Landless Workers' Movement

MST supporters in Brazil. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landless_Workers%27_Movement#/media/File:Mst_conabNove2004.jpg

Founded in 1984, Brazil's Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), or Landless Workers' Movement, unites about 1.5 million members who seize unused land to live and farm on. The MST currently has about 900 encampments where 150,000 families reside. Researchers say MST's occupied lands comprise an area larger than Italy. The MST is committed to Indigenous sovereignty and does not occupy lands claimde by Indigenous peoples.

MST members organize through sectors and collectives which are committed to issues of "production, cooperation, education, environment, gender, political education, health, culture, communications, human rights, [and] youth."

MST is a member organization of La Via Campesina. Members of the Anarchist Federation of Rio de Janeiro (FARJ) collaborate with the MST and some people belong to both groups.

Culture

MST meetings always begin with a mistica, which is described as "the morale-boosting, quasi-religious communal ceremony at the heart of the MST culture, involving songs and chants."

The movement puts enormous emphasis on education. They run schools influenced by the ideas of Paulo Freire. Each adult member spends two months studying each year. A member who is illiterate must study how to read, and a member who finished college must attend graduate school.

Freire himself strongly supported the MST and approvingly recounted how he once heard a a MST speaker say, "[T]he more ignorant we were, and the more innocent we were of the ways of the world, the better it was for the landowners, and the more knowledgeable we got, the more frightened the landowners became."

The MST is committed to social justice and diversity. The Gender Sector strives to implement the movement's goal of gender equality, for example by ensuring that women have 50% representation in spokesperson positions whenever possible. According to Rafael Forsetto, the movement welcomes "Black, Indigenous, quilombolas (Afro-Brazilians), and LGBTQ+ farmers, as well as those in both rural and urban areas."

As of 2023, the government has legalized about 60 percent of the MST's land occupations. The New York Times described the MST's impact:

The proliferation of legal settlements has turned the movement into a major food producer, selling hundreds of thousands of tons of milk, beans, coffee and other commodities each year, much of it organic after the movement pushed members to ditch pesticides and fertilizers years ago. The movement is now Latin America’s largest supplier of organic rice, according to a large rice producers’ union.

Decisions

Each group of 10 families forms a base nucleus which meets at least once a week to make decisions. Emphasis is placed on keeping remarks brief. The assembly strives to make decisions by consensus. MST tries to make as many decisions at possible at the base-nucleus rather than at higher levels.

The base nucleus elects a man and a woman to its settlement council, and that settlement elects a man and a woman to the regional council. The regional council then sends a pair to the province council, which sends a pair to the national council. At a 2007 national council meeting, there were 17,000 participants organized into nuclei of about 50 people each.https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/amory-starr-maria-elena-martinez-torres-and-peter-rosset-participatory-democracy-in-action.</ref>

Economy

The MST are committed to replacing capitalism with a system where: "All production will be developed with the control of workers over the result of their work. The social relations of production must abolish exploitation, oppression, and alienation."

The MST settlements establish sustainable farms, schools, and credit unions. As an example, the 7,500-acre Contestado encampment has "a town square, a farmers’ cooperative, a health clinic, schools, markets, and even a cultural center."

MST settlements vary in economic structure, with some farming communally and others parceling out land to individual families. According to Peter Gelderloos, the communal farmers, notably Comunas da Terra, obtain a higher standard of living.

Environment

The MST's 2014 Agrarian Program emphasized environmental sustainability and reforestation. Here is the section on "Natural Resources":

"Water and native forests are assets of the natural world and they should be treated as a right of all workers. They cannot be treated as commodities and must not be subject to private appropriation.

a) Ensure that the waters and forests are preserved as a public good, accessible to all.

b) Combat deforestation and illegal logging and illegal trade

c) Reforest the degraded areas with ample biodiversity of native and fruit trees, ensuring environmental preservation."

The MST opposes most pesticide use, and one of the national spokespeople says "The MST defines agroecology as its main productive method." The Contestado community is one of several in the process of fully transitioning to agroecology.

Crime

"When there is a discipline problem, the person goes before the discipline sector of the camp and may be required to perform community service."

From Peter Gelderloos, Anarchy Works

The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), or Landless Workers’ Movement, is made up of 1.5 million impoverished laborers who occupy unused land to set up farming collectives. Since its founding in 1984, the MST has won land titles for 350,000 families living in 2,000 different settlements. The basic unit of organization consists of a group of families living together in a settlement on occupied land. These groups retain autonomy and self-organize matters of day-to-day living. To participate in regional meetings they appoint two or three representatives, which in principle include a man and a woman though in practice this is not always the case. The MST has a federative structure; there are also State and National Coordinating Bodies. While most of the decision-making takes place at the grassroots level with land occupations, farming, and the establishment of settlements, the MST also organizes at higher levels to coordinate massive protests and highway blockades to pressure the government to give land titles to the settlements. The MST has shown a great deal of innovation and strength, organizing schools and protecting themselves against frequent police repression. They have developed practices of sustainable agriculture, including setting up seed banks for native seeds, and they have invaded and destroyed environmentally harmful eucalyptus forestry plantations and test grounds for genetically modified crops.

Within the logic of democracy, 1.5 million people is considered simply too large a group for everyone to be allowed to participate directly in decision-making; the majority should entrust that power to politicians. But the MST holds an ideal in which all possible decision-making remains on the local level. In practice, however, they often do not meet this ideal. As a massive organization that does not seek to abolish capitalism or overthrow the state but rather to pressure it, the MST has been brought into the game of politics, in which all principles are for sale. Furthermore, a huge portion of their members come from extremely poor and oppressed communities that for generations had been controlled by a combination of religion, patriotism, crime, drug addiction, and patriarchy. These dynamics do not disappear when people enter into the movement, and they cause significant problems within the MST.

Throughout the 80s and the 90s, new MST settlements were created by activists from the organization who would seek landless people in rural areas or especially in the favelas, the urban slums, who wanted to form a group and occupy land. They would go through a base-building period of two months, in which they would hold meetings and debates to try to build a sense of community, affinity, and political common ground. Then they would occupy a piece of unused land owned by a major landlord, choose representatives to federate with the larger organization, and begin farming. Activists working with the MST local would pass through periodically to see if the settlement needed help acquiring tools and materials, resolving internal disputes, or protecting themselves from police, paramilitaries, or major landlords, all of whom frequently conspired to threaten and assassinate MST members.

In part due to the autonomy of each settlement, they have met with a variety of outcomes. Leftists from other countries typically romanticize the MST while the Brazilian capitalist media portray them all as violent thugs who steal land and then sell it. In fact, the capitalist media portrayal is accurate in some cases, though by no means in a majority of cases. It is not unheard of for people in a new settlement to divide up the land and later fight over the allotments. Some might sell their allotment to a local landlord, or open a liquor store on their allotment and fuel alcoholism, or encroach on their neighbor’s allotment, and such boundary disputes are sometimes resolved with violence. The majority of settlements divide into completely individualized, separate homesteads rather than working the land collectively or communally. Another common weakness reflects the society from which these landless workers come — many of the settlements are dominated by a Christian, patriotic, and patriarchal culture.

Though its weaknesses need to be addressed, the MST has achieved a long list of victories. The movement has won land and self-sufficiency for a huge number of extremely poor people. Many of the settlements they create enjoy a much higher standard of living than the slums they left behind, and are bound by a sense of solidarity and community. By any measure their accomplishment is a triumph for direct action: by disregarding legality or petitioning the powerful for change, over a million people have won themselves land and control over their lives by going out and doing it themselves. Brazilian society has not collapsed due to this wave of anarchy; on the contrary it has become healthier, although many problems remain, in the society at large and in the settlements. It largely comes down to circumstance whether a particular settlement is empowering and liberated or competitive and oppressive.

According to an MST member who worked for several years in one of the most dangerous regions of Brazil, two months was simply not enough time in most cases to overcome people’s anti-social training and create a real sense of community, but it was much better than the prevalent pattern in the subsequent period. As the organization experienced a rush to grow, many activists began slapping together settlements by recruiting groups of strangers, promising them land, and sending them off into the regions with the poorest soil or most violent landlords, often contributing to deforestation in the process. Naturally, this emphasis on quantitative results amplified the worst characteristics of the organization and in many ways weakened it, even as its political power increased.

The context for this watershed in the MST was the election of President Lula of the Workers Party (PT) in 2003. Previously, the MST had been autonomous: they did not cooperate with political parties or allow politicians into the organization, although many organizers used the MST to launch political careers. But with the unprecedented victory of the progressive, socialist Workers Party, the leadership of the MST tried to forbid anyone in the organization from publicly speaking out against the government’s new agrarian policy. At the same time, the MST began receiving huge amounts of money from the government. Lula had promised to give land to a certain number of families and the MST leadership rushed to fill this quota and engorge their own organization, abandoning their base and their principles. Many influential MST organizers and leaders, backed by the more radical settlements, criticized this collaboration with the government and pushed for a more anti-authoritarian stance, and in fact by 2005, when the PT’s agrarian program proved to be a disappointment, the MST began fiercely challenging the government again.

In the eyes of anti-authoritarians the organization had lost its credibility and proven once again the predictable results of collaboration with the government. But within the movement there are still many causes for inspiration. Many of the settlements continue to demonstrate the ability of people to overcome their capitalist and authoritarian socialization, if they take it upon themselves to do so. Perhaps the best example are the Comunas da Terra, a network of settlements that make up a minority within the MST, that farm the land communally, nurture a spirit of solidarity, challenge sexism and capitalist mindsets internally, and create working examples of anarchy. It is notable that the people in the Comunas da Terra enjoy a higher standard of life than those who live in the individualized settlements.