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The MST and Agrarian Reform in Brazil

This article offers a brief reflection on the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) and the recent changes that have taken place in the politics of the Brazilian land reform. Land reform is a territorial policy that does not address the full complexity of the agrarian question. For this study, we view the agrarian question as a structural problem of capitalism (Fernandes 2001), part of its inherent logic of development. As such, it generates inequalities and processes of differentiation, expulsions and expropriations, thereby excluding, making subaltern, destroying, and recreating the peasantry. Relations between the peasantry and capital are permanently conflictual and are defined, on one hand, by the subaltern position of the peasantry vis-à-vis capital (including the power of capital to destroy and recreate the peasantry in accord with its own interests), and on the other, by peasant resistance in setting the terms of its own reproduction, through land occupations (Fernandes 2008a). At the core of these antagonisms is the territorial conflict over the process of creation and destruction of the peasantry. The agrarian question is thus a territorial question, and agrarian reform is the face of this aspect of the conflict. The struggles are over structural processes and their conjunctural traits. The accelerated expansion of monocultures and the increase in agro-industry in the 1970s, accompanied by the near-extinction of peasant movements through the military dictatorship’s repression, constituted one of the greatest crises for peasant resistance in Brazil. With the re-democratization of the country in the 1980s, the agro-export/agro-industrial model was consolidated alongside the territorialization of the struggle for land, with the spread of land-occupations as well as the struggle for agrarian reform. During the 1990s, peasant movements struggling for land multiplied, broadening the conflict and increasing the number of rural assentamentos (settlements), and the MST was at the forefront of that process.