The political and social basis of regional variation in land occupations in Brazil

Land occupations led by Brazil's most dynamic social movement the Landless Workers Movement (MST) began as a regional phenomenon. The south‐east and the north‐east regions were initially the centres of land occupations. The successful occupations in these areas were influenced by the origins of the movement, their proximity to urban areas with sympathetic support networks, concentrations of landless workers and the availability of vast areas of uncultivated land. Initial land settlements led to successful occupations in adjoining areas. Conditions which led to successful organising were later systematised by the MST leaders into a national strategy. Subsequently this strategy directed social intervention in other regions and created the basis for the extension of land occupations in regions beyond their original areas of strength. The extension of successful land occupations to new areas has been based on the ‘transplantation’ of leaders and the recruitment of local cadres who have assimilated the lessons of earlier experience. The MST has been transformed from a regional to a national movement. In the process, the MST has moved from a sectoral ‘agrarian reform’ social movement to a political movement with a national political agenda.     

The legacy of social conflicts over property rights in rural Brazil and Mexico: Current land struggles in historical perspective

This article proposes an approach to the agrarian question that focuses on the establishment of absolute private property rights over land in Brazil and Mexico. The author argues that current land struggles are conditioned by the property regimes inherited from past struggles. The author examines the liberal reforms of the nineteenth century and argues that the balance of class forces led to the slow establishment of absolute private property in Brazil, while in Mexico they triggered the Revolution of 1910–1917, which limited agrarian capitalism. The author then turns to the consequences of these different property regimes in the twentieth century and argues that capitalist social relations have been more dominant in the Brazilian than in the Mexican countryside. The conservative modernization of the 1960s and 1970s is identified as a turning point in the fully capitalist development of agriculture in Brazil. The shift toward food imports, the elimination of subsidies, and the reform of Article 27 of the Constitution signal the re-establishment of the conditions for capitalist development of agriculture in Mexico. The article ends with an assessment of the MST and EZLN's strategies to protect peasants’ access to land and to influence the institutional setting determining access to land.     

Gender,resistance and land: interlinked struggles over resources and meanings in South Asia

This article examines the nature of women's resistance to gender inequities in resource distribution and ideological representation. It argues that to understand how women perceive these inequities it is necessary to take into account not only their overt protests but also the many covert forms their resistance might take. At the same time, to significantly alter gendered structures of property and power it appears necessary to move beyond 'individual-covert' to 'group-overt' (organized collective) resistance. These issues are examined here especially in the context of women's struggles for land rights and gender equality in South Asia. Although historically South Asian women have been important participants in peasant movements, these movements have not been typified by women demanding independent land rights or contesting iniquitous gender relations within the movements and within their families. Some recent challenges in this direction indicate that attaining gender equality in the distribution of productive resources will require a simultaneous struggle against constraining ideological constructions of gender, including (in many regions) associated social practices such as purdah. And in both types of struggle (namely concerning resources and gender ideologies), group-overt resistance is likely to be of critical importance.     

Rural unions and the struggle for land in Brazil

Studies of Brazil's agricultural labor movement have generally neglected its relationship to the struggle for land, but this is neither fair nor accurate. Analyzing the rural labor movement's historical contributions to the land struggle in Brazil, this contribution has been organized into three main periods, emphasizing social relations, institutional activism and policy changes. It argues that despite the peculiarities of different historical contexts, rural labor consistently provoked protest against policies that privileged large landholders, whose concentration of power over land and labor resources continually worsened Brazil's ranking as one of the most unequal of nations. For more than half a century, the most constant opponent of this situation among the peasantry has been the National Confederation of Workers in Agriculture (CONTAG), a corporatist organization of rural labor unions founded in 1963.     

Thinking land law differently: Section 70(1)(g) and the giving of meanings

Elements of this article first appeared in a paper given at the Hart Conference on Property, 1993.     

Agrarian structure,foreign investment in land,and land prices in Brazil

The recent global rush for farmland in Latin America has produced a dramatic increase in the level of foreign investment in land in Brazil. The current trend accentuates the ongoing process of foreignization of agriculture associated with the production of grains, sugar, ethanol and other commodities, increasing land prices. In response, the Brazilian government reestablished a legal mechanism for ‘controlling’ land-based foreign investment which has proven neither efficient nor effective in solving land concentration. This paper examines this issue by analyzing the causes of the increase in investment as well as the consequences of this process with respect to land prices, critically situating land-based investments and the government's policy response in a broader discussion of the demands of agrarian social movements.     

The contested nature of Afro-descendant quilombo land claims in Brazil

In Brazil, Afro-descendant quilombola communities were for the first time in history recognised as legal rights-holders to land in the 1988 constitution – 100 years after the abolition of slavery. Drawing on fieldwork in the quilombo Bombas in the state of São Paulo, and a review of relevant literature, this contribution explores the historical trajectory of the constitutional quilombo provision and how it has been translated into practice. Combining a discussion of the use of self-identification and the concepts of ‘regulation’, ‘force’, ‘market’ and ‘legitimation’ when analysing the dynamics of access and exclusion, we show how struggles over land are simultaneously enacted in controversies over the meanings of quilombola identity and its implications.     

Education of the countryside at a crossroads: rural social movements and national policy reform in Brazil

This contribution explores the strategies used by popular movements seeking to advance social reforms, and the challenges once they succeed. It analyzes how a strategic alliance between the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) and the National Confederation of Agricultural Workers (CONTAG) transformed the Ministry of Education's official approach to rural schooling. This success illustrates the critical role of international allies, political openings, framing, coalitions and state–society alliances in national policy reforms. The paper also shows that once movements succeed in advancing social reforms, bureaucratic tendencies such as internal hierarchy, rapid expansion and ‘best practices’ – in addition to the constant threat of cooptation – can prevent their implementation.     

This is your afterlife: gender,slavery, and televisual subjection

In 1957 Arries Ann Ward, who was formerly enslaved, appeared on the classic television interview-entertainment program, This Is Your Life. Despite Ward’s practices of refusal, the rare interview enacts an idealization of black female servitude and indebted obligation through performances of affection and racial benevolence. Ward’s appearance effectively works to resolve national crisis produced by widespread images of civil-rights protest and counterinsurgent violence, reifying discourses of American exceptionalism in Cold War context.     

The Landless invading the landless: participation,coercion, and agrarian social movements in the cacao lands of southern Bahia,Brazil

This contribution draws on Nancy Fraser's concept of ‘participatory parity’ to analyze the reproduction and contestation of inequalities internal to land reform settlements affiliated with the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) located in the cacao lands of southern Bahia, Brazil. These inequalities are variously manifest in unequal control over land and legal documents, disparities in status and what Fraser calls ‘voice'. These circumstances help account for quantitative evidence that shows a strong preference among local landless populations for land reform organizations that are more decentralized and less hierarchically organized. These circumstances also motivate direct actions undertaken by grassroots MST settlers seeking to destabilize the conditions that ground these inequalities. This research highlights the importance of attending to local histories and interactions through which participatory disparities are christened and reproduced; indicates potential methodological consequences; and examines the interplay of transgressive action, dialogue and recognition as settlers struggle to bring about ‘participatory parity' – or what they might call genuine ‘friendships' – in their communities.     

Understanding rural resistance: contemporary mobilization in the Brazilian countryside

Contradictions between impressive levels of economic growth and the persistence of poverty and inequality are perhaps nowhere more evident than in rural Brazil. While Brazil might appear to be an example of the potential harmony between large-scale, export-oriented agribusiness and small-scale family farming, high levels of rural resistance contradict this vision. In this introductory paper, we synthesize the literature on agrarian resistance in Brazil and situate recent struggles in Brazil within the Latin American context more broadly. We highlight seven key characteristics of contemporary Latin American resistance, which include: the growth of international networks, the changing structure of state–society collaboration, the deepening of territorial claims, the importance of autonomy, the development of alternative economies, continued opposition to dispossession, and struggles over the meaning of nature. We argue that by analyzing rural mobilization in Brazil, this collection offers a range of insights relevant to rural contention globally. Each contribution in this collection increases our understanding of alternative agricultural production, large-scale development projects, education, race and political parties in the contemporary agrarian context.     

Oligarchs,megafarms and land reserves: understanding land grabbing in Russia

This paper seeks to unravel the political economy of large-scale land acquisitions in post-Soviet Russia. Russia falls neither in the normal category of ‘investor’ countries, nor in the category of ‘target’ countries. Russia has large ‘land reserves’, since in the 1990s much fertile land was abandoned. We analyse how particular Russia is with regards to the common argument in favour of land acquisitions, namely that land is available, unused or even unpopulated. With rapid economic growth, capital of Russian oligarchs in search of new frontiers, and the 2002 land code allowing land sales, land began to attract investment. Land grabbing expands at a rapid pace and in some cases, it results in dispossession and little or no compensation. This paper describes different land acquisitions strategies and argues that the share-based land rights distribution during the 1990s did not provide security of land tenure to rural dwellers. Emerging rural social movements try to form countervailing powers but with limited success. Rich land owners easily escape the implementation of new laws on controlling underutilized land, while there is a danger that they enable eviction with legal measures of rural dwellers. In this sense Russia appears to be a ‘normal’ case in the land grab debate.     

Looking back to see forward: the legal niceties of land theft in land rushes

This paper aims to make a modest contribution to an overdue need to locate the current land rush in its historical context, less as a new phenomenon than as a surge in the continuing capture of ordinary people's rights and assets by capital-led and class-creating social transformation. It aims to do so by looking back to earlier land rushes, and particularly to those which have bearing upon sub-Saharan Africa, the site of most large-scale involuntary land loss today. In particular, the paper focuses upon a central tool of land rushes, property law. The core argument made is that land rushes past and present have relied upon legal manipulations which deny that local indigenous (‘customary’) tenures deliver property rights, thereby legalizing the theft of the lands of the poor or subject peoples. Even prior to capitalist transformation this feudal-derived machination was an instrument of aligned class privilege and power, later elaborated to justify mass land and resource capture through colonialism. Now it is routinely embedded in the legal canons of elite-aligned agrarian governance as the means of retaining control over the land resources which rural communities presume are their own.     

Capitalism,workers organising and the shifting meanings of workplace democracy

This article explores the limits imposed by a capitalist system of industrial relations on the construction of workplace democracy. It does so by focusing on the experiences of two grass-roots organisations, from both the formal and informal sectors of the economy, in the context of contemporary Argentina. Against one-sided and abstract views of union democracy, the article argues that, for a critical engagement on the issue of democracy, we should go beyond analyses that consider this in isolation from the material, institutional and ideological capitalist context within which unions’ actions are inserted. Democracy permeates the life of unions as collective organisations, but the struggle for control in a context of unbalanced power shapes democracy as a practice. Questions about the right balance between democratic decision-making and delegation and between efficiency and accountability in unions remain open.     

Histories of now: listening to women in British film

ABSTRACT

The research project ‘Calling the Shots: Women and contemporary film culture in the UK, 2000–2015’ investigates contemporary women's film history through two primary routes: the statistical analyses of the numbers of women in six key above-the-line professions (director, writer, producer, executive producer, cinematographer and editor), and interviews with 50 women in those same roles (by August 2018 we had interviewed 58). This paper focuses specifically on the permutations of the interview process for constructing women's film history in the contemporary period. Taking into consideration the theoretical, methodological and political issues at stake in recording oral histories of working women filmmakers, we contemplate the consequences of collecting and writing history that is still in medias res.