Agriculturists Without Land
The following is a critique of the content of the above article and aims to open a discussion on the issue of social movements being incorporated within the system when they can not be defeated by physical (violent repression) means. Comments related to the subject are welcome and will be published as soon as possible.
MST is a 30 year old movement in Brazil. It has both class and social characteristics. It is a movement for people without land by the people without land. Brazil is the country with the largest percentage of the population having no access to land. Very counter-intuitive if you consider the vast area of jungle and unexplored forests created by the Amazon. This means that a very small group of people have converted all land to private status. This was done with a mechanism called IMF when the country first started going bankrupt 40 years ago.
This article nevertheless calls the MST movement agriculturists without land, which apart from being poorly written reveals a specific political value. What we can conclude from it is that land is perceived as means of production which utilizes specialized workers to produce for others. Something that as far as we can find about MST it is not. What is odd about the article and drew our attention is the term agriculturists, meaning agricultural workers, which if searched through the net it has not been used before in reference to MST.
How innocent of an inaccuracy can such terminology be? If MST is a movement by the poor who seek as a political right the access to land, so they can live on it, eat from the land, and escape the misery of the shanty towns around mega cities, why are they labeled agriculturists? To separate them from industrial workers? Is land an industry? According to the likes of ADM, Monsanto, BASF, etc. land is an industry that produces GM and hybrid agricultural products, very specific in their design and patents. Monsanto's soya is not just like any other soya, it is an industrial product. Accepting the fact that if Brazilians achieve their goal and gain access to land they would be incorporated into a centrally designed model of production and consumption. This is a value shared by neo-liberal multi-national capitalists as well as Marxists. Centrally administered government, centrally designed and monitored economy.
Even democratic Trotskyists who promote the idea of worker managed production do not explain where the decision to have such industrial production comes from. The Soviet decides to produce AK47 and workers decide how to do it within the factory. In the same fashion, whether nothing changes in the political economic structure of Brazil, land can be passed by reforms to the poor to work on as an industry selling to the local and international markets. This would indicate that a 30 year old movement will be consumed into the supernational economic order of worldwide neo-liberalism or death ultimatum. So what is CSU's Green blog really saying? It points to the direction of the repression of the movement if violent and brutal repression fails.
So repression, within this new (past 50 year effort) system of capital total domination of life and land, may come from the right, the center, and the left. Social movements without specific political programming and agenda can be incorporated into this model when physical repression fails. The left has been incorporated into this model of repression to play a significant role within the neo-liberal agenda. Autonomy for and by a community on land that is under the control of the community is not an industry, and the community is not a labor sector exploiting it. It is simply what it is. People surviving on top of their land, bound by their own decision of how to work and how to live and not as subjects or tools of a larger scale model. The MST is not what the CSU blog says it is, and if it was this is how it would be defeated.
In general, what makes neo-liberalism separate itself from historical capitalism, is that large scale capital has organized to dominate land and life, to defeat social resistance specifically where it is encountered, to control government above government (through financial strangling), and to utilize the left (when center/right repression fails) as local directors of the neo-liberal state. Because in these times the state will either be neo-liberal or it will not be (ie N.Korea, Cuba).
SELF-ORGANIZATION SELF-GOVERNMENT SELF-DETERMINATION EVERYWHERE
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