Landless Workers' Movement
| Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra | |
| Formation | January 1984 |
|---|---|
| Legal status | Social movement |
| Purpose | Agrarian land reform |
| Services | Land reform movement, squatting (primary); basic healthcare and education (secondary) |
|
Membership
|
1,500,000 |
|
Main organ
|
National Coordination Body, Nucleo de Base |
Landless Workers' Movement (Portuguese: Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra, MST) is a social movement in Brazil, being generally regarded as one of the largest in Latin America with an estimated informal 1.5 million membership in 23 of Brazil's 26 states. According to the MST, its aims are to fight for general access to the land for poor workers through land reform in Brazil and through activism around social issues impinging on the achievement of land possession, such as unequal income distribution, racism, sexism, and media monopolies. In short, the MST strives to achieve a social covenant providing a self-sustainable way of life for the poor in rural areas.
Following in the tracks of various messianic or partisan-inspired movements for land reform in Brazil, the MST differs from its previous counterparts in its being mostly a single-issue movement, treating land reform as a self-justifying cause. It claims its effort at land occupations are legally justified and rooted in the most recent Constitution of Brazil (1988), by interpreting a passage which states that land property should fulfill a social function. It also claims, based on 1996 census statistics, that just 3% of the population owns two-thirds of all arable land in the country.
The MST appeared late in the long history of the Brazilian land question, which had already been hotly debated (as well as actually fought) into the framework of previous Brazilian politics. During the mid-20th century, a consensus developed among Brazilian leftists that land reform was a necessary step for the democratization of property relations and for the actual exercising of political rights on a general basis, as opposed to the concentration of actual power in the hands of traditional elites. Therefore, land reform was understood by many Brazilian Marxist activists and authors as a necessary part of a late process of Bourgeois Revolution.
However, the Brazilian ruling class and political elites never put a viable process of land reform on its feet - on the contrary, they mostly opposed actively any attempt at land reform as threatening their social and political power. Therefore, it was eventually felt by the political leadership of the rural poor that land reform should be achieved only from below, by means of a grassroots movement. Therefore the fact that the novelty at the MST's emergence resided in its from the start playing the role of taking unto itself the task of achieving land reform on its own, "breaking ... dependent relations with parties, governments, and other institutions", at the same time dealing with the struggle for the land in purely political - instead of social, ethical and religious - terms.
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