In this interview given to Cira Pascual Marquina and Chris Gilbert – creators and hosts of Escuela de Cuadros – João Pedro Stedile, a key spokesperson and founder of the MST, discusses the movement’s emphasis on collective struggle and solidarity, the challenges of organizing cooperative production, and the meaning of integral agrarian reform. The complete transcript of the interview is available on the Monthly Review website.
On collectivity and cooperation
João Pedro: We believe that only mass struggle can achieve social conquests and effectively organize people. If you want to change your life, you have to take part in mass struggle because that is where real strength lies: in the people. As an organizing force, mass struggle is more effective than the motive of collective work alone. That is why in our movement’s grassroots work we link mass struggle with political power.
Our strength does not come from our arguments or ideas; it comes from the number of people we can mobilize. From the beginning, we have adopted a method that involves everyone—children, youth, men, women, and elders. The whole family must participate in a land occupation for it to succeed. A land occupation is a collective mass action that must generate enough force to create conflict and compel the national government, the state, to enforce the agrarian reform laws.1
The second concept that is woven into the fabric of our movement is solidarity, which we see as a civilizatory principle of human reason. Human beings can only truly realize themselves and find happiness through solidarity, which is ultimately mutual aid. What does this mean? To occupy land and change my life, I must join with others in an act of solidarity as an equal. At the same time, these collective actions also generate broader solidarity from society and the working class toward our struggle. That principle has defined our movement from the beginning.
Another important challenge is organizing production after the people reclaim the land and form what we call an assentamento in Brazil. Initially, there was a strong political will to develop agricultural production collectively. However, both our experience and that of campesinos in general have shown that cooperative work in agriculture can be quite difficult. Each campesino interacts with nature differently, following their own work rhythms and schedules. Some rise early to start their tasks, while others sleep in and begin later in the day. Some bring their children to the field, while others do not. Over time, our lived experience has taught us that when it comes to cultivating the land, collectivization does not always work.
Since organizing campesino labor [in the fields] collectively proved challenging, we shifted our focus to cooperative structures in other areas of production. For example, the MST has established cooperatives to acquire farm machinery or manage the commercialization of agricultural goods, including processing plants and storage facilities. We have advanced to the stage of cooperative agro-industrialization, developing enterprises for milk production, cold chain supply, and more. Agro-industrial production is complex, requiring diverse tasks to be carried out with precision and collaboration—for instance, in food processing and distribution. This is where our cooperative efforts are now concentrated.
On Integral Agrarian Reform
João Pedro: Throughout the twentieth century, most countries operated under the hegemony of industrial capitalism. For industrial capitalism, it was convenient to integrate campesinos into the market, which is why land reforms were implemented in most industrialized nations of the Global North. We call these “classic” agrarian reforms because they were the first; they involved expropriating large estates and redistributing land to campesinos. Those campesinos were then integrated into the internal market. They consumed what was produced by industry and also produced for agroindustry.
While these classic agrarian reforms played a significant role in the development of productive forces, they also represented an alliance between the industrial bourgeoisie—who opposed the latifundia and the rural oligarchy—and campesinos who needed land to work. However, as you pointed out, since the 1990s, the hegemonic sector of capital has shifted from industrial capital to financial capital and its multinational corporations that dominate the world market and, by extension, agriculture. Unlike the previous model, which maintained an alliance with campesinos, there is a new mode for exploiting agriculture, which is known as agribusiness. It is big capital’s way of dominating agriculture as a whole. It involves large-scale monoculture, widespread use of genetically modified seeds, intensive mechanization, and widespread use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
Faced with this new capitalist model, the campesino bloc had to rethink its project, which could no longer focus exclusively on land tenure. Instead, it would have to address the reorganization of agriculture in general. New programs, not just focused on defending the small producer, began to be developed. We call our program the “people’s agrarian reform,” but in other parts of Latin America it is called “integral agrarian reform,” or, when a more political focus is wanted, “radical agrarian reform.” These are just names. However, the important thing is that the program is now different. We have to think about agriculture as a whole and respond with new paradigms. At an earlier time, land reforms in favor of peasants, as exemplified par excellence by Emiliano Zapata’s reform during the Mexican Revolution, had a huge influence all over Latin America. Nevertheless, the project cannot be just about distributing the land; it has to be about responding to the needs of the whole people. So now our aim is to address the needs of the pueblo as a whole, and we have to do it with new paradigms. In Zapata’s time and in the Asian land reforms, peasants aimed to free themselves from the exploitation of the latifundia or from feudal lords. However, in today’s world, people’s agrarian reform has to aim, above all, at the production of healthy food for the entire population.
This means employing agroecology as a method of food production. Additionally, we must defend nature. If we do not reforest, protect water sources, and safeguard biodiversity, life on this planet will not be sustainable. We are already witnessing the devastating effects of climate change, which is endangering millions and taking many lives. Just last summer, more than fifty thousand people died in Europe due to extreme heat. In my home state in Brazil [Rio Grande do Sul], an actual deluge affected about five million people. Fortunately, the death toll was relatively low—around two hundred—but crops were destroyed and thousands lost their homes, including my son. This is the future capitalism is creating. It is up to us in the rural areas to defend nature so that life on this planet can continue for everybody.
The new people’s agrarian reform also focuses on what we call human emancipation. This means that on the land we reclaim, beyond producing food, protecting nature, and safeguarding water and biodiversity, we must also forge new social relations among the people who inhabit it.
Now it is not just about defending the campesino way of life. We need schools, agro-industries, and, above all, new human relations. Life must be emancipatory, based on living well together, on being respectful of diversity, of women, of diverse sexual identities, of Black and Brown people, of all cultures. This is the new paradigm we are building; a task that is ongoing and permanent.
In the end, this is not just a theoretical program written down on paper that people will just follow. It is a continuous educational process, a process of self-training and self-transformation within communities. It requires changing the economy in ways that will also transform society. For instance, we cannot overcome patriarchy without ensuring that women have incomes and autonomous work. No one envisions a future where women work in the fields all day like beasts of burden. What we seek is dignified work and an income for women, for young people, for everyone. For us, that is only possible by developing agro-industrial cooperatives. Cooperative production will create new economic and social relations capable of combating the distortions of capitalism—patriarchy, racial discrimination, and all other forms of oppression.
This article is part of a series on the theme of agrarian reform, published in the lead-up to the Second International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD+20). As ICARRD+20 draws nearer, it offers a much-needed multilateral space to assess progress in the responsible governance of land, fisheries, and forests, and to develop and coordinate effective public policies to address a range of pressing issues. These include land and resource grabbing, the growing concentration of land, climate change, land degradation and biodiversity loss, violence against land rights defenders, discrimination against women and girls, and the role of land in contexts of conflict and war.