transformation.

Even during the mid-twentieth century, as capitalist socioeconomic relationships

developed within Brazil’s countryside, land remained concentrated in very few hands.

Biorn Maybury-Lewis writes of this point in Brazilian history, “The essential social fact

of Brazil’s contemporary rural political economy is the monumental concentration of

1 Joao Pedro Stedile and Atilio Boron (interviewer), “The Class Struggles in Brazil: The Perspective of the MST” in Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (ed.), Socialist Register 2008: Global Flashpoints: Reactions to Imperialism and Neoliberalism (London: The Merlin Press, 2007), 215-216.2 Sue Branford and Jan Rocha, Cutting the Wire: The Story of the Landless Movement in Brazil (London: Latin American Bureau, 2002), 4.

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land in the hands of a distinct numerical minority.”3 Given such an inequality, land

reform became an ongoing issue. This was definitely the case as Brazil underwent a

“developmentalist” stage as per the policies of then-President Juscelino Kubitschek

(1955-1960). Sue Branford and Jan Rocha write,

In the 1950s it had seemed that the logic of capitalist development would force the government to carry out a radical programme of agrarian reform. The large unproductive estates were beginning to act as a brake on industrial development, which required an abundant supply of cheap food for

urban workers.4

However, actual capitalist development in Brazil during the 1950s left the large estates

(fazendas) untouched. As a result, various rural workers’ movements sought to resist and

reduce the gap in land ownership. Thus, land reform was a key demand. The MST was

one such movement which championed land reform. In fact, it practiced its own version

of land reform since the 1980s.

The MST’s founding was a reaction to the socioeconomic developments that were

unfolding within the Brazilian countryside. In the course of Kubitschek’s

“developmentalist” agenda, many peasants were separated from their means of

subsistence in rural Brazil. Accordingly, they had to seek their livelihoods as wage

laborers in the cities – the chances of them becoming unemployed were also plausible.

That they would organize as Kubitschek’s “developmentalism” program went underway

was hardly surprising.

The plight of the peasantry was and remains indicative of a general trend

associated with capitalism known as primitive accumulation. Karl Marx considers this

process the cause for the existence of the working class, the proletariat. Going back to the

feudal era, Marx writes of primitive accumulation,

3 Biorn Maybury-Lewis, The Politics of the Possible: The Brazilian Rural Workers’ Trade Union Movement, 1964-1985 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1994), 27-34. 4 Branford and Rocha, 4.

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[T]he historical movement which changes the producers into wage-labourers appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and the fetters of the guilds, and it is this aspect of the movement which alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these newly

freed men became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood

and fire.5

At its roots, primitive accumulation as a process is the separation of the peasantry from

the land, thus depriving peasants of the farmland on which they made their livelihoods

and turning them into wage laborers as capitalism becomes the dominant economic

system. It is an economic process that is specific to capitalism as a beginning phase and

also as a concurrent process of capitalism. Although the former case appears obvious, the

latter case is valid as well because of the capitalist economy’s ongoing need for wage

labor.6

The process of primitive accumulation which unfolded within twentieth century

Brazil was instrumental in the development of capitalism as the primary mode of

production in the country’s economy and society. This process was not specific to the

political economy of Brazil. Similar processes took place in other countries that

underwent the transition to capitalist economies and societies. To take one early and

important example, capitalism’s origins in England included the essential process of

separating farmers from the land.

Analytical detours: Primitive accumulation and the development of capitalism in the late medieval English countryside and twentieth century rural Southeast Asia

One of the earliest examples of primitive accumulation is from late medieval

England where and when enclosure policies led to the abolition of common land rights

5 Karl Marx, Capital (volume one) (Penguin Books, 1990), 875.6 Werner Bonefeld, “The Permanence of Primitive Accumulation: Commodity Fetishism and Social Constitution,” The Commoner 2 (September 2001): 6-11.

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and thus the expropriation of the peasantry from the land. According to Robert Brenner,

the process paved the way for capitalist development in the English countryside,

[B]y the end of the seventeenth century, English landlords controlled an overwhelming proportion of the cultivable land – perhaps 70 – 75 per cent – and capitalist class relations were

developing as nowhere else, with momentous consequences for economic development. In my view, it was the emergence of the ‘classic’ landlord/capitalist tenant/wage-labourer structure

which made possible the transformation of agricultural production in England, and this, in turn, was the key to England’s uniquely successful overall economic development [emphasis added]. With the peasants’ failure to establish essentially freehold control over the land, the landlords

were able to engross, consolidate and enclose, to create large farms and to lease them to capitalist tenants who could afford to make capital investments.7

Given England’s “uniquely successful overall economic development” due to landlord

control of seventy to seventy-five percent and the resultant introduction of a

landlord/capitalist/wage-laborer set of socioeconomic relationships, one can argue that

capitalism began in England. Certainly, during a time period in which feudalism

remained the dominant political, economic, and social system in Europe, the novel,

ground-breaking developments in England indicated the origins of a new socioeconomic

system, capitalism, in a small part of the world. Ellen Meiksins Wood takes up this

perspective in no uncertain terms,

The capitalist system was born in England. Only in England did capitalism emerge, in the early modern period, as an indigenous national economy, with mutually reinforcing agricultural and

industrial sectors, in the context of a well-developed and integrated domestic market.8

Similarly, Marx writes,

In the history of primitive accumulation, all revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for the capitalist class in the course of its formation; but this is true above all for those moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labour-market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil is the basis of the whole process [emphasis

added]. The history of this expropriation assumes different aspects in different countries, and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession, and at different historical epochs.

7 Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” in T.H Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (eds.), The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1985), 48-49.8 Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern State, (London, New York: Verso, 1991) 1.

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Only in England, which we therefore take as our example, has it the classic form [emphasis added].9

Brenner, Wood, and Marx were not the only ones to argue in favor of the

connection between the expropriation of the peasantry from arable land (thus leading to

minority landlord control and ownership over the majority of that land) and the agrarian

origins of capitalism. Karl Polanyi and Barrington Moore, Jr. also trace the origins of

capitalism to developments within rural England at the time. Polanyi writes on the

beginnings of capitalism,

There was, starting in England with the Tudors, agricultural capitalism with its need for an individualized treatment of the land, including conversions and enclosures. […]

Commercialization of the soil was only another name for the liquidation of feudalism which started in Western urban centers as well as in England in the 14th century – and was concluded some 500 years later in the course of the European revolutions when the remnants of villeinage

were abolished.10

The enclosures, which helped contribute to the “individualized treatment of the land” and

the “commercialization of the soil,” allowed for the “liquidation of feudalism” in Europe

over a period of at least five centuries. Furthermore, like Marx, Polanyi harbors no

illusions as to the effects on the common peasantry,

Much of the social damage done to England’s countryside sprang at first from the dislocating effects of trade directly upon the countryside itself. The Revolution in Agriculture definitely antedated the Industrial Revolution. Both enclosures of the common and consolidations unto compact holdings, which accompanied the new great advance in agricultural methods, had a

powerfully unsettling effect. The war on cottages, the absorption of cottage gardens and grounds, the confiscation of rights in the common deprived cottage industry of its two mainstays: family

earnings and agricultural background [emphasis added]. As long as domestic industry was supplemented by the facilities and amenities of a garden plot, a scrap of land, or grazing rights, the dependence of the laborer on money earnings was not absolute; the potato plot or ‘stubbing

geese,’ a cow or even an ass in the common made all the difference; and family earnings acted as a kind of unemployment insurance. The rationalization of agriculture inevitably uprooted the

laborer and undermined his social security [emphasis added].11

Moore, Jr. concurs,

9 Marx, 876. 10 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001), 188-189. 11 Polanyi, 96.

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Propelled by the prospect of profits to be made either in selling wool or by leasing their lands to those who did and thereby increasing their rents, the lords of the manors found a variety of legal and semilegal methods to deprive the peasants of their rights of cultivation in the open fields and also their rights to use the common for pasture of their cattle, the collection of wood for fuel, and

the like.12

Finally, neither does Moore, Jr., obscure the grim realities for the English peasantry,

Those who promoted the wave of agrarian capitalism, the chief victors in the struggle against the old order, came from the yeomanry and even more from the landed upper classes. The main

victims of progress were as usual the ordinary peasants. 13

The “progress,” which is the nascent capitalism in England, led to changing conceptions

of the use of land.

The alteration in perspectives on land use (and control over land) also exposes the

clash in viewpoints between the landlords and yeomanry on one side and the peasants on

the other.14 The former was in favor of the enclosures and the other actions associated

with primitive accumulation in order to hasten the transition to capitalism by way of

clearing out the farmland, replacing crops and farmers with sheep, and selling the sheep’s

wool for profit (an example of capitalist commodity production and exchange). The latter

resisted the enclosures, and thus primitive accumulation, because their livelihoods, which

had some stability under feudalism, were under attack. That stability was due to a

“subsistence ethic” that withered away, or was abandoned, as capitalism developed.

Again, as Moore, Jr. writes,

Under the pressure of circumstances, the medieval notion of judging economic actions according to their contribution to the health of the social organism began to collapse. Men ceased to see the agrarian problem as a question of finding the best method of supporting people on the land and

began to perceive it as the best way of investing capital in the land. [emphasis added] They began to treat land more and more as something that could be bought and sold, used and abused, in a

word like modern capitalist private property.15

12 Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, Beacon Press: 1966), 9. 13 Moore, Jr., 11. 14 Moore, Jr., 11.15 Moore, Jr., 8.

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Likewise, Moore, Jr. adds,

More generally, since the English peasants had won for themselves a relatively envious position under the protection of the custom of the manor, it is no wonder that they looked to the protection

of custom and tradition as the dike that might defend them against the invading capitalist flood from which they were scarcely in a position to profit.16

This subsistence ethic, which existed in one form in the English feudal manors,

also existed in other geographic contexts. Likewise, it unraveled in the face of capitalism

in England and elsewhere.

Outside of England, for instance, James C. Scott writes about its obsolescence in

the villages of mid-to-late twentieth century Southeast Asia (specifically, peasant

communities in Lower Burma, Vietnam, and Malaysia) as the evolution of capitalist

socioeconomic relations led to the breakdown of reciprocity and other forms of mutual

aid that helped support the peasantry’s livelihoods on a more or less consistent basis. Just

as many peasants in late medieval and rural England became wage laborers because of

primitive accumulation, so did farmers in twentieth century Lower Burma, Vietnam,

Malaysia, and, presumably, other countries in Southeast Asia (and, conceivably, the rest

of Asia). In both cases, for late medieval rural England and for modern twentieth-century

Southeast Asia, the subsistence ethic became irrelevant.

Also, with the demise of the subsistence ethic in Southeast Asia (or, at least, in the

villages where Scott did field work), approaches to farming changed. As Scott writes,

Given the social reality of the subsistence crisis level for most peasant cultivators, it makes eminent sense for them to follow what [James] Roumasset calls the ‘safety first’ principle. In the

choice of seeds and techniques of cultivation, it means simply that the cultivator prefers to minimize the probability of having a disaster rather than maximizing his average return. This

strategy generally rules out choices which, while they promise a higher net return on the average, carry with them any substantial risk of losses that would jeopardize subsistence.17

16 Moore, Jr., 12. 17 James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), 17-18.

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The principle of “safety first” is the core of the subsistence ethic because it emphasizes a

risk-averse approach to crop cultivation. The emphasis on avoiding risk is at odds with

the nature of capitalist commodity production and exchange, which involves the

investment of money so as to receive more money as a result. Scott notes,

Questions of profitability of investment, yield per unit of land, the productivity of labor are in themselves of secondary concern. The distinctive traces of the safety-first rule are also to be found in common observations that Southeast Asian peasants are reluctant to strike out for profits when

to do so might mean upsetting subsistence routines which had proved adequate in the past. Finally, the goal of a secure subsistence is expressed in a wide array of choices in the production process: a preference for crops that can be eaten over crops that must be sold, an inclination to employ several seed varieties in order to spread risks, a preference for varieties with stable if

modest yields.18

As the profit motive became widespread, socioeconomics conditions generally associated

with capitalism became common sights as well. Scott, in his 1978-1980 case study of a

village in Malaysia, observes the growing division between wealthy and poor as a result

of the “pattern of capitalist development, export-led growth, and encouragement of

foreign investment.”19 Similar developments also unfolded in mid-twentieth century

Brazil.

The case of Brazil: Primitive accumulation, the transition to capitalism in the countryside, and rural workers’ movements

Primitive accumulation in Brazil began in the mid-twentieth century. Although

the New State (Estado Novo) era under Getulio Vargas of the 1930s included the

implementation of an import-substitution industrialization agenda, the modernization

plan did not include a land reform component which could have ended the power and

privileges of the big landowners (fazendeiros) by way of policies such as a “land to the

tiller” program or a collective self-management approach that movements such as the

18 Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant, 22-23. 19 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), 51.

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MST advocate.20 The result was partial and uneven economic development in Brazil with

industrial modernization on one hand and quasi-feudal, non-capitalist agriculture on the

other hand. According to Maybury-Lewis, capitalist relations did not yet exist in the

Brazilian countryside and thus there were few wage laborers to speak of. In fact, prior to

the early 1960s rural labor unions were practically non-existent.21

Instead, before “developmentalism” began in the 1950s and as per the

aforementioned quasi-feudalistic norms that defined rural life then, personal relations of

socioeconomic domination reigned supreme in fazendas on which many agricultural

laborers worked. Maybury-Lewis elaborates,

Personalist, face-to-face relations and a patrimonial, clientelistic style of organizing social life were the norms. Patriarchy went so far as to make ideologically possible, and even desirable, the

establishment of fictive kinship ties (compadrio) between the worker and his landlord, thus privileging vertical solidarity, as opposed to horizontal alliances between members of the same

subaltern social class.22

Because wage labor was not prominent, these rural workers were self-supporting. The

only exceptions were the few small, independent farmers (sitiantes) who had their own

tracts of family-owned or family-controlled land.23 Any commodity exchange they were

involved in was marginal as Maybury-Lewis confirms,

Workers typically used their small plots to plant subsistence crops for their families and produce goods to sell or exchange at local markets; they rendered services, in-kind payments, and/or cash

to the fazendeiro in return for their usufruct rights.24

Obviously, this state of affairs was not permanent.

By the time of Kubitschek’s presidential term, from 1955 to 1960, efforts to give

more uniformity to the country’s economic development began. A policy of mass

“developmentalism” became the norm as Kubitschek sought to modernize the country. 20 Maybury-Lewis, 5-6. 21 Maybury-Lewis, 3-5. 22 Maybury-Lewis, 4. 23 Maybury-Lewis, 3-5. 24 Maybury-Lewis, 4.

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Maybury-Lewis documents the transition from pre-capitalist relationships to capitalist

ones,

Beginning in the 1950s, the fazendeiros adopted what they termed a ‘new mentality’ that corresponded essentially to a more market-oriented economic and social posture. Spurred by the

increased demand for their products in Brazil’s growing cities, they became less and less interested in maintaining the economically inefficient, patrimonial social order of the traditional

fazenda. The fazendeiros’ desire to maximize profits led to cutbacks in their permanent workforces, an increase in the use of salaried workers (often on a temporary, short-term basis), an imposition on the remaining permanent workers of more onerous terms governing land usufruct

rights, and mechanization.25

As the socioeconomic trends associated with “developmentalism” demonstrated, the

introduction of the basic process that defines capitalism, the maximization of profits

(along with rent, interest, dividends, etc.), meant that socioeconomic relations within the

fazendas changed. The peasants on the fazendas, who were already victims of

socioeconomic inequality in a personalized way, became victims of a new form of

socioeconomic inequality that was more abstract and mediated than before.

One telltale sign of a fundamental transformation within Brazilian agriculture was

the marginalization, if not the elimination, of subsistence farming. The abandonment of

the subsistence ethic and the other grim realities of primitive accumulation became

apparent as an agrarian capitalist class grew and rural workers discovered that they were

effectively landless, especially in southern Brazil. According to Maybury-Lewis,

In the relatively developed south, central-south, and southwest, rural society increasingly consisted of capitalists, technicians, labor contractors, and a mass of rural laborers - the latter

with less and less control over, or even access to, land.26

The fazendas during their quasi-feudal times at least gave some measure of support and

opportunities for subsistence, but the new capitalist fazendas ended all of that. The

modernization of the country’s rural areas was essentially a bourgeois-capitalist

25 Maybury-Lewis, 4. 26 Maybury-Lewis, 30.

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revolution from above that occurred and succeeded at the cost of the pre-

“developmentalist” livelihoods of many people in the countryside.

None of these agricultural developments were met without protest on the part of

the peasantry. Parts of the peasantry began organizing around agrarian issues. For

example, land reform soon became a key political, social, and economic issue – the

Confederação Nacional dos Trabalhadores na Agricultura (English: National

Confederation of Agricultural Workers. Acronym: CONTAG.) was one early rural

workers’ organization that demanded an end to the expropriation of the peasants from

the land, a land reform policy based on the principle of “land to the tiller,” and the direct

democratic involvement of the peasants in land-related matters.27 The demands of

CONTAG and other rural laborers’ movements attained a mainstream hearing soon

enough.

Notably, after Kubitschek finished his term, his successor Joao Goulart, a big

landholder politically oriented to the left, publicly called for land reform in 1962.

However, Goulart’s administration was unable to implement any longstanding land

reform policies due to a March 1964 military coup at the behest of key Brazilian

industrial and agricultural interests and with the support of the United States

government.28 Although the Brazilian military government, which lasted from 1964 to

1985, pursued a ruthless counterinsurgency campaign against dissidents, it also allowed for tepid versions of land reform such as a Land Statute (Estatuto da Terra) that turned

out to be ineffective and the mass transfer of farmers from the northeastern part of the

country to the Amazonian basin. So far as the latter decision was concerned, the farmers

27 Maybury-Lewis, 6, 18-19. 28 Branford and Rocha, 4.

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quickly lost their meager land holdings in the basin to corporate interests.29 Despite the

change of governments by force, economic modernization remained on the agenda.

Coincidentally or not, CONTAG set agrarian reform in terms of modernizing the

economy.30 The MST, which originated after CONTAG in the later years of the military

dictatorship, advocated land reform for different reasons.

The MST: Its history, its political stance, and its activities

As mentioned before, the MST was founded in the early 1980s. It developed in

the state of Rio Grande do Sul where peasants established an encampment known as

Encruzilhada Natalino (literally, from Portuguese to English, “Natalino’s crossroad”) in

February and March 1982.31 This occupation of the land turned out to be self-supporting.

Angus Wright and Wendy Wolford provide some examples,

On March 12, 1982, the people of Encruzilhada Natalino moved to their new patch of land acquired through the church, calling it Nova Ronda Alta. Each family had its own vegetable

garden, and a collective community garden was planted. In addition to garden crops, the settlers grew corn, beans, garlic, rice, peanuts and soy. They also had a fine crop of radishes, a load of which they sent to an industrial suburb of Porto Alegre, to the workers who had been the most

stolid supporters of the community. The settlers sent another batch to the state secretary of agriculture, to show that they were not lazy, that they just needed land in order to be able to

become productive.32

At roughly the same time, the Brazilian military government was gradually ceding

political power and democratic elections were finally held after nearly twenty years of

dictatorship – in Rio Grande do Sul, the leftist candidate Jair Soares, who campaigned on

land reform, won the governorship.33 Subsequently, in June 1983 the occupiers of

Encruzilhada Natalino received 1,870 hectares of land as other occupations began

29 Branford and Rocha, 4-5.30 Maybury-Lewis, 46-47. 31 Angus Wright and Wendy Wolford, To Inherit the Earth: The Landless Movement and the Struggle for a New Brazil (Oakland: Food First Books, 2003), 30, 72.32 Wright and Wolford, 72. 33 Wright and Wolford, 72-73.

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proliferating on a national basis, leading to the formation and christening of the MST.34

Since then, the MST has waged additional occupations and established land

settlements that operate as collectives. It seems to pick up where previous rural workers’

movements such as CONTAG left off. However, its perspective on land reform is

politically to the left of CONTAG’s orientation in light of the latter’s more mainstream

view of fitting land reform in with economic modernization, of capitalist development.

Instead, the MST’s approach not only challenges those priorities but also calls into

question the fundamental premises of economic modernization. The MST’s variant of

land reform does not go hand in hand with the priorities associated with the development

of capitalism.

In one sense, then, the MST advocates for an agrarian form of socialism through

collective ownership, control, and use of the land by farmers who were otherwise

landless. On this matter, Branford and Rocha write,

The MST’s aim is not just to conquer land for the landless but to create communities where the formerly excluded rural workers become active, socially engaged citizens who, instead of being

marginalized, enjoy decent levels of education, health care and leisure. No other peasant movement in Brazil has viewed the struggle for land in quite such terms, which means that the semm-terra are often stepping, figuratively as well as literally, on to land where no one has trod

before.35

The figurative new ground that the MST was treading on and continues treading upon is

the construction of a new culture that allows, even compels, workers to “become active,

socially engaged citizens.”

Thus, the members of the communities the MST builds are imbued with a

democratic, collective, and participatory ethos aimed, evidently, at instructing and

influencing people so that they exist on equal terms. In practice, this ethos translates into

34 Wright and Wolford, 72-73. 35 Branford and Rocha, 63.

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a strict regimen. Branford and Rocha continue,

The MST believes that almost everyone – alcoholics, tramps, the homeless, and so on – can rebuild their lives. The MST instills two kinds of discipline in the camps: the external, almost

military, discipline of getting up early to take part in the first assembly, of taking part in commissions, and of preparing for ‘mass resistance,’ with singing, marching, and shouting of

slogans; and the internal discipline of not drinking alcohol and of not behaving violently to your spouse or children. New recruits are given several chances to change their ways, but if they do

not or cannot, they are expelled.36

By molding or re-molding the lives and relationships of its members, the MST clearly

seeks to construct a new society that still exists within the confines of the old society.

Conceivably, that new society may surpass the old one. This process of molding or re-

molding transpires not merely in everyday life on the settlements and in the culture that

the MST inculcates, but also in the availability of literacy education for children and

adults alike and the training of new member activists.37

Furthermore, the MST publishes its own media such as a Web site

(http://www.mst.org.br/) on which editorials and other articles appear as well as a print

journal, Sem Terra. A cursory look at its Web site shows that it publishes material on its

current campaigns and activities, the political economy of Brazil, and land-related issues

such as occupations and settlements. For example, Jose Juliano de Carvalho Filho writes,

As politicas agrarias dos governos de Lula e de Dilma se inserem no contexto do modelo de desenvolvimento economico primario-exportador, de baixa incorporacao tecnologica e maior

vulnerabilidade externa.

Esse modelo beneficia os interesses envolvidos no agronegocio e coloca o pais em uma posicao subaltern em relacao ao exterior.

[The agrarian policies of the Lula and Dilma governments insert themselves in the context of a primary-exporter economic development model, of low technological incorporation, and high

economic vulnerability vis-à-vis the world market.

This model benefits the interests involved in agri-business and places the country in a subaltern position in relation to other countries.]38

36 Branford and Rocha, 87.37 Branford and Rocha, 109-125.

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This criticism by a MST member of the economic policies of the current Brazilian

government appears to fit with a description by Joao Pedro Stedile, a leading MST

member, of the country’s economy,

There is now a new economic model in Brazil in which the most dynamic sector of the economy, aimed at the export business – represented by the largest 200 firms, each of them embodying the alliance between international capital, the banks and the large Brazilian economic groups – has been growing at an average of 7 per cent per year. These 200 firms control 52 per cent of the

economy and 78 per cent of all our exports.39

The concentration and centralization of capital in the contemporary export-oriented

economy of Brazil, in broad and sweeping terms, show yet again the possibilities of

continued land inequalities and ongoing peasant struggle. Plausibly, perhaps, firms

associated with the export business will see fit to clear the land of inhabitants for the

purpose of establishing production, processing, and/or packaging facilities. The MST

would certainly be at the forefront of opposing such a trend.

Likewise, the longtime inequality in land holdings, along with the steep

inequalities of wealth and income, shows why and how such a new economic model

could develop in the first place.40 Without the concentration of land and money at the top

of the socioeconomic pyramid, along with the industrialization of Brazil that took place

during the twentieth century and the establishment of a military government in order to

forestall serious and substantive land reform, the largest 200 firms of the country could

not so easily exercise control of the economy. Stedile goes on to argue,

What happened here was the imposition of a model of agribusiness in a manner not unlike what Lenin saw as the imposition of the ‘Junker road’ to capitalism in the nineteenth century. The backward ‘latifundarios’, who because of their old ways and shortage of capital had devoted

themselves to cattle-raising, now received capital from transnational firms which furnished them with seeds, tractors, etc. Where did these firms get the money for this large operation? From the

38 Jose Juliano de Carvalho Filho, "Agronegocio impoe uma reforma agraria ao reves ao pais," Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra - MST. N.p., 30 Apr 2013. Web. 2 May 2013. <http://www.mst.org.br/Jose-Juliano-Uma-reforma-agraria-ao-reves-esta-ocorrendo-no-pais.39 Stedile and Boron, 193-194. 40 Wright and Wolford, 9.

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banks, from the financial capitalists who played a fundamental role in all this. […] Therefore, what we had in Brazil was a type of ‘Junker road’ that transformed our old landowning class into

capitalist entrepreneurs. […] We have realized that our struggle against the backward latifundarios is not enough because they were transformed as they were drawn into expanding the

frontier of capitalist agriculture.41

This observation demonstrates, from the perspective of somebody with the MST, that the

conversion of the fazendeiros into capitalists in particular, the transition from a non-

capitalist mode of production to a capitalist one in rural Brazil in general, and the

concurrent dispossession of the peasantry are all part of the aforementioned bourgeois-

capitalist revolution from above that occurred in the country. It also underscores the

continuing quest of the MST as a social movement of, by, and for rural workers.

Concluding remarks

The MST’s struggles go on today as neoliberal economic policies and

neoclassical economic theories continue to define contemporary capitalism in many

countries. For a country like Brazil, where the Workers’ Party (Partido dos

Trabalhadores), like so many other labor, social democratic, Socialist, and Communist

parties throughout the world, has become an advocate of a “soft” form of neoliberal and

neoclassical political economy, seemingly “radical” policies such as agrarian reform have

been appropriated for the goal of modernizing the national economy. As Cliff Welch

writes,

By 2002, however, the [Workers’ Party] position had changed: Agrarian reform was no longer part and parcel of the fight for socialism, but rather an essential economic development policy.42

Undoubtedly, this fact remains relevant today, as the Brazilian government pursues an

agenda of “neo-developmentalism” in which it takes an active role in promoting

41 Stedile and Boron, 201-202.

42 Cliff Welch, “Lula and the Meaning of Agrarian Reform,” NACLA Report on the Americas, 44:2 (March/April 2011): 27.

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economic growth.43 At the same time, Michael Kugelman takes note of the current and

global phenomenon of “land grabbing,” a contemporary form of primitive accumulation,

as food-importing nation-states, investors, and agribusiness firms take over tracts of

farmland to the detriment of local peasants.44 All the above trends indicate the basic truth

as to the importance of revolutionizing agriculture in order to achieve economic

modernization. They also demonstrate, again, the MST’s reasons for being as well as the

reasons for disgruntled and desperate peasants to join rural social movements. In this

regard, the political economy of modern Brazil serves as a companion example to the

political economy of late medieval England.

Brenner, Wood, Marx, Polanyi, and Moore, Jr. write of the origins of capitalism

in the medieval English countryside because of, among other important and valid reasons,

the dispossession of the peasantry. Scott writes of similar phenomena during the mid-to-

late twentieth century in Southeast Asian regions or countries such as Lower Burma,

Vietnam, and Malaysia – phenomena virtually contemporaneous with the socioeconomic

developments in mid-to-late twentieth century Brazil. They could just as well have

written about the economic history of Brazil and, thus, the reasons for the MST to take

shape and act.

A linguistic note

I have no proficiency in Portuguese (more precisely, Brazilian Portuguese). Nevertheless, I was able to use my working knowledge of Spanish to find cognates between Portuguese and Spanish (along with cognates between Portugese and English – cognates that the Spanish language may share) in order to translate a few sentences from a source that I cited in this paper. Of course, all errors are my own.

43 James M. Cypher, “Brazil’s ‘Big Push,’” Dollars & Sense, 305 (March/April 2013): 19-24. 44 Michael Kugelman, “The Global Farmland Rush,” The New York Times February 6, 2013: A25.

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I have also included a brief glossary with the Portuguese-language terms that I reference in the paper.

Glossary (Portuguese – English)

Confederação Nacional dos Trabalhadores na Agricultura - National Confederation of Agricultural Workers.Compadrio - fictive kinship tiesEncruzilhada Natalino – Natalino’s crossroad (literal translation), site of a land occupation and settlement that helped lead to the establishment of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra.Estado Novo - New StateEstatuto da Terra - Land StatuteFazenda – a large, landed estateFazendeiro – big landownerPartido dos Trabalhadores - Workers’ Party Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra - Landless Workers’ MovementSitiantes - small, independent farmers

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