User:JWesleyPowell/Landless Workers' Movement

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Landless Workers' Movement (Portuguese: Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra, MST) is a social movement in Brazil, inspired by Marxism, generally regarded as one of the largest in Latin America with an estimated informal membership of 1.5 million across 23 of Brazil's 26 states. MST defines its goals as access to the land for poor workers through land reform in Brazil and activism around social issues that make land ownership more difficult to achieve, such as unequal income distribution, racism, sexism, and media monopolies. MST strives to achieve a self-sustainable way of life for the rural poor.

Ideology

The MST is an ideologically eclectic rural movement of hundreds of thousands of landless peasants (and some who live in small cities) striving for land reform in Brazil. The MST has been inspired since its inception by liberation theology, Marxism, the Cuban Revolution, and other leftist ideologies. The flexible mix of discourse that includes "marxist concepts, popular religion, communal practices, citizenship principles and radical democracy", has increased the movement's popular appeal.

The landless say they have found institutional support in the Catholic Church's teachings of social justice and equality, as embodied in the activities of Catholic Base Committees (Comissões Eclesiais de Base, or CEBs) which generally advocate liberation theology and anti-hierarchical social relations. This theology, a radicalized re-reading of the existing social doctrine of the Church, became the basis of the MST's ideology and organizational structure. The loss of influence of progressives in the later Catholic Church, however, has reduced the closeness of the relationship between the MST and the Church as such.

MST's anti-hierarchical stance stems from the influence of Paulo Freire. After working with poor communities in the rural Brazilian state of Pernambuco, Freire observed that aspects of traditional classrooms, such as teachers with more power than students, hindered the potential for success of adults in adult literacy programs. He determined that the students' individual abilities to learn and absorb information were severely impeded by their passive role in the classroom. His teachings encouraged activists to break their passive dependence on oppressive social conditions and become engaged in active modes of behaving and living. In the mid-1980s the MST created a new infrastructure for the movement, directly guided by liberation theology and Freirian pedagogy. They did not elect leaders so as to not create hierarchies, and to prevent corrupt leadership from developing.

The MST has widened the scope of their movement. They have invaded the headquarters of public and multinational institutions, and begun to resist the appearance of fields of genetically modified crops, carrying out marches, hunger strikes and other political actions. The MST cooperates with a number of rural worker movements and urban movements in other areas of Brazil. The MST also remains in touch with broader international organizations and movements that support and embrace the same cause. The MST includes not only landless workers stricto sensu, or rural workers recently evicted from the land, but also the urban jobless and homeless people who want to make a living by working on the land; thus its affinity with housing reform and other urban movements. The squatters' movement MTST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem teto - Homeless Workers' Movement) is commonly seem as an offshoot of the MST.

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Liberation Theology and Mística

As mentioned above, the MST draws ideological inspiration from many conceptual frameworks both religious and political with one aspect of this inspiration being the practice of mística. Mística refers to performance or dance conducted in ceremony like conditions, often with nonverbal components and carried out with the intention of affirming confidence in desired goals or action.With this in mind, mística can be considered a form of mysticism that exists within a distinctly Latin American context. With regards to the MST, this form of mística underwent a series of changes prior to becoming fully adopted by the organisation as part of its methods and practices. Christian mysticism is often a individual experience rather than collective and communal, and so the form of mística practiced by the MST differs chiefly in this regard. It is a communal experience (often linked keenly with the emergence of CEBs) that often sees participation from the assembled group rather than an individual, and this change was brought about by the influence of liberation theology on the MST in the late sixties.

Additionally, as historian Daniela Issa notes, mística is a process by which communities associated with the MST can narrate their own history by reviving a collective memory of the oppressed, often in contexts where censorship and state violence are commonplace. The form of mística associated with the MST also draws on a variety of cultures and origins, with roots in Catholic ritualism, as well as Afro-Brazilian religious practices that had first been introduced after the migration of slavery into Brazil in the 16th century. Not only this, but some contemporary historians have also identified aspects of the MST mística as having originated from Indigenous practices and belief systems. One example of recent demonstrations of mística within the MST is found in the practices of the ceremony at the ten year anniversary of the Eldorado do Carajás massacre. Members engaging in mística carried effigies of the bodies, while singing and chanting, as they converged on a location that symbolised the site of the event.

The MST highly value education and the organisation is committed to the teachings of Freirian pedagogy, which espouses the process of conscientisation. This commitment to community education forms another aspect of the groups mixture of influences. Popular education and liberation theology are closely linked with the practice of mística within the MST, as CEB's, and the sense of community generated by popular education often form the site of mística - with many members having overlapping interests and participation in each aspect. Such settlements and communities produced by the encampments of the MST actively encourage and sponsor the practice of mística within CEB's present, as a method of reaffirming commitment and dedication to the goals of the group, these goals often being exclusively linked to the political ambitions and campaigns at the time of practice.

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