The landless rural workers' movement in Brazil: independence and autonomy
Keywords:
Agroecology, mística, peasant movements, democratic socialism, State, MSTAbstract
In this article we review the dilemma of whether movements should engage the state and be coopted or avoid engaging it and be sidelined. We argue that Brazil’s Movement of Landless Workers (MST) successfully addressed this dilemma and became one of the longest lasting, largest, and most influential social movements in Latin America. Such success is rooted in both engaging with the state while maintaining its independence from it. Furthermore, it has also established alliances with other political organizations like the Workers’ Party (PT), while retaining its autonomy to focus on its own crucial struggle for land. It’s cultural policy around mística, an educational policy, and agroecological methods of production have helped the MST to become an internally cohesive movement, develop a strong, rotating leadership, and posit an alternative productive paradigm to that of input- and energy-intensive agriculture. Such cultural and production practices keep the movement vitally engaged in its anticapitalistic struggle for a popular-democratic socialism.
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