Given the opportunity, I like to take students to a lovely community on the outskirts of São Paulo, Brazil, where the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Workers Movement, MST) forced the creation of an agrarian reform settlement in 2004. There, the physical evidence of enthusiastic peasants working together to produce both healthy agricultural products and a more humane way of life influences students to consider how agrarian reform is important and beneficial for Brazil. When they hear how joining the MST struggle helped turn around the life of the once alcoholic and homeless Mauro Evangelista da Silva (now a settlement leader building an orchard with the family he had once abandoned), they come to understand the transformative potential of collective action. In the book under review, Anthony Pahnke similarly recounts his personal transformation as a researcher engaged in participatory observation of the MST from 2009 to 2011.
The book has significant strengths. It is timely, informing readers about the impact of recent political events on the agrarian reform struggle in Brazil. Pahnke brings a unique perspective to the topic as someone who grew up farming in Minnesota. His is the fourth generation in a line of farmer-activists. His grandfather told stories of his great-grandfather’s struggles and of his own activism from the 1960s to the 1990s. Pahnke himself militated with the Family Farm Defenders organization in Wisconsin, which, like the MST, is a member organization of La Via Campesina, uniting some 180 organizations worldwide in defense of small-scale farmers.
The book makes these facts relevant by drawing comparisons between family farmer political action in Brazil, the United States, and other countries. Some of this perspective appears in the personal anecdotes that introduce and punctuate the book’s five main chapters. In the first, Pahnke recalls making important discoveries about the MST as an organization when he was injured touring a settlement on horseback. The fact that he was riding a horse creates an opportunity for him to explain his rural roots; the organizational insights learned through the experience allow him to express the book’s principal argument: that the MST, as a social and territorial movement, is engaged in “revolutionary political action” (6). This umbrella term consists of what Pahnke calls “revolutionary contention” and “revolutionary resistance.” Pahnke uses the MST example to argue that social movements need to be taken seriously for their political content, not just as civil society actors.
The title of the book signals its “revolutionary” thesis. But the concept of a “long revolution” is neither examined nor explained, in contrast to another concept, found in the book’s subtitle: “radical achievements.” Those who know Brazil will recall that certain historical figures have long sought a Brazilian revolution, while others have celebrated the country’s ability to evade one. Soon after right-wing military leaders declared themselves revolutionaries for toppling the government of a left-wing president in 1964, a highly regarded historian (and Communist Party activist), Caio Prado Junior, published a book called A revolução brasileira (The Brazilian Revolution, 1966). For Prado, a successful Brazilian revolution would have to model itself on the recently consolidated Cuban revolution by transforming the countryside through the elimination of the rural oligarchy and their unproductive farms, international relations through a break with the United States, and the export-dependent bourgeoisie through the construction of a domestic market more powerful than foreign ones.
Without citing Prado’s classic arguments, Pahnke compares the Cuban revolution to the MST’s “revolutionary” actions. He sees parallels between the “extended periods of time when transformation [was] planned and carried out” by Cuban revolutionaries and the prolonged “revolutionary resistance” practiced by the MST (14). As Fidel Castro built his movement, for example, he referenced unfulfilled social and political rights in Cuba’s 1940 Constitution, just as the MST referenced rights, such as land’s “social function,” as specified in Brazil’s 1946 and 1988 Constitutions, to ground its struggle for change (15). In Cuba, Castro used land seizures as a form of resistance after launching an armed struggle in 1956. Similarly, argues Pahnke, the MST forces the Brazilian government to create agrarian reform settlements by occupying private estates and stolen public lands.
Like Castro’s Cuba, the MST has always emphasized literacy and education in the territories it controls. By providing public services, such as education and health care, the MST fights for policies that treat the rural poor equitably and recognize the
legitimacy of land occupation encampments. To compensate for faulty services, the movement provides its own distinct forms of technical support, security, and health care, as Pahnke discovered when he received an herbal-based first aid treatment from an MST team. The author says that these parallels show how revolutionary action is organized “inside, outside of, and through the state” (204).
According to its own internal documents, the MST is an organization that “struggles for land, agrarian reform, and socialism,” but it does not identify itself as a revolutionary movement. However, if its objectives became public policy, they would contribute greatly to the kind of Brazilian revolution that Prado defined. One of the most overwhelming continuities in Brazil’s history is the dominance of large rural landholders. They have wielded power since the colony’s founding in the sixteenth century. The MST targets them with plans to “democratize access to land” and other natural resources. Land concentration in Brazil is extremely high, and the MST project calls for limiting the size of landholdings. Gutting the power of this class while simultaneously liberating natural resources and protecting the rights of workers, the MST program would dramatically and profoundly transform Brazil.
While the lives of thousands of individuals like Mauro, the reformed alcoholic, have been radically changed, Brazil’s land tenure situation has worsened since the MST was founded in 1984. Although more than eight thousand agrarian reform settlements have been created since that time and more than a million families have had their peasant aspirations fulfilled, the area controlled by large landlords and corporate enterprises, including foreign firms, has grown even more. These seemingly contradictory results are the product of Brazil’s expanding agricultural frontier. That is to say that during the last 50 years, millions of acres of undeveloped land came under production, the vast majority of it falling into the hands of large, conventional ranching and agricultural firms, rather than social movements like the MST. In the meantime, most agrarian reform settlements were located on public lands, presenting almost no threat to the landlord class. For these reasons, even MST militants would probably find themselves confused by Pahnke’s central argument about the MST’s revolutionary resistance. Given the authoritarian turn consolidated by the overwhelming electoral victory of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018, MST leaders believe that Brazil has fallen backward at least a generation with a number of regressive new laws and policies.
Pahnke’s book offers a refreshing approach to studying the MST. It recognizes the movement’s amazing achievements and appreciates it as both a research object and subject, interpreting its direct action tactics and organizational acumen as models for First World activists. These qualities alone make the book a unique reference, even if the central thesis has been undermined by events. As a final note, the book suffers somewhat from lackluster copyediting and a failure to factcheck. The first-person pronoun is overused, some words are misspelled, and some important dates are incorrect. Consequences, one suspects, of the very neoliberal reforms Pahnke and the MST criticize, as public institutions like the University of Arizona pass to authors services such as typesetting and copyediting.
