What is the Landless Workers Movement, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST)

A documentary about the history of the fight of the rural workers in Brazil. Go here for the list of videos

What is the MST?

Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) in Portuguese, is a mass social movement, formed by rural workers and by all those who want to fight for land reform and against injustice and social inequality in rural areas.

The MST was born through a process of occupying latifundios (large landed estates) and become a national movement in 1984.  Over more than two decades , the movement has led more than 2,500 land occupations, with about 370,000 families - families that today settled on 7.5 million hectares of land that they won as a result of the occupations. Through their organizing, these families continue to push for schools, credit for agricultural production and cooperatives, and access to health care.

Currently, there are approximately 900 encampment holding 150,000 landless families in Brazil.  Those camped, as well as those already settled, remain mobilized, ready to exercise their full citizenship, by fighting for the realization of their political, social economic, environmental and cultural rights.

Why is there a lag in our publishing activity

First, and not least, we do not get paid or receive any money from doing this, nor did we undermine the project as something quick and simple.  Certainly we would be able to do more if there were more of us doing it, so if you have developed an interest in getting involved let us know.  Sometime horizontal organization is slow and complicated in terms of production.  Each one of us must convince and be convinced of a proposal to do something.  And this we do neither consider a luxury of a problem, quite the opposite we are critical of those who operate under a hierarchy, an authority, and produce.  

Judging by certain polemics it would seem that there are anarchists who spurn any form of organisation; but in fact the many, too many, discussions on this subject, even when obscured by questions of language or poisoned by personal issues, are concerned with the means and not the actual principle of organisation. Thus it happens that when those comrades who sound the most hostile to organisation want to really do something they organise just like the rest of us and often more effectively. The problem, I repeat, is entirely one of means.

Errico Malatesta   October 1927

So it is not only important to us to do something or do it quickly, but to find the acceptable ways to do it.  If we were to develop specialists, hierarchy, authority, to do something, the value of the product would be all lost as we have returned to the state of affairs we are so eager in departing.  So among the other, real life projects we are engaged in, our digital project has fallen back in priority, while we are constantly reexamining what we have done so far and where we want to go with this.  And this must take time.

our efforts are for peace, their efforts are for war

How can we express enough solidarity and who are we to voice such a thing?  How can we ever mention the struggle of the indigenous people of Mexico and not broadcast the following text loud and clear?  How can we stand still and read, learn, think, and discuss, when order is threatened by the forces of human disorder and suffering?  Rage?  No words can ever describe what we feel.  We feel as we are in prison, locked far away from our comrades.  Locked up in a world without autonomy, without daily dignity for the land we step on, the food the masters feed us, the lies they serve us, the labor extortion they subject us, the humiliation of being trapped and powerless on their land.  The submission to a world where they decide and we materialize and execute their wishes, unable to ever materialize any of our own.

Solidarity is a simple word used by many, but few are able to carry on the weight of its true meaning.  How can you express solidarity without sharing the struggle?  How can you not express solidarity without sharing the defeat from it? And what is there to do?  Are we consciously ready to make the leap?  Are we ready to leave the world of the masters and create our own world?  Are we afraid?  Do we have second thoughts?  Is there life away from struggle?  Is there any meaning in such other life? 

Long live the struggle of compañero Galeano 

Long live the meeting (the Sixth) of all struggles around the world

Always we will win always

May 12, 2014

Where Has It Brought You?

Zapatista Pain and Rage

by SUBCOMANDANTE MARCOS

To the Compañeras and Compañeros of the Sixth:
Compas:
To tell you the truth, the communiqué was all ready. It was succinct, clear, precise, how communiqués should be. But…well…maybe later.
For now the meeting with the compañeros and compañeras bases of support of the community of La Realidad is about to begin.
We listen.
We have known the tone and the emotion with which they speak for a long time: pain and rage.
So it occurs to me that a communiqué will not adequately reflect this.
Or at least not fully.
True, maybe a letter won’t do so either, but at least the words that follow are an attempt, even if they are only a pale reflection.
Because…

Editorial. Rebeldía Zapatista (Zapatista Rebellion)

the Word of the EZLN

Front Cover of Rebeldía Zapatista #2

We rebellious Zapatistas, along with our mother earth, are threatened with destruction in our Mexican homeland. Both above and below the earth’s surface, the bad governments and bad rich people, all neoliberal capitalists, want to commodify everything they see.

They want to own everything.

They are destructive, they are murderers, criminals, rapists. They are cruel and inhuman, they torture and disappear people, and they are corrupt. They are every bad thing you can imagine, they do not care about humanity. They are, in fact, inhuman.

They are few, but they decide everything about how they will dominate countries that let themselves be dominated. They have made underdeveloped countries into their plantations, and made the underdeveloped capitalist so-called governments of those countries into their overseers.

This is what has happened in Mexico. The neoliberal transnational corporations are the bosses, their plantation is called Mexico, the current overseer is named Enrique Peña Nieto, the administrators are 
Manuel Velasco in Chiapas and the other so-called state governors, and the badly named municipal “presidents” are the foremen.

This is why we rose up against this system at dawn on January 1, 1994.

Hannah Arendt on the Concept of Power

Hannah Arendt on the Concept of Power by Pat Duffy Hutcheon

My first and only personal encounter with Hannah Arendt was when she came to speak to the students at Yale University in 1968 while I was studying sociology there. As always, she was questioning the conventional wisdom of the times. At that time -- at the height of the Vietnam War crisis -- she stood solidly with the student protesters. Nevertheless, during that visit she sounded a warning against the popular obsession with unlimited "sovereignty" of either the individual or the collective, and with violence as a favored vehicle for both entities in their pursuit of social change. She let us know how much she deplored the glorification of violence by many students, and their glib talk -- from privileged and protected enclaves in the Western world -- of the "necessity" for violent revolution. For this she blamed what she saw as the malevolent influence of Jean-Paul Sartre and Franz Fanon. She felt (rightly, I now believe) that these writers and other significant opinion setters among the young were then sowing the seeds for which the whole world would one day reap the whirlwind.

On power and violence

This was a book summary we found on http://www.fsmitha.com/review/arendt.html and we believe it is a good starting point on the discussion of how social organization leads to power, from coexistence with other powers will come conflict, and how can conflict be managed so power is not lost at the stage where coexistence of powers is impossible.  Also under what conditions can there be no conflicting powers and therefore avoidance of conflict and violence.  Could comments here start an open and public discussion?  In political circles this subject is systematically overseen and avoided.

______________________________________________________________

On Violence

Author: Hannah Arendt

A Harvest Book, 1970

In Arendt's own words:

The end of human action, as distinct from the end products of fabrication, can never be reliably predicted.  The means used to achieve political goals are more often than not of greater relevance to the future world than the intended goals.
There are, indeed, few things that are more frightening than the steadily increasing prestige of scientifically minded brain trusters in the councils of government during the last decades [the 1950s and '60s] ... they reckon with the consequences of certain hypothetically assumed constellations without, however, being able to test their hypotheses against actual occurrences.