Anthony Pahnke’s Brazil’s Long Revolution is an excellent example of Marxist and critical theory applied to social movement studies. Its main argument is that the Brazilian landless peasants’ movement is a “movement of revolutionary resistance” because it builds a dual power vis-a-vis the state.
Understanding the literature that sustains the theoretical background of Pahnke’s case study is crucial to appreciating this definition that he proposes. It is built on an original combination of the ideas of Vladimir Lenin, Antonio Negri, Enrique Dussel, and Carl Schmitt with the aim of understanding what Pahnke calls the landless workers movement of Brazil. Lenin’s classical idea of “dual power,” defined as the construction of alternative institutions that are gradually building a different status quo, is combined with Negri’s and Dussel’s discussions of “constituent power” and “constitutive power” as the originary power of the multitude (Negri) or people (Dussel) from which institutional power derives. In addition, Pahnke introduces Schmitt’s classic friend/enemy dichotomy into the theoretical discussion as the essential distinction of politics, combined with the partisan argument in which Schmitt presents his idea of disputing the sovereignty of the state by an irregular force.
With this conceptualization in mind, Pahnke argues that the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) is a movement of revolutionary resistance because it has constituted an alternative institutionality in the lands that it occupies, representing a people’s foundational action of a different order. This is achieved through “revolutionary resistance,” understood “as the mutually exclusive claim to space and the effort to transform political, economic, and cultural relations in a way that erases the distinction between institutionalized public and private power” (p. 200).
Empirically, to prove his point, the author goes through a detailed analysis of the MST and also makes some brief references to other social movement organizations, such as the Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens, the Movimento dos Pequenos Agricultores, the Comissão Pastoral da Terra, and the Confederação Nacional dos Trabalhadores na Agricultura (CONTAG) union. The main focus is to show the groups’ shared origins (not applicable to the CONTAG), and the MST’s tactical repertoire and its interaction with the state at the national and subnational level (mainly in Paraná and Rio Grande do Sul).
The author argues that defining the MST as a peasant movement eliminates its revolutionary character, reducing it to a subsistence movement. However, I think his claim is not accurate in conceptual and historical terms. Conceptually, one is a sociological definition of the social actors mobilized, and the other is a political definition of the strategic goals of these same social actors. Historically, there are several cases of revolutionary peasants’ movements across history, and Marxism has provided important contributions in theory and practice to their analysis from Mao Zedong, José Carlos Mariátegui, and Eric Hobsbawm, among many others.
Moreover, even though Pahnke recognizes the influence of Bernardo Mançano Fernandes’s concept of “socio-territorial movements” in understanding the MST’s claim for space, he does not get involved in the discussions of critical geographers that would have helped link his efforts to conceptualize the MST into a well-established debate on the topic. Instead, the author correctly identifies three central gaps in the social movement literature: the lack of a fruitful dialogue between the mainstream social movement literature and Marxist studies, the concomitant underdeveloped political economy of social movements, and the lack of contextualization for tactical choices in social movement studies.
Although his theoretical approach offers a possible solution to the first two gaps in the literature, the third point deserves to be explored a bit further. Pahnke proposes the creation of an intermediate category between legal and illegal to classify types of tactics: the “extralegal” ones. In Pahnke’s own words, “I define extralegal political action as neither legal nor illegal practices, but a form of collective action that appears similar to illegal conduct, but that lacks clear statutory guidelines for punishment and/or approval” (p. 7). This definition synthesizes the notion of “irregularity” in Schmitt with Lenin’s strategic argument concerning the need to combine types of tactics to achieve revolution. It has an important strength in acknowledging the historical construction of tactics—that is, the tactics are a result of conscious learning processes—as well as the possibilities of addressing certain social grievances in the present time.
The critical appropriation of tactics from the past is achieved in the MST through the conscious study of past struggles; contact among generations of activists, such as with the Peasant Leagues; and the influence of dynamics that are coming from alternative paths—for example, the military agrovillas—showing the modularity of repertoires and their sedimentation across time. I fully agree with this argument, finding in my own research on the MST and other movements very similar results. However, the subsequent analysis of this phenomenon is static, so it is unclear how the interesting extralegal tactics empirically develop in the sense the author correctly theorizes. The issue seems to be that he decided on an approach rooted in methodological individualism regarding the construction of the tactical repertoire. A relational approach would have been more appropriate, either by following Charles Tilly’s tradition or a class analysis approach.
Concretely, Pahnke observes the revolutionary resistance of the MST in two key dimensions: (1) the regular resistance to the penetration of the state into specific spaces in Brazil where the MST has organized a cooperative community with its own educational and agricultural models, and (2) the performance of a combination of legal, illegal, and mainly extralegal tactics that constitute defiance to the current legal order while pushing the boundaries of the status quo.
Concerning the organization, Pahnke shows how the grassroots núcleos result from a combination of inspirations: the locally based Comunidades Eclesiais de Base and the Communist Party’s democratic centralism. Even though not analyzed in comparative terms, this organizational characteristic is typical of most popular movements that have been struggling against capitalism or neoliberalism in Latin America. Concerning education, he masterfully presents a very interesting organizational model that complements Paulo Freire’s pedagogical approach as used by the MST. The “ascending and descending democracy” model used to teach in the MST schools provides different collective ways of participating in decision making.
With this approach Pahnke discusses the applicability to the MST of the traditional theories of revolution: those of Charles Tilly, Theda Skocpol, Hannah Arendt, and Jeff Goodwin. For Pahnke, revolution is not a matter of taking the state and constituting a new government and regime, but rather of disputing the existing state in specific territories for the organization of a portion of society in a different fashion. This would imply pushing the boundaries of what is legally allowed and, mainly, what is not even typified as illegal by the current legal codes. This would lead to a rupture with the current order by creating a situation of dual power at a specific territorial site where the MST is occupying land and to building a community that works with an ethos different from that of the dominant society. In other words, it is the extralegal nature of the MST’s revolutionary political action that can lead to the construction of dual power.
In this way, Pahnke presents a seemingly situationist/autonomist understanding of revolution. Even if not explicit, this view appears present across the whole empirical analysis. A question that arises is thus, Would Pahnke consider the MST a revolutionary movement in general macrohistorical analysis terms too? Is the MST pushing for dual power at the national level as well or only at the local level?
The puzzle that this excellent book poses implicitly is that the goal of a movement and the relational outcome it achieves across time are not necessarily the same. Pahnke argues convincingly that the intra-movement dynamics of organization, education, and production are revolutionary in the constitution of counterhegemonic socioeconomic and cultural practices for the MST’s members. However, external to the MST, the dynamics of interaction with different Brazilian governments do not show any relational revolutionary dynamic. They rather seem to be bridging-with-the-state outward dynamics in the quest for improving the lives of the mobilized communities. Thus, considering the centrality the MST gives to education and alternative ways of organizing, why was the movement not defined in Gramscian terms as a counterhegemonic (revolutionary) movement?
The book closes with comparisons of the MST with the Cuban revolution and with the struggles against slavery and indigenous oppression in the United States. Both comparisons stretch the comparability of the MST too far. In methodological terms, a movement, a revolution, and different social dynamics of subaltern groups are not the same kind of phenomena.
Beyond these questions and critiques, Brazil’s Long Revolution is a fantastic book. Pahnke’s refined theoretical edifice and solid empirical analysis engage the reader in a crucial debate about one of the main social movements in the contemporary world.
