The Landless Workers' Movement and Social Struggles Against Neoliberalism

Abstract

It has been said that history is more creative than the theories that we construct about it, including those concerning its purpose. In the 1990s, movements like Brazil's Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Workers' Movement-MST) seem to be showing us that that old fool Clio has prepared one more surprise. Twentieth-century Brazil enjoyed one of the world's highest economic growth rates. By 1940 the value of industrial output had already surpassed in value that of agriculture, even though the source of accumulation was coffee production and the nucleus of capitalist accumulation was mercantilefinancial. In the process, urbanization increased throughout the 1960s until Brazil's rural inhabitants became a minority of the total population. The development of rural capitalism, which increased after the military coup d'etat of 1964, brought into prominence a new agricultural proletariat of boias-frias (casual laborers hired by the day and trucked in from the towns). This reinforced the arguments of those in the heart of the Brazilian left, who, long before Eric Hobsbawm had verified the disappearance of the peasantry, were asserting that the struggle for land was no longer relevant to the formation of Brazilian society or, even worse, that it was no longer a force for progress. In Brazil as in other dependent countries, any analysis of the potential for a revolutionary struggle in the countryside turned mainly on the presence or absence of feudalism in the rural economy. Those who argued for feudalism were ready to trust in the revolutionary character of the peasant struggles for a variety of reasons. Some considered that, in fighting for land reform, the peasants were fighting the most conservative forces in Brazilian politics and were contributing to the enlargement of the domestic market and, as a consequence, to the development of a nationally based capitalism. In other words, they viewed the peasants as an important force in the struggle for a demo-