MST and the
Fight to Change the Brazilian Power Structure: An interview with Gilmar Mauro
By Brian Mier(link is external), Research Associate of the Brazil
Unit at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs
During the 1960s, legend has it that
governor José Sarney sat down at a table with a group of cattle-ranching
cronies and aerial photographs of Maranhão state, in Northeastern Brazil. They
marked boundaries on the photos with pencil and divided up the land. In the
decades that followed, these ranchers committed what Brazilians call grilhagem, altering documentation to illegally
appropriate land. Sarney and his henchmen fenced off millions of hectares of
land, then either kicked out the peasants who were living there, forcing them
into mud hut settlements between the road and the fences, or keeping them on as
laborers, often paying them with vouchers for use at their own stores and
patrolling the grounds with armed guards so that no one can escape. Under
Sarney’s control, Maranhão state was deforested, and roughly half of its
majority Afro-Brazilian and indigenous population migrated to big cities in the
Southeast, some of which, like São Paulo, saw their populations increase
fivefold over a period of a few decades. The case of José Sarney, who would
become the president of Brazil (1985-89) and three-time Senate President, is
just one chapter in the 500-year-old story of how large rural landholders
dominate Brazilian political and economic life, which is represented today in
the largest political caucus in the Brazilian Congress, the ruralistas, whose majority recently voted to throw
out massive corruption charges against current President Michel Temer.[i]
Unlike other former European colonies in
the Americas, Brazil has never implemented agrarian reform. With the world’s
most unequal land division, 3 percent of the population owns approximately 2/3
of the arable land.[ii] When former president João Goulart attempted to enact
agrarian reform in 1964, he was thrown out of office in a U.S.-backed military
coup.[iii] As the resultant dictatorship approached its end in the early 1980s,
a new peasant-based social movement arose in Rio Grande do Sul state, called
the Movimento de Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless
Rural Worker’s Movement, MST). Incorporating theories from liberation theology
and intellectuals like Paulo Freire, Marx, and Gramsci into practice, landless
rural workers organized in groups to occupy fields of stolen land, resist
eviction (sometimes fatally), and farm.[iv] Using an innovative organizational
structure of upwards and downwards democratic accountability through voluntary
assemblies at the family, village, regional, state and national levels, the MST
quickly spread across the country and now operates in all 26 Brazilian states,
with “Friends of the MST” groups operating worldwide. Although it has yet to
reach its goal of enacting agrarian reform and building a socialist society,
there are currently 400,000 families living and farming in MST agrarian reform
villages across the county and the movement has successfully pressured the
government to create a series of innovative policies, such as the Programa de Aquisição de Alimentos (Food
Acquisition Program/PAA), ratified by former President Lula, which requires all
public schools and hospitals in rural areas to purchase all food for their meal
programs at subsidized prices from local family farmers.
The MST has a gender-balanced national directorate of
52 individuals, with two people elected periodically in each of its 26 state
assemblies. Gilmar Mauro is a member of the national directorate, representing
the state of São Paulo. I caught up with him at the MST national secretariat in
São Paulo on August, 25th, 2017, to talk about the current political context
and its ramifications for small farmers.
In Brazil, most food is still
produced by family farmers. What are some challenges that small farmers face in
the current political context?
Most of Brazilian agricultural production is, in fact,
produced by family farmers, but they are the group most affected by the policy
and program cuts that the current coup government under Michel Temer is
enacting. Examples of this include the current lack of access to credit and
lack of investment. However, the Brazilian agricultural system was organized to
favor exports, especially large-scale agriculture, as part of a strategy to
balance the trade deficit in Brazil. Since there is a large deficit in
government spending, including servicing the debt, all of the production of
commodities in general, whether in agriculture or mining, are geared toward
exportation with the goal of obtaining a trade surplus to stabilize the trade
equilibrium. So the priority is on large capital, in detriment to the millions
of family farmers who survive by producing food. We have to change this. I
don’t believe that this only holds true for Brazil, but we have a great
challenge to change the agricultural production model. The current model
poisons the environment and poisons the population. This agricultural
production model destroys natural resources and biodiversity. We have to have a
debate in society to discuss the role of agrarian reform, and the debate should
be over, ‘what type of food do you want to eat?’ and ‘how do we want to use our
soil, water, and natural resources?’ If this is the way that Capital is
operating, things will continue the way they are, but it will have
environmental impacts on this generation and on future ones. If you continue
eating these foods from large supermarket chains, it will impact your health
and that of those who produce it. We also have to return to the debate over
technological paradigms and technologies that do not damage the environment,
and that we can use in agriculture in Brazil and the world, and we think that
agro-ecology is an economic and social alternative that is much more
sustainable than this model that we are currently living under.
The English-language press –
even ostensibly progressive newspapers — has adopted the conservative
mainstream language of Brazilian media to describe the MST. For example, I saw
a recent Guardianarticle which states that the
MST “invaded” a few plantations. Why does the MST instead use the word
“occupation” to describe these activities?
“Occupation” is a term that we use
because it is related to the large land holdings that were illegally
appropriated by various sectors of Brazilian society, including the corrupt
politicians who used public money to acquire land, and what is called ‘grilhagem,’ which involves illegally forging documents
to appropriate large land holdings. I can give you a specific example here from
São Paulo state. Cutrale, an orange juice producer which also operates in the
USA, appropriated land that, in 1908 or 1909, was originally earmarked by the
federal government for settlements for recently arrived European immigrants.
The villages were never built, and the lands were illegally appropriated by
economic groups that destroyed their natural resources. We use the word ‘occupation’
to describe appropriating illegally-acquired land that is used by large-scale
ranchers and farmers that could and should fulfill their social function. This
is the reason that, in our understanding, the challenges against the MST and
agrarian reform are very intense. Let me put it into historical context. Our
first law regulating land was passed in 1850 and slavery was abolished in 1888.
Before 1850, land was public and was farmed with slave labor. In 1850, land
became something that could be bought and sold and in 1888 slavery was
abolished, bringing freedom to laborers. The slaves did not have money to buy
land in Brazil. And differently from what happened in most of the world where
agrarian reforms took place as a way to develop capitalism in the countryside
(for example, there is the story of the union between the bourgeoisie and the
peasants during the French Revolution to produce raw materials and food for the
workers in the cities so that industry could transform agriculture into a
market), agrarian reform never happened in Brazil. Brazil started by land
distribution into hereditary captaincies; afterward, through large land grants
called sesmarias, the plantation economy consolidated to its
current state in Brazil. For this reason, the struggle for land and agrarian
reform is a historical, fundamental battle in Brazil. We [the MST] organize
occupations as a form of pressure toward agrarian reform. There is a law that
permits homesteading in Brazil. If land does not fulfill its social function,
it qualifies, in theory, for disappropriation. For land to fulfill its social
function, it has to rationally produce, while respecting the environment and
federal labor laws. But most plantation owners and ranchers don’t respect the
environment or the labor laws, and even their unproductive land is rarely
redistributed In other words, we have a historic political problem.
This is why we say that the fight for agrarian reform is a fight to change the
Brazilian power structure. Brazilian political power is, historically and
contemporarily, deeply rooted in the land. Agrarian reform is a way to solve
one of our country’s historic political problems.
The MST was an important actor
in the consolidation of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party, PT). The
PT party’s three historic rallying cries were Political Reform, Urban Reform,
and Agrarian Reform. With 13 years in power, neither the Lula nor the Dilma
Rousseff administration managed to push through any of these promises. Why does
the MST continue to support ex-president Lula and the PT party?
That is a good question, that is related
to the Brazilian political struggle. It’s true. Agrarian reform did not happen
in Brazil. We have settlement policies. These settlement policies are the
result of a lot of struggles and death in the Brazilian countryside. It is a
historical problem that the PT did not solve, that nobody has solved in Brazil,
and we have to change the political power balance to advance the perspectives
for deep agrarian and urban reforms. The MST has always positioned itself in
Brazilian politics as an autonomous social movement. It has political autonomy.
It is not organically tied to any political party, and we respect all the
political parties on the Brazilian left. But we are living in a context of
retrogression in Brazil and the world where forces, not just neoliberal but an
entire neo-fascist ideology, are growing as has happened in other historical
eras of crisis. We are facing a coup in Brazil — a political coup. It is a
political coup that aims to take political power and apply a set of regressive
measures to cancel what the working class achieved during recent years,
including gains that occurred during the Lula and Dilma governments. Evidently,
we did not advance in deep structural reforms, but there were important social
advances that are now being dismantled [under the current administration]. It’s
not particular to Brazil. This is happening in various parts of the world
because, in our evaluation, there is a prolonged crisis with no way out in the
short term. In fact, I don’t know if there is a way out of the economic crisis
within the capitalist framework. A part of humanity no longer has space in this
mode of production. We are confronting power and resisting against setbacks.
This is why we are supporting Lula at the moment. We are acting to form
resistance, including electing him to the presidency to move forward with
social reforms. It’s not what we want for Brazilian society, though. We want to
move forwards from a perspective of socialization. We defend socialism as a
political and economical alternative for humanity, not just for Brazil.
Nevertheless, the MST does not have the conditions to do this by itself. The
MST is not strong enough to push through agrarian reform. Agrarian reform and
changes in the agricultural model depends on a debate within the entire
Brazilian working class and changes in the power structure. The MST is an
important actor, but it is just one actor that is part of a set of actors.
Together, we created the Frente Brasil Popular (Brazil
People’s Front, FBP) with a lot of internal differences. But we understand that
we have to face common enemies, and we have to build a unified political
culture. We have a culture of political unity for the Brazilian elections, but
we do not have a political culture of forming broad fronts for the mid- to
long-term. And we are in this process now. I always compare these alliances to
a wedding. Two people marry. They are different, even if they have the same
gender, but they have common projects, and they develop them together. If one
person subjugates another in this marriage, neither of them grow, and the
marriage often dissolves. This is what political alliances are like. Common
projects have common objectives, and we have to build these objectives
collectively. There are static objectives and strategic objectives. Our tactic
is to seek alliances with all progressive actors in Brazil and on an
international scale to confront the fascist ideology and retrogression. A lot
of people fit in this rainbow of alliances, and we need to be generous and
patient. It’s like raising children. I, like a lot of people, have children. We
have to say, “Did you bathe yet? Have you cleaned your room?” The left also has
to have a historical patience in coalition building. In our point of view,
nobody has any absolute truth, but everyone has goals. We all have ideas and we
have to talk about these common ideas to face common enemies. Some may want to
overcome the neoliberal order, others may go to the point of confronting the
coup and neo-fascist ideas but don’t want to go all the way to socialism. This
is a chapter that we will discuss and debate as the process unfolds, but not by
searching for hegemony or allowing ourselves to be homogenized by others. For
this reason, the PT is our ally, the Central Unica de Trabalhadores (Unified
Workers Central/CUT) CUT labor federation is our ally, the people’s social
movements in Brazil are our allies, and the other left political parties are
also our allies at this moment in history.
The largest general strike in
many years took place on April 28. The following month there was a huge protest
in Brasilia, the largest in that city’s history. At that moment it looked like
the fight against the coup government was picking up momentum. The second
general strike, despite being effective in some cities like Belo Horizonte and
Brasilia, was not as large as the first one. And the night that the corruption
allegations against Michel Temer were thrown out by Congress there were not
very many street protests. It may look like the organized left is losing force
at the moment. Is this analysis correct? What are the next steps in the fight
against further consolidation of the 2016 coup?
This, perhaps, is the central issue for us and for the
whole world. There is a structural problem. Sometimes the left focuses on
ideological differences that clearly exist — cooptation of sectors of the left
can’t be overlooked either because it exists — but it forgets a structural
problem that is going on in the world. There is a process within the capitalist
productive structure that is changing in the entire world. The productive
structurization that started in the 1950s and 1960s is changing due to new
technologies and materials that are used today. The Fordist production model
created large amounts of stock, used the logic of the production line and
permanently produced cyclical crises of overproduction.[v] This has changed in
the whole world in part through use of the Toyota production model, which is
being perfected around the world. I can’t go too far into this because my
answer would become very long and complex but we are at a time in history when
the world’s largest taxi company doesn’t own a single taxi. The largest hotel
company doesn’t own a room. Large businesses no longer have formal employees.
This process of weakening and outsourcing in the workplace is a reality for the
entire world. Why am I saying this? Because this impacts the working class’
organizational instruments. It was one thing to hold a strike during the days
of the Fordist model. If you shut down one sector of a factory it would
completely freeze the others. Today many sectors are connected from a labor and
financial standpoint. Companies centralize some of their activities and
outsource others to various locations around the World. Many workers are now
autonomous, without any labor rights whatsoever. So the instrument of the
strike, which was fundamental to the working class for a long time, is no
longer possible in many sectors of the economy. Many autonomous workers cannot
strike because if they stop producing, they stop receiving, and they don’t have
any financial or physical security. So we have a fundamental question here,
from my point of view, and we are debating this within the left. The tools that
the working class produced throughout history are not enough to confront the
current political problems because they are, generally speaking, defensive
measures. They were produced in a specific time in history when capitalist
development still allowed advances for the working class. We are entering a new
phase in history in which capitalist development is producing setbacks for the
working class and it is hard to launch an offensive against this model. It is
affecting the union movement. Look at the metallurgical workers in São Paulo’s
ABC region, who formed the basis for the birth of the PT party.[vi] During the
1960s there was a huge number of metallurgical workers in the region. Today
there are 13,000 metallurgical workers in the ABC. During the 1960s and 1970s
there were 90,000. And today, with 13,000, they produce a lot more than they
did back then. The odds are that this number of metallurgical workers is not
going to go up, it will diminish. You can say the same thing about the bank
tellers, who suffered huge layoffs during the process of computerization, and
all of the other sectors of the working class. This has an impact on the
working class’ political struggle. Is this the only justification? No, but it
is a challenge to build new forms of working class organization and
representation, to form a dialogue with the working class where it lives, that
incorporates location, and integrates regions in ways that enable effective
confrontation. I will take a second here to talk about a few mistakes made by
the left. One of them was to separate the economic and political struggles.
Delegating the economic struggle to the social and labor movements and the
political struggle to the Party was a serious mistake. The social and union
movements ended up falling into corporatism and economics, and the Party
disconnected from the people’s daily lives and turned into a bureaucracy. You
cannot separate economic struggle from political struggle. The economic
struggle is also a political struggle because you can’t separate the present
from the future. We are engaged in an important confrontation at the moment but
we have to plant what we want in the future now. I will use agriculture to
explain this. If you want to harvest avocados, you have to plant an avocado
tree. There is no other way to do it. So, if we want a more just society with
more solidarity, we have to plant solidarity here and now. If we want a society
in which men and women participate equally we have to open up spaces of equality
here now, including inside our own homes. If we want a new type of society with
new values, we have to cultivate and produce these values in the hearts of our
organizations here and now. Since theory cannot be separated from practice, it
should have developed like this: new movements have to be built and have to
incorporate this concrete economic struggle in a manner that engages with
people’s daily lives. An organization that does not respond to the concrete
needs of its base doesn’t have a reason to exist. Concrete needs have to be
integrated to the need of the political struggle. Conversations
about daily life, connected to survival, have to be integrated with dialogues
about what kind of society we want in the future. These are the challenges that
are out there. But to finish my answer to the question — fine, if we don’t have
these new instruments, should we throw everything that the workers ever
produced in the garbage? No, because we produced the best that we could.
Nevertheless, these instruments are not strong enough to overcome all of the
challenges of the moment. We have to modify these instruments and produce new
instruments to meet new challenges. Some sectors of the left want to build a
new reference point in the masses by passing over historically constructed
instruments and tactics. It’s obvious that you have to be critical, but you do
not build an instrument of popular reference by annihilating another
instrument. This is the old problem of vanguardism on the left. Many sectors in
the left commemorate the defeat of other left sectors. This is not
revolutionary, this is anti-revolutionary. Because new instruments should not
be created through the destruction of other instruments, even if they are full
of problems and limitations. Whoever has no problems can throw the first stone.
Therefore, you have to be humble and understand that we are all individually
weak and even while uniting the entire left we are still losing the battle. We
are being defeated. So we have to understand that there are a lot of challenges
ahead to organize the working class, most of which did not join the Brazilian
political struggles. We do have a working class militancy that has been very
important. If we hadn’t taken it to the streets the coup would have consolidated
to destroy the Brazilian left and we are resisting. But this is still too small
to oppose this entire offensive by big Capital in Brazil. I think the situation
is beginning to change, though; there is a politicization process underway in
Brazil and I hope that we will have historic patience, while at the same time,
initiatives to increase people’s participation, to not always speak to the same
people, to modify methods within the left, within our organizations that enable
dialogue with the Brazilian people, the working class to, first, understand
this moment in history and second, to mount a people’s offense to defeat the
coup government in Brazil.
The political conjuncture in the United
States at the moment is very bad, and there is a growing so-called “alt-right,”
with fascism and neo-nazism on the rise, even in the White House. Some people
are aligning themselves with the Antifa movement working against these trends.
Is there anything you would like to say to the people fighting against fascism
in the United States?
Fascism is a danger to humanity, and it’s not like we
don’t see it down here… we deeply understand it. In all historic times of
crisis, alternatives appear, like war, but there is a contradiction. Crises are
propitious moments for debate about systems and their contradictions. It is a
conducive moment for political debate but during crisis, retrogressive ideas
like fascism always arise, and they have to be fought. All sectors have to come
together to fight this. This isn’t even a question of ideology. If you are
human, you have to fight fascism, and its retrogressive ideas and everyone has
to unite. It doesn’t interest me who is at the forefront, who is behind or who
is on the side, but all sectors have to unite to face this. This implies that a
degree of generosity and patience is needed. And I believe that the U.S.
working class is going to face this and will be victorious, just as we will be
here in Brazil and other parts of the world. One of our challenges is how we
can unite internationally. It’s not enough to struggle just in Brazil, but it
has to be done in Brazil just as it has to be done in the United States and
every part of the world. We need local actions, but they have to connect to
struggles across the entire world. We have to confront these fascist ideas and
face the retrogression with the goal of producing new ideas for the world. We
need new ideas for economic and social sustainability, to solve the problems of
hunger and extreme poverty and to think about what kind of world we need to
suit the generations that come after us. I wish lots of successful struggle and
lots of luck to you in the United States. And, look, you have a fundamental
role. The struggles in the United States have a fundamental role for Brazil and
for the entire world. We support you, and we believe that you will be able to
effectively face the biggest corporations that practically dominate the entire
planet. You can always count on our solidarity.
Inga kommentarer:
Skicka en kommentar