This was a final term paper that I wrote during the Spring 2013 semester at CUNY for Professor Frances Fox Piven. I focus on developments in the Brazilian countryside during the twentieth century and, in the process, trace the evolution of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) (Landless Workers' Movement). Along the way, I write about the economic modernization of Brazil and the situation of the country's peasantry.

1. 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
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.
1

2. 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.
2

3. [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.
3

4. 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.
4

5. 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.
5

6. 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.
6

7. 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.
7

8. 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.
8

9. 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
20
Maybury-Lewis, 5-6.
21
Maybury-Lewis, 3-5.
22
Maybury-Lewis, 4.
23
Maybury-Lewis, 3-5.
24
Maybury-Lewis, 4.
9

10. “developmentalism” became the norm as Kubitschek sought to modernize the country.
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
25
Maybury-Lewis, 4.
26
Maybury-Lewis, 30.
10

11. modernization of the country’s rural areas was essentially a bourgeois-capitalist
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
27
Maybury-Lewis, 6, 18-19.
28
Branford and Rocha, 4.
11

12. country to the Amazonian basin. So far as the latter decision was concerned, the farmers
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
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.
12

13. Encruzilhada Natalino received 1,870 hectares of land as other occupations began
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
34
Wright and Wolford, 72-73.
35
Branford and Rocha, 63.
13

14. influencing people so that they exist on equal terms. In practice, this ethos translates into
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.
36
Branford and Rocha, 87.
37
Branford and Rocha, 109-125.
14

15. This model benefits the interests involved in agri-business and places the country in a subaltern
position in relation to other countries.]38
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,
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.
15

16. 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
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
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.
16

17. 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
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
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.
17

18. 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.
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 ties
Encruzilhada 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 State
Estatuto da Terra - Land Statute
Fazenda – a large, landed estate
Fazendeiro – big landowner
Partido dos Trabalhadores - Workers’ Party
Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra - Landless Workers’ Movement
Sitiantes - small, independent farmers
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